The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree (Berkley Prime Crime)

weight.
    Or maybe they didn’t feed them very well at the prison farm. She’d heard that the farm raised its own food, but that the best of it—the meat, especially, and the freshest vegetables—went to the guards and the higher-ups and their families. Of course. That was just the way things worked. The prisoners would always come last. They probably didn’t get any milk, either. And she had heard horror stories about the prison doctor who tended the prisoners when they got sick—not somebody you’d want to look after somebody you loved.
    They put the boy to bed in one of the kids’ beds. Lucy covered him lightly and smoothed his gashed forehead with a tender hand. “He doesn’t have a fever anymore, thank goodness,” she said, half to herself. More loudly, she said, “You have a nice rest now, Joey. I’ll fix you something else to eat when you’re awake.” She glanced at Ophelia. “And then we’re going to do what we talked about. Remember what that was?”
    The boy’s eyes lit up. “Today?” he asked eagerly.
    “I hope so,” Lucy said, with a glance at Ophelia. “But first you have to rest.”
    They went back into the kitchen. Without a word, Lucy set about cleaning up the mess. She scooped the food into the slop bucket by the door, where it would go to feed the pigs, and put the plate and fork and spoon into the enamel dishpan, to be washed later.
    Ophelia stood by, feeling helpless and more than a little guilty, not knowing what to say. When Lucy was finished, she helped her right the table, and managed, in a small voice, “I’m sorry, Lucy. I didn’t know—I mean, I thought he was ...”
    “I know what you thought,” Lucy said in a chilly tone. “And you were wrong. That poor boy nearly died in that prison farm. He didn’t belong there in the first place. Do you know what he was sentenced for?” She answered her own question. “He got six months for stealing a chicken, that’s what. One lousy chicken. He was hungry. The poor kid hadn’t had anything to eat for several days.”
    Ophelia stared at her. At her house, things were pretty much the way they always had been, so it was easy to turn a blind eye to the problems that were cropping up everywhere else. Men without jobs, mothers without food for their children, children without proper clothes and shoes.
    “They sentenced him to the juvenile home,” Lucy continued, “but it was full, so they sent him to the prison farm with all those tough, seasoned criminals. He wasn’t strong to start with, and they made him work terribly long hours, in all kinds of weather, until he could barely stand up. There was worse abuse, too, because he’s young and slender and some of the other prisoners, big bullies, men who—” Her voice broke and she turned away.
    A moment later, she turned back, wiping her eyes with her hand. “I don’t want to tell you what they did, but you can imagine.” Ophelia could, and shuddered. “It was more than he could take,” Lucy went on. “When the other fellow made a break for it, he ran, too. He told me he was running for his life.” She turned to look squarely at Ophelia. “And if you’d been me, Opie, you would’ve taken him in, too. You’re a kind person—you couldn’t have helped yourself.”
    “What happened?” Ophelia asked quietly.
    Lucy finished wiping the table. “Sit down and I’ll pour us some coffee and tell you,” she said, and Ophelia obeyed.
    What happened, it turned out, was that when the two convicts escaped, the sheriff and Buddy caught the older man right away, at the low-water crossing on the road between Ralph’s place and the Spencers’. The other convict, Joey, managed to get away and hide out in the woods before the dogs arrived.
    Normally, of course, the dogs would have tracked him down and the sheriff would’ve hauled him back to the prison farm before supper time. But Scooter and Junior found him first, hiding under a sweet gum tree in the swamp about a mile away. They saw how young and scared and pitiful he was and immediately felt sorry for him.
    “I was proud of them,” Lucy said quietly. “They knew they couldn’t let that boy go back to the prison farm, and they were right.”
    It was Scooter’s idea to trade shoes with him, to keep the dogs from following. Each of the boys put on one of Joey’s shoes—such as they were, almost no heels and soles flapping loose—and gave him one of theirs to wear. Then Junior took the boy on his back and carried