Free Your Eyes in Stars by M. E. Kerr Page B

have followed Daisy anywhere, and he did—to Auburn, the Finger Lakes town in upstate New York where the Raleighs lived.
    Two years from the day she leaned against him laughing, her long blond hair in her beautiful blue eyes, as Slater led her away from the smoking automobile, judge Raleigh had had it! It was not the first time she’d done something crazy, with someone she hardly knew, but the judge never put any blame on her. He got a court order forbidding Carr to come within ten miles of Auburn. Carr found a job pumping gas, seven miles away, living in a room above the service station.
    Daisy Raleigh took the telephone during one of Slater’s dozens of calls to the family home and told him when to meet her in front of the Naybor Pancake Shop. Her Pierce-Arrow would be out front, where he should get behind the wheel and wait for her. He would have to be on time and prepared to take off immediately, because she would be running from her father.
    Actually, Daisy was running from Mr. Naybor. She had her father’s pistol tucked into the waistline of her jeans and bills of all denominations crammed into a gym bag. There was the sound of gunfire and steps running toward Slater. Daisy dropped to the ground, which was where he last saw her, in a pool of her own blood.
    She died there, with Mr. Jeff Naybor dead too, on the steps where Naybor had shot at Daisy.
    Slater got in the Pierce-Arrow and escaped the law for one month, hiding five miles away at the Won’t You Come Inn, washing dishes in the diner across the street.
    One of the arresting officers had witnessed the crime, seen Slater race away, then made it his business to find him eventually and take him in.
    “You never should have run, Goldilocks.”
    “Oh, sure, I’d get a break around here. I had to run!”
    “It’s over now, Goldilocks.”
    “Stop calling me that.”
    “That’s my name for you. “
    That was the first time anyone had ever called him by a nickname. He rode in the backseat of the patrol car thinking that the dead girl was as strange to him as the nickname. What had he ever really known about her?
    Although he told the police he knew nothing about a plan to rob the pancake shop, no one believed him. He was an accomplice, no matter what he said to the contrary. Two people were dead, one the daughter of Judge A. G. Raleigh and the other the local sheriff’s son, owner of the shop.
    “You can pick ’em, Goldilocks,” the arresting officer said. “You go before a judge with those two dead, you won’t even be considered a nonkilling accomplice. They’ll throw the book at you!”

21
    I T WAS SUCH a scorching end of July, people were sleeping both in Hoopes Park and up by Cayuta Lake in Joyland Park. Some would just take blankets from their beds and go to the parks late at night, and others would make an event of it, packing coolers of cold drinks and sandwiches, their swimsuits, bathing caps, toy sailboats, and inner tubes.
    We had to depend on fans. Standing, ceiling, window fans positioned throughout the house. When my mother was canning vegetables in the kitchen, she ordered a block of ice from the iceman. He put it in a pail near the fan, so it blew icy air at Mother and Myra from Elmira, who was always allowed to take a few jars back to her room at the reformatory.
    Up on The Hill, honor inmates could sleep in the yard under the stars. That was a big treat for the dozen my father selected nightly. To keep fights from breaking out,Daddy allowed the inmates to play chess and checkers in the common room after supper, although Taps at nine thirty remained the signal for lights out.
    Elisa was teaching me to waltz. She would bring over her album of music from Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, and we would dance to the “Baron Ochs Waltz” up in my bedroom.
    Soon school would begin. I would see in my mind’s eye the two of us, going up the long circular walk with everyone by then used to the idea that we were fast friends. “Guten