Charlaine Harris - The Julius House

“He doesn’t talk much about himself,” Martin said after a pause. “I guess you’ll have to find out what he’s like from his actions.”

I’d made Martin angry. Perhaps he felt I was questioning his judgment.

“You know what I call the way you look now?” I asked.

Martin raised his eyebrows in polite query. He really was angry.

“Your ‘Intruder Alert’ face.”

He looked surprised, then irritated, and finally he began laughing.

“Am I that bad?” he asked. “I know I have a problem talking about some things. No one ever called me on it before.”

I waited a little while.

“I don’t talk about Vietnam easily, because it was dirty and scary,” he said finally. “And there are some people I don’t talk about, because they’re connected with that time… I guess Shelby’s one of them. He’s from Tennessee, from Memphis. We were in the same platoon. We were good friends. After the war, we hung around together for a while. We kept in touch. Maybe once every three months I’d get a phone call or letter, for at least four years or so. Then I didn’t hear from Shelby for a long, long time. I thought something must have happened to him.”

Martin turned to look at the floodlit church, the lights shining full on his face for a minute, making him look-old.

“I got a letter from him about a year ago, and we resumed the connection. He had married Angel.”

Martin stopped abruptly and I realized I had gotten all I was going to get.

It was a start.

I was at the Julius house by seven the next morning. I looked at each room, slowly and carefully, revising my room-by-room list of the changes that needed to be made. At 8:15 the carpenters came, followed me around, took notes, and left. At 9:00 the paint, wallpaper, and carpet people came, measured, and left. At 9:45 the plumber showed up, trailing a miserable-looking assistant with a cigarette stuck in his mouth.

“Please don’t smoke in here,” I said as pleasantly as possible.

The lanky red-haired boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, threw me a sullen look and retreated to the front yard, where I was willing to bet he’d leave his cigarette butt in the grass. After years at the library, I could fairly accurately predict which teenagers were going to behave and which were going to be problems. This one was a problem. I looked at my plumber.

“I know, I know,” John Henry said. “I don’t think he’ll last long. It’s a pain riding in the truck with him. But his mama is my wife’s best friend.”

We sighed simultaneously.

John Henry and I discussed the bathrooms, worked out a schedule (as soon as possible), and then he crawled under the house to check out the plumbing. “I’m a little scared to explore too much here,” he confessed with a broad grin. “Who knows but what they’re all under the house?”

“Oh, the Juliuses.” I smiled back. “Well, I bet the police checked that out pretty thoroughly at the time.”

“Sure. Still, I bet you wonder if they’ll show up here somewhere. It’d give me the creeps, Roe.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said dismissively, and turned to the open front door to see a stranger standing there. He was looking back over his shoulder at the red-haired boy smoking on the lawn. When he turned to me, I recognized the dark man who’d been sitting in Martin’s waiting room the day I’d returned from Ohio.

This was Shelby Youngblood. He looked at me in that moment, and we had a good rude stare at each other.

He was about five foot ten, swarthy-skinned, with muscles that were truly impressive, even to one used to Martin’s muscular build. His hair was a dusty black, shaggy, only a few threads of gray, and his mustache was the kind that framed his mouth. His eyes were blue, and he wore old jeans and a faded T-shirt. His hands looked broad and hard.

“Miss Teagarden?” he asked, in a pleasant voice. “I’m Shelby Youngblood.” I’d expected him to growl.

“I’m glad to meet a friend of Martin’s,” I said honestly. “Please call me Roe.”

We shook hands. His were very hard, ridged and scarred.

“Come see the garage apartment,” I suggested.

I got my keys and led the way, out the kitchen, under the roofed walkway, over to the garage with the covered stairs running up the side closest to the house. I unlocked the door at the top, and we went in. Since the garage was not only more than wide enough for two cars, but had a deep storage room running all its width along the back, the apartment was larger than one expected from outside. It was a very good size for one person-it was basically one large open room. I hoped two people would be comfortable there. The bathroom was small but adequate, and more modern than the ones in the house, since it was the Juliuses who had turned what had been a glorified hayloft into an apartment for Mrs. Julius’s mother. The tiny kitchen was not meant for producing a full Thanksgiving feast, but would be bearable for someone who was not an enthusiastic cook.

I looked at Shelby Youngblood inquiringly.

“Is this okay?” I asked, when he didn’t say anything.

“It’s fine,” he said with some surprise, as if he hadn’t realized I was waiting for his verdict.

“This carpet is mildewed, I think the carpet pad is, too,” I said, wrinkling my nose. I hadn’t noticed this the other time I’d looked at the apartment. “I’ll replace it. Is there any color you particularly like? Anything that might match your furniture…?”

“Right now, we don’t have any,” he said calmly.

He seemed amused.

All right! What was so damn funny about not having furniture, about my wanting to know if their furniture was any color I should be mindful of when I ordered carpet! Didn’t most people in their forties have furniture? It wasn’t as if I’d asked about his racial origin or asked him to describe a shrimp fork. I could feel myself turning red.

“Angel and I haven’t been in one place long enough to accumulate much,” he said, and I nodded curtly.

“Then I’ll rent it furnished,” I said, and turned and walked out.

I stomped down the stairs breathing heavily.

I spied John Henry’s wife’s best friend’s son going into my house with a cigarette in his mouth.

“Excuse me!” I called.

He stopped and turned.

This kid had an attitude, no doubt about it. He looked at me as if I’d crawled out from under a rock to question his God-given right to smoke in my house.

“Please put out the cigarette before you go in,” I said as evenly as I could manage, coming to a stop in the front yard a few feet away from the boy as he stood on my front steps.

He rolled his eyes and sneered. It was one of those teenage grimaces that make you amazed that so many of them survive to adulthood. Of course teenagers had acted like this in the library, and I had handled it then, but a few months away had resensitized me.

Already angry, I was now inwardly berserk. What this translated to on the outside was that I had my hands clenched in fists by my side, my jaw felt soldered together, and all I needed to complete my Shirley Temple imitation was to stick my lip out.

The boy dropped the cigarette on my wooden porch and ground it out with his foot. He took another step inside.

“Pick it up,” suggested a quiet voice from behind me.

“Huh?” The boy’s mouth was open in amazement at this novel idea.

“Pick it up and put it in your pocket,” the quiet voice said, as if it were implanting a posthypnotic suggestion.

With a fearful stare over my shoulder, the boy reached down, picked up his cigarette butt, dropped it in his pocket, and scuttled into the house.

“Now,” I said, pivoting on my heel, “I could have handled that by myself.”