Pawns

by Willo Davis Roberts

  All the way over to Callie’s, Teddi debated whether or not to confide in her friend. Maybe Callie would have some insight into how to handle the situation.

  They picked the top and skirt that Callie would keep, and Teddi drew in a deep breath. “Listen. I need some advice, but you have to promise not to tell anyone else, okay?”

  Callie listened to the whole story, looking more disturbed at each revelation. “Maybe Mamie won’t notice the money is gone. I mean, she throws change in there all the time, and I doubt if she keeps very close track of it.”

  “Not the silver, or the ones. But how could she forget she dropped a twenty in there? Sooner or later she’s going to remember. And it could only be me or Dora who took it. If I’m going to say anything to Mamie with any chance she’ll believe me, it has to be right away. The longer I wait, the more phony it will sound that I noticed, that I knew and didn’t say anything until somebody suspected me. Mamie will think I lied when I got caught.”

  Callie wanted to help, but she had no answer, either.

  Teddi walked home through the twilight, worrying, uncertain what to do.

  She made no decision. Mamie and Dora were in the living room, watching television, turned down lower than Dora usually played it. It was a sitcom of the type that Teddi and Mamie had never watched; one of those silly, slapstick things with occasional raunchy bits of dialogue. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out who had picked that show, Teddi thought wryly.

  During a commercial, which Dora muted, Mamie cleared her throat and said, “I’d like to watch the ten o’clock news tonight. I’m going to bed a bit early, I think.”

  “Oh,” Dora said flatly. It was clear that she already had something else picked out, but it was, after all, Mamie’s TV. “It would sure be handy if I had my own set, wouldn’t it?”

  Still, Teddi held back, unable to bring up the matter of the twenty-dollar bill that had been removed from the jar. The news only partially held her interest. Political news, a bad accident on I-5 involving two cars and a semi, an update on a little girl who was recovering from a bone marrow transplant, a judge’s verdict that a little boy who had been adopted over a year ago should now be returned to his birth mother. The sorrow of the adoptive parents twisted the knife in Teddi’s heart. Would it be any better for Mamie if she lost Danny?

  Dora, who had been reclining on the couch, sat up abruptly about ten minutes into the news. “I think I’m going to find a book and read in bed for a while.”

  So the evening was ending, and Teddi still had not said anything. The situation seemed more dismal by the moment.

  Mamie was heading for bed, and Teddi accepted her hug good night at the foot of the stairs before going up. She couldn’t yell across to the house next door about the quandary she was in, but she was hoping Jason would be there so that they could talk for a few minutes.

  However, his window remained stubbornly dark.

  Teddi went to bed, falling into a troubled sleep that culminated in a dream of an infant wailing and herself being pursued by an unseen enemy, then falling, falling. . . .

  She jerked awake, disoriented, realizing it had been only a dream. She turned her head to check the clock beside her bed. Twenty past midnight.

  She punched her pillow, then turned it over to find a cooler spot. And then she heard a continuation of her dream: a baby crying.

  For a few seconds Teddi waited for Dora to get up and tend to Danny. But nothing happened. The thin whimpering went on and on, until at last Teddi got out of bed, feeling annoyed. Didn’t Dora realize that Mamie needed her sleep, that the baby should be fed or whatever he needed, so that he didn’t wake up Mamie?

  Mamie’s door was closed, however, when Teddi went downstairs. She must be sleeping soundly. Probably, Teddi had to admit, she wouldn’t have heard the baby herself if she hadn’t been awakened by the bad dream.

  The door to Dora’s bedroom was also closed. Danny’s fussing was barely audible to Teddi as she stood in the hallway, listening.

  “Come on, Dora, get up and tend to him,” she muttered under her breath.

  The whimpering became a full cry.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Teddi rapped lightly on the door and said, “Dora?”

  There was no response.

  A second rapping brought no results, either.

  Teddi glanced across the hall at Mamie’s door, expecting her to emerge at any moment.

  If she knocked any harder to rouse Dora, she’d undoubtedly disturb Mamie, too.

  On impulse, Teddi twisted the knob and opened the door to peer into Dora’s room.

  Now the crying was loud enough to be heard more clearly. She quietly closed the door and turned on a small lamp, illuminating the bed on the far side.

  It was empty. The covers were turned back, as if Dora had been sleeping in it, but now she was gone.

  “Dora?” Teddi looked around, but there was nowhere to hide unless she was in the closet, which wasn’t likely. The bathroom? No, that door was open, and the bathroom was dark.

  Teddi drew a deep breath and crossed to the bassinet, where the baby, red faced and upset, continued to emit those unhappy sounds.

  “What’s the matter, buddy?” Teddi leaned over him, feeling the light blanket and then the sleeper Danny wore. Everything was soaking wet. Not only that, it was cold soaking wet.

  “How long you been lying here like that?” Teddi asked softly. “Hey, now, I’m here, don’t cry.”

  She picked him up out of the sopping basket and looked around for something to change him into. There was nowhere to lay him except in the crib, which he had not so far used, so she put him down there, with a waterproof pad beneath him.

  He had stopped crying the moment she picked him up, but started again as soon as she put him down.

  “Okay, give me a chance to find some clean clothes. Ah, there they are.” Still in the laundry basket sitting on the dresser, neatly folded by Mamie as they came out of the dryer. Teddi found a clean sleeper and undershirt, then a disposable diaper from the package at one end of the crib.

  His little body felt clammy as she stripped him of the soggy garments. How many times had he wet the diaper for it to have leaked so much? she wondered. The things were supposed to be practically leak-proof, according to the TV ads.

  Once he was re-dressed and wrapped in a clean receiving blanket, she held him against her shoulder, where he quickly calmed down.

  Not until he had fallen asleep again did she put him into the bassinet in fresh sheets and a blanket. How much time had passed? Twenty minutes, anyway.

  Where was Dora?

  She turned out the light, reclosed the door on the sleeping baby, and went looking.

  It was a small house. It didn’t take long to determine that Dora was not in it.

  And the front door had been left unlocked.

  Where was Dora? she continued to wonder uneasily as she climbed back upstairs to her own bed.

  Chapter 11

  Going back to bed did not mean going back to sleep.

  Teddi lay in the semidarkness, thinking.

  She had been devastated when her mother died, even though they had known that it was going to happen. And then her father had committed suicide, and in a place where he must have known that she would be the one to find him.

  Had he even thought about it? About her?

  “What kind of father does that to his kid?” she had cried out in a paroxysm of pain and grief. “How could he do that to me? I’ll never forgive him.”

  And Mamie had held her and let her cry, and tried to answer. “His own anguish was so great that at least at that moment he was incapable of thinking of anything else,” she told Teddi. “Losing your mother was probably the most awful thing that had ever happened to him. I suspect he was simply incapable of going on without her. It wasn’t that he didn’t love you, Teddi. I know he loved you. I’m sure he cared. But he was hurting so much that he felt he had to find a way to end it, and I doubt if he consi
dered anything else. Not even you.

  “We’re all human, honey,” Mamie had told her gently. “Even when we’re trying to do our best, we fail other people sometimes. We don’t mean to. We just don’t always have the strength to do what we ought to do.”

  Teddi had recognized the truth of that. A month after her father’s death she had sat beside Mamie in church and listened to a sermon on the necessity of forgiving those who have wronged us. Not once, not even seven times, but seventy times seven times.

  Which meant, Mamie had explained when they talked about it later, indefinitely.

  She remembered how she had asked, her face stony, “So I’m to just forgive my father for abandoning me the way he did, letting me find him dead in our own garage, sitting in the front seat of the car? It’s not that easy.”

  “No, it’s not easy. But it’s the only way you’ll find peace of mind, Teddi. Your anger and resentment isn’t hurting him, you know. It’s only hurting you. It’s . . .” Mamie had groped for the right words. “It’s like a sort of acid, poured over your soul. Until you can forgive him, it will continue to hurt you. Forgiving causes the acid to begin to be washed away, so it doesn’t keep on eating away at you.”

  They hadn’t talked about it since, but though Teddi felt she had sincerely tried to forgive her father, she knew she hadn’t really accomplished it.

  Yet she had come, and quickly, to trust Mamie. Mamie was only a neighbor, a friend, yet she had stepped in to embrace a homeless orphan, to offer her the security that she needed so badly.

  And now that security was threatened—by a young woman neither she nor Mamie had even heard of a few short weeks ago.

  Dora. She had arrived on their doorstep, moved in, taken over their lives. Disrupted the peace that had begun to heal Teddi’s heart.

  They’d never heard of her, knew nothing of her. But look at Dora now.

  How did they even know she was Ricky’s widow?

  The thought came with the suddenness of a hammer blow.

  Teddi’s breath caught in her chest.

  She lay very still, consciously expelling the air caught in her lungs, deliberately inhaling another breath, forcing herself to calm down.

  How did they know?

  Only because Dora said so. Oh, she’d shown Mamie a marriage certificate. But an official document could be faked, couldn’t it? People used computers for all kinds of things like that, including printing out counterfeit money that looked real enough for the forger to get away with it for a while. There’d been a case like that in the paper not long ago. All Dora would have needed was a copy of a genuine certificate to copy and the use of a computer to do it on.

  Mamie apparently had been convinced by the marriage certificate. But there was no other I.D. of any kind. Nothing to signify that Dora was Mrs. Richard Thrane, or what her name had been before they got married. Ricky, peculiarly enough if Dora’s story was true, had not told his mother about her. He had, only moments before boarding the airplane on which he had died, made out an insurance policy to his mother, not the wife who was pregnant with his child.

  Ricky had been too much older than Teddi for them to have been close buddies, but he had been a casual friend. He had waved when he saw her as he was coming and going, and once when she’d crashed on her bike and had a bloody knee, he’d had her sit on the front steps while he got a washcloth and a Band-Aid.

  She’d watched from next door when he’d brought his friends home with him. Teddi had been fascinated by the tall, athletic young men with bottomless appetites, judging by their overheard conversations, and by the pretty, mostly athletic young women who occasionally accompanied them. Funny that Ricky would marry a couch potato like Dora, when he had enjoyed so many sports and more energetic activities.

  And now, staring up at the ceiling that was barely visible through the night, Teddi wondered again, How did they know that Dora was really Ricky’s widow? Only by a single piece of paper that could have been produced on any modern computer.

  Of course some men didn’t marry the same type of woman they’d dated beforehand. She supposed even a jock didn’t necessarily stay a jock when he grew up and took on a responsible job and wanted a family.

  But the lack of I.D. took on increased significance as Teddi pondered it. Now that she considered it carefully, it seemed incredible to her that they’d accepted Dora’s claim of relationship with so little hard evidence.

  Was it only wishful thinking to imagine that Dora, for some inexplicable reason, might be an impostor?

  Unable to lie still any longer while such thoughts swirled in her head, Teddi got up and walked to the window to look down on the silent street with its alternately lighted and shadowed areas.

  The crazy idea, once implanted in her head, was ready to grow by leaps and bounds. She was wide awake now, not sleepy in the slightest.

  Why would Dora pretend to be Ricky’s widow if she were not?

  She had come here within days of giving birth, and without much in the way of funds. So the obvious answer was money.

  Yet if she knew anything about Mamie, she must have been aware that Mamie was not wealthy. She had this small, ordinary house and a small pension that enabled her to live comfortably without having to hold a job, but hardly in luxury.

  Except that now they knew there was a large insurance policy. Only how could Dora have known about that if Ricky had not told her about it? And if Ricky had told her, why wouldn’t he have made her the beneficiary rather than his mother?

  No, Teddi thought after a few moments of reflection, Dora could hardly have known about the insurance.

  The answer still had to be money, didn’t it? Maybe not a lot of money, but certainly Mamie’s modest house and income were proving to be adequate for a girl who needed a place to go at a time when she couldn’t look after herself very well.

  A refuge in the time of storm. The phrase came to her, unbidden. Wasn’t there a hymn about that? Of course. They’d sung it not long ago at church, only it was “A Shelter in the Time of Storm.” Shelter, refuge. A place one sought to wait out a difficult time.

  Like giving birth to a baby. Giving birth without medical attention, insisting she could not go to a hospital, no matter what.

  Teddi couldn’t imagine approaching childbirth the way Dora had. She couldn’t even have been certain that an ignorant fourteen-year-old would be around to assist her; she had planned to have Danny entirely on her own.

  Teddi remembered how Dora had jerked the telephone free from the wall, then hung on to her so that she couldn’t possibly plug it back in and summon help.

  Along with the lack of driver’s license, Social Security card, or other I.D., there had been another item lacking in Dora’s purse. There was no insurance card. Dora had said she could not afford to go to the hospital, which was undoubtedly true. But Dr. Woods had said that if they had taken Dora to the hospital, she would have been taken care of. Mamie had mentioned getting her on Aid to Dependent Children. Would that agency have demanded identification beyond what might be a bogus marriage certificate? Dora had been quick to state that Ricky never would have wanted her to accept welfare. Yet she seemed to have no hesitation at accepting whatever Mamie could provide, and was even hinting about wanting other material things.

  So what other reason would there have been for staying away from a hospital at a time when most people would have considered it essential?

  Did the lack of proof that she’d been married to Ricky have anything to do with it? Because whether she had money or insurance or not, Dora surely would have been expected to provide something to prove who she was.

  Might there be other things Dora was not prepared to reveal to anyone? Had she been afraid that the stress and pain of delivering her baby might let her slip and divulge some truth that she did not want known?

  She was getting far afield here, Teddi knew, yet the path her thoughts were pursuing was too compelling to reject. In the distance, where insects fluttered around a streetlight, some
thing moved, but she was too engrossed in her own speculations to pay much attention.

  The more she thought about Dora, the more Teddi was convinced there was something very peculiar about her. Was it merely wishful thinking to believe there was a serious problem here, beyond the fact that Dora appeared to be a thief? No, Teddi decided.

  She brought the room’s only chair to sit beside the window, leaning her elbows on the sill, welcoming the faint cooling breeze as it stirred the hair around her face. It was time she thought things through very seriously.

  It was Mamie the airline had notified when Ricky’s plane went down. Mamie who was told that his body had not been recovered and that it probably never would be.

  Why Ricky’s mother, rather than his wife?

  Why did Dora not even have a snapshot of her supposed husband?

  Why didn’t Dora talk about her life with Ricky? She was willing, even eager, to listen to Mamie’s tales about Ricky’s life before marriage. But Teddi couldn’t recall a single instance of a specific anecdote from Dora about her husband.

  There were occasional general comments. They’d liked a certain little Italian restaurant in San Diego. They’d enjoyed a movie, a walk, a book. (Though Teddi couldn’t imagine Ricky reading any of the books she’d seen Dora read so far.)

  Below her on the street, a figure emerged from shadows, and Teddi’s pulse suddenly quickened.

  It was Dora. She was sure it was Dora, and she waited until the streetlight directly overhead made it a certainty.

  For a moment Teddi was tempted to go downstairs, to confront the woman, right now at nearly two o’clock in the morning. She imagined turning on the light just as Dora stepped inside the front hall, and saying, “Danny cried and cried, so I came down and changed him. His bed was soaked. How long did you leave him alone? Where have you been?”

  Would that awaken Mamie? Was she, Teddi, ready to confront Dora, in front of Mamie?

  Her mouth went dry, thinking about it.

  No, not tonight, Teddi decided. But maybe soon.

  In the meantime there must be things she could do to find out about Dora’s background. If there was evidence anywhere that Dora was not what she claimed to be, Teddi had to have it before she challenged her.