High Noon

could ask the cook to make pancakes or—”
    Apparently the idea of more food after the horrors of the night, the burger, the fries, the ride in a police car, was too much for Carter’s stomach. It tossed up the Quarter Pounder right there on Cousin Bess’s antique Aubusson carpet.
    Mortified, exhausted, Phoebe just closed her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t been shot and killed, but she was sure her life was over.
     
    Mama had tended Cousin Bess’s house for twenty years now, scrubbing, polishing, arranging. She’d served that demanding old woman until the day she died.
    Through those two decades, the house had become Essie’s world—not just her home, or even her sanctuary. Her entire world. And what was outside it, her fears. It had been nearly a decade since Essie had gone beyond its terraces, its courtyard.
    Reuben’s death in prison hadn’t broken those locks for her, Phoebe thought as she rose to put her gun in the lockbox on the top shelf of her closet. The bitter end to Cousin Bess’s bitter life hadn’t thrown the doors open for her.
    In fact, it seemed to Phoebe those events had simply added more and stronger locks.
    If Cousin Bess had done the right thing, the kind thing and—fat chance—passed the house to her mother instead of shackling Phoebe to it, would things have been different? Better? Would her mother be able to walk out of the house, stroll over to the park, pop in and visit a neighbor?
    They’d never know.
    Where would she herself be now if not for that night? Would she have married Roy? Would she have found a way to keep her marriage together, to give her daughter the father she deserved?
    She’d never know that either.
    So they’d have the lilies in the parlor, order pizza, and settle in together for a Friday night at home.
    And Phoebe would go out to dinner Saturday—just this once. There was too much in her life already that needed tending without adding a man to it.
    She’d cried when she spoke to Roy last, yes, she had. But those tears had mostly been anger. She’d shed most of the sorrow and disappointment long before, when Carly had been only a baby.
    Too much that needed tending, Phoebe thought again as she changed.
    She glanced at the blush pink lilies in the cobalt-blue vase on her dresser. Flowers were lovely. But blooms faded and died.

6
    Still, flowers and an evening of girl movies smoothed out a lot of edges. At the end of the marathon, Phoebe carried her sleeping daughter to bed. Any-o’clock made it to just past midnight this time.
    Twenty minutes later, Phoebe was as deeply asleep as her daughter.
    The sound of the doorbell had her bolting straight up in bed. She rolled out, glancing at the bedside clock—three-fifteen—before snatching up her robe. She was already at the steps and starting down when Essie and Ava came out of their rooms.
    “Was that the doorbell?” Essie clutched her robe closed at the neck, and her knuckles were white. “At this hour?”
    “Probably just kids fooling around. You stay up here with Carly, okay? In case it woke her.”
    “Don’t open the door. Don’t—”
    “Don’t worry, Mama.”
    That twenty-year-old fear, Phoebe knew, was always waiting to push off from the bottom of the dark pool toward the surface.
    “I’ll go with you. Probably just a couple half-drunk teenagers playing pranks,” Ava said before Phoebe could object.
    No point in making it bigger than it was, Phoebe decided, and let Ava walk down with her. “She’ll be upset the rest of the night,” Phoebe murmured.
    “I’ll see she takes a sleeping pill if she needs it. Stupid kids.”
    Phoebe peered through the pattern of textured glass on the panel of the front door and saw nothing. They’d run off, she thought, likely laughing hysterically as kids would over waking up a household.
    But when she rose to her toes to study the veranda more carefully, she saw it.
    “Go on up, Ava, tell Mama it was nothing. Just kids being a nuisance.”
    “What is it?” Ava clutched at Phoebe’s arm. “Is there something out there?”
    “Go on up and tell Mama. I don’t want her scared. Tell her I’m just getting a glass of water while I’m down here.”
    “What is it? I’ll go up and get Steven’s baseball bat. Don’t you open that door until—”
    “Ava, nobody’s out there, but I need to open this door, and I can’t until you go up and tell Mama everything’s fine. She’s working herself up into a state by now. You know she is.”
    “Damn it.”