The American Café Read online

  “Oh.” Emma turned her face away from Sadie again.

  Silence returned. As Sadie watched the crowd disperse through the gate, she wondered if Emma had any idea how offensive her comments sounded.

  In the distance Sadie noticed a woman standing away from the crowd. She continued to watch as the stranger bent low on one knee and placed flowers on a headstone not far from Goldie's grave. A toot from a car's horn brought Sadie's attention back to the present as the traffic began to flow away from the cemetery.

  “What do you think, Emma? It's already two o'clock. You want to call it a day and start fresh tomorrow?”

  Emma nodded her head and spoke softly. “That's okay with me, honey.”

  “I'm going to drive into Tahlequah and pick up some supplies. Do you want to go?”

  “No, you go on. I could use the rest.”

  Sadie turned west at the four-way stop and the two women rode in silence until they pulled into the driveway of Goldie's house.

  “Would you mind coming in for a few minutes?” asked Emma.

  Sadie said she wouldn't mind, and the two walked from the car to the house. Sadie opened the unlocked door for Emma and they went in. Emma dropped onto the sofa and kicked off her shoes. Sadie stood at the door, not sure what to do.

  “Where was the son?” asked Emma.

  “Who?”

  “Her son. Why wasn't Pearl's son at the service?”

  “Oh, I don't know. Lance said he'd been looking for him for two days. He wants to question him about what happened right before he left Pearl the day she—” Sadie stopped in midsentence, joined Emma on the couch, and slid her feet out of her shoes, too. “But I guess it doesn't matter since Lance said she left a note.”

  “Note?”

  “Suicide note, explaining that she didn't want to live anymore after what she had done.”

  Emma's eye grew wide. “Oh? That's the first I've heard of that.” She stared at Sadie for a moment before she stood, picked up her shoes, and walked toward the bedroom. “I guess that's it, then. Case closed. Time to move on.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Sadie contemplated Emma's words for a moment, slipped into her own shoes, and walked to the door. “Anything I can bring you?”

  The phone rang. “Can you wait just a moment, Sadie?”

  Sadie could hear Emma speaking with someone she obviously knew. Not wanting to intrude, she got up and turned her attention to a group of photos nestled within a trio of handwoven, double-walled baskets on top of the piano. Sadie picked up one of the baskets and recognized the signature design of a local award-winning master weaver, a Cherokee woman who lived north of Eucha. Goldie must have had an appreciation of Cherokee artwork, she thought. Something her sister didn't exactly exude.

  She replaced the basket and turned her attention to the photos. In one picture, Sadie recognized a radiant teenaged Goldie gazing into the eyes of a young Indian man decked out in a starched army uniform. Two other photos included the same person.

  After a few moments Emma emerged from the bedroom dressed in a worn pair of slacks and a soft pullover. She looked tired. “That was my son Jeff on the phone,” she said. “The one who lives in New York. I left a message for him earlier today and he just called back. I thought I should at least tell somebody in the family what happened. He knew I was coming here to be with Goldie, but he didn't know…” Emma pulled a tissue from her pocket and wiped her forehead.

  Sadie coaxed Emma toward the sofa.

  “That isn't all.” Emma used the same tissue to wipe at her nose. “Jeff said Rosalee called him. She needed money to get out of jail, so he wired her five hundred dollars. He said she was somewhere in Oklahoma. I wish that girl would get her life straightened out. You never know when something might happen, you know, like it did to Goldie.”

  Sadie patted Emma's shoulder.

  The front door opened, startling both women. Sadie stood and Emma froze. A woman about Sadie's age with stringy blond hair hiding half of her face stood in the doorway. Sadie immediately recognized her as the stranger she had seen earlier at the cemetery. The woman dropped her large purse on the floor and closed the door.

  “Rosalee?” Emma let out a gasp. “Is that you?”

  “I can tell you're thrilled to see me, Mother.”

  “Good grief,” exclaimed Emma. “Where in the world have you been? You look awful.”

  Rosalee wore a multicolored flowered-print skirt and a jacket, two-toned in purple and turquoise. Her black lace hose and white sandals echoed the contrast of her bleached hair and distinctly darker roots. “If I could remember I'd tell you,” she muttered.

  Sadie walked toward Rosalee and offered her hand. “Hello. I'm Sadie Walela.” When Sadie looked into the woman's face, she could see her eyes were red and swollen as if she had been crying.

  “I'm Rosalee Singer, the black sheep of the family. I see you already know my mother.”

  “This is not a good time for that kind of talk,” snapped Emma. “Especially with what's happened to your aunt.”

  Rosalee approached her mother, bent and kissed at the air near her cheek. “I know,” she said.

  “When's the last time you had a bath?” asked Emma. “You smell like beer.”

  Sadie could see the pain on the faces of both women and decided this was a good time to leave. “I was just on my way out.”

  “That's okay,” said Rosalee. “Don't let me interrupt. I can't stay.”

  “Now where do you think you're going?” asked Emma. “Can't you stay here, at least for a little while? You can clean up. Maybe some of Goldie's clothes will fit you.”

  “I've got my own clothes here.”

  “Here?” Emma looked surprised.

  “Yes, here, Mother. I've spent a lot of time with Aunt Goldie in the last six months or so. She cared about me, and I cared about her. She really wasn't very well, you know.” Rosalee stared at her mother with cold eyes. “She told me I was adopted, Mother. Is that true?”

  “Oh, honey, she had no right—”

  “She told me when you came to visit we would sit down together and you would tell me the truth. So I guess it's up to you and me to talk about it now.”

  Emma covered her mouth for a moment as if she might be sick, then lowered her hand. “There's nothing to talk about. We took you in and we raised you like you were our own. We gave you a good home. That's all you need to know.”

  “Who was my real mother?”

  “I don't know, Rosalee.” Emma's voice took on a defensive tone. “She abandoned you. I told you, we took you in. I didn't know who she was then, and there's no way to find out who she is now. It's not like we got you through an adoption agency or something. We were good to you. Isn't that good enough?”

  “I think you all need to have some time alone.” Sadie withdrew toward the door again. “It was nice to meet you, Rosalee.” Then she turned her attention to Emma. “Emma, do you want me to pick you up on Monday morning or are you going to drive Goldie's car?”

  “That old beat-up thing? No, honey, I'm used to walking. It's not that far and I need the exercise to stay in shape. If it's okay with you, I'll just meet you there.”

  Sadie got into her car and drove back toward the main intersection of Liberty, then headed south toward Tahlequah. She wanted to find out more about Pearl Mobley and try to decipher some of the babbling about Goldie and “someone having her way with her.” It sounded like Pearl might have been raped. But, even so, what would that have to do with Goldie? Maybe she could learn something from old newspaper articles.

  Twenty minutes later, she parked in front of the Tahlequah Public Library, entered the building, and approached the information desk. The woman behind a stack of books looked too young and fit to be working inside a library all day. She had vibrant eyes, a sunny smile, and highlighted hair framing her friendly face. Sadie explained what she was looking for, and the woman led her to a room full of filing cabinets.

  “We'll have to resort to old-fashioned mic
rofilm.” As the two women walked, the librarian continued to talk. “It's too bad the small-town newspapers like you're looking for aren't archived on the Internet yet.” She led Sadie to a bank of filing cabinets and directed her to the top row of drawers. “Here are the dates for each newspaper,” she said. “You can view the film on one of these viewers.” She pointed at two monster machines that looked to be about the same age as the building—old.

  Sadie thanked the librarian and began to search through the file drawers. She didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she felt like Liberty's past might help explain the present. Pearl's riddle about a missing child had piqued her interest, and now Emma's admission of an under-the-table adoption added to the puzzle. Based on Rosalee's age, something should show up in 1967, she thought. Sadie pulled open the drawer marked for that year and starting pulling out spools of film taken from the Tahlequah paper.

  Three hours later, the woman from the front desk arrived to remind her they would be closing in thirty minutes. Sadie looked at the mess she'd made of film and canisters on the table beside the viewer.

  She closed her eyes, chose one last spool, and fed the end of the film into the viewer, pulling images of newsprint across the screen once more. She groaned when she realized the microfilm had been misfiled. It was the wrong year: 1966. As she reached to hit the rewind button, something caught her eye. The headline read: “Liberty Rape Remains Unsolved.” Sadie quickly scanned the article, positioned it between the marks on the screen, and punched the button to make a copy. The old machine growled and spit out a page of paper. She replaced the spools of film on the counter as requested by the librarian, paid ten cents for her one copy, and retreated to her car.

  She sat behind the steering wheel and read the article, then folded it and pushed it deep into her purse. After she finished shopping for supplies, she would have plenty of time to think on the long drive home to Eucha.

  15

  When Lance Smith left the cemetery after Pearl's service, he drove north out of Liberty past Wilson's sawmill toward Billy Goat Hill Road. The undeveloped countryside on both sides of the gravel road displayed an abundance of oak, sycamore, and pine trees, billowing over dense under-brush. He maneuvered the police car down the steep winding hill for which the road was named. When the road flattened out, it continued hugging the base of the ridge and ran through a strip of bottomland. He stopped at the mailbox marked “Mobley.”

  A worn path led from the road through tall grass to a dilapidated trailer house sitting among a grove of red oaks. This was his third trip to this point in the road this week. “Hot dog,” he said. “Third time's a charm, Smith.” He could see John Mobley's Harley sitting at the end of the mobile home, covered with a worn tarp.

  Lance nosed his car off the road onto the path and made his way to the trailer. He parked behind the motorcycle, lowered the driver-side window, and sat in his car for a few moments. A recent deer kill hung from the lowest branch of a mulberry tree at the corner of the house. It was covered in flies, and stank.

  Lance honked the car horn and waited for John Mobley to come to the door. Sure enough, after several minutes John opened the door and stood in the entryway. His shaved head looked as if he'd been standing bare-headed in the Oklahoma sun too long.

  With beer can in hand, John raised his chin and spat into the yard. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and teetered for a moment before he took a step and tumbled to the ground.

  “And you white boys thought you could conquer us Indians with fire-water,” Lance mumbled as he rolled out of the car and walked over to the fallen drunk. “Take a lesson, my friend,” he said to himself. “Who is standing, and who is eating dirt?”

  John pushed himself up with his arms, looked at Lance, and belched.

  “You're going to have to get a hold of yourself. Getting drunk like this isn't going to do anybody any good, John. Get up.” Lance took hold of John's arm, pulled him to his feet, and helped him back into the mobile home.

  John sank onto the couch and reached for a beer bottle sitting on the windowsill. An assortment of bottles and cans lay strewn across the table, countertop, and floor. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes and Lance could smell spoiled food. The place look as if it hadn't been cleaned since the old contraption had been dragged across the pasture and had its wheels removed. From the look of things, that had been a while.

  “You got any coffee around here?” asked Lance.

  John didn't respond, so Lance ventured a peek into the cabinets and found a jar of instant coffee. He used the cleanest dirty pan he could find to heat some water.

  By then John had come out of his stupor enough to realize something wasn't quite right. “Hey man, what are you doing in my house, anyway?” His slurred speech indicated he had a long way to go before he would be able to carry on any kind of a conversation.

  Lance poured the boiling water into a mug and stirred in the freeze-dried granules to make a quick cup of brew. Then he set it on the kitchen table. “Come on, John. Let's see if we can sober you up so I can talk to you.”

  Four hours later, Lance had gone through all of the instant coffee available and then resorted to plain water. John stood at the front door and relieved himself into the front yard so many times that Lance thought surely most of the alcohol had been flushed out. After convincing John it was a good idea, Lance helped him into the small shower, turned on the cold water, and listened to him whine. After a while, John emerged from the back bedroom in a pair of dry jeans and a muscle shirt. A U.S. Marines emblem tattooed on the top of his right shoulder caught Lance's eye.

  “Say,” said Lance. “You a Jarhead, too?”

  John rubbed his hand over the indelible image—Semper Fidelis, the Latin words lettered in script under his skin. “Yeah, so?”

  Lance offered his hand. “Semper Fi,” he said. “The Nam. 1972.” For a moment, Lance thought he had found a way to connect to John, as the slogan from Vietnam surfaced in his mind. There are only two kinds of people who understand Marines: other Marines and the enemy. Everyone else has a second opinion.

  John ignored Lance's gesture. “What do you want?”

  “Okay, then. We'll do it your way, all business.” Lance returned his hand to his belt. “You weren't at the cemetery today to pay respects to your mother. Why not?”

  “She was just a crazy old woman,” John grimaced. “All I need is another beer.”

  “Hold on. After I leave, you can drink yourself to death for all I care. But before you do that I need to know what happened when you visited your mother the other day.”

  John frowned again. “You don't have any aspirins on you, do you?”

  Lance held his rock-hard stare.

  “Nothing,” said John. “Nothing happened. She wouldn't even talk to me. She turned her back on me and wouldn't listen to a thing I was saying. I didn't know what she was doing. It looked like she was braiding a rug or something. I got mad and left.”

  “Did she ever admit to you that she killed Goldie Ray?”

  John glanced out the window. “No. My momma would never hurt anybody…not on purpose.”

  “Did you know she was going to hang herself?”

  “I guess I should have figured it out, but I'm used to her doing loony stuff. I tell you she was just a crazy old woman.”

  Lance thought for a moment. He felt relatively sure John was telling the truth. “Whose house is this, John?”

  “I bought it for my mom a while back. She was living in an old shack that was about to fall in on her head. I pulled this thing over here from Arkansas and gave it to her.”

  “So it's in her name?”

  “Hers and mine. What difference does it make? She's dead. I ain't got no daddy, no brothers or sisters. So all her stuff is mine anyway.” John looked around his surroundings. “And that sure as hell ain't much, is it?”

  “You told me the other day that you kept your guns at your mom's house. Did you mean here?”

  John
sniffed. “Yeah, so?”

  “Your mom confessed to killing Goldie.”

  John looked at Lance with a blank face.

  “We've got the gun she was toting around that morning,” continued Lance. “Virgil Wilson took it away from her after she pointed it at some people in a restaurant. But I need your permission to see what other guns she might have had access to.”

  John shrugged his shoulders. “Knock yourself out. They're all in the hall closet.”

  “Would you get them for me, John?”

  John got up, walked to the closet, and retrieved four shotguns—two 20-gauge, one 12-gauge, and a small .410. He handed them one by one to Lance. Lance checked each one to make sure it was unloaded before leaning it against the wall. The chambers were all empty. Then John handed him a 30.06 Remington rifle. Lance checked the magazine. It too was empty. He handed it back to John.

  “That's quite a collection you got, John. Is that all of them?”

  John nodded as he replaced the rifle in the closet. “I like to hunt.”

  “I guess you realize deer season's about four months away.”

  John wiped his face with his hand. “Man's got a right to eat, don't he? We got so many deer now, they're half starved from lack of food. I don't think anyone's going to miss one doe. I shot it on my way home after you stopped me…for nothing. Harassment, if you ask me.”

  “How'd you get a deer home on a motorcycle?”

  “Good balance,” John sneered. “Everyone around here thinks I'm crazy as my momma, don't they? Including you.”

  “That deer wouldn't have been killed with a slug from a shotgun, would it, John? I thought you weren't riding with any loads that day.”

  “I wasn't,” John grinned. “But I stopped by the hardware store on the way out of town.”

  Lance shook his head. “John, you'd better take advantage of my good mood today and not cross me again.” Lance picked up the guns and carried them out the door toward his car, then stopped, looked back at John, and nodded toward the smelly carcass hanging in the tree. “That thing's past keeping. You'd better get it down before someone turns you in.”