Lizzie reached for my hand, and I leaned in against her. We listened carefully, our eyes darting from Eloise to Deke and back again, like spectators at one of the tennis matches over at the high school.
“We got some money, all right,” Eloise said, “but it was just a drop in the bucket, and we only get one check once a year, and it don’t hardly make ends meet . . .”
“But see, she knows that when you girls grow up, you’ll have the right to sue her for her part.” Deke spoke with more passion than I’d ever seen in him. “She knows you can pull the whole rug right out from under her. Then we’ll all be billionaires and be sitting pretty, and she’ll be the one out in the cold.”
“That’s why she wants you dead,” Eloise explained. “If you don’t never grow up, then you can’t sue her for your part.”
Lizzie squeezed my hand, and I knew it meant that she wasn’t sure whether to believe them. That Barbie doll had really clouded her thinking. “She didn’t act like she wanted us dead,” Lizzie said. “She seemed nice.”
“Are you calling me a liar, girl?” That gentleness in Eloise’s voice was gone. “You don’t expect her to have horns and a forked tail, do you? Of course she seems nice. But she acted all nice to your daddy, too, right up to the time she killed him. And if we hadn’t come along, you two would be road kill.”
I’d seen enough stiff cats lying on the side of the road to know that I never wanted to be like that. But I had a hard time being grateful that Eloise and Deke had rescued us.
“What did she say to you?” Eloise demanded.
“Just . . . happy birthday,” I said quietly. “That we had grown.”
I looked at Lizzie and saw that she had tears in her eyes. She held her eyes wide to keep them from falling. “She said we looked beautiful.”
I might have known Lizzie would get hung up on that. Compliments just blew her away. If some dangerous killer came along and told her he wanted to strangle her, but that she really looked pretty, she would probably just stretch out her throat for him.
“Anything else?” Deke leaned close, real interested.
“She told us she loved us.” I recognized the defi- ance in Lizzie’s voice, and I squeezed her hand to silence her, but she went on. “She didn’t act mean.”
“They never do.” Eloise got in her face, her eyes narrowing into slits. “Now you look at me, young lady. You promise me that if you ever see her again, you’ll run. Do you hear me? You’ll come get Deke or me, or you’ll call the police and turn her in. If you don’t, we could all wind up dead.”
I was still trying to figure out the part about how we were rich. “You mean, when we grow up, we’re gonna be rich?”
“Not if she gets her claws into you,” Deke said.
“But if we stay away from her, we could have a lot of money and live in a castle?”
“Something like that.” Eloise shifted her massive rump in her chair. “When you turn eighteen, we can get us a lawyer and sue the stew out of her. You can say that you were robbed of your inheritance, and yes, then you’ll be rich and can buy me and Deke a mansion of our own, and dole out hundred-dollar bills like they were pennies.”
“Will we be famous?” Lizzie asked.
“Of course you’ll be famous,” Deke said. “The Billion Dollar Babies? Darn right, you’ll be famous.”
I went to bed that night wishing I’d never taken the Barbie doll from that woman, wishing I’d spit in her face when she kissed me on the cheek . . . wishing I’d never gotten that scent in my brain. I took her card with the phone number and tore it up into little pieces and flushed it down the toilet. Lizzie wouldn’t let me do hers, though. Instead, she memorized the number and kept the card so she could sniff it, because it smelled like Amanda’s perfume.
I lay in bed for a long time, thinking about the mother and father and the grandpa and grandma she’d stolen from me, and all the money that we could have had. And I thought that if I ever saw her again I would kick her right in the shin and run.
I looked over at Lizzie before I went to sleep. She was curled up next to me under a dingy sheet, holding Eliza in one arm and that brand-new, decked-out Barbie in her other.
TWENTY-THREE
I never expected Lizzie to keep that phone number for so long, because I had flat forgotten about it. But she must have practiced saying it over and over in her head, as if it were some magical chant that would bring our fairy godmother.
When we were thirteen, Lizzie finally had cause to use it.
We hadn’t known how the night would turn out when Steve Crawley and Teddy Malone, two sixteen-year-olds from the high school, asked us to go to the state fair with them. Lizzie and I had developed early, and we looked more like fifteen. The boys seemed to like our long, curly red hair, and I have to admit we got a lot of looks whenever we went anywhere. It seemed like overnight we went from being treated like little girls to getting instant attention when we walked through the truck stop to get a Coke.
And it suited me just fine. Lizzie said I was boy crazy, but I just told her I was mature for my age. Most of the men who blew through town in their eighteen-wheelers grossed me out, and I wouldn’t have given them the time of day.
But Steve and Teddy seemed pretty harmless and they were fun to be around. We had never been on a car date with boys before, and when they waved around a wad of money they’d earned mowing yards and said they would win us some stuffed animals and show us a real good time, well, how could we turn them down?
We picked a night when we knew Deke and Eloise would be at the casino, not because they wouldn’t have let us go, but just because we didn’t want them to come out snooping around for the money we would spend and find some way to trick Steve or Teddy out of it.
We drove the hour to Jackson and inched our way along the off-ramp near the fairgrounds, searching for a place to park. Teddy wasn’t a very good driver. We’d had some close calls as we drove over the stack, where I-20 and I-55 crossed.
Once we got Teddy’s rusty old car parked up on the curb along the ramp, we trekked around the fence to the entrance. The smells of corn dogs, cinnamon rolls, corn on the cob, and cotton candy wafted over the grounds, so unlike the air we breathed in Barton. The sun had already gone down, and we marveled at the way the double Ferris wheel lit up as it rolled over the city. From where we walked, we could hear the screams from the Matterhorn and the loud, competing heavy-metal sounds from each of the rides.
I thought I might burst with excitement.
I looked at Lizzie to see if she was prancing and waving, but she was walking normally, gaping at the rides like we’d entered a whole new world.
“I want to ride the Ferris wheel first.” She turned around and walked backward as she spoke, her face glowing. “And then the bumper cars. And I want one of those big Tasmanian Devils and a goldfish.”
“I ain’t buying you a goldfish,” Teddy said. “I didn’t come here to buy no goldfish.”
“You don’t buy them, genius,” she said. “You win them.”
“Yeah, but you got to pay about a hundred bucks to win one. And then how would you get it home?”
Lizzie looked disappointed, but I agreed with Teddy. There was no way we could get a goldfish home in one piece, and once we got it home, what did she think we’d do with the thing?
“I want cotton candy,” I said. “Smell that, Lizzie. Have you ever smelled anything so nice?”
“We ain’t eating all my money away.” Steve Crawley tried to put his arm around me, but I shrugged it off. I didn’t want to be too rude to him, since he was paying my way and all, but I didn’t feel like being all lovey-dovey with some guy who was telling me I wasn’t going to eat his money.
He got this insulted look on his face, like maybe this wasn’t going to turn out like he hoped. “Hey, you’re not going to act all seventh grade, are you?”
I threw up my chin. “If you’re so worried about what grade I’m in, why’d you ask me to come?”
“Becau
se you look better than any of the girls in my grade.”
He said things like that all the time, which is why we hung out with him. I don’t mind telling you that it made me feel the slightest bit superior to those girls who looked down their noses at us because we were young or had less money. But I knew their daddies all farmed, or worked at the chicken plant or the paper mill, and most of them smelled as bad as Deke did when they came home from work each day.
We got to the entrance, and the boys shelled out the money for the ticket, and I had to keep myself from leaping and running along ahead of them.
They indulged us by taking us on the Ferris wheel first. I went with Steve and Lizzie went with Teddy, and when the thing stopped with us at the top, Steve tried to put the move on me. I elbowed him in the ribs and made him mad, and then I was sorry for it, because I had to sit there with him until the wheel rolled down again.
I looked behind us and saw that Teddy was kissing Lizzie. Her arms were crossed over her chest, but she wasn’t resisting him. And she said I was boy crazy.
“Why are you so hostile?” Steve glared at me. “Here I am spending my life savings on you, and you take the first chance to crack my ribs.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby. I was just playing.”
“I don’t know if I want to spend any more on somebody who’s so hostile.”
I started thinking that I didn’t know if I wanted to spend another minute with somebody who kept holding that money over my head, like it was a big stick he was going to beat me with if I didn’t act right.
“You know, Lizzie and I can get our own money. We don’t need you.” I looked back over my shoulder. Lizzie hugged the side of her chair and looked down into the crowd. I saw Teddy with his arms around her, coaxing her into a longer make-out session, and I felt like screaming for him to leave her alone.
But Lizzie was going to have to say it, and she didn’t.
Finally, the Ferris wheel began to move, making me a little sick as it swept to the ground and back up again, the delicious-smelling wind blowing through my hair.
I watched a group go to the ticket booth and buy a roll of tickets. One guy in a red shirt took out a wad of money like Steve’s and Teddy’s and shoved it into his pocket. I got to thinking how easy it would be to take somebody’s wallet in a crowd. I started wondering how it would be if we did that and found a stack of twenties in it. Then Lizzie and I wouldn’t have to do anything Steve and Teddy said.
When we got off the Ferris wheel, I felt a little wobbly. Lizzie’s clothes and hair were all disheveled, and she was in a real cranky mood.
I grabbed her and pushed her hair back from her ear so she could hear my whisper. “How about we ditch these guys and steal some guy’s wallet? Then we can do whatever we want.”
Lizzie looked at me like I needed a straitjacket. “How would we get home?”
“Well, maybe we can make up with them before they leave. Or find somebody else to take us home.”
“I don’t want to make Steve and Teddy mad and wind up walking home,” Lizzie said. “But we could take a wallet, and then they wouldn’t keep complaining about all the money they have to spend on us.”
The guys started telling us that they needed for us to walk over to the coliseum with them, into the empty stables where they kept the animals for the agricultural shows. It was dark in there, and I knew what they wanted. But they kept hounding us to go with them.
“You guys go wait for us there,” I told Teddy and Steve. “Lizzie and I need to find a bathroom. We’ll be right over.”
They looked doubtful that we could come.
“How would we get home if we lost you?” I asked Teddy. “What do we look like? Idiots?”
They seemed satisfied with that, and I realized that we would have to keep our promise to join them. We picked out a guy with a bulging wallet in his back pocket. We decided that Lizzie would bump into the guy from the front, distracting him, and I would grab the wallet and run.
We followed him into the most densely crowded area and watched as he tried to get through the people.
Then we made our move.
Lizzie ran around in front of him, then stopped suddenly, making him almost trip over her. I grabbed his wallet, but it didn’t come out as easily as I thought it would.
His hand came back, and he tried to turn around, but before he could stop me, I got it out.
He grabbed my wrist. I yelled, and Lizzie started running. I managed to slip free, but he yelled behind us. “Catch her! She’s got my wallet.”
We ran together, dodging people and trying to lose him in the crowd, but he was right behind us, running like a madman. He caught up to us, grabbed each of us by the hair . . .
And there we were, face-to-face with two cops who grabbed us and wrestled handcuffs onto us.
“I didn’t do anything!” I cried. “He was chasing us for no reason!”
But the cop reached into my pocket, where I’d stuffed the man’s wallet, and there it was, incriminating me like some kind of smoking gun. I was sunk.
“She was in on it, too!” The man pointed to Lizzie. “She bumped into me, trying to distract me. They’re in it together.”
“We didn’t do anything!” I cried again, but it was futile. The two cops escorted us back to the gates and put us into their squad car.
I had never been to jail before, so I didn’t know what to expect. Since we had no identification and refused to tell them our names, the police assumed we were older and took us to the Hinds County Detention Center just a few blocks from the fairgrounds.
They took us through a heavy steel door that crashed shut behind us, then searched us in a garagelike room. Finally, they threw us together into a holding cell made of yellow cement blocks with bars over the glass.
“Nice going, Kara.” Lizzie glared at me like I had just ruined her life.
“Hey, if you’d distracted him like you were supposed to—”
“I did the best I could. I didn’t know you were going to fight him for his wallet! I thought you were just going to slip it out of his pocket.”
I got up and went to the window. Through the bars, I could see into the processing room. A couple of deputies moved around in there, clearly unconcerned about us. “Now what are we gonna do? We can’t call Eloise and Deke. They’re not home. And there’s no way to get in touch with Steve and Teddy.”
“We can call her.”
I turned back and looked at Lizzie, knowing exactly who she meant. She was talking about Amanda, the woman who wanted us dead.
“Are you crazy?”
She stood with her face close to mine, daring me to protest. “She said to call her if we ever needed her. I know her number by heart.”
“Why? Why would you know that by heart?”
“Because I thought I might need it someday.”
“So you planned to wind up in jail for pick-pocketing?”
Hot accusation burned in Lizzie’s eyes. “I never planned to wind up in jail, period. But I’m here now, thanks to you. You got any better ideas?”
“Yeah. We can give them our names and tell them we’re thirteen, and they’ll realize we don’t know better . . .”
“They’ll put us in juvenile detention,” Lizzie said. “I don’t want to go to juvenile detention.”
“You’d rather be in jail?”
“No. I want out. If we wait until Eloise and Deke get home, they might make us rot here. They sure aren’t going to shell out any money to get us out of here.”
“And she will?”
“She said if we needed her to call. Maybe she’ll come.”
“I don’t trust her,” I said. “Don’t you remember what Eloise and Deke told us about her?”
“Maybe they lied.”
“They didn’t. That’s the one true thing they’ve ever said.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it makes sense!” I was losing my patience with Lizzie. Sometimes she could be so dense. “Why else
would we be dirt poor and living with Deke and Eloise if our grandfather was a billionaire? She took all our money, that’s why. She killed our parents and took our money.”
“I’m calling her.” Lizzie knocked on the glass. “You can get comfortable in here if you don’t want to come, but I’m getting out.”
“If you can figure out some way to get her to bail us out without our having to be alone with her, then okay. But I’m not giving her a chance to finish off our family.”
When the deputies came to process us, Lizzie got to make her phone call. I watched her dial the number. Her face was pale as she waited for it to ring.
“Can I please . . .” She stopped and cleared her throat. It had gotten all raspy. “Can I please speak to Amanda Holbrooke?”
I waited a moment to see what would happen. I fully expected Amanda to hang up on her or laugh her head off that Lizzie had actually used the number.
They must have asked who was calling, because Lizzie said in a weak voice, “Lizzie Holbrooke.”
Even though it was night and that was probably her home number, the person put her on hold. The deputy sat at her desk, typing information into a computer. We had finally given her our names, and she’d quickly discovered that we were thirteen. She’d allowed us the phone call, probably in hopes of turning us over to someone who could pay our fine, before she had to go to a lot of trouble figuring out what to do with us.
“Yes . . . ,” Lizzie said, and I looked up at her again. “Hi. Uh . . . remember when you came on our tenth birthday? And you gave us the Barbies? And you gave us the phone number? Well . . . we’re kind of in trouble . . . and I wondered . . .”
Her voice broke off, and I knew that Amanda woman was talking ninety-to-nothing, probably giving her an earful about her nerve in calling so late.
“Yeah . . . we’re in jail, see . . . there was a misunderstanding at the fair, and some guy said we took his wallet . . . Hinds County . . . downtown . . . yes . . .We can’t reach Deke and Eloise . . . Yes, Kara, too . . .”
It didn’t seem that Amanda was laughing or chastising her at all. Lizzie seemed downright calm.When she hung up the phone, I gaped up at her. “What did she say?”
Covenant Child Page 9
