Better the Devil You Know by Betty Keller

Author:Betty Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781894759823
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Published: 2011-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

When all was quiet again, the Reverend—fearful for Merton’s safety but even more fearful for his own—eased out of the cellar and up the stairs onto the back stoop. Opening the door cautiously, he hissed “Merton!” With a little luck, the child would have had sense enough to stay out of sight.

Princess tottered past him into the kitchen. At some point in her dawn adventures, she had lost the Reverend’s bonnet. Her hair and her ruffles hung muddied and limp. Her borrowed boots were sodden. “Ya don’t hafta whisper,” she said with scorn. “That mean old Dora’s long gone.” Shivering, she trudged into the hallway.

Half-convinced but only slightly emboldened, Dodds searched the kitchen, dining room and parlour, then poker in hand, he advanced up the stairs to the bedrooms. “Merton?”

Princess shut the front door left open by their departing guests. “Sonofabitch,” she muttered. “Sonofabitch!” And she began wobbling up the stairs to her room just as the Reverend reappeared on the upstairs landing.

“He’s gone! Angel’s taken him!” he wailed and hurtled down the steps, heading for the front door.

“Serve ’er right!”

The Reverend grabbed his macintosh from the hall coat rack. “Daisy made me promise I’d look after him ….”

“Boy, women sure hate ya, don’t they?” Princess had reached the top of the stairs and turned to look at him. “You goin’ out onna street lookin’ like that?” She disappeared down the hall to her room.

He faced the hall mirror. Shirt, vest and trousers were overlayered with thick black mud. He raised a hand to touch the caked mud on his face. There was more in his sparse hair. Damn it! She was right. But if he stayed to clean up, Angel would have Merton hidden away before he caught up to her. Then I’ll never get him back! He pulled his macintosh on over his muddy clothes and opened the front door, prepared to charge forth to Merton’s rescue in spite of the knowledge that he was playing directly into Angel’s hands. But outside daylight had arrived and so had the ditch-diggers. The Reverend paused in the doorway.

“Cor blimey, Luigi! Will ya look at that? Some’un’s been muckin’ about with our ditch ag’in! It’s ruint! Our perffuck ditch is ruint!”

The diggers had stopped right in front of the Reverend’s house, each man carrying one end of their scaling ladder, and each balancing a shovel on one shoulder.

“So dey knock a leetle dirt ina hole, Alfie. So what? Forget about it, eh?” From his rear guard position, the grey-haired ditch digger thrust the ladder forward. “Keepa going, eh?”

His partner stood his ground. “Alfie ’Opkins’s ditches is always perffuck!” He set his end of the ladder on the ground.

Luigi Fiore sighed in exasperation, put his end of the ladder down and reluctantly unshouldered his shovel.

Alfie lowered the legs of the ladder into the ditch. “I gotta pertect me repitation, Luigi.”

Aware that it would be somewhat difficult to explain away his incriminating mudstains to the ditch diggers, the Reverend stepped back inside the house and very quietly closed the front door.

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