the house.”
“What a good idea,” said Miss Emily. “I’ll walk over
there right now. Isn’t it nice that we’re finally getting a
taste of spring after all that cold?”
“Are we? I haven’t been outside yet.” I glanced out
the window. Sunshine. And the wind was blowing so
gently that the leaves on the azalea bushes Dwight and
I had set out in the fall barely stirred. “Maybe we’ll see
you in a few minutes.”
Cal headed for the garage door.
“Sit,” I said quietly.
He sat down at the kitchen table and I took the chair
across from him. “You want to tell me what happened
yesterday?”
He shrugged, twined his feet around the legs of the
chair, and tried to look innocent. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
His brown eyes darted away from mine. “Nothing
really.”
I waited silently.
“We were just playing.”
“And?”
“He kept bugging us. Aunt Kate wouldn’t let us
use the PlayStation because she said we weren’t letting
Jake have enough of a turn and when we let him play
Monopoly with us, he couldn’t count his money, so—”
He hesitated.
“So?”
“So we said we’d play hide-and-seek and then . . .”
His voice dropped even lower than his head. “I guess
we sorta hid where he couldn’t find us and we didn’t
111
MARGARET MARON
come out even when he said he gave up and then he
started crying and Aunt Kate got mad and made Mary
Pat go to her room.” He looked up with a calculated
glint in his eyes that more than one defendant had tried
on me. “But then I did read Jake a story.”
I wasn’t any more impressed with that than I gen-
erally was in the courtroom when the defendant says,
“But I only hit him twice with that tire iron and then I
did take him to the hospital.”
“You think that makes up for getting Aunt Kate upset
again?”
He shrugged, but his jaw set in a mulish fix that was
so reminiscent of Dwight that I might have laughed
under different circumstances.
“You promised me on Thursday that you were going
to be nicer to Jake and cut him some slack.”
“Sorry.” It was a one-size-fits-all, pro forma apology.
