The police officer approached me.
My stomach whirled in panic. Don’t let him take me, Cook. Don’t let him touch me, Simon. The words tried to force their way out of my mouth. Somehow they only stuck in my head. In the tension and strain of this room, I couldn’t utter a word.
“Miss Emma Ross,” the officer said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
Yeah. I was about to be arrested and hauled off to juvenile hall for being a runaway. The Troll had probably told him she couldn’t stand to set eyes on me ever again after all the trouble I’d caused and for the judge to throw the book at me.
“Your great-grandmother passed away from a stroke two hours ago,” the officer said.
At first his words made no sense to me. They were nonsensical syllables. Maybe because they didn’t contain the words “jail” or “judge.”
Cook took my hand. “She suffered a stroke three days ago, honey, and held on until today. I’m heartbroken for you, child.”
Oh my God. I had killed my great-grandmother by running off without permission. She hadn’t been feeling well for a couple weeks at least, and I’d finished her off. The stress had been too much for her. I was practically a murderer. That’s why the police were here to arrest me. For second-degree murder. It was all my fault. Images of a dark fortress-like prison flitted through my brain. Tears filled my eyes. Cook and Simon couldn’t save me now. Nobody could.
“I-I killed her, Cook,” I blubbered. “I didn’t mean to, honest. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well lately, but I never thought it would come to this. I’ve murdered my only living relative!”
Cook pulled me close as I dissolved into sobs of . . . of what? Fear? Guilt? Remorse over what I’d done? All of that. Except for grief or sorrow. I cried even over that—guilt over not being grief-stricken. I should be sad for my great-grandmother’s loss, yet, try as I might, I couldn’t make myself feel grief.
“It’s not your fault, baby,” Cook crooned into my ear. “She was an old lady who wouldn’t take the pills the doctor prescribed. You didn’t cause this, Emma. She brought it on all by herself.”
“Excuse me, Miss Ross,” a man’s voice said behind me. “I’m Mr. Tolridge, your great-grandmother’s attorney. You and I are going to be spending time together in the future. You’re a minor. The bank in town has been designated as the Trustee. They will be overlooking your great-grandmother’s estate and making sure you have everything you need. It’s quite a sizeable estate, and I will be there to make sure your needs are met until you officially inherit the money and the ranch at age twenty-one. However, there is one decision I’m afraid you must make sooner rather than later as the sole heir. Would you prefer the ranch to be sold and the money invested for you, or would you rather have me hire people to maintain the ranch for you?”
None of this felt real. Couldn’t this wait for another time? No, it couldn’t.
“I don’t want the ranch sold. It’s my wish that Cook and Simon always have a home here and be kept on salary. Hire any other employees you need to run the ranch’s business.”
Cook wiped away a tear. Simon walked over and hugged me. Of course, he did back off at arms’ length afterward and warn me that I still had a lot to answer for.
“I fretted like a dang mother dog searchin’ for her litter of pups,” he said. “An’ mark me well, child, you will explain where you got off to, hear?”
I nodded, wondering how in the world I expected to pull that off.
“By the way,” he said, smiling once again, “remember them clothes of yers sent up here by Fed Ex? Them two big boxes Miss Ross ordered me to burn?”
I nodded again.
Simon widened his gap-toothed grin. “I done hid ‘em up in the barn loft and covered ‘em up good so’s the mice couldn’t get into ‘em. You got plenty to wear now, Miss Emma, besides these.” He fingered my dirty frontier girl dress.
Ordinarily I would have felt ecstatic to know I could dress like a human being from the twenty-first century again. Today I couldn’t summon any pleasure from it.
The third man walked over and told the others to give him some time and some space.
“I’m Liam Collins from Children’s Protective Services,” he said. “We already know you have no other relatives, Emma. You could stay here for a short while with Miss Hamby and Simon, but we’ll have to find you a permanent foster home soon. We’ll wait until after your great-grandmother’s funeral.”
My heart folded in on itself. A foster home? Living with strangers in some far-off city without Brad? I felt paralyzed by the way my life could whirl out of my control in the space of five minutes. Too paralyzed to even cry, I felt the tears building with the pressure rising in my chest.
“Could I stay with a friend’s family?” I asked. My previous experience with CPS almost guaranteed he would say no.
“We might make that work short-term if there is both a mother and father in the home willing to take you in. However it’ll just be temporary, just until we find you an accredited foster home.”
~ ~ ~
Mr. Collins made some calls and helped Cook and me pack what I’d need for a few days. He drove me out to the Rylands and had Brad’s parents fill out the required paperwork. Brad seemed pretty excited.
“Nothing will stand in our way now,” he said, showing me the cute bedroom that would be mine. “I can’t believe I can see you all the time, whenever I like.”
“For a while,” I said, testing the bed. It was smooth and soft and had real covers on it with a pretty pink-flowered bedspread that went with the pale pink walls. Not a lump in sight. Against one wall stood a desk with a lamp and room for my laptop. An actual closet with a door on it had been built into one wall. The opposite wall was half-covered by a long polished dresser with six drawers and a huge mirror. I kicked off my Nikes and felt the deep carpet beneath my toes. So much light. I had forgotten how much I missed light.
“What do you mean, ‘for a while’?” Brad asked, his smile a fading ghost.
“I can stay here only until an accredited foster home can be found. Mr. Collins said the only two in Sweet Creek are still full. I will have to leave this area and go to some other town.”
Brad leaned against the bedroom door as if his legs could no longer support him. His face bloomed a pale red and his fists tightened. “Don’t even try to tell me Penelope Ross ran an accredited foster home,” he spat.
“No. Not hardly. She was a blood relative. If I had another blood relative here in Sweet Creek, I could stay with them if they agreed to take me.”
Brad hit the door with the flat of his hand. “Just when I think you and I can have a normal relationship with nobody getting in our way, you’re going to get shipped off to some other town, and believe me, baby, there are no close towns around here.”
I walked over to him and laid my cheek against his chest just below his left shoulder. “I’m as frustrated as you are,” I whispered, wrapping my arms around his middle. “Wherever I go, I can always try to convince the trustee of the Ross estate that I need enough money to buy and support a car. We’ll manage to see each other somehow.”
Brad groaned. “Yeah, like once every couple of months when we can both make excuses to be gone all day and can meet for a few hours in the middle? Emma, I’m in love with you. It was brutal enough seeing you just once or twice a week. I couldn’t stand seeing my fiancé only once a month.”
I said nothing for a few minutes. I just leaned against him, breathing in his manly scent tinged with aftershave and listening to his heartbeat, wishing I could freeze this moment and make it last forever. Then a new thought hit me.
“Guess what this means.”
“What?” Brad asked.
“Haven’t you heard?” I teased. “I’m the only heir to Penelope’s estate and to my parents’ esta
te also. I’m rich. I just can’t get my hands on a single dime without the say-so of my trustee. But hey.”
“Hey what?” Brad’s mood was heading further south.
I stepped back and gazed up at him. “Don’t you realize what this means?”
Brad ran the back of his fingers down my cheek. “That you’re too good for me now and will only move in high society circles from now on?” He managed half a grin.
“No, silly. It means I won’t have to worry about college tuition. I’ll be able go to college without working, and to become a Physician’s Assistant without taking a penny in school loans. And you’ll get that football scholarship for college and we can worry about law school later.”
“You’re kind of getting ahead of yourself, aren’t you? It’ll still be forever before we can be together.”
“No it won’t. I’ll be out of high school in two years. We can both go to University of Oregon and be together every day. By the time I’m done with all my studies you’ll be out of law school. You’ll be twenty-five I’ll be twenty-four. We can marry then and both go to work full time.”
Brad wrapped me in a soft hug, “I want to be with you now, darlin. I don’t want to wait until we’re both in college. I don’t want to wait two weeks.”
I looked up and kissed his throat. What had happened to the man I loved who insisted we could do this? “Maybe I can figure out something else.”
“Good luck with that,” Brad murmured petulantly. He leaned down and planted a Romeo-and-Juliet kiss on my mouth that left me feeling hot and somewhat boneless. God, I’d miss that.
Chapter 25
The day after Penelope’s death passed in a blur. Brad helped me pack everything that belonged to me at the Ross house and truck it over to his place. We burned Charlotte’s seven church-cult dresses with the trash. I could almost hear Charlotte clapping her hands with a “You-go-girl!” up in Heaven.
I considered burning Charlotte’s diary, too, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I wrapped it in newspapers when I was alone and stuffed it into a burlap sack before stashing it safely back in the crawlspace. While Brad was outside helping Simon load up Penelope’s clothes to be delivered to charity, I used a hammer and some small nails to repair the wainscoting and seal in the diary, forever, I hoped. Someday, many years from now, I might tell Brad about the diary, but nobody would be told where it was. I would never take a chance on revealing the secret of the spring. That bit of information would die with me.
Cook, Simon and I put together the final details for Penelope’s funeral at her strip mall church. The funeral would be in two days and after it was over, Mr. Collins would be driving me the two hours to Eugene where he had made arrangements for me to begin a new life with an accredited foster family. They already had two children of their own and two foster children. There was no time to waste, Mr. Collins said, because school started next week and he wanted me settled before then.
All day I dreaded being forced into a new life with a bunch of strangers and suffered nightmares about it at night. Brad moped around looking like he had a mouthful of barbed wire. His parents even worried that the pain he felt over this new development would hurt his schoolwork and interfere with his concentration in football, jeopardizing his chance of landing a football scholarship. Brad and I spent every possible second together as the moment of separation grew closer. There would never be enough seconds to satisfy us. Time was running out. A quiet desperation descended over us like a fog the sun couldn’t burn off.
I was told by Mr. Collins that I could only take the bare essentials plus a few items of clothing when I left the Rylands due to the over-crowding at the foster home. Brad’s mother assured me it would be no problem to store the rest of my things at their house. Our last night together, after my few things were packed for the trip to the foster home, Brad and I packed a picnic dinner and a blanket. We drove to the river for the last time.
The food went largely untouched. We lay on the blanket watching the stars appear out of nowhere as the sun went down, fantasizing about running away together, willing time to slow down. Time was such a fickle thing, dragging like a sack full of stones when you wanted something to be over with and racing like a cheetah closing on a gazelle when every fleeting second was precious. We’d promised Brad’s parents we’d be home by midnight, and with desperation fueling the heat of passion, that was probably a good thing. I still didn’t want to risk making Charlotte’s mistake. An accidental pregnancy now would ruin our plans. My future was at stake and so was Brad’s.
I crawled into bed at just after midnight my last night in Sweet Creek. Sleep wouldn’t come. Each time the fog of drowsiness began to close over me I’d remember where I’d be sleeping twenty-four hours from now and jerk awake. As I stared at the ceiling, some thought my mind couldn’t quite grab prickled at the edge of sleep. By four in the morning, the thought finally materialized.
~ ~ ~
Penelope’s funeral filled every folding chair in the old Baptized by Fire Evangelical Church of God. She had no close friends I was aware of, or even any not-so-close friends. The size of the crowd surprised me. Some, I assumed, were there because they went to any function important to the church. The rest were there out of morbid curiosity. In the front row I sat with Brad and his family, Cook, Simon, Mr. Collins, and the Gordons. Below the low wooden stage, Penelope’s black enameled coffin rested on a wheeled cart. The lid was open, displaying Great-grandmother at rest in her finest black gown sewn all over with glistening black beads. Her whole body glittered under the store’s fluorescent lights. She looked alive with her hair freshly done and a bit of makeup to hide the waxy pallor of her skin. Even her dour expression was the one she wore in life. It gave me the creeps. Brad held my hand as we both endured an hour of hellfire and brimstone.
At the cemetery, only Pastor Stevens and our little group attended the interment service. Cook and I had discussed inviting the mourners to the Ross house for refreshments after the funeral, but there were no real mourners and fortunately we had decided to skip that. I listened to the pastor doing his “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” routine, fighting back my tears. Not for Penelope Ross. For the fact that after this was over I’d be taken against my will by Mr. Collins to some unknown life with strangers in Eugene; a life without Brad. Brad must have felt it too. He never let go of my hand.
When the final prayer had been said and we began walking back to the cars, Mrs. Gordon whispered in my ear that she’d talked Mr. Collins into letting me stay for lunch along with the rest of our group. A reprieve? At least for an hour or two. And maybe a chance to move on the memory I’d nailed down at four o’clock this morning.
~ ~ ~
After lunch Mr. Collins announced we had a long drive ahead and we’d better get a move on. We were all sitting in the Gordon’s living room enjoying a piece of Mrs. Gordon’s homemade peach pie. Brad’s hand tightened over mine.
“I know you don’t want to go, Emma,” Mr. Collins said, “however time’s a-wasting and I want to get you there well before dinnertime. That way I’ll be able to get back in time to have dinner with my own family.”
I stared up at his face as he checked his watch. “Mr. Collins, you said I could stay in Sweet Creek if I had blood relatives here, didn’t you?”
He rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh. “Now Emma, we both know you don’t have any blood relatives anywhere, and it’s too late in the game to change our plans now.” He stood and shook Mrs. Gordon’s hand. “Nice of you to invite me to lunch.”
Brad frowned at me. “If you had a relative here, you would’ve already told me.”
“No, you told me,” I replied. “You said your best friend claimed to be related to Joseph A. Perkins.” I turned to Matt. “Is that true?”
Matt glanced from one of us to another with wide blue eyes. “Well, yes. I think that’s right. M
om told me a long time ago the Gordons were related to the Perkins. Right, Mom?”
“Well, not exactly, Matt. The Gordons are not related to the Perkins, but my maiden name is Perkins. I am a direct descendent of Joseph.”
“What are you doing, Emma?” Brad whispered in my ear. “You’d never even heard of Joseph Perkins before you saw his portrait hanging down at City Hall.”
“Actually, I had,” I replied. “I’m related to his brother, Charley. That makes me a niece of some kind to Mrs. Gordon.”
Simon came to sit down on my other side. “Lissen, child. If ‘n I were thirty years younger an’ had me some money and a decent home, I’d adopt you straight out myself. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it, ‘ceptin’ I wouldn’t be allowed. Cook feels the same as I do. The pity is that neither of us are in a position or of an age to make that possible. I know how much you want to stay, honey, but cookin’ up some tall tale like this ain’t gonna work neither. You need a family what can take care of you right.”
Mrs. Gordon dragged a rocking chair around in front of me and sat facing me, eyes intense. “Nobody around here knows about Charley Perkins, Emma. How did you hear about him?”
“I actually know quite a bit about Charley and Joey. They are my relatives, after all.”
Mr. Collins had clearly had it with all the delays. “Miss Ross, if you were any kind of relation to the Gordons or this Charley Perkins character, whoever he is, we’d have uncovered it long before now. Quit stalling and get your things. We’re leaving.”
I smiled to myself. The last time a relative search had been conducted by Child Protective Services, Joey had died in 1876 as a six-year-old and never had any descendants. That’s why CPS hadn’t been able to find any. Charlotte had never divulged the name of her baby’s father, so any blood connection to Charley Perkins was completely off the radar. Of course, I could hardly tell Mr. Collins that, and the Gordons would think I’d lost my mind.
A Certain Twist in Time Page 21