Night Light

  “It’s gone,” Joey said in a raspy voice. “He took our money.”

  Edith was screaming, grabbing people, trying to get them to help her. It served her right. He supposed it might serve them right too, but there was nothing he could do about it now. The rage that had been beating through his throat suddenly turned to sorrow. For the first time in his life he felt helpless.

  Tears ran down Joey’s dirty face. “She double-crossed us. She lied. We shoulda known.” He shoved Aaron, knocking him back. “I told you, Aaron. But no, you were so smart.”

  Aaron didn’t fight back.

  “We shoulda stayed with the Brannings. At least they were gonna take care of us with the money. But now they’ll never take us back. You think you know everything, Aaron, but you don’t, you stupid idiot!”

  Aaron hated himself for crying, but he couldn’t stop the tears. He just stood there, letting his brother’s words hammer him. Sarah’s wounded cries only made it worse.

  “You told us to trust you,” Joey ranted. “You said you knew what you were doing. But you don’t, Aaron!”

  Aaron slapped the tears rolling down his face. “I’ll get it back. I’ll find out who that man is, and we’ll steal it back from him and more.”

  “How? We don’t have a gun any more. We don’t have anything!”

  “Aaron!” Aaron heard his name and turned. Doug and Kay Branning were rushing toward them.

  But being found didn’t even matter anymore. Even the Brannings would leave them alone as soon as they knew they’d lost the money.

  They were of no use to anyone now.

  forty-two

  KAY RAN TOWARD THE GATLIN KIDS. LITTLE SARAH STOOD crying with bleeding, skinned knees, her hair stuffed up in a baseball cap. Joey and Aaron were crying too. Luke just watched them all with horror in his eyes.

  She fell to her knees in front of the little girl. “Sarah, are you all right? Did you fall?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Kay picked her up and pulled the cap off her head. Her curls were soaked with sweat. She pulled Sarah into a hard hug, then kissed Luke on the cheek and stooped down in front of Aaron and Joey.

  “We thought we’d never find you,” she cried. “Where have you been?”

  Aaron couldn’t answer.

  “We’ve been listening to this idiot,” Joey said, pointing to his brother. “Doing everything he said. He had this great idea that Edith was gonna help us get our money. But she stole it from us, and then some guy stole it from her!”

  Kay closed her eyes as the news sank in. She looked up at Doug.

  He mopped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “Did you know the guy? Can you describe him?”

  “He was tall and fast,” Aaron bit out. “That’s all I know.”

  Doug looked down at them, his eyes full of so much frustration that Aaron expected him to spit on them and walk away. But he didn’t. “Aaron, we’ll go report it to the sheriff,” Doug said. “Maybe someone around here saw it and knows who he was.”

  Kay’s heart sank. These poor kids. They’d been lured and double-crossed, tricked and deceived far too often. It made her sick. She wanted to find Edith and slap her face. How dare people treat children this way? She was glad Edith’s money had been stolen. She didn’t deserve any.

  “It’s okay,” Aaron snarled. “We don’t need the stinking money. I took good care of my sister and brothers before today and I can do it again. I don’t need no adults. I don’t need nothing!”

  Doug’s face softened, and he looked at Kay. She brought her fingertips to her lips as tears rolled down her face. Doug ruffled Aaron’s hair. “Son, I know this is bad. But it’s not the end of the world. I want you to come home with us. It’ll be all right.”

  Aaron gaped at him. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have the money. We don’t know the guy who took it. You’re not gonna get anything out of us.”

  “I don’t care about the money,” Doug said. “We got our disbursement, and it’ll have to be enough.”

  “But you said you couldn’t take care of us if we didn’t have the money,” Aaron said. “You said you needed it to feed us.”

  Doug bent down and looked into his eyes. “Listen to me. God will provide. We’re not letting you go back on the street just because we can’t get your money. I told you in the beginning we weren’t in it for the money. It would have helped, sure. But we’ll manage.”

  Kay touched his shoulder. “He’s right, Aaron. We’ll be fine.”

  Aaron shook his head. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because God loves you,” she said, “and he put that love for you in our hearts.”

  Aaron looked at Doug, searching his eyes.

  “It’s true, Aaron. We want to help you find your family, people who will love you and take care of you even without getting something out of it.”

  Kay lifted Sarah onto her hip, and the little girl looked down at her brother. “Please, Aaron,” she said, hiccupping her sobs. “Can’t we go back?”

  Kay saw the confusion on his face. “People aren’t nice for nothing,” he bit out.

  Joey spoke up. “But they haven’t been mean to us, Aaron, and they don’t make us work any harder than their own kids. We got a nice comfortable bed to sleep in at night and food and clean water.” He lifted his chin, brooking no debate. “I’m going back.”

  Aaron looked from Kay to Doug, as if giving them one final assessment.

  “What are you waiting for?” Joey cried. “Maybe they’re telling the truth. Maybe they’re just good people!”

  “Please, Aaron.” Kay reached down and touched his face, wiped the tears from his cheek. “We want to help you, son. Come home with us.”

  Aaron couldn’t seem to speak, but slowly he nodded his head, clearly too tired to fight anymore.

  forty-three

  “WHAT A DAY!” KAY FELL INTO BED THAT NIGHT SO EXHAUSTED that she’d almost been too tired to change clothes. “Ten weeks ago, who would have dreamed that we would stand in line for six hours to get 150 dollars and then beg four orphaned children to come live with us?”

  “These are the times we live in.” Doug pulled the sheet back and got in.

  “At least we’ve convinced them to stay.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  She propped herself on an elbow and looked down at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they still may be planning an escape.”

  “Why? They don’t have any money, and they know now that no one at the apartments is going to help them.”

  “They may try to get our money and take off again. That’s why I’m sleeping with the money on me tonight.” He reached into the pocket of the jogging shorts he slept in and pulled out the roll of bills.

  She sighed and collapsed on her pillow. “You’re right.”

  “Tomorrow I’m going to the apartments to confront that Edith woman,” he said. “Maybe she knows who robbed her. At least we can tell the sheriff. It’s a long shot, but maybe he can get the money back.”

  “I feel sorry for her,” Kay said. “Now she’s without anything.”

  Doug just gaped at her. “Sorry for her? Are you kidding? That conniving woman exploited and abused these children. She deserves everything that happened … and jail too.”

  Kay stared at the darkness. “I know. But think of how she feels right now. She’s got to be devastated. She’ll need help.”

  “Well, she’ll benefit from our work at the apartments. But that’s all I’ll do for her.”

  A moment of silence followed. Then Doug kicked off his sheet and turned on his side, facing her. He braced his elbow on his pillow and propped his head up. “You’ve changed, you know,” he said softly.

  She looked up at him. His eyes were soft in the moonlight coming through the window. “What do you mean?”

  He ran his knuckle along her cheekbone, outlining the shape of her face. “I mean, you’re more caring now. More selfless. You’re willing to do hard things even w
hen it costs you.”

  She smiled and turned her face to kiss his hand. “I just took the lead from you.”

  “Really? Because I don’t feel all that giving right now. Sometimes I feel like I’m just going through the motions.”

  She turned on her side and stroked the stubble on his jaw. “I think that’s okay. Love is more about what we do than how we feel.”

  He grinned and moved closer to her. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s about how we feel.”

  He kissed her then, a long, slow, stirring kiss that reminded her of all the reasons she’d fallen in love with him. She needed that reminder.

  LATER, WHEN THOSE BARRIERS OF WEARINESS AND DUTY HAD MELTED away and they felt once again like beloved partners, they lay snuggled together, waiting for sleep to come.

  “Doug?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a bad feeling that instead of making things better for us, the disbursement is going to make things more evil. I’m afraid there will be more robberies and murders.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, too,” he said. “We’ll just have to be alert. We can’t let our guard down. But God has brought us this far.”

  “I feel safe with you,” she whispered.

  He reached down beside the bed and felt the rifle lying there, once again resolving to use it if he needed to.

  forty-four

  THE INFUSION OF CASH INTO THE ECONOMY HAD ALLOWED some of the stores to open in Crockett, and when the first passenger locomotive came through town the day after the disbursement, Deni went to the station and covered the story for her little newspaper.

  The sight of travelers getting off the train and running into the arms of loved ones broke her heart. Craig could have come — or she could have gone to him. But that was all over now. She wondered how soon he’d get her breakup letter. When he got it, would it faze him, or would he just toss it on his desk and get back to business? It had taken him a week to read her letters before. Would he read that one in one sitting?

  Things would soon get a little easier at home; her parents had bought some kerosene and made some lamps, so that they had light in more of the rooms at night. Now she could work on her paper in the quiet of her room without having to sit at the kitchen table while everyone hovered around. With four extra people in the house, it was getting a little crowded. She wished they’d been as successful with buying the chickens, though. It might be weeks before their order was filled.

  To celebrate the disbursement and the striking of water in the well, Oak Hollow planned a celebration for Friday night. There wouldn’t be food there, since no one could spare any, but they had lined up every musician in the neighborhood and some outside Oak Hollow to come and play. They could dance and mingle and find some relief from the labor that had occupied every waking hour these last few weeks. Deni looked forward to the reprieve. She needed a break from her melancholy.

  In the meantime, her father was bent on making Edith pay for her greed. When he went to confront the woman at Sandwood Place, Deni went with him. The conniving woman met them at the door with swollen eyes, wearing a hollow look of desperation. “What do you want?”

  Her father’s voice was steady, though a current of anger drifted on his tone. “We understand you took the Gatlin children’s disbursements.”

  “So? Not like I have anything to show for it.” She thrust out her arm. “Here, take it out of a vein if you want.”

  If her father had any plans of reaming the woman, her pitiful look stopped him. “Who took it, Edith?”

  “If I knew, don’t you think I’d have gotten it back by now? If I ever see that man’s face again, I’ll claw his eyes out.”

  Deni grunted at Edith’s righteous indignation. “When you stole it from the kids, did you really think you’d get away with it?”

  “Look, I got mine, okay? Is that what you wanted? I don’t have the money. I can’t give it back. But my life has been pure misery since then. My neighbor three doors down is dead ’cause somebody broke into her apartment the night of the disbursement and stole her money. The man in 16D got in a fight over his. Now he’s dead too. That money was supposed to help! It was supposed to make things better!”

  Deni’s anger shattered, and she looked at her father. His face changed, and that hard glint in his eyes softened.

  “It’s so easy for you to come telling me how to live!” Edith spat out. “I saw that house you live in! You have well water, you have food growing — ”

  “That’s because we work hard, Edith,” Doug cut in. “So can you. That’s why I’ve been trying to help. If you would quit trying to figure out shortcuts and get used to the idea of hard work, you’d be able to make it.”

  She tried to close the door. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  Doug stopped her from closing it. “Give me their things and we’ll leave. They need their clothes, and I want the bikes they stole from us that night.”

  She left them at the door and came back with the kids’ bags. Thrusting them at Doug, she said, “I put the bikes in their apartment. I should’ve sold them. Have a nice life. Someday you’ll get yours.”

  The door slammed.

  Doug stared at the wood grain for a moment, his jaw clenching. Deni waited, expecting her father to let out a rare curse or kick the door, like she wanted to do. But he didn’t.

  “Hard to feel sorry for her, huh?” Deni asked.

  Her father’s lips stretched tight over his teeth.

  “She’s kind of like that Haman guy in Esther,” Deni said, “with her wicked scheme coming back to bite her. She deserves what happened to her.”

  He sighed then and turned away from the door. “Come on, let’s get the bikes.”

  She followed him to the Gatlins’ door. He opened it with Aaron’s key and rolled the bikes out.

  “We shouldn’t help her with all the others who live here, Dad. We should let her clean up her own garbage and walk five miles for water.”

  “We can’t do that, Deni. Whatever we do for the others, we’ll do for her too.”

  Deni blew out her frustration. “I knew you’d say that. But anybody would understand if we didn’t include her.”

  “It’s not anyone I’m trying to please, Deni. It’s God. And I have my marching orders.”

  forty-five

  THE PARTY DIDN’T START UNTIL EIGHT O’CLOCK FRIDAY night, after the sun went down and the temperature cooled. Citronella candles, every one the neighbors could gather, cast a sweet glow around the place. Several of the musicians in Crockett had gotten a band together and were playing from a truck bed in the street. Jeff had been invited to join them on his guitar. Someone had lifted a piano into the truck bed, and musicians with fiddles, guitars, trumpets, saxophones, and drums accompanied it as they played everything from bluegrass to rock and roll. The road had become a dance floor, and everyone from ages two to eighty-five was making use of it.

  Determined to feel festive, Deni had made herself put on makeup tonight and had washed her hair before she’d come. Instead of the T-shirts and shorts she’d been wearing every day for the last two months, she’d pulled on a pair of her jeans and a red silk blouse. The jeans were now so big on her that they threatened to fall off, but she laced a belt through the loops to hold them up. She supposed everybody’s clothes were loose these days.

  A few months ago, she’d have killed for the body she had today. She’d have paid big bucks and worked out for hours a day, stepping and cycling, to get into this kind of shape. Now it came naturally. She wasn’t complaining. It was just too bad Craig would never see it.

  She sat in a lawn chair sipping the cool water from their well, watching the neighbors they’d gotten to know so well over the last few weeks. Eloise, the dear lady who lived across the street, had been too weak to walk over, so Kay had brought her in a borrowed wheelchair. Deni watched her mom serving the cancer victim, who seemed to be having a wonderful time.

  On the street, Judith and Brad, her next-door neighbors,
danced and laughed. It had been a long time since there had been so much laughter in this neighborhood.

  On the grass near the lake, Beth had rounded up most of the neighborhood children and was working on the play she had written. It was an ambitious undertaking — a musical about David and Goliath — but it was a nice diversion for the children.

  Mark sat next to Deni and Chris, his chair tilted back on two legs. He was still something of an outcast here, so he stuck close to the two who accepted him. There were others who sat quietly like outcasts, their faces soft and longing. Amber Rowe seemed that way as she sat nearby, watching her children spin and play. Her husband had left her and moved in with some woman just before the outage; since then, he’d been around only once or twice to see the kids and had done little to help her survive. Amber was clearly still mourning.

  And Cathy Morton, the doctor’s pregnant young wife, sat by herself, watching her husband with jealous eyes. Deni couldn’t blame her. He’d been known to wander, and he hadn’t quite grasped the fact that his wife needed security at this vulnerable time in her life.

  Deni followed Cathy’s gaze to the doctor and saw him coming toward them. She hoped he wasn’t coming to talk to her.

  The doctor, who had the look of a California surfer dude, had Chris as his target. “Hey, Chris. Want to dance?”

  Chris glanced uncomfortably across at Cathy. “Doc, I think it would be better if you danced with your wife.”

  “Hey, I’m just being friendly,” he said, “trying to bond with my nurse, that’s all.”

  She forced a smile. “I just don’t feel like dancing right now. It’s too hot.”

  He moseyed off into the crowd, and Deni gave Chris a look. “What’s up with that?”

  Chris rolled her eyes. “I like working for him. I mean, it’s the only place I can get a job right now. But sometimes I feel like he’s coming on to me, you know? I just don’t trust him. I mean, maybe his intentions are good, maybe he is just trying to be friendly, but I know his history.”