But now they weren’t going to the prison. They were headed for a hospital where she’d see Pa lying helpless in one of those narrow beds with iron sides, like another kind of prison. Pa, so lean and tall, lying limp in a hospital bed hooked up to machines like Ma had been, bandages around his chest where he’d been stabbed. And even with the machines, the oxygen, the IV, maybe Pa wouldn’t live, maybe he’d die in the hospital. Die this morning before they ever got there. Or die after she went away again leaving him alone in a strange place. She didn’t realize she was squeezing Cora Lee’s arm hard until Cora Lee flinched.
“I’m sorry,” she said, easing up her grip. The wind through the open windows smelled of onions from the fields, of freshly turned earth and commercial fertilizers, and the early sun slanted sharply into their eyes. She sat nervously telling herself Pa wasn’t going to die; she wanted to kill the man who had stabbed him, she thought he should be the one in ICU or in the morgue, not Pa.
She knew when she saw Pa she’d have to be cheerful and positive, try to make him feel better, but she didn’t feel positive. She just felt scared. Pa was all she had; sometimes she missed him so bad, missed how he had been when she was just a little girl, before the bad things started to happen. When she’d run away from Pa and hidden for two weeks in the library basement, she hadn’t understood then why he’d locked her up. While she was sitting in the dark little concrete hole on the old mattress she’d dragged in, living on peanut butter and canned peaches, sometimes, not knowing why Pa had made a prisoner of her, she really had wanted him dead.
But then later when she’d understood that it was to save her life, then she’d been ashamed. When she’d learned about the children that Pa’s own brother, and that other man, had murdered, that Pa was trying to save her from them, she didn’t know what to say to him.
And now Pa’s own life needed saving. She prayed for him. She wanted to tell him she loved him, she hadn’t told him that in a long time. Right now, Cora Lee’s presence was the only thing that held her steady. As if, without Cora Lee, she’d fall into some endless dark space with nothing at all to hold on to.
11
JOE WAS ALL set to leave the kitchen and slip into the garage with Dulcie and Kit when Maudie set a few crumbs of coffee cake and a saucer of milk before him. Settling down on the step again to enjoy the little treat, he listened with interest as mother and son argued, both so hardheaded that Joe had to hide a smile. That careening truck had worried David far more than it seemed to worry Maudie; he didn’t want to leave her and Benny alone, and Maudie refused to go home with him. Nor did she want him to stay; and Joe could tell he really didn’t want to stay, that he was too worried about his wife, Alison.
“Think about it, Mama. Whoever killed Martin and Caroline might think you saw him that night. Maybe he followed us here, intending to hurt you, to silence you?”
“Well that’s melodramatic. It was dark, how could I have seen anyone?”
“There was a moon, you told me there was a thin moon. The killer doesn’t know you didn’t see him.” David’s smooth face was stern with worry. “Between whatever that was this morning and these home invasions, I don’t want to leave you two. You’re half crippled with that lame shoulder, you can’t—”
“I saw the truck coming, I was ready to move.”
“You didn’t have a clue. Benny said you had your back to it, unloading packages.”
“I heard it, I heard the truck.”
“Come home with me, Mama, just until Alison’s through the surgery and on the mend, until I can get a live-in nurse for her, someone reliable. Then I’ll take a leave and come on back with you.”
“Benny’s had enough upset, he needs to be settled in one place, he doesn’t need to be shuttled around anymore. No one’s going to harm us. I want to get him started in school, maybe that private school where Ryan’s young friend Lori Reed goes. He’ll be—”
“He’ll be what?” David snapped. “He’ll be sideswiped by a truck on his way to school?”
“No one,” she said with certainty, “would want to harm Benny.”
“Someone already harmed him deeply when they killed his father.” Rising, David stepped to the sink, emptied his coffee cup, and headed for the stairs. “Please go pack, Mama. For the two of you. I’ll call and try to get us all on a flight.”
“No,” Maudie said. “We’re staying here. We’ll be in our own home for Christmas. And you will be where you belong, with Alison. And that’s the end of it.”
Apparently it was. David headed up the stairs shaking his head, but saying no more.
“Kids,” Maudie said to the tomcat. “Even when they’re grown they think their mothers are helpless.” Smiling a secret little smile, she sipped her cooling coffee.
“I wish someone could understand how much I dread Christmas,” she told Joe. “But Benny has to have Christmas, he’s hurting so bad. Benny’s daddy was the only stable thing in his life, until Caroline. That little boy idolized his daddy.
“When Allen was alive,” she said, “when we were raising the boys, Thanksgiving and Christmas were the most exciting times of the year.” She looked bleakly at Joe. “Is a tomcat the only one in the world I can talk to? The only one who won’t think me silly and who won’t argue with me?” Her blue eyes were flat with hurting. “I miss Martin the same way I missed his dad when he died. Like part of me is gone. They say that when a leg has been amputated, the pain in the missing part is still there, you can still feel it there, though there’s nothing but empty space.”
Joe Grey had such a powerful desire to speak, to answer the poor woman, that he leaped off the stairs with alarm and trotted away into the garage. What was he, a feline shrink? A four-legged therapist for the lonely and grieving? Winding his way among mover’s cartons and stacks of banker’s boxes, he sniffed a dozen lingering aromas transported three hundred miles from L.A., invisible artifacts boxed and preserved like elusive archeological treasures. The labels were written in a beautiful round cursive, the kind of handwriting Joe saw only among his older human friends: PERSONAL LETTERS, FAMILY PHOTOS, TAX RECEIPTS, OLD SWEATERS. Somewhere ahead among the mountains of cartons, little Benny was talking in a soft monotone, apparently to Dulcie and Kit—unburdening himself to feline sympathy just as Maudie had. What was it about being a cat that made folks so eager to confide, to bare their very souls?
When, ahead in the gloom, he couldn’t see the two cats or the child, he leaped to the top of a four-foot carton and reared up for a better look. Nothing. Only when he gave a low hunting cry in his throat did Dulcie rise up out of an open carton, ears and whiskers at half-mast, her green eyes amused. Beside her, Benny peered over, too, but when the child realized the strange sound had come from Joe Grey, he disappeared again, down inside the box.
Leaping across the stacked boxes, Joe looked down into their hideaway. The carton was filled with packets of bright cloth: neatly cut squares of cotton print tied in bundles with hanks of bright yarn. Benny had piled them around the sides, to clear the middle into a little nest. He sat cross-legged, clutching an album open on his lap. The female cats snuggled beside him again, watching the pages as he slowly turned them. His little-boy scent wafted up, as distinctive as the scent of a puppy. Looking innocently up at Joe, Benny clearly expected the tomcat to join them. Quietly Joe dropped down among the little bales of quilting squares and settled beside Dulcie.