Flowering Judas(9)

“If Graham and I find out you’re living in your car and you didn’t tell us you needed money, we’re both going to come out there and kill you. I mean it. There’s no reason for you to be teaching at all anymore if you don’t want to. We could support you. You could come out here and we could find a place big enough—”

“I’m not going to move out to California,” Penny said. “And would you stop? I’m fine. I really am. And I’m going to be late if I don’t get off this phone and do something. I really do have to get to class.”

There was yet another long dead silence on the phone. Penny took a deep breath and counted to ten.

“All right,” George said suddenly. “Call me when you’re done. I’m going to call Graham.”

“I really am all right,” Penny said.

But George had hung up. That did not bode well.

Penny looked down at the shirt and the shampoo and the soap. Then she put her old shirt on and swept everything else back into the totebag.

She’d have to come back up here after class and wash up then. She didn’t like the idea. She didn’t like being up in this part of the building in the middle of the night. There just wasn’t any help for it.

Maybe she’d postpone the idea of taking a night in a hotel. She was going to have to have enough money put by to get herself a place to stay when the weather got cold, because the weather got very cold in this part of New York state.

And it wasn’t that far until October.

6

Charlene Morton knew she couldn’t go out, not so close to night, not with half the family in the house. They watched her these days, her family did. They made sure she wasn’t carrying anything but the usual leaflets and flyers and posters. They made sure she wasn’t wandering around at odd hours that some judge might consider “harassment.”

Still, she could come out to the greenhouse, and she had. Part of that was to be by herself for a while, to be away from them and on her own. Part of it was to look at the flowering Judas tree. It was the hardest thing she had ever undertaken to grow. It was tall and its purple flowers looked like they were made of silk. She was proud of it, but worried about it, too. The dirt around the roots was chopped up and mounded here and there. She’d worked at it for half an hour and barely made it what she wanted it to be again.

Then she’d headed back to the house, because she knew they would be waiting for her. They were suspicious of her even when she was only tending to plants.

This was the truth of it—no matter how often Stew and Suzanne and the boys all said they cared about what happened to Chester, no matter how often they all said they wanted to bring him back home … well.

They all wanted a quiet life. That was what was going on. They wanted Chester back if it took no pain or suffering to get him back. If it meant lawsuits and stalking charges and nights in jail, that was something else again.

Charlene had heard Kenny leave for school, but she hadn’t gone out to the hall to say good-bye. Kenny didn’t want to be in school, and he didn’t want to join the business, either. He wanted what Chester used to want, a place of his own and a life of his own. Charlene was not completely stupid. She knew that was a natural thing for young men. They always wanted to be off somewhere.

But still.

Charlene was sitting at the big round table in the kitchen. She had poured herself a cup of coffee an hour ago. Now it sat, cold and only halfdrunk, near her elbow. There was a stack of the latest flyers in the middle of the table. There was a stack of the latest posters right next to it. The posters were not real posters, the way they had been when Chester first went missing. These were just ordinary pieces of typing paper with the picture and information printed on them by the printer Mark had downstairs. There wasn’t as much energy as there used to be in the search for Chester Ray Morton.

Of course, it had been twelve years. Twelve years was a long time.

The kitchen door swung open. Charlene looked up. It was Stew standing in the doorway. Charlene wondered what had happened to Mark.

“Kenny got off to school,” Stew said.

Charlene nodded. She put her hand up to touch Chester’s face in the picture on the poster. It was the same as the picture on the flyer. She’d brought those flyers all the way up to the third floor of Frasier Hall today. She didn’t even know if anybody ever went to the third floor of Frasier Hall. At least the bathrooms were clean.

Stew came in and sat down on the other side of the table. He looked old. Charlene thought she probably looked older. She couldn’t really see herself in the mirror anymore.

“I think we’ve got to at least consider the possibility that our boys are not cut out for school,” Stew said.