tapping his foot in time to the rhythm. And there it was again, the magic of music. This was a man who’d shown us nothing but harshness, had not smiled in all the time we’d been with him, but the music had found a way to slip beneath all that hard, bitter armor and touch something softer and more human inside him.
When I finished that last song, the pig scarer assessed his pint bottle, which was nearly empty, and slapped the cork back in the neck. I could tell he was ready to bring the evening to an end.
“How much did you pay for that moonshine?” I asked.
His one good eye studied me with suspicion.
“Seventy-five cents? A dollar?”
“Dollar and a quarter,” he finally said.
“Any good?”
“Might as well be drinking kerosene.”
I tapped the spit from my harmonica and put the instrument into my shirt pocket. “I know a way to get you the best corn liquor you ever tasted,” I said. “And it’ll cost you practically nothing.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING the one-eyed pig scarer put Mose and me to work in the orchard and left in his truck with Albert. He threatened to turn us over to the sheriff if we crossed him in any way. As soon as he was gone, I dropped my rake, told Mose to keep working that scythe, and started to leave.
He grabbed my arm and signed, What are you doing?
“I’m going to find Emmy,” I said.
He shook his head. He’ll hurt her, he signed. You, too.
“I have to make sure she’s all right. But you need to keep working or he’ll see that you’ve been slacking off.”
He shook his head vigorously.
“Mose, we have to know about Emmy. And if we’re going to get ourselves out of this, we need to know everything we can about him, too.”
What if he comes back? he signed. Catches you?
I kicked over the water bucket so that it emptied. “I’ll tell him I had to fill it.”
I could see he wasn’t happy and probably not completely convinced, but he finally let me go.
The farmhouse door was locked, but the windows were raised and the pig scarer hadn’t bothered to latch the screens, so I slipped inside easily. I’d expected the place to be a pigsty but was surprised by its neat appearance. I suspected that in the same way we’d been put to work in the orchard, Emmy had been put to work here. The large main room was situated around a big potbellied stove, the primary source of heat for the farmhouse in winter. I stood in the kitchen nook next to a table and three chairs. A divan served as a divider between the main room and a little sitting area with a couple of old, upholstered wing chairs. Between the chairs, on a table whose finish was worn almost down to the bare wood, sat what in those days was called a farm radio, powered by a battery pack. Herman Volz kept one in his carpentry shop and let us listen to music while we worked. And there’d been one in the Frosts’ farmhouse, and sometimes when we’d finished our labors, Mrs. Frost had let us listen to Death Valley Days or The Eveready Hour or The Guy Lombardo Show with Burns and Allen.
There were two doors off the main room. I tried the first. Inside was a bedroom, sparely furnished—an unmade bed, a chest of drawers, a washstand with a big enamel bowl and a straight razor, and hanging on the wall above that, a simple, round mirror. Atop the chest of drawers sat a photograph in a fine wood frame. It showed the pig scarer and a woman, sitting side by side on the divan in the other room. Nestled in the man’s lap was a little girl with pigtails, who appeared to be about Emmy’s age and who, in fact, resembled Emmy a good deal. The pig scarer and the woman looked deadly solemn, but the little girl was smiling.
I tried the door to the second room. Locked. I knelt and peered through the keyhole but couldn’t see much. “Emmy?” I said quietly.
At first, I heard nothing, then a rustling, like I used to hear when Faria was scurrying across the floor of the quiet room.
“Odie?” came Emmy’s voice from the other side of the door.
“Are you all right?”
“Get me out, Odie.”
“Give me a minute.”
A keyhole lock was one of the easiest to get around. I rummaged in the kitchen drawers and came up