Charlaine Harris - The Julius House

“I knew that Mama would tell. And Harley would go to jail. I’d never see him again. So I told Harley to go back up on the roof, and when Mama came back I told her to go up to the bedroom, lean out the window, Daddy and Harley had something they wanted her to see. So when she leaned out the window, Harley hit her, too.” She must have read something in my face, because she said, “Mama was really sick, anyway, she was going to die.”

And no traces of the murders had been found in the house, because they had actually taken place on the roof.

“What about your grandmother?” Angel said.

“Well, I knew she would tell about Mama,” Charity said pettishly. “It just seemed to grow and grow. I’d always felt closer to Alicia, anyway. Me and Harley couldn’t think of what to do, so I told Great-aunt Alicia what had happened. She and my grandmother had never gotten along good, and sharing that house in Metairie had just made it worse. They had hardly any money, and they didn’t have many friends, and she had forged Grandmother’s name before, once or twice, and not gotten caught. She said people couldn’t tell old women apart anyway. What she told us to do-she thought about the money right away-she said we might as well get it and have a life, rather than going to jail, that Mama and Daddy wouldn’t have wanted me to go to jail. So she called Grandmama, and told her Mama was up in her bedroom and was feeling very bad, and Grandmama hurried up those stairs, and when she was in the bedroom looking around, I sort of wrapped my arms around her and stuck her head out the window, and Harley… took care of her.”

My stomach lurched.

I would just as soon not have heard more, but by then I couldn’t have stopped her.

“We sat down in the kitchen and talked. Harley was kind of crazy by that time. We couldn’t decide what to do with the bodies, or what to tell Mr. Engle, who was coming to pour the concrete in two hours. Then we thought… just leave them where they are. Harley said we should cover them with lime, that’s what his dad did when the family dog died and they didn’t want other animals coming in the yard to dig at the grave. And up on the roof, we’d get turkey buzzards if we didn’t do it… so he went into Atlanta and bought the lime and a gray tarp… he had gotten some blood on his clothes so he borrowed some of my daddy’s. Harley got back and fixed them up on the roof, and then he waited.

“Alicia had realized by then that no one knew she was there, so she could pretend to be Grandmama. And she said if I put on Mama’s wig, Mr. Engel wouldn’t know from a distance it wasn’t Mama. And he had to see me as me, too. We’d just tell him Daddy had had to go off on an errand. So Harley drove the truck around behind the garage and hid it while Mr. Engle was there, and I went out and talked to him, and then I ran upstairs and put on Mama’s Sunday wig, because she was wearing the other one.” For a second the toughness cracked in Charity Julius’s face and I could see the horror underneath. “And I went and rattled round in the kitchen so Mr. Engle could see me, and Alicia pretended to be Grandmama.”

I had wondered all along why Hope Julius had been wearing her Sunday wig when Parnell had seen her working in her kitchen, yet it had been on the wig stand when Sally had been shown through the house the next day. And I had seen the everyday wig, its synthetic hair fluttering in the breeze on the roof.

“How did you vanish?” I asked.

“It was my great-aunt who realized I had to. We sat down that night and figured it out. Harley had to go home like nothing was wrong. I had washed and dried his clothes by then, and he put them back on and we just put the ones of Daddy’s he’d been wearing in a garbage bag… Harley’s hairs might be on them or something. And I got in the car with him, not taking hardly anything of mine, just one change of clothes, because Alicia said it had to look like I’d just been taken without notice. I put Mama’s wig back on the wig form; my hair was enough like Mama’s that I didn’t figure it would matter if they found one of my hairs in it. Then Harley, on his way back home, dropped me off at a bus station. I had the key to the house in Metairie. We used all the cash Mama had in her purse to buy the ticket.”

“The police checked all the bus stations within a reasonable radius,” I said.

“I wore an old pair of Mama’s glasses, and I put a pillow in my front like I was pregnant,” Charity said rather proudly. “That about knocked Harley over, he really laughed.”

For the first time, I met Angel’s eyes. She was looking as sick as I felt. I had completely lost my taste for this insider information.

But she went on talking, though Harley was now stirring and moaning. She’d stayed in the Metairie house for a couple of days, eating only what was in the pantry and not going outside. On the third night, she’d slipped out of the house very late, gone to a pay phone at a convenience store a few blocks away, and called her great-aunt, asking her to get a message to Harley. Harley’s parents might question a young woman calling their house. Harley could join her as soon as the investigation died down, maybe in a month, they figured.

“I couldn’t stay in the house that long, someone would see me, I knew,” Charity said. “I was going crazy.”

I was willing to bet that was true: shut in a house, forced to remain invisible, with her last memories of her family closed in that house with her.

“So what did you do?”

“Aunt Alicia cashed one of my grandmother’s checks and snuck out and mailed it to General Delivery, Metairie, and after I picked it up, I went to New Orleans and rented a room and found a job. I’d never done any of that before.” She sounded rather proud. “I gave them Harley’s name and Social Security number. I figured girls could be named Harley, too. And it was a real Social Security number. I had it written in my billfold. I knew everything about Harley.”

“And he came down when he figured it was safe?” Angel wanted to cut this true confession short. She (and Harley) were shifting restlessly.

“And got a job at the lumber place. And then we rented this cabin. And here we’ve been for all this time. Until you found us. Who the hell are you two?”

“I own the Julius house,” I said.

“Oh, you’re the one Alicia called about. The one Harley was supposed to get rid of. The one who was asking so many questions, with too much time on her hands.”

I could have done without Angel’s cocked eyebrow.

“But he said he screwed it up. And he was too scared, being back in that area where someone might recognize him, to try again. He was so mad… Listen, I’ll bet you don’t care, but really I’m in awful pain.”

“Why didn’t your great-aunt just sell her house and drop the phone number?” It was the last question I really wanted an answer to.

“She and grandmother both had to be there for a house closing; they owned it jointly. And if Alicia cut off the phone, where was she supposed to be? People did call her from time to time… and she had to get her mail somehow. So she got the idea of renting it to that tub of lard, her cousin’s daughter, so she could get some money to live on till the estate was probated… four months! We almost made it!”

And her confessional mood changed suddenly to hatred, all directed at me. She actually managed to heave herself at me, despite the broken knee, despite bound hands. I found myself wondering if it were true that Harley had wielded the hammer in all three murders.

“I’ve had a thought,” Angel said, unmoved by Charity’s desperation. “If the forensic anthropologist examined those bones the day after you found them, he knew that one skeleton wasn’t Charity. He must have told them it was an old woman. So who are the police going to question first?”