1
Apatch of faded blue gingham hovered in the lofty branches of Abner Brown’s precious apple tree. As the branches shuddered, dropping the delicate pink blooms onto the grass below, Haldis Fredriksen stopped, eyeing the tree. Her gray eyes narrowed when she recognized a familiar swatch of cloth—the same cloth that was becoming more and more visible with each quiver of the tree.
She crept closer, using the furrow of lush rosebushes for cover. As she peeked through the roses, she could see the checked fabric now waving like a flag in the gentle spring breeze. She glanced around, assuring herself that her nemesis, that priggish Mr. Brown, was nowhere in sight.
Three feet from the tree, she straightened and planted her hands firmly on her hips. “Liv, get out of that tree...now!”
There was a frantic rustling in the upper branches, followed by a heavy shower of apple blossoms, and suddenly a mass of gingham skirts and blond braids tumbled to the ground. Sitting indignantly on a bed of crushed apple blossoms was Hallie’s nine-year-old sister, Liv.
“Thunderation! Hallie, you scared the spit out of me!” Liv stood up, carelessly slinging a knotted pair of black stockings over a shoulder before attempting to dust off her debris-covered behind. “A person could get hurt, having a body creep up on them like that.”
“I know a person who’ll be hurting—and soon.” Hallie turned Liv around and swatted the dust off the girl’s skirt a bit harder than necessary. “You swore you’d stay off Mr. Brown’s property. Two days later and you’re back in his tree again. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Liv mumbled. She gave Hallie a quick, guilty glance before she sat down and started fumbling with her knotted hose.
Hallie looked down at Liv, who was tugging on a stocking over her bark-scraped leg and muttering something about crossed fingers. The sight struck a familiar chord in her. It seemed that all she did lately was lecture Liv. Was she being too hard on her, or was Liv just testing her limits? She’d been a handful for as long as Hallie could remember, but in the three years since their mother’s death, Liv’s belligerent attitude had worsened. Hallie had tried reasoning with her, but that hadn’t worked. Her youngest sister kept defying the rules. With Liv, you never knew what to expect next. “Well, young lady, it seems you don’t know why you’re doing anything lately, doesn’t it?”
Liv was stubbornly silent.
Hallie tried to infuse a stern tone into her tired voice. “A day spent inside might improve your memory. And while you’re trying to remember why you broke your word, you can do that stack of mending sitting by my bed.”
“But Hallie—”
“And if you finish before supper, you can give the boys a bath.” Hallie watched Liv’s face contort into a grimace of distaste. They both knew from experience that bathing the four-year-old twins was like being thrown from Noah’s Ark—only forty days and nights of rain was probably dryer.
Liv scrambled to her feet. “A person could get sick, stuck in a stuffy house all day, breathing that stale air.” Her eyes grew big as she added dramatically, “And then, if she got wet, a person could get lung fever and die!”
“You’re going to wish you were dead if you give me anymore backtalk. Now get!”
Apparently the look on Hallie’s face did the trick. Liv scurried off toward home. As she rounded the corner, Hallie noticed her sister’s shoeless feet. She dared not call back and risk alerting Mr. Brown. They’d been trespassing in his prized garden long enough, and if children’s shoes weren’t so hard to come by in San Francisco, she would have been sorely tempted to just leave them dangling up in that tree.
She looked around the base of the tree and found nothing. Poking in a few nearby bushes only resulted in disturbing a few bees. As she swatted the bugs away, she looked up. Dangling from one of the uppermost branches of the apple tree were Liv’s new shoes.
Now what? For as long as she could remember, anything steeper than a flight of stairs had sent her into an attack of vertigo. Her one prideful attempt at overcoming this weakness was burned into her memory, along with the humiliation she had suffered when she, the captain’s own daughter, had to be cut down from the tangled rigging some thirty feet above the ship’s deck. The endless five minutes she had spent helplessly swaying from the ropes convinced her to not test her fear again.
Of course, that had been six or seven years ago. Maybe it had only been a childhood fear. Didn’t one grow out of such things? She was much taller now. What could be so frightening about climbing a tree? Besides, she reasoned, how else was she going to get those shoes?
Now, she was convinced that retrieving those shoes symbolized her new emergence into womanhood!
The lowest branch was right above her head, and for once thanking her Nordic ancestors for her height, she pulled her five-foot-ten-inch frame onto the branch. By throwing her right leg over it, she managed to get into a sitting position. Fortified with her new confidence, she reached up and grasped the next limb, pulling herself into standing position.
Then she made a mistake. She looked down.
The ground appeared to rise like yeast on a hot day. Her vision blurred, her head swam, and she wrapped her arms around the limb, holding on for all she was worth. Sucking in great breaths of air, she managed to calm down enough to see. She glanced around the tree, hoping to somehow recapture her nerve. It was gone.
Hallie stared up at Liv’s boots. The blasted things were hanging high on the branch. With one arm gripping the limb, she very slowly stretched her free arm toward the shoes. She was still a few inches shy.
She searched around for a twig to help extend her reach, found one, and broke it from the branch. Standing on tiptoes, she hooked the forked end of the twig around the knotted shoelaces. Gradually, she lowered one boot enough so she could grab its toe. With a quick tug, the leather half-boots came free, along with most of the blossoms on the high branch. Clutching the shoes in one hand, she waited for the drifting petals to clear, and then she turned slowly, carefully, her heart in her throat, still keeping her grip on her security limb.
A second later, the wood cracked. The branch tipped sharply toward the ground and Hallie slid down the limb, stripping it of twigs and blossoms as she skidded to the ground.
“My tree!My tree!”
A high-pitched Abner-Brown-wail pierced the air, penetrating Hallie’s rattled brain. She brought one stinging hand up to brush the pale hair out of her face. There, with arms waving like the semaphore atop Telegraph Hill, was a very unhappy Abner Brown. Clad in his usual black undertaker’s garb, he was hopping up and down while he hollered.
“Mr. Brown, I... uh,” Hallie stammered, at a loss for words as she watched him.
His pallid skin was unnervingly lifeless for a man in his thirties, and its sallowness made his brown hair appear lank. The huge hook nose that dominated his homely face was his only bit of color. It was bright red. And as his jaw worked in and out, it looked to Hallie as if the man had finally grown a chin. The anger that emanated from his hard, oddly pale eyes had often carried a sinister quality. Now was no different.She watched his long, skinny fingers form claws which she could picture wrapped around her throat—squeezing.
