Not Dead Yet... by Peg Herring

Author:Peg Herring
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: plot twist, crime and suspense, 1960s Chicago, mysterious characters, action and humor
Publisher: Peg Herring
Published: 2018-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-two

Jake wished she’d gone with Memnet and Roy. If you’re interested in three days of H-E-double hockey sticks, spend them with Charlene Dobbs.

The first day Charlene cried, not tears of fear, but irritating, whiny bawling. Libby’s insistence she’d be set free unharmed in a few days made no difference. She kept crying. And crying.

What a pain!

They kept her in the women’s room, shoving a large cabinet against the door to keep her there. When the workers came downstairs, Libby sat on her to keep her quiet. Libby had to deal with her, since Charlene had already seen her. Roy and Memnet went off to ready the house, glad to escape the curator’s distress. That left Leo and Jake to clear their belongings out of Storeroom C, which they did late at night.

Tuesday and Wednesday they sorted and packed things into knapsacks, pillowcases, and whatever else was available. They disposed of what couldn’t be carried with them to 100th Street. When they told the museum staff where Charlene was on Thursday at closing time, they planned to be long gone, with no trace left behind.

It was surprising how much they’d accumulated. Leo and Jake stored some bags in lockers at the train station to be retrieved later, keeping only what was essential for the last day. Items they’d no longer need were shoved into various trashcans around the city.

Libby fretted, as usual. “We should have had Roy call the pay phone down the block so we know how they are progressing on the house.”

Jake figured it didn’t matter. “Whatever’s there, we’ll make it work, just like here.” She did hope for a real bed, with a mattress in place of lumpy, shifting pillows.

On Wednesday evening, Leo sat on the floor, making entries in his journal, a homemade book in which he kept notes and drawings of things important to him. He seemed unaware she was watching. She’d formed a new theory, researched at the public library B.C. (before Charlene). The answer was so simple she should have seen it right away. Her friends were aliens.

Everything fit once she got past the idea that only crazy people and movie directors believe in life from outer space. Extraterrestrials have no past, which they pretty much admitted: no fingerprints on file, no recorded documents, nothing. Also interesting was their discomfort with modern machines. They all hated the telephone; Roy distrusted anything with a motor; Memnet was afraid of the machine at the drugstore that made malts; and Libby was appalled if Jake suggested they hop into an elevator to get to the top floor of a building.

She guessed their spaceship had crashed, and Norman found them in the New Mexican desert. At school she’d heard about an alien landing that was hushed up. Norman sounded crazy enough to have stolen the government’s aliens, and he couldn’t have known he’d die and leave them alone in a strange world. The accents didn’t fit, but she was working on that.

“Leo?” He raised his head and stopped writing, as he always did when she spoke.

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.