As You Wish Read online

  It was a very hot day and she and Kit were dressed so differently they may as well have lived in separate countries. Olivia wore long sleeves, her collar up, and a wide-brimmed hat. Her long legs were encased in cotton trousers that reached to her ankles. Kit had on nearly nothing.

  “What about your feet?” Kit asked. “They’re open to the sunshine. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “You laugh, but you don’t know what sun does to your skin. When you’re forty you’ll look sixty.”

  “And you’ll always look twenty,” he said in such an admiring way that she blushed.

  The old men had delighted in teasing her about the way she and Kit were now working together.

  “You two have certainly become friends,” Uncle Freddy said.

  “I never would have thought that could happen after the way you two started out,” Mr. Gates said.

  “I truly believed that our Livie hated young Kit,” Uncle Freddy said.

  Letty was confused. “But she cooked a second lunch just for him. I thought she liked him.”

  “Did she?” Uncle Freddy asked. “I don’t remember that.”

  Mr. Gates agreed. He didn’t remember that either.

  “It was the best fried chicken I ever had,” Ace said. “How could you forget that?”

  “They didn’t,” Olivia said. “They’re just pulling your leg.”

  That phrase made the children’s eyes widen.

  She didn’t want to be caught in one of their twenty-minute-long “why” sessions, so she changed the subject. “Who wants strawberry Popsicles?” She narrowed her eyes at the men, but her warning just made them laugh.

  It was the next day, as she and Kit were hanging up the laundry, that he heard the screaming. When he dropped one end of the sheet, it scraped the ground.

  “Hey!” Olivia said. “I just washed that. You’re going to have to—”

  “Quiet!” His voice was a command and in the next second he took off running.

  Olivia tossed the sheet into the basket and ran after him. It wasn’t until they’d rounded the trees that she heard the children crying. And there was a low moan of such anguish that it made chills run down her spine. She would have stopped, afraid of what she was about to see, but Kit didn’t slow down.

  When she saw the pond, she halted. To her left were the children, clinging to each other and crying loudly. To her right, Mr. Gates was sitting at the edge of the slimy old pond, his legs in the water. Pulled onto him, facedown, like some sea creature dragged up from the depths, was Uncle Freddy. All of him was wet, with nasty pond weeds clinging to him.

  “Get the kids!” Kit ordered as he went to the two old men.

  “He’s dead.” The agony in Mr. Gates’s voice made Olivia shiver.

  She started toward the children but they ran the opposite way, afraid of what had happened. They were very difficult to catch! She chased them past the chicken coop, through the orchard, and toward the house. “Please don’t let them go in the house,” she said aloud.

  With all those hiding places, she’d never find them.

  She managed to get Ace just as he reached the clothesline. But then, the child was crying too hard to keep running. Olivia went to her knees and pulled him into her arms. His convulsions were making her body shake.

  As Olivia knew she would, Letty stopped running and came back to them. Olivia opened an arm and held her too.

  “We killed Uncle Freddy,” Ace wailed.

  “We drown-ded him,” Letty said.

  She could guess what happened. The children loved to push Uncle Freddy around in his wheelchair. They’d been warned about getting too near the pond with him, but it looked like with all the adults busy that day, they’d disobeyed—a common occurrence with them.

  “It was an accident,” Olivia said, but then she too began to cry. Uncle Freddy and his humor, his kindness and generosity to all of Summer Hill. Gone forever. And poor, poor Mr. Gates. How was he going to live without his friend? How—?

  “I can swim,” came a raspy voice over them.

  Olivia’s head was bent over the children, the three of them clinging together so hard they looked like a human barrel.

  It was Ace who first looked up.

  Kit was standing over them, a weak, dirty Uncle Freddy in his arms.

  “Livie,” Ace whispered, a hiccup in his voice.

  Olivia kept crying. Dear Uncle Freddy. And there was what was waiting for Ace with his mother! It was too much for one child to have to bear in his little life. “I know, Ace, sweetheart, it’s not your fault. It was an accident.”

  “Olivia!” Kit’s voice was stern. She was still holding the children tightly.

  Letty looked at Ace, then turned to see Kit holding Uncle Freddy like he was a baby.

  She let out a scream and pushed so hard that Olivia fell backward onto the ground.

  In the next minute, the children were clutching Uncle Freddy’s hand and laughing, crying, hiccuping.

  “You’re going to get sunburned.” Kit was smiling at Olivia as she looked up at him in astonishment.

  Behind them, Mr. Gates was pushing the wheelchair. From the look of him, he’d aged years.

  Uncle Freddy, his thin, frail body limp in Kit’s arms, smiled at them. “We’re going to put in a swimming pool because I can swim.”

  “Come on, old man,” Kit said, “you’re getting heavier by the minute.” Looking at Olivia, he nodded toward Mr. Gates. He needed to be taken care of.

  She went to him, gave the wheelchair a push that sent it rolling, then picked up his arm and put it around her shoulders. That he made no comment about hugging a pretty girl scared her.

  Ace’s dad, Dr. Everett, was called and while they waited for him to arrive, Mr. Gates insisted on bathing Uncle Freddy. It’s what he’d done since both of them were in their early twenties, and he wasn’t going to neglect his duty now.

  Kit helped undress Uncle Freddy and get him into the hot water, then left him with Mr. Gates, who was still shaking. “They need each other,” Kit told Olivia.

  As for the kids, they were so subdued by what had almost happened that they weren’t making a sound. Olivia gave them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with glasses of milk and they were in the kitchen, eating in silence.

  Kit had put on a shirt and he and Olivia were sitting on the hall floor, one on each side of the bathroom door. Inside, they could hear Uncle Freddy talking. His voice was low but there was excitement in it.

  “The kids didn’t put the chair’s brake on,” Kit said. “It was all because I made them swear that they wouldn’t go swimming without an adult present.”

  “And Uncle Freddy is an adult.”

  “Right,” Kit said. “I should have added qualifiers. It had to be an adult who could jump in after them if they started to drown. An adult who is not in a wheelchair. One who is—”

  She couldn’t bear to hear him blame himself. “But he found out he could swim?”

  “Yes. His chair rolled into the pond and when he floated out of it, he began waving his arms around. That’s when he remembered how he used to swim. The exertion nearly killed him, but he did make it to the bank.”

  “And that’s when Mr. Gates found him.”

  “Uncle Freddy was so worn-out that he couldn’t move. A lifetime of no exercise takes its toll. When Mr. Gates saw Uncle Freddy lying facedown at the edge of the pond, he assumed he was dead.”

  “And the poor kids...” She started to say more but she heard voices in the kitchen. It looked like the doctor had arrived. “I’ll go.” In the kitchen, Ace had wrapped his arms and legs tight around his father and was crying again. Letty was at the table, tears slowly running down her cheeks.

  “Come on,” Olivia said to the children, “let’s go pick some tiger plants.”

  Dr. Everett, a handsome man, midth