The Don's Animal-Talking Little Girl novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Basket

Bernice tells Teo about the baby on her porch and the note, Teo realizes Dilly is Agata's daughter, Etta refuses to hand her over, and in the morning a caseworker arrives with an anonymous report.

Nobody spoke for a long second.

The oxygen machine hissed down the hall.

The dead man lay across our back step with one boot still inside the kitchen.

"Your sister," I said.

"Agata." Teo didn't look away from the locket. "She wore it every day from the time she was twelve."

Dilly put her hand over it.

"It's mine," she said.

"I know," he said, softer than I'd heard any man say anything. "I'm not going to take it."

Behind me, Gran's door creaked.

She stood in the hallway in her flannel nightgown, the oxygen tube looped over her ears, her white braid over one shoulder.

She looked at the body on the step.

Then she looked at Teo Speranza in her kitchen.

"Well," she said. "Somebody put the kettle on."

His guards dragged the man off the step and onto a tarp.

I didn't watch where they took him.

I put Dilly in my bed with the cat and the white bird and told her not to come out.

She came out twice.

The second time, the cat walked straight across the kitchen floor and sat down on Teo's shoe.

It's a big cat. Twenty pounds, maybe. It doesn't sit on anyone.

Teo looked down at it.

It looked up at him.

"What does it want?" he said.

Dilly leaned in the doorway and listened to the cat.

"She says you smell sad," Dilly said. "And like smoke. And she says you can stay."

"Bed," I said.

She went, dragging her blanket.

The cat stayed where it was.

Gran set three mugs on the table and sat down across from Teo.

"Ask it," she said.

"Where did the baby come from?"

"My porch." Gran wrapped both hands around her mug. "Six years ago this Friday. A laundry basket by the door. I almost stepped on her."

"A Friday," Teo said.

"Raining. She was maybe a day old, wrapped in a good blanket."

"What else?"

Gran got up, slow, and went to the drawer under the bread box.

She came back with a folded index card in a sandwich bag.

She set it in front of him.

The writing was small and slanted, done in a hurry.

Keep her away from my family. Please.

Teo didn't touch it.

He sat very still.

"Two nights later," he said. "The Sunday."

Gran nodded. "Radio said a girl died in a car fire on River Road. I didn't know the name. I didn't know it was anything."

"It was her."

"I figured that out tonight," Gran said. "Same as you."

He picked up the card then.

His thumb went over the word Please.

"This is her handwriting," he said.

I watched him do the math.

His sister was pregnant, and he never knew.

She had a baby, left it with strangers in a graveyard, and died two nights later.

And the note said to keep the baby away from her family.

From him.

He put the card down.

When he looked up, the closed door was back on his face.

"She's coming home with me tonight."

"No, she isn't," I said.

"She's my sister's daughter."

"She's six. She's asleep in my bed. And you're a man I met this afternoon who had somebody shot on my step."

"Who was coming through your door with a knife."

"I noticed."

He stood up.

He was very tall under our low kitchen ceiling.

I got up and walked to the hall doorway and stood in it.

I've hauled headstones. He still had a foot on me and a gun under his coat.

"You'll have to move me," I said.

"I could."

"Then do it. In front of her."

We both knew Dilly was listening behind the door.

The cat got up off his shoe and came and sat on mine.

Gran laughed into her tea.

Teo looked at the cat for a long time.

Then he buttoned his coat.

"Two of my men stay on the lane tonight. And every night."

"Fine."

"You don't get to say no to that."

"I said fine."

He stopped at the back door, where the step was still wet from the bucket.

"My sister wrote 'Keep her away from my family,'" he said. "I'd like to know who she meant."

"So would I."

"Lock this." He looked at the broken latch. "I'll send someone to fix it."

"I'll fix it myself."

The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile.

"I believe you," he said, and he went down the path between the graves.

I fixed the latch at one in the morning with two screws and a hinge off the shed.

I didn't sleep.

At six-thirty I let the cat out and made Dilly's toast.

Two black cars sat on the lane by the back gate, engines off, windows fogged.

At seven-forty someone knocked on the front door.

Nobody uses our front door.

A tired woman in a gray raincoat stood on the porch with a county badge on a lanyard and a folder under her arm.

"Ms. Birchall? I'm with Children and Youth Services."

She glanced past me, down the hall, toward the kitchen.

"We had an anonymous report last night," she said. "It says a seventy-one-year-old woman with heart failure is raising a six-year-old in a graveyard. Where a man was shot dead yesterday."

Behind me, Dilly came down the hall with toast in her hand.

"Etta," she said. "The crows say this lady is nice. But she's going to make Gran cry."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend