“What’s the matter, Penny? Don’t you believe in cooperating with your local law enforcement officers?”
She was staring at the road intently. “Like that matters to you, Gramps. We could find out easy enough if Ross is out there without help from Deputy Dawg. I don’t get it.”
He stretched his lanky frame and shrugged. “You don’t have to get it, Penny. You just have to do what you’re told.”
She pouted in silence a moment, then said, “He’ll just get in the way, Gramps. You’ll see.”
Findo Gask smiled. Right you are, Penny, he thought. That’s just exactly what he’ll do. I’m counting on it.
CHAPTER 4
Driving home from church, Nest Freemark brooded some more about John Ross. It was a futile exercise, one that darkened her mood considerably more than she intended. Ross was a flashpoint for all the things about her life that troubled her. Even though he wasn’t directly responsible for any of them, he was the common link. By the time she parked the car in her driveway and climbed out, she was ready to get back in again and start driving to some other time zone.
She went inside resignedly, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him from coming to see her if that’s what he intended to do, nothing she could do to prevent yet another upheaval in her life. She changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled on heavy walking shoes, then went into the kitchen to fix herself some lunch. She sat alone at the worn, wooden table she had shared with Gran for so many years, wondering what advice the old lady would give her about John Ross. She could just imagine. Gran had been a no-nonsense sort, the kind who took life’s challenges as they came and dealt with them as best she could. She hadn’t been the sort to fantasize about possibilities and what-ifs. It was a lesson that hadn’t been lost on her granddaughter.
Polishing off a glass of milk and a sandwich of leftover chicken, she pulled on her winter parka and walked out the back door. Tomorrow was the winter solstice, and the days had shortened to barely more than eight hours. Already the sun was dropping westward, marking the passing of the early afternoon. By four-thirty, it would be dark. Even so, the air felt warm this winter day, and she left her parka open, striding across her backyard toward the hedgerow and the park. Her old sandbox and tire swing were gone, crumbled with age and lack of use years ago. The trees and bushes were a tangle of bare, skeletal limbs, webbing across the blue sky, casting odd shadows on the wintry gray-green grass. It was a time of sleep, of the old year and its seasons passing into the new, of waiting patiently for rebirth. Nest Freemark wondered if her own life was keeping pace or just standing still.
She pushed through a gap in the bare branches of the hedge and crossed the service road that ran behind her house. Sinnissippi Park stretched away before her, barren and empty in the winter light. The crossbar at the entrance was down. Residents living in the houses that crowded up against its edges walked their dogs and themselves and played with their kids in the snow when there was snow to be played in, but there was no one about at the moment. In the evenings, weather permitting, the park opened from six to ten at night for tobogganing on the park slide and ice skating on the bayou.
If the temperature dropped and the forecast for snow proved out, both would be open by tomorrow night.
She hiked deliberately toward the cliffs, passing through a familiar stand of spruce clustered just beyond the backstop of the nearest baseball diamond, and Pick dropped from its branches onto her shoulder.
“You took your sweet time getting out here!” he snapped irritably, settling himself in place against the down folds of her collar.
“Church ran a little long,” she replied, refusing to be baited. Pick was always either irritable or coming up on it, so she was used to his abrupt pronouncements and sometimes scathing rebukes. “You probably got a lot done without me anyway.”