Cut & Run (A Rachel Scott Adventure) - By Traci Hohenstein Page 0,1
was keeping in her closet.
The lights were off and the blinds were closed tightly. Only a sliver of light sneaked in from the adjoining bathroom. I fumbled around the nightstand to turn on the lamp.
She moaned when the light came on. “Just some aspirin. Turn the light off, please. Give me a few minutes and I’ll get ready.”
I left the room to check on the kids. Mary Kate was in her room, lying on the bed and listening to her iPod. She was already dressed in her practice clothes. She looked up, smiled at me, and gave a small wave. I pointed to my watch and put up my hands. “Ten minutes,” I mouthed to her. She gave me a thumbs-up sign, closed her eyes, and went back to listening to her tunes.
Patrick was in the study playing on the computer. I could hear the ping-ping sound of some game he was engrossed in. He looked so grown-up behind my battered oak desk. “Hi, Dad. Mom’s sick,” Patrick said in his squeaky voice. Not quite boy, not quite man. He was going through that horrible stage of adolescence that I remembered only too well.
“Just a headache, son. She’ll be fine. What are you doing?”
“Playing Warcraft. I’ve leveled up again,” Patrick said, his attention back on the screen.
“Nice.” I looked through the mail Erin had put on my desk. It seemed amazing that she was still capable of taking care of the details like this, sorting the mail and paying the bills and keeping a grocery list. I guessed she was working as hard as I was at keeping up a normal facade. “Ten minutes and we’re out of here.”
“Okay, Dad.”
I went through my usual routine of getting everything ready for practice, putting the situation with Erin at the back of my mind. I grabbed some oranges from the fridge, tossed them into a container, and carried them outside. In our detached garage, I pulled a bag of ice from the deep freezer. I poured filtered water into the lime-green ten-gallon portable cooler and then loaded everything up in the back of our Dodge Durango.
We lived just one street off St. Charles Avenue, in the heart of the Garden District. When my father died, he willed the house to my brother and me. My mother had died some twenty years earlier, of multiple sclerosis. My brother Chris, who liked to be as far away as possible from the daily grind of New Orleans, liked living in the suburbs of Metairie. So I bought out his share of the family home, spent some dough renovating the hundred-year-old Victorian mansion, and moved my family in. The imposing main house was four thousand square feet and situated on a prominent corner lot facing Valmont Street. We had a large pool, a hot tub, and an outdoor kitchen that were well used. The garage faced a corner street, and we’d put in an apartment above it to serve as my wife’s art studio.
Just as I closed the hatch of the Durango, I turned around and came face-to-face with a stranger. I jumped back and banged my elbow. A tall black man stood before me, his clothes soiled and torn and his posture stooped, although his frame still appeared strong and muscular.
“Mister, can ya help me out?”
I was used to homeless people asking for handouts around the French Quarter, but it had never happened in my own backyard. I looked at the gate and saw it was standing wide open. I had forgotten to lock it when I came home. Even though I felt we lived in a relatively low-crime area of the Garden District, we always locked the driveway gate as well as all the doors and windows to the house and apartment. We also had an alarm system in the main house, but like most people, we usually forgot to set it when we were home.
My heart began to slow to a normal pace as I reached into my front pocket. “What’s your name?” I asked the gentleman.
“Moses.” When he spoke, I could see perfect, straight, white teeth that looked out of place with the rest of him. He wore a filthy trench coat, even though it was almost eighty degrees outside. His shoes were caked with mud, and his fingernails were long and had dirt underneath them. But those teeth were sparkly white and straighter than mine ever could be.