see something.”
Linda didn’t want Tereza to call her a chicken again and she itched to learn more about the girl who now had a name. “As long as you don’t tell your folks so they can’t tell mine.”
Not that Mother was likely to seek out the Dobras. At dinner one night she’d said, “Just because she’s the only girl your age this side of the highway doesn’t mean you have to play with her. We don’t know anything about them.” Daddy suggested Mother walk over and welcome them to the neighborhood, poke around in their garbage can. She didn’t, of course.
Tereza pulled a rusty crowbar from the log.
“How’d that get there?” Linda didn’t like the idea of Tereza visiting The Island on her own and putting stuff in the log without her agreement.
“I found it back of my house, hiding in the grass.”
Tereza lived in an apartment building and what she called grass was more like weeds but Linda didn’t correct her.
They crept along the riverbank, approaching Crazy Haggerty’s from the back, stepping around mounds of dog poop. “I never saw him walk that dog,” Linda said.
A small stack of firewood rested against a wall by the back door. “The door’s locked,” Tereza said. “I tried it already. I could’ve busted in but I waited for you.” Padlocked shutters covered the windows on the outside. “I can smash ’em open, easy.”
“If you do, I’m not staying. I won’t tell, but I won’t stay.”
“Look up there.” Tereza pointed to a small window close to the corner of the house, too high to reach without a ladder. Its shutter hung by a hinge. “I broke that one because it’s harder for the cops to spot. I jimmied the window open with a rock.”
“When?”
“Last week, at night. It was too dark to see inside.” She monkeyed up the drainpipe and chinned herself on the window ledge. If Linda tried that, her weight would bring the pipe down. Her heart thumped at the fear of getting caught but she was too curious to leave.
“The kitchen,” Tereza said when she got back down. “Nothing in it except a wood stove. No table, no chairs.”
“They must’ve eaten in the dining room.”
“Or not at all. They could be zombies from outer space.”
Linda sighed in exasperation. Tereza might be older but she wasn’t all that smart. “Zombies are already dead. Crazy Haggerty wouldn’t have died of natural causes if he was a zombie.” Then she noticed two small basement windows barred but not shuttered. Kneeling on a piece of wood so she wouldn’t get her knees dirty, she peered in one window. The light was dim but she could make out two white pillars with black drapes hanging between them.
“I see a cape on a hook,” Tereza called out from the other window.
Linda scooted over to look.
“The guys at the store say Crazy Haggerty worshipped the devil,” Tereza said. “They say he had snake fangs, rat tails and porcupine quills in his pockets when he died. I think the old man kept her as a slave, sicced the dog on her if she didn’t do everything he wanted. Too bad I didn’t move here sooner. I would’ve sprung her.”
“How?”
“I would’ve figured a way.”
“Maybe she was a lunatic Haggerty saved from the horrors of an asylum,” Linda said. “They tie you up and turn hoses on you, you know, attach wires to your head and cook your brain.” She’d learned about asylums from a comic book passed around the school playground. She wanted to believe Haggerty had been protecting Miranda from that or something worse.
Tereza snorted. “The horrors? La-di-dah, Miss Dictionary.”
Linda stomped home alone.
At dinner, she asked, “Did Mr. Haggerty’s daughter have a garage?”
“What an interesting question,” Daddy said.
Linda related what Tereza had said.
Mother looked at her plate.
Daddy said, “You and your mother need to have a chat.”
That night a black bug as big and heavy as Linda climbed onto her back. She couldn’t breathe. She must have screamed because Mother came into her room and rubbed her back. “Hush, angel,” she said. “It was only a dream.”
• • •
Six weeks later Mother disappeared into the hospital for what Daddy called a female thing. “Take care of your father,” she said. “He has no idea what to do with a stove.”
Linda rummaged in her brain for everything she knew about being a wife. Keep your hands out of the wringer washer. Start with the collar when you iron a shirt, then the yoke, then the sleeves. Skim the cream from the milk for his coffee. Be sure all evidence of your housework is out of sight by the time he gets home.
Tereza was no help. She didn’t want to help dust or vacuum or wash floors. “I’m never getting married,” she said. “If I have to clean somebody’s house I’d better get paid for it.” When Linda was stuck at home cooking and cleaning, Tereza hung out with the greasy-haired boys who prowled the neighborhood in a pack.
Sometimes, women from church dropped off a meatloaf, cabbage rolls or even a chocolate cake but you couldn’t count on it. Linda could scramble eggs, dissolve Jell-O and open cans of Daddy’s favorite Manhattan clam chowder soup. She’d sit outside with him after dinner while he talked about his secretary, his boss and the vital role of the cost accountant at Bartz Chemicals. He’d help her with the dishes before their nightly hospital visits. While he was at work, she stood at the sink, guzzling jars of expensive Queen Anne cherries Mother had hidden in the pantry behind a broken toaster and buried the jars later under garbage in the can outside. She sat at Mother’s mahogany dressing table and smeared her face with Pond’s, as cool and creamy as Junket pudding. Licked two fingers as she’d seen Mother do and moistened the tiny brush before dipping it into the little red mascara box. She washed her hair by herself for the first time and needed every bobby pin in the house to set it. Without a mother, how would Miranda know to brush her hair a hundred strokes a night?
Driving with Daddy to the hospital a week after Mother went in, Linda asked, “How come nobody knew Mr. Haggerty had a daughter?” She was in the front where Mother usually sat and got to watch Daddy shift gears. The seat cushion still held Mother’s lemony scent.
“People were scared of him. Your mother went over there once to collect for the Red Cross and he greeted her on the porch with a shotgun.”
“Do you suppose his daughter went to school somewhere?”
“I doubt it.”
Poor Miranda. Linda liked almost everything about school: getting escorted across the highway by a police officer, waiting on the playground for the bell to ring, learning about the solar system, using the pencil sharpener. “Why wouldn’t her father have let her go?”
“No idea.” He reached over and patted
