Dani carried her shoes and her coat from the room. Mother would hear her rustling if she put them on beside the bed. Mother had good ears. But she didn’t even stir when Dani eased the door closed. She was sound asleep.
Dani shoved her feet into her boots. They were getting too small. Daddy said she grew every time he was gone. Mother told him he better stop leaving then. Dani’s coat fit fine, though. Her hat too, and she pulled the edges down over her ears so she wouldn’t get cold on her walk. It was growing dark already. She would have to hurry so she could get a good look. Then she would come right back.
But Charlie was so sweet. And Dani stayed too long.
The clanging of police bells greeted her when she rounded the corner for her street. She began to run, certain that Mother would be awake. She would be angry and scared. Maybe the police were looking for Dani.
Two police cars were in front of her house, parked in haphazard fashion, their lights on and their doors open. As she watched, another car pulled up and three more officers tumbled out to join the two already standing in the yard. Daddy’s car was there too.
The front door of Dani’s house was open. Mrs. Thurston from next door was talking to the officers, hunched against the cold but gesticulating wildly.
“Oh no,” Dani cried. They were looking for her. Mother would never let her have a kitty now.
Nobody had seen her. Not yet. Dani raced across the neighbor’s yard and slipped quietly through the back door of her own house, the one that led into the kitchen, hoping she could find Mother first. Then mother could tell them all to leave because Dani had returned.
But the police were already inside. One man stood in the door between the kitchen and the sitting room. He wore a jaunty cap on his big head, and his long overcoat hung open, revealing two rows of brass buttons that marched down his big belly. A gold star peeked out from behind the lapel.
Someone had turned on the lamps in the house. All the lamps. The house blazed with light. Mother wouldn’t like all the lights on and the doors open. The heat from the stove would be whisked out into the January evening.
The policeman was looking down at the floor, and his cap shielded the upper part of his face. He didn’t look up when she entered the kitchen. The clanging from the front yard was enough to deafen the entire neighborhood.
Where was Mother?
Dani took another step and craned her neck, trying to see beyond the table between her and the policeman, to the sitting room and the front door.
Then she saw them.
Mother wasn’t in her bed anymore, but she was still asleep. She and Daddy both were—lying in a tangle of limbs on the kitchen floor.
Mother would be so glad Daddy was home. She’d said he wouldn’t be back for days.
Mother wasn’t wearing any shoes, and Daddy still wore his overcoat and his hat, like he’d run in from outside and picked Mother up and spun her around, kissing her and swinging her until they both fell down. Maybe Daddy had left the front door open.
He was lying across Mother, and Dani couldn’t see his face. She couldn’t see Mother’s face. Only her pretty, bare feet and the hem of her red dress. Mother’s dress had ballooned around her, around her and Daddy both, framing them in a big, red heart.
The policeman lifted his head.
“Ah hell. I found the kid!” he shouted. “Malone, get in here.”
Another officer in a matching uniform, this one younger and darker, appeared behind the first and strode through the kitchen, avoiding the crimson heart and the sleeping couple. He reached out a hand and set it on Dani’s shoulder, urging her to turn away from the confusing display on the kitchen floor.
“Keep her outside until we can sort this out,” the big-bellied policeman said, pointing toward the back door. “And see what she knows!”
Several more police officers entered the house through the front door. She heard their steps and felt their presence behind the first officer.
“Come with me now, lass,” the young policeman said, and though his voice was low and kind, his big hand on her shoulder was insistent.
Sometimes Daddy called her lass like that. The policeman named Malone didn’t have a voice like Daddy’s, though. His voice was softer. Rumbly. Like he didn’t use it very much. Like he didn’t sing at the top of his lungs and shout whenever he spoke. He was much younger than Daddy too, though he seemed older somehow. He had a serious mouth and dark, drooping eyes that made him look a little like Mrs. Thurston’s hound dog, Reggie.
“I need to tell my mother,” Dani said. Her voice echoed oddly, like she was shouting in the church. “I already left once without telling her where I was going.”