Jillie

by Olive Balla

  Lil’s mouth fell open. “Whoa, you’ve never threatened to leave before.”

  “I mean it. Can’t you see she’s in trouble? We can’t just turn her out.”

  Lil threw her arms into the air. “Why not just go ahead and save the whole world while you’re at it, o-you-who-ignores-reality?” She turned to Jillie. “You got a crew hidden out somewhere waiting for us old softies to lead you to our valuables?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Stop it, Lil,” Dix interrupted. “We’re going to feed her and listen to her story.” She made a slashing motion with her hand. “Don’t cross me on this.”

  Lil peered at her sister, eyes closed to slits. “Did you grow a pair when I wasn’t looking?”

  “Lillian Jean Ruiz, such language.” Dix sniffed. “No police until after we’ve heard her out. Understood?” Her eyes bored into her sister’s.

  Lil turned toward Jillie, a scowl on her face. “I’ll give you two hours. After that I’m calling the police, even if I have to sneak out of the house to do it.”

  Dix rested her hand on Jillie’s shoulder. “Come on inside. You must be starved.” She shot a meaningful look at Lil. “Show her where she can wash up.”

  Lunch was spaghetti with meatballs, garlic toast, and salad from the garden. Jillie gratefully accepted Dix’s offer of seconds.

  During the meal, Lil kept glancing at Jillie out of the corner of her eye. The expression on her face left no doubt she expected Jillie to either stuff the silverware in her pockets or attack the sisters with the bread knife.

  After lunch, Dix brought out desert, something she called Banana Split Bread a la Dixie. She poured two cups of coffee and a huge glass of milk then sat down. “Tell us why you’re here.”

  Beginning with Digger’s death, Jillie poured out all that had taken place over the past few weeks. Her voice caught in her throat, and she fought not to cry when she talked about Beth. The two sisters never took their eyes off her face.

  When Jillie fell silent, Dix stood. She took a deep breath and said, “No way are we going to take this child to the police.” She looked back at Jillie. “What’s your plan?”

  “I have to find out what the hospital’s done with Beth, so I can spread her ashes around the tree with our parents.”

  Dix’s eyes teared up. “I’m not sure the crematory would give ashes to someone so young without an adult family member. They might even call the police.”

  Jillie’s shoulders drooped. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Dix lifted her chin. “We’ll talk to our nephew. He’s a detective with the Los Lunas Police Department.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Lil said. “I’ll use the landline to call him. He can be here in a half hour.”

  Jillie’s breath caught in her throat. “Please—”

  “Stop it, Lil. Can’t you see she’s terrified?” Dix smiled and put her hand on Jillie’s forearm. “Don’t worry. We’ll invite our nephew to dinner and ask a few hypothetical questions.” She turned to Lil. “Least we can do is explore options. When he’s gone, we’ll make a solid plan.”

  Lil jumped up from the table. “What? You’re going to let her stay for dinner? Have you finally lost the last bit of what passes for your mind? We’ve only got her word for what happened. Or did that whole I-killed-my-brother-in-law-with-a-machete thing not register?”

  All gentleness melted from Dix’s face. “Don’t start with me Lillian Jean. I’ll call Davie while she takes a bath. She’ll eat before he gets here then hide in my bedroom.” She turned to Jillie. “It’s right at the top of the stairs. I’ll leave the door ajar, so you can hear every word. Is that okay with you?”

  Lil shot a look at Jillie. “Don’t touch any of my stuff. I don’t care what my bleeding-heart twin says. I don’t like kids. I especially don’t like thieving kids.”

  “She’s not a thief.” Dix held her opened hand toward her sister, displaying the colored beads and stones retrieved from the garden. “She left something lovely in place of every single veggie she took.”

  Lil made a sound something like humph and crossed her arms.

  Dix held the beads in her open palm. “Thank you for these, but I can’t accept them. Consider the veggies a gift.”

  After a couple of beats, Jillie took the beads and stuffed them into her pocket.

  Dix continued, “There’s a jar of bath salts by the tub, sprinkle a scoop into the water while it’s running. The shower gel is on the little ledge.”

  “Thank you,” Jillie said.

  Lil sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “Better make it two scoops.” At Dix’s horrified look, Lil shrugged. “What?”

  Dix put an arm around Jillie’s shoulders. “Come on.” She pulled a huge, fluffy white towel and matching washcloth from a closet in the hall and motioned toward a door at the top of the stairs. “That’s the bathroom. Give me your clothes, and I’ll start a load of laundry. There’s a robe hanging from a hook behind the door. You can put that on while your clothes wash.”

  Jillie took the towel and cloth and headed upstairs. She filled the tub, sprinkled in the lilac-fragranced bath salts, stepped in, and lay back. Lack of sleep and exhaustion coupled with the soothing warm water tugged at her eyelids.

  Dix’s tapping on the bathroom door jerked her awake. “We’re all set, Davie’s coming to dinner.” Dix rattled the doorknob. “Jillie?”

  Jillie lifted the lever on the tub that would allow the now-cold water to drain. “Coming.”

  “I don’t like anything about this,” Lil shouted from downstairs.

  “Noted,” Dix hollered back.

  Jillie stepped out of the tub, dried off and pulled on the bathrobe. She opened the door to find Dix waiting just outside.

  “As soon as your clothes are dry, we’ll sit down and make a list of questions for Davie. But for now, how about I show you my toy Slinky collection? Got a whole room full, all sizes, some almost as big as you.” She chuckled. “The biggest ones make so much noise going end-over-end down our wooden staircase you can’t hear yourself think.”

  Jillie glanced toward the bottom of the stairs where Lil stood glaring up at her. The expression on the woman’s face made her stomach feel queasy.

  Beth was right, some people wouldn’t like you no matter what you did.

  Chapter Twenty

  Detective David Ruiz climbed out of the rented bass boat, moored it to the marina, and headed for his rented cabin. He’d always loved coming to Elephant Butte lake, had fallen in love with the place when his aunts brought him as a child. Some of his best memories were of the three of them paddling around on inner tubes, splashing each other, and eating hotdogs they’d roasted over a grill.

  He sat on the easy chair he’d pulled onto the porch and stared at the lake for one last time before heading back home. Why was it that looking at water soothed the human soul?

  The silence was broken by the chirping of his cell phone. He squelched a sigh, glanced at the screen, then punched the answer-dot. “Hey, Aunt Dix, what’s up?”

  “Are you back in town yet?”

  “No, but I will be this afternoon,” David said.

  “We were hoping you’d come to dinner tonight.” His aunt’s gentle-yet-persuasive voice poured across the ether.

  “Dinner would be great. What can I bring?”

  “Just your appetite,” Aunt Dixie said. “We’re having your favorite, chicken paprika with brown Basmati rice and pickled cucumber salad. Around seven-ish?”

  “Sounds good.” David replaced the receiver in its cradle.

  Dinner would not only be a good time to catch up with his aunts, it would relieve some of the guilt he felt for not spending more time with them.

  David’s father Ben had adored his two sisters. Poor to the point of poverty-stricken after David’s grandfather’s early death, the burden of taking care of the family had fallen on nine-year-old Ben’s shoulders.

  While his mother drowned her sorrows in pills and a bottle, Ben sneaked
into the county zoo and collected fresh eggs and meat from animal cages to feed his siblings. At the age of twelve, he got a job pulling corn tassels on a farm just up the road from their trailer house, and little by little, things got better.

  By the time David’s grandmother died of cirrhosis of the liver, successful entrepreneur Ben had put his twin sisters through college. But a life of hard work had taken its toll, and Ben suffered a heart attack at forty-two, leaving behind a young widow and ten-year-old son David.

  David was twelve and showing signs of rebellion when his mom remarried. Unable to get along with his stepson, the new husband demanded he be sent away to live with relatives. Teary-eyed and apologetic, his mother had asked her psychologist sister-in-law Dix to take him.

  From the day David moved in with his aunt Dix, she treated him as an adult. And although he’d made a few self-destructive choices, she never expressed the slightest regret at opening her house to him. Even through her three disastrous marriages and subsequent divorces, Dix had made time to help him with his homework and meet with his teachers.

  When Dix’s last husband absconded with her life savings, leaving her with a hefty second mortgage and the clothes on her back, the two of them moved in with Aunt Lil.

  Although from the same ovum, the two women could not have been more different. Where free-spirit, aging hippie Dixie was gregarious and sociable, Lillian, a retired accountant, isolated herself from the world.

  David not only loved his two aunts with all his heart, but he owed them big time. And while to the outside observer their style of interacting with each other might sometimes seem harsh, to him it was normal. More than normal, it was what had made their house a home.

  After hauling the chair back to the cabin, David packed his belongings, loaded his Jeep, returned the cabin keys to the owner, and headed home. His stomach growling in anticipation of dinner that evening, he headed home.

  ****

  At exactly seven David pulled into his aunts’ driveway. He retrieved a bouquet of daisies from the passenger seat and headed for the front door.

  “Lil,” Dix yelled from the door she’d opened before David could press the bell. “Davie’s here.”

  David smiled. He’d just turned thirty, and they still referred to him by the moniker they’d hung on him when he was a toddler.

  Aunt Dixie enveloped him in her customary wrestling-championship-competition hug and nearly dragged him into the house, while Aunt Lillian offered her usual pat on his shoulder. The smells coming from the kitchen made David’s stomach growl, and he marveled that anyone still used that room for anything other than microwaving cups of soup and coffee. He’d heard that in some large cities, apartments no longer even came with a kitchen.

  Conversation around the table started off in the usual vein.

  “So, Davie, anyone special in your life nowadays?” Her eyebrows penciled into black arcs of perpetual surprise, Dix chewed a mouthful of savory chicken.

  David swallowed a groan and said, “Not yet. When I meet someone, I promise you two will be the first to know.”

  “You just haven’t met the right one,” Dix said. She pointed her fork at her nephew and smiled.

  Lil snorted. “This from someone who’s met at least three right ones.”

  Beyond the standard verbal jabs at each other, the two acted strangely through the meal. While Aunt Dix repeatedly aimed innocent expressions in his direction, Aunt Lil refused to look him in the eye.

  A series of prolonged silences and weird vibes kick-started a sense of dread. Was one of them ill? Had they invited him over to break some horrible news?

  Careful not to allow his inquiring gaze to linger overlong on either aunt, David obliquely studied their faces while the muscles in his neck tightened. Something was definitely up.

  After dinner, over a cup of strong coffee smelling faintly of cinnamon, it was Lillian who finally got to the point. “Hypothetically speaking, what if a runaway showed up on someone’s doorstep looking for help? What could be expected?”

  Dix shot a look of what appeared to be censure toward her sister and quickly added, “Lots of stories in the news lately about runaways. We just wondered.”

  David studied his aunts’ faces while a feeling of unease toyed with his gut. “If the child is under twelve, the adult, or adults, could be charged with kidnapping. That is, unless they called the police immediately.” He looked pointedly at first one then the other wrinkled face and caught the victorious look Lil shot at her sister.

  Like mercury in a thermometer, the gentle throb at the base of David’s neck began to move upward. “The hypothetical adults could be in a whole lot of trouble.”

  A nearly telepathic conversation passed between the twins, and they immediately changed their facial expressions to ones of light interest.

  “Surely that can’t be right,” Dixie said. “I mean, what if the poor child ran away to escape some terrible situation?”

  “It may not seem right to you, but believe me, there are plenty of people out there willing to profit from a child’s misery,” David said. “The laws are in place to protect the child.”

  “And if the kid’s already twelve?” Lil said.

  David shook his head, the action kicking the ache up a notch. “It’s not like finding a puppy and deciding to keep it. The police should be notified.”

  Dixie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “What would happen to the child?”

  “Child Protective Services would pick him up and put him into foster care,” David said. “Or they’d return him to his parents.”

  “But what if the child was already in foster care, and the foster parents were horrible?” Dixie said.

  “Then the judge would put him somewhere else.” David looked closely at the women. “Even then, the people who found the child wouldn’t be allowed to keep him until they’d gone through the foster care screening process. And that can take a while.”

  A cold breeze suddenly ruffled the table cloth and set Dix’s kitchen chimes tinkling. Tiny metal replicas of pots, pans, and skillets clinked against each other as if a spoiled elf-child was having a tantrum.

  “The wind blew the door open again,” Lil said. She stood and headed toward the offending house part, yelling at Dix over her shoulder, “I thought you called someone to fix the thing.” After slamming the door, she stomped back to the table.

  The pain meter in David’s head neared the red zone. “What are you two trying to keep from telling me?”

  Again, the sisters did that telepathic thing.

  “Just hypothetical,” Dix repeated.

  Her lips compressed, Lil stared into space above David’s head.

  Suddenly, both women stood, thanked David for coming, offered him plastic containers of leftovers, and almost pushed him out the door.

  David sat in his car for several seconds before slipping the key into the ignition. Whatever the hell dinner had really been about, right then he didn’t want to know. All he wanted was to go home and hit the sack.

  “Welcome back to reality,” he murmured.

  He started the engine and turned the radio to a station that played classical music.

  “That was The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” The soothing voice of the female disc jockey poured over David like warmed honey. “We’ll return in sixty seconds with Debussy’s Clair de Lune.”

  Again pushing aside the uneasiness that kept forcing its way into his thoughts, he promised himself the next day he’d get to the bottom of whatever had his aunts riled up. With the siren songs of two extra-strength aspirin calling to him from his home medicine cabinet, David backed out the driveway.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jillie’s shoulders sagged as she listened to the conversation around the dinner table. Although the sisters didn’t come right out and tell David about her, he’d asked a lot of questions and didn’t seem completely satisfied with the answers.

  Dix had been nice. And even though Lil had fussed ab
out Jillie’s being there, she hadn’t told the policeman about her. But the old ladies could get into a lot of trouble for trying to help her, maybe even go to jail.

  After a few more minutes of listening, Jillie had slipped down the hall and to the guest room where Dix had put her backpack on the bed. She stared at the fluffy, down-filled comforter topped with two thick pillows and almost changed her mind.

  She was so tired: tired of running, tired of being alone, tired of dreaming about hollering, bleeding Digger. Mostly, she was tired of being alive when her sister was dead.

  But Beth was counting on her.

  Jillie straightened her shoulders and picked up her backpack. Careful to put her feet down next to the posts at the side of the stairs to avoid squeaks, she tiptoed downstairs and toward the front door. She’d just reached for the knob when the sound of chairs scraping on the dining room floor warned dinner was nearly over.

  Quickly, she pulled the front door open. A fierce gust of wind pushed it toward her so hard she had to put her weight behind it to keep the thing from smashing against the wall.

  Cold outside air shoved the warm, food-fragranced indoor air aside. It rattled the dried leaves and colored corn husks of a fall decoration hanging on the entryway wall.

  Leaving the door open, Jillie scurried outside where she hunkered down behind a sage bush shrouded in darkness. Barely breathing, she peered through spaces between the leaves toward the back-lit doorway.

  “I thought you said you were going to call someone to fix this thing,” Lil had shouted over her shoulder as she reached for the doorknob. Muttering, the old lady slammed the door and shot the deadbolt home.

  Like a flaming sword, distant lightning blazed its initials across the sky. Jillie counted the seconds between the lightning and thunder. Fifteen seconds meant the storm was about three miles away. Hopefully, she’d make it to the train station before it broke loose.