as sluggish as the air. Bright green slimy globs lazed on the surface. She couldn’t picture Daddy swimming in that.
Tereza held her nose. “Smells like sweaty socks, don’t it?”
Linda grunted in response. When the wind was right, she would catch whiffs of the river on her way to school. The sometimes sweet, sometimes rotten smell of mystery lurked behind houses grander than hers with plush green back yards leading to wooden docks and rowboats. But this close to the water, the smell was almost indecent, more like soiled underwear than sweaty socks.
Tereza pulled a penknife from her pocket and cut a couple of punks, leaving short stems. She produced a small box of wooden matches. The punks weren’t dry enough to flame up and she wasted a couple of matches before they caught and smoldered. “Mmm,” she said, waving her punk under her nose, “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.”
Linda hid herself behind a bush and held her punk down by her knees so the smoke wouldn’t give her away. She stuck the thin, hard stem in her mouth and puh-puh-puhed as she’d seen Daddy do to get his pipe going. The stem tasted like potato peel.
Tereza snorted. “Ain’t nothing to inhale, genius. This your first punk?”
So what if it was? “Of course not. It’s just more fun this way.”
Tereza puh-puh-puhed, too, then sucked on the stem so hard her eyes crossed. “No it ain’t.” She plopped on the ground without a care for the mud.
Linda kept crouching, though her knees and thighs had started to burn. “What should we do this summer?” Tereza was the only girl even close to her age on the “right” side of the highway Linda wasn’t allowed to cross alone. Tereza moving in was like finding an extra gift under the Christmas tree.
“I don’t know. Hang out. Play baseball. I seen a couple cute guys at the store.”
Hoods. Rude boys who made Linda feel ashamed for simply being a girl.
Tereza was first to spot the police car as it crept down the street. “Shit.” She snuffed out her punk and spidered up the riverbank, Linda right behind her. Both girls wore pedal pushers but Tereza looked better in hers. Her skin was the color of a root beer float and her body wasn’t lumpy. Linda squinted. She’d left her ugly glasses at home but she could make out two shapes in uniforms emerging from the car. They scaled the hilly lawn to Crazy Haggerty’s and took the steps to the wraparound porch. One was stout enough to be the crotchety officer who gave talks at school on what to do if someone tried to force you into a car. All Linda could ever remember was to scratch the license plate number in the dirt with a stick. What if there was no dirt, no stick?
“Somebody must’ve got bumped off.”
“No one gets murdered in this boring town,” Linda said.
• • •
The dog has abandoned his post at the foot of the lad’s bed.
He bounds down the once fine staircase to the shadowy front entrance where Miranda stands awash in her own fear. His growl is a deep rumble she feels through her bare feet. Nicholas wouldn’t be growling if the footsteps belonged to James. And James wouldn’t be coming in the front. He’d be shuffling through the back where Miranda has looked for him off and on since last sunset, slipping up and down the stairs, stealthy as a shadow, risking more than one furtive glance under the back door window shade. She’s had to keep the lad amused on her own and cope with Nicholas doing his business all over the house.
James never leaves her overnight. And they’ve not been apart, before, on Summer Sun Standing: the day of the year the sun stands still before retracing his steps down the sky; when night holds her breath, beguiling you, for a moment, into believing mortal life can exist without death. James should be here, dancing with her on the summer king’s tomb.
Nicholas’s growls become short sharp barks as one pair of feet and then another reach the porch. Miranda’s Veranda James named it when she was learning to rhyme. He tells her she trod on its boards when they crossed the threshold. She doesn’t remember. She was three.
Strangers knock from time to time. Most leave quickly after hearing the dog. Not these. Nicholas hurls himself against the ponderous oak door so violently it shudders. The impact throws him to the floor. Miranda winces, feeling his pain in her shoulder and hip.
“Police!” A clean, hard voice, not breathy and musical like James’s. “Anyone home?”
Nicholas’s nails click against the pegged wood floor as he scrambles up, readying himself for a second assault. If James were here, he’d retrieve his shotgun from the closet and make sure she and the lad were hidden.
The doorknob rattles. She ponders the lock and the long black key she’s never turned.
Should they appear one day when I’m away, James said, welcome them a thousand times over but deny all knowledge. She closes her eyes and summons the memory, hoping to extract more guidance from his words, but the memory gets lost in the dog’s barking and the mewling of the lad upstairs, who has woken to find Nicholas gone.
Is there still time to hide?
The door shudders again, this time from pounding on the outside. “Anyone in there?” Louder now. “Don’t make us break the door down and shoot the dog.”
Miranda drops to the floor next to Nicholas and wraps her arms around his quivering body. He smells of decay. His heart thumps so hard she fears it will burst.
“Breathe my air,” she whispers.
He licks her face, his tongue hot and frantic. He’s already lapped up more than his measure of years but she can’t bear the thought of anyone shooting him.
“Open up!”
One arm about the dog, she drags him with her as she sidles on knees to the keyhole. Pinches and turns the key with thumb and forefinger until she hears the click. Stands and grips Nicholas by the ruff. She pulls open the door enough to detect two bodies, one near enough to touch. Muggy air infiltrates the entryway.
“Good day,” she says, summoning the courage of Alice facing the Queen. But her voice comes out as thick as cold treacle and her legs go weak. Nicholas howls and a gun materializes in the closer man’s hand. Miranda presses her free hand against the wall to steady herself. “Silence,” she hisses. Nicholas obeys.
The man with the gun says, “This Mr. James Haggerty’s home?”
“Aye.” In twelve years she has spoken only to James, the lad and Nicholas. She knows not how much or how little to say.
“This your home, too, Miss?”
“Aye.”
He inhales sharply and says to the other man, “Thought they said he lived alone.” He turns back to her. “We have news. Are you able to control the dog?”
She points and firmly says, “Nicholas, go.”
He backs up through the dining room into the kitchen and, with an extravagant sigh, slumps to the floor by the wood stove, in eyeshot of the door.
Miranda’s arm shakes as she opens the door a smidgen wider and blinks into unfamiliar daylight. The one who spoke is tall and wiry, younger
