When Did We Lose Harriet? Part 9

Up to then I could have given him the money with an easy conscience. He was no drunker than a lot of men on Friday night with their wives away. But alcohol had lowered his manners as well as his inhibitions. Whatever Myrna was, she was family, and where he and I both come from, family matters. You might not like them-or even be nice to them in private-but you don't disown them to strangers. I wasn't about to hand him Harriet's three thousand dollars. "Please tell Dee I came back, and that I think you ought to call the police." I headed back toward the car.

He walked along beside me. When we got near the car, Glenna rolled down her window and called, "h.e.l.lo, William!"

"Why, h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Crane! Are you with her?"

"She's with me. This is Jake's sister, MacLaren," Glenna told him.

He leaned into her window and said sincerely, "I sure was sorry to hear about Jake. How's he doing?" While Glenna told him, I got in the car.

"You didn't give him the money?" she asked as we drove away. She wasn't criticizing, just asking.

I shook my head. "He's had just a tad too much to drink. I decided to wait."

"Oh, dear. I'm sorry to see William drinking. He was such a nice boy. Used to help his grandmother and me with all sorts of projects. Nora, his mother, prefers to give money and attend social functions, but Lou Ella always likes to get right down and do a thing. When he was young, William used to help us with rummage sales, children's carnivals, and events for people we tutored. He was such a fine young man-devoted to his grandmother." She made a left turn before adding, "Lou Ella and I go way back. We've worked in organizations together since I was a bride. She's slowing down, though. Doesn't get out much except to church. The last thing I remember her doing was play beside me in the bell choir, the night the Olympic torch came to Jasmine Hill..." Her voice petered out.

I knew exactly what she was thinking. Last Memorial Day, Joe Riddley and I spent the weekend with Jake and Glenna. Jake had Glenna pack a picnic, and he took us all up to Jasmine Hill, which is a marvelous park just north of town full of authentic reproductions of cla.s.sical Greek sculpture. As the four of us wandered among the spring flowers, columns, and statues of that lovely garden, Jake kept pestering everybody nearly to death by asking again and again, "Don't you feel just exactly like you're back in ancient Greece?"

Finally Joe Riddley said in exasperation, "Jake, I never was in ancient Greece."

At the look on Jake's face, Glenna and I laughed so hard we cried.

We cried on our way to the hospital, too. That's how worry and grieving wear you out. Not just by day-after-day exhaustion, but by sudden catches and claws at memory just when you've managed to forget.

Twelve.

At the window of my house...I

noticed among the young men, a

youth who lacked judgment.

Proverbs 7:6-7.

Jake was worn out from trying to act brave about his upcoming surgery, so I was ready to go home early. Glenna insisted on staying at the hospital all night, but first she wanted to put on something she'd doze in more comfortably. I didn't try to convince her to stay home. I'd have done the same for Joe Riddley.

As we drove up to the house, she remarked, "It's just as well my car won't be here. Jake had my keys on his ring, too, and he may well have left something in his glove compartment with our address on it." Realizing what she'd said, she gave me a stricken look. "Oh, Clara, they'll have his house keys, too. Why didn't we think of that before?"

"Don't worry," I told her a lot more firmly than I felt. "The doors both have chains, and I'll put chairs under the k.n.o.bs. I'll be fine." I hoped it was true.

We flipped on more lights than two women needed, but it made us feel better. Then Glenna shut all the blinds and insisted that we hide the money right away. "We won't want to fool with going by the bank in the morning, and I don't want to be worried about it."

Hiding money is a lot harder than it sounds. Every hiding place one of us found looked to the other like the first place any halfway intelligent burglar would look. Finally, I spied Glenna's ironing basket under the sewing machine. Jake always jokes that putting something in that ironing basket is like flus.h.i.+ng it down the toilet. In self-defense, he started ironing most of his own clothes the second year they were married. Mama was scandalized, but I was filled with admiration for Glenna.

In the bottom of the basket I found Jake's old khaki fis.h.i.+ng pants. Shoving the envelope down one leg, I crumpled the pants up a bit and shoved them under all the skirts, blouses, and tablecloths Glenna planned to get around to ironing one day.

When the phone rang, Glenna answered. "Hey, Joe Riddley!...Yes, he'll have it first thing tomorrow morning. The doctor is real optimistic...Aren't you sweet! And Clara has been so much help to us."

He asked a question, and because Glenna could not lie, she admitted, "Well, I've been there most of the day, but Clara was out a few times trying to track somebody down."

I managed to pinch her before she told him the somebody was a missing child, but that bloodhound nose of his had already scented trouble.

"Put her on," he growled. "Who were you trying to track down, Little Bit?"

"Just somebody whose things I found this morning, and wanted to return."

"What kind of things?"

It was no use lying. He always could tell. "Papers and some money."

He was onto me like a mosquito onto a bare midriff. "A check?"

"Well, no, it was cash." I frowned at Glenna, who smiled apologetically.

"How much?"

"Oh, three thousand dollars. Listen, honey, I need to say good-bye to Glenna before she leaves for the night."

It didn't work. He yelled so loud I had to hold the phone as far away as I could reach, and he was still clear as a bell. "You been carrying around three thousand dollars? After you'd already been robbed once? Of all the tomfool things! How long did it take you to find the owner?"

He'd find out eventually. "I haven't yet, but don't worry. I'm taking the money to her family tomorrow, and I've found a real good hiding place."

When I told him where it was, he snorted. "Well, Little Bit, let's just hope you don't get a burglar who needs fis.h.i.+ng pants."

It was barely nine o'clock, but after Glenna left, I decided to go straight to bed. It seemed like a year since I'd arrived the night before. Had I really never heard of Harriet Lawson then?

Almost as soon as my head touched the pillow, I was asleep.

The brown-haired toddler clung to the gate and shook it with all her might, but the latch held firm. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

The slight figure on the sidewalk, little more than a child herself, scarcely checked her step. She wasn't going back. No way! No more diapers, no more sticky, messy feedings. No more crying all night.

She gave herself a shake of relief and determination and strode off down the hill, the child's wails propelling her faster and faster toward the bus stop. Reaching into her duffel bag, she put on earphones and tuned in her private music, loud. When the bus arrived, she climbed aboard without a backward look.

Still the brown-haired toddler clung to the gate. "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!"

I woke gasping, bathed in sweat, my heart pounding so hard I both heard and felt it in my ears. The dream had been so real that the baby's wails still echoed in my head.

I knew I wouldn't go right back to sleep, so I turned on the bedside lamp and took out a mystery novel I'd bought to read during all those long free evenings I'd expected to have in Albuquerque. I hoped it wouldn't be too scary, for in spite of what I'd told Glenna, I felt just a tad uneasy.

Flipping on the radio, I twirled the dial until I found a cla.s.sical station to wrap me in a coc.o.o.n of Chopin. I managed to concentrate pretty well. After I'd read a bit, though, I got hot. I'd forgotten to turn down the thermostat out in the hall.

Jake and Glenna are more concerned with conserving energy than with being comfortable, so in the summer they keep their air conditioner far too high. When I'm there, I often creep out at night to turn it back a few degrees so I can sleep. I usually put it back before they wake up. And if you think that's dirty, you need to know that at my house, Jake lowers the thermostat in winter. He's even been known to go home without turning it back up, so Joe Riddley and I go around for several days s.h.i.+vering and thinking we are coming down with something before we figure out what's the matter.

I was halfway across my room headed for the hall when, above the music, I heard a small crash. I froze and listened intently. It wasn't followed by anything. "Must have been an unbalanced dish in the drain," I told myself firmly, opening the bedroom door.

"Scritch, scritch, scritch." The noise was so soft I could almost be imagining it.

I drew back. If it was mice, they could carry away the entire kitchen so long as they didn't come my way.

Then the noise changed to a soft "chunk, chunk, chunk."

That must be a whopping big mouse.

n.o.body has ever given me a medal for bravery, and I loathe stories in which a supposedly intelligent heroine walks straight into danger. I was certain, however, that we were being visited by a rodent of some kind. It seemed too slight for a burglar. Besides, Glenna and Jake have an open chimney, and from time to time squirrels fall down. I expected to find one feasting on tomato peelings in the wastebasket.

"It can't be a person," I rea.s.sured myself aloud. "This house has dead bolts and burglar bars, and I've wedged a chair under each outside doork.n.o.b. n.o.body could get in."

The den was so dark, though, that I decided to take the longer way through the living and dining rooms, where streetlights glimmered through the windows. I was so busy creeping that I failed to notice a dining room chair Glenna had pulled out earlier to set her purse on. I ran straight into the chair, toppling it with a crash.

The noise stopped.

The sunporch door slammed.

Feet pounded down the empty drive.

I ran to a front window and pulled back the blind. A shadow ran parallel to the drive in the darker shadow of Jake's tall redtips. All I got was a glimpse when it reached the street. I wouldn't have been willing to swear, but under a dark cap, I thought his hair was white.

I turned on the kitchen light. What I saw made me collapse onto the telephone chair in a breathless heap.

Before Jake gla.s.sed in the porch, the back door and one window opened onto it. Instead of moving the back door, he only put a gla.s.s storm door to the outside, leaving both the door with the dead bolt and the window still opening into the kitchen. When Glenna-who was helping him by painting trim-accidentally painted the kitchen window shut, Jake a.s.sured her, "That's fine. We won't need to open that window anymore, anyway." When he added burglar bars to the house, because that window was so securely stuck and its panes were so small, he'd not bothered to put bars on it.

My recent intruder had pried open the sunporch door, found the back door dead bolted, and tried the window. He'd broken a pane to unlock it-that was the small crash I'd heard-then, when he found it stuck, tried to chip it open with a pair of scissors Glenna had conveniently left out there in a mending basket. He must have been jabbing at the seal with the closed scissors when I disturbed him.

I shook like a pompom at the Georgia-Florida game. "Dear G.o.d!" I whispered over and over. "Oh, dear G.o.d!"

If Ricky Dodd was the intruder, I'd certainly brought it on myself. "Bragging about having Harriet's money, and flat out insisting he take Jake's name and phone number," I scolded myself. "Anybody could get the address from the phone book. MacLaren Yarbrough, you're about as dumb as they come." As early as it still was, with no cars in the drive and no lights showing, he may well have concluded n.o.body was home.

With trembling fingers I dialed 911. When the operator answered, though, I just couldn't face another police interrogation that day. If the would-be burglar left prints, they weren't going anywhere before morning. "Never mind," I said. "It can wait." I didn't care what she thought.

I knew I'd never get back to sleep. At first I couldn't even make myself lie down. I was s.h.i.+vering so hard I finally wrapped up in an old wool afghan I found on my closet shelf, but it did little to warm me. The chill seeped out of my bones.

Finally, still wrapped in the afghan, I lay down and tugged both the sheet and the bedspread over me. A second later I sat straight up, horrified.

That broken pane was too small to get through, but it was just what anybody with a key would need. If the boys who stole Jake's car came calling now, they could reach through the hole, take off the chain, shove away the chair, unlock the door, and walk right in.

I went to the kitchen and put every pot and pan I could find on the seat of that chair and around its legs. That wouldn't keep anybody from moving it, but they'd make a heck of a racket if they did. I went back for the afghan and stretched out on Glenna's Duncan Phyfe living room sofa. If I couldn't sleep, I could at least lie down.

Thoroughly frightened and miserable, I waited for dawn.

Thirteen.

A cheerful look brings joy to the

heart, and good news gives health

to the bones. Proverbs 15:30.

The brown-haired child looked up the long length of him. "How long will you be gone, Daddy?"

"A while." He spoke uneasily. "My new job is far away. But Granny will look after you. Be a good girl, now. You hear me?"

"Will you be back for my birthday?"

"I don't know, honey, but you listen to what your granny tells you. I don't want her calling to say you've been bad. Okay?"

"Can't I come, too?" Her big brown eyes pleaded. He looked away.

"Sorry, honey. You'll be better off with Granny. *Bye." He bent and gave her one rough, quick hug, then ran lightly down the steps. "Thanks, Ma," he called over one shoulder, "I'll make it up to you." He jumped into the s.h.i.+ny blue car. A woman with yellow hair was waiting with the motor running.

The brown-haired child ran to the gate and climbed onto the board at the bottom. She swung and watched, watched and swung, until his car was out of sight.

"Clara? Clara! Open the door! I can't get in!"

Glenna rattled the front door and called again. "Clara!" As I struggled up through the cobwebs of my dreams to let her in, memories of the night before landed on my chest in one heavy pounce. I staggered to the door to let in Glenna and the dawn.

She gave the afghan and the dented pillow on the couch a puzzled frown. "Why were you sleeping out here?"

"I had a bit of trouble last night. But first, how's Jake?"