Tracking Daddy Down Read online

  “What’s going to happen if they get caught?” Tommy asked.

  “I reckon they’ll end up at Pendleton,” Uncle Russell said.

  No! Not Pendleton. That scared me enough to make my teeth chatter. They couldn’t take Daddy to the Pendleton Penitentiary. I’d known about that place ever since I was a little kid. It was just a few miles west of Myron, a long row of flat gray buildings surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire fence. I got cold chills every time we drove by there.

  I’d heard only the worst criminals in Indiana got sent to Pendleton: guys like Vaughn Watson, who’d shot and killed his own brother in downtown Myron a few years ago. I’d never known him, but I knew his son, Goble, who was meaner than a snake. If Daddy got caught, he’d be in the same prison as Goble Watson’s dad—maybe even the same cell.

  That’s when I decided I had to find Daddy quick, before the police captured him. If I could convince him to surrender and give the money back right away, maybe him and Uncle Warren wouldn’t get sent to Pendleton. Maybe the judge would let them off with a couple of months in the county jail.

  I wanted to talk to Tommy about it, but the diner had gotten so busy I couldn’t ever catch him alone. I wandered through the afternoon in a haze of cigarette smoke, jukebox music, and Wishers joking around. The news about Daddy and Uncle Warren didn’t seem to bother any of them. In fact, they acted like it was downright funny, whooping and slapping each other on the back. I figured Mama was right: The only reason they’d shown up was to celebrate bad news and brag about all the crazy stuff any of them had ever done over the last twenty years.

  The robbery had become big news in Myron, too, especially since Millerstown was only five miles up the road. At least half the town had stopped by to hear the details. Nothing that exciting had happened since Vaughn Watson shot his brother.

  Mama made me wait on customers, and every table I passed people were talking about Uncle Warren and Daddy. Their voices would hush into a whisper whenever I walked by, but I could still hear them, loud and clear. They might as well have been shouting from the top of the Myron water tower.

  “That oldest Wisher, Warren, he’s always been a troublemaker…”

  “…surprised to hear Earl was involved. He’s wild, but I’d never thought he’d do anything so radical as stick up a bank…”

  It went on like that all afternoon, until I wished I could yell, “FIRE! Everybody run for your lives.” Finally, when Mama wasn’t looking, I ducked into an empty booth, pretending to clean it. Aunt Charlene and Bud Castor were sitting in the booth next to me, huddled close together, talking real low. I was hoping Bud would say something about the search for Daddy and Uncle Warren. Maybe he’d gotten more news from the Millerstown cops.

  I kept my nose buried in a plate of leftover mashed potatoes, watching Bud from the corner of my eye. He scooted closer to Aunt Charlene, then struck a match and lit her cigarette. She blew a puff of smoke over her shoulder. “Thanks. My nerves are shot,” she said.

  “I can see why,” Bud said. “This has got to be hard on your boy.”

  Aunt Charlene shrugged. “I don’t know how he’s taking it. Tommy’s not close to his dad; never has been. That bum’s not paid a lick of attention to his own son all these years.”

  “Now that’s a downright shame,” Bud said.

  “I know Billie’s hurting, though,” Aunt Charlene went on. “She adores her daddy. Always has, from the moment Wanda brought her home from the hospital. Followed Earl around like a puppy as soon as she could crawl. It like to killed her when he left.”

  “Is that right?” Bud said. “You know, I never was real clear why Earl went to California in the first place. All I heard was he got laid off from Firestone, then went to work with his brother on some good-paying construction job out West.”

  “You want to hear the real story?” Aunt Charlene said, her voice husky and secretive.

  Bud tilted his head toward her. “Sure enough.”

  I slumped farther down in my booth so they couldn’t see me. My heartbeat pounded in my ears.

  “Earl didn’t get laid off from Firestone,” she said. “He got canned.”

  Chapter 4

  Daddy got canned? What was Aunt Charlene talking about anyway?

  I bit hard on my knuckles to keep from jumping up and telling her to get the facts straight. Daddy hadn’t been fired from his job at Firestone. He’d explained it all to Mama; I’d heard him. “Work’s slowing down at the factory,” he’d said. “They had to lay off a couple of us new guys.”

  But I could tell Castor Oil was lapping up every word Aunt Charlene said. He scooted even closer to her. So close you couldn’t have slid a hair between them.

  “Yep,” Aunt Charlene told Bud. “Something fishy was going on, so Joe let Earl go. Joe made it look like a layoff, though, to protect Wanda and the kids.”

  “Now that’s news to me,” Bud said. “Never heard it.”

  “That’s because Joe never breathed a word of it until Wanda pressed him for the facts. You know, he’s carried a torch for her since high school. But then he went off to Korea and Wanda took up with Earl.”

  “Now ain’t that something?” Bud said. “He’s a stand-up guy, that Joe Hughes.”

  My ears turned hot as ash. Joe Hughes isn’t any stand-up guy, I wanted to shout. He’s nothing but a fake. If Daddy had really been fired, then Mr. Joe Hughes had done it on purpose, just so he could get rid of Daddy and win Mama over for himself.

  “Yep, Joe’s a keeper, all right,” Aunt Charlene said. She snapped her pocketbook open and pulled out a mirror, then patted her stiff yellow beehive into place. Aunt Charlene was a beautician at Miss Mona’s Beauty Parlor in Myron, and she prided herself on wearing the most fashionable hairstyles.

  I slipped away when Uncle Russell came over and started talking to Bud about the good deals at his used car lot, but I couldn’t forget a word of what Aunt Charlene had said. It weighed on my mind like a sandbag all afternoon. Why had Mama married Joe Hughes when she knew he’d fired Daddy? Couldn’t she see what he’d been up to? I didn’t say anything about what I’d overheard, but as the day wore on, I got madder and madder at her and Daddy Joe. I avoided talking to her as much as possible, even when she tracked me down in the kitchen of the diner and tried to hug me, asking if I felt all right.

  By late afternoon I guess I’d heard fifty different versions of the bank robbery, each one worse than the last. And I still hadn’t told Tommy my hunch about Daddy and Uncle Warren’s hideaway. I hadn’t had a chance to get him by himself. He’d been ignoring me and hanging around my uncles and cousins, acting more and more puffed up as the day wore on.

  “You think this is going to be on the radio?” Tommy asked Uncle Russell.

  “Reckon so. It’ll probably be on the television news, too. This here’s pretty big-time stuff.”

  That made Tommy’s head swell even more. I could hardly stand the way he swaggered around in front of our cousins, acting like we were related to Jesse James or something. By the time Ernestine came to the diner to see me, I couldn’t wait to get away from everyone.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go outside.”

  We sat on the concrete bench outside Fuzzy’s Tavern, where I filled her in on everything that’d happened.

  Ernestine handed me a piece of her Bazooka bubble gum. “Gee whiz! I’m sorry about your daddy. What’s going to happen if he gets caught?”

  I tore off the wrapper and stuffed the gum in my mouth. “He ain’t going to get caught. He’s out of state by now, probably up near Washington, D.C.” I didn’t plan on lying to Ernestine. It just came out that way. She’d never been too good with secrets, so I wasn’t keen on letting her know my suspicions about Daddy’s hideaway.

  She gasped. “For real? You think they’re going all the way to Washington, D.C.?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure of it. Or else they may be headed up to New York City.” I picked up a rock from the sidewalk and scratched a tic-tac-to
e game between us.

  “What will they do there?”

  “I don’t know. Probably look for a place to live or something.”

  I made an X in the middle box and handed Ernestine the rock. She thought for a while before she scratched an O in a bottom corner. “If I robbed a bank,” she said, “I’d share all the money with poor people. You know, like Robin Hood or something. You think your daddy will do anything like that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Why do you think they did it?” Ernestine asked.

  “It was because of Uncle Warren. He owes money to some crooks in Indianapolis.” I scratched an X above Ernestine’s O.

  The diner door swung open, and Mama came outside with Charlene and Bud Castor. “I’m going to Millerstown, Billie,” Mama said. “The detectives told Bud a couple of our things are in your dad and Warren’s apartment. Charlene’s going to take care of the diner while we’re gone. I want you to watch Carla until Joe gets back.”

  “How come he’s coming back here? I thought he was at work,” I said.

  “He’s getting off early,” Mama said, “to help out with Carla.”

  “I can watch Carla by myself. I don’t need any help from him. All he wants to do is shove his nose in my business.”

  Mama grabbed my arm and steered me up the sidewalk, away from the others. She leaned so close to my face I could’ve counted her eyelashes.

  “You listen to me, young lady, and listen good.” She clenched her teeth together, the words pinging out of her mouth like sparks. “I don’t need one…single…solitary word of back talk from your smart mouth right now. You understand?”

  I glared at her, jerking my arm from her grasp. Without giving her the satisfaction of an answer, I stomped back inside.

  Chapter 5

  Daddy’s family didn’t clear out of the diner until after suppertime. They left the place a mess, too. Sticky pie dishes and root beer float mugs sat stacked on the counter, knives and forks were tossed everywhere, and I found ketchup smeared all over the booth where my cousins had been sitting. On top of that, someone had even used the ketchup to scribble a dirty word across the middle of the table, except they’d spelled it wrong.

  When Daddy Joe came to get Carla, he took one look at the place and said, “Billie, I’d like for you and Tommy to take care of these dishes and clean the tables. Your mother could use the help.”

  I snatched a rag from under the counter and, behind his back, started flicking crumbs onto the floor. How come he always stuck me with the dirty work? If he wanted the place cleaned up so bad, why didn’t he do it himself?

  Daddy Joe found Carla curled up asleep in one of the booths. When he went to pick her up, he noticed the grape sucker stuck to a clump of her hair. He tried to untangle it, but it wouldn’t budge. I would’ve just yanked it right out. Daddy Joe didn’t, though. He shook his head and chuckled. “Guess your mama will have to take care of that,” he said, then flopped Carla over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She never even made a peep.

  She’s the lucky one, I thought, as Daddy Joe patted her on the back. She gets treated like a cute little princess for having candy stuck in her hair, while I have to clean the whole diner.

  “Don’t dawdle, Billie,” Daddy Joe said, his voice sounding even gruffer than usual. “You kids need to get home soon. Your mom doesn’t like you out after dark.”

  Once he left, I threw my wet dish towel at the closed door. “Bossy jackass. I wish he’d been the one who robbed a bank. I wish he was the one going to Pendleton.”

  “Yeah. Next time I’m going to tell him to mind his own business. How come he’s always picking on us anyway? This ain’t even our mess,” Tommy said.

  We started hauling dirty dishes back to the kitchen and stacking them in the sink. I didn’t waste a minute before telling Tommy my news.

  “I know where our dads are.”

  Tommy stood with his back against the sink, holding a stack of plates. “No way. Not even the cops know that.”

  “Remember last week when Daddy took me and Carla to Millers Park Pool?”

  “Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?”

  “Just listen,” I said. “On our way to the pool, we stopped at Jim Dandy’s.” That’s where Uncle Warren worked, the Millerstown Jim Dandy service station. “Daddy got out of the car to talk to your dad while he was pumping our gas.”

  “What? What did they say?” Tommy’s eyes lit up with curiosity.

  I took a deep breath. I hadn’t thought much about Daddy and Uncle Warren’s conversation at the time, but now the memory of it made my heart race.

  “Daddy was standing behind the car, but I heard him say, ‘I cleared it with Hinshaw,’ and then your dad said, ‘You sure we can trust him?’”

  Tommy hadn’t moved an inch. He kept staring at me, hugging the plates to his chest.

  I went on. “Daddy said, ‘Oh, we can trust him, all right. He owes me. Besides, we won’t need it for more than a few days, tops.’” I shivered as I told this to Tommy. I thought Daddy had been talking about borrowing something, but now I knew different.

  “Well?” Tommy said, still staring at me.

  “Well, what?”

  “I don’t get it. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means our dads are going to hide out in Old Man Hinshaw’s fishing cabin for a few days,” I said. “That’s what.”

  “No way! You mean crazy Old Man Hinshaw? He won’t let our dads on his property. He’ll shoot anyone who tries to go near that cabin.”

  Tommy was right: Old Man Hinshaw was crazy. “He’s got a mental disorder,” Mama had said. “Acts agreeable one minute, like a lunatic the next.” Everyone in Myron knew that, and no one—probably not even Goble Watson—had enough nerve to go near his property. But Tommy didn’t know the whole story about Daddy and Old Man Hinshaw, like I did.

  Chapter 6

  “Old Man Hinshaw owes Daddy a favor,” I told Tommy. And then I went on to explain it. A couple of months ago, when Daddy had first come back from California, I rode with him and Uncle Russell to Millerstown. We’d taken Vernal Pike, the gravel road that ran by Old Man Hinshaw’s property, and Daddy had let me steer the car.

  We’d been laughing about how I’d almost run us in the ditch when we saw an old man on the side of the road. He was standing by a truck with its hood open.

  “That’s Fred Hinshaw,” Daddy said to Uncle Russell. He steered our car to the side of the road. “Let’s see if the old coot needs any help.”

  Uncle Russell had laughed. “Hope that dang gun ain’t loaded,” he’d said. I’d been a little nervous myself, because I’d always heard how Old Man Hinshaw would shoot anything that crossed his path. He’d acted real happy to see Daddy and Uncle Russell, though. They both knew a lot about repairing cars, so it only took a few minutes for them to fix the problem.

  “What do I owe you?” Old Man Hinshaw had said, pulling a worn wallet from his overalls pocket.

  “Won’t take a dime,” Daddy said, getting back in the car. “My pleasure.”

  “Now you listen here. Fred Hinshaw pays his debts,” Old Man Hinshaw said. He stuck his head in Daddy’s open window. “You fish?”

  “Like a shark,” Daddy answered. “Love them catfish.”

  “Tell you what. You ever need a good fishing hole and a place to stay, you let me know. I’ll put you up in my cabin a couple of nights.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Daddy had said.

  Daddy and Uncle Russell had laughed about it on the way home, saying they might take Old Man Hinshaw up on his offer the next time they played poker. “Where the heck is that cabin anyway?” Uncle Russell asked Daddy.

  “Way back in the sticks. Sits at the end of the lane that runs past the railroad bridge,” Daddy said. “That crazy old goat doesn’t know it, but I was out there a couple of times when I was a kid.”

  Tommy dropped the plates into the sink, letting them clang against the metal. He shook his head. �
�I still don’t get it,” he said. “Why would our dads want to hide out in some old cabin? They’re rich now. Why wouldn’t they just take off?”

  “Because Daddy promised me he’d never ever take off again, that’s why. He probably wants to take me with him or something.”

  “You ain’t going, are you?”

  Run off with Daddy? To tell the truth, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. A shiver of excitement tingled up my arms when I pictured it, though. My daddy was so much fun; I imagined us tooling across the windy desert out west, stopping alongside the road to sightsee and camp out. “Throw me the fishing gear, baby,” he’d call from the banks of the Mississippi River. “One dollar to whoever catches the biggest one.” Maybe we could even go to the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone National Park, where Daddy said grizzly bears roamed wild. My mind raced faster than a getaway car as I gathered another load of dishes.

  “Maybe I will go with him,” I said. “I’m sick of Mama and her turd-ball husband anyway.”

  “Oh, man! You can’t take off with your dad. You’d never get away with it. Your mom would have every cop in the United States out looking for you. She’d have your dad thrown in Pendleton for life.”

  I didn’t like hearing it, but I knew he was right. I couldn’t go with Daddy, even if he wanted me to. It would break Mama’s heart, and I’d never get to see Ernestine or Tommy or Carla again. There was only one way out of this mess. Daddy and Uncle Warren had to turn themselves in. They had to give the money back to the bank, and they had to do it right away. But would they both agree to it? I figured Daddy would if I cried my eyes out and begged him. I wasn’t so sure about Uncle Warren, especially since he was in trouble with those crooks in Indianapolis. I asked Tommy what he thought.

  “I dunno.” He shrugged, heading out of the kitchen. I shook the last of the lipstick-smeared cigarette butts into the garbage can and followed him.

  “You’ve got to talk him into it,” I said. “You’ve got to help me find them before the police do. We need to go out first thing tomorrow and look for that cabin.”