Broken Strings by Nancy Means Wright

Author:Nancy Means Wright [Wright, Nancy Means]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 2015-08-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“To Yew from Me. No Strings Attached.”

Wednesday, October 3

“She’s at Billy’s,” Ethan said. “I saw her bike.”

“Saw her bike where?” Fay asked, her nerves popping out like hives. She’d just come back from milking and discovered Chance’s room empty. The girl wasn’t known for early morning departures, so she must have been out all night.

“By his apartment building, of course,” Ethan said. “Where else? I warned you.”

Fay sighed. A year before, the girl had been gone ten days and still come back. “Let me know if she’s in school, would you? Call me when you get there.”

What else could she do? Confront the girl and you had a tempest in your kitchen. At least things had been going smoothly of late – Chance had been preoccupied with her goat marionettes. And she’d played the good fairy at last night’s rehearsal. They’d changed the Sleeping Beauty ending back to something more traditional for the sake of the young children. “We wouldn’t want to disillusion these youngsters, would we?” the teacher had said. “They’ll wake up to reality soon enough.”

She heard the yellow school bus wheeze and groan outside on the road. Ethan was running for it. “What were you doing outside Billy’s place last night?” she called after her grandson. She worried that Billy was selling drugs. But Ethan was already leaping up the steps onto the bus, the black spikes of hair rising up like snakes on his head. Medusa in a male body. The bus lurched forward with a gassy hiss.

She raced haphazardly through a number of household chores: she fed Chance’s mutt and then the greyhound; tossed a chicken treat into the Maine Coon cat’s dish; reminded Glenna to “take notes if anyone calls,” although Glenna’s glaucoma was worsening and her handwriting looked like hen scratchings. So now there was Chance to worry about as well as Beets. Delores, the caseworker, had been calling twice a day; she’d sent out waves to all the foster care people across the state, even the former foster homes, in case he went back to one for a bed or meal.

In case of what? Fay didn’t know. It had been five days since the boy had gone north with his father, then run off. Five days since Puss was found hanging from the shower curtain rod. Two weeks since Marion’s death – and no one accountable.

In case of something bad, she told herself. Every day she read about missing children, sometimes found, but too often not. Now there were two foster children missing – had it anything to do with the Valentini sisters’ killers? It was important to find those killers, yes, but the sisters were already dead. You had to consider the living, still in danger.

Here was Apple in khaki pants and red sweater, ready for school. Today the girl was getting a ride with a classmate’s mother up the road. Fay enveloped the child in her arms, then held her at arm’s length. “You look lovely, sweetie. Got your lunch box?”

“I put a banana and two of Glenna’s cookies in it, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.