shins. These were not ornamental. And his elbows had huge bandages on them, too.
“What happened to you?”
“I fell off my bike,” he said. “And it hurts, too. I hurt everywhere.” I thought he was on the verge of tears, but he just sighed with so much sadness, I prepared myself for a terrible explanation, because this was all wrong.
This was a kid who could ride a bike with no hands. And turn corners. As we all said, he was part monkey. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I knew intuitively I wasn’t getting the whole story.
“Want to tell me what really happened?”
They looked nervously at each other and didn’t answer me.
“Okay, Tyler. Let’s move on to you. What’s going on?”
“Sharon just did something that was so terrible.” He stopped and looked at Hunter. “We have to tell Miss Holly, Hunter.”
“What did she do?” I said.
Hunter still wasn’t talking, but he nodded consent to Tyler.
“I’ll tell her. Hunter was riding his bike, see? But when she told him to stop and come inside, he took off as fast as he could.”
“Because there was no reason why I shouldn’t be riding my bike!” Hunter said. “It’s summer!”
“She did room inspections and didn’t like Hunter’s. It wasn’t perfect enough for her. So she took his bike away until his room passed inspection.”
“I’m not even six years old! I can’t change the sheets! It’s too hard! I can’t reach the washing machine buttons and I can’t read what they say anyhow! And the vacuum cleaner is too heavy for me!”
“Inspections?”
“Yeah, she says she didn’t marry our dad to be a personal maid to us.”
“Anyways,” Tyler said, “she jumped in her car to follow him to make him get off the bike. She pulled around in front of him. Hunter didn’t have time to stop and so he flipped over his handlebars and got all cut up on the road. I saw the whole thing happen.”
“She didn’t even say she was sorry,” Hunter said. “She said next time, I’d listen to her, wouldn’t I?”
“Does your father know about this?” I asked.
“No. He only knows what she said,” Tyler said.
“She told him a lie. She said she followed me and got there just in time after I fell off my bike,” Hunter said.
“She didn’t say it was her fault that he had the accident in the first place,” Tyler said.
This was a clear case of reckless endangerment of a minor, and who knew what else?
“I hate her guts,” Hunter said.
“Me, too,” Tyler said. “It’s like living with the devil. My little brother could’ve been killed! What if he had landed on his head?”
Tyler wasn’t wrong.
“Okay, what would you boys like me to do? Would you like me to tell your father your side of the story?”
“Yeah, but she’ll kill us if she finds out we told on her,” Hunter said.
“Nobody’s killing anybody,” I said.
“We won’t get out of the house until school starts!” Tyler said. “And Dad doesn’t listen to us anymore!”
“We’ll see about that.”
“He just goes along with whatever she says,” Hunter said.
I believed them, and any fool could see they had no advocate. These boys needed family therapy. So did Archie and Sharon.
“Let me talk to your father,” I said. “He listens to me. Sometimes.”
They drained their juice and put their glasses in the sink.
“Thanks, good luck,” Tyler said. “Things are really terrible, Miss Holly.”
“I hear you, sweetie. It’s going to get better.”
They literally ran home in fear that Sharon would come home from the drugstore and discover them missing. And why had she left them home alone, anyway? I was tempted to tell Ted. They were still too young. Surely Sharon knew that.
The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I went out to the apiary to check on the bees’ water supply and, of course, laid the whole story at their fuzzy little feet. Not just the pink hive, but the other two as well. I was talking to myself all over the backyard. What the hell was the matter with Archie? And what was the matter with her? Eventually I came to the conclusion that I’d talk to Archie. If he didn’t want to hear it, I’d take it to Ted. This was too important to let slide.
I waited for a time when Cruella de Ville’s car was gone and Archie’s car was there, and boldly, I rang his doorbell. He answered and invited me inside.