Among the Hidden

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Luke lay awake the rest of the night. At first light, he got up and quietly scrubbed away the mud Jen had tracked in and up the stairs. Trust her not to think about mud. He fervently hoped she'd thought of all the details about the rally.

Luke was just finishing the last of the kitchen floor when he heard the toilet flushing upstairs. He hid the muddy rags in the trash and scrambled back to his place on the stairs just in time to meet Mother coming down.

" 'Morning, early bird." She yawned. "Were you up during the night? I thought I heard something."

"I had trouble sleeping," Luke said truthfully.

Mother yawned again.

"And you're up early… feeling okay?"

"Just hungry," Luke said.

But he picked at his food. Everything he ate stuck in his throat.

After the rest of his family left, he risked sneaking over and turning the radio on low. There were weather reports and commercials for soybean seed and lots of music.

"Come on, come on," he muttered, keeping one eye on the side window, watching for Dad.

Finally the radio voice announced the news. Someone's cattle had gotten out and caused a minor car wreck. Nobody hurt. A Government spokesman predicted a poor planting season because of all the rain.

Nothing about the rally.

Dad came back toward the house. Luke snapped off the radio and bolted for the stairs.

At lunch, Dad forgot to turn the radio on, and Luke had to remind him. The announcer promised a big story after the commercials. His sandwich gone, Dad reached over to turn the radio off.

"No, no-wait!" Luke said. "This might be interesting-"

Dad harrumphed, but waited.

The announcer came back. He cleared his throat and declared that new Government statistics proved last year's alfalfa harvest had set a record for the decade.

It was like that for days. Luke kept waiting, desperate to hear anything. But the few times he could get to the radio, it said nothing.

Every time Dad left the house for any length of time, Luke switched on the light by the back door, his old signal to Jen. He stared so hard, willing her answering light to go on, that he thought he would go blind. But there was nothing.

He took to watching her house as obsessively as he had when he had first discovered her existence. There was no sign of her. The rest of her family came and went as usual. Did they look sadder? Happy? Worried? At peace? From a distance, he couldn't tell.

He got so desperate, he asked Mother if she'd thought about going over to visit the new neighbors, to welcome them to the area. She looked at him as if he were deranged.

"They've been there for months. They're hardly new anymore. And they're Barons," she said. She laughed in a way that didn't hide her bitterness. "Believe me, they don't want us visiting."

And what was she supposed to do, say, "Nice to meet you. Now, tell me everything about the child you never talk about"?

After a week, Luke did feel deranged. Every time anyone spoke to him, he jumped. Mother asked him, "Are you all right?" so many times, he took to avoiding her. But he couldn't just sit in the attic, waiting. He paced. He fidgeted. He chewed his fingernails.

He came up with a plan.