Diamonds in the Dust Read Online Free

tell you to keep your mouth shut earlier?”
    “What?”
    “When we were talking about Connie Hadley finding the witness.”
    Maya listened, head cocked to one side.
    “It was nothing,” Alfie said, shuffling his feet.
    “What did the witness say?” Hatti insisted. “Tell me.”
    “Oh hell!” Alfie muttered. “You might as well know, I suppose. But promise you won’t say nothing.”
    She nodded. They had stopped outside her door.
    “We were all drinking tea at Connie’s place,” he explained. “She invites a group of us over regularly, real nice of her. To give us a bit of home life instead of just barracks and bars. When she heard how and why this pipsqueak had been arrested,” he tweaked Maya’s hair teasingly, “she got us all out on the street by the jeweler’s store searching for witnesses.”
    Maya edged closer to Hatti in the darkness as though nervous of what was coming.
    “So who did you find?” Hatti wouldn’t let it go.
    “Well, damn me if we couldn’t find anyone. No one had seen anything. But there was an old woman who was up in an apartment opposite the store.”
    “She saw?”
    “No, no.” He laughed. “She was tucked up in bed with a crook chest, but Connie Hadley marched right in there, and the next thing we knew this old woman was spouting some story about two boys running out with the jewels and—”
    “Yes,” Hatti said. “I know the rest.” She smiled, her throat so tight it hurt. “Maya, that
mem
of yours must think a whole lot of you.”
    “She my friend.” She touched a hand tentatively to Hatti’s arm. “You my friend too now. I come visit you.”
    “Make sure you do,” Hatti muttered gruffly. “G’night.” She vanished abruptly into her house so that she wouldn’t have to see a young man in uniform waving good-bye.
    * * *
    The oil lamp spilled a yellow light around the room and it pooled on the photograph on the mantelpiece. It stood in a wooden frame and smiled back at Hatti when she called out, “Hello, Tom,” to it. It was of her son in his army uniform, taken the day before he shipped out to Malaya, and if she leaned very close she knew she would see the nerves behind the smile, the slight tension around the eyes. But tonight she didn’t look close; she didn’t want to see anything but his happy, carefree smile.
    He had his father’s smile and his father’s good teeth, not her wonky ones. But he had inherited her red hair and her lanky bones. His father had skipped town more than fifteen years ago, and good riddance to the bastard was what she felt, but she’d been sorry for Tom when he was little, missing his good-for-nothing dad. Never seen hide nor hair of him since.
    She marched into the kitchen, kicked off her boots, and pulled the last bottle of beer, the one she’d been saving specially, from under the sink. She snapped off the cap and took a long pull on it. Tonight she needed it. To ward off the memory of her son’s easy smile when he waved good-bye and shouted, “I’ll be back, Ma. Keep a beer cold for me.”
    Something inside her hardened stubbornly when she remembered the form she’d filled out this morning when yet again she’d tried to find a trace of him or where he had been sent. With a frown and the familiar churning in her gut, she walked into Tom’s empty bedroom. She didn’t light the lamp, just stood there in the dark, listening to her own breathing, fast and shallow. In a shifting patch of starlight she stepped slowly toward her son’s old army uniform that was hanging, clean and pressed, on the outside of the wardrobe door.
    She didn’t allow herself to hurry. No rushing to it. No running. No clinging. Her fingertips brushed the rough material, seeking a warm body within it. Slowly she rested her forehead against its collar and inhaled its scent. She stood like that for a long time in the darkness.
    She couldn’t stop herself—even though she tried—from reaching into the side pocket of the uniform. Her fingers