2 On the Nickel Read Online Free Page A

her way through
the crowd as I held on to her car and tried to steady my racing heart. Britt
was nowhere in sight. I spotted my elderly next-door neighbor, Mrs. Waltz,
headed my way. She was eighty going on a hundred and ten, with her gray bun
coiled tightly on top of her head. Her pale green polyester slacks outfit
reminded me of pistachio ice cream. “What’s going on?” I asked, sounding calmer than I felt.
    “Car wreck in the church lot.”
Mrs. Waltz leaned heavily on her wheeled walker. Her breath came in short huffs. “What happened to your hair?”
    “Golf hat.” I ruffled my limp
hair self-consciously. I should have left my hat on. “Was anyone hurt in the
crash?”
    From attending this church all my
life, I knew the layout of the rear parking lot intimately. If there was a car
wreck back there, it couldn’t be too serious. There was only one place, the
circular loop connecting the back paved rectangle to Main Street, where there
was any room to go faster than a crawl. While I was thinking this, a part of me was also thinking, Please don’t let Mama be back there.
    “Don’t know, and I’m not waiting
to find out.” Mrs. Waltz maneuvered her walker around the island I made on the
sidewalk. She muscled it over a bit of grass and back onto the concrete. “Got
to keep moving or my joints will seize up.”
    “Nice seeing you,” I called to
her back.
    Jonette returned, looking
puzzled.
    “Well?” I asked.
    “I didn’t get much. No one is
allowed on the church property.” Jonette did an empty-handed gesture. “I spoke
to two of your mother’s friends. Muriel and Francine were working in the church
office when the police evacuated the building. Muriel is miffed because they
won’t release her car from the rear parking lot.”
    That shaky feeling in my knees
returned. The hair on the back of my neck stirred. “Muriel is always miffed
about something. She’ll get over it. Did you see Mama?”
    Jonette shook her head. “She’s
not here. Muriel and Francine said Delilah stood them up today.”
    Relief flashed through me, closely followed by annoyance. “Where is she?” I hoped she wasn’t over at Erica Hodges’
house beheading Erica’s chrysanthemums again. Or over at the newspaper
spreading rumors about Erica to the gossip columnist.
    “I asked her friends. They don’t
know where she is.”
    Another thought broadsided me. What if Mama hadn’t made it because she’d been in the parking lot accident? I shivered. “Is
her car parked back there?”
    Jonette patted my shoulder. “Chill,
Cleo. Delilah’s not here. That’s good news. Let’s not invite trouble.”
    “You’re right.” No need to invite
trouble; it came whether you wanted it or not. But I couldn’t shut down my
worry machine. Dread crept from my bones into my blood.
    I shook my head to clear it. “Why
is our entire police force here?”
    Jonette shrugged. “Don’t have a
clue.”
    “Mrs. Waltz said it was a car
wreck. Did you hear anything about a collision?”
    “Not a peep.”
    The stone front of the church
looked cold and forbidding, no easy feat in the heat of August. It’s normally
welcoming red double doors reminded me of spilled blood. My knees wobbled, and
I willed them to hold me. Don’t borrow trouble, I reminded myself.
    Except for the driveway to the
rear parking lot, the structure of Trinity Episcopal filled the block on the
Main Street side. It was maddening to be so close and still be clueless. “Let’s
sneak around back.”
    Jonette’s eyes widened knowingly.
“Sounds like a plan.”
    We skirted the edge of the crowd,
past the dense tree line that blocked the church parking lot from full view of
Linden Avenue. We continued around the block on Schoolhouse Road until we came to the thicket.
    Every Trinity Episcopal kid knew
their way through the thicket. Navigating the dense foliage was a rite of
passage like baptism and communion. The reward for such courage was an
unobserved, secret hiding place