Simon Said (19 page)

"I think she's still alive," Simon said. "Flowers came to the funeral in her name. In fact, I think she might have been at the burial."

 

"Could be," Joe said. "The Whites were all long-lived. I can ask around, see if anyone knows what happened to her," Joe said. "If she's still alive, she'd be old. Almost ninety." Simon gave him a card. "If you find out anything, will you call me?"

 

"Sure," Joe said. "Bessie sure could make lemon meringue pie. My wife got the recipe from her, but it never tasted the same."
Chapter Nineteen

SO, SIMON THOUGHT, ANNE BLOODWORTH WAS A BLUESTOCKING. She attended a four-year women's college and planned to graduate. She belonged to the League of Women Voters, just one of the women's clubs, leagues, and missionary societies that waged war on the considerable social ills at the early part of the twentieth century. By Anne's day, they had passed women's suffrage and Prohibition into law, and women had turned their attention to law and order, lynching, child labor, and prostitution. These women were a formidable lot. They didn't much like what America's preoccupation with business and moneymaking had done to society, and they intended to do something about it. It was a big job. Life was prim and prosperous on the surface but rotten with poverty, crime, and the double standard at its core. A Capone was just one of the nasty products of the era. And Anne's father, Charles Bloodworth, railroad baron that he was, would have represented the Establishment in spades. Dinner-table conversation in the Bloodworth home must have been very lively.

Lillie Blythe's name had nagged at Simon ever since the florist had given it to him. He thought he'd heard of her before in another context. He stared at her address, and then he remembered. Her house was on Rose, a small two-block street buried deep in his own neighborhood. Once when he was collecting signatures for a zoning petition, he had made the mistake of knocking on her door. She had seemed pleasant enough at first, but her conversation revealed the frightening mental chaos of old age, and Simon had beat a hasty retreat as soon as he could. She attracted all the neighborhood speculation that elderly recluses usually do. Rumors about her abounded, especially among the kids, who carefully avoided walking by her house on their way home from school. She supposedly had a loaded gun in every room and would shoot anyone who set foot on her property. Raccoons, squirrels, and stray cats lived in her house, it was said, lured by the food and water she left out for them every day. She played opera all night—usually Carmen—on an ancient hi-fi. Every now and then, her neighbors would wonder if she was dead or alive. Just as they would be about ready to call the police to check on her, she would emerge from her house, carefully dressed in an outfit from the Eisenhower era, complete with demure hat and gloves, and go to Cameron Village to do her shopping. Sometimes she pulled a cart behind her to bring back her groceries, and sometimes she returned in a cab.

Simon did not look forward to interviewing Lillie Blythe, but he didn't see how he could avoid it. She might know something critical. After all, if she had been mentally competent enough to read about Anne Bloodworth's funeral in the newspaper and to order flowers, then she must have periods of lucidity. Maybe Simon could catch her in one.

Mrs. Blythe was pleasant enough to Simon when he called her on the telephone. He wasn't sure that she really understood the purpose of his visit, but she did invite him to come by that afternoon.

Rose Street was so short, it almost qualified as an alley. Narrow and winding, it hadn't been asphalted in years, and the original cobblestones showed in patches. If any place in Cameron Park was haunted, this was it. At first glance, the house looked like it belonged in a fairy tale; it sat on a huge wooded lot. Its roofline, front door, and window arches were rounded. The house was a wreck, though. The porch was piled with junk—old lumber, Victorian fretwork that must have fallen off over the years, window screens, and the rotten remains of some wicker porch furniture. The roof was decorated with fallen leaves and branches. An old paneled station wagon with broken windows and four flat tires was parked next to a Quonset hut. Once a garage, it had now fallen in.

The yard was a new-growth forest. Saplings and volunteers sprouted all over the place. Grass would have been impossible under the layer of leaves that hadn't been raked in years. Kudzu had begun its inexorable work, growing over a side yard and covering a patio on its way to tear down the house. Simon could see the lumps on the patio where the wrought-iron furniture had been carpeted with the stuff. If the kudzu got any kind of a grip on the foundation, it would take blowtorches to stop it.

Mrs. Blythe had stacked piles of wood across the walkways to the house and painted them white to discourage trick-or-treaters many Halloweens ago. The barricades couldn't stop anyone serious about getting to the house, but they made it look fortified and forbidding.

Simon picked his way around the piles of wood and climbed up the crumbling stone steps. He rang the bell but didn't hear it sounding inside. So he knocked twice, loudly.

Lillie Blythe answered the door almost immediately. She wore a neat blue dress with a wide skirt and white Peter Pan collar and cuffs. The dress was faded and threadbare, although clean and ironed to perfection. She wore stockings, black pumps, and a pearl choker. Her blond hair showed an inch of gray at the roots and was styled like Doris Day's forty years ago. She could have stepped out of a Frigidaire advertisement in the pages of Life magazine in the s, except maybe for the cigarette that dangled out of her mouth and the dowager's hump that caused her to lean forward slightly. Her skin was remarkably clear and unlined. She had obviously spent most of her life indoors.

Simon was so busy taking in her appearance that he didn't say anything. "Yes?" Mrs. Blythe said. "Can I help you?"
Simon introduced himself. To his surprise, she remembered who he was.

"Please come in," she said, opening the door wide and gesturing into the dark interior. Simon entered with the same apprehension Pip must have felt when he was summoned by Miss Haversham. But instead of cobwebs, dirt, and decaying wedding cake, Simon saw boxes piled everywhere.

Mrs. Blythe's living room was stacked at least five feet high with boxes sealed with packing tape. From the labels, Simon could see that the boxes had originally held everything from Jack Daniel's to lamp shades. There was no clue what was packed in them. The living room was so crowded that it could be negotiated by only two narrow paths, one that disappeared down a central hallway and one that went into a dining room. From where he stood, he could see that the dining room table and floors were stacked with boxes, too. What he could see of the wallpaper and furniture had been aged to a uniform gray-brown, with an occasional splotch where a pattern had once been. The house was very clean. There were no cobwebs and decayed wedding cake here.

"Come into the kitchen," Mrs. Blythe said. "I'm afraid that there isn't room to sit in here. When one gets old, one does tend to collect things."

Yes indeed, thought Simon. He followed her down the path that led into the central hall, which was lit by a chandelier with just one functioning lightbulb. There were boxes here, too, stacked along the wall and lining the sides of the staircase to the second floor.

He definitely did not want to walk into her kitchen. But he did, and he saw the clues to what Mrs. Blythe stored in her boxes stacked on the kitchen table. Crocheted blankets, shawls, and pillows were piled on a big old kitchen table in a breakfast nook with a bay window. Mrs. Blythe must spend all of her time crocheting at this table, he thought. An old wing chair stood at its head, and near to hand were a lamp and baskets of yarn and other supplies. Simon reckoned if all the boxes in the house were full, she had been crocheting almost constantly for many, many years.

The kitchen was clean, too. There was no grime on the old stove or refrigerator, and the counters looked clean enough to eat on. The stove was a gas one. Simon didn't much like the idea of an open flame in that house.

Vines almost obscured the view from the large window near the kitchen table. One tendril had worked its way inside through the window frame, crept along the floor, and twisted around the leg of the wing chair. Simon could imagine that someday the vine would cover the chair and Mrs. Blythe, too. The image disturbed him deeply, and he had to fight the urge to leave and disregard whatever Mrs. Blythe might know about Anne Bloodworth.

She led him over to the table, where she sat down in the wing chair. The ivy twined perilously close to one foot. Simon took a straight chair next to her.

"Please excuse this mess," she said. "I'm afraid crocheting is my passion. This piece," she said, holding up a lovely, intricately patterned shawl, "is for my sister Sallie's girl. She's having a baby soon. She gets so cold when she's expecting."

It was at least eighty degrees outside, and Sallie's girl was probably a grandmother by now.

 

"It's very nice," Simon said.

"Thank you. Time does crawl by now that my boys have gone to college. And my husband travels so much in his work. I just have to do something to keep busy. All this," she said, gesturing around the table, "is for the church bazaar next month. My things always sell so well there."

Simon wondered if it would be possible to get her on the subject of Anne Bloodworth, and whether it would be productive if he did.

 

She picked up her hook, threaded yarn deftly over her fingers, and began to add a row to the shawl. Her hands moved easily and confidently.

 

"I know you're here to talk about Anne," she said. "I'm not surprised that she died violently. When you socialize outside your class, that's what happens."

 

Simon could not believe his luck. "Are you talking about her beau, Mrs. Blythe?"

"Of course. This is what this is all about, isn't it? She was in love with someone who was completely inappropriate for her. She couldn't even tell her friends who he was. Called him Mr. X—what nonsense. It's no wonder her father tried to hurry up her marriage to Adam. He was probably afraid she would make a fool of herself and never recover socially."

"Do you think she was trying to run away when she disappeared?"

"I suppose so. She was so influenced by those college people, and by all those suffragettes in the clubs she belonged to, she thought she could do anything. She gave no thought of her responsibility to her father. She was his only child and heir, and she had obligations. Adam Bloodworth was the perfect match for her. They would have had money and social position. But she didn't care about that."

"Do you know who Mr. X was?"

"I would be the last person she would tell. But I do know she met him at college. She couldn't help but drop a few clues about him. All the other girls in our crowd thought it was thrilling to have a secret lover. His letters were so romantic, they said. I would say, 'What's the point if he can't afford to give her a ring?' "

"Couldn't he?"

"If he could afford to marry her, why didn't they get engaged like regular people? Because he didn't have any money or expectations, that's why. So they had to sneak around behind everyone's back. I used to tell her she watched too many Greta Garbo movies."

"What do you remember about her disappearance?"

"She had given the help the night off so they could go to some movie they wanted to see. It wasn't their regular night off, either. Anne didn't have any idea how to handle servants. She treated that maid of hers as if she were white. Anyway, the servants came back late, after Mr. Bloodworth and Anne were in bed, or so they thought. No one knew she was missing until the next morning. Then the neighborhood was in a complete uproar. I remember sitting by the front window of our sitting room, watching everyone look for her. I've never seen so many men and dogs in my life. Even the boys from State College and the volunteer fire department from Fuquay-Varina showed up to help search. It took two years for our camellias to recover from the trampling they got. Then, of course, everyone seemed to think she had left town. But she didn't get far after all, did she?"

"No, she didn't. Where was her cousin during all this?"

 

"Adam was supposedly fishing all night up at Whitaker Mill, and he showed up at the house hours after all the fuss started. I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now." "You don't? Why not?"

 

"He was absolutely fastidious. He took germs very seriously. Anne told me that he washed his hands with carbolic every day. I cannot envision him baiting a hook."

"So you think he could have killed Anne?"
"I didn't say that. I think he didn't have a good alibi, so he made one up, quickly." "Did other people accept it, or did most people think as you did?"
"Those coloreds in Little Rock, they're out of line, don't you think?"
"Excuse me?"

"You let colored people go to school with white people and pretty soon they'll want to marry one another," she said. "It seems to me that if they use the same books, they're getting the same education. Separate but equal—that makes sense to me."

Now Simon understood why she dressed like June Cleaver. This woman was still living in the fifties.

"Imagine President Eisenhower sending in federal troops like that, to a sovereign state," Mrs. Blythe said. "The states have the right to run their own affairs. It says so in the Constitution. That's what we fought the Civil War over."

Somehow, Simon didn't think it would help to mention the fact that the South had lost the Civil War.

Simon tried to get Mrs. Blythe back on the track of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance in 1926, but he only managed to get the subject changed to Sputnik and the Russian menace.

Mrs. Blythe escorted Simon out of her decaying house, past the boxes of crochet destined for the church bazaar. Should she ever decide to deliver them, she would have to hire Mayflower to do it.

Chapter Twenty
"I THINK YOU CAN TRUST WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT EVENTS IN THE distant past," Marcus said. "The present would be another story."