The Julius House Page 0,41

imagine what my mother would do in my present predicament - but it was like trying to picture the pope tap dancing.

Sally arrived punctually, in a very expensive outfit that she intended to wear to rags. Sally had been forty-two for a number of years. She was an attractive woman with short permed bronzey hair. She was neither slim nor fat, neither short nor tall.

During the past two or three years, Sally had been close to breaking into the big time with a larger paper, but it just hadn't happened. She had settled for being the mentor and terror of the young cub reporters who regularly came and went at the Sentinel as they learned their trade. For the first time, Sally gave me a ritual hug. It was a recognition of the big things I'd undergone since last we met, the fact that I was now a respectable married woman, and not only married, but married to a real prize, an attractive plant manager who presumably had an excellent income. This really can all be conveyed in a hug.

"You look great, Roe," Sally pronounced.

I don't know why people seem impelled to tell brides that. Is regular sex supposed to make you prettier? A number of acquaintances had told me how great I looked since we'd come back from the honeymoon. Maybe only married sex made you look better.

"Thanks, Sally. Come on in and see the house."

"I haven't been in here in years. Not since it happened. Oh, who would have known there were hardwood floors! It looks wonderful!" Sally followed me around, exclaiming appropriately at each point of interest. As I put lunch on the table, she told me all about her son Perry and the wonderful girl he'd met in his therapy group, and about her husband Paul and the shakiness of their new marriage.

"Surely you can work it out, Sally! You had such high hopes when you married him, and it's only been a few months!"

"Fourteen," she said precisely, spearing a strawberry with her fork. "Oh. Well. Would marriage counseling help, do you think? Aubrey Scott is really good."

"Maybe," she said. "We'll talk about it when Paul gets back from Augusta." "So, can you tell me all about the disappearance?" I asked gently, when she'd poked at her dill pickle for a few seconds of recovery. "Do you have the stories from the Sentinel?"

"Yes, the main one. I really want to know what you didn't put in the paper, or what stuck out in your mind. Were you out here then?" "Along with a slew of other reporters. Though I did get an exclusive for one day. The disappearance was really hot for a while, until a week had passed with no news. But being the local reporter paid off." Sally laid down her fork and opened her briefcase. She extracted a few pages of computer printout from a file folder.

"Those are your notes?" I'd expected a spiral notebook with scribbles. "Yes," Sally said with a hint of surprise. "Of course I put them on a disk when I get back to the office. Let me see ... this will be a reconstruction." She glanced over the pages, organizing herself, and nodded. "When the police got here," she began . ..

There's an old woman standing out in the driveway. She's small, and gray, and alternately distraught and grumpy. Her name, she says, is Melba Totino, and she is the mother of Mrs. Julius, Hope Julius. They're all gone, she says: Hope, and her husband T.C., and their girl, Charity. They vanished in the night. She herself had risen at her usual hour and gone over to the house to prepare breakfast, as she always did. She had expected all of them to be there, even Charity, who had been home sick the day before. Charity is a sophomore at Lawrenceton High, newly enrolled. She'd had a hard six weeks getting used to being in a new school, missing her boyfriend, but finally she'd adjusted. She'd had a low fever the past couple of days. But Charity, sick or not, now wasn't in the house.

Melba Totino goes in by the front door, since the back door of the kitchen faced outward over a new expanse of concrete, poured the day before to make a patio. She is unsure whether or not it's okay to walk on the concrete yet, so she goes to the front. The door's unlocked. No lights on inside. No stirring, no movement.

Mrs. Totino steps