Dusty took that as her cue to leave. “Call me if you need a ride home, Ian,” she said as she gathered her purse and keys.
“No problem. I’ll walk. It’s only a mile or so back to the school and my truck.”
One problem solved. Six more cropping up. Dusty decided her next stop would be Chase’s office. He had some explaining to do about Mabel’s house and the possibility of adoption.
“Alessa, I really hope you will come see me from time to time,” Dick said, elbows on the kitchen table. His daughter—wow this was his daughter!—sat across from him. She made geometric patterns with her crackers.
“I won’t come back at all if you keep calling me that.”
“What? Alessa? That’s the name your mother called you. Alessandra, same as her name. She’s Sandy, you’re Alessa.”
“Yeah, but it’s her name. I don’t want it. I want my own. I’m Hope now.”
“Okay, Hope.” Dick pushed aside his fears. His basic psych classes in med school would paint all kinds of bipolar disorders on this identity issue. There was more going on here than a rebellious child running away from a new and complicated family readjustment. “I eagerly anticipate you coming to see me on holidays and maybe several weeks during the summer. That’s what hope means. Looking forward to a brighter future.”
“Will your fiancée hope to see me, too?”
“I think so. She’s used to a big extended family.” He certainly hoped Thistle was coming back. That he could persuade her they really and truly belonged together. Tomorrow. He only had a little longer to wait.
“Speaking of holidays, why has this town gone so nuts about Halloween?” With a jerk of the head she indicated the floral arrangement at the center of the table. Golden chrysanthemums, red-and-orange leaves, a miniature scarecrow, and a candle all set into a glass pumpkin bowl. “I mean, there’s stuff all over town, even on Main Street and around City Hall. Every yard looks like a horror movie set with gravestones and ghosts and witches and lights and stuff. You put sound effects on a motion detector on your front gate for trick-or-treaters.” She tried to sneer with adolescent superiority, but her eyes shone with a bit of anticipation.
“For a long time this town was just another rural community with a failing textile mill and a long road into Portland for any decent paying jobs. The festivals helped bring tourist dollars in and formed a community bond; gave us a reason to remain an incorporated city rather than just another suburb. We’ve kept up the traditions even though the new corporate owners of the mill have revived the town economy, and the freeway makes Portland seem close enough to commute.”
“You guys really get into it?”
“Yes. In fact, I plan on taking you through the haunted maze in The Ten Acre Wood tomorrow or Saturday night. My sister has organized most of it. Volunteers will represent the ghosts of some of our more notorious ancestors, including pirates, riverboat gamblers, and an ax murderer. So there are bits and pieces of history lessons thrown into the fun.”
“Cool.” Hope reached across the table for the matches tucked beneath the flower arrangement and calmly lit the pristine orange candle. The wick flared to life in paler colors than the flowers and leaves. She stared at it for a long time, seemingly mesmerized by the flickering blue-and-white center of the flame. The match burned down. She ignored it until she had to shake the matchstick free of fire or get burned.
An afterthought, or instinct rather than conscious decision?
Still she stared at the candle. Her face relaxed as her mind wandered.
Bits and pieces of that damnable psych course fluttered through Dick’s mind like a troubled Pixie looking for a safe perch. I’m looking for trouble where there is none.
“We’ll talk to your mom about visiting me as often as you like when she comes to get you on Sunday.”
“Mom’s coming here?” Hope snapped out of her trance. “No way. No how. I’m not going back. Not if that man is still living in her house.” She shoved her chair back so hard it crashed against the floor. Then she ran out the back door without even stopping for a sweater or jacket.
“Chase Norton, you are as obsessive-compulsive as I am,” Dusty said.
“Huh?” He looked up from the computer screen to find his fiancée smiling at him from the doorway of his office. Of course, the moment he looked away from the text on the screen he knew where to place a comma to make sense of the long narrative. “Have you been standing there long?”
He half stood, ready to wrap her in a long and crushing hug. Maybe add a kiss or six to the embrace. He hadn’t wanted to leave her this morning when they both went to work. He didn’t want to let go of her now.
“I’ve watched you just long enough to feel guilty about disturbing you.” She moved close enough for him to grab her about her waist. He followed through with his plan.
Several breathless moments later he blindly hit the comma key, hoping the cursor was in the right place. He didn’t want to spend any more time untangling his report of ejecting a man from Chase’s parents’ diner for drunk and disorderly when they refused to serve him a beer. They didn’t serve any alcohol, but that didn’t keep the man from putting his fist through a glass desert case.
“I’m ready for a break. Do you want some dinner? Ginny’s supposed to have fried chicken on the special menu,” he said, still clinging to Dusty.
“In a moment.” She bit her lip.
“This looks like it might take a while. Why not talk about whatever is troubling you over dinner?”
“I think this needs more privacy than your family’s diner.”
“Don’t tell me you’re backing out of the wedding! I didn’t hurt you last night, did I?” Panic made his heart race.
“No, silly.” She giggled a bit as she playfully hit his chest. “If anything, last night made me even more eager to spend the rest of my life with you. Did you know that when you fall deeply asleep, when pain and stress fall away, your face relaxes so much that you look ten again. Like you did when I first fell in love with you.”
“I look forward to discovering more about you when you are deeply asleep and I’m not exhausted and woozy from pain pills.” He kissed her again.
“Mabel hinted at some things that make me hopeful about our future together.”
“And what did Mabel say?” He nuzzled her neck, drinking in the faint hint of her lavender shampoo and soap.
“Something about helping us with adoptions.”
His heart skipped a beat. He hadn’t planned on having this discussion until after the wedding. In some ways last night was their wedding. He took a long, deep breath and released it. “Pull up a chair. You’re right. This will take a bit of sorting through and needs a lot of privacy.”
When she’d dragged the straight wooden chair across the tiny room so she could sit beside him, he held her left hand in both of his on her thigh.
“Mabel runs an underground railway for teens that have fallen through the cracks of the system and need either a new identity and relocation or advocates in court for emancipation from abusive homes—their own or foster care.” He blurted out the words so he didn’t have time to think about it. “I’m not directly involved, but I know about it, unofficially, and sometimes direct kids to her.”
“Is that why Hope was in her house when Dick found her?”
“Probably. Runaways sometimes pick up word of a safe haven on the street. Some of those girls are pregnant.”
“And Mabel thinks we can convince those girls to let us adopt the child,” she finished for him. Her eyes brightened with tears and her lip trembled; ever-so-hopeful but afraid at the same time. Afraid she’d guessed wrong.
“I was hoping so, but didn’t want to suggest it until Mabel offered.” His fingers caressed the ring on her left hand.
“But?”
He fought for the right words.
“There is always a but…” she prodded him.
“When a girl is desperate enough to run away, she feels unloved, unwanted
, like she has no right to happiness or family. Selling herself on the street for food and shelter doesn’t seem wrong. It’s survival. Her body isn’t hers to protect. Then a new life blossoms inside her and suddenly she feels as if this baby is the only person in the world who can love her. Like the child is the only thing in the world that is truly, solely hers. She’d rather accept meager welfare than give up the baby.”
Dusty worried her lip with her teeth some more. “I think I understand. So how does that help us?”
“If we find the right girl and offer open adoption, she can visit anytime and the baby knows she’s the birth mother. We’ll have a better chance of being able to afford the adoption process and don’t have to go overseas to adopt an infant.”
Dusty flashed him a blazing smile. Her tears of hope became tears of joy, spilling down her cheeks unchecked.
He smoothed them away with a fingertip. “I hope those are tears of joy.”
“They are. I want at least one baby I can raise from birth, but I’d resigned myself to adopting an older child. They need homes and loving parents, too.”
“We’ll talk more when we get home tonight.” He kissed her again, wanted to linger, but those awful reports weren’t going away. He’d made good headway through the afternoon. Not enough. He’d be here all night if he didn’t let Dusty go right now.
Right now.
His cell phone rang. “Norton,” he barked into the instrument of tortuous interruption.
“Chase, there’s a fire at the high school gym,” Dick shouted anxiously. “I just got called to meet the trucks there.”
“Damn, I miss having Mabel in house. The county dispatcher tells me nothing,” Chase snarled. The high school. Where the static parade was supposed to take place day after tomorrow. Someone was out to destroy the town festival. Someone with a kinship with fire.
Either Haywood Wheatland aka Snapdragon or the teens he enthralled sprang to mind.
“There’s more.” Dick sounded like the world was about to end.
“What?” He put the cell phone on speaker to include Dusty in the conversation.
“Hope has run away again.”
“And…?”
“She has a fascination with fire. I just confirmed it with her mother.”
Thirty-six
DICK SHRUGGED INTO HIS HEAVY volunteer fireman jacket one-handed, keeping Chase and Dusty on the line. “I’m afraid…”
“Don’t be,” Chicory whispered to him. The little blue creature circled his head, wings beating double time. “Hope has not gone far.”
“How long has Hope been gone?” Chase asked. His voice had the vacant echoey quality of the speaker function.
“Maybe five minutes. No longer,” Dick confessed.
“Then she can’t be responsible for the fire. It would take her twice that long just to walk to the school, another five for the smoke to get noticed.” Chase sounded calm and reassuring. Professional.
“Dick, we’ll meet you there!” Dusty called. She sounded panicky with ragged breath. After all, it was her static parade getting set up in the gym.
“Chicory says that Hope only got as far as the back gate,” Dick said. He’d believe that when he saw his daughter there and no sooner. As he spoke, he dashed out, jacket only half on. “If you get there before I do, explain to the chief why I’m late.” He closed his phone and jumped down the three steps to the flagstone path.
A motionless shadow within a shadow by the back gate drew Dick like a magnet. He stepped deliberately, making sure Hope heard his approach over the sirens climbing the hill from downtown. “Hope, sweetie, those are fire trucks. I have to go.” He held her by the shoulders.
“You’re abandoning me. Just like my mother did when she married that man.”
“Not at all. Mom will be home from the grocery store in a few moments. You won’t be alone long. And the Pixies will keep you company.”
She wrenched away from his grasp. “You’re just like…”
“Hope, listen to me and not your rampaging emotions that make no sense.” He shook her slightly as he turned her around to make sure they made eye contact.
“What?”
“Listen, Hope. I’m an EMT with the volunteer fire department. There is a fire. I need to go. People need me to be there. I have obligations and responsibilities. I am not abandoning you.”
“Can I go with you?” She looked up at him, fearful. Why was she so afraid of being alone when she’d run away from home into the solitude of life on the streets?
“Not this time.” More sirens approached. “That’s three trucks at least. A bad fire. People will be very busy, almost frantic to put it out quickly. I’m afraid you might get hurt because you don’t know what to do, where to stand. I really don’t want you hurt. You’ve come to mean a lot to me in just a few days.”
Her eyes focused on him. “Okay. I’ll wait for Grandma inside.”
“Where it’s warm and dry. I don’t want you to catch a chill.”
“I won’t.” She turned to retreat into the house where cheery lights beckoned with the promise of warmth and friendliness. “And thanks for explaining to me. I’m just so sick of no one telling me anything. All I want is to know why.”
Dick watched her until she’d closed the kitchen door behind her. Then he turned his attention—or the half of it that wasn’t lingering with his daughter—to getting to the high school and the fire as fast as possible.
“You want to talk about it, Hope?” Chicory assumed a casual pose in front of the flour canister, legs stretched along the kitchen counter, his head propped up with an elbow. He flattened his wings against the sculpted fruit design of the milk glass container. This one with pears fit him better than the grapes or apples of the sugar and tea canisters.
“Nothing to talk about,” she said, head down, rearranging her cheese and crackers again. Squares this time, box of four square crackers. She moved a fifth, broken one around the outside of the design with a seemingly idle finger.
She spoke volumes without saying a word.
“How about all that ‘Don’t abandon me!’ crap you gave Dick?”
“None of your business.” Her voice sounded flat. She’d had this conversation before.
“The highest calling for a Pixie is to befriend those in need. You sound like someone mightily in need of a friend right now.”
“Friends accuse you of horrible things you didn’t do and then they leave. Or they tattle.” She shoved her chair back, the wooden legs scraping noisily on the floor.
“Who’d I tattle to? Since when is a Pixie in a position to judge you about right or wrong? Pixies can’t lie.”
“Everyone lies.”
“Not Pixies. We can’t. As in ‘it is physically impossible.’ If we even think about lying, we curl up into a ball, turn into dust, and blow away in the slightest breeze.” He thought about the trouble Thistle had writing out her statement for the judge. While it wasn’t all a lie, some of it was. Her stomach cramps and dizziness had been real and debilitating until Dick wrote out the words and she copied them. Not telling a lie, just copying letters onto a page.
“I wish people were like that.” Hope plopped back into her chair. Her careless movement shifted the broken cracker farther away from the square, which remained intact.
Interesting.
“So who told lies about you?”
Hope remained silent so long Chicory thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“A bully at school,” she whispered.
“I hate bullies. Their anger at themselves gets so tight they can’t contain it. So they let it spill onto innocents. The only way they can feel good about themselves is to make other people hurt worse than they do.” Their blind anger also made bullies prime targets for pranks. But they never got the joke.
“You think so?” Hope looked up, hope filling her eyes.
“I know so. So what did the bullies at school say about you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Hope curled in on herself.
Chicory flew to the plate of crackers and stood atop the broken one off to the side. “Look at me, Hope. Talk to me. If you don’t tell someone what’s really going on inside your head you’ll have to keep running away from it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“It’s hard.” A tear snaked down the side of her nose.
“So is living on the streets, scrounging for food in dumpsters, getting cold and wet, never sleeping soundly because you can’t know what danger lurks in every shadow. Always running away from yourself.”
Her face worked as she alternately tried to speak and bite back the words.
“Just the first part. Just tell me what lies the bullies told about you. You know they are lies. I will know they are lies. You can trust me that much.”
“This really cute guy, he’s on the basketball team, and a senior, and every girl in school wanted him.”
“And?” This was starting to sound a bit like the story of Alder and every girl Pixie in his tribe.
“And he asked me to the dance after the last basketball game of the season. It’s a big deal every year. More so last spring ’cause the team was going into the championship playoffs.”
“He made you feel special.”
“Yeah. He’s a senior, for gosh sakes. I was only a freshman. He could have asked any girl in school.”
“But he chose you. Did he say why?”
“I didn’t ask. I just agreed to go. Mom bought me a really pretty dress, and he gave me a corsage and everything.”
“But?
“He only asked ’cause he bet some guy he could get inside my pants. He said he loved me, but I was just another virgin in his long list of conquests.”
Another Alder. “Did you let him?”
“No.”
“Ah. His pride couldn’t take rejection. So he lied and bragged to everyone that you had succumbed to his charms. And because he’s a big man in school, people believed him rather than you, even some of your friends.”
Chicory Up: The Pixie Chronicles Page 26