decided to come back, but to get to Caldonia he needed to find a way around Rowena.
Finding the Past
ON HIS WAY BACK TO the hotel, Tom stopped at the Thirsty Bear Tavern, had a beer and a club sandwich, and hurried back to his room. He settled at the desk and studied the spread of notes laid out in front of him. This case was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture was supposed to look like. Most people left a paper trail as they traveled through life but not the Hobbs siblings. They were here then gone. People remembered them, but that’s where it ended. The only trail they’d left behind was one of piecemeal memories.
The few facts he had been able to find only served to raise more questions. Did Martin Hobbs come back after his supposed disappearance just to collect the papers for Virgil’s name change? Or did someone else, pretending to be Martin, sign for the papers? Who? Why? And then there was the question of Nellie and Edward, apparently shipped off to some nameless family in Huntington. Were they adopted? Did they also have new names? Was it possible the new family had requested their school records?
Tom penciled in a reminder to check the Coal Creek school.
He’d planned to make a quick stop in Coal Creek the next morning and then start for Huntington. Now he was rethinking it. A nagging in the back of his mind kept arguing there was more to be found in Coal Creek from the people, particularly Caldonia Markey. She’d seen the story through from start to end. She and Eliza had been close, best friends from what Tom could gather. Chances were she knew a lot more than what she’d said, but the question was whether or not she’d be willing to share it with him. He circled Caldonia’s name, put a question mark beside it, and sat there thinking.
After 15 minutes, he picked up the telephone, told the operator he wanted to place a long-distance call to Heatherwood, Georgia, and gave her Margaret’s number.
——————
MARGARET ANSWERED SO QUICKLY IT was almost as if she’d been sitting there, waiting for the telephone to ring.
“I wish I had better news,” Tom said, “but so far all I’ve gotten are bits and pieces of information; nothing concrete.” He asked if there had ever been any mention of Martin returning to Coal Creek after they’d come back from Barrettsville.
“Not that I know of,” Margaret replied. “Once we left Barrettsville, no one ever heard from Daddy again.”
Then Tom asked about the red-haired brother.
She laughed. “That was Ben Roland. He was the only redhead. Oliver used to tease him, saying he was adopted. He wasn’t, but it used to drive him crazy when Oliver said that.”
“Was Virgil close with Ben Roland?”
“Closer than he was with anybody else. Most of the time he just wanted to be off by himself, but if he had any kind of problem Ben Roland was the one he’d turn to.”
Tom explained Virgil’s name change from Hobbs to Palmer and how a man claiming to be Martin Hobbs had signed for the document. “Any chance that was Ben Roland?”
“It could have been. He was about seventeen the year Virgil disappeared and big enough to pass for a full-grown man.”
Tom told her about his visit to Coal Creek.
“Apparently, there was a fire in your family’s house. The back of it is completely gone. I did a walk-through to see if there was anything that could be salvaged, but the only thing I came up with was a photograph. It was on the wall in what looks to have been the living room. The glass wasn’t broken, so the picture is in fairly good shape. Judging by the way the man and woman were dressed, I figured it was your parents.”
As he spoke, Margaret closed her eyes and saw the grainy photograph. It was one of the few things her mama had taken to Barrettsville and brought back with them. She pictured the brown sofa where she’d sat side by side with her mama and the piano that sat pushed up against the far wall before her mama sold it.
“We called that room the parlor,” she said. “I remember that picture. It was Mama and Daddy’s wedding photo.”
“Your smile is a lot like hers,” Tom said. “While I was there, I talked to a number of families living along the hollow. Most only had sketchy memories