“Yes.” My voice cracked as I spoke. “Yes, I am here. Just do what you have to do. I will let my husband know.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Happy Holidays.” Cynthia hung up.
“Yeah, happy freakin’ holidays to you too, Cynthia.” I yelled as I slammed the phone down.
“You okay, Mom?” Sammy was standing next to me, tugging on my sleeve. “I heard you yelling.”
“I’m fine, sweetie. I was just saying good bye to the person on the phone.”
“You sure were saying goodbye loud!” He laughed as he grabbed me around the leg and squeezed.
“I know! I wanted to be sure she could hear me!” I laughed with him and watched him skip out the door of the kitchen and back down the hall to his bedroom.
23
Joan Again
The next morning, I woke up wired with excitement. I rushed around the room and bathroom getting showered and dressed. I kissed the boys and sent them off to school and then spent an hour pacing the house waiting for it to be time to catch the bus to Claire’s house.
Joe pulled though his surgery and the doctors pronounced him in stable condition. The chief sent everyone home sometime around two in the morning. Andy stayed at work until the shift’s end and then had come home and gone straight to bed, exhausted after his night shift. I took a small bit of comfort in the fact that he would sleep through my big day. Somehow if he were home in bed rather than out on the streets, the crime I planned to commit would feel like less of a betrayal to our marriage and his trust.
As I left the house, I tripped on a loose brick in the walk way that sent me sprawling to the ground. As my knees hit the bricks, I heard a loud tear in the knee of my jeans and felt the warmth of the blood soaking the denim before I saw it.
Turning so that I was sitting on my backside on the cold ground, I stretched the injured leg out in front of me and investigated the wound. By the amount of blood on my jeans, I was certain I would need several stitches but closer investigation revealed nothing more than a scrape. Digging a tissue out of my pocketbook, I mopped at the redness until the scrape dried up. My knee cap was throbbing but I could still bend it normally.
As I sat on the sidewalk, giving my knee a rest, I had the opportunity to examine the place we called home. The paint on the shutters peeled and the siding needed to be power washed. The roof had lost several shingles and the chimney had lost its rain cap. The driveway was cracked and the windows were cloudy with moisture.
“Well! If it isn’t Susie Timmons!” The familiar voice of Joan Crawford sounded from behind me. I groaned but turned around anyway.
“Hello, Joan. How are you?” I asked from my position on the ground.
“From the looks of it, I am doing much better than you are! What are you doing down there?” she asked, eyeballing my torn jeans.
“Well, I am just down here inspecting the sand between the bricks. It seems we might be missing a few grains.” I tried really hard to bite back the sarcastic words but they came rolling off my lips anyway.
“Well, I never…!” Joan threw her hands on her hips and tapped the toe of her right foot.
“What do you think I am doing, Joan? I tripped and fell and scraped my knee. I was just about to get up and head to the bus stop. Is that okay by you?”
“Susie Timmons, you used to be such a nice girl. When did you get such a sharp tongue? Is it from the brain damage?” She spoke with a smile but her words were laced with venom.
“I suppose it must be, Joan. Nasty, nosey neighbors have a very negative effect on brain trauma.” I jumped to my feet and started walking down the sidewalk. As I passed her, I flashed a fake smile. “Have a great day.”
I could hear her tennis shoes crunching on dead leaves as she rushed to catch up with me. I just walked faster, trying to put some distance between us.
“So,” she huffed, struggling to keep up. “How are things going, Susie? Have the seizures stopped?”
I halted in mid step. “What exactly do you mean?” I asked her. No one except my family and my three best friends knew about the seizures. Or so I had been told.
“Well, isn’t that why Andy’s mother is still here? Because you can’t take care of the boys? Did you just have one when you fell?”
My face flamed with indignation as I glared at my nosey neighbor. She grinned at me like the cat that had eaten the canary. Joan was fishing for information; I just didn’t know why.
“I don’t know what you think you know, Joan, but my medical history is none of your business. Neither are the people I have living in my home. All is well, so you can stop nosing around now and get on back to your neighborhood watchdog duties.” I turned on my heel and headed down the street again. My knee really ached and it probably would have been best if I had walked slower but I needed to get away from that woman.
“I’m not done with you yet, Susie Timmons. I know things.” I heard her mumble. Joan’s eyes bored into the back of my head until I turned the corner. Mercifully the bus pulled up to the stop when I got there. Dropping a few coins into the meter as I climbed the steps, I made my way to the middle of the bus where I found a single empty seat.
As the bus lumbered up and down the busy streets of Virginia Beach, I contemplated my run in with Joan Crawford. Her parting words to me were bone chilling. I’m not done with you yet. I know things. What the hell did that mean?
That woman was up to something. She knew too much and I wouldn’t doubt that she had been spying on me. For what reason I couldn’t imagine but I was pretty certain she had an angle and I knew I wasn’t going to like it.
The bus jerked to a stop at the corner near Claire’s house. As I climbed down the stairs, my knee screamed in pain. The ligaments had begun to stiffen up and a bruise was forming across my knee cap. That was going to look real pretty with my Lucy dress.
24
Sometimes You Just Never Know
Claire let me in before the doorbell even stopped chiming and then hurried away down the hall. As I entered the family room she disappeared down the steps to the weapons room. I settled into an arm chair and waited for Laura and Becca to arrive.
“When the others get here, will you let them in?” Claire yelled up the stairs.
“No problem!” I called back. Almost immediately the doorbell rang. I heard a series of loud banging sounds below the floor as I crossed the highly polished hardwood to go let our other friends in.
Becca was all smiles but I could tell right away that something was wrong with Laura.
“Susie! How are you?” Becca grabbed me in a hug as she passed by me and entered Claire’s house. Not waiting for an answer, she headed straight to the family room calling for Claire.
“Hi, Laura.” I greeted my best friend. She nodded as she entered the house. Something was really, very wrong.
“Laura? What’s up?”
For the first time in all the years that we had known each other, I saw my best friend cry. The tears came out of nowhere, fat drops of salt water rolling down her cheeks. She just stood there in the entry hall, leaning against the door, arms crossed over her chest and cried. I tried twice to hug her but every time I got close, she put out a hand to stop me.
So, I waited. I leaned against the opposite wall and waited while my friend cried a river of tears, her shoulders shaking with emotion. When the tears finally subsided, she wiped at her red, swollen eyes with the back of her hand and slumped against the wall.
“Laura? Are you going to tell me what is wrong now?” We could hear the faint sounds of Becca’s chatter from the family room. From somewhere in the house the slight echo of a cuckoo clock rang. Laura and I stared at each other.
“I…” She spoke first, her voice tiny and defeated. “I…” She stopped again and dropped her eyes. “I can’t even say the words,” she whispered.
“Laura, what is it?” I stepped closer, my eyes intent on her face. Something was dreadfully wrong, I could see it in her anguished expression.
“I …
I took Mia to the doctor last week. And…”
“And what?”
“She was having some pain in her joints. So, I thought maybe a little rheumatism. My grandmother suffered from rheumatism. So did my mother. Anyway, they did a little blood work and… and… I got … the … I got the results… yesterday after I dropped you off.” She covered her face with both hands.
“What did they find?” I suddenly didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know at all.
“Leukemia. She has leukemia. Advanced. Her immune system is a wreck. She’s going to die, Susie.” She collapsed into tears again.
The image of seven-year-old Mia with her shining blue eyes and long blonde curls filled my mind. Long, beautiful curls that would soon be lost after the toxic chemicals of chemotherapy ravaged her poor little body.
Leukemia! How did that happen?
“Oh, Laura! I am so sorry!” I wrapped my arms around her, ignoring her struggles to resist me. “What can be done? What can I do?”
She clung to me, holding me tight as she cried until the shoulder of my sweater soaked through. Finally, when all of the tears had run dry, she sniffed a couple of times and pulled back.
Wiping at her nose with her sleeve, she managed half a smile. “I’m sorry for…” She motioned toward the large damp spot on my top.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It will dry. What can they do for Mia?”
“She is going to need a bone marrow transplant if she has any hope of surviving.”
“A bone marrow transplant? That’s it? What about chemotherapy? Isn’t that the usual course of things?”
From down the hall, Becca called out, “Hey, girls! You coming back here?”
“Be there in a minute!” I yelled back. I turned back to Laura with a questioning look, waiting for her response.
“They don’t think traditional chemotherapy will do anything except make her very sick. Her body has already been ravaged by the disease. Her blood counts were off the charts. Our only hope for Mia is intense radiation therapy to kill off all the diseased marrow and a bone marrow transplant. None of us are a good enough match so we don’t even have a donor!” Laura threw her hands in the air in frustration as her voice crumbled into tears again. I let her cry it out, waiting patiently for her emotions to run dry.
When she had regained control, she continued. “Even if we had a donor, we can’t afford the transplant. The insurance won’t cover all of the expenses and we barely make ends meet now. What the hell are we gonna do? She’s my baby, Susie!”
Suddenly, I was as angry as I had ever been. Mia was seven years old. She'd barely had time to live. I stamped my foot in anger.
“She is not going to die! Not if there is even one little thing that we can do to save her! We will get you that money! And we will find her a donor. We can have one of those drives. We will get everyone we know tested. Someone in this town will be her perfect match, I just know it!”
For the first time since she arrived at Claire’s Laura looked hopeful. “Do you really think we can? Find a donor, I mean?”
“Absolutely!” I said with way more conviction than I felt. “Mia is not going to die!”
“I want to believe you. I need to believe you. I have to fight for my little girl’s life. I am not giving up!” Tears were welling up in her dark eyes again.
I slung an arm over her shoulder and said, “Come on, Laura. Let’s go tell Becca and Claire that we have a new mission.”
Together we walked down the hall, arm in arm. Laura’s normally straight shoulders were slumped and her usual quick step was slow and clumsy but we made it to the room where our friends waited.
Becca took one look at Laura and gasped. “Laura! What is wrong?”
“It’s Mia.” I answered for my friend. “She has cancer and she needs to have a bone marrow transplant.”
“Is that true?” Claire asked Laura.
“Yes,” Laura whispered.
“But what about chemo? Or surgery?” Claire asked the same questions I had.
“It’s leukemia, there is no surgery for that. And the doctors say chemo won’t be effective by itself,” I explained.
“Oh crap, Laura. I am so sorry!” Becca virtually leaped across the room to where Laura stood beside me and grabbed her in a hug. “What can we do?”
“They need to find a donor first. And, of course, they need money. I figured we all got the money part covered. We just have to put our heads together and figure out how to find her a donor.”
“Isn’t there a registry for that? Some sort of national data bank?” Claire asked, resting her long index finger against her cheek in thought. “Yes, I am pretty sure that there is.”
“The hospital already checked. There is not a match for Mia in the registry,” Laura answered, dejectedly. “There’s no hope. She starts chemo day after tomorrow but the prognosis is not good. I just need to prepare myself for my baby leaving me! Well, at least I will have the money for her funeral!”
Laura began to cry again. Becca, Claire, and I just stared at each other feeling helpless. We surrounded her and wrapped our arms around her in a group hug of support. Finally, Laura excused herself to go to the bathroom. The three of us stood in an uncomfortable silence. I couldn’t rid my thoughts of little Mia fighting the evils of cancer.
Our main focus for weeks had been solving our problems with money. Foreclosures could be stopped, hunger could be prevented, and heat could remain on with the funds to do so. But a little girl with a cancer ravaged body? What could our stolen cash do for her?
Absolutely nothing.
That’s when it hit me with all the force of a ton of bricks. Despite what I had previously thought, money couldn’t solve everything. For months I had been wading through the days, yearning for the life we had before the recession. I believed with all my heart that if we had more money, then everything would be fine. Nearly losing my own life wasn’t even enough to teach me that the things that really mattered, the real riches in life had absolutely nothing at all to do with money.
When Laura returned from the bathroom, her eyes were red and swollen and her skin looked splotchy but she wasn’t crying anymore. “Thanks, girls, for letting me have my little breakdown. I haven’t wanted to cry in front of Mia. She is scared enough as it is. She doesn’t quite understand what is wrong yet but she knows it’s not very good.”
Becca hugged Laura again. “You can cry on my shoulder any time. I am always here for you no matter what you need.”
“Me, too,” Claire and I chimed in simultaneously.
“I just feel so helpless. Here is my little baby girl facing this huge thing and there is nothing—absolutely nothing—I can do to take it away from her. She has to fight the enemy all by herself and she can’t win. It’s a losing battle.”
“Laura, are you sure that’s what the doctor said? That nothing will save her except maybe a transplant?” I asked.
“He said that her best hope was a transplant. The leukemia is consuming her body. It has gone unchecked for too long.”
“But a transplant will save her?” Claire spoke up.
“There’s no telling if it will or won’t until they do it. It’s hopeless.” Laura threw her arms up in the air in exasperation and then dropped back into the overstuffed chair behind her. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Are we ready to do this thing, Claire?”
Her quick topic change caught me off guard. I didn’t expect Laura to still be in the mood to go through with the job. My expression must have given away my thoughts because she looked at me and smile. “Of course, I still want to do the job. It may not save my baby but it would be nice to make her last days extra special, you know? Maybe we will go to Disney World or something.”
The sound of the cuckoo clock in the dining room indicated that it was half past nine. If we wanted to make it to the bank by ten we needed to get ready.
Claire spoke up next. “Laura, if you think you are ready, we really should get prepared to head out.
”
Laura wiped at her wet eyes again. “I’m ready.”
Claire instantly flushed with excitement and I could tell that she really lived for this stuff. She acted like a junkie, getting high off the adrenaline rush of robbery. Her eyes were sparkling as she skipped back to the family room and disappeared into the opening in the floor. A series of clanging and banging sounds made their way up from the underground room as Claire readied the weapons.
My Lucy dress had been neatly laid out on the sofa with the shoes placed on the floor in front of it. Grabbing up the hanger, I took the dress up stairs to the master suite. I wanted to use Claire’s bathroom so I could clean up my cut knee and try to bandage it up a bit.
Claire’s home was so beautiful on the first floor that I should have been prepared for the elegance that made up her master suite. A heavy four poster bed, set so high up from the floor that it had a small footstool next to it, adorned in a thick mauve and gold comforter sat against one wall. Heavy braiding trimmed the edges and matched the canopy that hung above it. Piles of overstuffed throw pillows were impeccably arranged across the headboard and an afghan sat neatly folded on an antique hope chest at the end of the bed. Two wing-backed chairs were arranged in front of a bay window in a little sitting area. The chairs were upholstered in a deep gold and each one had a little matching pillow balanced in one corner. A throw rung, obviously hand woven in a deep pile, sat before the two chairs elaborately combing all the shades of mauve and gold present in the room, right down to the light rose brocade of the wall paper.
Wide planks of walnut stained hardwood, polished to a high shine had obviously never experienced the trials of matchbox cars and soccer cleats extended into the en suite bathroom.
As I stood in the doorway of the room, gazing at the magnificent artwork and sculptures scattered around the room, I couldn’t help but wonder just how many of them were stolen.
The Heist Page 14
