Free Night Swimmers by Betsy Byars Page B

reason.”
    “She won’t.”
    “It’s not like we did anything wrong.”
    “I know, but that’s the way she is.”
    “Stop talking about me,” Retta snapped. She was standing apart from them, waiting. She kept her back to them as if they were too unimportant to notice.
    “Well, that is the way you are,” Johnny said. Arthur’s presence at his side made him feel stronger.
    He glanced up at Arthur for the first time since his sister’s arrival. “Everything always has to be her way. She always has to be the boss.”
    “I got that.”
    “Nothing we want matters.”
    Arthur glanced at Retta’s unyielding back. He said, “Well, maybe she really cares about you guys, only she just doesn’t know how to—”
    Retta spun around, eyes blazing. With the moonlight shining on her, she looked taller than either of the boys. She looked at Arthur with such loathing that he moved back a step.
    “Don’t you dare say anything nice about me!” she yelled.

R ETTA KNEW SOMETHING WAS wrong as soon as she rounded the corner of her block. The porch light was on, and a strange car was parked in front of their house.
    “Something’s happened,” she said. She began to run up the hill toward the house.
    Behind her Arthur and Johnny sensed something too. They moved faster, closing the distance between them. The three of them reached the porch steps at the same time, but Retta beat them through the front door. It was she who saw the colonel first.
    She stopped so abruptly that Johnny bumped into her and shoved her to the center of the room. Then Johnny saw the colonel too and drew back, leaving Retta standing alone. He had only had a brief look at the colonel before—and the colonel had been wearing shorty pajamas at the time—but he knew this was the colonel. He let out his breath in a long, uneasy sigh.
    The colonel sat with his hands on his legs in a pose that looked military. Beside him, crumpled into a ball, lay Roy. He had cried himself to sleep and now lay still, wrapped in one of the colonel’s flannel shirts, drawing an occasional shuddering breath.
    Roy had been, from that first illegal swim, afraid of the colonel. It was the kind of unreasonable fear usually saved for ghosts and wolves and two-headed giants. And in his one dramatic meeting with the colonel tonight, the colonel had seemed to live up to expectations.
    The colonel had been so big, so stern, so all-powerful as he stood above Roy that Roy had quivered with fear. His hands, reaching for him, had looked as big as hams, and his eyes seemed to glow red.
    At the same time Roy himself seemed to be shrinking. It was as dramatic a sensation as something out of science fiction. He could actually feel himself getting smaller. He half expected to disappear.
    This miracle had not happened, however, and he found himself forced into the colonel’s house, forced into dry clothes (that was how he thought of it), forced to tell his name and address. Then—this was worse than being arrested—he was driven home.
    As the car had pulled up to the curb in front of his house, Roy had had a brief hope that the colonel would let him go with a stern warning. He tried to get out of the car with a strangled, “Thank you for the ride,” but politeness did not work.
    The colonel unbuckled his seat belt. He got out of the car. On the way up the walk the colonel said the most terrible words Roy had ever heard in his life: “I want to talk to your father.”
    Now Retta looked from the colonel to Roy. When her eyes met the colonel’s a second time, she straightened her shoulders. “What happened?”
    “Are you his sister?”
    “Yes. I take care of him.”
    “You weren’t taking very good care of him tonight. He almost drowned.”
    “What?”
    “He came swimming alone. He jumped into the deep end of the pool and he can’t swim. If I hadn’t been there, he would have drowned.”
    “Oh, no.”
    Retta stood in the center of the room. She felt as if the middle part of the room