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Chapter or Story
Chapter 14
An hour later, Miss Parker, Broots, and Sydney all met back at the courthouse. Miss Parker was ceremoniously locked up again, and Aunt Bee returned home.
“Well?” Miss Parker hissed at Broots and Sydney.
Broots shrugged. “Angelo hasn’t found anything in the Times. A few possibilities, but nothing that jumps out.”
“Tell him to go over them again!”
“I did. He still has a few left to go, so maybe something’ll come up.”
“Syd?”
“Miss Crump let me take away all her Times from the last few weeks. I didn’t have time to go through them all.” He didn’t tell her he had spent more time talking to Helen than reading newspapers.
“Well, at least we’ll have something to do. Give me a newspaper. Wait!”
Otis had finally awakened with a snort.
“Wa’al, it’s about time you woke up!” Andy said. “Your breakfast has been waitin’ a good hour or more.” He unlocked Otis’ cell and brought in the tray Aunt Bee had left.
“That’s alright,” Otis mumbled, sitting up. “Aunt Bee’s cooking’s good hot or cold.”
“You shore are right.”
As he came out, Miss Parker put out a hand through the bars to his arm. “Sheriff, wait. Let me in there—please. I have to talk to him.”
Andy stopped and gave her a searching look. “You promise not to threaten him?”
“Yes—yes, I do,” she said impatiently, but with an effort at a conciliatory tone.
“Alright, then.” He unlocked her door. “Otis, you got a visitor!”
“What?” Otis looked up from his grits and stared as Miss Parker came in and sat down in the chair opposite him, crossing her legs and looking hard at him. “Who—?” He grabbed his coffee and took a big drink, closing his eyes as if hoping she would be gone when he opened them. She wasn’t. “Andy! You better get the doctor! I musta had something bad last night! I’m seeing dead people!”
“No, you ain’t, Otis. Just listen to the lady.”
“You don’t remember seeing me last night?” Miss Parker demanded. “You came in and called me Catherine. My mother's name was Catherine. Catherine Parker.”
“Catherine Parker?” he repeated slowly. “Your mother?”
“How did you know her, Otis?”
He shook his head, slow but stubborn. “Don’t want to talk about it.”
“You have to, Otis! She was my mother! She died when I was little, and I know very little about her. I’m trying to find out what she was doing before she died. Please, Otis!” Her face had become astonishingly soft, the face of the child who needed to know the most important person in her life.
“You sure do look like her,” Otis muttered.
“It was more than twenty years ago, but you remember her well.”
“I should. She ruined my life.” He pushed his food back and turned away.
“What?”
Even Andy was staring, obviously completely unaware of whatever episode in Otis’ life he was talking about.
Miss Parker actually touched Otis’ arm. “Otis, my mother died suddenly. She was murdered, and I’m finding out that it was because of the work she was doing. Life without her is a blank, Otis. It’s not what was supposed to be.”
“She wrecked your life, too, huh?”
“Her absence has,” Miss Parker muttered.
“Yeah, me, too.”
“Otis, what happened? How did you know her?”
Otis sighed. For a moment he was no longer a comic character but a vital part of a mystery, with his own role to play beyond coming in drunk every Friday night. “Years ago my wife and me wanted to have kids. And we never did. So we thought, OK, we’ll adopt a baby. So we went to Raleigh and applied for adoption, and they said, no, you ain’t got enough money. Enough money to keep our own kid, but not enough for some orphan nobody wants? Well, we were all cut up about it, and we went home and didn’t tell nobody. Then this lady shows up. Beautiful lady, with this look in her eyes like the whole world depended on her. Catherine Parker. And she says, I heard you wanted to adopt a kid, and we says, Yeah. She had a kid in mind, but it was this special case. Not a baby but a seven-year old, and not a boy but a girl, and this girl had been kidnapped and had horrible things done to her, and she would have to have—” he paused and said it carefully “—psy-cho-therapy. And when she got older she would have to go to a special school because she was a genius, and Catherine would pay for all of it, because the important thing was to have her in a family that loved her and in a real nice town like Mayberry. And even with all that we said yes, we’d take her. And then Catherine said the thing was she was still kidnapped and had to be rescued, and it was dangerous, but she was going to do it. She came back to Mayberry a coupla times, always looking disappointed and saying she was trying. She showed us a picture of our little girl, our Annabel, a poor, mournful-looking, plain-looking little thing with real bright eyes. I can still see her as plain as day. And then one day Catherine just stopped coming, disappeared, and we couldn’t find out anything about her, not that we had money to look, till one day somehow we found an obituary on her, said she was dead, and a year after she died we got a letter from her. It said, if we got this letter she was dead and her lawyers had orders to send the letter a year later. It said poor Annabel was dead, and they were on to Catherine, because she’d saved a bunch of kids from the kidnappers, and they found out and she was in danger. She was sorry she’d never come back, but she didn’t want to put us in danger, too. And that was that. Well, we never talked about it no more, but we’ve both thought about our Annabel every day. We’d been thinking of her as our kid for months, and w couldn’t just leave off. That was when the wife started getting all angry and mean and I started drinking.”
“Oh, Otis,” Andy said softly. “Nobody ever knew. We woulda helped you.”
“Nobody was supposed to know! That’s what Catherine said. Though we couldn’t decide whether it was all real or she was some crazy lady out getting people riled up over nothing.”
“It was real,” Miss Parker said. “She rescued seven children, and then she was murdered the day before she was going to rescue three more. I don’t know anything about your Annabel, but you can be assured she existed. Maybe she was killed, too. They’re like that.”
“Who are?”
“The kidnappers.” She looked at Sydney for a moment. My kidnappers. She wanted to rescue three children: Jarod, Angelo…and me. From my father. She looked back at Otis. “I’m sorry you never got your Annabel. I’m sure she would have loved it here. I’m sure you would have been good parents.”
“We woulda tried,” Otis said quietly.
