July 29, 1964
Jocie Brooke here reporting from Hollyhill, Kentucky. Can you believe it's almost August? We go back to school in August. Groan. We used to wait until after Labor Day, but then it snowed quite a bit one winter and we were still going to school in June. The powers that be decided it would be better to go to school the hottest time of the year, the end of August, instead of the maybe not so bad first of June. June can be a sweet month without the kind of humidity that melts down even beauty queen Vanessa's curls. Vanessa has been known to call her mother and pretend she's sick to keep from being at school with her hair less than perfect.
Not that the boys care the least bit about one of her blonde hairs maybe being out of place. The boys, and I mean ALL, the boys at school run into the lockers after they land their eyes on her. I haven't figured out what's all that pretty about her, especially with wild curls springing out around her face and that frown on her face at any boy except the captain of the football team.
But I'm not reporting on Vanessa. You'd be bored silly. I'm hoping almost August isn't too early to dream about Christmas. Do you see that bike in the Sears catalog? Wow! I could go places if I had a bike like that. (I'm sure Vanessa already does.) But I could ride to Miss Sally's and go fishing maybe. I could ride to school. Groan. I wasn't ready to think about that again yet. I could almost maybe, well, not quite, keep up with Wes on his motorcycle.
A new bike would be the neatest Christmas present. The very neatest! A bike of my own and not a hand-me-down rusty bike that's been buried under a ton of hay for years in some old farmer's hayloft. Maybe if I start talking now I can talk Dad into it by Christmas. It never hurts to ask, does it? Except Dad is always thinking about how we don't have a lot but we have what we need and some of the people in town don't have what they need, not even a rusty old bike, and how it's our Christian duty to share our blessings. I'm all for that. But I could use that bike. I might even be able to keep an eye on Mr. Whitlow if I had that bike! Well, I could have last week.
Oh, I didn't tell you, did I? He's disappeared. Well, I can't say for sure that he disappeared, but he's left town. Didn't check out. Bill Jackson says his room is paid up to the end of September. Says his clothes or at least some of them are still in his room. When somebody asked him how he knew that, Bill said it was his responsibility to check the room after the man didn't show up at the grill for breakfast two days in a row. The man might be sick or even, God forbid, dead. And wouldn't that cause a stink?! It didn't matter that his car was gone too. A person never knows and it's good to know. I think I like the way Bill thinks.
Zella doesn't know where he is. She doesn't want to talk about it either. She's worse than Cat before Wes feeds her. Snarling at the first word about anything. And she couldn't care less if that man was in town or out of town. Just ask her, if you dare, and she'll tell you.
But oh, that bike. Did you ever have a brand new bike? Did it have a new bike smell? Or was there something else you wanted so bad that you started wishing for it in August?
May 20, 1964
Jocie Brooke here reporting from Main Street, Hollyhill, Kentucky.
A stranger checked into the Hollyhill hotel last week. So what's so strange about that? The only person to check into that hotel in my lifetime is Bill Jackson who moved into one of the rooms ten years ago after his mother died. Bill's neck is too long for his head and he must have had polio or something because he sort of drags one of his feet. I know he can't help how he looks, but the man could star in a scary movie except that he knows everybody in town and is the nicest guy.
He didn't rent but one room but Mr. Hastings, who owns the hotel and prefers Florida to Hollyhill, lets him have the run of the rest of the hotel as long as he keeps it clean. I guess he also has the job of desk clerk if any passer-throughs see the hotel sign and stop for the night since it turns out that it wasn't that you couldn't rent rooms there. It was that nobody wanted to rent a room there. People go to a fancy hotel in the next town or rent a room at the little motel out on the outskirts of Hollyhill.
Nobody knows why Mr. Whitlow is here. Not even Bill Jackson, but Bill's the kind of fellow who doesn't ask questions. He says if somebody wants you to know something, they'll tell you. But the stranger has been eating down at the Grill so Lorraine there will be knowing everything about him in nothing flat. She's already told people he puts ketchup on his scrambled eggs and likes his toast lightly browned, no jelly. When I bought a shake there Saturday, Lorraine went on and on about how nice looking Mr. Whitlow is. Compared to Bill Jackson maybe, I told her, but she just said I'm too young to know what I'm talking about. So I took a closer look next time I saw Mr. Whitlow. He's old, at least forty. He wears his hat pulled down low over his face like he doesn't want anybody looking too close. You think he might be hiding out here in Hollyhill? Maybe he's running from the law. I decided that the next time I was at the Post Office I'd check the wanted posters there. You never know.
But if he's trying to hide out here, he doesn't know much about small towns. Folks here have got their eyes on him. And guess whose eyes are on him biggest of all? Zella's. I caught her the other day standing inside the front window peering through an old pair of binoculars up the street. She got all flustered when I asked what she was looking at. She sputtered something about Red being missing. We had to shorten Cat's name to Red. Red Spot is a great Jupiter name, but too hard to say. Red, what Wes says is Cat's first name anyway, works fine. He's a Red kind of cat.
But Zella wasn't looking for Red any more than I was. She just said the first thing that popped into her head even though she's always onto me if I even try to pull the truth out into a more interesting shape. She just let out a little huff when Red came out from under her desk and began winding around her legs. Turns out Red must think Zella wears catnip for perfume. He's always hanging around her desk and Zella definitely wasn't looking for him through those binoculars. She was watching Mr. Whitlow. I peered around her out the window and saw him headed up the street to the Post Office. Probably to check the wanted posters there and figure a way to get rid of any with his picture on them. I should have been quicker checking them out.
Wes tells me to stop letting my imagination go wild. That folks looked at him the same way when he first came to Hollyhill from Jupiter and that Mr. Whitlow is probably just from Venus or Mars. Nothing at all to worry about. But there's something odd about the man. I'll be watching him. Between Zella, Lorraine and me, we'll know what he's up to soon enough.
Why do you think he's come to Hollyhill?
