Survival Clause, стр. 60
It was enough to stop her in mid rant, although it took her a second to switch gears. “Oh, my God. Is he OK?”
“He’s fine.” I reached into the back of the Volvo and pulled out the baby seat. Carrie had fallen asleep on the way here, and looked like a little angel, with long lashes shadowing her cheeks and her little pink pout. “It’s not the first time he’s pulled something like this. Last time, he was at camp up on the Cumberland Plateau, and he used a bike, and it took him hours to get here. We were all worried sick.”
Especially since we didn’t know whether he’d actually run away or whether Hernandez had grabbed him.
“He spent the night with us and came to brunch this morning,” I added, as I headed up the steps to the front door. “He and Rafe were going to see Mrs. Jenkins at Audrey’s before Rafe took him home. On the bike.”
I stuck the key in the lock and twisted it.
“How will his mother feel about that?” Charlotte wanted to know.
“I imagine she might have some things to say about it.” I pushed the door open and went in. “But as Rafe pointed out, by then it’ll be too late. Oh, shit. I mean… shoot.”
“What?” Charlotte peered around me, and came up with a more subdued, “Oh, not again!”
“It’s starting to feel personal, isn’t it?” I looked around for the baseball, and saw it lying over by the wall, in practically the same spot as it had been the last time.
Charlotte nodded. “Either someone has really bad aim…”
“Or really good aim.” I headed for the kitchen and the broom. “I’ll get the glass up. You can find something to tape over the hole. And one of us is going to have to go to the hardware store and get another piece of glass before we leave here tonight.”
Charlotte nodded, and went to look for a piece of cardboard.
She ended up going to the hardware store while I stayed. It wasn’t necessary for both of us to be at the open house, and I was the one with the real estate license. She was more expendable—in this case—because she couldn’t discuss price or any of the other official details with anyone who asked.
By then, the first rush of visitors—the one that shows up in the first hour—was gone, and I was waiting for the second rush, the one that shows up in the last fifteen minutes and often stays after the official end of the open house at four. Charlotte had left, and there was a young couple meandering around in the master bedroom. I had told them to give me a holler if they had any questions, but otherwise I was going to stay in the living room, between Carrie and the front door. I had tucked her into a corner of the dining room, below the broken and taped window, as far from the front door as she could get, so nobody would reach in and snatch her.
That was when a young woman with two kids walked through the door. She looked vaguely familiar, and it took me a second to place her. Then it came to me: she lived a couple of houses down the street, and when the roof had blown off last month, she and her husband and the kids had been out in the street, worrying that their little house would be next.
For the life of me I couldn’t remember her name, or that of the kids, but I greeted her like I recognized her. “Hi there! How are you?”
“Fine.” She didn’t look fine, though. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, but kept looking down instead. “Jerry has something he needs to tell you.”
Jerry. Right. The little boy.
He was about four, and like the last time I’d seen him, he was clinging to his mother’s pant leg. This time, there was no explosion to account for the nerves, so something else must be wrong.
I squatted down to his level. “Hi, Jerry. What’s up?”
I hope you won’t accuse me of arrogance if I say that I thought I might have guessed the problem. It didn’t come as a surprise when the kid took his thumb out of his mouth, blinked big, blue eyes, and told me, “I broke your window.”
I nodded, since I’d already suspected it. “How did it happen?”
“I was playing with my ball,” Jerry said, “and it slipped out of my hand and went through the window.”
The window that was five feet off the ground, when the kid was only about three feet tall.
“Twice?” I asked.
“What?” his mother said.
I looked up at her. “It’s the second time it’s happened this week.”
She turned to the kid. “Jerry?”
He clearly wouldn’t be growing up to have David’s fortitude, because all it took was a frown on his mother’s face to make him break down. His little face twisted, and tears filled his eyes. “The man told me to do it,” he said.
“The man? What man?”
But Jerry didn’t know what man. Just that he’d driven by in his car, and had told Jerry he’d pay him five dollars if Jerry could get the ball through the window in our house.
“Jerry!” his mother said, appalled. “What have we told you about talking to strangers?”
Not enough, apparently, to outweigh the chance to make five dollars. “Did the man come back again yesterday?” I asked.
Jerry nodded. He was knuckling tears off his face with both fists.
“Jerry!” his mother said. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to break other people’s things? Mrs. Collier’s husband is a policeman! He can take you to jail for this!”
He probably couldn’t, actually. Not for this. But who was I to tell this woman how to parent her child? And clearly Jerry needed incentive, both to keep him from talking to strangers in cars, and from breaking windows.
“Can you tell me what the man