Miss Julia Renews Her Vows by Ann B. Ross Page A

asked, as I parked beside her recently acquired red car.
    “Yes’m, I guess. Just so they don’t come back for me.”
    “I’ll walk in with you and see that you’re settled. You need to take it easy, Etta Mae, and try not to worry. I’m sure Binkie’ll be around by tomorrow and she’ll take care of everything.”
    Etta Mae pushed open the door to her trailer, hissing through her teeth on finding it unlocked. That alone should’ve prepared us for what we saw. We weren’t, though, because who would’ve been prepared for their home to be in complete disarray?
    “Who did this!” Etta Mae cried as she stood just inside the door and looked at the cushions on the floor, the drawers pulled out, food staples opened and spilled out into the sink and on the counter and books splayed out in front of a little two-shelf bookcase.
    “Oh, my word,” I said, but by then Etta Mae had run down the narrow hall, stopping abruptly in the door to her bedroom.
    “Look at this!” she shrieked. “Just look at this!”
    I followed and looked over her shoulder into the back room and saw every scrap of clothing she owned, including her lacy underwear, piled up on the bed or flung onto the floor. All the drawers in her dresser had been pulled out and emptied, shoes had been thrown out of the closet and the whole place looked as if it had been gone through with a fine-tooth comb.
    “Oh, Etta Mae,” I said, patting my chest. “Have you been robbed?”
    “No. Oh no,” she said, her face red with anger and her fists clenched. “I’ve not been robbed, I’ve been searched ! This was police work, and I’ll bet anything it was those dang Delmont deputies who did it!”
    “They can’t search without a search warrant, can they?” I asked. Then, seeing the despair on her face, I went on. “Unless you gave them permission to do it.”
    “Well, I guess I did,” Etta Mae said, her shoulders slumping. “They asked if they could look around, and since I knew there was nothing to find, I said they could. But I didn’t expect them to tear up everything while they did it.”
    “But why would they even want to search your home? And leave such a mess, too?”
    “Looking for that blasted gold bracelet, I guess, and they didn’t care what kind of mess they left. They wanted me to know they’d been through my things. I tell you, Miss Julia, they like it when people are afraid of them.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Etta Mae,” I said, trying to calm her down. “I haven’t found that to be true with the deputies I’ve met.”
    “Well,” she said through gritted teeth, “you haven’t met the ones in Delmont. This isn’t the first time they’ve had their fun with my underclothes.” She turned and stomped back to the little kitchen area of the living room. Standing there, surveying the disorder, she said, “I’m gonna sue ’em. I’m gonna sue every last one of ’em, see if I don’t.”
    “I don’t blame you, but talk to Binkie first.” I walked to the sink and looked down at the mixture of flour, cornmeal, sugar and who knows what else. “Why in the world would they ruin food like this? They’ve just poured everything out with no thought of all the starving children in Africa.”
    Etta Mae was seething, standing by me surveying the contents of the sink, breathing hard. “It just shows you how they think, or don’t think. Because who, I ask you, would be dumb enough to hide a gold bangle bracelet in a box of grits?”
    My goodness, I thought but didn’t say, I would’ve thought a box of grits would be a good hiding place. But what did I know about criminal behavior?
    Etta Mae whirled around, the soles of her boots crunching the grains of sugar and grits that were scattered across the linoleum. “I’m so mad I can’t see straight!”
    “Pull yourself together, Etta Mae, and let’s make a start on getting this cleaned up. Then you get a few things together, because you’re not staying here by yourself. You’re going