Broke: (11 page)

From the face she made, Immy thought the hag was going to spit. But she kept her face screwed up like that and hobbled away. She stayed hunched.
Immy realized s
he hadn't been leaning on the fence
all that much. Instead,
she had a bad dowager's hump. The woman walked toward the street. Immy crept into the
kitchen
door to peek out a side window so she could see where the woman would
go.
The Tompkins house sat on top of a hill and there were no apparent
near
neighbors.

When Sadie McMudgeon turned and started making her way slowly down the hill, Immy snuck onto the
front
porch and watched.
Sadie
soon turned into some thick growth of trees and bushes.

"I guess there's a house there,"
Immy
murmured.

"The McMudgeon place." Linda had stopped her drill and heard Immy. "If you think this place is in bad shape...."

"Does
s
he live there alone?"

"Yep. Has for
a few
years.
I'm not sure where she came from, but she
lives there all alone now. Get
s
crankier every year.
Has her locks changed all the time.
"

That was sad, Immy thought.
Her heart softened toward the poor old
paranoid
woman. She headed to the
backyard
. A
s soon as she
got there
,
her cell phone rang It was Jersey Shorr.

"I just
now
got a strange call," Jersey said. "It's from your neighbor
, Ms. Curmudgeon or something
. She says you're tearing up the yard."

Immy's heart hardened right up again. "I don't know what her problem is
. We're...
we're
putting in a pond for the pig." The next time it rained, Marshmallow's hole would no doubt hold some rain water. That could be called a pond. "It's another improvement."

Chapter
Twelve

As soon as Immy and Drew got home on Tuesday, Drew, as usual, raced through the house call
ing
her pig.

"When he's trained, maybe he'll come when we call him," said Immy.

"Let's train him!" Drew jumped up and down. "We hafta win the show. We gotta train him!"

The
Pot Belly Association
Pig Show was soon, next Saturday. Immy hadn't gotten further than Beg
and Speak
with commands and
wondered if
maybe they should make a costume and enter him for Cutest rather than Best Trained.

Marshmallow ambled into the kitchen and sat in front of Immy,
staring with his clear, blue, intelligent eyes,
obviously Begging. She obediently tossed him a Rice Krispie pi
g
treat. But
Immy
thought maybe she was the one who had been trained, not the pig, since she hadn't uttered the word "beg."

As Immy sliced an apple for Drew's snack, she broached the subject. "Wouldn't it be fun to dress Marshmallow up?"

"Now?"

"For the contest."

"Whose clothes would he wear? He doesn't have any clothes."

"We could...make him some clothes." Would a costume shop have something that fit a pig? Probably not. Maybe she would check, though.

"He could be a Ninja Turtle
," said Drew around the apple in her mouth
.
"
Or Thomas the Tank Engine. Or Cinderella."

Immy stood and faced the sink to keep from laughing.
She could actually picture all three and they would be hilarious.
"Don't speak with your mouth full, sugar."

A knock sounded on the front door.

Now what?
Immy thought. "I wish people would stop barging in here."

"Knocking isn't barging in, is it?" asked Drew.

"I guess not." Immy made her way through the Great Hall to the front door. And was surprised to see her mother standing on the porch
, h
er arms full
.
Immy flung open the door and took a tray and a large shopping bag from her. "What's all this?"

"I thought Marshmallow might be running low on treats," Hortense said. "And I made brownies for you and Drew." She stepped inside and looked around, inspecting the room.

Immy suspected she was there to check out
Immy's new living quarters
, since she hadn't seen the inside yet.

"This," said Immy with an imperious sweep
of her arm
, somewhat hampered by the shopping bag dangling from her hand, "is the Great Hall."

"My," said Hortense. She gazed
up to the ceiling, three stories above. "It's...tall."

Mother, Immy thought, must be
awed
. Tall?

Hortense recovered herself quickly. "The chamber is capacious and lofty, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Immy, relieved Mother was back to her old self.
"And look at this."

She led the way into the kitchen and they deposited the bounty. Hortense was impressed with the amount of counter space. But when Immy showed her the library, Hortense lost the ability to speak completely. She stretched out a pudgy hand and took slow steps toward the nearest laden bookshelf. Running a
finger
reverently along the spine of a leather
-
bound volume, she finally uttered a sound. "O
oo
h."

A
teardrop
rolled
down
Hortense's
round
cheek.
"All these books."

"Yes," said Immy. "There are a lot."

"Do you have unencumbered access to the entire collection?"

"I guess so. No one said I don't. I can use the furniture if I want, so I guess I can read the books."

Hortense gently pulled an ancient tome from the shelf and leafed through its yellowed pages. "This, I believe, might be a first
edition. Georges Simenon," she read from the cover. "The Strangers in the House."

"Let me see," said Immy. "Is it about this house? It has plenty of strangers."

Hortense gave her a
L
ibrarian
L
ook. "This is a classic of the genre. And it's in very good condition."

"What genre?"

"Mystery, of course." Another
L
ibrarian
L
ook.

Good grief. Immy hadn't heard of
every mystery writer for the last
one or two
hundred years. "First edition, you said. Those are worth a lot, aren't they?"

"I would opine that this would fetch a good sum. If you can find the proper collector of such things. There are purported to be many who would covet this volume. Maybe you should
ascertain
exactly what sort of access you have to these."

Hortense pulled out another book and seemed equally impressed. After she had inspected a half dozen, she said she needed to sit down. The furniture in the library was still
shrouded in
dustcovers so Immy led her to the Great Hall and the stiff settee
she had slept on the night before.

That's when Hortense noticed Drew's cot. "Is the child using this room for her bed chamber?" Hortense sat and fanned herself
with a hand
, even though the room
wasn't very warm. Immy figured she was overwhelmed by the books.

"She wants to sleep with Marshmallow beside her and I don't think he'll go up the stairs."

"Have you attempted such an exercise?"

"Well, no."

"Maybe you should experiment.
He's larger than he was when he couldn't negotiate the steps at your real ho
me
.
You should be able to find something on that topic in the library."

Or on the computer, though
t
Immy.
She ignored the crack about 'her real ho
m
e' and
made a mental note to look up 'can pigs climb stairs' tomorrow at work. "It would make life easier if he could do stairs," Immy admitted. "Would you like to see the rest of the house?"

Her mother wasn't as impressed with the bedrooms as she had been with the library. Putting her nose in the air in
Drew's
room
, the one she hadn't yet slept in
,
Hortense
said she smelled mold. She pointed out the rust around the drain in the bathtub and the missing grout between the tiles. But when she saw
Immy's
bedroom
,
with the wallpaper hanging off, she turned and went back downstairs.

"There are some more rooms," said Immy.

"I have perused enough of them. I think we should have some brownies now."

They sat in the breakfast nook with glasses of milk and Hortense's gooey confection in silence until the first rush of
chocolaty
taste was gone.

"Imogene," said Hortense, "have you signed the lease on this, this domicile?"

"Yes. I'm officially living here. This is my new h
om
e."

"Do you think you might have been precipitous?"

"It was the last place I looked at. There weren't any more to see, any more that I could afford that would let me have a pig."

Hortense's bosom quaked with a sigh that rattled her chins. "What is the term of the lease?"

"Um, there are a few terms.
A bunch of legal language.
"

"I mean the length."

"Oh, a year. That's standard."

"I hope your health and that of Nancy Drew holds out. This is a musty, drafty old place. I wonder if
stachybotrys
lurks in the walls.
"

"Is
stachybotrys a type of ghost
?" asked Immy
.

"It is not. It is a most virulent type of black mold.
In fact,
I feel my throat closing up. I had better depart." She heaved herself out of the seat and Immy followed her to the front door. Her mother turned and aimed yet another stern look at her daughter. "If the child starts to ail, you must
forthwith
bring her to my place
. W
ithout delay. You should move out if you acquire any breathing or cold or influenza type symptoms."

"I will, Mother."

Immy ushered her mother out, having no intention of abandoning her new home.

***

The next day, Immy looked up
pigs
and
stairs
on her work computer,
but her research was confusing
. Some pig owners said it was fine for them to use the stairs, and even gave instructions on teaching the skill,
placing favorite foods on the steps to lure them. B
ut others thought it would harm their
spines
. One was sure that their low slung tummies would get scraped, dragging themselves up and down on their stubby legs. The article used the unfortunate term
pork bellies
. That image did it for Immy, so she decided not to make Marshmallow use staircases. M
aybe Ralph could make a ramp that covered the steps halfway, on
the side against the wall
. The stairway was wide enough
for that, she knew
.

She ran to the costume shop on her lunch break, but
, after examining a few outfits,
realized she'd have to measure Marshmallow before she could commit to a costume. There were lots
of Ninja Turtles, but they were
rather small.

Ralph phoned Immy as she was leaving work to tell her he couldn't make it into Wymee Falls that night.
He thought she'd be safe with the locks changed.
Rats! He was
, finally,
supposed to work on the front, to get that porch railing looking better. Immy wa
s anxious for
some progress that was visible from the street, something positive that the neighbors
--
and her boss
--
could see.

She stood looking at the porch from the front yard for a bit while Drew and Marshmallow
had a romp in the
backyard
. What
made it
look the worst were the broken posts.
Balusters
, Mother had called them. About half were leaning and some were even splintered. If those weren't there, it would look better. Ralph was making new ones,
and fixing up the old ones he'd
found in the shed, but he wasn't here tonight. He'd left some
of his
tools, though.

Immy retrieved a sturdy hammer from his
small, portable
tool box in the kitchen and knelt to knock out some bad posts. She whacked one of the splintered ones and it flew into the front yard. Good! She was doing it right. She soon removed all the broken ones and went down the steps to gather the wood. Not sure what to do with
the debris
--maybe Ralph could use
it
for something?--she piled the
splintery wood
next to the porch.

Now she would take out the leaning balusters. A trickle of sweat dripp
ed
from her hairline, down
her face
, in front of her ear
. After she fixed herself a glass of ice tea and drank half, she set the glass on the porch floor and s
tarted in
work
ing
again.

The leaning posts were still attached at both the top and bottom. She had to punch the first one a half dozen times before it budged. It wasn't as ready to fall out as it looked. The railing
sure was
cleaner
looking
without those old post
s
, though, so she kept going. After three more posts she
was working up a mighty thirst
.

W
hen she went in to refill her ice tea glass
, s
he checked on Drew and Marshmallow
,
out the back window. Marshmallow was enlarging the "pond." Immy gave a sigh,
hoping the busybody neighbor who had complained wouldn't be back soon,
then returned to her task. The light was beginning to fail and she wanted to finish this up before it was dark.

She set her glass where it had been before and knocked one more post out. More than two-thirds of them were gone
now
. Immy decided there weren't really any good ones--she'd take them all out.