“Thaddeus,” she said. “Come back over here where it’s safer.” He looked at her and made that weird little laughing sound. She shook her head. “Thaddeus,” and she dropped her tone into a scolding voice, “come back here.”
He looked at her again. “Hah, hah, hah, hah.”
She groaned. “Please don’t drown,” she said. “I really don’t want to lose you right now.”
His wings flapped in the air, and he made another weird sound, but this time he obliged and came closer.
She smiled when he got to her legs and said, “There you go now. You should be safe.” But, of course, she couldn’t stop thinking about what he might have seen in the water. Hopefully it was nothing, and just the height of the water bothered him. But she got up and walked to the edge to check.
As she got too close, Mugs barked at her. She looked down at him and nodded. “Right. But you didn’t bark at Thaddeus, did you?” she said. “It probably wasn’t a good idea for him to get as close as he was.”
From where she stood, she tried to peer into the water but wasn’t seeing anything. She smiled and said, “I think we’re good, guys. He didn’t find anything.” At least she hoped he didn’t. She kept checking it out, but the water flowed so fast that she couldn’t see into it at all. She moved back to the spot where she’d been sitting, when Mugs barked again. This time, he faced the pathway.
She frowned and looked to see several figures walking up and down at the far side. “They might have every reason to be there,” she scolded him. “It’s not our creek, even though we like to think it is.” But still, she was curious. With the animals in tow, she walked up along the houses on her side of the creek until she stopped in front of the two young men, standing there on the opposite bank. They were obviously agitated.
“What’s the matter?” Doreen asked them.
One guy shrugged and said, “I wasn’t expecting the water to be this high. I was looking to cross the creek.”
“Can’t right here,” she said. “A little footbridge is down a ways, but some of the wood’s rotten. So if you fall in …”
He shrugged, nodded, and said, “How do we get to the street?”
“Well, where did you come from? Because if you lived in one of these houses,” she said, “you could have just walked around to the front of the house.”
He looked at her in surprise, then back at the houses behind him, and said, “Well, we are staying there with some friends, but we were told to head over to the cul-de-sac on the other side.”
As that would have been close to Penny’s house, she nodded and said, “You have to walk all the way around then, so that won’t be the fastest thing to do.”
“And how do I get there?” he asked.
She shrugged and said, “You need to find one of the little bridges closer to you.”
He asked, “You live here?”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Down a ways.”
“Can we go through your yard to get to the front road?”
“Only if you explain to me why you aren’t using the street in front of the house where you’re staying,” she said. “Because that would make the most sense.”
“We don’t really want them to see us,” he said. “We were staying there, but some funny stuff is going on, and we don’t want to get involved.”
By funny stuff, she figured he meant drugs. She sighed and said, “Come on then.”
She didn’t know how old they were. To her, they looked like about twelve though, which meant they were probably at least sixteen, if not older. The boys fell into step with her quite happily, crossing over her little bridge without a mishap. And, when she got into her backyard, she led the way out to her front yard and then said, “There you go. That’s my cul-de-sac. But I think you want the next cul-de-sac over. So you have to go down and around that way.” And she gave them instructions regarding how to get to Penny’s cul-de-sac, probably closer to the house where these teens came from. The young men smiled and thanked her; then they took off, walking in the direction she suggested. She smiled, and, as soon as they were out of sight, she turned back to Mugs and said, “Well, that was our good deed for the day.”
He barked several times, but he didn’t seem to be all that happy. She wished she’d taken pictures of the two boys. She had tried to identify some characteristics for each just because she wasn’t comfortable dealing with strangers anymore, yet nothing had seemed to distinguish these teens. No tattoos. No piercings. No scars. No moles. No singular hairstyles or shocking stripes of color in their hair. Still, she jotted down a few notes on her cell phone and then turned and said, “Guys, it’s bedtime. Let’s get inside and crash for the night.”
And that’s what they did.
Chapter 5
Saturday Morning …
The next morning, instead of waking up energized and full of life, she woke up exhausted. She’d had terrible nightmares about this Bill/Brian/Bob Small guy, and she was too tired to even figure out what his proper name was. Putting the coffee on, she noted it was still early. But then, considering that Mack was supposed to start working with her on the deck, she needed to be feeling a little bit better. And she’d promised she would eat before he got here. Her animals looked like they’d had as rough a night as she had.
Mugs was stretched out flat on the floor, his legs almost in a weird little froggy position.
“What’s with you today?” she asked, crouching down and
