His smile stretched to its full width. “I’ve heard that folks in Houston see so much crime they’re always thinkin’ they’ll be next. Well, you don’t have to worry here in Kluney.”
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I blurted out. “Crimes take place everywhere, even in small towns.”
“Oh, we got crime, of sorts,” he said, and rubbed his chin. “In fact, lately we’ve had a little more than usual. To my way of thinkin’, the amount of crime depends on who’s stoppin’ off or movin’ through town.”
“Your own citizens are squeaky-clean?” Mom asked.
Sheriff Granger went on as though he hadn’t heard the disbelief in Mom’s voice. “We keep tabs on our own.”
I was too curious to let the subject drop. “What kind of crimes do you get?” I asked.
He shifted his weight, and the chair trembled. I was really getting worried about the fate of that chair. “Shop-liftin’ … burglaries,” he answered. “Earlier this year we had a string of shopliftin’ reports. Started out with some minor stuff, like pocketknives and flashlights, hardly worth botherin’ about; but then stuff like VCRs, camcorders, and such got taken. A motorcycle gang came through town around that time, and there were a couple of other people from out of town we all had our doubts about.”
“You didn’t catch the shoplifters?”
His forehead puckered and grew a little redder. “My jurisdiction extends only so far. I can’t go huntin’ down folks who are long gone afore I get the shopliftin’ reports.”
He shifted toward Mom, but I wanted to know the rest. “You said burglaries too. What about them?”
“Yeah … Funny thing about ’em, they started around the time the shopliftin’ stopped and, like the shopliftin’, they didn’t amount to much at first—a few small office supplies, some auto tools, a case of beer. Then some folks got their homes broken into.”
Mom looked interested in spite of herself. “Maybe that’s what was planned for us tonight.”
“I doubt it,” the sheriff said. “Burglars don’t want to be seen or heard. It’d be too hard to burglarize a small house like this while people are in it.”
“Hasn’t anybody been able to identify the burglars?” I asked.
Sheriff Granger shook his head. “You’re thinkin’ of robbery, which is a more serious crime than burglary. Folks tend to get the two mixed up. Robbers are the ones who hold you up with a gun. Burglars come around when you’re gone or when you’re asleep and take what they want and get away fast. Usually, nobody sees burglars.”
A sudden thought seemed to come to the sheriff. His eyes darkened and deepened, drilling into Mom’s eyes, and I realized he wasn’t always the easygoing man he seemed to be. “Let’s get back to your reason for calling me. Is there anything you haven’t mentioned, Miz Gillian? Like maybe a husband somewhere tryin’ to give you a bad time?”
Mom closed her eyes, as though she wanted to shut out both the sheriff and unhappy memories. “My husband died in a car accident six years ago,” she answered.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and his voice softened. “Then let me try a different direction. Anybody tryin’ to repossess your car? Anybody you’re havin’ trouble with?”
I waited for Mom to bring up the Brownsville articles, but I remembered what the sheriff had said about Mom making people upset with her columns. She must have remembered too. She jutted her chin out stubbornly and answered, “No. Nothing like that.”
“Then we’re through here,” Sheriff Granger said. “I’ll be goin’. If anythin’ else worries you, just give me a call. That’s what I’m here for.”
Without answering, Mom led him to the door. The moment he was outside she locked it firmly, then turned and leaned against it.
“It’s weird,” I said. “Sheriff Granger actually looks like he’s playing the part of a small-town sheriff on TV. I couldn’t believe it when he started to quote passages from great literature. Mom, it doesn’t add up.”
“It does seem odd, but as a journalist I’ve learned never to assume I know what a person is going to be like. You’re trying to make him fit into a category,” Mom said. “We’re all guilty at times of categorizing people, even though we know better.”
“But the sheriff has a stomach that laps over his belt, he drops his g’s, and he calls you Miz. Is he for real?”
“Why can’t he have a good mind and a love of good literature?” Mom asked.
“It’s still kind of weird,” I mumbled, unwilling to give up easily, “and even if you won’t say it, I know you agree.”
“Tomorrow,” Mom said in a low voice, as she took another look at the door, “I’ll get some dead bolts and window locks at the hardware store, and a couple of bright lights I can string up in the backyard. Those French doorsn … I don’t like all that glass. Maybe at the store they can suggest something that will help me secure them.”
“Mom?” I asked, shuddering from the chill that ran up my backbone into my neck. “You think whoever was out there will come back, don’t you? But it’s not connected to Brownsville and the articles, is it?”
She looked surprised for a moment, and I had the strange feeling that she’d forgotten I was there. “Oh, Katie,” she said, and strode across the room to clasp my shoulders, hugging me tightly. “Don’t mind my ramblings. I was just talking to myself, just taking extra precautions. I didn’t mean to frighten you, baby. I don’t know what to think, but I know that we need to be careful.”
I wanted to reassure her that I was all right and no longer a baby to be worried about, but when I opened my mouth a huge, noisy yawn came out.
Mom smiled. “We’re both exhausted. Let’s forget all about this craziness and get to bed. Okay?”
“Okay,” I answered, and walked off toward my room at the back of the house. I held the curtains back so I could stare out the window into the darkness, searching for movement among the shadows, yet terrified that I might see it. I wished Mom had answered my questions. It wasn’t okay.
CHAPTER TWO
It was misery waking to the alarm clock, and the chill of the bare wood floor stung my toes. At least the floors were clean—scrubbed and waxed and polished until Mom was satisfied—a huge improvement on the way they’d looked when we’d first arrived at the house and stepped inside.
The badly worn boards had been gritty with beach sand and dirt and scuffed with a mixture of bare footprints and the intricate design of whirls and whorls from the imprints of sports shoes. Crushed beer and soft drink cans lay in the mess, and a couple of ashtrays filled with butts decorated the tables.
“I thought we’d find something like this when I discovered the door was unlocked,” Mom had said, making a face at the room. “It looks like a few beach bums found a free place to flop for the night.”
I immediately looked over my shoulder, and Mom smiled. “Katie, honey,” she said, “they’re long gone. Look at the dust on that table.”
It didn’t look any different to me than the dust lying everywhere. What an awful place to have to live! “Maybe we could get a hose and just wash everything down,” I suggested.
“Better yet,” Mom said, “help me move the furniture out on the porch. Then fill that bucket over there with water and soap, and let’s get to work. This little house is going to look one hundred percent better when we’re through cleaning it.”
I didn’t believe it, but Mom was right. We scrubbed everything, including the walls, threw out the drapes and curtains, and hung new ones Mom had bought for the bedrooms and bathroom. The other windows she left open to the sea.
“What about the attic?” As I stood in the short hallway that joined the two bedrooms with a bath between them, I glanced upward at the rectangle in the ceiling with a short rope dangling from it. I knew that meant folding stairs. “Do we have to clean the attic too?”
“No. We’ve reached the end of our cleaning, thank goodness,” Mom said as she flopped into the nearest kitchen chair. “Uncle Jim wasn’t interested in posses
sions. He owned very little, and what he didn’t need he gave away. He told me once he only went into the attic when roof repairs were needed, so we won’t find anything up there except more dust.”
“And maybe mouse droppings and rabid bats,” I’d added.
Mom laughed and threw her cleaning rag at me. “Let’s wash up,” she said, “and cook our first meal in our new house.”
Mom may have been eager to live there, but I wasn’t. For one thing, no matter what we did to it, the house still looked ancient and tired and dried-out, like dead leaves or old paper. It wasn’t anything like our big apartment in Houston.
And for another thing, I missed the High School for the Performing Arts and my specialty field of dance so much it was like an ache that wouldn’t go away. “You’ve got what it takes, Katie,” the ballet instructor had told me, even though he understood that ballet was not my career goal but just my private love. No matter how high he’d set my goals, I worked with all my strength to meet them.
Maybe it sounds weird that I never told anyone—even Mom—how much I loved ballet. Each time I practiced, each time I performed, the steps would become part of the music. The music would blend with my mind, and my body would follow with a joy that could have shone clear and golden, if anyone else could have seen it. But they didn’t, because I hugged my feelings to myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have.
One day Mom sat with me, her eyes glittering with excitement, and explained that she wanted to take six months leave from her column and magazine writing and write a novel. She explained that while she was writing the novel there would be very little money coming in, and staying in Uncle Jim’s old beach house, on which she’d kept up the tax payments, would save our biggest expense—monthly rent.
My words came out in a ragged croak. “But my dance lessons? The school musical?” My voice broke, and I couldn’t finish.
“You’re talented in so many directions, Katie—dance too—and I know you enjoy your ballet lessons,” Mom said.
The words zinged inside my head like a tennis ball gone crazy. Enjoy my lessons? Enjoy? Couldn’t Mom understand that my love of dance was so much more than “enjoy”?
No. Of course she couldn’t, and it was my fault, because my love of ballet was too private to share.
I guessed that Mom was trying to read my face, because she looked sort of puzzled, then sad and vulnerable as she told me the plan for letting our apartment go and storing the furniture. “We won’t do it unless you agree, Katie,” she said. “I know it’s hard for you, or anybody else, to understand, but this story I want to write has been taking over my mind. Mentally, I’m inventing whole chunks of dialogue, and visualizing scenes, and living more with my imaginary characters than with the real people around me. The story has to come out. I have to write it.”
Strangely enough, I did understand. Even though I was sure I’d never want to be a published writer, like Mom, I realized what she was trying to tell me. I keep a journal, and sometimes I just have to write down my thoughts and feelings. It’s like an itch that starts in my brain and drives me crazy. I can’t ignore it.
Mrs. Gantner taught us to keep journals when I was in eighth grade, and I’ll always be grateful that she did. She’d look through our journals, to make sure we were on the right track, but whatever we wrote was private, and she never talked about content, even to us. Once, I wrote my thoughts about ballet in a kind of poetry that pulled the music from my body and laid it out on the paper in the form of words. Mrs. Gantner told me my poem was good and she was glad I liked to experiment with word forms, so since then I wrote a lot of poetry in my journal. Maybe it was good, maybe not, but it doesn’t matter. Nobody had ever seen it except me.
Mrs. Walgren, my English lit teacher at Kluney High, was also big on journals. She seemed pleased when I told her I’d been keeping one. I guess she didn’t want to have to explain all over again how to do it to the new student. She had asked us to turn in our journals over the weekend, so I brought mine Friday and added it to the stack.
I was eager to get it back because I wanted to write about what had happened last night. It’s easy for me to sort out ideas, feelings, problems, and all that stuff by putting them into words on paper.
I gobbled down a quick breakfast, grabbed my books, and walked along our road about three blocks to where it intersects with the main road into town. The dogs knew me pretty well by now, but they came running down the long slope from their houses, which were almost out of sight on the next road north, and leaped against their chain-link fences, showing me, with a few halfhearted barks, that they were on constant duty.
I took a few moments to talk to each dog, so I had to run the last few feet to catch the school bus.
The bus was loaded with junior high boys—all loud mouths and big feet. I squirmed through them to the nearest empty seat and plopped down, out of balance as the bus took off. This was pickup truck country, and I doubted if there were more than two dozen kids in the entire high school who didn’t drive pickups to school.
One of the have-nots was sitting near me—a small, quiet, brown-haired girl who was in most of my classes. I remembered her name—Tammy Ludd.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I answered, and opened my history book. Lana Jean had told me that Mrs. DeJohn, in history, liked to give pop quizzes on Mondays, and I wanted to look over the chapter I’d read Friday night.
“Did you have any trouble with that chart we had to make for biology?” Tammy asked.
“No. It took a lot of time, that’s all,” I said, and tried to read.
There was silence for a moment, but Tammy spoke again, and I could hear an edge of anger in her voice. “Why do city people think they’re better than us?”
I looked up, surprised. “They don’t.”
“You do. Look at you—reading a book so you won’t have to talk to me.”
“That’s not why I was reading. If we’re going to have a test …” I closed the book and tucked it in with my other books. “I’m sorry. I guess I did seem rude. It’s just that … I didn’t think anyone at Kluney High cared if I talked to them or not.”
A brief smile flickered over Tammy’s lips, and she said, “I’ve gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten. Some of them are nice. Some aren’t. But even some of the nice ones kind of stick to who they know. It’s not just that you’re from the city. It’s more that because your mother’s a famous reporter your life’s probably pretty exciting and nothing like you’d find down here.”
“So you’re all going to snub me before I get a chance to snub you?”
She stared at me for a minute before she answered. “I guess it must seem that way, but that’s not how it’s meant.”
“Let me put things straight,” I said. “My mom has saved up enough money to get us through the next six months, if no emergency comes up. We’re living in the house her uncle left her because living there is cheap. Mom’s here to write a novel, and when she finishes we’ll go back to Houston, and I’ll go back to the High School for the Performing Arts.” I paused, then added, “And, for what it’s worth, our life in Houston isn’t that exciting.”
“What’s the High School for the Performing Arts?” Tammy asked.
“A regular high school, only the students spend extra time working in dance or drama or music or photography—one of the arts.”
“Neat,” she said, and looked at me with curiosity. “Which were you?”
“Dance—ballet.”
Tammy grinned. “Julie was right. She said you walk like the ballet dancers she saw in Houston.”
I grinned right back. “Like a duck, with toes pointed out.” And when Tammy began to demonstrate, I said, “It’s the way we stretch our muscles.”
“Don’t you have to keep up your lessons?” Tammy suddenly asked. “I mean, there’s nobody around here who teaches ballet.”
“I know,” I said, and turned toward the window, blinking hard. All I could do was keep up my practice
sessions, but that was hard in our little house without room for anything much beyond the basic positions and with only the top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom to serve as the barre.
As the bus bumped and rocked over the curb next to the drive leading to the schools’ joint parking lot, Tammy said, “We have lunch the same period. If you want, come on over to our table.”
“Thanks,” I said, and winced as the junior high boys, yelling and shouting, shoved and pushed, trying to be first to get off the bus.
English lit was first period, and I bumped into Lana Jean outside the classroom door. I noticed her fingernails weren’t clean and there was something that looked like a grease stain on her sweater. “I’m scared,” she said.
“Scared? Of what?” I asked. I thought of myself and my mother last night.
She hunched her shoulders as she gave a long sigh. “Of getting our journals back. Mrs. Walgren keeps giving me awful grades and telling me I don’t understand what journal writing is all about. But I have to pass English lit. My mom will kill me if I don’t.”
I sighed. I was never really scared of getting a bad grade. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could flunk keeping a journal. “It’s going to be okay,” I said and opened the door to the classroom. A huge guy named Billy Don Knipp twisted in his seat by the window and smiled at me. He had a gap in his teeth where one had probably been knocked out. I was not the least impressed, but I smiled back, still feeling good about Tammy’s invitation.
Mrs. Walgren, round and pink with a halo of gray hair, beamed at me with enthusiasm, which puzzled me. I didn’t have time to find out what was making her so happy, because the bell jangled in our ears and we dropped into our seats.
We tried to look like we were paying attention through the long list of office intercom announcements and the beginning-of-the-week quote of inspiring thoughts—this time from the Spanish Club. Finally, with a squawk the intercom was silenced, and Mrs. Walgren got to her feet.
“I’m going to return your journals to you,” she said. “Most of you are doing well—I’ve made just a few comments here and there—and I want you to continue writing in these journals daily until the end of the semester.”
Shadowmaker Page 2
