Jubilee's Journey (The Wyattsville Series) (9 page)

When the last of the cars and people were gone, tears settled in the little girl’s eyes. With the crowds she had not been so terribly alone. Yes, they were city people, but she felt if need be she could ask for help. There was always that thin sliver of hope she’d find a friendly face in the crowd. Now there was nothing.

She looked across at the stretches of yellow tape crisscrossed over the doorway of the store where Paul was working and thought back on where she’d seen the same type of thing. It had been an abandoned mine. A place where her daddy said people died. Fear mingled with loneliness and became sorrow.

When the sorrow became unbearable, Jubilee stuck her thumb in her mouth. It was something she hadn’t done since she was two. But the thumb was there; it was an old friend that brought comfort. It was something she could count on. After a long while the tears stopped.

Jubilee had no idea how long she’d been sitting there, but the sun was low in the sky when she thought she saw the bicycle boy coming toward her.

Olivia Doyle

W
hen Ethan Allen turned twelve, I thought my troubles were over. Taking in a child of his age is a handful for anybody, never mind a woman who’s closing in on her sixtieth birthday.  I didn’t expect it to be easy, but neither did I expect another problem to come knocking at my door. Of course, Ethan Allen is a boy who can find trouble even when there’s none to be found.

I have to laugh at how foolish I sound when I say things like “I never expected.” Of course I didn’t. Nobody expects the turns their life is going to take, good, bad, or otherwise.  When life takes you someplace other than where you had in mind, the only thing you can do is hang on and make the best of whatever happens.

I tried to remind myself of that when Missus Brown called and told me Ethan Allen was going to be late coming home because he had detention for an hour after school. She said he had to stay and do the social studies lesson he’d missed because of getting there two hours late and without an excuse note.

Lord God,
I thought,
what’s he up to now? 

Girl on a Bench

N
ormally Ethan Allen didn’t travel down Main Street on his way home from school. He went along Cypress and then turned onto Ridge Road. But with the robbery this morning, he thought it might be his only chance to get a look at a real crime scene. Now that he was allowed to stay up and watch
Dragnet
on Thursday nights, he’d discovered how fascinating crime-fighting could be. Of course, this morning had been somewhat of a disappointment. The Wyattsville detectives didn’t sound anything like Joe Friday, but then neither did Jack Mahoney.

Ethan Allen braked to a stop when he saw the doorway to Klaussner’s covered with a crisscross of yellow tape that read “Crime Scene – Do Not Cross.” He climbed off the bike and approached the store. Cupping his hands around his face and pressing his nose to the glass, he peered inside. Too dark; he couldn’t see anything other than what he’d expect to see. He stepped over the bottom line of tape and ducked beneath the one above it. Just as he was jiggling the handle to check if maybe the door had been left unlocked, the street lamp snapped on. He let go of the door handle and scooted back under the yellow tape. He was seriously considering trying the back door when he noticed the girl still sitting on the bench, in the exact same spot.

It was the time of year when the temperature fell quickly once the sun had set, and nights were chilly enough for a wool coat. Ethan had already pulled on his sweater, but the girl was wearing just a thin, blue dress. She looked cold. She looked scared too.

Ethan Allen turned away and headed for the back door of the store. Most likely the police had locked that too, but it was worth a shot. He was halfway around the building when he started to remember the night his mama and daddy were killed. He was eleven at the time. An eleven-year-old can handle something like that. An eleven-year-old can drive his mama’s car and hitch rides. This girl was just a kid—four, maybe five years old. Ethan turned and headed back.

He crossed the street and sat on the bench alongside the girl. “Hi.”

She turned, looked square into his face, and said nothing. She didn’t smile or frown. She just looked at him with big eyes peering from beneath a fringe of bangs. Behind those eyes Ethan Allen saw the all-too-familiar landscape of fear.

“Ain’t you kinda cold?”

She nodded.

He shrugged his sweater over his head and handed it to her. “Here, put this on. I got a heavy enough shirt.”

The girl smiled and took the sweater from him. She stood and pulled the sweater over her head. Her hands disappeared in the sleeves, and the bottom hung longer than her dress.

With more than a year of learning Olivia’s rules for proper behavior and mannerly things to do, Ethan prodded, “Ain’t you supposed to say something?”

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“Jeez, that’s the best you can do?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“I ain’t no stranger!” Ethan Allen said. “I’m a kid. Kids can talk to kids, right?”

She shrugged. “You’re still a city person, and my brother said don’t talk to no—”

“I ain’t a city person!” Ethan said indignantly. “I’m off a farm, so you got no cause—”

She broke into a wide grin. “Back home we grew a whole lot of stuff. It wasn’t no farm, but the stuff still growed.”

“Where’s back home?” Ethan asked.

“Coal Fork.”

“Coal Fork? I never heard of no place called Coal Fork.”

“It’s a long ways away. We rode on the bus to get here.”

Ethan gave his name, then asked hers.

“Jubilee Jones,” she answered. “But everybody calls me Jubie.”

“Well, Jubie,” he said, “how come you been sitting here all day?”

“I’m supposed to wait for Paul.”

“Who’s Paul?”

“My brother. He went to get a job.”

When Ethan asked where the job was, Jubilee lifted her arm and stretched a finger towards Klaussner’s Grocery.

“He ain’t in there,” Ethan said. “Ain’t nobody in there. That store’s closed up tighter than…” He was going to say a bull’s ass, but remembered how Grandma Olivia had warned him against such language. He settled for saying, “He likely forgot you was waiting.”

“He did not!” Jubilee snapped. “He promised he’d be back!”  

Ethan remembered the promise his mama made—“Tomorrow morning we’re leaving for New York,” she’d said. But there was no New York, and there were no more tomorrows. Maybe there was no more Paul either. He reached across and wrapped his arm around the girl.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I can take you home.”

Jubilee’s eyes filled with water, and she started to cry.  Not the kind of wailing you might expect from a frightened little girl, just a silent cascade of tears falling from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

“Jeez, Jubie, you got nothin’ to cry about. I said I’d take you home.” Ethan fished in his pocket for the hankie Olivia always told him to carry. When he came up empty, he wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of his sweater. For the next fifteen minutes, he tried asking questions that would give him some idea of where the girl lived. In the end he didn’t know anything more than he did at the start. If Jubilee had an address she either didn’t know what it was or wasn’t going to say.

Not knowing what else to do, Ethan Allen suggested Jubilee come home with him. “Grandma Olivia’s nice,” he assured her. “She helps kids in trouble.”

Jubilee eyed him with a suspicious look. “I ain’t in trouble.”

“Maybe not,” Ethan Allen answered. “But if your brother got that job, he might stay working all night.”

“Oh.”

“If that happens, you don’t want to sit here cold and hungry, do you?”

She shook her head. “No, but…”

Ethan grabbed the notebook from his bicycle basket and tore a page out. “We’ll leave a note so he’ll know where you went. How’s that?”

She smiled. “Yeah, that’s good.”

He wrote the note then showed it to Jubilee, who nodded her approval. Ethan Allen placed the note on the bench and put a rock on top of it so it wouldn’t blow away. Once that was done, Jubilee slid her hand into his and allowed him to lift her up onto the crossbar of his bicycle.

After Missus Brown’s call Olivia had suffered through a harrowing afternoon of worry about what mischief Ethan Allen was up to. That’s when she started cooking. Clara swore it was impossible for a person to cook and worry at the same time, so Olivia decided to make a lemon pound cake. Then it was three dozen oatmeal cookies done from scratch. Once she’d made the stew and set it to simmer, she also made a meatloaf and two pounds of mashed potatoes. When she realized that she’d cooked up more food than they could eat in a week, possibly even two, Olivia portioned the meatloaf and potatoes onto three dinner plates and delivered them to Clara, Barbara Conklin, and Jack McGuffey, who’d been nursing a cold for nearly a week.

Barbara protested, saying she’d decided to become a vegetarian. But Olivia insisted almost all vegetarians also ate meatloaf. “They just don’t talk about it,” she said. Shoving the overloaded plate into Barbara’s hands, she then scurried off in case Ethan Allen was trying to call home.