All Washed Up

and Dead

 

 

 

by

Ellyn Bache, Bill Crider, Helen Chappell, Dianne Day, James Dalessandro, Jerrilyn Farmer, Jean Heller, L.C. Hayden, Vicki Hinze and Camille Minichino

 

 

 

(Part 1) Ellyn Bache

Just Odie's style, to get sprung in the middle of a Halloween deluge. Tropical storm Griselda. Aptly named, Janet thought.

Odie snored in the passenger seat as Janet inched the car through the wall of rain, her hair a damp yellow mat -- not that appearances seemed to matter. Just Odie's style, after three years away, not to care enough to make conversation or watch the scenery. Well, forget it. With any luck they'd make it back in time to retrieve his stash before this mess got any worse. Then she'd be done with him.

An announcer on the radio droned on about the storm. "River's rising," Janet yelled in Odie's direction.

"Huh?" He startled into a sitting position. Good.

"What river?"

"What river do you think?"

His face, pale enough when he'd blinked his way out of a life behind bars, turned ashy.

 

Oh, Janet thought. OH.

Odie and Bluey, the two most inept men on the face of the earth. Three jobs, and caught every time. Then Bluey was blown away, and Odie thought he'd be cool, take Janet to the funeral at Riverside Cemetery like another innocent, mourning friend. He was arrested twelve hours later.

Score one for Odie. He must have buried the stash in the newly-turned earth before they got him. So stupid not to have known! And her being sweet all these years, him swearing they'd retrieve it together after he got out. Janet's foot on the gas was so wet she felt mushrooms growing between her toes, but she floored it. With a little planning, she and Jimmy could still finesse this.

The rain eased. She switched the wipers from wild rat-a-tat to rhythmic swish. She thought it was a good omen. What she'd forgotten was her old rule of never underestimating another woman. Griselda. Before it was all over, Griselda would take the river twenty feet above flood level and wash up more than anyone ever expected.

 

(Part 2) Bill Crider

The cemetery gates yawned open. A sign spanned the entrance. It said "Riverside Cemetery," though Janet thought "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" might have been more appropriate.
She must have muttered it under her breath because Odie said, "Huh?"

He was a less than stunning conversationalist, and Janet wondered for the thousandth time why she always seemed to wind up with men whose brains were about the size of a green pea. Not Jimmy, though, she told herself. Not Jimmy. He was smart, he was clever, and he was going to rid her of Odie and his ilk forever.

"Huh?" Odie said.

"Nothing," Janet snapped, wondering if she'd been muttering again.

"We're here."

Odie peered out the windshield through the still steady rain, and said, "Yeah."

There wasn't much to see. The rain and the clouds and the darkness of the night made even the halogen headlights of the Toyota seem dim. Through the murk Janet could barely make out the lumpy black outlines of granite headstones and tall obelisks and the trees that towered over everything.She drove straight through the open gates and down a narrow road to the point where it sloped gently downward. At the bottom of the grade was the river, or at least the bottom was where the river had once been. It wasn't there now. Now it was halfway up the slope, raging along through the tombstones.

"Jesus," Odie said reverently, though he wasn't a reverent person,not even in prison, where so many of his fellow inmates had found religion. Or said they had.

"Son of a bitch," Janet said. She wasn't reverent, either, and the river's appearance didn't inspire her to awe. Instead she was angry that the radio announcer was so far behind the times. The river wasn't rising. It had risen. That might not be good.

"Bluey's buried down there," Odie said.

"I was at the funeral," Janet said. "Remember?"

"Oh. Yeah. So what're we gonna do now?"

"What do you mean 'we'?" Janet asked. "It's your stash."

"Yeah, but I'm not exactly sure where the grave is. How can I get to it with the water like that and everything?"

"That's your problem."

Odie stared at the dim yellow pathway made by the headlights.

 

"Some of those tombstones are leaning. What if they wash over? What if . . . what if something washes up out of the ground?"

"Deal with it," Janet said. She leaned back in the seat. "What are you waiting for?"

Odie didn't answer. He just stared out the windshield for several minutes. Finally he sighed and looked at Janet. She didn't look back. Odie sighed again, opened the door of the car, and stepped out into the rain. He was immediately drenched, and the wind plastered his wet clothes to his body.

"You'll leave the headlights on, right?"

"Sure," Janet said. "Don't forget the flashlight. And the shovel."

Odie got them out of the back seat. Then he closed the door and started down the hill.

 

( Part 3) Helen Chappell

The wind picked up, whipping around him like a force of evil. Odie lowered his head against the rain, feeling the cold sheets running down the back of his neck. It was so dark that he could barely see his own feet, and as he walked, he sank into the swampy mire. Once or twice, he slipped and fell, sliding across the wet ground as if he were on a sheet of ice. The wind howled overhead with a sound like a freight train, and he knew that they were in the worst of the hurricane.

"Ungh--" he grunted he collided with a solid object. His eyes met the sightless gaze of an alabaster angel, fallen from her pedestal and it was all he could do not to shriek in terror and run. He dropped the shovel as he clutched for the angel, sliding in the mud. But it was too late; he fell face forward into the mire.

 

Fallen angel, he thought as he struggled to his feet. That was a good one. That's what they used to call Janet, a thousand years and a thousand miles from here, back in a place where it all seemed so simple, back at Bluey's Bar in Sea City. That was twenty years ago, before they sent him to Clifton T. Perkins, the state hospital for the criminally insane. Odie was crazy all right, crazy for letting Janet talk him into this. In the dark, he felt around for the shovel again. He was used to the dark.It was a dark a lot of the time in the single cold cell he had lived in for the past 20 years. Dark. Odie liked the dark; in the blackness, the thoughts that raced through his mind were like a movie and all he had to do was watch.

He put his hand around the shank of the shovel and used it to pull himself to his feet. Overhead, empty tree branches creaked and moaned. They sounded like lost souls.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then bent to examine the base of the angel's lost monument.

 

WILBERT CRUMBIE

1947-1979

WE'LL UNDERSTAND

IT BETTER BY AND BY

 

Well, he thought, maybe WIlbert finally understood it. He hadn't understood much the night they'd held up the Crinks Bonded and Insured Money Truck. Poor dumb Wilbert, he'd never even had a chance; the cops had caught him red handed, the gun still in his belt. Of course, it hadn't helped that the dye pack had exploded all over the front of his pants. . .

So now it was just Odie and Janet. And as far as Odie was concerned, he'd earned that money by spending 20 long hard years in the looney bin, just as much as if he'd worked for it.
He thrust the spade into the wet soil at the base of the monument, pleased to see that it worked so easily. Under the fallen angel, he thought, there was 3 million on cold hard wet cash from that Crinks job. And now it would be all his. Well, his and Janet's. That is, if he let her live.

His spade hit somehting solid and metallic. The steel box he'd buried here 20 years ago! His heart pounded louder than the storm. This was the moment he'd dreamed about for all those years in the dark. . .

"Just what do you think you're doing. Odie?" Asked a familiar voice.

The only trouble was that voice belonged to a dead woman. You could barely hear Odie's scream above the shriek of the storm.

(Part 4) Dianne Day

Along came Jim. He knocked on the passenger side window of Janet's car, loudly, to be heard above the wind.

"Goddammit, Jimmy, you scared me half to death!" Janet complained, as she leaned across the front seat to unlock the door she'd locked behind Odie. No way she was going to sit in an unlocked car in a graveyard in the dark in a storm, uh-uh, no way.

"Well," said James W. Peterman III, slipping deftly through the car door to take his place beside her, "then I'd say you're in the right place for it."

"Huh?" Janet asked. Then she thought, Oh shit I sound just like Odie.

"Never mind, it's not important." James III, who was called Trey by his family but Jim or Jimmy by everyone else, was always a gentleman. He even looked like one when he was soaking wet.

"I got it. You mean on account of this being a cemetery and all."

"Exactly."

 

With the palm of his hand Jimmy wiped rain from his long nose. Janet could hear water dripping from his trench coat onto her new red imitation leather seat covers. He turned halfway toward her, his facial planes shadowed in the reflected glare of the headlights.

 

"Where's the old boyfriend?"

"Out there, digging. That is, if he can find the right place for it."

The car windows had clouded up. The rain drummed on the roof, and the wind pushed so hard at the heavy old Thunderbird that she swayed from the force of it. Jimmy leaned up and cleared a circle on his side of the windshield.

"River's rising," he commented.

"Yeah, I know. I saw."

"Look, Janet, I know you're not too fond of this guy anymore, and I know you think he owes you, but is all this really worth it?" He made an open gesture with his hands, long thin fingers sweeping as if to encompass the night, the storm, the wildness of it all.

"What, you think I should change all my plans just because of some stupid hurricane?"

"Let me go after him, what's his name, Odie. We'll stash him in a motel or something, come back when the storm's over. C'mon, Janet, it's inhuman to insist he go digging up graves on a night like this."

"Grave. Not graves. One grave, just one, because that's where the money is."

Jimmy went quiet. He wants the money too, Janet thought. That fancy family of his had been broke and covering it up for a long time. She was one of a very few people who knew how much that money could mean to a man like James W. Peterman III. What she didn't know was if he was willing to kill for it.

 

 

(Part 5) James Dalessandro

Janet opened the cheap imitation black patent leather purse and fumbled nervously through the birth control pills, the little stewardess-sized bottles of bourbon, a tube of "Vampirella Red" lipstick she had boosted from Macy's, and a spray bottle of cologne that her last lover, Mel, the well endowed, one-eyed Ostrich butcher had dubbed "Evening in The Bronx."

At the bottom of the mess, her fingers wrapped around a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38. She managed to pull it free while dumping barely half of the purse's contents on her lap.
She dropped her head onto the steering wheel and wondered why she had ever hired a novice hitman of vague sexual orientation named James Peterman III. Janet looked over at the wet spot he had left on her virgin red naulgahyde seat covers and opened her door. The wind and the roar of the hurricane almost drove her back inside.

She started talking to herself as the rain soaked her instantly and her boots squished down into the sloppy road. "You better get close," she said, "but not too close so he can grab it. At least with this wind no one can hear the shots."

At the grave, Odie had slipped a flashlight through the halo on the Angels head, illuminating the spot where he now fought a desperate tug of war. The mud and water had created a ferocious suction that clung desperately to a metal box. His feet slipped and slid through the muck until it oozed cold and slimy down the back of his pants. He cursed a stream and groaned as he struggled, feeling a slight pop and tear above his left testicle.
Finally, with a loud sucking sound the box slipped free and the mud and water filled the hole and Odie staggered to the edge of the grave, collapsing with the box underneath his chest. Gasping for breath and battered by the wind and rain, he pulled a screwdriver from his coat and slipped it beneath the box's tiny padlock. One quick jerk and the rust-weakened latch gave way. Odie dropped the screwdriver and with his left hand grabbed the flashlight. The moment he had suffered for for twenty years had finally arrived.

His heart leapt and the water streamed off his face. It was all there, in tens and twentys and fifties and hundreds. Three hundred thousand and change. The euphoria did not last long. The first shot ripped through Odie's shoulder and shattered his left clavicle. It knocked him backward onto a steep, slippery slope. Illuminated by the flashlight, a stream of red mingled with the downpour. Odie's mouth opened and he tried to curse when James Peterman III, cold and wet and his hands shaking so badly he almost dropped the Luger, stepped forward and put another slug in Odie's chest. And then another.

Peterman stepped forward and lifted the box, growing heavier as it filled with rain. The light of a second flashlight startled him.

"Is it all there," Janet asked?

"Huh," he said, unable to hear her words amidst the howl and deluge. This Odie disease was contagious, she thought. She stepped forward.

"The money, is it all there?"

"It sure looks that way."

 

That was all Janet had to know. If the money had not been there, she would have let James Peterman III live. Killing that scumbag Odie would have been good enough for her. But she had no intention of sharing the money. She had had enough of cheap booze and cheap apartments and cheaper lovers.
She raised the Smith & Wesson and pointed it as his chest. The horror barely had time to register on Peterman's face.
A half mile upstream, the ancient stone and concrete dam gave way. Even in the thundering storm, they heard the splash and rumble.

Janet barely had time to turn and look uphill when the water hit them.

(Part 6) Jerrilyn Farmer

"Hellfire!" Janet said, spitting rain, gagging now on the smell of earth and something dank, as the swell of rushing water pushed her back, and almost over."Hell and damnation!"

Janet swore, her voice swallowed by the wind, as struck by another surge of icy-cold river, she dropped the Smith & Wesson, and watched in horror as it swirled away, just like she had flushed it down a filthy toilet. Tricked by nature. She slapped at the cold, brown river, which was pushing hard, knee-deep now, against her, but couldn't come up with the gun. Janet, a woman who, in her murky past, might have benefited, once or twice, from a better sense of humor--but perhaps this exact moment was not one of those times-- nevertheless, began to laugh. Hysterically.Convulsively. Amid the toppled tombstones and sliding mud, she quivered with laughter.

"Hell's..." she coughed out, "bells!"

She felt her feet planting firmly, too firmly, in the sucking mud beneath her. This was not good. Sober, now, not laughing at all, she looked up. She'd better get out of there. And, where had that idiot Peterman gotten to? And then, "Huh?"

 

She looked down, sharply. Great! Hey! What was that, now? That sharp pain. Standing knee-deep in thick, freezing water, something was striking at her legs, biting her, it seemed, just below the water. Staring hard, Janet could see nothing but brown swirling upon black swirling upon gray. But sure as she was sure that damn fool, Odie, had heaped his last lick of bad luck slap onto her, she was pretty sure things were getting worse. She'd been struck by something carried swift on the current, something stiff. Something, she could almost feel now, reaching down into the muddy water, that was heavy and shriveled and had fingers.

She screamed louder, this time, louder than the wind. Louder than the rush of the dead body that was carried past her in the swirling water. That body had not been Odie's. No, she was certain. Just before it submerged again, raging past, she
was certain that old body wasn't Odie's. Halloween, she thought. It's Halloween night.And this was her treat: Body parts. Desiccated limbs.The worm-eaten jawbone of what once was somebody's grandpa.Stopthinking, she told herself. Stop imagining things, damn it! In the force of the swollen river, the sodden graves threw up their flimsy wooden boxes. Thrown against trees in their paths, splintered like muddy eggs, the shoddy coffins split open to reveal rotted bone and flesh and tooth in a hellish sea of corpses.

 

Why me? Janet wondered. What have I ever done to deserve...?. And then she heard it. A noise above the rushing of the water. What the hell? She strained to make out the sound. A woman's voice. Sure as she was shivering, Janet heard a woman's voice. Calling her name.

 

Part 7 (Jean Heller)

"Who are you?" Janet screamed into the teeth of the gale. "Where are you?"

The silence that answered her frightened her more than the voice, if indeed there had really been a voice. She thought perhaps she was going mad. Then she heard it again. From behind her this time.

"The money, Janet. Don't forget the money."

"Shit!" she hissed, her greed momentarily overwhelming her fear.

The wall of water had probably washed the box away by now.
Her intent was to fall to her knees and search the immediate area below the water with her hands, but the current had risen now to mid-thigh, and she wasn't certain she could keep her head above the raging water. Gingerly, she lowered herself, battling the water that threatened to carry her off.
She made it to her knees, the water churning around her stomach. Something hard hit her in the abdomen, and she grabbed for it instinctively, thinking if she got lucky it might be the steel box full of money. It wasn't. It was a rotting tree limb.

Janet found that she could keep her head above water by twisting her torso slightly and feeling the ground around her with one hand, while keeping her face turned up. Scooching forward on her knees, she felt along in the general direction she remembered last seeing the box, in Peterson's hand dangling over Odie's body. She realized at the same time that Odie might have washed away. Peterson, too, for that matter.
Her fingers brushed a lot of submerged stuff, some hard, some soft and squishy. She forbid her brain to imagine what any of it might be.

"Hurry, Janet," the voice said.

She skinned her knuckles just then, and felt to learn what her hand had it. It was the fallen angel statuary. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the last-seen relationship between the body and the statue, and moved toward where she recalled seeing Odie last. When her hand hit flesh, it actually surprised her. And when she realized she had found Odie's crotch, she recoiled from it. Then she shrugged. It couldn't be any deader now than it had been when Odie was alive.

She plunged back into the water, noticing as she did that just in the last few seconds, the water had risen several more inches. Now it sloshed around her neck and tried to wash into her mouth. She gagged, unable to ignore thoughts of the body parts that might wind up wedged between her teeth. The world's supply of Crest and floss would be insufficient to put things right.

"Hurry," the disembodied voice implored. "Hurry."

Janet felt the metal corner then, and the box's rusty handle. It was wedged part way under the body's chest. She tugged as hard as she could, but the combination of Odie's dead weight and the sucking muck held the box fast.And, still, the water rose.

Driven by desperation, she ducked under the water and grabbed the box with both hands. She was reminded of when she was a child, trying to pull her fingers out of a Chinese handcuffs toy. She raised her head, gulped some fresh air and returned to the task at hand. Slowly, the box cleared the ooze and dead flesh, but when it finally came free, it did so more abruptly than Janet planned. She fell backward, and it was just the leverage the raging water needed. She lost contact with the ground and felt her self carried off.

She tried frantically to gain a handhold on something, anything, and keep possession at the same time of the precious box.
Then the water tossed her into the trunk of a tree, and the world winked out.

 

(Part 8 L.C. Hayden)

Janet slowly opened her eyes. Where was she? What happened? The world around her remained blurry and she felt desperately cold. Her head throbbed, making it impossible to concentrate. She sat up and looked around. She was floating, but she wasn't wet. She was. . .oh God, she was inside an open coffin, but not just any coffin. This one belonged to Bluey. She felt the bile rise and her head spin. If she jumped into the raging water, where could she go? Parts of bodies, opened and closed caskets bumped into her coffin as the angry waters carry
them all to some unkown destination. As best as she could, she glanced around. The precious box had to be here somewhere.

"It's there behind you," said a familiar voice.

Startled, Janet looked around. She was alone among floating death. She must have imagined the voice.

"Didn't you hear me? I said it was behind you," the voice repeatted.

 

Panic tightened in Janet's chest. The voice came from within her. Slowly, she pivoted. Her eyes focused on the floating body closest to her coffin. Those clothes, the dead man's general shape--that had to be Odie.

"That's not possible. You're dead. Go away."

The body rolled right-side up, revealing a ghostly face. The eyes popped opened. A sadistic grin covered Odie's face. He pointed a deathly finger at her. "The box. That's what you wanted. So now you have it. For this, you betrayed me."

"No, no. I didn't. Jimmy. He, uh, he. . ."

 

She realized she was babbling, but the fear which gripped her was so intense, she had no choice. "You're suppose to be dead. How. . ."

"You know, Janet, I've always heard voices. At first I thought I was crazy. Remember Clifton T. Perkins where I spent all that time in the criminally insane state hospital? That's where I learned to keep quiet about the voices I heard. Then today, I heard the voice again. I should have listened. She was trying to warn me about you, but I didn't listen. So now I'm here to keep you company. I'll be the voice you'll be hearing."

Janet covered her ears. "No! No! I will not listen. This isn't possible."

"But it is. If you can't accept it, then tell me, how did you end up floating in Bluey's coffin?"

"I--I was tr-trying to hang on." God, it was cold. "Th--the water--it made me crush against a tree. I--must have fallen in the wa-water."

"But that still doesn't explain how you ended up in the coffin."

Janet covered her eyes, wishing she could make this nightmare go away.

"When you hit the tree and passed out, I carried you and put you in the coffin. And now it's taking you to its final destination." Odie smiled, a wide curvature of the lips filled with evil. He rolled back over and continued to float down the river. I's not real, Janet told herself. I'm dreaming. I'll wake up any time now. This did not happen. Still her body shook as a chill covered her body.

The water began to slow down. Maybe she could paddle with her hands. She searched for a dry area. There, up ahead. Several hundred feet ahead. She forced herself to put her hands in the water and paddle.She had almost reached her destination when she realized someone waiting for her. Filled with relief, she smiled. Jimmy. He would help her. She paddled faster, relief flowing through her veins. She looked up, waived, and wished she hadn't.

 

Too late she realized what was wrong.

 

 

(Part 9 Vicki Hinze)

 

Jimmy too was dead. And standing, staring at Janet. Tangled moss snatched from the gnarled oaks and raging wind snagged against him, framing his deathly pallor.

Frantically, Janet clutched the boat, dipped her hand into the icy white-capped water, paddled away from him. An exposed root jutted up, breaking the surface of the choppy water. She grabbed it, stretching through the shadows, uncertain now if she was incarnate or spirit. Evil spirit. Her own, and Jimmy and Odie's.

And regret consumed her. Halloween. All Hallows Eve. The festival of the spirits. The one night of the year when the veil between worlds of the spirit and humans was thinnest, and she'd dared to believe that greed was a passion strong enough to claim what the spirit world held. Her fingers clutched the rough bark. She was incarnate. Alive. Human.

A shudder of relief washed through her. The wind tore through her, rain falling hard and fast, stinging her skin. Memories ripping even more viciously through her mind. Memories of herself, as a child, before everything in her life had become imitation and cheap. Eating the feast on these nights, the plates set with their finest china and crystal for those who remained human and those who had crossed over. Her grandmother's gently whispered, "Blessed Be." Them, outisde, and Janet sitting under a canopy of stars on the cool earth inside a candlelit circle of stones. Again her grandmother's voice, giving thanks, chanting blessings, telling Janet to respect all things--living and dead.
Advice Janet had ignored. Ignored and forgotten. Until now.

"Let go, Janet," Odie said from behind her, from within her.

 

"You chose long ago. Tonight, you begin living the destiny you chose."

The truth swept into Janet and stark terror exploded inside her. This wasn't a battle for the money. It was a clash between worlds--human and spirit--and the prize was her soul!

 

"I can't let go!" Confused, angry, resentful, Janet scrambled, shoved the metal box under her, sat on it; grabbed the root with both hands and squeezed hard. "I won't let go!"

The root shook, grew warm and then hot against her palm. Burning her flesh. Searing and scorching her bones. Every instinct in her body demanded she release the root, but she held fast, somehow certain if she let go, she would die. Worse, she would become an evil voice, restless, resentlessly tormenting and torturing some other human soul. She had done a lot wrong in her life. In ending it, she couldn't do more. She couldn't . . . .

The root cooled, slowly lifted out of the water, rising higher and higher. The rough bark, skinning the charred flesh from her hands, the veils blinding her from from the truth about the person she had been to the woman she had become fell away, and what she saw sickened her. If only she could remember her grandmother's words--the ones asking for forgiveness. She'd have to truly mean them. To suffer the ravages of regret and truly mean them. Would she? Could she do that? Was there enough of the innocent child she had been left inside under the evil ruins to find forgiveness? She darted a frantic gaze at the moss-draped Jimmy, heard his urgings:

"Forget that nonsense, Janet," he shouted, his hands reaching out to her. "Take me in. Hear my voice. Only my voice."
"No, mine, Janet." Odie clutched at her shoulder, his bony fingers digging deep into her skin. "You have to hear my voice. Only mine."

This is the insanity--the war of voices of spirits inside you, clashing, fighting to be heard. The battle would rage non-stop, each fighting harder for his desires to be acted upon. More evil. More and more evil the longer the battle raged. Deeper and deeper into insanity.

"I don't want this," Janet screamed into the wind. "Grandmother, please! Help me, please!"

The root slid higher above the water. Thickened against Janet's hand, changed texture, took form. Human form. Sharp wind forced her eyelids closed, keeping her from seeing. Janet cupped a hand at her brow, dipped her chin, blocking it, straining to see. Was the form her grandmother? Bluey? The disincarnate evil of yet another spirit who would battle for her to act on his evil passions--would his voice to drive her deeper still into insanity's bleak abyss--for eternity?

Lightning flashed. The sky filled the darkness. And Janet saw the truth.

Part 10 Conclusion -- (Camille Minichino)

A tombstone loomed before her—brighter than all the diamonds in Tiffany’s, and too big for the tallest bank vault. The world seemed suddenly still, every molecule in its place. The river flowed gently, lapping at her ankles, smoothly washing away the waste that had been her life.

Janet squinted, trying to adjust her eyes to the brilliant clouds, her breaths coming short and heavy. She expected any moment to bring back the raging storm and waves of dross. A noise set her heart pounding in a new place in her chest, but it was only the rustle of trees, rich and soft as a choir of angels.She crept up to the stone, bent down and brushed away pink and red rose petals that clung to the deeply etched letters.

JANET ROUNDER
1949-1979
GRANDAUGHTER OF GRISELDA ROUNDER

Janet stood, her head reeling.

Dead. She’d been dead for twenty years, living an imitation life, waiting, fidgeting. One foot in the present and the rest of her sad soul six feet under.

"Finally," a voice said. "The first smart choice of your life.

 

Blessed be."

Her grandmother opened her arms and Janet fell into the warm embrace.

"Now do you understand, Janet?"

"Huh?"

 

The End