“The left side,” Rebecca interrupted, “if I’m facing the
house?”
Ginny smiled. The direction seemed so obvious to her. In
anybody else she might have found the question a dumb one. Coming from Rebecca,
it was simply endearing. “Yes, my sweet,” she continued, “face the house and go
around the left side.” She gestured through the window toward the house,
growing more substantial by the moment as Saturday morning brightened around
them. “Head back toward the creek until you come to a large hedge.”
“How large a hedge?” asked Rebecca.
“Like a wall,” Ginny replied without pause. “But just a
couple of feet or so past where the house ends and the hedge begins there is a
gap, an opening big enough for one and a half of your beautiful selves to get
through.”
“Ok…” Rebecca smiled. “And what if the books aren’t there?”
Ginny grimaced briefly. “Just come back, I guess, but I
think you’ll find them.”
“How can you be so sure?” Rebecca wondered.
Ginny glanced through her side window to the front door of
the house, surprisingly white in the early light. “Because my note is gone.”
Rebecca, her hand still on the handle of the door, leaned
across the middle console and planted a kiss on Ginny’s mouth. “I’ll be right
back,” she said. Opening the door and stepping into the bright new morning, she
smiled and added, “I hope!”
The passenger door swung shut with a soft thud and Ginny
chuckled, watching the way Rebecca’s hips swayed as she walked away from the
idling car. She hated sending Becca for her journals, but not as much as she
hated the thought of running into Gordon.
Rebecca turned and waved as she rounded the left corner of
the house and passed out of sight. From the driver seat, Ginny returned the
wave. Glancing at the clock in the dash, she saw that it was just about a
quarter after six. In a few minutes she would have her journals and her girl
back in the car; neither, she hoped, the worse for wear. Looking at the clock
again, she calculated the drive down south to San Pia might take two or three
hours. Unconsciously drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, hoping she
would like Rebecca’s family at least half as much as she liked Rebecca, Ginny
gazed at 61 Euclid sitting whitely in the clear light of Saturday morning, and
waited for her lover to return.
Editorial note: See Part I, chapter eight, for the results of Rebecca's trip through the hedge.
