A call, high-pitched and insistent, cut into Maggie’s dreams. She grumbled and pulled the blanket over her face. She was drifting back into sleep when the quiet was broken once more. Pushing up on an elbow, she realized two things at once: she was not in her room at home and a rooster was crowing. But the third thing, where she was, took a bit longer. When she remembered that she was in Twisted Creek, she smiled sleepily and dug beneath her pillow for her watch.
Five-thirty. “Five-thirty!” she groaned. No wonder I can’t open my eyes. But that’s all right. Roosters mean haystacks, clean air, healthy eggs, and green things growing. She punched her pillow into shape and was ready to relax again when she heard a shout.
“Nicky! Nickee-ee-ee!” a girl’s voice called below Maggie’s window. “Bring my shoe back!”
Maggie scrambled out of bed and pulled back the window curtains. In the murky light she saw a small blonde girl in a woolly blue robe racing across a narrow bridge at the base of the hill behind her grandfather’s house. The little girl stopped, whirled around, and shrieked, “I won’t, Cat, I won’t! Not till you tell me where you’re going!”
An older girl, slim and with the same fair hair, ran across the bridge. Below her jeans, red socks and only one white sneaker showed. She lunged at the girl called Nicky and yanked the mate of her shoe from her hand. “Now stop this silliness! I’ll be late.”
“Late for what?”
“None of your business!”
“You don’t tell me anything anymore,” the little girl whined.
Maggie pushed the window up. “Hey, you guys,” she called, “cool it. My grandfather’s still sleeping.”
The two blonde heads jerked upwards as if pulled by strings, the older girl’s face turning red as she put her hand over her mouth. They stood motionless for an instant, then scrambled off the bridge, disappearing into a clump of tall firs.
Maggie stayed at the window, looking at the spot where the two had vanished, wondering who they were and, with some of Nicky’s curiosity, where the girl called Cat was going. Finally, she crawled back into bed. For a while, sleep would not come. But at last her eyelids grew heavy. And that was when the rooster began crowing again. Maggie gave up and swung out of bed.
If the rooster and the girls haven’t awakened my grandfather, she thought, he’ll sleep through anything. But, just in case, I’ll have to find something quiet to do. She dragged her suitcases to the center of the floor, ready to unpack. But one look at the sky, now turning pink above the mountains, and she changed her mind. She pulled on a heavy sweatshirt and her warmest pants, and tiptoed down the stairs and out the front door.
Below her lay the rest of the town. She swallowed a great gulp of air and hugged herself. She was going to love it here! Then she tightened the laces on her running shoes and, after a few stretching exercises, began her run. In a few blocks she found herself on Main Street. Soon she was at the highway that had brought her here. It was called High Street. The four corners of Main and High were taken over by The Bank of A.J. Bremmer, the Bremmer Community Library, Bremmer’s Market, and Twisted Creek Hardware. Bremmers are big in this town, she thought. Wonder who owns the hardware?
At the corner she paused automatically, waiting for cars, but there were none. Turning right, she jogged past storefronts until the sidewalk ended and a small meadow began. She was having trouble breathing, and that surprised her until she remembered the altitude. Running more slowly, she concentrated on getting home. When car wheels braked behind her, she didn’t hear them. But she heard a shout.
“Hey, you!” Glancing over her shoulder, Maggie saw a burly man hurrying around an old green pickup truck. “Hey, you!” he called again, tucking the ends of a green woolen shirt into his trousers. “What’d ya think you’re doin’?”
Maggie’s heart hammered loudly. She wanted to run faster, but her legs refused to cooperate. She stopped and turned. “I’m running,” she gasped. “Running … what … else?”
“I can see that,” the man growled. “What I want to know is, why? And what’s more, what’re you doin’ in Twisted Creek?”
A head appeared from behind the bed of the old pickup. “I know who she is, Mr. Halstead.” Nicky, almost lost in a hooded red jacket, circled the car. “Cat and I, we saw her at Mr. Cruz’s.”
“Go home, Nickel,” the man said. He pointed a finger at Maggie. “Now you, don’t you go nowhere till I get things straight. Who are you?”
“Maggie,” she said. Then, finding her breath, she told him that her name was Margarita Cruz and that she was visiting her grandfather.
The man in the green shirt frowned as he looked from her dark glasses down to her shoes. “Don’t make no sense,” he said. “Victor ain’t told me word one about no granddaughter visiting him. We got rules, and the rule says you gotta let me know ‘bout visitors.”
“Tell you?” Maggie asked. “Why you?”
Blood rose in the man’s face. “Because I’m in charge of keepin’ order in this town, that’s why. All right, let’s go talk to Victor.”
It took a lot of pounding on her grandfather’s bedroom door to wake him, but finally he called, “Jack Halstead? The devil you say. What do you want?” He appeared at the bedroom door in rumpled pajamas. He made short work of convincing Halstead that this was indeed Maggie, his granddaughter, and that if Maggie said she was running for exercise, then that was exactly what she was doing.
Halstead grunted a couple of times as he listened and walked reluctantly down the stairs. “Next time,” he muttered as he opened the front door, “lemme know she’s coming.”
“Go on, Jack. I’m sure you have better things to do. Don’t waste your time. Or mine.”
When they were alone, Maggie said, “What’s wrong with him? Couldn’t he see I was jogging? He acted as if I was doing something absolutely weird.”
“That about sizes it up,” her grandfather said with a grin. “In this town jogging is weird. But forget him.” He turned toward the kitchen. “I might as well fix us breakfast since I’m up.”
Maggie offered to help and when he said no, she went upstairs for a shower. When she came down her grandfather was at the stove in the kitchen. He was shaved and wearing a heavy sweater over jeans and a flannel shirt. The “layered look,” she thought, except it’s probably not a look up here but a necessity. Breakfast was juice and eggs scrambled with chorizo, lots of toast, and coffee.
“¡Chorizo!” she said, smiling broadly. “It’s the best sausage in the world.”
“And the chorizo Señora Ramos makes is even better, if that’s possible.”
She ate the eggs hungrily but passed on coffee. Across the table, steam from her grandfather’s coffee cup spiraled between them. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry my jogging got you up so early.”
“It’s just as well. Gives us more time to talk.” He pushed his plate aside and nodded encouragingly. “Bueno, Margarita, what’s this visit about?”
She took a deep breath and said, “First of all, I’m mostly called Maggie now. And I’ve kind of grown too old to call you Papacito. Would Grandpa be all right?”
He rubbed his chin for a few moments, then nodded and broke into a grin. “Grandpa will be all right, Maggie. But no more hedging. What’s this visit all about?”
“I didn’t just come to visit, Grandpa,” she said, deciding to plunge right in. “I was hoping I could stay a while, maybe live with you.”
Her grandfather frowned. Abruptly, he raised his cup to his mouth and emptied it. Then he rose and walked to the window above the sink, where he stood looking out. She twisted around in her chair, staring at the back of his gray wool sweater, trying to read what he was thinking.
He turned. “Problems at home?”
“Oh, no!” She shot straight up in her chair. “No. Nothing like that. Mom’s really okay and, on a scale of one to ten, Jase is about an eight as a stepfather. It’s something else.”
Her grandfather raised an eyebrow, and his eyes seemed to darken behind his glasses, but he said nothing as he sat down again.
“It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” Maggie said. “Then the day before yesterday I knew what I had to do. I had to come here. I couldn’t talk with Mom about it because she was gone again. To London. So I left her a note, and here I am.” She didn’t look up as she added, “In L.A. when you came down for my dad’s funeral, you said if I ever needed you, you’d be there for me. I do need you. I need a place to live.”
“I don’t understand. If things are all right at home …?” He shook his head slightly, as if to loosen up a stubborn bit of information. “I’m wondering why you need a place to live.”
Maggie bit her lip. He would not be easy to convince. She had to choose her words carefully. She didn’t want to discuss Jase and Mom right now. She leaned across the table and said, “Sure, I have place to live, but it’s not that great a place. It’s not the people that make it that way, it’s … it’s the surroundings. Cities aren’t good. I’m not talking about crime and all that. It’s other things. For instance, in Los Angeles all the food we get is loaded with pesticides. And I’ll bet more than half the buildings are plastered with asbestos that people just keep breathing in. Then there are airplanes spilling bad stuff and cars spewing smog. And if that weren’t enough, TV and radio stations and other high-voltage places are blasting us with … with … what’s it called?”
“Radio magnetic energy?”
“That’s it,” she said somberly. “Grandpa, I can’t believe people. Like the crazies who run around with cell phones attached to their heads, just waiting for brain tumors to develop.” Then, willing her voice not to break, she added, “I want to get away from everything that killed Dad, all the stuff that gave him cancer.”
“We don’t know what caused it, Maggie. Besides, cities have their advantages.” He put his hand over hers. “You really miss him, don’t you?”
They were silent then, lost in their separate thoughts. Maggie was remembering something her father had said a couple of years back. She had been helping him wash his car, and he had stopped and looked across the hood at her. “I’m very proud of you, mi’jita. Always will be.” Then he winked and added, “Especially when you become a famous lawyer.”
“Knock it off, Dad,” she said, “even if you are teasing. You know art’s my thing. Painting.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll hide my disappointment.” Then he had said seriously, “Always do what’s right for you. That’s important.”
Now she looked at her grandfather and said, “I want to do what’s right for me. And what I need is a good place to live. A place where people know what’s important.”
“And you think Twisted Creek is it?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
The eyebrow shot up again. “Look here, Maggie. This town is fine for me. I was hooked when I came to see the house my sister Graciela had left me. For a writer like me, one who doesn’t rely too much on research, the remoteness is irresistible. I can bury myself here and get my work done without interruption. But for a young girl like you, no. Absolutely no.”
“But why? Why?”
Instead of answering her, he said, “We have other things to consider. How about school? Can’t have you missing that.”
“I’m not. It’s spring vacation. Woodbine, that’s my school, doesn’t start up again till next week. By then I could be going to school here, couldn’t I?”
A ghost of a grin touched her grandfather’s mouth. “You’d find it very different.” He shook his head. “No, Margarita … Maggie. No, it won’t work.”
“Please,” she said quickly, “don’t say no. Please think about it.”
“I’ll think about it.” He seemed suddenly older as he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his temples. There was a tug at Maggie’s heart as she noticed how much he looked like her father. Then the glasses were back on. “I’ll think about it,” he repeated. “But before I do anything else, I have to let your mother know you’re here. Do you have her number in London?”
“Yes,” she said and got up from the table. At the door she stopped. She didn’t want him to call. Not yet. “Papa— Grandpa?” Her voice was full of feelings. Could he hear them? “Grandpa?” she repeated, asking, telling, hoping all at once.
“Yes?”
“I just want you to know that this is very important to me. That I thought and thought about it before I decided and that I …” She stopped. What was the use? He wouldn’t let her stay. “Guess I’ve already told you all this,” she said and went quickly into the hall.