Jubilee's Journey Page 4

  “Why can’t I come with you?”

  “Jubie,” he said with a laugh. “Men don’t bring their baby sister when they’re asking for a job.”

  Giving him a look that argued the point, she griped, “I ain’t no baby!”

  “I know you’re not. But right now I need you to be a really big girl—a really big girl who can stay here and keep an eye on our things.”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “Not at all,” Paul said, holding up his right hand. “That grocery store’s willing to pay thirty dollars a week. If I get a good job like that, we won’t need to find Mama’s sister. We’ll have enough money to get ourselves a nice room to live in and good food to eat.”

  Finally Jubilee agreed.

  Before he turned and crossed the street, Paul shook a warning finger. “Now don’t leave this bench, no matter what. And don’t talk to strangers.”

  “Everybody in this town’s a stranger,” Jubilee grumbled resentfully.

  “In time they won’t be,” Paul answered and turned toward the street.

  The bread truck blocked Hurt’s view of Paul crossing the street. And the girl, small as she was, sitting on a bench partly hidden by an oak tree, was beyond the scope of where he’d fixed his vision.

  He moved down the street with long strides. No cars out front: good. No passersby: good. Hurt had to make sure there were no witnesses. Witnesses only meant trouble. He’d gone soft in the jewelry store heist when Eloise Mercer had whimpered and cried, and what did he get in return? She pointed an accusing finger at him, and he spent an extra five years in prison.

  “No more,” he mumbled. “No more.”

  Paul was standing in front of the counter asking Sidney Klaussner about the job when the store door opened.

  Sidney Klaussner was fifty-eight years old but sharp as a tack. He was also damned and determined that nobody was ever gonna rob his store again. A year earlier three thugs who had jumped off a freight train came in waving a gun and walked off with more than four hundred dollars. For a good six months Sidney berated himself for letting them get away with it; then he went out and bought a Browning 16 gauge shotgun. It was an automatic that could fire off five shots faster than a rabbit could run across the yard.

  Whenever the store door swung open, Sidney always looked up and nodded a hello. It was his way of greeting people. When Hurt walked through the door, Sid saw him reach into his jacket pocket and pull the gun out. Before Hurt closed the gap between them Sidney pulled the rifle from beneath the counter, and without taking time to aim he began firing.

  Hurt was faster. His bullet tore through Sidney’s chest like a cannon ball.

  Sidney squeezed off two shots as he fell. The first one hit Paul in the head. The second one went wild and lodged itself in the ceiling.

  Hurt stepped over Paul and banged open the cash register. He grabbed all the bills, then turned and walked out of the store like a man who’d just stopped in for a pack of cigarettes.

  He never noticed Martha Tillinger. Without her hearing aid she’d been unaware of what was happening until she heard the bang of gunfire and that’s when she squatted down behind the cereal boxes.

  Martha, afraid for her life, stayed behind those cereal boxes for nearly twenty minutes before she found the courage to venture out. When she finally tiptoed out and saw the bodies in the floor, she screamed so loud that Mario Gomez heard her two doors down. He came running from the barber shop, and that’s when they finally called the police.

  By time the patrol car pulled up in front of Klaussner’s Grocery, Hurt McAdams was five blocks from the bus station.

  Angry Faces

  The Klaussner’s Grocery Store robbery occurred at 8:06 on the first Wednesday of March. By 8:30 there were two ambulances and five patrol cars sitting crosswise on Main Street. Cars were rerouted to Washington, but those on foot could cut through the park and come out on Main. Within twenty minutes there were nearly fifty people who had come from out of nowhere crowded in front of the store.

  Ethan Allen left for school at 8:40. It took ten minutes to get there and he had ten minutes to spare, so when he bicycled across Ridge Road and saw the flashing red lights a block down on Main he turned and headed in that direction.

  Leaning his bicycle against the lamppost, he edged his way into the crowd and looked for a familiar face. Seth Porter’s was the first one he saw.

  “Hey, there, Mister Porter,” he called out.

  Porter turned and scanned the faces in the crowd.

  “It’s me,” Ethan Allen called and pushed past a hefty woman who’d been blocking his view. “What’s going on?”

  “Ain’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “Yeah, I’m on my way.”

  “Then you’d better get moving.”

  “What’s going on?” Ethan Allen repeated.

  Porter glanced at his watch and thumbed his finger in the direction of the school. “Get going. It’s five ‘til nine.”

  “School don’t start ‘til ten today,” Ethan answered. “So what’s going on?”

  “A robbery,” Porter finally said. “Sidney Klaussner got shot. They’re saying he shot one of the bandits, but the other one got away. ” He eyed Ethan Allen suspiciously. “You sure school don’t start ‘til ten?”

  “Positive.”

  Moments later Carmella Klaussner jumped out of Henrietta Banger’s car and pushed her way through the crowd screaming, “Sid! Sid!” The poor woman was almost hysterical, and it was all anyone could do to hold her back. She screamed, cried, and pleaded, but still Ed Cunningham refused to allow her past the barricade he’d set up. It was Ed’s third day on the job, and he was starting to think that maybe being a policeman wasn’t what he was cut out for.

  “This is a crime scene,” he kept repeating, “and no one except the police and medics are allowed in.”

  Of course the crowd of onlookers sided with Carmella.

  “Let her in!” somebody shouted. “She’s got a right to see her husband!”

  “Yeah!” several others yelled. “Let her in!”

  “Nobody’s allowed in,” Cunningham repeated, but by then beads of nervous perspiration were building on his forehead. He wanted to explain how the police were trying to collect the sort of evidence they needed to find the perpetrator, but the crowd was obviously not in the mood to listen.

  It was after ten-thirty when the medics carried out the first stretcher. Cunningham pushed the crowd back to clear a pathway to the ambulance, then helped Carmella in so she could be with her husband. As the doors slammed shut, the last thing he heard was Carmella’s voice crying, “Say something, Sid, say something…”

  The second stretcher was carried out minutes later, and when the medics went by an angry rumble rolled through the crowd.

  “Murderer!” someone yelled; then others echoed the word. Once the gurney was locked in place, the second ambulance sped off.

  “You should’ve just let the hoodlum die!” somebody shouted. After that a loud and angry discussion ensued about what was right and wrong.

  “If someone repents of their sin, the Lord forgives them,” Pastor Brian argued.

  “An eye for an eye!” Bob Ballard yelled.

  “Yeah,” several people agreed. “An eye for an eye.”

  Cunningham started to sweat profusely. “Let’s all calm down. There’s nothing more to see here. Just go home and let well enough be.”

  After a lot of arguing and yelling, Pastor Brian left the group and made his way back across the park. Little by little the others began to drift away.

  Only then did Seth Porter realize he’d lost track of the time. It was well after eleven when he finally shooed Ethan Allen off to school.

  Making his way through the now-thinning crowd, Ethan Allen noticed the girl sitting on the bench. She was a little kid, sitting there all by herself. She probably should be in school too, he thought, but nobody’s telling her to scram. As he pedaled past the bench, a fleeting
twinge of resentment caught hold.

  “How come she gets to stay here?” he grumbled as he turned the corner and headed toward Wyattsville Junior High.

  Jubilee remained on the bench throughout the morning. She’d heard the gunshots, but she’d heard gunshots before. In Coal Fork it simply meant the men had gone hunting. Even as she watched the crowds gather she was not alarmed. This was the city. Paul had warned her things were different in the city.

  When several hours had passed and he still hadn’t returned, she began to search the faces of the stragglers standing in front of the store. The expressions were hard and the voices angry, so Jubilee remained where she was. She thought back on Paul’s words.

  “You can’t go talking to strangers,” he’d said. “People in the city ain’t like us. They got their ways, and we got ours.” So far, Jubilee was none too fond of their ways.

  For a brief moment there had been a boy who seemed different—someone she might ask to go in search of her brother. The boy looked at her for a moment, then climbed onto his bicycle and pedaled off. Once he rounded the corner and disappeared, Jubilee knew it was a foolish thought. He was like all the others.

  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

  When 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

  Normally 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 lit
tle 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.