Angel Falls (Angel Falls Series, #1), Babette Jongh [books for 6 year olds to read themselves .TXT] 📗

“I’m sorry I woke you, lass.”

I’d forgotten how much deeper his voice was than Ben’s. Something about it softened my insides like caramel heated over an open flame. “You didn’t,” I lied, as if sleeping late on Saturday was a crime. “I was awake.”

His chuckle sounded like sin and sex, like warm chocolate and cold whipped cream drenched in Godiva liqueur. “Liar. You’re still in bed. I can tell by your voice.”

I quit trying to convince him otherwise and stretched out across the sheets. “Okay. I was asleep.”

“I wanted to catch you before you left the house.”

“Well,” I said, the last of the word lost on a jaw-cracking yawn. “You’ve caught me.”

“Already? I thought you’d be much harder to get than that.”

“Where are you, anyway?”

“I’m in South Carolina at the moment, looking at some...” there was a tiny pause, “investment property.”

“Oh,” I said brilliantly. “When are you coming back?”

“The end of the week, I should think. Thursday or Friday.”

“Oh, good.” I wanted to bite my tongue the minute I’d said that. I had no business implying that I missed him, or that I wanted him to come back soon.

“Could I persuade you to save some time for me this weekend?”

Hell, he could persuade me to do anything, but I didn’t want to sound too eager. Ian was entirely too sure of himself as it was. “Sure, I guess. How much time were you thinking?”

I heard a muted sound on the other end of the line, a door opening, maybe, and a quiet sound muffled by Ian’s hand over the receiver. Then his smooth voice came back on the line. “I’ll call you in a day or two, all right?”

“Okay, sure,” I chirped, trying to replace my disappointment with a nonchalant tone. But my tone didn’t matter at all, because the line was already dead.

*

For the week of Halloween, I wore my usual costume, black leotard and tights and a tattered skirt I’d made by tying long strips of black tulle to an elastic waistband. I didn’t bother with a witch hat. My own hair, braided the night before and brushed out into a cloud of frizzy waves in the morning, looked witchy enough.

The week’s parties went well until my first class on Thursday, Halloween day. I should have suspected a downward spiral was about to begin when the mother who’d offered to stay and help with the preschool-class party bowed out. She sent a dozen chocolate cupcakes and juice boxes instead. Things were going okay, though, in spite of my lack of assistants.

I managed to get the bunch of ballerinas, fairies, princesses, and witches seated in a fairly organized circle on the studio floor. I doled out cupcakes. I stuck tiny straws into juice boxes. I cleaned up the mess from one little witch’s discovery that a juice box, if squeezed hard enough, could shoot a delightful stream of liquid through the straw.

Sticky orange mess notwithstanding, we made it through the party-half of class very well. Then we moved on to the Halloween dance. I had choreographed one for every class, just a simple combination of well-known steps set to spooky music and repeated twice. Parents had been told to come early to pick up their kids, so they could see the dance performed at the end of class.

We’d gone through the steps a few times, and I was standing at the stereo cabinet working on a slight glitch with my iPod, when Amber, hopped up on sugar and excitement, asked if she could go to the bathroom. I didn’t even look up, just waved my hand in a shooing motion to give permission. I knew better than to deny a four-year-old the right to go to the bathroom.

I started the music again, and we were on the second repeat when Amber came running into the classroom, panic-stricken.

“Miss Casey, the toilet’s overfloating!”

“Oh, Lord.” My outburst was more prayer than blasphemy. I ran toward the bathroom with eleven little girls behind me, doing the calculations—what part of the newspaper office was below the studio bathroom?

Think quick.

Think quick.

Think...

Holy shit. If I couldn’t unclog the drain quickly, toilet water would drip through the ceiling and onto Ian’s desk downstairs.

Just as things were going so well, too. Ian had called twice more while he was out of town. We’d talked of everything and nothing, phone-date conversations designed to ramp up interest and expectation. I’d given him my cell number, and he’d texted this morning that he’d be back sometime today.

This was not a good time for toilet water to pour onto his desk.

I encountered a lake just outside the bathroom door. “How many times did you try to flush this overfloating toilet?”

Amber stood beside me, eyes wide, thumb in mouth, innocent.

“Back up,” I yelled to the excited, curious crowd. “Don’t step in the water.” I took off my ballet slippers and tossed them across the foyer into the doorway of the dressing room. I rolled up my tights, waded into the bathroom, grabbed a mop from the utility closet, and pushed a path through the deluge.

A double-sized roll of toilet paper lay like a pufferfish at the bottom of the bowl. And hadn’t there been two extra rolls on top of the tank earlier today? I shoved my sleeves up and reached into the bowl, causing another tidal wave to gush onto the floor. The waterlogged mess came apart in my hand, and thin strips of toilet paper floated wraithlike in the water. I dug the wad of gummed-up paper from the pipe it had been partially sucked down and threw the mess in the trash. But I wasn’t rewarded by the glug-glug sound of a cleared pipe.

I worked the plunger, and even more shreds of paper swirled up through the yellowish water like some demon version of egg-drop soup. “Amber!” My voice rose to a screech. “How many rolls of toilet paper did you stick down the toilet?”

Amber blinked wide, innocent eyes and sucked harder at her thumb.

Bet she didn’t