Buck hurried down the corridor, trying not to get tangled in the dog. They went up the stairs and at the door to the tower room Demon flopped down heavily and buried its head between its paws. Scarlett tried the doorknob.
“The sewing room’s locked,” Buck told her.
“Farrie can pick locks, she’s real good at it.” She rattled the door handle. “She could get in there if she wanted to.”
“Why in hell would she want to do that?” Buck stepped over the dog and bent and put his eye to the keyhole. He couldn’t see anything, it was dark. “Farrie?” he called, experimentally.
There was no answer.
He turned to Scarlett. Her face was white. She held one fist to her mouth, trying not to cry out. “It’s dark in there,” she moaned. “Farrie went in there in the dark to hide.”
There was no heat in there, Buck knew, but he didn’t say it. He felt a slow coil of fear unwind in his belly. Why would a child go hide in a dark room as cold as this one, unless she didn’t expect to come out? Buck braced himself for something unpleasant. “Stand back,” he told Scarlett.
Scarlett drew a deep breath. “You going to shoot the lock off?”
“You’ve been watching too much television. No, I’m going to use a key.”
He took out his key ring, found the right one, and unlocked the door. There was no sound from inside while he was doing this, and no sound when he swung it open.
The outside shutters were drawn and it was so dark Buck stumbled over some boxes groping for the light switch.
Scarlett charged past him. “Oh, Farrie, Farrie, my poor baby,” she screamed.
The light didn’t come on, the bulb was burned out. Buck couldn’t see what Scarlett was doing, but he heard her sobs. “Move aside,” he told her, as he pushed the dog out of the way and swung his legs over a trunk and came down on the other side. He saw the old football jacket. That was all there seemed to be, the jacket, and a pair of scrawny legs, but he recognized the lime-colored tights and the stained high-top sneakers. Buck bent and slid both hands under the bundle that was the youngest Scraggs.
When he picked her up her head fell back and he saw the pale, wizened face, seemingly lifeless, the eyes closed tight.
A little too tight, Buck noted. In his experience, when someone was unconscious the eyelids came loosely together, relaxed. Miss Farrah Fawcett Scraggs was playing possum.
But that was not to say she wasn’t a pathetic little possum. In his arms, Buck found as he started for the door, she was as weightless as ever and even her clothes were cold to the touch. Up there in the dark tower room it must have felt like the tomb itself.
Poor little pixie, he thought, she’d probably got more than she’d bargained for. She was rigid with cold.
Still, he reminded himself, she could have come out at any time.
“Farrie,” Scarlett moaned, following them down the stairs and out into the hall. “Why did she go and do it? She near froze in there!”
Buck maneuvered around her, kicking the dog out of the way. “The bedroom,” he told her. “I’m going to put her in your bed. You go downstairs and fix her something hot to drink.” As Scarlett wavered, he snapped, “Go ahead, my mother’s got some cocoa mix somewhere.”
Scarlett ran down the stairs. Buck carried Farrie into his sister’s bedroom. When he leaned over her to put her on the bed, she opened her eyes. He hung over her, finding he couldn’t get her little hands unlocked from around his neck.
“You’ll be okay,” Buck said, trying to pry her fingers apart. “You can let go of me now.”
The sad little eyes looked up at him.
“Don’t make no use,” the child whispered. “If I let you go, we still can’t stay noplace. There’s no place at all for Scarlett and me.”
There was no need to deny it, she spoke the truth. There was no place for Scraggs children and other outcasts; day in and day out in the southern mountains he saw it, and his deputies did, too. Farrie wasn’t the only one.
“We’ll work on it,” Buck told her. “You just relax.”
He knew that wasn’t good enough to tell a wisp of a child who had wanted to crawl into a cold dark place and disappear, but it was the best he could do at the moment.
“Just lie back and shut your eyes for now,” Buck said. “And tomorrow you can show me how you get into locked rooms.”
Eyes closed, Farrie smiled.
Fourteen
Scarlett lay beside farrie in the big tester bed, listening to the wind roar around the corners of the Grissoms’ house. The rain had stopped. Through the ruffled curtains dark clouds scudded before a full moon. The wind and weather had changed; it would be much colder in the morning.
It was cold now, Scarlett thought with a small, comfortable shiver. In the night, in the dark, the deep, soft bed was a wonderful place, a warm nest with fancy ruffles of the canopy covering them overhead, where she could still hear the comforting sound of the furnace cutting on and off.
She reached out and gently rolled Farrie’s curled, bony little body up against her. When she held her fingers against her sister’s cheek she found her still cool to the touch. It was nothing short of a miracle that she hadn’t run a fever – Farrie, who could run a fever over practically nothing when she wasn’t happy. But her little sister had bounced back from her adventure, if you could call it that, and had even eaten a good dinner from the tray Buck had brought to her room.
They’d argued over whether Farrie should have had hot soup, even after the hot chocolate, but Scarlett didn’t have time to make soup. And Farrie had gobbled up what she’d fixed, anyway: a whole baked stuffed potato with bacon and creamed spinach, then the grilled tomatoes with cheese, the green peas, garbanzo beans, candied yams, and even half a box of Oreo cookies she’d found in the pantry.
“My God,” Buck had said, watching her. “How can she eat like that and still stay that size?”
Scarlett said thoughtfully, “I think she’s gaining weight.”
“And growing, too.” Farrie looked up at them with her bright eyes. “I think I growed some, too, while I was here.”
Buck had groaned.
Nevertheless, Scarlett thought, watching the cold moonlight dance across the ceiling, he had told her he wasn’t going to give in to Devil Anse and take a bribe, even if the bribe was Scarlett. He’d even called Devil Anse “vile,” and “low-minded.” Scarlett supposed you could call her grandpa that; she’d heard all her life there wasn’t anything a lowdown Scraggs wouldn’t do. And Devil Anse sure set the example.
Sheriff Buck Grissom was a brave man, Scarlett thought, and he had a kind heart. He’d fed Farrie hot chocolate from a spoon, taken her pulse, then sat on the bed beside her while Farrie ate and talked to him about opening locks.
“You know that Master lock number three?” Farrie loved being important; she hiked up in the bed next to Buck so she could look right in his face. “Like the one that you got in your gun case downstairs in the den with the twelve-gauge shotguns, and the automatic weapons like the AK-47? Well, they say in those ads in gun magazines that they can’t be picked. But they can!”
He’d looked skeptical. “That lock has a guarantee. That’s why it’s on my gun case. Those are confiscated illegal weapons.”
“I know that. But what you do is” – Farrie gestured in the air with her thin little fingers – “you get you two pieces of wire like from a coat hanger. The first piece you bend into a L-shape and slide right in at the opening where you put the teeth of the key, and you hold down the ratchet with it.”
Buck raised his eyebrows.