The Courage Tree Page 3

  Gloria tried several more times to reach Alison’s cell phone, without success, and at four o’clock, Janine could take it no longer.

  “What’s Alison’s home phone number?” she asked Gloria. Her voice sounded curt, but she felt herself soften as she saw the look of concern in Gloria’s face.

  Gloria knew the number by heart, and Janine dialed it on her own phone.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice answered.

  Janine gripped the phone. “Alison?” she asked.

  “No, this is Charlotte. Alison’s not here.”

  “Are you her…housemate?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m waiting for her at Meadowlark Gardens,” Janine said. “She’s supposed to be bringing my daughter and another girl back from West Virginia. Have you heard from her?”

  “No,” Charlotte said. “I was wondering where she was, actually. She should have been home an hour ago. We’re supposed to go to Polyester’s tonight.”

  Janine had no idea what Polyester’s was, nor did she care. “Look, if you hear from her, tell her to call this number immediately.” Janine gave the woman her number.

  “You could call her, if you want,” Charlotte said. “I can give you the number for her cell.”

  “We’ve tried calling her. She must be out of range.”

  “I doubt that. She has the same phone plan I do. We’re never out of range.”

  “Well, I guess she has it turned off, then.”

  Charlotte laughed. “She never turns her phone off. She’s terrified of missing a call.”

  Janine said goodbye, then hung up her phone. She looked toward the entrance of the parking lot, where a short line of cars was waiting to exit, and none were waiting to come in.

  For whatever reason, Alison had turned her phone off now.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They waited until nearly four-thirty before calling Holly’s parents, and by that time the muscles in Janine’s face ached from trying not to cry. She wondered how another mother might react in a situation like this. The mother of a healthy child would take tardiness in stride. She wanted to behave like the typical mom of a typical child, but she’d had so little practice with that.

  Gloria stood next to Janine as she placed the call to Holly’s parents, but it was apparent from her end of the conversation that they were not home.

  “Are you Holly’s sister?” Gloria asked into the phone. “Will you have them give me a call as soon as they get home? It’s important…no, now don’t worry them. I’m sure everything’s fine.” Her voice was tight but upbeat. “Holly’s just a little late getting back from camp, and I wanted to let them know, that’s all.” She gave the girl her number, then hung up the phone and smiled at Janine.

  “They have seven children,” she said. “Can you imagine?”

  They could lose one and still have six left, Janine thought, although she knew such thinking was both irrational and callous.

  “Holly falls smack in the middle,” Gloria continued.

  Suzanne glanced over at Emily, lying on the lawn with the four other girls. “Em’s the middle child, too,” she said. “Though she doesn’t have that middle kid syndrome. Not yet, at least.”

  “Jason has it, that’s for sure,” Gloria said, referring to her son. “Of course he’s stuck in the middle between two girls, so it’s not just the middle child syndrome he’s coping with.”

  Janine had nothing to add to this conversation. How could Gloria and Suzanne stand there chatting about birth order when Sophie and Holly were over an hour and a half late? She stepped away from the two women and dialed Alison’s cell phone number again. Still no answer. She thought of what Alison’s housemate, Charlotte, had said about Alison never turning off her cell phone out of fear of missing a call. Had she had the phone glued to her ear on this trip? Might she have been concentrating on a conversation rather than on her driving and smashed into a tree? But then, wouldn’t Gloria have seen the accident, since she had been behind her? Maybe Alison had taken a different route. Then Gloria wouldn’t have been able to see the accident, and…

  “Why don’t I take the girls home?” Suzanne interrupted her ruminating with a question to Gloria. “I’ve got the station wagon. I can fit them all in. Randi, too,” she said, referring to Gloria’s daughter.

  Gloria looked at her watch, then nodded. “That would be great,” she said. “No sense in all of us waiting here.”

  Suzanne gave Janine a quick, one-armed hug. “I’m sure everything’s fine,” she said. “This is just one of those crazy misunderstandings. You’ll see.”

  “I hope so.” Janine tried to smile.

  She leaned against the van, watching Gloria and Suzanne help the girls load their gear into the station wagon. She supposed she should help, but felt unable to move from the side of the van, dazed by the sight of all those healthy brown arms and legs, as the girls climbed into the station wagon with their sleeping bags and knapsacks. From the other end of the parking lot came a cacophony of whistles and applause, and she turned to see a car drive out of the lot onto Beulah Road, streamers sailing in the air from the rear bumper. Her mind was so heavy with worry that it took her a moment to realize it was a bride and groom making their getaway.

  Gloria came to stand next to her as they watched the station wagon pull out of the parking lot. She looked at her watch again.

  “I think we should call the police,” she said. “We should make sure there haven’t been any accidents.”

  “Yes,” Janine agreed. She thought they should have called the police an hour ago.

  Again, she listened to Gloria make a call in that tight, even voice, describing the problem in terms Janine deemed far too mild. She wanted to grab the phone from Gloria’s hand to tell the dispatcher her view of the situation, but she kept her hands knotted firmly around her own phone.

  “They’re sending someone over here to talk with us,” Gloria told her as she clicked off her phone. “Though I hope by the time they get here, we won’t need them.” She looked toward Beulah Road as if hoping to see the blue Honda.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Janine said. “The one time I let her go someplace alone, and now she’s…Who knows where she is?”

  Gloria put a gentle arm around Janine’s shoulders. “I’m sure she’s fine,” she said. “And Sophie had the best time, Janine. I was so glad she was finally able to do something fun with the rest of the girls. I just can’t get over how well she seems.”

  “I know,” Janine said. “But she still needs to be careful. To watch her fluid intake and her—”

  “And her diet,” Gloria finished the sentence for her. “We were careful with her, Janine. We were vigilant. Although she knows what she’s supposed to do to take care of herself. She’s very sophisticated about her condition.”

  “Yes, she is,” Janine admitted. “But it’s gotten more complicated because of the study she’s in. Her fluid needs are always changing.”

  “She told me about Herbalina.”

  “What did she say about it?” Janine asked, curious.

  “That she hated getting it at first. The needle was painful and all. But she knows it’s made her feel so much better. And it’s given her more freedom at night from being hooked up to that machine.”

  “It has.” She remembered how Sophie had cried the first time that fat needle had pierced her vein. The last couple of weeks or so, though, she’d been so brave, sticking her arm out for Dr. Schaefer’s attack. Janine owed that change to Lucas and his courage tree.

  “Is it a cure?” Gloria asked. “Or just a treatment.”

  Janine sighed. “Depends on who you ask,” she said. “The doctor in charge of the study believes it can ultimately cure her. But Sophie’s regular doctor thinks it just buys a little time, and not much of it at that.” She looked away from Gloria, toward the road, tears burning her eyes again.

  Gloria squeezed her shoulders. “Even if that’s the case, at least she’s able to enjoy herself rig
ht now.”

  “Exactly my thought,” Janine said. Although she knew she was lying. Deep inside, she could not settle for mere temporary relief for Sophie. She wanted Sophie to have the chance at a normal life, the same chance Gloria’s daughter had.

  “She’s such a sensitive little girl,” Gloria commented. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds,” she added quickly. “It’s not like she’s overly sensitive to what people say to her, or anything like that. But she’s very sensitive to the needs of the other girls. Brianna was homesick that first night, and Sophie told her jokes to take her mind off it.”

  “That’s my girl.” Janine smiled. Sophie would always talk about the other kids in the hospital with sympathy. She felt sorry for them for being sick, as though she didn’t recognize that she was one of them herself.

  “She said she was worried about you,” Gloria said.

  “About me?”

  “That you’d be lonely without her over the weekend.”

  Janine shook her head, pressing a fist to her mouth. “I don’t want her to worry about me,” she said. Yet she knew that Sophie always did. More than once, Janine had stood in a hospital corridor, peeking unnoticed into Sophie’s room. Sophie’s pale, freckled face would be contorted with pain and misery, but her features would shift instantly into a devil-may-care smile once she realized her mother could see her. What about right now? she wondered. Wherever Sophie was, she had to know that Janine was worried about her. And that would upset her. Sophie had always taken on too much responsibility for the feelings of others.

  A police car pulled into the parking lot, turning toward the southeast corner, slowing as it neared them. The car came to a stop next to Gloria’s van, and Janine felt her hope pour into the young officer who stepped out from behind the wheel. He looked little more than a child himself, though, as he walked toward them. She could see the sunburn on his nose and the gawky way he carried himself, as if he’d suddenly found himself in his father’s police uniform and didn’t know quite how to wear it.

  “Are you the two ladies with the late Girl Scouts?”

  “That’s right,” Gloria replied, but Janine was struck by the insensitivity of his words. The late Girl Scouts. She supposed it was her own sensitivity that was putting her on edge.

  “They were due here at three.” Gloria told him about the trip back from the camp and gave him the names of Alison and the two girls. He wrote the information down slowly, in neat block letters, on a small notepad.

  “Are you sure she took the same route as you?” he asked Gloria. He pronounced the word rowt.

  “I assumed so. I mean, we followed each other going up there. I imagine she would have taken the same route back.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure.”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual when you were driving back? Any construction or anything going on along the side of the road—maybe a crafts fair or something—that they might have stopped for?”

  “No. But I wasn’t really looking, either.”

  The young man studied the words on his notepad as though he wasn’t sure what to make of them. “Okay, first of all, let’s get everyone down here. The troop leader’s roommate, your husband.” He nodded toward Janine, and she thought of correcting him, but there was little point in doing so just then. “The other girl’s parents,” he continued. “And I’m going to call in my supervisor. He has a phone and can check with the dispatchers along the route to see if any accidents have been reported. Unfortunately, only a small part of the route is in Fairfax County, so we’ll have to coordinate with the other police barracks between here and the camp. Of course, we’ve got a recent change of shift, so whatever dispatchers are on duty now might not know about any accidents that occurred on the other shifts.” He tapped the end of his pen against his chin as he stared at the notepad, and Janine grew impatient.

  “Wouldn’t they have a record of any accidents, though?” she asked.

  “Oh, sure, of course. I was just thinking out loud. Shouldn’t do that.” He grinned at her, and she looked away from him. He was too young to have any children of his own, she thought. He had no idea what this felt like. She watched him stride over to his car just as Gloria’s phone rang.

  Gloria quickly brought her phone to her ear, but the caller was only Holly’s mother, and Janine wanted to scream out loud with her disappointment.

  “Right,” Gloria said into the phone. “She’s riding in the car with Alison and one other Brownie, Sophie Donohue, and they haven’t shown up here yet. I’m sure everything’s okay, but we’ve contacted the police just in case…yes, you should come over. The police want everyone to be here.”

  Somehow, knowing that the police wanted everyone together at Meadowlark Gardens made the gravity of the situation even more real.

  “I’ll call my ex-husband,” Janine said, dialing his number on her own phone.

  There was no answer on Joe’s end, just his taped message about being unable to come to the phone right then.

  Yet another cell phone turned off, she thought. But at least with Joe, she could be reasonably sure where to find him…and who would be there with him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joe had never seen Paula quite so vicious on the tennis court. He dove to return her serve, missing the ball and nearly tripping over his own feet in the process.

  Paula must finally be pulling out of her period of mourning, he thought, as he sent the ball back over the net to her. Six weeks ago, he’d accompanied her to Florida for her mother’s funeral, staying with her in her childhood home, trying to comfort her when she seemed inconsolable. Her mother had been her last living relative, and Paula’s pain over her death had been fierce and was only now beginning to lift. It was a particular sort of pain Joe knew and understood all too well.

  Or maybe Paula just seemed more aggressive today because his heart was not on this tennis court in Reston, but rather at Ayr Creek, where Sophie would be babbling excitedly to Janine about her weekend at camp. He wanted to hear all about it. Despite the fact that he had strongly objected to her going, he hoped she’d had a wonderful, healthy time. He had no desire to have his grave misgivings about the trip proven correct.

  Paula let out a whoop as she sent the final ball over the net, far out of his reach. He didn’t even bother attempting to return it. Instead, he bent over, his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath from the wild ride she’d just taken him on.

  “Congratulations,” he called across the net. This was the first time she had beaten him so decisively. He straightened up, walked toward the net, and shook her hand.

  “A hollow victory,” Paula said, pulling the clasp out of her dark hair and letting it fall across her shoulders. She tossed it back from her face with a shake of her head.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, as they walked on opposite sides of the net toward the benches.

  “Because you weren’t paying a bit of attention to the game.”

  “Well, my focus might have been a little off, but you won fair and square.”

  Paula sat down on the bench and mopped her face with a towel. “You’re still worried about Sophie, huh?”

  “Not worried, really.” He slipped his racquet into its case. “If anything had gone wrong at the camp, we would have heard. I’m just really curious to see how she made out. This is the first time she’s ever done anything like this.”

  “The first time she’s been able to,” Paula reminded him, and he knew where she was headed with her train of thought.

  “Right,” he said. He sat down and took a long drink from his water bottle.

  “But you still can’t admit that it’s that herbal treatment that’s made the difference, can you?”

  “Oh, I’m willing to concede that it might be,” he said. “But everyone says—everyone except the doctor in charge of the study—”

  “Schaefer,” she said. “And I know what you’re going to say. That everyone else thinks her im
provement is just a temporary effect of the herbs.”

  He guessed he was beginning to sound like a broken record. “Right. So who would you believe?” he asked. “Sophie’s type of kidney disease has been around a long time, with bona fide researchers looking at it from every angle. Should I believe them, or some alternative doctor who appeared out of nowhere with his bag of weeds?”

  “But she’s doing so much better,” Paula argued.

  “I’ll admit that those IVs she gets have made her feel better. That doesn’t mean she is better.”

  “Are you going over to Ayr Creek to see her tonight?”

  “Uh-huh. Want to come?”

  Paula nodded. “If that’s okay with you,” she said. “Unless you want to spend the time alone with her and Janine.”

  He appreciated her consideration, but he also knew how much she cared about Sophie.

  “No, I’d like you to—”

  They both turned toward the small parking lot at the sound of a car door slamming shut. The tennis court was surrounded by trees, and Joe stood up to try to peer through the branches. A woman was running from the parking lot toward the tennis court.

  He frowned. “That looks like Janine,” he said.

  “Joe!” the woman shouted as she pulled open the chain-link door of the court, and he could see her clearly then—clearly enough to see the fear in her face.

  He froze where he was standing. Sophie. Something was very wrong. Paula stood up next to him, clutching his arm as Janine ran toward them.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, finding his voice as he took a step toward her. “Is Sophie all right?”

  Janine glanced at Paula, then back at Joe again. “She’s late returning from camp.” Janine was winded. “She’s riding with another girl and one of the leaders. I’ve been waiting at Meadowlark Gardens for her, but she hasn’t shown up yet.”