Shadowmaker (12 page)

“I’m sorry, Katie,” he said, looking so remorseful I wanted to hug him. “I was thinking out loud. I want to take care of you, not frighten you.”

“It’s okay,” I said, although the idea still made me feel a little shaky. “Besides, if something had been left behind we would have seen it when we first cleaned the house.”

“Right,” Travis said. “I told you I was just thinking out loud.” He smiled and added, “I didn’t promise to make sense.”

I could hear Mom banging pans around in the kitchen, so I took his hand and said, “Let’s go in and see what Mom’s cooking. If there’s enough, maybe you’d like to stay for dinner.”

“Thanks, but my folks are expecting me to show up for supper on time.” I took a step forward, but Travis didn’t budge. “Katie,” he said, “According to B.J., you told Mrs. Walgren that Lana Jean probably didn’t throw away the torn-out pages from her journal.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know where they are? I mean, since what she wrote was about me, I’d sort of like to have them.”

I wished he hadn’t asked. The journal pages were Lana Jean’s property, and I had no right to give them to Travis or anyone else. “When Lana Jean turns up, you’ll have to ask her where they are,” I said.

His gaze was penetrating. “I thought you’d know.”

I couldn’t tell Travis I had the missing pages. Lana Jean had trusted me. I tried to make light of the situation and teased, “And you’ll have to get in line behind Mrs. Walgren. Even though she told us she hadn’t read Lana Jean’s journal entries, she wants those papers too.”

Travis followed me up the porch steps. “Can I see you again?”

“I’d like that.”

Travis smiled. “I’ll pass along the word that your mom really is writing a novel. That will give the gossips something to work on, and they’ll stop worrying about what she’s planning for the Hawkins brothers. By the way, is it a sexy romance?”

“Travis! Is that the kind of novel you think a woman would write?” I grinned at his discomfiture and added, “Tell them it’s going to be a blockbuster, a best seller.”

“Soon to be a major motion picture,” he said.

We both laughed. “Thanks for coming over,” I told him. I opened the porch door, holding it wide.

“I’ll track in too much sand,” Travis said, shaking his head. “I’ll just cut around the other side of the house.” He bent toward me, and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he said, “Don’t be afraid, Katie. I don’t think you’re going to have any more trouble.”

He ran down the steps and soon disappeared around the far side of the house.

During dinner I told Mom what Travis had said as he left.

“No more trouble?” Mom repeated. “I hope he knows what he’s talking about. That would be good news.”

Good news?
I wondered,
or wishful thinking?

T
he dogs woke us, and I heard running footsteps along the walkway, but by the time Mom stumbled into the room and we threw back the drapes at the window there was no one in sight. The outside lights allowed us just the glimpse of a car heading back up the road.

“Do you recognize the car?” Mom asked.

“It’s too dark. I couldn’t tell what it was. It might have been a sedan or maybe even a pickup.”

I let the drapes fall back into place and shivered. “Someone ran up to the house just outside my window, Mom. He stopped for only a second, then ran back.”

Mom and I stared at each other for a moment, and I could see, by the sudden fear that widened her eyes, that we were both remembering the stink bomb that had been
tossed into her hotel room two years ago when she was writing about fraud in one of the unions.

“Get into my bedroom,” she said, pushing me so urgently that I slammed a shoulder against the door frame. “If there’s an explosion, climb out the window.”

“Mom! Come with me! You can’t go out there! What if someone really did leave a bomb?”

Panicked, I pulled on her arm, but she pulled back, and our struggle swung us out of the little hallway into the kitchen. Mom suddenly stopped tugging, and I stumbled into her.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the floor just inside the kitchen door. “It’s not a bomb. It’s a letter.”

Neither of us moved to pick it up, watching the small envelope as though it might suddenly slither across the floor and strike.

“It’s only a letter,” Mom finally said, and before I could stop her she broke away from me and picked it up, slipping a single sheet of paper from the open envelope. “Short and to the point,” she said, and read aloud, “ ‘Get out of Kluney before it’s too late.’ ”

The crude threat was corny, sounding as though it came from an old western movie, but the anger that made someone print those words was plain and raw, and it scared me. “Do you think it’s from Harvey Boggs?” I asked.

Mom shrugged. “Harvey Boggs, Belle Dobbs, Bubba Hawkins … Who knows? The warning could be from practically anyone in Kluney.”

“Are you going to call the sheriff?” I asked.

Mom shook her head. “I doubt if it would do any good. I
can hear Sheriff Granger now, complaining that if we didn’t see who shoved the warning under the door, then he couldn’t do anything about it.”

“What are we going to do, Mom?” I asked.

“Stay right here,” she said. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I have a novel to write.”

“Good! That’s it, Mom—” I began, but she interrupted me with a familiar tight, determined expression.

“And this warning makes me all the more interested in discovering exactly what the Hawkins brothers are up to.”

I grabbed her shoulders and begged, “Mom! Don’t go to the waste disposal plant. Forget it!”

“I have to go, Katie.”

“Then promise that you won’t go by yourself. Take me with you. Promise me! Please!”

“All right, Katie,” she said. I didn’t expect her to give in so easily. “I’ll pick you up after school tomorrow, and we’ll drive out to the plant and see if we can get a glimpse of whatever’s inside that fenced-in property that reaches from the main building all the way down to the bayou.”

“That’s all? Just try to get a look inside the fence?”

“It’s a start,” Mom said. “Even if they see us, we have a right to look.”

“What do you expect to see?”

“Fifty-gallon metal drums,” she answered. “Lots of them.”

The next day it was hard for me to keep my mind on what was taking place in class. At lunchtime Tammy cornered me and said in a low voice, “You’re a million miles
away. You didn’t even hear Billy Don when he said hello to you.”

“Billy Don? Why would he say hello to me?”

With a shrug of exasperation she said, “Who knows? Just stop worrying so much about Lana Jean. Face facts. She ran away, and she’ll probably come back before too long, the way she did last time.”

I felt a little guilty, because my mind hadn’t been on Lana Jean. I’d been thinking about the warning note and the Hawkins brothers and what Mom and I planned to do as soon as school let out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I have a lot on my mind.”

“Well, lighten up.” She nudged me.

“Hi, Katie … Tammy.” Travis walked over to our lunch table and climbed over the bench to sit beside me. I was surprised at how glad I was to see him and flattered when Travis paid much more attention to me than to anyone else.

As the warning bell rang we scrambled to our feet, still laughing over a joke Travis had told. He stopped long enough to quietly ask me, “Want a ride home after school?”

I certainly did. I would have loved it, so the regret in my voice was real as I answered, “I’m sorry, Travis. Mom’s coming to pick me up.”

“I thought you rode the school bus.”

“I do, but today Mom’s going to be out running errands and said she’d stop by to get me.”

“Will you be going right home? Can I come over?”

“Not today,” I said. “I’ve got … uh … stuff to do … homework.”

“How about tomorrow? Can I give you a ride home then?”

I smiled. “Tomorrow will be perfect.” But something puzzled me. I’d asked Tammy on the bus that morning who Cindy Jones was, and found out she was the blond, blue-eyed, well-filled-out head cheerleader of the pep squad. With girls like that to choose from, why was Travis interested in me?

Forget the comparisons
, I told myself.
Who cares about the answer?
Maybe the rest of my stay in Kluney wouldn’t be so bad.

Mom was waiting for me as classes let out. I hurried to climb into the car, a little nervous now about what we were going to do.

“What if someone sees us?” I asked Mom as she drove away from the curb and through the double lines of pickup trucks.

“It doesn’t make any difference if anyone sees us or not. Actually, in a place like this everyone sees everything—or everything they want to see,” she said. “But we’ll be on a public road. We won’t be trespassing.”

“You’re not going inside the gates? Are you sure you don’t want to talk to one of the Hawkins brothers?”

“Not yet,” Mom said. “Just getting a look at what’s stored on that huge lot will be enough for now.”

“If there’s something they don’t want you to see, they may hide it.”

“There’s no way to hide a large quantity of fifty-gallon drums.”

I told her, “You could be wrong, you know. You haven’t any proof Anita Boggs is right.”

Mom didn’t answer, and she didn’t take the route that led past Anita Boggs’s house. She drove a roundabout way, following the bayou for a short distance, then heading away from it as the road made an abrupt turn. On our left, leading from the heavy stand of scrub and trees that bordered the bayou, was a high, wooden fence; and on the other side of that fence was the Hawkins Brothers Waste Disposal plant.

“That fence is at least eight feet high and solid,” I said. “How are we going to see anything?”

Mom pulled the car to a stop. “I was hoping the wood would have weathered in places, or that a knothole or two had fallen out,” she said. “Let’s go back to where the fence begins at the bayou.”

Within a few minutes she parked the car at the side of the road, under a tree with wide-spread branches, and opened the door. “Want to try climbing from the car to the tree?” she asked.

“Why not?” I smiled. “Are you coming up too?”

“Sure,” she said, and pulled off her shoes.

My sneakers made it easy. The bark of the tree was rough and full of bugs, so Mom didn’t try to climb it. I glanced down at her, where she balanced on top of the car, holding on to a nearby tree limb, and asked, “Can you see over the fence?”

“Just a little,” she said. “I was right about the metal drums. How much land can you see?”

“It looks like acres of metal drums,” I said, and wrinkled my nose. “And they smell awful.”

“Are any of them corroded?”

“Yes. There’s stuff oozing out around the bottom on the ones over here. The ground near the bayou is a black, sticky mess.”

“Okay,” Mom said. “Come on down. That’s what I needed to know.”

When we were both inside the car and Mom had driven back onto the road I asked, “What if the stuff in those drums is just gluck? What if it’s not toxic?”

“That’s a possibility,” Mom said. “Tests will have to be taken. That’s where the inspectors will come in.”

“You said it would take time.”

Mom sighed. “Yes, and it may take even more time to go through legal channels to get soil samples from Anita Boggs’s property, if she and her husband are unwilling to cooperate.”

“How deep would you have to dig to get the kind of samples you’d need?”

“Not deep at all,” Mom answered. “If toxic waste is infecting the soil, it will seep right up to the surface.” She took her eyes off the road just long enough to give me a penetrating glance. “Why did you ask, Katie? What do you have in mind?”

“Just the beginning of an idea,” I said. “I haven’t thought it all out, and it might not come to anything.”

“Remember,” Mom said firmly, “you can’t help yourself
to soil samples on the Boggses’ property without their permission.”

“I know,” I answered, but that didn’t discourage me for a minute. All I wanted was for Mom to forget the Hawkins brothers and get back to her novel and finish it, so we could head back to Houston. I wanted to prove Mom wrong.

The next afternoon I rode home with Travis but didn’t invite him in. “There’s something I promised to do,” I told him.

“Can’t it wait? It’s a nice day, and I thought we could walk along the beach again.”

I almost gave in, but I had to find out if my idea would work. “Thanks for the ride,” I said as I climbed out of Travis’s pickup. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I tucked away in the trunk of Mom’s car a paper bag that contained a couple of screw-top glass jars and a trowel. Then I drove to a small nursery I’d seen on the outskirts of town and bought a thick pair of gardening gloves and a flat of Scarletti begonias.

My next stop was Anita Boggs’s house. Holding the flat of begonias in front of me with both hands, I managed to reach the doorbell with my left elbow.

Anita opened the door cautiously, examining both the begonias and me with suspicion.

“I brought you a present,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

Her face softened, and I quickly said, “I’ll be glad to plant them wherever you like.”

“They’re pretty. That’s nice of you,” she said.

I fought back the guilt. “Tell me where,” I said, and added, “Maybe your little boy would like to help me.”

She looked away. “Johnnie isn’t feeling too good today.”

Still not meeting my eyes, Anita seemed to hesitate, but then she walked off the porch and pointed to each side of the steps. “Maybe you could put some along here, on each side,” she said. “Do you need something to dig with?”

“No,” I answered as I laid the flat on the walkway. “I brought my gloves and things with me. I’ll get them out of the car.”

“Thanks,” she said, then glanced toward the house. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go back inside. I don’t want to leave Johnnie alone too long.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, relieved to have her out of the way. I collected my things, took the little plastic pots from the flat, and arranged them the way they’d look best. Then I got down on my knees and began planting.