The Phoenix Girls: The Complete Trilogy

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Little Red

Penny Sinclair came out of the old nightmare in her usual fashion, jerking awake with a gasp and throwing a hand in front of her eyes to block out that blinding flash of light. She slowly became aware of her surroundings, not a country grove in the dark of night but the back seat of a bus.

Even as reality asserted itself, the dream faded from her mind. As always, only the barest sense of the nightmare remained, and the knowledge that she’d had it many times before in the past four months. The four months since her mother died.

Penny lowered her upraised hand and saw strange faces, all turned toward her. Curiosity was plain on some faces, irritation on others, but most regarded her with naked sympathy, even pity.

Except for Miss Riggs, who sat beside Penny with her nose pressed in an open book, as oblivious to Penny as she had been on the flight in from California. Miss Riggs responded to Penny’s few attempts at conversation with terse, single word replies and impatient grunts.

Penny ignored the stares and peered through the window past her silent traveling companion. A passing car threw a glaze of brightness over the glass, and as it faded, she found her own reflection, bloodshot green eyes, her long, curly red hair mussed from a day of hard travel, staring sadly back at her for a moment.

It was hard to believe she was hundreds of miles away from the city she’d lived in her entire life. The view through her window was achingly familiar. It could have been any of a hundred northern California roads she’d traveled with her mom.

The bus slowed as it passed a low, wild hillock, then slowed further as the wild grass blurred into a field of early summer wheat. Penny’s California daydreams evaporated into her new Washington reality when a weathered sign passed in front of her window.

Welcome to Dogwood, Washington – Home of Harvest Days.

Penny closed her eyes, sighed, and when she opened them, they were rolling to a stop in downtown Dogwood.

“Welcome home,” Miss Riggs said, catching Penny’s eye. She watched her with a familiar, narrow-eyed scrutiny, as if studying a picture she didn’t much like.

Penny couldn’t muster the strength for a reply, could barely muster the strength to stand when Miss Riggs rose to her feet. Hugging the bag that held her last few possessions, Penny waited for Miss Riggs to step past her, and followed her down the narrow aisle.

They were the only two to exit the bus in Dogwood, and no one waited at the curb to get on. A few moments after Penny stepped down onto the sidewalk, the door swished closed behind her.

Penny watched the silhouettes of the passengers through the bus windows as it moved into the distance, wishing she were still with them, driving into the orange summer dusk for cities and towns unknown.

I could have my pick, Penny thought wistfully. Anything but this.

The bus followed Dogwood’s short Main Street and turned with it in front of an elderly looking school building. Then it was gone.

“Stuck here now,” Penny whispered, feeling small and lost. Tears stung the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away before Miss Riggs, or the growing number of gawkers gathering at porches and storefronts, could see her tears.

“What?” Miss Riggs regarded Penny again with those sharp, hawkish eyes.

“Nothing,” Penny said, and followed her to a rundown white VW Bug sitting alone at the curb a block away.

The woman arrived at her car a block ahead of Penny, and stood holding the passenger door open, tapping her foot impatiently.

Penny controlled the impulse to turn and run in the other direction, all the way back to San Francisco if she could manage it, and walked a little quicker, sliding into the back seat of the Bug and cringing as Miss Riggs closed the door behind her.

“Little Red,” Miss Riggs said unexpectedly, startling Penny from her thoughts.

“Huh? What?”

Miss Riggs did her sigh again, a sound Penny was learning to loath, at once theatric and weary, and shot Penny a cross look through her rearview mirror. I don’t know why I even bother trying, her expression said.

“Susan says your nickname is Little Red.”

Penny nodded, surprised, and a little irritated. Little Red was her mom’s nickname for her, and no one else ever used it. She didn’t even know anyone else knew about it.

Penny was born prematurely, and had been small all her life. Her mom called her petite, which didn’t sound like a bad thing to her. The kids at the group home called her pipsqueak, runty, or the ginger hobbit.

Little Red had always been just between Penny and her mom, and coming from Miss Riggs’ mouth, it sounded more like an insult.

“I can’t hear you nod, you know,” Miss Riggs snapped, though she could obviously see her in the mirror. “The polite response would have been ‘Yes, Miss Riggs.’ A little elaboration would have been nice as well, since I’m attempting to get to know you.”

Penny bit her lips, cutting off the first reply that came to mind, and forced as polite a response as she could manage once her anger began to ebb.

“Yes, Miss Riggs, my mom called me Little Red. I don’t like other people doing it though.” She ended on a sharper note than she’d intended, and decided to keep her mouth shut from then on before she got herself into trouble.

The silence held for a few minutes before Miss Riggs broke it again. “Susan is eager to see you. She jumped through a number of hoops to get you out of that orphanage, you know.”

All feigned friendliness had left her voice. It was dust-dry and sharp as a whip crack.

“She didn’t have to,” the woman was quick to add. “She agreed to be your godmother when you were a baby, but she doesn’t even know you.”

Penny bit her lips again. She didn’t trust her mouth at that moment.

“Susan is generous to a fault, and there never has been a shortage of people willing to take advantage of it.”

Penny could hold her tongue no longer.

“I didn’t want to come here,” Penny shouted. “I didn’t ask for my mom to die, and I didn’t ask for anyone’s help!”

Penny took a savage satisfaction in Miss Riggs’s stunned expression. Her eyes were open so wide it looked like they might fall out of their sockets. Her mouth stretched so tight it almost vanished.

Penny knew she should stop, she was probably already in trouble, but she couldn’t. The words kept flowing, bitter water from a broken dam.

“Who are you anyway? If Susan is so eager to see me, why didn’t she come get me? Why did she send you?”

For several tense seconds Miss Riggs offered no reply. There was no sound at all except the unhealthy sounding rattle of the old VW Bug as it sped over rough country pavement.

Penny turned away from the pinched face reflected in the rearview mirror, two conflicting emotions battling in her head, making her want to scream. She was ashamed at her outburst; she didn’t like other people seeing her lose control. But a deeper part of her relished the shocked expression on Miss Riggs’s face and was not a bit sorry.

Penny watched the field outside her window. The orange dusk had deepened to a violet twilight. Downtown Dogwood was at her back now, though she could still see the school building when she craned her neck to look back. She hoped the ride would end soon.

“I am Susan’s sister. Her older sister,” she said, regaining her calm, if disdainful, tone. “Though she so seldom chooses to take my advice that it hardly matters.”

“The reason I was blessed with the thankless chore of fetching you from the arms of orphan-hood,” she continued in that same dry, hateful tone, “was because she had to work today. Since I did not, she took advantage of my very limited generosity.”

The car slowed, and for a moment, Penny thought the woman was going to stop and let her out right there, in the middle of nowhere. Instead, they turned a sharp left at a sign that read Clover Hill Lane and started up a steep gravel path. Penny ignored the pinched and frowning face in the rearview mirror and peered through the windshield, straining at her seat belt to see the climbing road.

Something red and furry leapt from the grass, landing on four legs in the center of the gravel road. It paused there as the twin beams of the car’s headlights fell over it, and turned to face them.

“Look out!” Penny said, but Miss Riggs ignored her and drove on. Penny clamped her eyes shut, not wanting to see what would happen next, waiting for the fatal thump as the little car’s bumper hit the animal, but the thump did not come. She opened her eyes again and spun in her seat, scanning the road behind them. The angry red glow of the car’s rear lights revealed nothing. No dead or injured animal lay in the dust and gravel. No live animal sprang back into the grass to escape them.

Penny faced forward again, her heart still racing a little, and the house at the top of Clover Hill came into view.