The Search for Belle Prater Read Free Page A

on the stroke of midnight. That’s the moment I was born thirteen years ago. It was her way of wishing me a happy birthday.”
    The room was so quiet then that you could hear the sound of fireworks from the direction of Main Street. Could it really have been Aunt Belle calling Woodrow at that special moment they had always shared?
    “How would she know you are here?” Granny said.
    “She knew you would take me in. She knows. I’m sure of it.”
    “Call the operator!” Mama said. “Find out where the call came from.”
    “Good idea,” Porter said, and did as Mama suggested.
    In a few moments he was giving the necessary information to the operator.
    Then he said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
    He turned to look at all of our expectant faces. His own face was sober.
    “It came from a pay phone in Bluefield,” he said.
    Bluefield was a medium-sized town sixty miles east of us right on the Virginia/ West Virginia state line.
    “Then that’s where she is,” Woodrow said.

3
    Woodrow wanted us to go look for his mama right then and there, but the grown-ups said it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
    “Believe me,” Grandpa said, “if I thought there was any hope of finding her, we’d go.”
    But Woodrow and I couldn’t let it be. A few days later the two of us were walking home from school, discussing the seemingly remote possibility of going to Bluefield on the bus by ourselves to look for Aunt Belle.
    “But, Gypsy, your mama will never let you go,” Woodrow said.
    “Right! And I know Grandpa and Granny will jump at the chance to let you go without a grown-up,” I said sarcastically.
    “No,” he admitted, “but I think my chances with them are better than yours are with Aunt Love.”
    “What about Porter?” I asked. “He’s the only one of the four who doesn’t think we still need a babysitter.”
    “That’s it!” Woodrow said. “We should go to Porter first.”
    Half an hour later we were walking into my stepfather’s office at the Mountain Echo building down on Main Street. His work space was just a cubbyhole really, partitioned off with a glass wall from the rest of the large press room. Through the glass we could see that Porter was busy on the phone, but he motioned us to come in and sit down across from his desk.
    Porter was jotting down notes on a pad. It was obvious he was taking a story from somebody over the phone, which could take a while, so I looked around at the pictures displayed on his wall. There was one of Main Street in 1933; another of the championship Coal Station High School football team in 1949; and of course, Porter and Doc Dot’s father, who started the newspaper in 1925. On Porter’s desk was a gold-framed portrait of Mama, looking as beautiful as a movie star, and beside it, to my surprise, was a picture of me. The last time I was in this office, it had not been there, and I was pleased to see it.
    I always did like the atmosphere of the newspaper office. It hummed busily, and I could smell the printer’s ink on fresh news pages rolling off the press. Maybe I could get a job here when I was older.
    “All right,” Porter was saying to the person on the phone. “See what you can find out about the school board meeting. Talk to you later.”
    He hung up the phone, stuck his pencil behind one ear, and looked at me and Woodrow. “To what do I owe the honor of this rare visit?”
    “Nothing special,” Woodrow said. “Just wanted to see you, that’s all.”
    Porter laughed. “Try again, Woodrow. What are y’all up to now?”
    Woodrow grinned. “Yeah, you’re right.”
    Then he told Porter what we were up to.
    “Woodrow wants to look for his mama,” I said after Woodrow’s explanation, “and I want to help him. But you know how my mama is. She acts like I’m still in diapers, and Granny and Grandpa are not much better.”
    “Yeah,” Woodrow added.
    Porter listened, then he looked at us as he played around with a paper clip. You could tell