The Julius House Page 0,42

inside hesitantly, calling. She doesn't want to stroll in without warning. But no one answers her call. She creeps through the house, now anxious, looking about for signs of the untoward. The house is clean and peaceful. The cuckoo clock in the living room makes its brainless noise, and the old lady jumps.

Where is her daughter? Where is Hope? With approaching panic, the old lady finally screams up the stairs, but no one answers. Telling herself she is being ridiculous, and she'll give them a real talking-to when they come home, Melba Totino sits at the kitchen table, waiting for someone to come. She doesn 't dare to touch a thing. The dishes are all put away. There is no coffee perking, nothing baking in the oven. After half an hour, she walks back out the front door and looks in the garage. She hadn't bothered on her way over - why would she?

And now, as far as she can see, everything is the same. She doesn't drive, she doesn't know anything about cars, but this car is her daughter's family car, the truck is her son-in-law's pickup, with "Julius Home Carpentry" proudly painted on the side, phone number right below.

No one is in either vehicle.

She goes from the entrance to the garage past the stairs leading up to her apartment, across the covered walkway over to the house, into the his backyard. She is glad she has her sweater on, there's a nip in the air for sure. There's a turkey buzzard circling in the sky. The yard itself is empty. She looks up to the second story of the house, hoping to see movement at Charity's window, but there is nothing.

Bewildered, trying to keep her terror a secret from herself, the old woman walks slowly back to the front of the house, still trying to keep pristine that new concrete that the owners of the house will never see again. Finally, after some interminable hours, she calls the police.

"Parnell Engle drove by that morning in his pickup truck," Sally explained, "and since he'd poured the concrete the day before, naturally he glanced at the place as he went by. After he saw all the police cars there, he just happened to stop by the paper to check on his classified ad, and just happened to wander into the newsroom and let me know what he'd seen."

"Naturally," I agreed.

"Of course, this was a couple of years before he 'found the Lord,'" Sally said. "Lucky for me, because I was able to talk to the old lady before any other reporters even knew something had happened. By the next day she wasn't talking to anyone. Wonder where she is now?"

"In Peachtree Leisure Apartments," I said smugly. "She gave me a wedding present." It was not often I got to impart news to Sally. "It's odd she chose to stay here, with no family. I gather she and her sister had been living in New Orleans. Wonder why she didn't go back?" "She told me she was waiting for the Juliuses to turn up." Sally shuddered, and took a sip of her iced tea. "That's creepy in more ways than one. You know, Hope Julius would be dead by now, even if she was alive." I raised my eyebrows, and after a second, Sally realized what she'd said. She shook her head in self-exasperation.

"What I mean is, Hope Julius had cancer," Sally explained. "She had ovarian cancer, I think, very advanced. Though there was apparently little hope, she was undergoing radiation treatment in Atlanta. All her hair had fallen out... I remember seeing one wig and one empty stand in her room when the police let me walk through the house... Mrs. Totino said it was okay. One wig, a curly one that she wore almost every day, was gone. The one that was left was fancier, like she'd had her hair put up. She wore that one to church and parties." "Oooo," I said. "That's awful." A woman's false hair, sitting there in her room when the woman was gone.

"It really was," Sally agreed. She turned a page in her notebook.

"Why was the wig there, I wonder? That makes it look bad for Mrs. Julius." "Yes, it does. She wouldn't leave without her extra wig, would she? And the wig made the whole scene eerier... like Martians had beamed them up right after they'd made their beds that morning, but before they'd gone down to breakfast." "They'd made their