treacherous, that his little feet would not stick to the stair. Smithy was his main catcher.
Dad took a great shot of Smithy helping Tris down.
In no time, stairs were history. Tris ran, crayoned, wore little blue jeans with stitching on the seams. Smithy turned up the cuffs so he’d be fashionable. He had little baseball shirts and little train engineer overalls. When he began talking, he was such fun, Smithy could hardly stand it.
But to get Tris, they lost Mom.
Smithy thinks of this every day, sometimes every hour.
And every day, sometimes every hour, she thinks of her mother’s final assignment: you and Madison be the best big sisters on earth.
Angus will want me to discuss that on television, she thinks now. That’s the point. Crawl inside their little hearts and souls, scrounge around, leave them stripped and sobbing in front of the world.
“I have to hit the girls’ room,” she says casually, releasing her seat belt before Angus can end his smile. “Meet you in the parking lot.” She’s out, slamming the door behind her. Cars move forward and Angus has to drive up one. He cannot see her now and he cannot get out of line.
Also caught in the take-out line is a TV van. Probably even vampires like French fries.
Smithy darts in to find McDonald’s packed with teenagers—not surprising, since Saybrook High is next door. She peels off her jacket, turns it inside out so only the white fleece shows and walks out with a high school group. It happens so quickly that Angus probably hasn’t moved up a car length.
The teenagers don’t notice her. They’re laughing hystericallyat nothing much, crashing into each other on purpose and high-fiving. She walks faster than they do, using them as a screen.
* * *
Tris proves how quickly he can climb, while Madison and Jack take a position behind the beanbag chairs. They are not invisible to the librarian—the library is arranged so that there is no such thing—but the staff pays no attention. They think nothing of two teenagers and a toddler early one Friday afternoon; home-schooled kids are here all the time.
“Say you’re right,” says Jack. “Say Cheryl did it. Why? What would make her do that?”
A TV cop show requires a complex, gruesome murder within the first minute. But this is life, where murder doesn’t happen. Only breakfast happens, and then school, and you outgrow your clothes and watch a little TV, and your friends come over.
Madison has a hard time squashing a spider. She can’t watch Animal Planet because some poor dog gets hit by a car or some little meerkat roasts in the Kalahari sun. And she and her brother are actually discussing the possibility that their very own father, the one they need so much and can never replace, was killed by another person?
Madison cannot think of a reason to kill anybody, never mind Dad. Furthermore, she isn’t just postulating that Cheryl killed Dad. She’s saying Cheryl blamed a two-year-old for it, thereby taking a second life—Tris’s. And now, Cheryl plans to chop it up, burn it and make a TV show out of it.
“If we accused her, Cheryl would get a lawyer,” says Jack. “The lawyer will point out that individual vehicles behave individually. Some Jeep in a parking lot has nothing to do with Dad’s Jeep a year ago. I don’t think the police ever investigated, you know. Nobody ever asked for Dad’s stuff, not even his laptop and his briefcase. I have them in the attic over the garage. A real investigation includes fingerprints. If Aunt Cheryl had ever been questioned or fingerprinted, we’d know. She’d have whined for months.”
No police investigation?
It occurs to Madison that in letting go, the police might have been trying to help Tris. Maybe the cops had little boys of their own and just couldn’t go there. It’s a little kid, they probably thought, wincing. Make this nightmare longer and deeper? Nah, let’s drop it.
“Or Cheryl could shrug and say Dad goofed up,” says
Dad took a great shot of Smithy helping Tris down.
In no time, stairs were history. Tris ran, crayoned, wore little blue jeans with stitching on the seams. Smithy turned up the cuffs so he’d be fashionable. He had little baseball shirts and little train engineer overalls. When he began talking, he was such fun, Smithy could hardly stand it.
But to get Tris, they lost Mom.
Smithy thinks of this every day, sometimes every hour.
And every day, sometimes every hour, she thinks of her mother’s final assignment: you and Madison be the best big sisters on earth.
Angus will want me to discuss that on television, she thinks now. That’s the point. Crawl inside their little hearts and souls, scrounge around, leave them stripped and sobbing in front of the world.
“I have to hit the girls’ room,” she says casually, releasing her seat belt before Angus can end his smile. “Meet you in the parking lot.” She’s out, slamming the door behind her. Cars move forward and Angus has to drive up one. He cannot see her now and he cannot get out of line.
Also caught in the take-out line is a TV van. Probably even vampires like French fries.
Smithy darts in to find McDonald’s packed with teenagers—not surprising, since Saybrook High is next door. She peels off her jacket, turns it inside out so only the white fleece shows and walks out with a high school group. It happens so quickly that Angus probably hasn’t moved up a car length.
The teenagers don’t notice her. They’re laughing hystericallyat nothing much, crashing into each other on purpose and high-fiving. She walks faster than they do, using them as a screen.
* * *
Tris proves how quickly he can climb, while Madison and Jack take a position behind the beanbag chairs. They are not invisible to the librarian—the library is arranged so that there is no such thing—but the staff pays no attention. They think nothing of two teenagers and a toddler early one Friday afternoon; home-schooled kids are here all the time.
“Say you’re right,” says Jack. “Say Cheryl did it. Why? What would make her do that?”
A TV cop show requires a complex, gruesome murder within the first minute. But this is life, where murder doesn’t happen. Only breakfast happens, and then school, and you outgrow your clothes and watch a little TV, and your friends come over.
Madison has a hard time squashing a spider. She can’t watch Animal Planet because some poor dog gets hit by a car or some little meerkat roasts in the Kalahari sun. And she and her brother are actually discussing the possibility that their very own father, the one they need so much and can never replace, was killed by another person?
Madison cannot think of a reason to kill anybody, never mind Dad. Furthermore, she isn’t just postulating that Cheryl killed Dad. She’s saying Cheryl blamed a two-year-old for it, thereby taking a second life—Tris’s. And now, Cheryl plans to chop it up, burn it and make a TV show out of it.
“If we accused her, Cheryl would get a lawyer,” says Jack. “The lawyer will point out that individual vehicles behave individually. Some Jeep in a parking lot has nothing to do with Dad’s Jeep a year ago. I don’t think the police ever investigated, you know. Nobody ever asked for Dad’s stuff, not even his laptop and his briefcase. I have them in the attic over the garage. A real investigation includes fingerprints. If Aunt Cheryl had ever been questioned or fingerprinted, we’d know. She’d have whined for months.”
No police investigation?
It occurs to Madison that in letting go, the police might have been trying to help Tris. Maybe the cops had little boys of their own and just couldn’t go there. It’s a little kid, they probably thought, wincing. Make this nightmare longer and deeper? Nah, let’s drop it.
“Or Cheryl could shrug and say Dad goofed up,” says
Similar Books
