The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 39

Caitlin crosses the Mississippi River Bridge with her heart pounding. She is sure she has found the girl who passed Linda Church’s note to Penn at the Ramada, and she did it with two phone calls. The trick was figuring out whom to call. Caitlin had only caught a glimpse of the girl at the hotel, and mostly walking away, at that. But she’d seen enough. The giveaway was the hair. At first glance the girl’s hair had looked short, but as she walked away, Caitlin had seen the telltale mane hanging out from the tail of the jacket. Caitlin hardly ever saw waist-length hair anymore, and when she did, it usually meant one thing-in the Deep South, anyway. The other thing was the girl’s eye makeup. Not only had she worn twice as much as she needed, but it looked as though it had been applied by an eight-year-old trying to imitate her teenage sister. These two things together told Caitlin that the girl was wearing her idea of a disguise. And what she was disguising was her religion.

Caitlin had been fascinated when Penn told her that Mississippi had the highest per capita number of churches and also the lowest literacy rate. Three years ago, she had used these statistics as the launching point of a story on charismatic religions. People speaking in tongues, faith healing. For her, the most disturbing thing about doing the story had been her contact with the younger girls in the churches. She could see that they aspired to be like other teenage girls, but they had been raised in families with nineteenth-century values, or certainly pre-Eisenhower-era twentieth-century values. Her portrayal of these churches as patriarchal and sexist had upset a lot of their members and got some girls in trouble with their pastors, but it had also opened a lot of eyes to a closed society.

A couple of the women she’d spoken to had remained kind to her, and so the moment Caitlin suspected that the girl who delivered the note might be Pentecostal, she had checked her files at the Examiner and made some phone calls. Using what she’d gleaned from Penn’s description, she said she was looking for a tall girl who had probably lost a lot of weight in the past year or two, and who might have a job in Vidalia. That was all it had taken to get the two pieces of information she needed: a name and a location. Darla McRaney, the Bargain Barn on Highway 15.

At first Caitlin had been tempted to tell Penn what she’d discovered. But then she’d realized it would only prove to him that his jab about her penchant for following a story was on target. If this trip led any closer to Linda Church, Caitlin had promised herself, she’d tell Penn immediately.

The Bargain Barn is a long, low-slung building just off the highway, that looks as if it might once have been a brand-name store. During all the time Caitlin lived in Natchez, she’d only been inside it once, but her memory is clear. The store sells everything from clothing to housewares, medicine to ant poison, all of it cheap both in quality and price.

Only a few cars are in the lot. Caitlin parks between two of them, then locks her car and walks through the glass door. An elderly man wearing an orange vest greets her with a puzzled smile, and she walks past him into the clothing section.

“Can I help you?” asks a middle-aged woman sorting dresses on a circular rack.

“I’m looking for Darla McRaney.”

“Darla mostly stays over in housewares.”

Caitlin quickly navigates the empty aisles until she reaches an area filled with thin metal pots and imitation Tupperware. In the next aisle, above a rack of blenders, she sees Darla McRaney’s head. She knows it’s Darla because a girl would have to be almost six feet tall to be seen above the blenders.

Making a U around the end of the aisle, Caitlin approaches Darla cautiously, like a naturalist trying not to spook a timid animal. In spite of this, Darla looks up sharply and takes a step back, blushing scarlet.

“I didn’t see you,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“Darla, my name is Caitlin. I’m a very good friend of Penn Cage.”

The girl stares back for several moments, neither breathing nor blinking. Then she starts to back away.

“Wait,” Caitlin says. “Please, wait. I know you gave Penn that note at the Ramada Inn. I know you tried to disguise yourself, but he recognized you. He thought you worked at a restaurant, but I found you anyway.”

“I used to work at a restaurant,” the girl says in a dazed voice. “Franky’s Pizza. I liked it there, but I kept putting on weight. I had to quit.”

Caitlin nods with empathy.

“But I don’t know nothing about no note,” Darla says, twice as loudly as she’d spoken before.

Caitlin can’t help but smile at this obvious lie.

“But you knew exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned the Ramada and Penn Cage.”

Darla licks her lips, then looks around as though suspicious someone is watching her.

“I was at the Ramada,” she says. “So were a lot of people. And I did see the mayor there. But I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no note. I haven’t passed notes to men since grade school.”

Caitlin takes a step forward and speaks with sisterly intimacy. “I’m trying to help Linda Church. She’s in terrible danger, more even than she knows. I know you’ve been trying to help her, you and your friends. But she needs more help than that.”

Fear glitters in Darla’s eyes. “I told you, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout any a that. I gotta get back to work. I got customers.”

“I don’t see any customers,” Caitlin says gently. “But I’ll be glad to buy something if you’ll tell me just a little bit of the truth.”

“I did,” Darla insists.

“Have you seen Linda yourself? The reason I’m asking you is because of your eye makeup. I saw you didn’t know how to put it on, and I figured that if Linda was with you, she would have fixed it for you.”

Darla looks on the verge of tears. Her neck is splotchy, and her breath is going shallow. “I can’t talk anymore. Please, go away. Leave me alone.”

Caitlin reaches into her purse and hands Darla a card with her cell number on it. “I want the same thing you do, Darla. I want Linda to be safe. Please call me later. Think about all this. You’ll know it’s the right thing to do.”

Darla accepts the card with a shaking hand, then turns and hurries down the aisle toward a collection of Chinese lawn mowers.

Caitlin knows the girl is lying, but sometimes you have to stop pushing and let the source make her own decision. With a girl as skittish as Darla McRaney, it shouldn’t take long.