Chapter Two
I haven’t been in Germaine long enough to know its secrets, or at least that’s what the old families believe. They think they are holding all the dirt and intrigue and greed and murder down in some untapped underground place and sometimes I think they are holding in the sweetness, kindness, generosity, and natural peacefulness like these were precious secrets, too. I see through them. I see the good and I see the bad. I don’t think I’m particularly special in that regard. Doesn’t everyone see those things? Just that most people ignore whichever things bother them or don’t fit in with their idea of how the world works.
There are some things I see which I am pretty sure other people don’t see, except maybe the Seer of Germaine. I don’t want to talk about the Seer, yet, or what that has to do with me.
Ask me how I knew that the bones in that bag belonged to a man who played the saxophone and I’ll tell you I didn’t. Not at first. I did know that they belonged to a musician because I saw the notes dropping on the floor and heard something wild and fluid when Sheriff Sweet pulled that bone out of the bag. We all know it was the ulna from a grown man. We learned that pretty quick. It was all over town and into the country ten miles by noon. The telephone is faster than a speeding bullet. Faster than the newspaper, certainly. Especially The Germaine Truth, which comes out when it feels like it. That’s not entirely fair. Howard tries to stick to a schedule. Once or twice a month. Except in August when he usually goes on vacation for a month. Don’t ask me where the Applegate money comes from, could be drugs for all I know. Rockie hasn’t ever told me about the Applegate family. Everyone here seems to like them okay and Harlan is related to them. He’s related to everyone else in Wilbur County. Could be a slight exaggeration, but there are cousins all over this county.
Harlan is a McCoy and that’s an old family here. They came out from Virginia in the 1840’s with the first settlers. A founding family. Myself, I come from a foundling family. Anyway, that’s what I say to myself. I’m an orphan. My momma’s dead and I don’t know who my father is, but I mean to find out.
I was sixteen years old and living on the streets of Portland when Momma died. I saw it on the 11:00 news at one of my friends apartments where I was couch surfing. First they showed the motel room where she was staying. Then they said a woman had been found dead in there and it appeared she had overdosed, she was a known drug addict and prostitute and hispanic. That’s all they had to say about her. They didn’t give her name. I knew it was her. I also knew she had a bank account and a safe deposit box and that she got some kind of money every month and she would never tell me why or how much. It just wasn’t ever enough.
I didn’t want to go to the morgue to claim her because I knew someone would want to put me in foster care. But I sure wanted to get to that bank account. I figured I could really use the money. I knew which bank it was, but it took me a couple of weeks to get up the nerve and go inside. One thing Momma did, which I still don’t really understand, is she put my name on that account. She put my name on the safe deposit box, too. I hadn’t ever signed any cards and it took the bank people some major time to match up my Oregon ID to my face and make sure it was not faked. The only other thing I had was a social security card. Somehow I’d hung onto that through the last year since I ran away from home. Well, not from home, from Momma. There wasn’t really a home to run away from.
Mama had been riding the tracks up her arms and behind her knees and between her toes for a long time. The check that came every month was not enough to buy the goodbye she needed. She had a few boyfriends and some stayed longer than others, but she had never sold herself until that year I turned fourteen. The boyfriends had disappeared along with their contribution to our income, which usually amounted to a withdrawal and an IOU. Mama had been pretty at one time. She still had pretty good bones and the remnants of a nice figure. Neither of which are really necessary to your basic, bottom of the barrel skin trade. When the nightly stream of boyfriends started and we got evicted from the slummiest, mold-encrusted apartment in East Multnomah County we had ever lived in, I just decided that I wasn’t going to wait around for the sheriff to come knocking with the landlord and lock us out. I pretty much expected Child Welfare to be there and take me away. I went to school the day the lockout notice would come due. I hadn’t been in school for awhile so I ended up in the attendance counselor’s office for part of the day. I convinced them I was really, really ready to come back to school.
You know, I really might have been ready, but I had to find a place to spend the night, and the next night, and the night after that, so I was kind of too busy to go back.
