His eyes narrowed and he stared hard at me. “Late,” he said. “I walked in around one a.m. and it was last call. She was there with the Lang girl and a couple of guys who were trying too hard to make sure everyone knew they were stinkin’ rich but they could go slummin’ for a night with the white trash, if you know what I mean.”
I leaned against the doorjamb and closed my eyes. “I get the picture,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
“That kid is heading down the road to perdition,” he said. “She’s going to do herself some real harm. And maybe take somebody down with her.”
“I know,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how to stop her.”
“Well, you better figure out something,” he said. “Because if you don’t, there’s going to be hell to pay. It’s only a matter of time.”
When he left a short while later to join the crew in the fields, the tension between us was still as taut as an overwound clock. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told one of the girls who’d just arrived for work that she could reach me on my mobile if something came up.
I had an errand in Leesburg.
Eli’s office was down the street from the old courthouse on West Market Street. I found a parking space around the corner on Church and walked past the pretty white-columned brick building as the bell in the tower serenely chimed ten o’clock. Out front, a statue of a Confederate soldier, dedicated to the thousands of Rebel soldiers who died fighting for a cause they believed in, stood guard. Elsewhere on the grounds the old stocks and whipping posts memorialized past methods of law enforcement. The way I felt about my sister just now, maybe they knew a thing or two about discipline in those days.
Eli’s dark-haired young receptionist was on the telephone as I walked in. She nodded at me and pointed to the stairs, giving me thumbs up to indicate that my brother was in.
He had his back to me, sitting on a high stool hunched over a set of drawings spread across his drafting table. The room was neat as a pin, except for the empty soda cans on top of the filing cabinet—although not surprisingly they were aligned in a perfectly straight row. A scale model of a shopping center occupied another table. Photographs of Brandi and Hope were crowded on top of a credenza, above which hung a corkboard covered with drawings and photos of buildings in various stages of completion. His Filofax, which he practically chained to his wrist, sat on his desk open to today’s date. Judging by the amount of writing on the page, he had a full schedule.
“Hey,” I said finally. “Sorry to bother you.”
He jumped and swung around. “Luce! I didn’t know you were there. What are you doing? What’s wrong?” “Why does something have to be wrong for me to drop by?” I asked.
“Nice try,” he said. “When your face goes all red like that and you don’t blink for a long time, I know it’s bad. What’s up?”
“Mia,” I said. “Quinn saw her at the No-Name last night. That biker bar on the Snickersville Turnpike.”
“Oh, jeez. That dump. What was she doing there?”
“What do you think? Drinking. And playing pool. She came in absolutely falling-down drunk the other night. I had to put her to bed.”
“It’s her age. We were like that, too. I remember when you and Kit used to steal bottles of wine from under Jacques’ nose and drink them over at Goose Creek Bridge.”
“Kit and I didn’t get drunk.”
“Sure you didn’t.”
“You’re not helping. She’s underage.”
“You can count the days until she’s not.”
“She has a problem, Eli. Binge drinking. God knows what she gets up to when she’s at school in that sorority house.”
“We can’t babysit her. Look, I’ll talk to her, okay?”
“Good. She won’t listen to me.”
He rolled his eyes. “Because you’re always on her case.”
“What am I supposed to do when she comes home throwing up and I have to take care of her?” I banged my cane on the floor. “Tell her it’s okay?”
“Of course not. But why don’t you try reasoning with her for a change?”
“I
“Okay, okay. I’ll call her.”
“It needs to be face-to-face, Eli. Why don’t you invite her to spend the weekend? You’ve got, what, ten bedrooms in that palace?”
“Only eight.” He sounded miffed. “And ixnay on the weekend thing. Brandi’s been getting migraines. She needs to have things kind of quiet.”
“How about dinner? Could you have her over to dinner one night?”
He considered the suggestion. “Sure. But not this week. I’m completely slammed with work. Next week sometime.”
“When?”
“I dunno. How about Friday?”
“You can’t do it before then?”
“Look, most nights I barely make it home for dinner myself. At least Friday I know I’ll be there. That’s the best I can do.”
“Okay. Next Friday. You’ll call her, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll call her.” Eli reached over and picked up his bulky Filofax, scribbling something on the page. “Jeez. I gotta write everything down these days or I’ll forget. Just so damn much stuff going on. I can’t keep track anymore.”
“Thanks for doing this,” I said. “Call me afterwards and let me know how it went, okay?”
He picked up the Filofax again. “Damn. I’d better write that down, too.”
Half a block from his office I stopped at a store called Leesburg Little Ones and bought a shopping basket’s worth of coloring books, picture books, boxes of crayons, and cases of colored pencils.
“Are you a teacher?” The woman at the cash register smiled as I handed her my credit card.
“No.”
“Run a day-care center?”
“Nope,” I said. “They’re for a friend.”
The Patowmack Free Clinic opened for business in half an hour, but already every rocking chair on the front porch was occupied. Children and adults sat on the railing or on the porch floor, and a line, mostly of elderly people and mothers with babies, snaked from the front door down the stairs and around the border gardens into the parking lot.
I threaded my way through the mostly Spanish-speaking crowd and went around the side to the staff entrance. A volunteer let me in.
Ross and Siri kept a large basket of donated children’s books near the waiting room. Every child who came to the clinic—either as a patient or accompanying a parent—went home with either a book or a coloring book. While the mothers and fathers might not speak English, the children did. When I’d been here the other day, the basket had looked like it could do with replenishing.
“Lucie!” Siri came out of the kitchen carrying a small box. “What are you doing here?”
I held up my shopping bags. “Books, coloring books, crayons, colored pencils. Shall I put them in the donation basket?”
“How thoughtful of you! No, I’ll take them. Let me just set this down.” She placed her box on a table next to the kitchen door. The pink flip-flop still hung on it. “Thanks, honey. I appreciate it.”
I glanced in the box she’d just put down as I handed over the shopping bags. “More donated medicine?”
She nodded. “We take what we can get. Thanks for stopping by. I’ll get these out right away. They’ll be gone in no time.”
“Where’s Ross? Is he in?”
