by Ann McMan
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
About the Author
Also by Ann McMan
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About Bywater
For Susan Jane Barraclough,
who made me promise to keep telling my stories
“Suffer little children,
and forbid them not, to come unto me:
for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”
—Matthew 19:14
Prologue
She didn’t fear the water because it was deep.
In fact, it wasn’t deep. Not right here. She knew that much from experience.
If she took her time and chose a route that involved jumping from rock to rock, she could pretty much make it all the way to the other side without getting too wet. That was the most important part—not getting wet. And this part of the river had a lot of bigger, flatter stones that spread out just above the surface of the water. They looked more gray than brown in the late afternoon sun. That meant they weren’t wet and they’d be warmer on the bottoms of her bare feet. Her shoes and a book were cinched up tight inside a plastic grocery bag. She was careful to hold it high above the water while she crossed.
This was one of her favorite spots—this bend that wasn’t visible from the house or the narrow stretch of road on the opposite side that followed the river most of the way into town. That made it the safest place for her to cross without being seen.
She didn’t want to be seen.
The last time he had caught her trying to make it to the other side, he was so angry that he stormed right out into the water wearing his dress clothes to grab hold of her and drag her back to land. She remembered watching the sunlight flash in the spray that roared up from his surging feet. He was moving toward her like an angry wave, and when he reached her he delivered his first crude lesson about how dangerous the river was.
He held her face below the surface of the water for only a few seconds, but it was long enough for her to realize that if she kept her eyes open she could make out the smooth contour of the amber- and green-colored riverbed. It was strewn with ancient tree limbs and long, smooth stones that had been pushed deep into the soft ground by winter ice floes. It looked calm and simple. What a contrast it was to the world she inhabited above the surface, where heat and human passion took what should have been order and created chaos.
She was lucky that time. The water was cold—colder than usual for this early in the season. It didn’t make him less angry, but it made him more eager to get out of the slow-moving current that soaked his shoes and flattened his best pants against his spindly legs. Still, his rage was strong enough to carry them back to shore where he threw her against a pile of rocks and towered over her, shouting out a promise to leave her on the bottom of the river if she ever dared to defy him like this again.
Then his rage took an uglier, more predictable turn.
It took him days to calm down after that episode. She’d had to steer clear of him after work until he changed out of his suit and left for the evening. He was gone a lot more these days. So if she timed it just right, she could get back well before dark and be locked inside her room when he stumbled back in for what was left of the night.
That was her hope today.
She looked at the angle of the sun and tightened her hold on the bag. If she hurried, she’d have plenty of time. She hopped across to the next flat rock. Water swirled around it like it was caught up in some kind of crazy dance. The way it rolled and gurgled beneath her feet was almost funny.
She didn’t fear the water because it was deep.
She didn’t fear the water at all.
It was land that terrified her.
Chapter 1
The hardest part of this job was all the waiting around.
Well. Maybe that was the second hardest part. Learning how to drive this damn truck was no cakewalk either—especially for her. Navigationally challenged. That’s what her father called her. But that didn’t seem fair—or accurate. She didn’t have trouble finding things—she just had some problems parking once she got there. Sometimes, though, she got lucky and that task wasn’t as difficult as it was most days.
Like today. This stop on the route was one of the simpler ones because it was in a fairly desolate location where there wasn’t a lot of traffic. It was really just a crossroads. A spot in the middle of Jefferson County where the two-lane blacktop that ran alongside the river veered off and intersected a wide gravel lane that led to a bunch of farms. All she had to do here was get the truck pulled over to the edge of the gravel without slipping into the runoff ditch.
That had already happened. Twice.
But now she knew better and she had some good visual markers to help her know how close she could get without going too far. She had figured out that if she lined the left wall of Joe Baxter’s corncrib up with the right front bumper of the truck, she’d be positioned in a way that she could make a clean U-turn when it was time to leave. Not having to back up was a good thing. In her life, that bit of wisdom always held true, even when it had nothing to do with driving this bookmobile.
It seemed incredible to her that so many of the things that helped her in this job were also true in the rest of her life. It had taken her a while to figure that one out. Charlie said that was because she tended not to look at “the big picture,” but instead stayed focused on all the things in her path that might trip her up.
Roma Jean found it hard to disagree with that assessment. She’d always been pretty famous for falling over things. Especially when those “things” were great big distractions that loomed up out of no place and obscured her ability to see anything else. It wasn’t fair that real life didn’t offer up its own brand of visual markers that worked like Joe Baxter’s corncrib. More than once she wished for any kind of reference point that would keep her from sliding into other kinds of ditches. But if those markers existed, she sure didn’t see them. Not often, anyway. Consequently, she found herself spending a lot of time hauling herself out of the ditches that ran along both sides of the middle ground that defined her life.
The good news was that she tended to emerge from these forays less banged-up than the bookmobile. It helped that nobody else could really tell when she went off the rails. That’s what her uncle Cletus called it when somebody acted crazy. “Off the rails.” Of course, he was usually talking about Gramma Azalea, and in her case, that was a pretty accurate description.
It was slow here today. She’d already been parked in this spot for nearly fifteen minutes and nobody had shown up yet. That made her worry a little bit. Henry Lawrence was nearly always here waiting on her when she pulled up. He’d been living with his father in a small apartment over Junior’s Garage since last summer, when his dad got out of the army. James Lawrence had lost a leg when the transport vehicle he was driving hit a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Now he divided his time between working on engine repairs at Junior’s and delivering mobile homes for Cougar’s Flag Cars. When the mobile home business was good and James was away on overnight trips, Henry would move back into his room at the farm with Dr. Stevenson and Miss Murphy.
It wasn’t hot outside today, so she didn’t have the air conditioning going. She jumped at any excuse not to run the van’s noisy generator, even if that meant not being able to have the inside lights on. The gas-powered generator shook, rattled and thundered like a jet airplane engine, and it made the books on the
shelves vibrate. Miss Murphy had sent the truck out to Junior’s twice to have it checked out, but both times Junior said there was nothing wrong with it except that it was old. Miss Murphy wasn’t surprised by that. She’d bought the thing second-hand from some small library system in central North Carolina and everything on it was pretty beat-up. They’d had plans to fix it up, but Miss Murphy wanted to get it into service as quickly as possible. That meant they’d be having it worked on it during the days it wasn’t parked along some county road. At least Bert Townsend’s boy, Buddy, came by the library and kept it all washed and shining. Still, she wished they had time to paint over the ginormous red, yellow and orange sunburst logo that proclaimed “GET CHECKED OUT!” in two-foot-high, psychedelic letters. That part was really embarrassing—especially when Roma Jean was first learning how to drive it and kept crashing into mailboxes, trash cans and the drive-through awning at Aunt Bea’s.
The first time she pulled the big van into the lot at Freemantle’s Market (and nearly took out a row of gas pumps), her father came outside, took a gander at it, shook his head, and told her the dang thing looked like a mobile dating service.
They’d only been running it on the weekends but now that summer was here, Roma Jean would be operating it full-time. That meant a lot more stops in remote locations like this one. Miss Murphy was excited about extending library services to people who lived out in what she called the “backcountry” areas of the county. “We have an obligation to reach out to people who don’t have the ability to travel to the branch in Jericho,” she told the county supervisors. Of course, they all agreed with her, but they were unwilling to commit any more money to the library. So Miss Murphy made them a deal they couldn’t refuse: Put up the money to pay the salary for a summer intern, and she’d buy the damn bookmobile herself.
So here Roma Jean was, late on a Friday afternoon, making her last stop of the day. She heard the telltale creaking of the metal steps that announced the arrival of a patron.
Finally.
She got up from the driver’s seat and ducked back into the darker recesses of the bookmobile.
A young girl was standing there, blinking her eyes to adjust to the low light. She smiled when she recognized Roma Jean.
“Hey, Miss Freemantle.” The girl held up a plastic Food City bag. “I finished that book you gave me last week.”
Roma Jean reached out to take it from her. “Hey, Dorothy. Did you like it?”
Dorothy nodded. “A lot. Are there more books like this one?”
Roma Jean pulled the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird out of the bag. “I bet we can find something else you’ll like just as much.”
“I might need two books this time. I won’t be able to come back next week.”
“Oh, really?” Roma Jean checked Dorothy’s book back in and returned it to a shelf. “Is there a school holiday or something?”
“No.” Dorothy shook her head but didn’t offer any other details.
Roma Jean was tempted to follow up with more questions, but something about the girl’s expression made her think twice about that—not something she usually did. But they had read Pride and Prejudice in her freshman English class, and she was trying hard to be more like its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. “Keep your breath to cool your porridge,” Miss Bennet told the arrogant Mr. Darcy. Then she went on to play the piano and sing.
Roma Jean couldn’t play the piano worth anything. And her singing voice made her father’s beagles howl.
“Do you play the piano?” she asked Dorothy.
The girl blinked at her.
“I’m sorry. I guess that was kinda random. I just read a book called Pride and Prejudice in school, and all the ladies in it play the piano.”
“It’s okay,” Dorothy said. “We don’t have a piano.”
“We do. But it’s ancient and half the ivory is gone from the keys. I used to get splinters when I had to take lessons.”
“Why’d they make you take lessons?”
Roma Jean shrugged. “Beats me. Mama said it was supposed to teach me deportment.”
Dorothy looked confused. “What’s that?”
“It has something to do with being a lady.”
“How does playing a beat-up piano make you more of a lady?”
“If I knew the answer to that, my life would be a whole lot simpler.”
Dorothy seemed to accept that explanation at face value. “I don’t know very many ladies, so I don’t know how they’re different from the rest of us.”
Roma Jean thought about Dr. Stevenson and Miss Murphy. Nobody would argue that they weren’t ladies. Even though they didn’t have an ordinary relationship—at least not by Jericho standards. “I think they handle stuff better.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know. Stuff. Like how to react when things don’t go your way. Or what to do when you’re really frustrated and nobody else understands it.” She thought some more about Elizabeth Bennet and her run-ins with the awful Lady Catherine de Bourgh. “Or how to defend yourself when somebody really mean accuses you of things you didn’t do.”
Dorothy rolled her eyes. “That last part would be good to know even if you weren’t trying to be a lady.”
Roma Jean thought that was an odd comment. “Is somebody being mean to you, Dorothy?”
Dorothy never got a chance to answer because they were interrupted by the sound of feet pounding on the gravel outside. Little Henry Lawrence skidded to a halt just outside the door of the van. He was out of breath and his arms were full of oversized flat books. Half of his shirttail had come untucked and his bangs were hanging down in his eyes. He shook his head and tried to blow the hair back away from his face. He was only moderately successful. He smiled when he saw them both inside.
“Hey, Miss Freemantle. Hey, Dorothy. Am I too late?”
“Nope.” Roma Jean walked over to meet him. “Come on inside. You’ve still got plenty of time to pick out something new.”
“Okay.” He climbed up the metal steps. “Do you have more of those Harry books?”
Roma Jean took the stack of Gene Zion classics from him. “I don’t think so, Henry. You pretty much read them all.”
His face fell. “I like that dog.”
Roma Jean reached across the narrow aisle and pulled a book off a lower shelf. “I think you might like this one a lot, too. It has two dogs in it—and one of them is a yellow retriever.”
His eyes grew wide. “Like Pete?”
Roma Jean smiled at him. Pete was Dr. Stevenson’s dog. “Like Pete with short hair. Only not as old.” She handed him the copy of The Incredible Journey.
He opened it and quickly scanned the pages. “It has a lot of words.”
“It does. You’ll have to ask someone to read it with you.”
He sighed and handed the book back to her.
Dorothy reached out for it. “How about I check it out and help you read it, Henry?”
He looked at her with excitement. “Really?”
Dorothy nodded. “But you keep it at your house and bring it with you on bookmobile days.” She looked at Roma Jean. “Can we keep it an extra-long time?”
“You sure can.” Roma Jean smiled at her. “Now let’s find a new book for you.”
“Two books, if that’s okay,” Dorothy reminded her.
“Wanna try this one?” Roma Jean handed her a copy of Cold Sassy Tree. The Olive Ann Burns book was one of her favorites. She didn’t worry that the book was too advanced. She knew that Dorothy was already reading things that were far beyond her seventh-grade level. “It has a small-town setting, too.”
Henry pulled a dog-eared paperback off a shelf. “This one must be good, too.” He handed it to Dorothy. “There are nine copies of it. I counted them.”
Dorothy showed the book to Roma Jean.
Fifty Shades of Grey.
“Um.” Roma Jean held out her hand. “Probably not this one.”
“Why not?” Henry looked confused. “Wh
at’s it about?”
“It’s about . . .” Roma Jean deliberated. “Games. Grown-ups who play games.”
“I like games.” Henry looked at Dorothy. “Don’t you like games?”
Dorothy was too busy watching Roma Jean to reply.
“There are a lot of copies,” Henry continued. “We can both get one.”
Roma Jean knew she was blushing.
Dorothy seemed to take pity on her. “I don’t think this one is right for us, Henry.”
“How come?”
“I think maybe it’s too . . . advanced.”
Henry squinted behind his bangs. “What does that mean?”
They all jumped when they heard a throat being cleared.
Dorothy and Henry turned in unison toward the open door. A tall, blonde woman wearing sunglasses and a brown uniform stood just outside. She had an odd smile on her face.
“Charlie!” Henry raced toward her.
Charlie Davis scooped Henry up and gave him a warm hug. “How’re you doing, short stack?”
“Good!” Henry hugged her back. “Roma Jean is giving us some books to read, Charlie.”
“So I see.” Charlie pushed her sunglasses up on her head and took note of the book Roma Jean was holding. “Interesting choice. Care to elaborate?”
“Oh.” Roma Jean waved the book around in an ill-fated attempt at finding a place to stash it. She finally gave up and dropped the hand holding it to her side. “I wasn’t . . . they weren’t . . . we didn’t . . .”
“It’s about games,” Henry clarified. “But Dorothy says they’re too ’vanced for us.”
Charlie set Henry back on his feet. “I think Dorothy is right, pal. But I have to wonder,” she smiled sweetly at Roma Jean, whose face was now beet red. “Does our librarian here think these games are too ’vanced for me, too?”
Charlie smiled at her with that smug expression that always caused Roma Jean’s heart to do somersaults.
Roma Jean closed her eyes.
It was always the same. Two seconds after Charlie showed up, her composure would evaporate and she’d veer right off the rails into the nearest ditch.