Lightning

“But didn’t you feel terrible—breaking their things?”

“It was harder for Ruth than me,” Thelma said. “I’ve got the devil in me, while Ruth is the reincarnation of an obscure, treacly, fourteenth-century nun whose name we’ve not yet ascertained.”

Within one day Laura knew she did not want to remain in the care of the Teagel family, but she tried to make it work because at first she thought their company was preferable to returning to McIlroy.

Real life was just a misty backdrop to Flora Teagel, for whom only crossword puzzles were of interest. She spent days and evenings at the table in her yellow kitchen, wrapped in a cardigan regardless of the weather, working through books of crossword puzzles one after another with a dedication both astonishing and idiotic.

She usually spoke to Laura only to give her lists of chores and to seek help with knotty crossword clues. As Laura stood at the sink, washing dishes, Flora might say, “What’s a seven-letter word for cat?”

Laura’s answer was always the same: “I don’t know.”

” ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ ” Mrs. Teagel mocked. “You don’t seem to know anything, girl. Aren’t you paying attention in school? Don’t you care about language, about words?”

Laura, of course, was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells. But to Flora Teagel, words were game chips needed to fill blank puzzle squares, annoyingly elusive clusters of letters that frustrated her.

Flora’s husband, Mike, was a squat, baby-faced truck driver. He spent evenings in an armchair, poring over the National Enquirer and its clones, absorbing useless facts from dubious stories about alien contact and devil-worshiping movie stars. His taste for what he called “exotic news” would have been harmless if he’d been as self-absorbed as his wife, but he often popped in on Laura when she was doing chores or in those rare moments when she was given time for homework, and he insisted on reading aloud the more bizarre articles.

She thought these stories were stupid, illogical, pointless, but she could not tell him so. She had learned that he would not be offended if she said his newspapers were rubbish. Instead he’d regard her pityingly; then with maddening patience, with an infuriating know-it-all manner found only in the overeducated and totally ignorant, he would proceed to explain how the world worked. At length. Repeatedly. “Laura, you’ve got a lot to learn. The big shots who run things in Washington, they know about the aliens and the secrets of Atlantis …”

As different as Flora was from Mike, they shared one belief: that the purpose of sheltering a foster child was to obtain a free servant. Laura was expected to clean, do laundry, iron clothes, and cook.

Their own daughter—Hazel, an only child—was two years older than Laura and thoroughly spoiled. Hazel never cooked, washed dishes, did laundry, or cleaned house. Though she was just fourteen, she had perfectly manicured, painted fingernails and toenails. If you had deducted from her age the number of hours she had spent primping in front of a mirror, she would have been only five years old.

“On laundry day,” she explained on Laura’s first day in the Teagel house, “you must press my clothes first. And always be sure that you hang them in my closet arranged according to color.”

I’ve read this book and seen this movie, Laura thought. Gad, I’ve got the lead in Cinderella.

“I’m going to be a major movie star or a model,” Hazel said. “So my face, hands, and body are my future. I’ve got to protect them.”

When Mrs. Ince—the wire-thin, whippet-faced child-welfare worker assigned to the case—paid a scheduled visit to the Teagel house on Saturday morning, September 16, Laura intended to demand to be returned to McIlroy Home. The threat posed by Willy Sheener had come to seem less of a problem than everyday life with the Teagels.

Mrs. Ince arrived on schedule to find Flora washing the first dishes she had washed in two weeks. Laura was sitting at the kitchen table, apparently working a crossword puzzle that in fact had been shoved into her hands only when the doorbell had rung.

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