Miss Julia to the Rescue Read online

  Miss Julia to the Rescue

  Also by Ann B. Ross

  Miss Julia Rocks the Cradle

  Miss Julia Renews Her Vows

  Miss Julia Delivers the Goods

  Miss Julia Paints the Town

  Miss Julia Strikes Back

  Miss Julia Stands Her Ground

  Miss Julia’s School of Beauty

  Miss Julia Meets Her Match

  Miss Julia Hits the Road

  Miss Julia Throws a Wedding

  Miss Julia Takes Over

  Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind

  Miss Julia to

  the Rescue

  ANN B. ROSS

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Ann B. Ross, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Ross, Ann B.

  Miss Julia to the rescue : a novel / Ann B. Ross.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-56149-2

  1. Springer, Julia (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women—North Carolina—Fiction. 3. North Carolina—Fiction. 4. Widows—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O84198M585 2012

  813′.54—dc23

  2011037606

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Fairfield LH

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  This one is for The Book Club—the one in Mississippi that is so special to me, as well as for all the book clubs everywhere whose members buy, borrow, read, discuss, recommend and love books.

  Table of Contant

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 1

  “Hazel Marie,” I said as we sat at my kitchen table, “would you mind terribly if I redecorated your room?”

  “Why, Miss Julia,” she said, smiling at me, “it’s your house. You can do whatever you want to it.” Hazel Marie leaned over to replace a pacifier in one baby’s mouth, then rocked the twin stroller back and forth with her foot.

  She had strolled the babies over on this beautiful early June morning and now sat visiting with me. She was blooming—there was no other word for it. Second motherhood, late though it was, certainly agreed with her. Of course, a lot of it had to do with the fact that on this go-round she had a husband by her side. Well, not literally by her side today, for Mr. Pickens was off somewhere doing his private investigative work, while she reveled in her place as a well-situated matron, complete with spouse, three children, home and social standing.

  It was all so different, you know, from her first foray into motherhood, when she had kept her head down, raising Lloyd essentially alone and avoiding notice as much as she could. That’s what you do when you’re a woman kept by a married man who wanted to keep his double life secret. Which he did until he keeled over one night in his new Buick Park Avenue and it all came out.

  “What’re you thinking of doing to it?” Hazel Marie asked, picturing, no doubt, the pink and gold room upstairs that she for the first time in her life had decorated exactly as she wished. She had chosen pink velvet armchairs—faintly French in style—pink taffeta bedskirt and quilted coverlet, pink striated wallpaper, pink lamps and pink carpet. Touches of gilt on picture and mirror frames and odds and ends throughout the room relieved the pink to some extent. It was a little much for my taste, but Sam and I had slept in it for months while she was on bed rest, relegated by her doctor to the large bedroom downstairs.

  But now, she and Mr. Pickens, along with their baby girls, were ensconsed in Sam’s house, four blocks away, and Hazel Marie was loving every minute of it. That meant, however, that Sam no longer had a quiet and private place to work on the book that he’d been fiddling with for so long.

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” I said, leaning my head against my hand, “the upstairs hall is stacked with boxes of Sam’s papers and books—everything that was in his office at your house—so I have to make an office for him here. I’ve gone back and forth over this, and it comes down to either your room or the downstairs bedroom. Your room will be quieter for him and the downstairs room will be larger for the two of us, so that seems the best solution. The only thing, though, is the walk-in closet you put in upstairs. I hate to give that up.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” she said. “You could use it for out-of-season clothes and for things you don’t wear very often.”

  “Well, yes, I could.” I sighed, trying to visualize Sam and me in each of the rooms. “I’ve even thought of turning the closet into Sam’s office. Goodness knows it’s big enough. What it comes d
own to, though, is that I hate to dismantle what you loved so much. It’s like—I don’t know—resigning myself to the fact that you are truly gone.”

  “Why, Miss Julia,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. “That is so sweet. I thought you’d be glad to have me out of your hair and on my own. Well, on my own with J.D., I mean.”

  I knew what she was getting at—safely married with legitimate children. And I was glad, but I still missed her in spite of the rough start we’d had. The two of us had spent too many years together with me struggling to get over what she’d been to my now-deceased first husband—as hard as it still is to say, she had been his mistress and the proof of it, in the person of Lloyd, had the run of my house. And those same years had been spent with her trying to fit in with my respectable and unblemished way of living. We’d each done a good job of arriving at a meeting of minds and living in harmony, if I do say so myself. In fact, almost too good a job, because I was left with an empty space where she’d once been.

  But I tend to look on the bright side of things, and the bright side of having her in Sam’s house was not having little Julie and Lily Mae in mine. Oh, I was delighted with those twin babies, but I’d lived too many years in a quiet and well-organized home to adjust easily to the demands of growing children. Except for Lloyd, of course, whom I never minded having around, even though he was currently the reason for my unrelenting anxiety and feelings of dread.

  Lillian pushed through the swinging door from the dining room and stopped. “I didn’t know y’all was down here! Jus’ look at them baby girls, they growin’ like weeds.” She leaned over the stroller and stroked the cheek of one of them—I never knew which was which. “Hey, little sweet girl, you come to see Lillian? I think you both need a sody cracker, don’t you?”

  The babies kicked and crowed and smiled at Lillian, reaching little hands for the saltines she offered. One immediately spat out the pacifier and crumbled the cracker against her mouth, while the other tried to get her cracker in without releasing the pacifier.

  “How you doin’, Miss Hazel Marie,” Lillian asked, her eyes staying on the babies. “You gettin’ much sleep?”

  “They slept six hours straight last night. I couldn’t believe it, but I’m getting them outside as much as I can. They sleep better if they have some exercise.” Hazel Marie smiled ruefully. “Of course, pushing this stroller around means I’m the one getting the exercise. But I really need it.” She looked down and patted her stomach under the loose top she was wearing. “I’m so stretched out of shape from carrying twins, it’s unbelievable. I exercise like crazy, but I think the only hope is to have surgery to take up the slack.”

  “Oh, Hazel Marie, you’re not thinking of going to South America, are you?”

  She laughed. “No, my obstetrician said it can be done here, but to wait awhile before thinking about surgery. So I guess I’ll just keep on exercising. Anyway,” she went on, smiling down on her babies, “I have my hands full with these two little ones now. It takes all my energy to keep up with them.”

  By now—some five or so months after their birth—the babies were beginning to adjust their inner workings to fit in with the schedules of normal people, and I feared that Hazel Marie’s days were getting easy enough for her to reconsider the arrangements we’d made, especially if she was thinking of having surgery. I would never bring up the subject, though. I just acted as if the way things were would be the way things stayed.

  “I’m happy for you, Hazel Marie,” I said, picking up where we’d left off, “but I do miss having you around.”

  “Shoo, I seem to be over here so much you hardly have time to miss me. But I know what you mean, because as happy as I am, I miss you, too.”

  We smiled at each other, then she said what I’d been dreading to hear. “But, Miss Julia,” she said, her lovely face marred by a frown, “I miss Lloyd, too. I don’t see how I can do without him much longer. I’d like us to think about when he can move in with us.”

  I knew it. I knew it would be coming sooner or later, and here it was.

  Chapter 2

  Every time Hazel Marie came to visit, which was two or three times a week, I would get that sinking feeling, sure that she’d come to tell me she wanted Lloyd living with the rest of the Pickens family. Up until this time, the boy had remained with Sam and me on the basis that he didn’t need to be uprooted in the middle of a school year even though a move would not have meant a change of schools. The other, maybe more important, reason was that, try as they might, Lillian, Etta Mae Wiggins and Hazel Marie had been unable to get those two babies on any kind of reasonable schedule. One or the other of the twins, and often both at the same time, were awake and screaming half the night. Which meant that Hazel Marie had to sleep when they did—namely, half the day. And who wants a young boy wandering around a house alone while his mother is laid up in bed all afternoon?

  And Lloyd himself had made the final decision, saying that he didn’t have time to pack up and move all his stuff. That’s what he called it, his stuff, which consisted of a computer, a printer, lengths of wires and cables, books, games and innumerable other electronic gadgets, to say nothing of tennis rackets, tennis shoes, books and collections of everything from rocks to compact disks. Frankly, though, I thought that he, too, preferred peace and quiet to the continuous turmoil that the babies created. But he occasionally spent a night or a weekend with his mother when Mr. Pickens was out of town. Even though James lived in the apartment over the garage at Sam’s house, Hazel Marie liked having someone in the house with her. So it wasn’t as if the Pickenses had abandoned the boy, although Mr. Pickens worried about it at first.

  “I don’t want Lloyd thinking he’s been replaced,” Mr. Pickens had said to me. “He’s a big part of our family and I want him with us.”

  Well, he was a big part of my family, too, and I wanted him with me. But I tried to stay out of it, simply suggesting that he stay at least until school was out, when he could unhook all his electronic appliances without needing them every day for homework.

  So that’s where we were, but school would be out for the summer before long and here Hazel Marie was, saying she wanted her boy back.

  I thought about crying, which I was on the verge of anyway, but to use that as a method of getting my way was too low to consider for long. Hazel Marie loved that child, and regardless of how many other children she had, although I hoped the twins were the last, Lloyd was her firstborn and special to her.

  I pulled myself together and said, “I understand, Hazel Marie, and I think he’s planning on it as soon as school is out. Of course he’s welcome here as long as he wants to stay.”

  I didn’t mention that my heart would break if he left. One thing, however, was certain: I’d never dismantle and redecorate his room.

  “So,” Sam said that evening while we sat in the living room after supper, “Lloyd will be leaving when school’s out?” He folded the newspaper he’d been reading and watched as I separated yarn for the needlepoint piece I was working on.

  “That’s the way it looks.” I cut a length of yarn and tried to thread the needle, then gave up in spite of the glasses I was wearing. “Oh, Sam, I don’t think I can stand it. Just look at us, sitting here like two old people with nothing to do, and he’s just away for a tennis match. We should’ve gone, too. I don’t know why we didn’t. The school they’re playing is only two hours away. We could’ve gone.”

  “We go to the home matches,” Sam reminded me. “He doesn’t expect us to be at all of them.”

  “I know, I know.” I sounded a little snippy because I was on edge. “But I’m thinking that this is the way it’ll be all the time once he’s gone. And that we ought to take advantage and be with him every minute of the time we have left.”

  “Julia, honey, it’s not as if he’s moving cross-country. He’ll be in and out of here all the time. This is home for him.”

  “That’ll change soon enough, as soon as he settles in over there. And I kno
w I’m thinking only of myself, but I just don’t know how I’ll fill the days without him here.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you one way. Go with me to the Holy Land.”

  I looked at him over my glasses. “Why’re you bringing that up again?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve wanted you to go all along, even before this came up. Traveling would take your mind off Lloyd during his first weeks away.”

  “No,” I said, not having to even consider it. “I’ve not lost one thing in the Holy Land. Besides they’re shooting at one another over there.”

  “It’s safe enough,” he said, somewhat complacently. “You’d enjoy the trip. I know I will.”

  “Yes, but you have wanderlust and I don’t.”

  Sam grinned. “Restless foot syndrome.”

  “I believe it,” I said, remembering the trip to Russia he’d taken awhile back. “I know you want to go and that’s fine. Just count me out.” I looked at the needlepoint piece, wondering if I’d ever finish it. “Besides, it’s not as if you’re going by yourself. You’ll have plenty of company, won’t you?”

  “There’re about nine or so who’ve signed up, but Ledbetter asked if I would talk you into going, or anybody else, for that matter. I think he’d hoped to have a bigger group so he’d get better tour rates.”

  “For goodness sake, Sam, why would anybody want a cut-rate tour? I still don’t understand why you’d want to go with him in the first place.” Pastor Ledbetter was not someone I’d choose to lead me around a strange land. He was hard enough to take on home ground.

  “Oh, he’ll do fine. This’ll be his third trip, and I’ve heard good reports about the second one.” Sam raised his eyebrows and gave me a wicked grin. “Not so good about the first one. Everybody got sick, including him.”

  “Preachers ought to stay where they belong,” I pronounced. “I’ve never understood why they have to go running around all over the world. Next thing you know, he’ll be wanting to go to Africa.”

  “Yeah, he’s mentioned that. Wants to build a dam or a hospital or something one of these days.”