Overnight by Adele Griffin

Author:Adele Griffin [Griffin, Adele]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9737-7
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2013-01-03T00:04:00+00:00

Martha

TOPHER SEEMED RESTLESS. HE had finished his phone calls and he wanted to go up where the action was. Martha could tell. She was restless, too.

“Rugrats!” he said finally. “I’ll be right back. You know the drill. The three magic words are…?”

Nobody answered him. Everyone was absorbed in the end of the movie. Topher frowned and muttered, “Everybody stay put.” Then he took the stairs, two at a time.

Martha waited a few minutes, then stood.

“Drink of water,” she murmured with a yawn. “Does anyone want anything?”

Nobody answered. Were they playing a game on her? Martha’s pulse quickened. Everyone was acting weird tonight. Probably it didn’t mean anything. Probably it was because of Gray.

Martha crept quietly up the stairs, across the hall and into the pantry, her spy nook. Through a chink of opened door, she had a view of the kitchen. Still crowded. Some neighbors. Officer Bird Eyes and Officer Mustache. The Donnelleys. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenfeld were sitting at the table. Gray’s little brother, Robby, was flopped like a sack of potatoes on Mr. Rosenfeld’s lap.

“She might have needed some time to be by herself,” Mrs. Rosenfeld was saying. “Gray does that. This past year has been a challenge for us, but Gray, poor thing, she’s taken it very hard. I could understand if she wandered off. Gray isn’t irresponsible. Emotional, but not irresponsible. But truly, Officer, I don’t think forgetting her coat means—no, no, I don’t think it means anything.”

Mrs. Rosenfeld’s sickness had stretched lines across her forehead and pressed folds into the sides of her mouth. Her eyes were sunken into fleshy skin flaps. If people had not known Mrs. Rosenfeld before she got sick, thought Martha, they might have thought she was a grouch.

Mrs. Rosenfeld did not look like Gray, but Gray had inherited other things from her, Martha decided. Gray possessed her mother’s tame manners; the same way of sitting with her hands cupped over her knees, the same way of lifting the end of a sentence so that it sounded like a question. Anyone could see that Mouse and Mrs. Rosenfeld belonged to the same family.

“Listen,” Officer Mustache answered. “We’ve got a search on, but we can’t do as much as we want until daybreak. Tomorrow’s weather is forecast for clear, and by then we’ll have an aerial watch, the best dogs. We’ve got precincts eleven through fifteen combining forces. If she’s run off, we’ll find her…”

“For God’s sakes, where were you, Patsy?” asked Mr. Donnelley, turning on Mrs. Donnelley as if she had invented this problem all on her own. “When she left. Where were you?”

“I was…I was upstairs.” Mrs. Donnelley cleared her throat.

“Upstairs? For how long? Did it ever cross your mind to go downstairs? Any one of those girls might have—”

“Whoawhoa. No need to get into that.” Now Officer Bird Eyes stood. She was walking straight toward Martha. “Coffeepot is out here, right, ma’am? Mind if I help myself?”

The coffeepot was in the pantry.

Quickly, Martha ducked and fled on tiptoes into the living room.

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