The Secrets of Tree Taylor (3 page)

From all sides, car doors slammed and out climbed a motley crew of Hamiltonians, some in sweatpants, some in shorts, a few in robes and pj’s … like Dad.

Like me!

I had to get out of there. Fast.

I didn’t really care if anybody saw me in pj’s. But I still had to make my getaway. If I didn’t, sooner or later I’d be spotted. Then word would get back to Dad.

Keeping my head down, I sneaked home, zigzagging from tree to tree. I didn’t stop until I made it to my house. I scooped up my writing notebook from the sidewalk, where I must have dropped it. And I hustled inside.

There was no sign of my sister. Eileen had slept through the whole thing.

From the kitchen I heard Mom’s telephone voice and figured she was talking to Donna, Jack’s mom.

“She
what
?” Mom asked.

I peeked into the kitchen and saw Mom seated on the phone stool. She had on a sleeveless flowered dress that made her waist look tiny under the wide belt. But she still had her curlers in. She lifted her hand in a half wave, half plea to wait until she got off the phone.

“No. He isn’t back yet,” she said into the phone. “He bolted out of bed like we’d been bombed. First thing I thought was: another missile crisis.”

Mom went wordless for a couple of minutes, which confirmed my guess that Donna occupied the other end of the line.

I slid into the breakfast booth. Mr. Rose had built it for us in exchange for Dad taking care of Mrs. Rose, who’d died last year of tuberculosis. We ate most meals with Mom and Dad facing Eileen and me across our speckled Formica table. The booth seats, two long cushioned benches, opened to store newspapers and magazines underneath—Mom’s idea, and a pretty neat one, if you asked me.

Mom laughed at something Donna said. She took a swig of her black coffee and kept listening.

From habit, I glanced toward the window. I’d grown up watching birds nest in the elms just outside. But last summer Dad stuck a giant air-conditioning unit into the window. Now I couldn’t see anything except a tan box with knobs and vents.

I tuned in to Mom’s one-syllable end of the conversation and tried to figure out Donna’s stream of consciousness on the other end. Sooner or later, Donna Adams would know things. She would have made a great investigative reporter.

“So you think this has something to do with
that
?” The way Mom said this, I knew she was watching her words because of me.

Fine
. Let them guess what was happening at the Kinney place. I knew more than either of them.

I shoved aside my empty cereal bowl and silverware and opened my notebook.
I’m going to tell it like it is. Tree Taylor the Writer is going to write
.

I sat at our kitchen table with my notebook in front of me. But I had no clue where to begin my Kinney story. I’d written a lot—stories, school reports, journal stuff. I just hadn’t ever written a real article. And I’d never investigated.

I flipped through my journal until I found the quote I was looking for:

It was a little dippy, but Kipling’s advice was exactly what I needed. I’d had to memorize the same journalism questions in Miss Jones’s seventh-grade language arts class. We learned them in a different order, but I decided to go with Kipling’s order instead of Miss Jones’s.

I stopped writing because my five questions had turned into a dozen. And I had zilch for answers.

I wished Dad would come home. I needed to know if he was one hundred percent positive the shooting had been an accident.

I stopped chewing my Bic and tried again. Only this time, I posed my questions to Mrs. Kinney. I imagined her sitting across from me in the breakfast booth, that rifle stretched across her lap.

Who are you, really?

I pictured thin, dry lips barely moving as she answered:
“You know who I am, Tree.”
She let out a sigh like the one on her front porch.
“I reckon I’m Alfred Kinney’s wife. That’s all. I’m not like your mother over there, with friends to talk to on the telephone.”

It was weird. As I wrote, I could almost hear Mrs. Kinney’s flat, twangy voice. True, I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard her speak. But I knew how a lot of Hamilton women spoke. A country accent? A dialect? Ways of saying things that Mom always corrected Eileen and me on. “Warsh” instead of “wash.” “Fanger” instead of “finger.” “Fixin’ to” instead of “going to.”

I wrote it all down in my notebook and turned the page for more.

Yet in the time it took me to write my next question, my imagination fizzled on me. The skinny woman across the table began to fade … dissolve … disappear like a lump of sugar in a cup of hot coffee.

You go on and ask your daddy what happened
, Mrs. Kinney whispered.

I looked up from my notebook. And just before the image of Mrs. Kinney disappeared, I thought I saw her grin.

“Finally! I thought Donna would never get off.” Mom hung up the phone on the wall, where Dad had mounted it because I kept tripping over the cord. He’d refinished the little round table beneath the phone and caned the seat of the phone stool. Mom needed to be comfortable when she talked to Donna. Sometimes she curled her hair or did her nails during those conversations.

She walked to the sink and ran the water before filling her glass. She took a long drink, then turned to me.

No way my mother and Mrs. Kinney were the same age. Mom had blue eyes and page-boy blond hair, and strangers sometimes thought she and Eileen were sisters. Before World War II broke out, Mom worked as a nurse in a big Chicago
hospital. She signed up for the army because she couldn’t stand the thought of her five brothers on a battlefield with no nurse around.

Mom and Dad met in boot camp and got married in their army uniforms two months later. For the rest of the war, they were army doctor and army nurse overseas, only in different countries, like France and Germany, or maybe England. After the war, they moved to Hamilton, and Mom started working as Dad’s nurse three days a week. Patients from out of town made passes at her all the time. I’d have bet money that nobody had made a pass at Mrs. Kinney in a hundred years.

Mom leaned against the sink and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “A very bad thing has happened, Tree.”

I knew what she was going to say, of course. But I tried to act like I didn’t.

“You might as well hear it from me.” She drank the rest of her water and set her glass in the sink. “Our neighbor Mr. Kinney had an accident this morning.”

I looked down so she couldn’t see my face. Jack was always telling me, “It’s written all over your face, Tree.”

“He … is … well, he’s on his way to the hospital.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding like the Kit-Cat clock in Eileen’s room.

Mom’s eyes narrowed. “He suffered a gunshot wound, honey.”

I was lousy with secrets. And I wasn’t even sure why I’d been turning this into one. “I know, Mom.”

The wrinkles disappeared from her forehead. Maybe she’d
been afraid I’d burst into tears or scream in terror. Maybe I should have.

Then the wrinkles came back. “Wait—did you hear the gunshot, Tree?”

I nodded.

“Were you scared, honey?”

“I’m okay.”

“Did you see your father?”

“He ran down to their house. I was sitting outside, writing, when the gun went off.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You were on the phone.”

Mom began ripping the pink spongy curlers out of her hair. “Did you talk to Dad? Is he all right?”

“He’s okay. The sheriff is there.”
I
should have been there too, where the action was. Randy Ridings was probably there by now, collecting facts, interviewing neighbors. And what if Wanda had the same idea I did about getting a story for the school paper?

Mom set the fistful of curlers onto the counter and ran her long red fingernails through her hair. She and Eileen had the same hair. I got Dad’s wild and wavy black hair. “Tell me your father didn’t go down there in that raggedy robe and those awful slippers.”

My mom would never have left the house in a robe and slippers, not even if the house were on fire.

I shrugged. “Mom, do you know the Kinneys very well?”

“Not really. Lois—she was Lois Dodge then—went to
school with your dad, I think. Maybe she was a year behind him. Your dad skipped two grades.”

Jack was right as usual. Mrs. Kinney must have been about the same age as our moms. “But she looks so old.”

Mom came over and sat on the edge of the booth bench opposite me. Her feet stuck out, and I saw that her pink slip-ons matched the big flowers on the full skirt of her dress. “Lois Kinney has had a hard life.”

Mom was looking right at me, talking to me like I was one of her friends instead of one of her girls, the younger one. I felt like I was on the verge of uncovering something, part of a truth I’d need if I really planned to write about this. “How has her life been hard?”

“What’s going on?” Eileen, still in her powder-blue babydoll pajamas, shuffled into the kitchen. She and Mom had bought matching pj’s on their last shopping spree to Kansas City. I got the latest issue of
Mad
magazine, which was exactly what I asked for.

Eileen yawned. “Why are people crawling all over our street?”

Mom jumped up from the table. “I’ll tell you about it later, honey … after you’ve had a chance to wake up.” She glanced over at me and shook her head. Mum’s the word. Mustn’t sully Eileen’s morning with upsetting news. “Breakfast?”

“I’m off.” All hope of getting real answers out of my mother left the room the minute Eileen stepped in. Honesty went down the tubes as my sister slid into the breakfast booth and downed her OJ. Eileen never wanted to hear anything
ugly or disturbing. She refused to watch
The Twilight Zone
or
Alfred Hitchcock
with Dad and me. As far as my big sister knew, everyone died in his or her sleep after a long and happy life. And “dead” wasn’t a word you said out loud.

I needed to talk to Dad. He shot straight with me. When my grandmother was dying, he told me right out that he didn’t think she had long to live. I appreciated that. Grandmother Taylor and I had never gotten along too well. Knowing that my visit with her would probably be the last time I’d see her helped me be extra nice. Otherwise, I might have snapped back at her when she told me to stop my yelling, when all I was doing was talking normal.

I had to get Dad off by himself if I wanted the truth. Besides, there was no way I could spend another minute in the house—not while everything was happening right down the street. Mom wouldn’t approve, and Dad wouldn’t be happy to see me at the Kinneys’. But that was just too bad. I flipped toward the back of my notebook, where I knew I’d written a tough writer’s quote:

“Guess I’ll go get dressed,” I announced as casually as I could. “I’m working this afternoon.” I slipped back to my bedroom and changed into my swimsuit, white shorts, and a sleeveless tie-top.

Crooked house, here I come!

It wasn’t easy sneaking out of my house. The tamarack tree that shaded our back door used to barely brush the screen when you opened it all the way. But since last summer, the delicate branches had grown so that we had to duck and turn sideways to get out.

Then Midge pounced on me, barking her head off.

“Shush, girl.” I scratched her floppy ears.

She dashed off and trotted back with her chewed-up rubber ball. Her tail wagged so hard, her whole body swayed. Three years ago, somebody had dumped her by the side of the road. Dad spotted her on his way home from a house call and doctored her back to health.

“Sorry, buddy. No fetch. I’ve got work to do.”

Midge whined as I made my escape.

About a dozen people were milling around the Kinneys’ front lawn. Mr. Kinney would have had a fit. Down at the Quiet House, a shade looked half hoisted. Even Mrs. Lynch must have gotten caught up in the ruckus.

“Hello, Tree.” An older woman I recognized nodded at me. She belonged to a big group of Hamiltonians who knew Eileen and me because of our parents but whose names had never stuck in my brain.

“Hello.” I nodded back.

“Dreadful business.” She clutched her collar at her throat. Her black blouse and straight black skirt would have looked at home in a funeral parlor. “I’m surprised your daddy let you be here.”

I shrugged and kept walking. Strolling around to the side yard, I couldn’t see Dad or Sheriff Robinson. No ambulance, either.

Six or seven people huddled on the sidewalk. I sidled over there, close but not too close.

Olan Stemple and his wife seemed to be talking at the same time. They farmed eighty acres east of town. Their seven grandkids ranged from kindergarten to high school. “We went to school with Alfred,” Mrs. Stemple began.

“In a one-room schoolhouse in Mirable,” her husband continued. “Course, that school’s been tore down nigh onto forty years or better.”

“Post office is still there,” Mrs. Stemple chimed in.

I wanted them to stick to the subject. It would really help my article if I knew what Mr. Kinney was like when he was young.

Thankfully, John Rounds asked my question for me: “What was the old man like back then?” Mr. Rounds ran the hardware store. His right hand clutched one suspender like he couldn’t quite trust it to hold up his baggy gray trousers.