Jubilee's Journey (The Wyattsville Series) by Bette Lee Crosby Page A

visit,” Jubilee clarified. “Paul don’t know for sure where she is.”
    “Did he have her address?”
    Jubilee spooned another bite of stew and shook her head. “Unh-unh. We ain’t too sure of her name either. It was Walker like Mama’s, but if she got married it likely ain’t anymore.” 
    “Oh.” Olivia felt stymied and wondered where to go from here. She hesitated a moment, then asked, “When Paul told you to wait there, was he going to look for your aunt?”
    Jubilee shook her head. “I told you, he was going to do a job.”
    “What job?”
    “In the store.” Jubilee scooped one last carrot from the bowl.
    “Do you know the name of the store?”
    Jubilee looked up like she was thinking, then shook her head again. “I ain’t remembering the name. But it had a sign for working.”
    “Okay, that’s something.” Olivia gave her a reassuring smile. “I know remembering is hard, but you’re doing a very good job.”
    Ethan Allen, who generally had something to say about everything, was strangely silent as he listened to the exchange. Then when Jubilee said she didn’t know the name of the store, he jumped up from the table saying he thought he’d forgotten to wash his hands after all. Olivia was going to say he needn’t bother now that he’d finished dinner, but before she could say anything he’d darted off to the bathroom.
    “Can I have more?” Jubilee asked and pushed her empty bowl toward Olivia.
    “Of course you can.” Olivia filled the bowl a second time, handed it to Jubilee, and then went back to her questions. Hoping for even a scrap of information she asked, “Did Paul say anything about where you were going when he came back?”
    Jubilee nodded proudly. “He said we was gonna get a nice place to stay and good food.”
    “Did he say what the name of that nice place was?”
    “Unh-unh. He just said if he got money from the job, it wouldn’t matter none if we didn’t find Aunt Anita.”
    “Were you going to return home?”
    Jubilee thought back on the cabin they’d left behind. “No. We can’t live there no more. The mine man said so.”
    “The mine man?”
    Jubilee nodded. “He said only people what work in the mine can have houses, and ‘cause Paul promised Daddy he wouldn’t work in the mine we had to give back the house.”
    When Olivia asked how old her brother was, Jubilee wrinkled her nose and gave a shrug. “Sixteen, I think.”
     

     
    After almost an hour, two bowls of stew, a dish of ice cream, a slice of lemon pound cake, and three cookies, Olivia had learned almost nothing. The girl came from a place where people didn’t have telephones, her last name was Jones, her brother had brown hair, and they had come to Wyattsville looking for an aunt who might or might not be named Anita Walker.
     

     
    When Olivia was satisfied she had gotten all the girl knew, she settled the kids in front of the television with a bowl of popcorn. Disappearing back into the kitchen, she began calling all of the Walkers listed in the Wyattsville telephone directory. There were one hundred and forty-seven, thirteen with the initial A, and not one with the name Anita. When the twenty-eighth Walker slammed the receiver down and said it was too damn late to be bothering people about such nonsense she abandoned the project, at least for the remainder of the evening.
    Olivia wondered whether she should call the Wyattsville Police Station when she noticed Jubilee asleep on the sofa. If she notified the police and they couldn’t find the missing brother or the questionable aunt, the poor child would be carted off to a foster home or—worse yet—an orphanage. Olivia shuddered at the thought.
    Remembering how Ethan Allen had come into her life because he’d gone in search of his grandfather, she could understand why Paul was trying to find their Aunt Anita. “Family is family,” she said with a sigh. Convinced there was an Aunt Anita and the only challenge would be finding her,