Prologue
Triss
In 1957, when Triss was six, she snuck some of her birthday cake up to her brother’s room where he had been banished as punishment for a long-forgotten infraction. In the hallway near his door, she tripped and dropped the cake onto the Persian carpet. The rug was woven with rich reds and exuberant blues, but her pink frost- ing landed squarely on a beige patch, leaving a prominent and permanent reminder of her rule-breaking clumsiness.
When she was nine, she answered the telephone one Saturday afternoon. A girl’s voice came through the line, asking for her brother, who was outside at the far side of their yard. Rather than walk out to him in the sticky South Carolina heat, she shouted at him. Their yardman, Theodo, was mowing the lawn, and the humming motor swallowed her words. She started down the steps but spotted a rock under a shrub. She could throw it and get her brother’s attention and save herself the trip. Although she couldn’t have hit the broadside of a barn on a good day, she watched that rock sail through the air in a perfect arc. She gaped in horror as it rose then descended and collided with her brother’s head with astounding accuracy. He crumpled to the ground as a startling amount of blood poured from the wound. He got eight stitches. She got sent to her room for what was left of the summer.
When she was twelve, she witnessed a boy picking on a girl who had a limp. He mocked her and dragged his leg as he walked and called her Cathy the Crip. Triss strolled up to the boy, tapped him on the shoulder as he laughed with his gaggle of friends. He turned, and she punched him. Triss had never hit anyone before, but the angry trajectory of her fist combined with the unknowing turn of his head transformed her wild thrust into a jab that broke his nose. He went to the emergency room, and she went to the principal’s office and then home for a week.
After that incident, her mother told her she had never seen someone wreak so much havoc with their good intentions, and she hoped Triss would learn to fix the wrongs in the world without wrecking everything else. Perhaps she might think a little more before she acted.
Apparently, in the intervening eleven years, she had not learned a thing. For here she sat at her kitchen table, staring at a pile of cash she had stolen from her boss. With all the best intentions, of course.
Friday, November 3, 1972
Triss
Triss could say she had thought it a good idea to take the money, but it would be more accurate to say she had not thought at all. Like other times when she had gotten into trouble, she had an impulse, she jumped to obey it, and consequently found herself on the wrong side of a bad decision. Like now. Here she was, at her kitchen table, hyperventilating, wondering if Horace Haine had a way of tracing the cash sitting in front of her.
A knock sounded at the door, and Triss jumped so high she momentarily lost contact with her chair. She clutched her chest as if that would slow down her heart’s galloping pace. What if it was the police?
She gathered the cash and stuffed it under the kitchen sink, then smoothed her clothes as she walked to the door. After clearing her throat, she called through the door, “Who is it?”
“It’s your next-door neighbor, Arabella Fitzgerald.” A young girl’s clear, fluting voice contrasted with her own tremulous squeak.
Triss eased open the door and found a young blonde girl standing in the pool of porch light, the late autumn night stretch- ing out behind her.
“Hi! I just wanted to welcome you to the neighborhood. I meant to come by last weekend when you moved in, but we went to see my aunt. But I’m here now. My mom sent these and says hel- lo.” She thrust a cookie tin at Triss. “She wanted to come herself, but she’s keeping an ear out for my baby brother who’s supposed to be going to sleep but isn’t. She’s right over there.”
Triss blinked, struggling to switch gears from thinking the police were on her doorstep to instead finding this little girl who talked a mile a minute. She peered around the edge of her door to see a woman standing in her own porch light, turning her blonde hair into a corona. The woman waved and called out, “Hi, there! Welcome to the neighborhood!”
She weakly returned the wave. “That’s very kind of you and your mother,” she said. “Thanks to both of you.”
“You’re welcome! I’ve gotta get back and help. It was good to meet you.” She started to turn away, but stopped. “Wait! What was your name?”
“Triss. Triss Littlefield.”
“That’s a nice name! Hopefully I’ll see you soon. Bye!” She jumped down the steps and skipped back to her house.
Triss closed the door and leaned on it, willing her body out of high alert. How on earth had she ended up here, living in a trailer with a stash of stolen money stuffed under her sink, shaking in her socks when little girls came and gave her cookies?
She carried the container to the table as she thought about the path that led her here. Had it started when her parents died when she was fourteen? Would they have been more supportive of her desire to go to law school, unlike her grandfather, who did not think women should work outside the home? Or perhaps when she had argued with her grandfather and taken a job with the one person in town he despised? Or when he had told her that if she was going to defy him so blatantly then she should find somewhere else to live?
She supposed it was all the above.
But what else could she have done? She thought of Mrs. Singleton and Mrs. Doyle, who were both about to be evicted by that greedy old miser Horace Haine. Their problems were far worse than hers. And she was going to help them. She simply had to figure out how.
First, she needed to hide the money. But where? She did an inventory of her house. A closet? The freezer? She had an aunt that stashed her cash in her icebox. Of course, that same aunt talked to her cats like they were people and knitted little sweaters for them. But Triss had just moved in and didn’t have enough stuff to con- ceal the money. Not in a drawer or a cabinet. Not in a closet. She looked at the mobile home’s linoleum floor. She didn’t even have a board to pry up like they did in movies.
Her stomach rumbled. She would deal with the easier prob- lem of hunger first. She dumped a can of ravioli into a battered saucepan and heated it while she mulled over her situation. Under the mattress seemed too predictable. Buried in her underwear drawer likewise. And she didn’t want it staring back at her accus- ingly every time she opened the drawer.
Triss stopped stirring the pasta. Bury! That’s it. She would bury the money under the house.
After gulping down the food, she left the pot to soak and retrieved the cash. She encased it in plastic wrap, then, for good measure, added a layer of aluminum foil. The sheet’s metallic rattling echoed in her small kitchen.
She slipped into a jacket before taking a detour out the front door to fetch a flashlight from her car. It was nestled in her trunk, next to a flare, a tire gauge, and a set of jumper cables—all placed there by her grandfather when he gave her the convertible Pontiac for her college graduation. Grandfather was all about preparedness. For once, she was grateful. She shot surreptitious glances at the sur- rounding trailers. Every window seemed to have a pair of eyes watching her, knowing she was up to no good. She darted back into the shelter of her mobile home, gathered the packet of cash, and headed for the back door, but stopped when she realized she had nothing to dig with. She opened some drawers and found a metal cooking spoon. That should do. After all, she didn’t need a very big hole.
Triss stepped gingerly onto the cinder blocks that served as her back steps.
Thinking about spiders and other creepy-crawlies made her hesitate. But it was November—they should be gone, right? She hoped so, for there was no other place. Her backyard was spartan. A slender tree. A clothesline that stretched to where the property ended at a cornfield. And an oil tank that huddled against the back of the trailer as though it was the one needing warmth and not the other way around. That was the spot, she decided. She squared her shoulders, turned on the flashlight, and crawled a little way under the house, slightly behind the oil tank.
A cobweb brushed her cheek, and she turned a loud scream into a quiet yelp. She slapped at her face and shuddered. Lord, I am paying for my sins now. I promise if you get me out of this, I will behave myself for the rest of my life. The damp sand was easy to dig. Anxiety made her work quickly, and she soon had a decent hole. She stuffed the foil package into the cavity and shoveled the dirt over it. Just as she was patting the soil down, another light joined hers and a deep voice boomed, “Can I help you?”
She shrieked, jerked her head up, and hit the underside of the trailer. As she tried to back out, her coat sleeve caught on the supports of the oil tank. She was about to clear the mobile home when she remembered she was holding the cooking spoon, so she tossed it under the trailer before she stood. She brushed her hands off and started to smooth her slacks but thought better of it. Though it probably didn’t matter. Her knees had to be as dirty as her hands.
“What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” asked a gruff male voice that emanated from a large, hulking shadow.
Triss’s brain worked furiously. She should have come up with a cover story for this scenario. Now she improvised.
“Uh, I was fixing a pipe.”
The silhouette paused before replying. “You were fixing a pipe?” The voice was less threatening but a lot more doubtful.
“Um, yes. I had a small leak.”
The flashlight beam shifted down to the ground. “I don’t see any water.”
“It was earlier. I was just checking it.”
“You live here?” His voice sounded rusty as if he didn’t use it much. “Yes. I moved in a week ago.”
“Hmmph. I live across the street. Your next-door neighbor”—he jerked a hand toward the house where the little girl lived— “called me because she saw a flashlight in the backyard.”
“Oh! I hope I didn’t scare her.”
“She was a mite alarmed.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Triss said. The man didn’t say anything, and she rushed to fill the void. “I’m Triss. Littlefield.”
“Maynard Pritchard.”
“Nice to meet you. I mean, under the circumstances.”
He directed his light toward the spot under the trailer again.
“You want me to check that? I’m a handyman by trade.”
Triss felt the blood leave her face and was grateful he had trained the beam on the ground. Please, please don’t let him ask any questions about the leak or how I fixed it. “No, really, it’s fine.” She wanted to add more about how she tightened the pipe, but she had no idea if that’s what one did with pipes. Perhaps the less said, the better.
“All righty then. I’ll leave you to it. If you end up needing anything, I’m right across the way. Corner house.”
“Thanks, Mr., uh, Pritchard. I appreciate that.”
He turned and walked away, and as soon as he rounded the edge of her house, Triss slumped in relief. Once again, she pondered how she got here.
