Her skirt. She was still wearing it.
She tugged it up around her hips. She still had on her underwear, too.
She pressed. No soreness.
The relief threatened to drown her.
He hadn’t violated her yet.
Yet.
It was so dark.
CHAPTER 3
The Pantown neighborhood consisted of six square blocks.
It was built by Samuel Pandolfo, an insurance salesman who in 1917 decided he was going to construct the next great car manufacturing plant in good old Saint Cloud, Minnesota. His twenty-two-acre factory included fifty-eight houses, a hotel, and even a fire department for his workers. And to be sure they made it to work come sleet or snow, he ordered tunnels dug linking the factories and the houses.
For those who’ve experienced a Minnesota winter, it made good sense.
Pandolfo’s company folded two years after it opened, leaving the massive factory buildings empty and all those new homeowners without jobs. I had a history teacher, Mr. Ellingson, who swore that Pandolfo was sabotaged because his ideas were too good. My dad said that wasn’t the case. He said Pandolfo was a rotten businessman and he got what he deserved, which turned out to be ten years in prison. In any case, Pandolfo left behind the factory—currently the Franklin Manufacturing Company—the houses, and the underground tunnels.
Claude, Brenda, and I all lived on one side of the same Pantown street, Maureen on the other. Claude’s house sat on the corner, the house Maureen shared with her mom directly across. Three down from Claude’s was Brenda, who lived in a sprawling brown bungalow with a wraparound porch. She had two older brothers, Jerry in the army and Carl at an out-of-state veterinary program. Junie and I lived on the opposite end of the block. And right beneath all our feet, an underground maze connected everybody’s basements. We had our regular smiling life aboveground, but below, we became something different, rodents, scurrying creatures in the dark, whiskers twitching.
It’d be weird if we hadn’t grown up with it.
While kids were allowed, even encouraged, to play in the tunnels, you’d never catch a grown-up dead down there unless they had to get to another house and the weather was bad, like for the Roots-watching party last January. A winter storm had raged overhead, turning the preparty tunnels into a busy world, all lit up with flashlights, faces friendly and arms heavy with Tupperware and slow cookers. Hawaiian fever was sweeping the Midwest, which meant most every dish contained pineapple. Fine by me. It left extra of the good stuff: bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, ambrosia salad, glorious, drippy cheese fondue.
Claude had asked once why we still lived in Pantown now that Dad was such a bigwig district attorney and we were rich and could move anywhere. When I’d posed the question to Dad, he’d laughed. He’d laughed so hard he’d had to wipe his eyes.
He looked like a Kennedy, my dad. Not the famous one, the one who had been president, but maybe his younger brother. When he’d caught his breath, Dad said, “Heather, we’re not rich. We’re not poor, either. We pay our bills, and we live in this house that is plenty good enough for us, in the house I grew up in.”
It really was something, living in one home your whole life as my dad had done. He was a Pantown lifer. I’d never met his parents, my grandparents. They’d both died before I was born, Grandpa Cash even before Mom and Dad married. Grandpa had been in World War II, though he made it home after. He looked grim in the single photo of him that I’d seen, the one that rested on our mantel. Grandma Cash appeared kinder, but there was a tightness around her eyes, a look like she’d maybe been tricked one too many times.
Striding toward their house that was now our house, I stopped so suddenly that Junie barreled into my back. I’d been so busy worrying about the upcoming county fair show that I hadn’t noticed the empty driveway until it was almost too late.
“What is it?” Junie asked, stepping around me. “Dad gone?”
I nodded. “Yup.”
Junie sighed. It was an old sound, old as the stars. “I’ll go to my room.”
I blew her a kiss as we stepped inside. “Thanks, June Bug. It’s just for a little bit.”
It wasn’t so much that Dad took care of Mom when he was around. It was more that part of her stayed present for him, an important bit that slipped away when it was just Junie and me.
That, and she cried less when Dad was home.
A woman’s job is to keep a happy house, she’d said once, forever ago.
I waited until I heard the click of Junie’s upstairs door before tiptoeing to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Junie was old enough now that I didn’t need to protect her from this, but there was no good reason to expose us both when I had all the practice. Plus, despite the unsettling curves that had seemingly transformed her body overnight, Junie was only twelve.