They arrived in Posey's Bend around midnight. Caleb slept the entire way, not even stirring when they drove through the wildlife refuge, where the geese were honking so loudly Anne could scarcely hear Sam and Danny conspiring to undermine her virtue. She drove unerringly, straight into the heart of town, and, before stopping, she circled the deserted square once to get the feel of the place. It was, she recognized immediately, just like all the other small towns within a half-day's drive of Bentonville, Arkansas; it had been Walmartized to the brink of extinction. The windows of the grand old Victorian storefronts that surrounded the square were sporting more plywood than plate-glass, and the Christmas decorations, a motley, bedraggled assortment of mismatched foil candy-canes and Christmas trees that were hanging like dispatched ghosts of Christmases past from the light poles along the sidewalks, tended more to remind her of the Caruthers' meager observances of the occasion than to lift her spirits.
She slowed as she neared the main entrance to the courthouse, which occupied the center of the square and guided the car into a space that was marked with a sign saying "Reserved Parking – Judge Montcastle."
"Wake up, Caleb," she said softly, shaking his shoulder as she spoke. "We're home."
Caleb blinked his eyes and struggled to right himself in the seat. He looked around, staring through the windshield with a bewildered expression on his face while he tried to orient himself with his surroundings.
"Where are we?" he asked, rubbing his eyes with his fists like a little boy.
"Posey's Bend, or what's left of it," she said matter of factly.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he exclaimed in surprise when his eyes opened sufficiently for him to read the sign designating his parking place.
"Nothing to it, Caleb; I just followed Highway 51, and it brought me right here."
"What time is it?" he asked sleepily.
"Eleven forty," she replied.
"Have you seen Mood Dog and Hunter?"
"Yeah, they followed us down from Mayfield. They're parked behind us, across the street."
"Good," he said, glancing over his shoulder toward the sedan behind them with its lights off. "I'll be right back; I need to tell them what we're up to." Then he paused with his hand on the door handle and said with a grin, "You can scoot over while I'm gone; I think I can find my way now."
He was only gone a minute, and when he returned he slipped into the driver's seat and started the motor. As he backed into the street, he explained "They're going to follow us and return your car to you, when I drop you off."
"Drop me off?" she echoed questioningly. She wasn't sure where she was going to spend the night, but she hadn't expected to be "dropped off."
"Right," he said as he steered the car around the square and onto a side street. "I fell asleep and didn't get the chance to tell you. I made arrangements for you to stay at Miss Kate's boarding house. It was the best I could do on short notice, since the motel burned down last summer and apartments are in short supply."
"But, 'Miss Kate's boarding house?'" she repeated skeptically. She could just see herself rocking on a porch with a flock of senile, old pensioners and the thought hadn't a lot of appeal.
"Don't worry; you'll love Kate. Everybody loves Kate. God knows how old she is now, but she showed up eons ago and it seems like she's been around here forever. Hardly ever leaves her porch anymore, though, but she still wears her pink silk robe and matching slippers all the time, and she still smokes unfiltered Camel cigarettes in a foot long, ivory cigarette holder. Her hair's gone blue-white on her, but she'll be wearing it all puffed up like a cloud around her head, just like she did forty years ago."
"From your description, it sounds like she could have been the Cotton Queen's sole survivor," Anne laughed.
"Not quite," Caleb chuckled."
"Well, where did she come from then," she asked.
"Ah, now, there's a question," he answered, sounding a little mystical. "Where did she come from? You get the answer to that question out of her, Annie, my girl, and you'll give some of the folks in Posey's Bend the best Christmas they've ever had."
"Really?" she said with increased interest. "You don't know where she came from?"
"Nobody knows for sure. It's one of Posey's Bend's many mysteries; you'll learn about the others if you stay around a while."
"I thought in a place this small, everybody knows everybody else's business, right down to how often they wash their shirts and sleep with their wives."
"They do, believe me," he laughed. "But she's been as tight lipped about her past as a reformed madam at a job interview. She's French, or Flemish, that much I know, because her French accent's still so thick you can't understand hardly half what she says and she calls everybody 'Cheri' with every other breath."
"That's it? That's all you know about her?"
"That's pretty much it. Oh, there was some talk way back when she first got here. They say she was beautiful then, like a movie star or something of the sort, and the talk was that during the War she had worked for the French underground luring German soldiers into dark alleys and back rooms where the resistance fighters could waylay them."
"Wow," she whistled.
"Yeah. The rumor was that she had so much German blood on her hands that she couldn't stay in France after the War or some soldier's relative would hunt her down and even the score, so she came here."
"If that story's true, she sure picked the perfect place to disappear to," Anne observed, nodding toward the vacant buildings as they drove through town, "'cause, this is about the last place on earth anybody's going to come looking for anybody else."
"Oh, you might be surprised about that," Caleb laughed. "We used to be a pretty busy crossroads; that highway you came in on was the main road from Chicago to New Orleans a few years back, before interstate highway went through on the other side of the river. We've had all kinds of folks through here, from President Roosevelt to Al Capone."
"I don't doubt it, Caleb, but all of them kept moving 'cause they couldn't make a go of it here, didn't they."
"You got me there," he grinned.
"But, Miss Kate stayed? She made it work for her, I guess."
"She sure did. Settled right in and bought the biggest house in town. Paid cash money for it, too. Turned it into a boarding house right off the bat and started letting out rooms, but she always turned the old folks away and wouldn't rent to them. She said they were too old and stuffy, and she liked laughter and music, so she only rented to young people. She's still that way, pretty much. She'd rather have the place go empty than open her door to an old codger with a walker."
"Doesn't sound very practical to me," Anne observed.
"You're right. I doubt she's taken in more than two hundred a month in rent money the whole time she's been here, but making money never seemed to matter to her. She always appeared to have as much as she needed, kept the place fixed up, had a full time gardener to tend her flowers and always drove the newest, biggest Cadillac convertible she could find."
"I can see why there's all the talk about her, then," she smiled. "She sounds like quite a local character."
"I meant it, you're absolutely going to love her," he proclaimed, bubbling with enthusiasm. "Wherever she came from, you can bet she's been around the block a time or two in her day. She's about the most worldly woman to come through Posey's Bend since they shut down old Leviticus' tavern over at the River. Why, when I told her I was bringing a girl to stay with her for a few days, she winked at me and punched me with her elbow so hard I thought she had cracked a rib, and she told me, 'I put her in zee bes chambre wis zee beeg bed wis zee tres bon springs, n'est pas, Cheri?'"
"My kinda girl," Anne deadpanned, but she couldn't help wondering if her arrival might not displace Miss Kate as Posey's Bend's "most worldly woman."
"You'll have to wait till tomorrow morning to meet her; I'm afraid she went to bed hours ago. She gave me your key so you can let yourself in tonight."
"How much does Miss Kate charge for 'zee bes chambre?'" Anne asked apprehensively. "I haven't much cash left right now, and I somehow doubt that Rufus'll be in much of a hurry to forward my last check even if he knew where to send it."
"Don't worry about Kate; that's taken care of."
