House of Strangers

McSparren Carolyn

He didn’t have a clue how to find out. He didn’t dare come out and ask. Nobody could know who he was or why he was here until he’d found out everything he needed to know. The private detective Uncle Charlie had hired never was able to trace his mother’s movements beyond the bus station in downtown Memphis. The trail went cold at that point and had stayed cold until six months ago.

All these years later Paul still believed he knew what had happened to her. All he had to do was prove it.

She would have called his father from the bus station. No doubt he jumped at the chance to pick her up there or meet her somewhere he couldn’t be identified. Mr. Hotshot Delaney didn’t want an inconvenient French peasant girl interfering with his life in Rossiter. She had to disappear.

So he met her, killed her and hid her body so well it had never been found.

What kind of man would do such a thing to a woman who’d loved him so deeply she’d left her own country for him, searched for him for six years and never stopped believing he loved her?

Paul had lived with the specter of his dead mother and her murderer—his father—for most of his life. It wasn’t any easier now that the murderer had a name.

The whole sordid story had to come out. His mother’s body had to be found and properly buried. Paul wanted the present generation of Delaneys to acknowledge the monstrous thing their father had done.

He wanted them to suffer as he had suffered.

He wanted them to be ashamed.

He slipped into a booth at the caf'e, opened the Memphis newspaper and folded it in fourths as he had learned to do when riding on buses and subways in New York and New Jersey. He was surprised when the owner, a tall, handsome blond woman, set down a steaming mug of coffee in front of him. “Coffee?” she said.

Apparently one didn’t ask at this hour of the morning. One simply accepted that coffee was the drink of choice.

“Uh, thank you.”

“Cream’s on the table. What can I get you?”

“Plain wheat toast and a large orange juice, please.”

For a moment she stared down at him. Then she sniffed, went behind the counter at the end of the room and disappeared into the kitchen. He glanced at the group of farmers two tables away.

In a bar in France at this hour of the morning, the farmers would be on their third coffee and brandy. These men, who looked every bit as craggy as French peasants, were mopping up the last bits of egg with their biscuits.

Tante Helaine and Giselle would no doubt have turned up their noses at the food. But after years of grabbing godawful airline meals in flight and even worse in airports, Paul was happy with the menu at the caf'e. These people served actual green vegetables, not simply fried potatoes.

“Wheat toast.” His waitress had returned.

“I think we’re going to be neighbors,” he said.

Instantly her face broke into a smile that lit her hazel eyes. “Wondered if you was him. Hey.”

As he was about to get to his feet, she flipped her hand at him. “We don’t stand on ceremony. I’m Bernice. Nice to meet you. Thought you was getting together with the chief this morning.”

“The chief? Not that I’m aware of.”

She laughed. “Buddy Jenkins, chief of police. He’s Jenkins Renovation and Restoration.”

“Oh, then yes, I am meeting him.” He checked his watch. “In about ten minutes.”

“You eat up. Buddy’s always on time unless there’s a law problem he has to handle. We mostly only get speeders out on the highway and drunk drivers.” She looked at him hard. “We have some drug problems in the county, but we sure as shootin’ don’t want any more.”

He smiled. “I’m sure you don’t. Thank you.”

As he bent to read his newspaper, he realized that all conversation had ceased. The farmers at the other table had swiveled in their chairs so that they could watch him. The moment he smiled at them, however, they turned away, hunched over and began to speak softly.

As a stranger moving to a small town, he’d expected to be checked out, but this was ridiculous.

He ate his breakfast, paid his bill, tipped the waitress generously, nodded to the farmers and left.

In Manhattan, piles of dirty snow still lined the streets. Here fifty miles east of the Mississippi River, the March wind was chill, but it smelled of fresh grass and newly turned earth. He’d been warned that west Tennessee summers were brutal, but he was ready to endure almost anything for this gentle early spring. Besides, he planned to install central air-conditioning in his new house.

At some point between the end of the Civil War and prohibition, Rossiter must have been prosperous. The small plaque that leaned against his front steps said that the Delaney house had been built in 1890. A dozen similar mansions along Main Street looked as though they dated from the early 1900s.

The railroad still ran along the far side of the open square that separated the town from the Wolf River bottoms on the north side, but the trains no longer even slowed to acknowledge the existence of the town.

Once there must have been a station. Probably it had stood where the small park with the shiny, ornate Victorian bandstand now perched across the parking lot from the caf'e.

The caf'e stood on one corner of what remained of the town square. About the time the Delaneys decided to build a fine house and move into town from their plantations, the area must have been a crush of mule-drawn wagons piled high with bales of cotton. Probably the caf'e hadn’t existed then. He doubted the high-and-mighty Delaneys would have chosen to build their mansion next door to a caf'e.

The pickup trucks and stock trailers parked haphazardly in the area now were not nearly as romantic.

Bank, mom-and-pop grocery, and dingy pool hall sat on the south side across the street from the caf'e. Three handsomely restored row houses formed the west side. The lower floor of the first held his real-estate agent’s office and the second a florist shop. On the front porch of the third building, a twelve-foot black wooden grizzly bear advertised something, but Paul couldn’t begin to guess what.