Part One: Jim
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
A tap sounded at the secret door. Jim leaned over and flicked the latch. A moment later, Trixie’s head appeared, closely followed by the rest of her. “Can I come in?” she asked, a determined look on her face.
A sigh escaped Jim’s lips. Deliberately, he set aside the book which he had been studying, and turned to face his girlfriend. Whatever was on her mind, she would not be diverted from it for any amount of academic benefit. Seeing his acquiescence, she fastened the latch and settled herself on the bed, stretching out full-length on her stomach across its width.
“There was something you wanted?” Jim prompted, as she lay there watching him.
“Mmm,” she replied, eyeing him hungrily, “but that’s not what I came here for.”
Jim let out a surprised laugh. “Okay, then, Trixie,” he asked, “why are you here?”
The look of invitation vanished from her face as completely as if it had never existed. “I need to know a few things.” Her eyes dropped to the bedspread and a finger began to idly trace the subtle pattern. “You know the case I’m investigating? I’m starting to believe that there’s more to it than it seemed at first. So, I’m wondering if you could tell me something.”
“What is it, Trixie?” he asked, when she did not continue. “I can’t promise to have an answer for you, but you know you can ask me anything.”
She sighed. “Do you remember, on the day of Mrs. Riker’s funeral, your Dad received an envelope and you went and talked to him about it?” He nodded, his heart tightening in his chest. “You said that you’d tell me what it was about, but you never did. Can you tell me now? I’m certain it’s related, Jim,” she explained, without having to be asked. “Somehow, it fits in with all the other things that have been happening, but I can’t tell how unless I know what it is.”
Jim took a few minutes to consider. In the time since that meeting, most of the problems which arose in it had been successfully dealt with. There was no reason why Trixie should not know of the foiled attempts at sabotage, or the industrial espionage which had been thwarted. In the meantime, greater threats had arisen. The possibility of being wrongfully jailed for insider trading still haunted Jim and he would not speak of that matter aloud, for fear of being overheard. Still, he believed that Trixie was the best person to sort all of these random and apparently meaningless events into a cohesive whole.
“I can’t tell you, exactly,” he replied, at length. “It was mostly matters connected to Dad’s company – sabotage, specifically, and the leaking of information to the opposition – and it’s been dealt with. The people responsible have been removed from their positions; at least one person has been charged with an offence.” He took a breath. “There was something else, too, which I can’t tell you about at all. All I’m saying is that it was a personal attack against both Dad and me, apparently perpetrated by someone very close to Dad and involving the possibility of criminal charges. We’ve protected ourselves against that, too.”
Worry was plain on her face. “So, there really is a concerted attack on both you and your father.” By her tone, it was clear that this was not a revelation, merely confirmation of what she had already known.
“It looks that way,” he admitted, “though I can see no reason why it must be connected to these other matters.”
Trixie slowly shook her head. “It’s too much of a coincidence,” she told him. “I don’t think I could believe in a coincidence that big. I just hope we can figure out who’s doing this before things get worse.”
Thursday, June 9, 2005
“All ready to go?” Jim asked Trixie, as he entered the used book store where she worked. It was time for her to finish for the evening and they had arranged a date night.
“Jim, I’m sorry,” she informed him, “I need to stay here until closing. Mr. Porter’s been called away.”
His heart tightened in his chest. “You’d be here alone? Tell him ‘no’. He can’t ask that; not after what happened the other day.” He still felt a little shaken by the events of the previous Monday, when a man had tried to overturn a bookshelf onto a customer. Brian had luckily been on hand to make chase and had run the fugitive to earth in a nearby warehouse. The fact that he had disappeared when the police had gone to arrest him only made matters worse.
“I’m staying here,” Trixie announced. “It’s no big deal. It’s not even dark! I used to do it all the time in Sleepyside. Mr. Bridgeman would have something else he needed to do, so I’d close up for him that night. It’s the same thing.”
“Strange things weren’t happening then,” Jim insisted. A voice inside his head told him that he was being unreasonable, but he talked louder to drown it out. “You could be in danger here. What if someone comes in here?”
By the way that Trixie’s eyebrows rose, he knew that he was in trouble. “You mean a customer? What do you think they might do? Buy a book?”
“I meant someone who means you harm. The store might be held up-”
This time, his girlfriend just laughed. “Held up? Whoever heard of a used book store hold up? We don’t keep a lot of cash on the premises. Mr. Porter’s already done the day’s banking. I could give them this 1963 Encyclopaedia Britannica that’s missing volume 8. They might give me money to keep it.”
Jim ran a hand through his hair. “I’m over-reacting, aren’t I?”
She nodded. “If it makes you feel better, you could stay here with me,” she suggested. “There may not be many customers, so we could talk.”
He smiled. “Thanks, Trix. I’d like that.”
Saturday June 11, 2005
“Jim.” Matthew Wheeler’s voice was soft, as if he did not want to be overheard. “A word, please?”
He led the way into his study at the Manor House, where Jim was spending a few days. The door closed behind the pair. From the safe, Matthew withdrew a sheaf of papers and began to spread them on the desk.
“The situation is deteriorating,” he informed his son, in a grave voice. “You remember the forged documents I showed you last September?”
A chill ran down Jim’s spine as he thought of the matter. “I’d find it difficult to forget,” he replied, wryly. “The threat of being thrown in jail for something I didn’t do kind of sticks with me.”
Matthew nodded. “Those won’t hurt us now, but there are others that might be worse, in a way.” He showed a pair of similar-looking documents, one appearing to be a photocopy of the other. “The one on the left, I found in the appropriate file at my office. The one on the right was in the safe at home. It was a photocopy of the original.”
Jim leaned forward to examine the pair more closely. His breath escaped in a hiss as he noted the differences between the two. Small changes to the text had achieved the opposite meaning in a key part of the document.
“There are more,” Matthew continued. “I’ve been checking on the same projects that the saboteurs were targeting and it’s the same story in each one: key documents in the files have been falsified to show bad test results, serious problems and shoddy work practices. If there was some kind of enquiry – and I’m beginning to suspect that there will be in the very near future – these documents would be very damaging for the company. Businesses have failed over less.” He paused, his face grim. “Whoever is doing this must be someone very close to me; someone trusted. If this goes the way I think it’s heading, I doubt that I’ll still be in control of the company at the end of the month.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know that you need to do anything. You just need to be familiar with the situation. If the worst happens, I expect that there will be something of a cash-flow crisis while I disprove the allegations. In that case, I may need to start liquidating assets.” He paused. “The Preserve will be the first to go.”
“I’ll buy it,” his son answered, promptly. “So long as the insider trading situation is really finished with, I’m not in any danger from this, am I? I’ll buy anything you want to sell, to the limit of my financial abilities.”
“Thanks, Jim,” said his father. “Let’s just hope I don’t have to take you up on that.”
Part Two: Bobby
Wednesday March 30, 2005
For ten minutes, Bobby, Larry, Terry and Todd sat still, waiting and listening to the scraping and thumping noises inside the summerhouse at Ten Acres. As the minutes passed, each of them made stealthy movements, trying to stretch aching legs and arms without making enough noise that they would be heard by the strangers inside. Finally, the two intruders emerged.
“You’d better get these things up to Winter Rock,” the man said, as the door was pulled closed. “I’ll oversee things in Sleepyside for now.”
“Right,” she replied. “Can I drop you anywhere on the way?”
“Take me to the bank,” he said, laughing in a manner that drew chills up and down Bobby’s spine. “I’ve got some business to discuss with my old friend Peter Belden.”
The four hidden boys heard footsteps diminish into the distance, then the car doors opened and closed and its engine started. As the sound of the vehicle faded away, Bobby scrambled to his feet.
“We’ve got to do something!” he cried. “They’re going after my Dad!”
“But what?” demanded Terry. “He’s just going to talk with him and no one would believe us, anyway. I’m more worried about how we’re going to get into our clubhouse with the new lock on it.”
“I wonder if they took everything?” said Larry, crawling towards the window to check. He sighed, heavily. “All the cool stuff is gone. There’s nothing there, now, except junk.”
“And I promised Trixie I wouldn’t come here,” Bobby moaned, as if his friends had not spoken. “She’s gonna kill me if she finds out.”
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Terry decided. “Trixie’ll never let us use the summerhouse for our clubhouse if she finds out about this. You’ve got to promise, Bobby.”
“No way! I’m not promising anything else,” the other boy replied. “Promises are nothing but trouble.”
“But you agree, though, don’t you?” Terry prodded. “We can’t tell anyone about this. It would just get us into trouble.”
“Okay,” Bobby grumbled. “I won’t tell – for now – but if anything bad happens, I’m telling Trixie everything.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Terry dismissed. “So, how are we going to get in?”
“We need one of those lock-pick things they have on TV,” Larry suggested. “I wonder where you buy them?”
“No one would sell you one of them, doofus!” his twin objected. “What would you tell them if they asked you why you needed it? ‘I want it to break into someone else’s summerhouse.’ Like that’s gonna work.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” asked Larry. “We gonna break the door down? Smash a window?”
“I don’t want to get in at all!” Bobby announced. “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back. Those people will probably come back and Trixie will kill me if she finds out I scared ‘em away. We need to find a different clubhouse.”
Larry and Terry looked as if they were about to argue, but Todd threw his weight on Bobby’s side. “There must be heaps of places we could use. Let’s go look for one of them.”
“I guess we could try the Bob-Whites’ old clubhouse,” Bobby admitted. “Or, there’s the boathouse. I think there’s an old schoolhouse somewhere, too. I heard Brian and Mart talking about it one time. Maybe we could find out where that is.”
“Nuh uh,” said Larry, emphatically. “I’m not having our club in an old school!”
Bobby shrugged. “So, let’s try some of the other places. How about the old clubhouse?”
The four wandered in that direction, dropping in at the farm on the way past to tell Mrs. Belden of their change of plans. Bobby retrieved the key from its hiding place and they went inside.
“You weren’t kidding when you said it was messy in here!” Terry exclaimed, clambering over a pile of camping gear. “There’s no way we could use this place.”
“Not unless we convinced the Bob-Whites to keep their stuff somewhere else,” Bobby agreed. “If we want our club to be a secret, we couldn’t really do that.”
“We could tell them that we wanted it for something else,” Larry suggested. “We don’t have to say it’s for our club.” He stuck his head through the doorway of the partition, to see what was on the other side. “This would be better than the summerhouse, because it’s closer to Todd’s place and our place.”
“Moms wouldn’t worry so much, either,” Bobby added. “She doesn’t like me going up to Ten Acres because of Mrs. Frayne and the copperhead and the time that I got bitten. She let Trixie and Brian and Mart come here any time.”
“Well, you can ask Trixie if we can have it,” Terry told Bobby.
“No way!” he replied. “She’d be too suspicious. We should ask Jim or Honey – ’specially since it’s at their place.”
“Okay. You do that, then,” Terry decided. “Then we’ll have to convince them to clean it out for us.”
Satisfied, the four headed back to Crabapple Farm for lunch.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
“Bobby! Telephone!” He heard his mother’s voice and went running to the kitchen extension. “It’s your sister.”
Feeling a sudden dread, he took up the receiver and greeted Trixie.
“I need to know some stuff,” she told him, in tones that brooked no argument. “Tell me everything about the summerhouse.”
“The summerhouse?” he hedged. “At Ten Acres? Well, it’s kind of at the top of the hill, under a whole lot of bushes and vines-”
“I know where it is,” she interrupted. “I want to know when you’ve been there and whether you saw any sign of other people having been there.”
“Uh, there were a couple of times last summer – when I found the chair and all the junk, then you told me not to go again, so I didn’t for a long time. I only went there once since. I guess it was about two months ago. Things had changed a bit since the last time, so someone had definitely been there.”
“You’re sure you haven’t been there any other times?”
“Course I’m sure. I wouldn’t’ve gone that time, if the guys hadn’t wanted to, and I told them I’m not going up there any more.”
“That’s good.” She sounded distracted, which pleased Bobby greatly. If her thoughts had moved away from him and his misdeeds, all the better. “I’ll see you on Saturday and you can tell me some more then.”
Rats! he thought, as he finished the conversation. I knew this was going to be trouble!
Saturday, May 28, 2005
With extreme reluctance, Bobby followed his sister up the path towards Ten Acres. Without even seeing her face, he could tell that she was really annoyed with him. Her shoulders were set and she was striding so fast that he found it hard to keep up with her.
“I’m really sorry, Trix,” he admitted, trying to draw her into a conversation so that she would slow down. “We looked and looked for clues, but we couldn’t find any, so we thought there wasn’t anything going on and that it would be okay for us to go there again.”
She turned so sharply that Bobby almost ran into her. “What makes you think you’d know a clue if you saw it?” she demanded. “You don’t know half of what’s been happening. I told you to keep away from the summerhouse because I thought it might be dangerous.”
Her little brother scowled. “You were hardly any older than I am when you started solving mysteries. You went into the mansion when you thought there was a tramp in there.”
A rueful smile slipped across her face. “I’m lucky it was just Jim. Okay, I see your point. But, please, don’t come up here again, Bobby. Something bad is happening here and I don’t want you – or your friends – to get hurt.” She turned back to the task at hand. “So, where have you seen things?”
Bobby led the way to the old, rotting arbour and pointed to the ground. “See? People have been going in and out a lot. You can tell ‘cause there’s kind of a path here. Me an’ the boys haven’t been here for a couple of months.” He scuffed a toe against the ground as Trixie bent over to look towards the little building. “There’s a new lock on the door, too. One time, we saw some strange equipment in there – electronic stuff; boxes with lots of buttons, and cables, and stuff in boxes, or those plastic bags that computer stuff comes in sometimes – but they took it away before we could find out what it was.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you told me you were only here once since I told you not to come up here.”
“Well, um, yeah, that’s right,” he admitted. She was glaring at him in silence. He felt the need to fill the silence. “A car came while we were here and we hid and there was a man and a woman and they went in and got everything and drove away.”
The look of apprehension increased on Trixie’s face and she ducked inside the tunnel to check the facts for herself. Bobby waited in the clearing, feeling rather ashamed of himself. He had a feeling that if he had handled this differently, things would have worked out a lot better.
Finally, Trixie crawled back through the arbour and scrambled to her feet. “Let’s see if there’s anything else we need to know about.” Bobby trailed behind her as she explored the area, moving in ever-widening circles until obstacles blocked her path. At the end of an hour, the two had been over the area where the old mansion had stood fairly thoroughly, but without result. The only other traces of activity were fresh car-tracks in the drive.
“Let’s go home,” Trixie suggested, with a sigh. “There’s nothing else here.”
Once again following along behind, Bobby worked up the nerve to ask the question in his mind that was just itching for an answer. “So, what are you going to do now, Trixie?”
She gave him a surprised glance, but replied, “I need to think about it. I’ll have to talk to Jim, too. We need to make a decision on whether it’s better to let whoever it is think that we don’t know about it, or get in there and risk tipping them off. In any case, right now, I need a drink and a snack. Race you to the kitchen!”
Taken by surprise, Bobby had to run as fast as he could to catch up to his older sister.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
A cloud of dust flew up into Bobby’s face as he arrived at the doorway of the Bob-Whites’ old clubhouse. As it cleared, he heard his friend Terry apologise, saying, “I didn’t see you there.” A moment later, the cause of the dust cloud became apparent: Terry had thrown an old tarpaulin out the door. Dirt and dust, which had gathered in its folds, settled gently over nearby plants and Bobby’s feet. In the meantime, Terry had disappeared back into the storage area.
“What is all this junk?” Bobby asked, once inside the main room.
“Di rang us last night and said that the Bob-Whites had finished clearing out all their stuff,” Larry grumbled, while rummaging through a tangled heap of ropes. “When she said that we could keep anything that was left, we didn’t know she meant we’d have to clean it out ourselves.”
The small room was strewn with discarded belongings. Damaged or outgrown sporting and camping gear covered the floor, the table and the benches. In one corner, a pile of old posters and fliers threatened to slither across the floor. Wild rummaging sounds came from behind the partition and occasionally an item flew through the doorway.
“Hey! Watch where you’re throwing that!” Larry yelled, as an ice skate skimmed his arm.
Bobby picked it up and compared it to his foot. “Is the other one there? This looks about my size.” The rummaging sound increased and several more skates flew through the doorway, though none matched the first. “Wait!” Bobby asked, holding out a hand to defend himself against further flying footwear. “I’ll come and look for myself. Oh, hi Todd; I didn’t know you were here, too.”
Taking in the chaos that his friend had created in the small space, Bobby decided that some action was needed. He looked around for the largest useless object and turned to Terry. “Why don’t you and Larry carry away that broken sled? Todd and I’ll go through the stuff here and sort it out. The skate will probably turn up when we’re done.”
Terry shrugged and took the suggestion. As soon as he was out of earshot, Bobby confided, “Sometimes Larry and Terry have no clue. They don’t have to clean up after themselves at home, or clean out the garage, or attic. Let’s put some of this stuff back on the shelves.” He picked up the first thing that came to hand and tossed it onto a shelf. “You want to hang those skates back up? In winter, we can skate on the lake. You can have a pair of these skates, if you can find one that fits.”
“Thanks,” Todd muttered, sorting the remaining ones into pairs, before heading back to the main room. He returned a moment later with an armful. “I was kind of thinking that some of this stuff might be useful, but Terry wanted to get all of it out for our own stuff.”
Bobby rolled his eyes. “Like I said, he has no clue.” Most of the floor was clear, by now. He took a moment to toss a few broken things outside. He frowned at the main room, which was still very messy. “If we throw this stuff out, we’ll have to carry it away. I think we should stack most of it on the shelves.”
Todd nodded his agreement and the two set to work. They had made a good amount of progress when the Lynch twins returned.
“What are you doing?” Terry asked, as he walked in the door. “I thought we were throwing all that stuff out!”
“You want to carry it away?” Bobby asked. “I don’t. We can throw it out later, when we run out of room.” He picked up an old sleeping bag and tried to wedge it into a space on the top shelf. A shower of dust fell all over Todd.
“Stop it already,” he complained, stepping away and trying to shake himself clean.
Bobby found a box to stand on, to give himself more height. He gave the sleeping bag another shove. A box, next to it, shifted and the bag slid into place, but not without disturbing something up near the roof.
“Now you’ve done it,” said Larry, pointing. “You’ve broken the roof and the rain will get in.”
“No, I haven’t.” Bobby climbed up the shelves like a ladder, until his head was touching the ceiling. “There’s something up here.” He pulled out a sheaf of dirty papers, which had been rolled up and later squashed flat. His exploring fingers found the crevice in which they had been wedged.
All three of the other boys crowded around as he jumped to the floor. “What is it? Let me see!” they all asked at once. He spread them out, discovering that while the outside was dirt-smeared, the inside was quite clean and new. All four of the pages were covered in photocopies of maps.
“They’re all places around here,” Bobby observed, pointing out Crabapple Farm on one of the pages.
Larry leaned forward. “These two join together.” He poked a spot with a finger, showing a slight overlap between the pages. “Actually, they all join together.” He rearranged the pages to make one map.
“The Bob-Whites must have used it for one of their fundraisers,” Bobby decided. He pointed to a pencil mark on one of the sheets. “That’s Mr. Maypenny’s house. They stopped there on the bikeathon, I think.”
“What are all these marks?” Todd asked, pointing to Ten Acres. “Did they do fundraisers at that old ruin, too?”
Bobby shook his head. “Maybe Jim was planning something and used the map they already had. We should keep this; it’s kind of cool.” Carefully tucking the map into a space he had found behind one of the shelves, Bobby returned to the task of cleaning up.
Part Three: Diana
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
“Sweetheart?” Di heard her husband call. “Could you come and help us make the shopping list?”
Suppressing the groan which threatened to escape her lips, she agreed and reluctantly wandered in the direction of the kitchen. The nausea she had been experiencing had abated somewhat, but just being in the kitchen was still enough to make her feel queasy. She found Mart and Brian peering into the pantry with looks of confusion.
“What’s the problem?” she asked, taking the partially written list from Brian’s hand. Her eyebrows drew together as she tried to decipher his writing. The first two items, surely, must be ‘bread’ and ‘milk’, but after that it became rather more difficult. The following word appeared to be ‘clnwss’, which made no sense, and the one after ‘detective’, which seemed extremely unlikely.
“It’s my turn to shop,” Mart explained, “but there’s so little in here that the money won’t cover all of the things we’ll need. We’re trying to decide what’s the most important.”
Why me? Di wondered, her mind going back to a time when she had played ‘house’ in her family’s tiny apartment in Sleepyside. She remembered the old clothes she would put on, the strings of beads and the clunk of her mother’s high-heeled shoes, worn on feet many sizes too small. Somehow, it did not seem all that long ago. Disciplining her thoughts with great effort, she turned her mind to the problem at hand. “Maybe it would help if we made a list of what we need first, then choose the most important items on it.” She took up the pen and began to jot down grocery items in her curvy – and above all legible – script. With the Belden brothers’ help, she had collated a couple of dozen items when Trixie bounced into the room, closely followed by Honey.
“I’m glad you’re together,” Trixie announced the instant she arrived. “We need to know anything suspicious that’s happened since… well, pretty much since school finished last year.”
Brian’s face took on a sceptical expression. “Surely you know everything that’s happened already? Why do we need to tell you again? You witnessed most of it yourself.”
Trixie’s curls bounced with her impatient stomp. “I mean, all the things that you’ve decided not to tell me because you thought I might be on the trail of a mystery and you didn’t want to encourage me. Now, spill.”
Mart slowly shook his head. “I don’t have anything,” he told her. “I told you everything the last time you asked.”
There was a frown on Trixie’s face, now. “You’ve noticed nothing at all, however insignificant?”
“I noticed that you weren’t in your room at twenty-five to twelve last night,” he replied, drawing a matching frown from Brian.
“That’s not suspicious,” Honey answered, before Trixie was able. “I know, because I wasn’t there, either, and saw that Trixie wasn’t in her room, on account of one of our professors springing extra examinable content on us at the last moment.”
It was Di’s turn to frown. She shook her head, giving up on trying to decipher that one. “I don’t know anything, either. The way things have been lately, I wouldn’t know a clue if it came up and introduced itself.”
Brian shook his head, though he continued to cast suspicious glances towards his sister. “Sorry, Trixie. I don’t have anything, either. You might have to consider that there’s nothing else to know.”
She huffed in exasperation. “I’m sure there’s something else. I’m absolutely certain. Somebody, somewhere knows the thing that I’m missing. I just don’t know who to ask.”
“Maybe you should ask Dan,” Brian suggested, turning back to the pantry.
“Like that would improve things,” his sister muttered.
Di shot the other two girls a sympathetic look, then returned to her task.
Wednesday June 15, 2005
“Are you nervous?” Mart asked his wife, as they waited for her scan appointment at the large teaching hospital in Winter Rock.
“A little,” Diana replied. She adjusted the waistband of her maternity jeans. “I’m mostly worried that the baby’s going to be huge. Look at me! If I’m this big now, I don’t think I’ll fit through doorways by the time the baby’s due.”
“I still think you’re beautiful,” he crooned, gently rubbing her arm. “And maybe you won’t get much bigger. You might have done all the expanding at the beginning to get it over with, or something.”
Diana’s name was called before she could respond to this dubious theory. A short time later, she was established in the examination room. The trainee technician squeezed a quantity of clear, gooey liquid onto her exposed abdomen and used the instrument to spread it. The image on the screen shifted drunkenly, before resolving into a pattern of dark and light.
The woman moved slowly, watching the screen carefully and taking measurements. Suddenly, a hand waved into view. Di shot Mart a surprised glance and they shared a smile. When Di’s attention turned back to the screen, the hand disappeared downwards, but another came into view. The first hand seemed to reappear at the top of the screen.
The technician turned to her supervisor, who suggested an adjustment to the settings. This accomplished, the situation became clearer. Di sank backwards, her mouth dropping open. She felt her husband shift beside her, but could not draw her eyes from the screen to gauge his reaction.
In a voice that she barely recognised as her own, Diana asked, “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
The supervisor nodded. “It’s twins.”
Di’s vision swam for a moment and she thought that she was going to pass out. No! she silently cried. I can’t have twins! It’s just too much. There has to be some kind of mistake. Her eyes refocussed to find that the twins were still there on the screen. She shot a glance at Mart, seeing for the first time the bemused expression on his face.
“What is it?” she asked, faintly.
He shrugged. “Only that Moms asked me whether it was twins when I spoke to her a few weeks ago and I said it wasn’t, that they would have noticed that before now. Looks like she was right.”
Di let out an inelegant groan. “What is my mother going to say this time?”
Monday, August 22, 2005
Diana looked around the café, searching for the person she had come to see. Her eyes latched onto the correct face, a woman of around the same age as herself in whose arms a baby wiggled. With as much dignity as she could muster, Di strode across the room and took a seat.
“What do you want?” the woman asked, fear showing through her defiance.
“We both know that the letter you sent Mart was nothing but lies,” she replied, in a hard, cold voice. “What I want to know is who paid you to send it.”
“Please, don’t report me to the police!” the other woman cried, suddenly bursting into tears. “I really needed the money. I wouldn’t really do what I said in the letter. Of course, I wouldn’t! What good would it do if I did? You can tell by just looking at him that Mart isn’t his father.”
Di nodded. “So, who paid you?” she repeated.
“I don’t know her name. I thought it was Mart’s sister at first, but it wasn’t. She gave me cash. I used it to pay the rent.”
I’ll have to tell Trixie about this, Di decided, despite a reluctance to admit that this conversation had ever happened. Whatever this is about, it’s not really about Mart. It’s all to do with Trixie. Aloud, she said, “I need you to put it in writing that you were mistaken and that Mart is not your son’s father.”
“Of course,” the woman cried. “Anything! Just, please don’t report me. I’m so sorry I did it now.”
As the document was written, Di watched and pondered, pushing down a feeling of dread. This particular battle may have been won, but the war was far from over.