Little Paula by V.C. Andrews

Author:V.C. Andrews [Andrews, V.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

Before Trevor returned, I fell asleep sitting in the living-room chair. I had been trembling when I sat and needed to put a blanket over me. It wasn’t really cold, but my mind raged with fears that gave me the chills: What have I done? Why did I tell Lance anything? Trevor will be so upset. Maybe it will spoil his plans for retrieving Little Paula. I cannot reveal any of this to him, I thought, even though I realized that neither of us had ever been good at lying to the other.

When you grow up with someone else’s face almost always before you, the last face you might see before you went to sleep and the first you might see when you awoke, you learn what every movement of his lips and eyes means; you anticipate the lift of his eyebrows and the slight tilt of his head when he thinks this or that. It was surely the same for him, which was why we could tell each other so much without saying a word. I’d have to concentrate hard on not thinking about Lance when I was with Trevor.

Otherwise, I could almost hear him ask as soon as he saw me, What have you done?

Every time the flash of car headlights washed across our front windows, my body tightened. Critter, lying at my feet, would raise his head to look at me, as if he understood my tension. The anticipation eventually exhausted me. It was getting so late, too. Where was he? Had the Couch family discovered him spying? Had they called the police? Would they come knocking on our door to tell us?

They’d never call the police, I told myself, not after what they had done. How could they explain buying a child? That thought brought me some relief, and I dozed off again.

The sound of the rear door opening and closing woke me. Critter rose and ran to Trevor.

“What’s going on?” he asked when he saw me sitting with a blanket wrapped around me on the sofa. “You didn’t have to wait up.”

“Why were you so long? Of course I would wait up. I worried. You might have gotten in trouble, been arrested,” I said, putting him on the defensive before he could search my face for any other reason.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but I didn’t expect to discover what I did, so I spent more time on it.”

He sat beside me, his face lit with excitement.

“What did you discover?”

“We don’t have to worry about coming up with some fantastic plan to get Little Paula back. I was racking my brain about it until tonight.”

“Why not? What changed tonight?”

“I found an opening in the fence around the Couches’ property, a place they never repaired, probably because there was so much brush growing in that area. I walked along the side of the road carefully, never expecting to find it. I was worried about how to scale the fence, get Little Paula, and get back over it. Also, it’s a lot of ground to cover from that garden to the fence.

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