Read Online Search Party by Valerie Trueblood - Free Book Online

mind if we touch it?”
    â€œHer. No, that’s not the problem, she doesn’t mind. See, she wants to nurse off you.”
    â€œOff your finger,” Casey said. The baby did seem to be feeling for Ann’s hanging fingers with its divided lip.
    â€œBut no, don’t pet her,” Sam said. “All we do is feed her. It’s them she has to be with, not us. She does fine with her daddy and there’s still a chance with the mom. Whatever, it’s them she has to pattern after. Too much is going on, when you’re this size. You can get so turned around you don’t grow up right.”
    Ann felt like crying. Her mother came into her mind, the still, listening look she would get on her face when Ann was mean, in middle school and high school and even after that, and the unanswerable thing she would say every time, “You used to be such a happy child.” And before that her father and his cancer and his long-drawn-out unfriendly death. Oh, no, don’t let me get started, she thought as she began to cry. Neither of the others noticed for a minute, and then Casey saw and moved to circle her shoulders with an arm and pull her off balance again. Casey began to cry too, while Sam simply looked away and shook his head. He was not the crying type, Ann could tell. At least the tears had a cleansing effect on her mouth and throat, if she had to kiss him. This barn. The rain, the mud. Llamas. Firemen. She was going to have to stay the night. She wanted to. It would be like running away with the circus. They would put her in that little room, Randy’s room. The hell with Todd. The hell with her car in the mud and her life. It was llamas she loved.

Think Not Bitterly of Me

    W HEN she was a little girl in the thirties Abby had an experience that got into the newspapers.
    At the beginning she was on the front page of half a dozen papers in Virginia, amid the stories of bank failures and foreclosures, and at the end, more than six years later, the story ran again in the whole tri-state area. A story like that, with a happy ending, got passed around, read aloud, pinned up in social halls, because it was the thirties and by then the rest of the news was bad, news of farmers burning their corn for fuel, and coal miners in West Virginia who had to have the Quakers come in to feed them.
    If it had happened today, her story would have been explored in a different way, Jake Seligman told her when he was making his film. Certainly it would not have been allowed to fade, go unsolved, and reemerge only by happenstance. Abby said, “Well now, the Lindbergh baby got plenty of attention, and where was the benefit?”
    As it was, Abby had the single envelope of clippings, all bearing the same bleached photograph of two little girls standing on either side of a wagon with a baby in it. The smaller, prettier girl, a five-year-old in a smocked dress too large for her, with her hand on the back of a long-bodied dog, was Abby.
    Because the film took a number of years to come out, Abby had a hazy memory at best of the weeks Jake Seligman spentinterviewing her, and her memories of the events themselves, as she was the first to acknowledge, were not sharp.
    â€œI know a good bit of this is what I was told,” she said to Jake the first time they met. He was a man from Hollywood who had called her up because he had once lived in the town of McBride, her home. He had lived there for one year, “long ago,” as he put it, in the fifties, a time when their paths would never have crossed because she was a grown woman raising daughters and working nights and he was a kid in high school.
    He had seen her picture, the little girls with wagon and baby and dog, in his senior year in high school, when he was looking up the Depression in the library. The Depression had remained his interest, always. Probably Abby had not run across his documentary about the WPA? His first film. It did play here and there in