“Tomorrow, I’ll get supplies,” she told Tammy as the younger woman buckled Mikey into his car. “Food first. If you think of anything else we need, just add it to the list.”
She waved to Mikey and Nellie as they drove off. Madeline was still in the Clinic. No one else was around.
Melinda went back inside. Nobody Bodine was the Clinic’s janitor—would he also be cleaning the center? Was she paying him out of the center’s budget? Was she paying him at all?
She didn’t know what she thought about the silent man having full access to her center. All she really knew was that she thought about it a lot.
Hell, there was no way to know. It’s not like there was much to clean today, just some dusty footprints on the floor.
She looked down at the list of things she had to buy tomorrow. It was four pages long. She had an extra sheet of paper.
Before she could change her mind, she tore half of it off and dashed off a note. She didn’t have a desk or table to set the note on, nor did she have any tape to stick it to the door.
So she folded it into a little tent and set it in the middle of the floor.
She wondered if he’d be the one to find it.
That night, she was so tired that she only managed to sit by the fire outside for about twenty minutes. Although she knew it was ridiculous, she found herself staring at the trees. Would a man walk out of the shadows? Would he come sit by the fire? Would he stare at her with those dark eyes again, like he was daring her to ask another wildly inappropriate question?
He didn’t. As Rebel had said, nobody was there.
With a small ‘n’.
*
Nobody stood in the shadows watching and listening. He didn’t like to be in the Clinic when other people were there. The woman who answered the phone? Yeah, she didn’t like him. She’d even called the law on him a couple of times when he’d had to suck it up and go to the Clinic during daylight hours or risk bleeding out.
Clarence didn’t actively hate him, but Nobody always got the feeling that the nurse was just waiting for Nobody to lose it so he could have a crack at knocking him down. It would be a victory if he could take Nobody out, the modern-day equivalent of wannabe gunslingers looking to knock off a Sackett in the Louis L’Amour books Nobody read. Whoever could break Nobody would be the toughest bastard on the rez.
What Nobody would give to not be the toughest bastard on the rez. He’d rather not have to go through Clarence to lose the title, though.
So he waited until everyone else had gone home and then, just to be sure, he waited a little bit more. He saw Melinda get into the car with Dr. Mitchell and drive off. Did she know he emptied the trash and mopped the floor? Did she think he was little better than a loser because that was his job?
If she did, he wouldn’t blame her. Nobody didn’t know a hell of a lot about the Mitchell family—they were from Ohio, as Rebel had said, and had to have some money because Dr. Mitchell had pretty much single-handedly kept the Clinic’s doors open for a year. More than enough money that Melinda had to look down on a guy who cleaned toilets.
He didn’t see anything. It’d been fifteen minutes since Dr. Mitchell had locked up. Except for the couple of times Nobody had caught junkies trying to break into the clinic for drugs, no one came around after hours.
He unlocked the clinic and locked the door behind him again. He didn’t want anyone wandering in on him. He didn’t even turn on the lights. The shadows inside weren’t the same as the shadows outside, but he felt better when light wasn’t shining down on him.
He worked quickly, wiping down the exam tables, scrubbing the bathroom and mopping the floor. He was good at this. Of course, he’d had a lot of time to get good at it—eight years in prison with nothing to do but clean and fight. It was stupid to take pride in something as lowly as cleaning up other people’s messes, but he knew it was important for a doctor’s office to be germ-free. In some pathetic little way, he felt important for the Clinic.
He bagged the trash, took it out to the barrel and … didn’t light it up. Damn it all, he wasn’t done yet. Dr. Mitchell was going to pay him more to clean up the Child Care Center. He hadn’t wanted to do it—and that was before he’d seen Melinda Mitchell. It was one thing to keep a clinic clean. That was necessary. But a day care? He didn’t know why, but it felt like he’d lowered himself even more. If it’d been anyone else, Nobody would have turned them down, but Dr. Mitchell wasn’t the kind of person—man or woman—who took ‘no’ for an answer. And really, who was he kidding? He was already so low he couldn’t get any deeper.
He unlocked the back door of the center and surveyed the scene. The place looked almost the same as it had when he’d swept it up two days ago—some water splashed, most likely from hand-washing, some footprints on the floor. He went back to the Clinic and got his stuff.
He wiped down the bathrooms and opened the door to the main part. Even though the sun was well on its way to setting, enough light streamed in behind him that he could see.
There was something small and white and folded, in the dead center of the floor. Something that didn’t look accidentally dropped or even tossed.
Nobody stood there for a moment, looking at the paper, for that’s what it was. Part of him didn’t want to even touch it—it felt like a trap of some kind, something dangerous.
He set his stuff on the floor and propped the broom up against the door. Then he walked over, picked up the paper and unfolded it.
Mr. Bodine,
Thank you very much for having the center so spotless for me. I’m sorry to say that we’re going to be destroying your clean building in the next few days. I’ll be bringing in toys and furniture and we’re going to paint the walls. Don’t think of it as a mess, although it will be—for a while, anyway. Think of it as creative chaos. Out of disaster can come something beautiful.
Yours,
Melinda Mitchell
Nobody stood there in a state of shock. Mr. Bodine? If that wasn’t his last name, he’d be sure that she hadn’t meant to leave this for him. Hell, it was his last name and he still wasn’t sure it was really for him. She’d written him a letter. Him, of all people. He’d never gotten a letter before. What was he supposed to do now? What did normal people do? Should he write her back? What the hell was he supposed to say? Thanks, happy to scrub your toilets? No way in hell that was going to happen. He’d rather get shot again.
His eyes returned to the last part, where she’d written Out of disaster can come something beautiful and below that, Yours. Her handwriting was deeply slanted, so it almost looked like she was writing in italics. It wasn’t creative chaos—the words were perfectly formed, written with a steady, careful hand. And she’d written to him.
She wasn’t afraid of him. That stunning realization was quickly followed by another—if she’d written him a letter, she had to have been thinking about him.
Was that even possible?
No. No way. At least, not in the way he kind of wanted her to think about him. The idea was ridiculous and he knew it. She might have crazy hair and whatever, but she was still a rich-ish white woman who would be afraid of him, once someone saw fit to tell her all about the nothing that was Nobody.
Women like her might go slumming with a janitor, but not with convicted murderers. And never with janitors who were convicted murderers.
No, it was more likely that she was just being nice. One of those people who had been raised to be polite to the help, like her sister was always polite to him, in her disapproving way. That’s all this was. A small measure of kindness.
Still … Yours.
He folded the note and put it in his back pocket.
Then he cleaned the floor.
For her.
Chapter Three
The note was gone the next morning.
Otherwise, Melinda couldn’t see much difference in the place. It was as clean as it had been yesterday, but then, there wasn’t much to mess up. But no note meant that Nobody
had been there. She didn’t have a trashcan yet, so there was no way of telling if he’d thrown it away, burned it in the barrel out back or …
Or if he’d kept it.
The only thing she knew for sure was that he hadn’t left a reply. She had no idea if he thought she was insane or ridiculous or what for leaving him a message in the middle of the floor. That wasn’t an entirely foreign thing—many of the board members on the Mitchell Foundation thought she was a total flake. Yet another reason she was out in South Dakota instead of in Columbus.
Of course, in Columbus, she wouldn’t have had to leave a note on the floor. Even in the grittier areas of town, everyone had a cell phone. Everyone texted. Here? She couldn’t even get a signal except at about nine in the evening. On a clear night. It was like going back to the Stone Age.
Her little first-world whine was interrupted when Tammy showed up. She didn’t want to text anyone, anyway. All of her friends back in Columbus had thought she was nuts for following her sister out here to the middle of nowhere. No, she was here for the isolation, to throw herself into her work.
Starting now. After Rebel kissed his wife goodbye—Melinda so wasn’t used to that—she and Rebel headed up to Rapid City in Madeline’s Jeep. The Great Stock-Up had officially begun.
And it didn’t let up for two weeks—two of the longest weeks of Melinda’s life. The fact that she was getting up before seven every morning had something to do with that. Driving the three hour round-trip to Rapid City several times a day also had something to do with that, too.
Almost once a day, she drove to the warehouse store and bought as much food staples as she could get into the Jeep. Then Rebel showed her where the thrift stores and resale shops in town were located. She scored cups, plates, cutlery, books, toys and a couple of couches in decent shape. They had to come back for the couches with a truck—which was how Melinda met Rebel’s brother, Jesse.
He had a job on a road construction crew, so Melinda and Rebel had to get up even earlier to make it to his place to get the truck. Melinda wasn’t exactly comfortable letting a man she’d barely said hello to borrow her car, but she also wasn’t comfortable having kids sit on the concrete floor for story time. So Jesse drove off in her Civic and she and Rebel loaded up couches.
It was a start. At least the kids could all have a snack while she read them stories.
Tammy made admirable progress on organizing what Melinda trucked in while simultaneously keeping the kids from wandering off. She had Nellie in charge of organizing books and Mikey was responsible for stacking the boxes of crackers and cookies. Tammy was good with the kids, in her quiet way. She wiped noses and hugged away booboos like a professional. Melinda may have liked kids—and she did—but she got along better with the older ones who were at least in kindergarten, like Nellie. Babies were beyond her. Thank heavens Tammy was good at changing diapers.
Oh, yeah. She added more diapers to the list. Just another thing to get.
At no point during those two weeks did she see Nobody Bodine. No surprise visits for dinner. No sign of him at the center. No notes left anywhere she would find them. No one else talked about him, not even Rebel and Madeline.
It was like he didn’t exist. Except she couldn’t get that feeling out of her mind—the feeling she’d gotten the first night that he’d been just out of sight, watching her. Other people showed up to talk to Rebel, but Nobody wasn’t among them. This left her vaguely disappointed. How crazy was that?
Finally, the center had enough supplies to function. Melinda was still going to have to make regular trips into town—the kids went through an insane amount of milk on a daily basis—but she was ready to start spending time with all the short people.
She was also ready to stop getting up at the butt-crack of dawn. Tammy was going to handle the morning shift. The plan was that Melinda would roll in around ten, they’d handle lunch together, and then Tammy would head out at naptime. Sure, that meant Melinda would be in the center until the last kid left—no later than six every night, but she didn’t mind. In theory, she’d get back to Madeline and Rebel’s trailer just as dinner was being served.
Plus, if she was actually in the center, she could start painting the damn thing. Even with the addition of furniture and toys, the whole place was still as depressing as a morgue. In a perfect world, she would have painted the whole place before the kids showed up. However, the kids had come first. Ah, well. Life wasn’t perfect.
On Sunday, she made what she hoped was her final run into Rapid City for at least a few days. On Monday, she showed up at the center a little after ten, the car full of paint cans and rollers. Tammy had twelve kids already there, running from toddler to maybe eight. The older kids were outside playing kickball while the smaller ones played in the dirt. The day was bright and clear. Perfect.
The kids all stopped as she got out of the car. Some of the older ones were a little wary around her, but Melinda had already cemented her position as ‘crazy white woman who brings cool stuff.’ No kid was immune to that kind of fun. “What did you bring today, Miss Melinda?” they all asked as they crowded around.
“Paint!” she announced. “Who wants to paint today?”
The chorus of ‘me! me!’ was so loud she was thankful she wasn’t inside. One of the older kids said, “what color?”
“Oh, I like you. What’s your name again?”
“Mark,” the kid said, looking at his feet.
“Excellent question, Mark. Today we’ll be painting one wall primer white.” The kids all drooped in disappointment. “But tomorrow,” Melinda hurried to add, “we’re going to start a rainbow! Won’t that be cool?”
The kids all whooped and hollered. Melinda made the older kids carry in a gallon of paint while the younger ones got the rollers. Then she set them to work, clearing all the new-to-them stuff away from the western wall of the center. Sometimes that meant the younger kids were literally just throwing toys over their shoulders, but it was progress.
Soon enough, she had the drop cloths down, the kids into the t-shirts she’d snagged from a thrift store to act as smocks and they were rolling primer onto the walls. The kids squealed with joy as primer dripped everywhere. Far too late, Melinda wondered if some of the parents might not be so thrilled if their kids came home with white paint in their hair. Oh, well. It’d wash out. Eventually.
She worked on getting the names down. Kala and Andy were twins. Along with Mikey, those were the toddlers. Jeremy, Paris, Luis and Colby were all three and four. Sasha, the twins’ older sister, and Nellie were five, Courtney and Alex were six, and Courtney’s older brother Mark was eight.
They were a quarter of the way through the wall when a shadow passed in front of the door, blocking the light. Melinda turned and saw a boy, probably no more than ten, standing on the threshold. Something about the way he held himself was familiar. Head down, arms loose at his side—it was almost as if he was looking for a fight.
Then she noticed the bruises. The left side of his face was a mottled mess of greens and yellows—older bruises that had probably just started to fade.
Something in her cramped up, a pain that more than one person had referred to as Melinda’s ‘bleeding liberal heart.’ Whatever, she’d always said. Her heart bled because people hurt kids. Someone had hurt this kid. If that made her a soft touch, so be it. Someone should be soft. The world would be too hard a place otherwise.
She shot a look at Tammy, who was doing her level best to keep the paint on the walls and off the floors. “You know him?”
Tammy glanced over her shoulder. “No. Oh, Jeremy!” She rushed toward the boy, who’d started painting a stuffed animal.
Melinda set her roller down and approached the boy slowly. It had been her experience that abused kids didn’t like sudden movements. Slow and steady won the race. “Hi,” she started out.
The boy didn’t respond, except to drop his eyes.
Melinda considered her options. The smart thing to do would be to trade pl
aces with Tammy and see if the kid did better talking to another Lakota.
Melinda never did seem to do the smart thing. Another step forward. “You want to paint?”
Ah, a reaction. The kid shrugged. Excellent. Now they were getting somewhere.
“I could sure use the help,” she said, pausing long enough to snag another roller. “This wall is monster huge.” Another step forward.
Christ. She was close enough now that she could see how big the bruise was, how half of his face was still swollen enough that he looked lopsided. No wonder the kid couldn’t decide if he was coming or going. She was probably lucky he’d even made it this far. A bruise that big? How had he not gotten a concussion—or worse? She’d seen kids who’d been hit so hard, so often that it did permanent damage to their brains. It was a hard thing to see, to know it could have been stopped, the kid could have been saved.
She fought the overwhelming urge to pull the boy into a fierce bear hug and tell him no one would ever hurt him again. First off, grabbing the kid would probably scare the hell out of him. And second off, she couldn’t make promises like that. She knew damn well at the end of the day that this kid would go home, where he’d be vulnerable again. All she could do was offer him a safe place here. Damn it all.
She hated that feeling, the one of frustration that kept her from protecting kids.
“What’s your name? I’m Melinda. I’m Dr. Mitchell’s sister.” Nothing. She took another step closer and held the roller out halfway between them. If he wanted to paint, he’d have to come in the rest of the way. When she got no response, she added, “Do your parents know you’re here?” in a quieter voice.
Another shrug, but this one was followed by the boy snaking his hand out and trying to grab the roller out of her hand.
Victory. A really small one, but she took it. He was here, he wanted to paint. Except Melinda didn’t let go. “You have to tell me your name first. Everyone here has a name.”
He almost let go of the roller, almost turned and ran back out the door. Melinda could see the boy was terrified, but she wasn’t sure why. Was he scared of her, of what the other kids would say about his face—or of what his parents would do when they found him here?
Nobody (Men of the White Sandy) (Volume 3) Page 4
