The Keepers of Secrets

One | Coal and Lilacs

"Would be sooner if she'd just call that man of hers," Paula comments. "Really, Jean, you should give him a ring. You know he'd get ya out."

Jean frowns. "I'm not calling him to help me. I already told you that."

"But, why? I bet that poor fool is worried sick for you."

A terrible pain unfurls in Jean's chest. She doesn't like to think about him. Not one bit.

"He's not worried for me," she says. "He would've chased after me when I left if he really was worried about me."

"Jean—"

"Nope. I don't wanna hear any more of this, Paula."

Jean turns her face away from her friend and up to the sky, soaking up the last bit of sun that she can before she is confined to her cell once again.

Briefly, she thinks about the summertime of her youth and the boy that had captured her heart there.

And how she had ended up in a prison a thousand miles away from him.

•✦───✧✦✧───✦•
Summer, 1943
Sally Jean, age 5
•✦───✧✦✧───✦•

On some mornings, Mama liked to send Sally Jean to gather coal by the train tracks.

Sally Jean liked hunting for coal. She thought it an adventure traipsing through the thicket of pines that surrounded the weathered shack she called home, even when it was hotter than Hades outside.

The land sweltered hot on summer mornings, the gentle breeze carrying moisture and notes of pine and earth through the air, bugs buzzing alongside it.

Sally Jean didn't mind the heat, however. She didn't have time to. She was on an important mission, after all.

She strode through the woods like she always did, eyes alert and feet cautious like Mama had taught her. She was only five at the time, but Mama was too worried about the war to care much about that.

Mrs. Mayberry cared, though. She'd started sending out her two youngest to watch after Sally Jean the second she heard about the little girl's early morning whereabouts.

Sally Jean always enjoyed when the Mayberry brothers tagged along, that was why her face split into a grin when she spotted them waiting for her at the fallen log in the woods one morning.

Little Clyde Mayberry was trying to turn over the log with his worn, hand-me-down boots that had been passed down the long line of brothers to him.

The sun reached through the treetops to grab onto his dark hair, pulling out bits of red that only showed in the sunlight.

His older brother of four years, Jory Mayberry, leaned up against a pine, tall and lanky as he wrestled a pine needle from the spurs on his boot, his head covered by the Stetson hat his brother Simon let him have before he left for war.

"Sally Jean!" Little Clyde exclaimed when he spotted her, abandoning the decaying log and breaking out into a grin that rivaled hers. He ran up and grabbed her hand in his.

Clyde was Sally Jean's bestest friend in the whole wide world, and the only kid her age within a fifteen-mile radius. He lived beyond the shack and past the cow pasture at Mayberry Ranch with his brood of brothers and was practically inseparable from Sally Jean.

They spent nearly every day with each other. If it wasn't Clyde sneaking out of his chores to play with Sally Jean at her house, then it was Sally Jean helping him gather eggs and feed the livestock on the farm.