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a couple times for loitering, she started turnin’ up at the police station. She’d just sit on them old benches in the corridor hoping to hear word about her Kay Ellen.”
    “How sad.” I thought about Candace’s theory that Jeannie might have hurt her daughter, but from what Ed said, that didn’t seem likely. “Does Jeannie have anyfamily in town? Someone who could help her out of this situation?”
    “All she had was Kay Ellen. They’d been foreclosed on—once had a little brick house in the mill village,” Ed said.
    Mill villages consisted of streets and streets of identical houses surrounding the hundreds of mills all over the South. They were originally built by mill owners for the workers. The villages usually included churches, stores and sometimes even post offices. The Lorraine Stanley Textile Mill must have had a wealthy owner because the village in Mercy consisted of all-brick construction—a rarity. The houses elsewhere across the South were mostly clapboard.
    “They owned the house at one time?” I said. “From what I understood, the mill owners owned the houses in villages.”
    “Nope,” Ed said. “Ward Stanley sold them houses. Offered the mill workers a pretty good deal, too. Probably the only nice thing that old coot ever done in his life.”
    “Ward Stanley owned the mill?” Tom asked.
    “He did. And his daddy before and his daddy’s daddy before that. All of them are dead now except the last Ward Stanley and who knows what he’s up to. Anyways, once the bank kicked Jeannie and her girl out of their house, Kay Ellen got herself a job at Red Top—you know, that fallin’-down hamburger joint on the other side of town? Don’t know how the place stays in business. Anyways, they was livin’ at the church for a while ’cause minimum wage don’t pay anyone’s rent. Then Kay Ellen up and left. Don’t blame a sixteen-year-old for wantin’ to quit and leave a life such as she had.”
    “Did she stay at the church in the mill village—or somewhere else?” I asked.
    “Mill Village Baptist,” he answered. “I know ’cause the preacher came in here once askin’ to swap me firewoodfor a phone. Said with a teenager stayin’ in the pastorium, they needed another telephone.”
    “That means Kay Ellen had friends—or at least one friend,” Tom said.
    “Good thinkin’.” Ed nodded and smiled. “You can string things together like nobody I ever known—you and Tom, that is. A phone means the child was talkin’ to someone. Got to say, I never knew much about Kay Ellen. But Jeannie? Knew her better than most people did. She’d bring in junk she’d collected every other day and I’d give her a dollar or two.”
    “Tell me more about her,” I said.
    Ed rubbed a stubbled cheek. “She’d be about my age—maybe mid-sixties. Had her baby late in life. See, Jeannie was slow-witted. More like a kid than a grown woman. There was whispers someone took advantage of her after she showed up pregnant. I don’t think she even knew what happened to her. The daughter was a pretty thing and by the time she was ten, she was takin’ care of Jeannie. I once heard her explainin’ to her mama something about how to buy the best fruit in the Piggly Wiggly. Made me think she was a nice girl. Respectful. Maybe a little protective of Jeannie, too.”
    “Jeannie never had a job?” Tom said.
    Ed smiled. “Oh, she did. Worked in that mill since she was young. Us kids in town called her and the others like her lintheads. They’d be covered with cotton pieces when they came off a shift. Looked like they’d been snowed on.” His smile faded. “I’m not proud of how we treated the village kids. Not proud of how we treated the blacks, neither. It was a different time. Not an excuse, mind you. Wrong thinkin’ is all.”
    “Ed, you are a wealth of information concerning this town,” Tom said, sounding amazed. “But the truth is, not everyone else has realized how wrong-thinking those times were.