A.P.B. by Dave Pedneau

Author:Dave Pedneau [Pedneau, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective, mystery
ISBN: 9780345342058
Amazon: 0345342054
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 1987-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Dan Linnerman returned to his house just before midnight. Earlier the sheriff had called the woman keeping their kids. Usually the kids went to the picnic, but both of them had summer colds. Mary had thought it best if they stayed in. Mary, dear Mary, had been too right.

“I’m so sorry, Dan.” The woman who always kept the Linnerman children was like a grandmother to them all.

Dan had known her since he was a child. He went to her, allowed her arms to envelop him, and he cried, just as he had so many years before when this same woman had told him that his father had died.

“Why?” he said, her face pressed against his chest.

“God has his ways, son.”

He pulled away. “God? Would a God leave those two children to grow up without a mother?”

She held his hand. “Now, don’t say things you don’t mean. There’s a time to be born and a time to die. The Bible says so.”

“He threw her off a cliff! I saw her, lying there on a rock, broken and—her blood all over it.”

Dan Linnerman sunk to his knees. “I tried to get her to leave. I tried. Damn, I should have made her go. I should have made her go.”

The older woman put a hand on his head. “She was willful, Dan.”

The boy child came into the room, his eyes bleary with sleep. “Hi, Daddy. Where’s Mommy?”

Linnerman bit his lip against his tears. “Hi, Son. Is your sister asleep?”

The young boy nodded.

“Go wake her up,” he said. “Bring her in here.”

“It’ll keep until morning,” the woman said once the child was gone.

“I’ve got to do it now. In the morning I may not be able to. What do I say?”

“The truth, Dan. You remember when I told you. You weren’t much older than Billie.”

Dan remembered.

The little boy brought his sister back into the room. They stood there, almost eye level with their father, who was still on his knees.

He smiled through his tears. “I just realized how much you both look like your mother.”

“Where is Mommy?” the boy asked again.

Dan looked up to the woman. She waited.

He took both of them in his arms. “Mommy’s gone to heaven. She won’t be coming back.”

“Did she want to go?” the girl child asked.

“Well, no—”

The woman leaned down. “Hon, sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to do. Your mother didn’t want to go, but she had to. God called her to heaven to be with him.”

“But what about us?” the girl asked. “We want to go too.”

The woman grinned. “When it’s your time, you will.”

“But I thought just old people went to heaven,” the boy said.

“Did God come after her?” the girl asked.

The woman nodded.

“Did you see him, Daddy?”

Linnerman’s lips quivered. He fought back the emotion that wanted to burst forth as he looked into the two faces of his children. “No … hon, I didn’t.”

“I wish she had come home first.” With that, the little girl turned back to her bedroom.

The boy remained.

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.