Drew ran into the house, shedding her light purple jacket, as soon as Immy stopped the van.
Immy called after her. “Wait!” She hurried into the trailer. “Drew, just go potty and put your jacket back on.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Let’s not fight, Drew. This is important. Geemaw’s in trouble at the police station.”
“Did the pleece arrest her?”
Good question. She had been there all day. Was she being questioned all this time, or was she rotting in a jail cell? “Well, I’m not sure. We have to find out what’s going on, Drew. Get your jacket back on, and we’ll go see.”
She had cased the joint earlier, just before she picked up Drew, and now Immy circled the police building twice. The air still held a nip as spring moseyed along, taking its time getting to Saltlick. She would be glad when they quit having to bother with jackets, and the grass greened up. The dry, brown ivy that climbed the side of the police station and rustled in the wind would soon turn glossy green. The station looked a lot better in the summer.
Crossing her fingers, she hoped her strategy was a good one. It might be better if Drew weren’t with her, but that couldn’t be helped. She hadn’t been able to think of a plan all day. In fact, she had been expecting her mother to call for a ride home in the morning, then in the early afternoon. Now mid-afternoon was disappearing, and still no call. Wasn’t an arrested person allowed one phone call?
Earlier, after aimlessly leafing through her PI Guidebook for hours, she had formulated a plan. It hadn’t come from the book but from a TV show she had seen about a jailbreak. The book didn’t have anything in it about jailbreaks.
The police station was a tidy, one-story brick building. The grandest things about it were the double entry doors of thick glass, surrounded by an attractive, light stone facing. Small windows ran down one side of the building, the ones near the rear heavily barred. Midway was a door. Immy eyed the barred windows.
That’s probably where Mother is, she thought, in one of those cells. She pressed her lips together tight, determined to get her mother out of stir.
She parked by the side door and sat in the car for a moment wondering what she would find inside. She pictured her mother a victim of police brutality, being manhandled while helpless in handcuffs. Pictured her having her mug shot taken, having her chubby fingers pressed into sticky fingerprint goo. Pictured her writhing on the floor, being tased. She felt a shiver, light as a tarantula, crawl up her spine.
“OK, Drew, let’s go see Geemaw.”
“She’s arrested in there?” Drew threw her seatbelt off and climbed out of her car seat. She looked eager to see the inside of the station.
Immy took Drew’s hand, maybe as much for her own feeling of security as Drew’s, walked around to the front, and pushed through the doors.
She walked to the glass—probably bulletproof, or why would it be there?—and asked the creamy-hued, overly made-up woman behind it, whom she had known all her life, if she could please see Hortense Duckworthy.
“I’ll check. And who are you?” Hortense would have said her drawl was mellifluous. Immy wondered if those bleached eyebrows could go any higher.
“What do you mean, who am I? We went to school together, kindergarten to twelve, Tabitha.” I didn’t like you then any better, either, Miss Cheerleader Homecoming Queen Football Team Floozy. “My mother is back there, and I want to see her.” Drew jumped up and down trying to see. Immy reached down and lifted her to sit on the counter.
Tabitha, who had picked up an old-fashioned telephone receiver, slammed it down and stood. “Get her off there.” Mellifluousness was gone.
Immy took a step back, even though the thick glass was between them. “OK, OK. She just wanted to see. You don’t have to be so rude.”
“Have a seat over there.” Tabitha jabbed a finger toward the molded plastic chairs that lined the wall.
As they sat, Tabitha seemed to calm down. She resumed her call, keeping the two miscreants in sight of her narrowed eyes, lined in black and shadowed in powder blue. Immy set her jaw. Drew kicked the metal chair leg over and over. Grimy, well-thumbed magazines littered a small table, but Immy didn’t want to touch them. The air hung stale.
Immy thought hard, then approached the guardian of the window again. Time to get her plan rolling. “My daughter needs to use a restroom,” she said.
Tabitha didn’t answer, but she must have summoned him somehow, because eventually Emmett’s assistant Ralph appeared. He opened a door and motioned them to follow him.
Ralph had a big grin for them, probably for Immy herself, she thought. He’d been two years ahead of her in school and had always been a little sweet on her. He had been a football player, though, and she didn’t hang around with that crowd. She was intimidated by people that big, except for Mother, and had never responded to his overtures. She didn’t think Ralph had been in any of the accelerated classes she had been assigned to, but to this day, he still called her occasionally.
They trailed behind Ralph down the hallway and past a heavy door. The outside door on the side of the building, right where she had parked, stood across the hallway. Two doors away was a restroom marked Women.
This just might work, she thought, seeing how close the restroom was.
Immy paused outside the heavy door to peek through the small glass window, crisscrossed with embedded wire. Her mother slumped in a folding chair at a battered table. She looked exhausted, but she was alone. There were no visible bruises or lacerations. There could be hidden ones, though. There were torture methods that left no marks. Immy hoped she wasn’t too late.
Ralph, fully uniformed and armed, loomed in the hallway while she and Drew entered the restroom. He was still there when they emerged. It seemed rude, even if he did give them a polite nod. He led them past the room that held Hortense just as the smoke alarms started shrieking.
Imogene held her breath. Now was when her plan would either work or not.
Ralph threw open the interrogation room door where Hortense was and ran toward the front. “Fire!” he yelled. “Follow me!” He ran fast for such a big guy.
Instead of obeying and following Ralph, Immy ran into the room and straight to her mother. Her plan was working. At first, Hortense wouldn’t, or couldn’t, get up. She must have been sitting there for hours in that hard chair.
She grabbed her mother’s hand. Stupid Ralph. If the station were really burning out of control, he would have let her mother fry in here.
“Is that the fire alarm? Is there a fire?” Hortense gave her daughter a dazed look.
Immy had never seen her mother look so demoralized and bedraggled. “It’s part of my plan to get you out of here, Mother, my plan to spring you.”
“Darling,” she whispered back, “they think I killed Hugh. I really think that they really think that.” There was fear in her wide eyes.
Immy paused just a second to figure out her mother’s syntax, then resumed her urging. “Quick, before they come back.” Immy tugged Hortense to her feet and dragged her into the hallway. It was empty, but she could see people milling about in the front vestibule through the open door.
“This way,” Immy urged.
Hortense shook her head to clear it, stood tall, and was suddenly energized. The three pushed through the side door, clambered into the van, and Immy sped away, avoiding the front of the building.
“Ah. It worked! The old fire-in-the-wastebasket trick.”
“You set the fire?” Her mother looked at her in amazement.
See, I’m not so helpless. Not so stupid, either. Immy nodded and a big grin split her face. “Jailbreak! How cool is that?”
“Mommy.” Drew’s tiny voice piped from the back seat.
Immy turned to see her daughter’s puckered brow and worried eyes. “It’s all right, sweetie. Fasten your seat belt. Mommy and Geemaw are all right. Aren’t we, Mother?” The last question was more for Drew’s sake than her own.
“Where we going, Mommy?” piped Drew.
Immy felt her mother and her daughter looking at her.
“Well, what’s the next part of your plan?” asked Hortense.