Jubilee's Journey (Wyattsville #2)(13)

She broke into a wide grin. “Back home we grew a whole lot of stuff. It wasn’t no farm, but the stuff still growed.”

“Where’s back home?” Ethan asked.

“Coal Fork.”

“Coal Fork? I never heard of no place called Coal Fork.”

“It’s a long ways away. We rode on the bus to get here.”

Ethan gave his name, then asked hers.

“Jubilee Jones,” she answered. “But everybody calls me Jubie.”

“Well, Jubie,” he said, “how come you been sitting here all day?”

“I’m supposed to wait for Paul.”

“Who’s Paul?”

“My brother. He went to get a job.”

When Ethan asked where the job was, Jubilee lifted her arm and stretched a finger towards Klaussner’s Grocery.

“He ain’t in there,” Ethan said. “Ain’t nobody in there. That store’s closed up tighter than…” He was going to say a bull’s ass, but remembered how Grandma Olivia had warned him against such language. He settled for saying, “He likely forgot you was waiting.”

“He did not!” Jubilee snapped. “He promised he’d be back!”





Ethan remembered the promise his mama made—“Tomorrow morning we’re leaving for New York,” she’d said. But there was no New York, and there were no more tomorrows. Maybe there was no more Paul either. He reached across and wrapped his arm around the girl.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I can take you home.”

Jubilee’s eyes filled with water, and she started to cry. Not the kind of wailing you might expect from a frightened little girl, just a silent cascade of tears falling from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

“Jeez, Jubie, you got nothin’ to cry about. I said I’d take you home.” Ethan fished in his pocket for the hankie Olivia always told him to carry. When he came up empty, he wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of his sweater. For the next fifteen minutes, he tried asking questions that would give him some idea of where the girl lived. In the end he didn’t know anything more than he did at the start. If Jubilee had an address she either didn’t know what it was or wasn’t going to say.

Not knowing what else to do, Ethan Allen suggested Jubilee come home with him. “Grandma Olivia’s nice,” he assured her. “She helps kids in trouble.”

Jubilee eyed him with a suspicious look. “I ain’t in trouble.”

“Maybe not,” Ethan Allen answered. “But if your brother got that job, he might stay working all night.”

“Oh.”

“If that happens, you don’t want to sit here cold and hungry, do you?”

She shook her head. “No, but…”

Ethan grabbed the notebook from his bicycle basket and tore a page out. “We’ll leave a note so he’ll know where you went. How’s that?”

She smiled. “Yeah, that’s good.”

He wrote the note then showed it to Jubilee, who nodded her approval. Ethan Allen placed the note on the bench and put a rock on top of it so it wouldn’t blow away. Once that was done, Jubilee slid her hand into his and allowed him to lift her up onto the crossbar of his bicycle.



After Missus Brown’s call Olivia had suffered through a harrowing afternoon of worry about what mischief Ethan Allen was up to. That’s when she started cooking. Clara swore it was impossible for a person to cook and worry at the same time, so Olivia decided to make a lemon pound cake. Then it was three dozen oatmeal cookies done from scratch. Once she’d made the stew and set it to simmer, she also made a meatloaf and two pounds of mashed potatoes. When she realized that she’d cooked up more food than they could eat in a week, possibly even two, Olivia portioned the meatloaf and potatoes onto three dinner plates and delivered them to Clara, Barbara Conklin, and Jack McGuffey, who’d been nursing a cold for nearly a week.

Barbara protested, saying she’d decided to become a vegetarian. But Olivia insisted almost all vegetarians also ate meatloaf. “They just don’t talk about it,” she said. Shoving the overloaded plate into Barbara’s hands, she then scurried off in case Ethan Allen was trying to call home.

By the time the clock chimed five, Olivia had grown increasingly worried. She began scrutinizing the movements of the minute hand, and with each tick her apprehension increased. Before another fifteen minutes had passed she was so edgy it was impossible to sit still. That’s when she decided to try her hand at homemade potato chips. Ethan banged through the front door moments after she had a skillet of hot grease sizzling.

“It’s about time!” Olivia called out angrily. Bounding from the kitchen in a few quick steps, she stopped short when she saw the frightened-faced girl.

“Ethan Allen,” she grumbled. “You’d better have a good explanation.”

“It ain’t my fault, Grandma,” Ethan said. “It really ain’t.” He told how he’d been distracted by the robbery, stopped to see what was going on, and spotted Jubilee sitting on the bench early this morning. After telling how he’d met Seth Porter and a lengthy description of the bodies being carried out, he shrugged and said, “Anyway, she was still sitting there waiting, and since her brother wasn’t back yet I asked if she wanted to come home and have dinner with us. That ain’t so wrong, is it?”