in the woods. I saw her come out.”
“All right,” Jack said. “I’ll talk to her as soon as I clean up. Where is she?”
“In the field,” Mrs. Goodrich said dourly, indicating that as far as she was concerned, the field was almost on par with the woods and the embankment She pointed off to the distance, and, following her gesture with his eyes, Jack saw his older daughter. She was squatting down, and seemed to be looking at something.
He started to move toward the house but, seeing the glare Mrs. Goodrich was giving him, turned toward the field instead.
“No time like the present,” he heard the housekeeper mutter behind him.
Elizabeth didn’t see him until he was less than twenty feet from her. She suddenly looked up, as if she had heard something, but Jack was sure he had been silent. When she saw him a smile lit her face, and Jack could feel its glow brighten his spirits. He stopped, and the two of them studied each other for a moment. With her hair flowing free, Elizabeth looked more than ever like the girl in the portrait.
“How’s my favorite daughter?” he said, breaking the silence.
“Am I?” she said, the smile growing even brighter. “Well, if I am, you deserve this for telling me so.”
She stooped, and when she stood up there was a single buttercup in her hand. She ran over to him and held the flower under his chin.
“Well?” he said. “Do I glow?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” Elizabeth laughed. “Did you bung Sarah home with you?” He nodded, and when Elizabeth turned and began to walk toward the house, he stopped her.
“Hold on. Can’t you spend a little time with your favorite father?”
Elizabeth turned back to him. “I just thought—” she began.
“Never mind,” Jack said. “Sarah had a little trouble on the way home, and your mother’s cleaning her up. It’s nothing serious,” he added hastily as a look of concern twisted Elizabeth’s face. “Just something she ate. She had a bit of an accident on the way home.”
“Yuck!” Elizabeth said. “Does the car stink?”
“Mrs. G’s cleaning it up. She wants me to talk to you.”
“I thought she would,” Elizabeth said. “She thinks I was out on the embankment today.”
“Were you?” Jack tried to sound unconcerned.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t I don’t know why she thinks I was.”
“She said she saw you coming out of the woods.”
“I know,” Elizabeth said. “And I don’t know why she thinks that either. I wasn’t in the woods.”
“Were you near them?”
Elizabeth nodded. “I thought I saw Cecil, and I was following him. But I don’t think it was Cecil. It looked like him, but then, just as he was about to go into the woods, he jumped. ‘Cecil’ turned out to be a rabbit.”
“How could you mistake a rabbit for Cecil?” Jack asked. “Of all the un-rabbitish cats I know, Cecil is the most un-rabbitish of them all.”
“Search me,” Elizabeth said. “But he sure looked like Cecil till he jumped.”
“Well, I’m glad he did,” her father said. “If he hadn’t, you might have followed him into the woods.”
“I’d have noticed,” Elizabeth said. She was silent for a moment; then: “Daddy, why aren’t I allowed to go into the woods or to the embankment?”
“It’s dangerous, that’s why,” Jack said, his tone indicating that he would like to leave it at that. But Elizabeth was not to be put off.
“But, Daddy, I’m thirteen years old now, and I can take care of myself. I don’t see how the embankment can be any more dangerous than the quarry, and you let me go there any time I want to.”
“I’d just as soon you stayed away from there, too,” Jack said.
“But why?” Elizabeth pressed. When there was no answer she said, “It’s because of Anne Forager, isn’t it?”
“Anne Forager?” Jack said guardedly.
“All the kids are talking about it They say something awful happened to her, and that it happened out here. Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said truthfully. “I don’t really think anything happened to her, and if it did, I doubt very much if it happened out here. At any rate, that doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s just that the embankment is very dangerous.”
“Not any more than the quarry.”
Jack shook his head. “If you slipped at the quarry, you’d at least have a chance. You’d fall into deep water, and you can swim. With the embankment, you wouldn’t hit water. You’d hit rocks and surf. That’s a whole different story.”
“I