Don’t Let Me Go(33)

“Sorry. You’re right. You guys want to come in?”

“No,” Grace said. “We have to check on my mom and Felipe and Mr. Lafferty and Mrs. Hinman and make sure they’re OK. Oh, wait. Look. There’s Felipe.”

Billy looked up to see Felipe pause on the bottom step, looking relieved to see them all in one piece, and all in one place.

“Felipe,” Grace yelled, much louder than necessary. “Will you go and see if Mr. Lafferty and Mrs. Hinman are OK?”

Felipe turned and trotted back upstairs again.

“Let’s go get your key,” Rayleen said to the girl, “so we can go check on your mom.”

“I’ll go,” Grace said, wriggling to get down. “She’s my mom, so I’ll go check on her.”

Rayleen set the girl down with her bare feet on the wood floor of the hall, and she danced from one foot to the other because it was cold.

“Sure you don’t want me to come?” Rayleen asked her.

“Positive.”

“Go get your key, then.”

But Grace just headed off toward the basement apartment. A cautious step or two later, she pulled it out from under her pajamas and held it up for them to see: the key, still dangling on its cord around her neck.

She disappeared down the stairs to the basement apartment.

“Who knew she slept with that thing on?” Rayleen asked Billy, who only shrugged and shook his head.

He was still standing in his open doorway, not wanting to come out — of course — and not quite ready to invite anyone in after bedtime. In fact, he was still not wholly awake.

“I should have gone with her,” Rayleen said. “What if her mom—”

“Oh, good God,” Billy interjected, cutting her off. “Don’t even say it. Don’t even think a thing like that.”

“Sorry.”

“What is that on your floor?”

Billy pointed to an envelope lying just inside Rayleen’s open doorway, looking starkly white against the worn and darkened rug.

“Hmm,” she said. “Don’t know. Didn’t even see it.”

She walked back and picked it up. She opened it as she walked back to Billy’s door. But it wasn’t light enough in the hallway to read the printing on the small rectangle of card stuck inside. It looked colorful, though. It didn’t look like a written note. It looked more like an advertisement of some sort.

“I guess you’d better come in,” Billy said.

And he turned on all three lights in his living room.

Just then, both Felipe and Grace arrived back.

Grace bounded in, shouting, “She’s OK! She’s loaded, and I couldn’t wake her up all the way, but she’s not shot, because she grunted at me, so that’s good.”

Billy looked up to see Felipe paused in the open doorway. He had never seen Felipe before, except through the glass, and he expected that Felipe had never seen him at all. They eyed each other in the tentative way strangers often do.

“OK if I come in?” Felipe asked.

“Oh. Um. Sure. Please do.”

But Felipe only advanced a step or two into Billy’s living room.

“Mrs. Hinman’s fine,” Felipe said. “Little scared. Lafferty wouldn’t come to the door. But that’s prob’ly just cause I told him it was me.”

“But he answered?” Rayleen asked. “I mean, you heard he was OK?”

“No. He’s either out, or he made like he didn’t hear me.”

“What’s that?” Grace asked, pointing to the envelope in Rayleen’s hand. The fear and confusion of events had raised her voice to a near-shriek.

“It’s a gift certificate,” Rayleen said, as if only just figuring that out as she reported it. “It’s a seventy-five-dollar gift certificate to a store called Dancer’s World. And it’s made out to you.”

“Me?”

“Grace Ferguson. That’s you. Right?”

Grace screamed. She jumped up and down. Ten, then fifteen, then twenty times. She shrieked, “I can get tap shoes, I can get tap shoes!” Then she stopped jumping and shot Billy a worried look. “Can I get tap shoes for seventy-five dollars?”

“I’m sure you can get something decent,” Billy said.

And, of course, that got Grace jumping again.

“That’s the best present anybody ever gave me! Tell me who gave it to me, OK? Please? Tell me who gave me that, so I can go hug and kiss them forever! Tell me right now? Please?”

Billy looked at Rayleen, who shook her head. Then Rayleen looked at Felipe, and he also shook his head no.

“We don’t know,” Billy said. “Somebody just slid it under Rayleen’s door.”

“Maybe your mom,” Rayleen said. “Yeah. Must have been your mom.”

“I don’t think so,” Grace said. The mystery of the gift must have sunk in for her, because she stopped jumping and screaming, and her face took on a thoughtful expression. “She doesn’t even know I started tap dancing.”

“Who else knows, then?”

“Nobody. Just you guys. Oh, yeah, and I told my teacher. But if my teacher wanted to give me a gift thingy for tap shoes, I think she’d’ve given it to me at school. Right? And besides, I just told her I was learning to tap dance, and for all she knows maybe I have my own shoes already, because I didn’t tell her I needed my own shoes. Only you guys know that. Oh, yeah. And Mr. Lafferty. I told him about it when I was asking him to go get the wood.”