CHAPTER SIX

Another gap in the board fence opened onto a rutted gravel alley that ran between Prewett and Dunley.

Allison looked through as she threaded her hair into a single ponytail. She saw a delivery truck parked at one end by the bowling alley and a familiar homeless woman rooting through the Dumpster against the wall of Winnie's Crafts at the other end.

"Hi, Martha," she said, passing the woman.

Nobody knew Martha's real name. The folks who lived and worked around 6th and Dunley called her that after Martha Stewart, because she was always going through Winnie's trash to collect scraps of fabric, yarn, fake flowers and other such fripperies. She lived over in the vacant lot tucked in behind the Dollar Stop, in a corrugated tin lean-to that was tidier and better-decorated than Allison's own apartment.

Winnie threw a lot of perfectly good items into the trash because of Martha. She had tried just giving them to her, had tried inviting Martha to come into the store, but neither of those approaches did the trick. When openly offered anything, even the ultimate homeless-person triple-C of change, cigs or coffee, Martha scurried away.

Martha didn't return Allison's greeting. Her lips were moving, constantly, silently, as she pawed through the Dumpster looking for treasure.

Jamie Tremayne, who had the Readmore Bookstore across the street from the alley entrance, called her silent self-talk 'responding to internal stimuli,' which was a fancy way of saying that she was in constant conversation with the voices in her head.

Allison popped out of the alley and onto Dunley Street, duffel bag swinging at her side. Now she looked like she'd been out at the gym, nothing more sinister than that. Black spandex bike shorts, open jacket, white tank top over a sports bra, sneakers. Ponytail bobbing at the back of her head.

Jamie himself was out in front of the bookstore, stocking a rolling cart with old paperbacks. A Magic Marker sign announced that they were a quarter apiece, or five for a dollar. The front windows of the store were full of taped-up posters, fliers, and announcements of local events. Between them, the interior could faintly be glimpsed, with its high, dusty shelves of used books.

He saw Allison and paused to wave, resting books in his lap. Like her, Jamie wore his hair in a ponytail, though his was shorter, honey-blond, and tied with a black velvet ribbon like he thought he was Amadeus.

She waved back, and cut diagonally across the street toward him. As always, she felt a pang of guilt as she skipped lithely out of the way of oncoming cars and up onto the curb.

Jamie had told her time and again that she shouldn't feel guilty. "You have two perfectly good legs and you shouldn't be ashamed of using them."

Then, he had cast his gaze downward in a theatrical ogle, though she'd been wearing a calf-length corduroy skirt at the time, about as sexy as a nun's habit.

"Nope," he went on, winking. "You shouldn't be ashamed of them at all!"

Still, whenever she saw him in that wheelchair, there was that pang. It was different when he was in the store, behind the counter, and she could delude herself into thinking that he was sitting in an ordinary chair.

"Milady Allison Montgomery," he said as she reached him.

"Jamie, Lord Tremayne."

He scoffed. "Please! I prefer Sir Jamie."

"Sir Jamie it is. What's the catch of the day?"

"Bodice rippers," he said, fanning a bunch of paperbacks so she could see the covers. "Women with their dresses falling off, men with their shirts open. High-spirited heiresses and roguish scoundrels. Throbbing loins. Interested?"

"Are you trying to sell me a book or proposition me?"

"Book? What book?" He tossed them over his shoulder into a cardboard box and showed her his empty hands.

She laughed. So did Jamie. He was twenty-five, three years older than her, and had what he called a not-totally-useless degree in English. "Because I do work in the field," he'd said, indicating the used bookstore with an expansive gesture.

He also wrote, though as far as Allison knew, she was the only one he'd ever allowed to read any of his stories. And she'd had to pay for that privilege with some honesty of her own. Jamie knew something about Scoot. Uncle Bob had to have some idea, and Eva Cesare might suspect, but Jamie was the only one who knew a part of her secret truth.

"What are you up to tonight?" he asked.

"Nothing much. I'm working from four to seven, covering for Betty so she can go to her grandkid's school play."

"Plans for dinner?"

"There's a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli with my name on it."

Jamie made a face. "What kind of a friend would I be if I let you go home to the Chef? No, no, no, Allison. You're dining chez Tremayne this evening. I'm making my mother's meatloaf recipe, with mashed potatoes and gravy."

"Real mashed potatoes?" she asked, shooting him a skeptical eyebrow.

"Good God, no! The instant kind, flakes from a box! What do you take me for?"

"If it's the instant kind, I'm there," she said. "What time?"

"Seven-thirty?"

"Okay, but I'm bringing dessert."

"The last time you volunteered to bring dessert," he said, "you showed up with four packets of iced animal cookies from a vending machine."

"I'll do better, I promise."

"Then it's a date." He grinned up at her, then wheeled his chair around to go back inside and answer the door.

Mrs. Oberdorfer had come up to browse the bodice-rippers while they'd been talking. Now she, too, grinned up at Allison. She was a tiny round lady with two fluffy Princess Leia buns of hair on the sides of her head and a curl hanging down her unlined pink forehead.

"Ah, young love," she said, pronouncing it "luff."

"I didn't know you read this kind of thing, Mrs. O."

"I was meaning you and Jamie."

"Oh, hey, you've got us wrong. We're just friends."

"Hmm. But, yes, I like these books. Maybe they are not so much like real life, with the fiery passions and the fighting, but they are fun to read. Just don't tell Lindie. She would be shocked to know her mother-in-law reads such things."

"What about Maggie?" Allison asked, referring to the other Oberdorfer daughter-in-law.

Mrs. Oberdorfer flapped a hand. "Maggie, she reads them too. Eric told me. She is always either reading these or watching that Dr. Phil. Does that make sense to you?"

"Not really, but I don't watch Dr. Phil."

"I have tried, because he looks a little bit like my Gus. Don't you think so?"

Allison smiled. Gus Oberdorfer was a large, burly man of sixty, and she supposed that he did vaguely resemble the famed television shrink.

"The problem is," Mrs. O. went on, "that what you read in these books and what you hear on his show do not fit together. I should like to see Dr. Phil step into one of these and tell this …" she looked at the back cover of a Serenity Townshend, "… this Alaric Hawke that he needed to help out around the house. Can you?"

"Not really. I better go. See you, Mrs. O."

"Allie?"

"Yeah?"

"Netta's Bakery. Over on 5th Street. Tell Netta I sent you, and that you want the Dutch apple pie."

Saying that she would, Allison continued down Dunley, past the locksmith and the pet groomer. She crossed the street to the imaginatively-named Dunley Apartments and let herself into the entryway.

Her mail always smelled like burnt dryer lint because the laundry room with its three finicky machines was on the other side of the wall from the row of mailboxes. A dark hallway led to the first-floor apartments, including the unit belonging to the landlady. To reach her own, Allison had a choice between a claustrophobic stairwell and an elevator that was as slow and jittery as a palsied old man.

She chose the stairs, thinking that her mother would have a heart attack if she could see the peeling paint, water stains, and worn-through spots in the durable mustard-yellow carpet. But Marian Sherwood Montgomery had never clapped eyes to her middle child's current digs, and if Allison had her way, that was how it was going to stay.

Her apartment wasn't technically an apartment. It was technically a studio, a single bed-slash-living room that shared a kitchenette with the unit next door. The carpet was mustard-yellow in here, too, and the paneling a cheap knotty pine that made the small space feel even smaller. But the bathroom had an amusing old clawfoot tub, the shower curtain suspended above it on a metal ring, and there was a balcony just barely big enough for a white resin lawn chair and a cute little tripod barbecue.

Allison unpacked, dropping the garbage bag with the purse in it onto her thrift-store recliner and stowing her duffel bag on the single closet's top shelf. Next she unlatched the sliding door that led into the kitchen.

Eva Cesare, her neighbor, was a med school student who also worked as a waitress and was trying to help her only surviving brother break away from drugs and gangs and get into community college. As a result, Allison hardly ever saw her.

They got along fairly well and had yet to have any big arguments over the kitchen, though sometimes Eva's brother Hector would come over and help himself to Allison's stash of Mountain Dew in the fridge.

Speaking of which …

She "did the Dew," popping open a can and slurping down the bile-green fizzy liquid. The caffeine percolated through her system and the bubbles inspired a hiccup that was not quite a burp.

Supplementing the soda with a package crackers, cheese-flavored and sandwiched with peanut butter, she went back into her room and thumbed through the dryer-lint scented mail.

K-Mart ad … Val-U-Pak coupons … postcard reminding her of a dental appointment … letter from her kid sister … travel agency brochure … credit card application.

The ad, the coupons, and the application went into the trash. She flipped through the brochure long enough to admire the crystal-blue tropical waters and think that maybe someday she would like to take one of those all-inclusive vacations. The dentist's reminder went up on the corkboard by the phone.

The letter from Missy, she opened and read. It was printed on lined paper in careful sticklike letters. Missy was ten, the youngest of the brood and the only one that Allison really regretted leaving when she moved out on her own.

Dear Allie, I miss you, when are you coming home? David is going to tennis camp this summer and Steven to music camp so it will be boring here. Mom says it won't because I will have Danny to play with but Danny is a baby and he bites me. I drew you a picture so you remember who I am. Love, Missy. The signature, unlike the body of the letter, was an elaborate cursive scrawl with the tail of the 'y' swooping into a long curlicue.

Allison sighed as she set the letter down and picked up the folded sheet of drawing paper. Missy was better at art than she was at putting her thoughts into words, so the picture was quite good. Sad, but good. It showed the big house in the background, with various stick-people on the porch. Even as stick-people, Allison could guess who most of them were.

There were the twins, David with his tennis racquet, Steven with his flute. There was Daniel Jr., the eldest, with his wife Susan – Susan was depicted with her mouth wide open as if yelling – and their fat baby son, Daniel III. There was Hilary, four years older than Allison, in a ballerina's tutu. And there were Mom and Dad, Marian and Daniel Montgomery.

And, larger in the foreground looking alone and apart from the house and the family on the porch, was a girl-figure with long red hair and enormous sorrowful grey eyes.

It tore her heart to see Missy's picture. How she wished she could have brought her baby sister with her. No one else in the family had time for Missy, or understood her. But it was impossible. Allison knew she couldn't take care of a ten-year-old girl, couldn't provide a good home, structure, guidance, discipline and balanced meals for her.

"Hell, I can't even provide those for myself," she said to the empty room. "I was going to eat canned ravioli for dinner."

No, what it all boiled down to was that Missy would have to learn the hard way what Allison herself had learned. That if you were a Montgomery and a misfit, you could forget hoping that the family would adapt and embrace your differences. You could only wait it out until you were old enough to escape on your own.

It wasn't as if Missy were being abused, starved or even neglected. Overlooked, yes, and misunderstood, but those things did not warrant a Child Protective Services caseworker.

Reading the letter and seeing the picture had left her so down in the dumps that Allison almost forgot about Scoot's prize until her glance happened upon the garbage bag, still sitting in the recliner. She checked the time – not yet three in the afternoon, which meant she had a full hour before she had to leave for work. Plenty of time to change clothes and examine the purse.

She took a quick shower. The building's water heater was old and balky, so a quick shower was the only way to make sure of a hot shower. And as charming as the clawfoot tub was, she had yet to satisfactorily fill it with steaming hot water.

Dressed in comfortable old jeans and a man's white shirt, she left her hair loose and dashed on a bit of blusher and eyeshadow. This, too, would have horrified her mother if Marian had been here. Allison could only recall once in her life when she had seen her mother without a perfectly made-up face and perfectly styled hair, and that had been in the hospital after Missy was born.

Sitting on the floor in front of the little table that held her television, Allison unzipped the roomy buttercream-leather purse and reached inside.

**