I nodded. I felt grateful for her words—and somewhat vindicated by them as well—but that didn’t solve the predicament I was in.
She asked again how far along I was, her gaze dropping to my belly behind the smock I was still wearing, and I told her about two months. She stood up and walked to the window and I guessed she was looking out at the road, watching for the police. She had to be nervous, but she didn’t show it. She was a midwife. I thought she must be used to things going terribly wrong.
She asked me if I had anyplace else to go where the police wouldn’t be looking for me, and I shook my head. She let out a breath she must have been holding in, then said I would have to stay with them until the baby came.
I was stunned by the thought. I couldn’t imagine staying with them for seven months. The police would look for me here. I’d put all of them in too much danger.
“Jesse said to take care of you, so we gonna take care of you.”
I felt weak with gratitude and relief. I longed to turn myself over to someone stronger, someone smarter than I felt at that moment.
Then, Aunt Jewel told me to follow her into the hallway. She led me to a narrow closet. Pulling open the door, she revealed clothes hanging so tightly together they seemed to form a solid wall. I could smell mothballs. She told me that was where she and her cousins all hid when they were children. She reached through the wall of clothing. I heard something pop and above the hangers, I watched the rear wall give way, falling inward a few inches at an angle. Aunt Jewel told me to step into the space behind the wall to see if I would fit.
I pushed my way through the sea of clothing. The false wall had opened a bit like a door, allowing me to squeeze through the opening and into a suffocatingly narrow, dark space I imagined was teeming with spiders and who knew what else.
Aunt Jewel told me to push the wall back in place. I hesitated. I wanted to ask if she planned to leave me in the closet all the time, but thought better of expressing any doubt. Gulping, I pushed the wall back in place. Then I stood in the narrow pitch-black space, hardly able to breathe. Seconds passed and my breathing quickly grew shallow. Panicky, I tried to find a knob or something that would allow me to open the false wall again, but my hands felt only smooth wood. I called to Aunt Jewel, pounding my fist against the wall.
The wall tilted inward again and I let out my breath. “Scary in there, ain’t it?” she said with a laugh. I asked if there was a way to open the wall from the inside on my own, thinking ahead. What if the police came and no one was home to let me out? They’d find my skeleton in the wall someday, generations from now.
Aunt Jewel showed me how to dig my fingers into the edge of the door to pull it open again. She helped me step through the forest of clothing. She said finding me a hiding place was the easy part and I asked her what the hard part was.
“Telling Abe and Agnes—Jesse’s mama and daddy—you’re stayin’ here for the next seven months,” she said.
At that very moment, I heard the sound of voices coming from downstairs and my heart leaped into my throat. I reached for the knob of the closet, but Aunt Jewel set her hand on my wrist. She cocked her head to listen. It was just the family, she said. She told me to go back in Nellie’s room and stay there. She’d talk to them.
So that is where I am right now. In Nellie’s room, sitting on her bed. From here, I can look out the window at the long straight dirt road leading up to the farm. I’m watching for a police car. Why haven’t they come yet? The only reason I can think of is that they’ve already caught Jesse. I hope that isn’t so. Would they torture him to tell them where I am? I can’t bear to think of what they’d do to him if they caught him. Please, God, keep him safe!
And where are they looking for me?
I picture Karl going to Miss Myrtle’s house, asking her if she’s seen me. He’ll tell her I’m wanted for the murder of Martin Drapple and she won’t believe him. “Oh, that’s nonsense!” she’ll say. “Why, Anna wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
And he’ll say, “She killed him with the claw end of a hammer.” He’ll tell her that she’s lucky to be rid of me. That I’m dangerous.
I feel bad about that, imagining Miss Myrtle thinking of me as a danger.
I think of my clothes and books, my perfume and rouge and everything else I left at her house. It’s likely I’ll never see any of it again. Other than my purse and the clothes on my back, the only thing I have with me is this journal.
4 P.M.
I guess a half hour or longer passed as I sat there alone in Nellie’s room, my eyes glued to the long driveway, waiting to see Karl’s car coming to take me away. I could no longer hear voices downstairs and wondered how Jesse’s parents had reacted to Aunt Jewel telling them that they now had a fugitive on their hands. I heard light, rapid footsteps on the stairs, and in a moment, Nellie burst into the room, pigtails bouncing.
“We get to sleep in the same room!” she said, her huge eyes twinkling. She is so adorable. I’d felt drawn to her when I met her before and I’m even more so now. I tried to act like everything is fine as I talked to her. I didn’t want to frighten her. I told her I would try not to take up too much space in her room and she said she didn’t care, that she liked sharing.
She bounced a little on the bed. She pointed to my journal on my lap and asked me what it was. I explained that it’s like a diary, then realized she probably had no idea what a diary was. “It’s where you can write down your thoughts, just for yourself. So you can keep them to yourself,” I said. “No one else should read them.”
She leaned over and lifted the pages a bit, just enough to see my writing. She told me I wrote “that funny way. Where the letters get all hooked together.”
I explained the difference between printing and cursive writing, and she said she was going to learn how to write that way. She said her daddy doesn’t know how to read or write except for signing his name. “Mama can read good. Aunt Jewel and Dodie and Jesse … they can do all of it ’cause they got more learnin’.”
I said something about learning being very important, but my gaze was once more out the window. Then Nellie said she would never want to have a journal, and when I asked her why not she said, “I like everybody to know what I’m thinkin’!” She hopped off the bed and twirled in a circle and I laughed, but then I felt worried that she might share my whereabouts with someone. I told her how important it was that it stay a secret that I was living with her family, and she reassured me that she understood, pressing a finger to her lips.
Just at that moment, I heard voices downstairs. Abe’s. Aunt Jewel’s. And Karl? I gasped. In the few seconds I’d let my guard down, he must have come up the driveway.
I whispered to Nellie that the police were downstairs and got quickly to my feet. I grabbed this journal and my purse and carefully opened Nellie’s bedroom door, ready to rush to the closet and its false wall, but I could see onto the living room floor at the bottom of the stairs in front of me. I could see the lower legs and shiny shoes of two policemen and the dusty shoes of a man who had to be Jesse’s father.
Nellie saw what I saw. She gave me one brief look of panic, those big dark eyes of hers even bigger. Then she shut the door again, quietly, and flung open the lid of the big chest at the foot of her bed. She began tossing its contents—clothing, toys, stuffed animals—on the floor, while I watched, my heart thumping. “Get in!” she commanded.