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If Arnie had turned purple when he saw Glendora, he was puce now. She took pity on him.

“Mr. Frisbee told me to listen carefully. He made quite a point that Looey had avoided your men. In law, evade and avoid are two different things. Tax evasion, for example, is a crime, but tax avoidance is not. That was the first clue. Since it wasn’t against the law, that meant the forces of law were helping Mr. Flowers. The second clue was he said he’d see me today, and he’s doing that. So it had to be someplace close. The base was close, so all I had left to do was work out where Mr. Flowers belonged. He belonged in jail. So he had to be in the base stockade.”

Arnie turned to me. “You told her?”

Glendora explained further. “If Mr. Flowers had evaded your people, he’d have gone through them. But he avoided them by not leaving the base. Since he was in the stockade, they didn’t need those marshals anymore. I figured Mr. Frisbee intended to bring you out here for reasons of his own. So we got in touch with the military and they told us the whole plan.”

After they led Arnie away, she patted the cheek of the special agent from Plaquemines and nodded at the two large men in business suits who were still holding me. “He did a good job for us, you can let him go now.”

“All right, Glendora,” I told her.

“Why didn’t I have them arrest you all at the scene of the crime? Well, Mr. Buttons sent a horrible woman to the YWCA to kill me. I decided if he was going to be like that, he couldn’t be trusted not to kill you, so we decided to catch him with the helicopter he was expecting.”

If she wanted me to interrupt and ask how she’d disposed of the threat in the YWCA, I wasn’t going to cooperate, so I stood there pouting.

“You look real nice in blue,” she said. “Anyway, after your call, I explained things to this nice Mr. Luna. When I told him for all intents I’d been kidnapped and left to languish in the YWCA, he saw the federal component right away. Especially after that call to the FBI about your fingerprints. So, this morning, we talked to Mr. Flowers, and he told us what you had in mind. They liked your idea of using a dummy, but then I guess Mr. Flowers thought it would be a real good joke all around if he stayed there. He had his first bad attack last night.”

“The helicopter,” I said.

“You must think that deep down I’m just a rattlebrain. When Mr. Buttons reported his car stolen, we knew he was going to use it for the crime and he’d need another way off the military reservation. So we checked all the heliports and, sure enough, he’d chartered a whirlybird in your name. So we decided to give him a real surprise. That way, he wouldn’t try to shoot you with all those awful guns he had.”

I finally got my serious question out. “Why’d you pat Luna’s cheek?”

There came one of Glendora’s super smiles guaranteed to make everything all right. “Why, I do believe you’re jealous! Mr. Luna said after I finish law school, he’d like me to join the FBI. I told him I have other plans.”

I’m sure she does, but I’ve been afraid to ask what they are.

Mean to My Father

Carolyn Banks

Carolyn Banks teaches creative writing at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas. Her fourth suspense novel, Patchwork, was published by Crown in spring 1986, and her previous novel, The Girls on the Row, was recently reprinted in paperback by Fawcett-Crest. She is presently indulging her interest in horses, working on a nonfiction book for Texas Monthly Press tentatively titled The Horse Lover’s Guide to Texas.

My mother and my aunt say that I was it mean to my father. At least, they used to say it when he was alive. They said that whenever he put his arms around me, I would make a face and pull away, and then he would feel sad.

And that’s true.

I never meant to be that way. I always promised myself that the next time he came to me, I would hug him back. Maybe even kiss him on the cheek.

But then he would be there and I could smell his breath and see the red veins on his nose and something inside me would twist up. It was like what the nuns in school called a reflex, except that when they talked about it, it had to do with knees. You hit your knee and it would jerk away, even if you didn’t want it to. Well, that’s the way I was about my father.

My mother and my aunt said I was a cold fish, and I guess they were right.

I wasn’t always like that, though, except that I used to go down in the cellar sometimes and sit all by myself. When I was real little. I guess, if you think about it, that was a sign.

I would sit behind the cabinet where my mother kept cans of soup and stuff and smell the smell of bleach and ammonia. She only did the wash on Saturdays, but it smelled that way all the time. It smelled clean.

And it looked clean, too. We had a coal bin down there for the furnace, but you couldn’t really tell over on the side where I used to sit. The walls had been whitewashed and they were bright-white, because once a week my mother took a broom and swept the soot off the walls, swept them the way she did the floors. I made that part of the cellar my thinking place.

Not that I was that much of a thinker. The nuns in school were always yelling at me, and they would hit me, too, with a ruler across the palms of my hands. The only good thing about school was Nancy Killian, who was my friend.

At least, she was my friend in third grade, when she came to our school. And in fourth. The first part of fourth. Around the middle of fourth, she died.

She didn’t just die. She was stabbed thirteen times. They said her brother did it and he was sent away, but not to jail. To a hospital. But they said he would never get out and, as far as I know, he never did.

Nancy Killian was just like me. She wanted to work in an office when she grew up, just like me. She wanted a puppy and her mother wouldn’t let her have one, just like me. Except that she had a brother, a brother who was home all the time or else at the river, down by the trains. Or hanging out at the store where the pinball machine was. She had a bum for a brother, that’s what my mother said.

Nancy Killian didn’t come to school the day she was stabbed. She had a fight with me the day before and she ripped half of the hem out of my dress. And I said I would never talk to her again, never, and went home.

But my mother yelled at me about my dress and told me money didn’t grow on trees and that decent little girls didn’t go around fighting. I went down in the cellar to my thinking place and wished that I could be friends with Nancy again.

I was going to make up with her at school the next day, the day she didn’t show up. The day she was stabbed.

Most of the kids ate lunch at school every day because their mothers, like my mother and Nancy Killian’s, worked at the linoleum factory down the street. And their fathers worked, too, the way mine did and hers did, in gray shirts and gray pants, and big, heavy shoes. But my aunt lived up the street from Nancy’s house and she would make me soup for lunch, so I was allowed to go there.

I went to Nancy’s house first, though. I knocked on the back door and I went around to the front door and knocked there, too, even though we weren’t allowed to come in that way. But Nancy didn’t come. And then I felt as though Nancy was mad at me forever and we would never be friends again.

So I went home just to be sad instead of going to my aunt’s house to eat. And I went to my thinking place and I thought, not just about Nancy, but about how mad my aunt was going to be that I didn’t go there for lunch and what the nuns would say and my mother.

I heard the cellar door come open and I saw the bottoms of my father’s legs on the top step. Then he came down and I watched him, more of his legs and more and then all of him.