Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(A snippet from Luna City 12, in progress; a story from when Letty McAllister and Stephen Wyler were children in the 1930s … investigating a case of mysterious visitors to a neighbor in need of help…)

“Who – or what do you think is doing Mrs. Allison’s housekeeping, while she’s away in Karnesville?” Stephen ventured. He wasn’t one for believing in fairy stories either. Douglas considered the matter gravely, before he replied.

“I think that someone, or more than one someone – since the note said “we” it must be more than one – who are doing Mrs. Allison a good deed is human, but for some reason, they can’t show themselves.” Douglas looked earnestly at the young faces, gathered in the dim shade inside the tipi-hut, and ventured. “I wonder if they aren’t kids. Kids like us – and for some reason, they are afraid to show themselves. They’re on the road, like all those hobos, looking for work and a meal – and they don’t want anyone to see them. But they have a baby with them. And I find that real worrisome. Kids with a baby – they ought to be able to ask for help. From Chief McGill. Mr. Drury, or our father. The Reverend Rowbottom.”

“Strangers,” Retta commented softly. “If they were from anywhere around here, they’d know to be able to trust Reverend Rowbottom, or Chief McGill … certainly the mayor of Luna City.”

The mayor of Luna City was Letty and Douglas’ father, and there was no man in Karnes County who was a softer touch for the troubled, ailing or indigent, as long as they were truly in the condition and not freeloaders looking for a handout.

“We ought to do something about that,” Stephen said then – very decisively. He was the only son of the richest rancher in the county; a family well-accustomed to doing something positive regarding any matter which attracted concern.

“What ought we do?” Artie looked around the circle of faces. He was not entirely gormless, but one of those children made to be a follower, which is how he had come to latch on to the McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler.

“I think we out to set a watch.” Douglas sounded as if he had thought a plan out very carefully. Just as Stephen loved movies and books about bold pirates and scurvy dogs on the Spanish Main, Douglas was devoted to the exploits and the logical deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective.  “Letty and Retta ought to watch Mrs. Allison’s house and see who comes there during the day while she is away in Karnesville. It’s summer; school is out until fall, so no one would think anything of kids just hanging around. Meanwhile, Stephen and Artie and I will go around every business in town and see if there are kids that we don’t know hanging around, looking to cadge work.”

“Everyone around here notes strangers,” Artie Vaughn nodded an assent to the plan. “You should make us up a list, so we can split up and save time.”

“Let’s do it,” Douglas, being an intelligent boy, did not disdain sensible suggestions from other members of the club. He nodded, in slightly surprised agreement, pleased that Artie had been absorbing Sherlock Holmes’ logical methods.  “And meet tomorrow afternoon at four, to compare notes.”

Letty told her mother that she was going over to spend the day at Retta’s, once she had finished her daily chores. Retta told her mother that they were going to spend the day outside, and Retta’s mother kindly supplied them with a thermos of lemonade and some sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. The mothers of members of the Club were well-accustomed to their offspring spending the summertime daylight hours on kid-business of their own.  All the various mothers asked – and not with any real conviction that such requests would be scrupulously observed – was that their various activities not be physically risky, unlawful or likely to involve blood being shed.

Retta and Letty both were working towards Scouting badges in First Aid and had – so far – been able to staunch any flows of blood resulting from various misadventures, without drawing parental attention to them. Douglas and Stephen were quite grateful for this ability.

The girls took some books with them, and a pair of bird-watching binoculars which had belonged to Letty’s grandfather; the architect who had laid out the plans for Luna City and designs for all the public buildings, back in the waning decades of the previous century. Letty had to borrow the binoculars from her father’s study – but he was not a bird-watcher, and in any case, would be in town all the day long at his office, so the binoculars would not be missed. Retta borrowed her family’s wind-up alarm clock, likewise hoping that it would not be missed during the day. Douglas had suggested that the girls keep a log, noting the times, and for that, a clock was essential.

Retta’s father had built a treehouse in the far-distant quadrant of their yard, for the benefit of Retta’s three much-older brothers. Those brothers were now all well-grown and distaining such childish amusements, so Retta had the treehouse to herself and her friends. It was a simple platform of weathered planks with a crude waist-high rail around it, nestled in the center of a many-branched oak tree – a perch which offered a good view of the back of the Allison house across a meadow of unmown grass and the long dirt driveway between it and the mailbox on the main paved road. Since it was veiled by leaves all around, the platform could not be seen by a casual viewer. Anyone coming to or from the Allison house would be seen. It was the ideal position, as Douglas had pointed out, to surveil the Allison’s place. Retta and Letty climbed up the rough ladder formed by planks nailed into the oak tree trunk, emerging through a small trapdoor in the middle of the platform.

They had also taken the precaution of bringing some books and a pair of cushions to soften what they expected to be a day-long vigil. Letty loved spending time in the treehouse, for when the wind strengthened, the platform swayed gently, like a ship in a rolling sea.

“There goes Mrs. Allison,” Retta made a tidy note. “Eight-forty. Just in time to catch the 9 o’clock bus to Karnesville. The milkman already has been – she took in the milk and let the chickens out. And so has Sgt. Drury’s car. He must be going to Karnesville, too.”

John Drury was an older man, once a Texas Ranger, who served as a detective for the Luna City Police Department, at such times as required extra-special detecting skills. Crime did not often wave, in Luna City; such offenses as occurred were most usually quite transparent.

“Eight-forty,” Letty double-checked the time. “I hope this isn’t a day when the brownies don’t show up. I want to be the ones who solve the mystery.”

“Stephen was going to go to all the shops on Town Square,” Retta ticked them off on her fingers. “All the ones who might have hired boys to run errands, or something. Artie was going to Bodie’s, and to the Cattleman Hotel.”

“Douglas was going to the Tip-Top first thing,” Letty continued, “And then to speak to the folks at Gonzalez’ garage. He thinks that because the Gonzalez place is so close to the main road – that was where someone looking for work might go, after asking at the Tip-Top. They’re going to meet up at noon and go around to everyone that they might have missed in the morning.”

“Makes sense,” Retta agreed, as she opened her book. “I think we got the easy part, though.”

“The boring part,” Letty propped the binoculars on the railing, and focused them on the Allison’s back porch. They had agreed to alternate every half an hour.

It hardly had been forty minutes before Letty looked up from her book and spotted the girl, out on the county road that ran past the Allison and Livingston home places.

“Look now – over there, just by the mailboxes,” Letty said, softly. “See that girl? She’s pulling a little wagon … an old Liberty Coaster, looks like …”

“I see her,” Retta swung the binoculars around, and trained the lenses on the girl, walking along the roadside verge, pulling the little wagon after her. She was very obviously a girl, as her light brown hair hung down in two braids, although she was wearing faded denim overalls like a boy’s and a baggy shirt several sizes too large for a skinny frame – all this plain to Letty, even without binoculars.  “There’s another in the wagon … could that be the baby they meant – that they needed milk for?”

The girl, the wagon, and the smaller child in it were lost to their sight, momentarily screened by a thicket of hackberry bushes. Retta continued, almost whispering, “She’s … yes, coming down the drive to the Allison place.”

“If they go inside, they’re for certain Mrs. Allison’s brownies,” Letty whispered in reply. The girl with the wagon and smaller sibling was so far away that they might have conversed in normal tones … but the necessity for discretion compelled whispers.

Almost holding their breaths, Retta and Letty watched the girl go to the back door of the Allison place. The strange girl moved confidently, as if she knew what she was about, and had no apprehension about being there. She bent down and picked up the smaller child. Letty thought the smaller child was another girl, for the mop of yellow ringlets, and a baby smock which once might have been pink. Then the two girls vanished into the house – casually, as if they had every right to be there, leaving the wagon by the back porch steps.

“Nine-thirty-five,” Letty looked at the alarm clock, and made a lot in their watch-log. “The brownies are in the house. I wonder how long they will stay?”

“Depends on what Mrs. Allison has asked them to do,” Retta replied. “Say – what do we do when they go?”

Letty thought it over, very carefully. “I think that we should follow them. At least a little way. That way, we can tell the boys where they are staying.”

“They must be staying somewhere,” Retta agreed.

For some time, silence fell in the tree house, broken only by the faint rustle of turning pages, the metallic ticking of the alarm clock, and the slight scuffle as Retta and Letty handed off custody of the binoculars. The girl they were watching appeared in the Allison’s yard three times – once to open the henhouse and scatter feed for them, then again an hour later to sweep the back porch with a broom, and finally at around 1:30 to chase the hens back into the henhouse. Then, she emerged one last time from the house with the smaller girl in her arms. Retta and Letty noted the time and duration, in between bites of their own sandwiches. When the older girl set the blond child in the wagon, and set off down the long drive towards the county road, Retta and Letty were ready.

They crouched behind a stand of overgrown sunflowers by the Livingston’s mailbox until the girls and their wagon had gone past. Letty wondered if they were sisters, although they did not look much alike, or as nearly as she could judge from a close inspection through the binoculars.

“Not too close,” she warned Retta in a breathless whisper. “We don’t want them to see us following them – but we ought to see where they go, from here.”

It helped that neither of the girls looked behind; the older seemed to have all her attention focused on pulling the wagon, and the blonde toddler with the curls was too little to be taking notice of much. But Letty and Retta still lingered behind cover as they found it – overgrown roadside bushes, bends in the road, as it straggled southwards from Luna City itself, in the direction of the derelict abandoned tourist cabins, the burnt-out ruins of the old Sheffield mansion, and the derelict Mills home place.

“I wonder if they’re staying on Old Man Mills’ land,” Retta whispered, “I’d be scared to death of his pet alligators!”

Letty shook her head. “I don’t think they would dare … even if Ol’ Man Mills is practically a hermit, these days. Mrs. Mills is plenty sharp, an’ I don’t see that she would abide strangers, much. Even if they are kids. Those Millses are the biggest bootleggers in Karnes County – everyone says so.”

The girl and her wagon, with the smaller child in it had drawn somewhat farther ahead, lost to the sight of Letty and Retta around a bend in the road. They were nearest to where there remained a lightly-beaten track toward where the mansion had been – now a pile of weathered stones and timbers burnt to ashes and blackened slate shingles thirty years previously. Locals insisted that the low hill above a bend in the river was haunted. When the two girls ventured stealthily around that bed, the road which stretched out before them was entirely empty.

“We’ve lost them!” Retta despaired, but Letty shook her head.

“Maybe not … they weren’t all that far ahead of us. Look, Retta – there’s gaps in the fence, and all those paths leading away from the road. I’ll bet they went through one of them. We ought to look for the tracks that wagon would make in the dust. There’s plenty of spaces between the weeds where wheels and shoes could leave marks.” Letty smiled at her friend and nudged her shoulder. “We’re Scouts! Remember – we should be able to spot tracks!”