“Yes, but—”
Judy was not allowed to finish.
“They had no right!” stormed the boy’s father. “A couple of blundering old ladies drive over and kidnap six of your boys, Meta, and you stand there and let them.”
“It was a kindness!” she retorted, angry now. “The children have to have a place to sleep.”
“A kindness? Taking my boy away when I haven’t seen him for six long years?” George Anderson spoke in such a loud voice that some of the women who had offered help backed away. “That’s no kindness! That’s kidnapping!”
“Hold on a minute!” Peter stopped him, “before you make any more charges. Your son wasn’t kidnapped by the Jewell sisters. And I suspect you had plenty of opportunity to see him before the fire. He’s been trailing you around for days. I’m afraid, after what he saw and heard, he doesn’t want to meet you.”
“That’s a lie!” Danny’s father charged. “He couldn’t have been trailing me around for days. I only got in from Canada this morning. I was on my way to the old house. I was going to open it up and make a home for Danny. Then I saw the fire—”
“You mean you haven’t been over there to that house with the boarded-up windows?” Judy interrupted in surprise.
“No, and I haven’t seen Danny. He couldn’t have been trailing me.”
“Well, he was trailing somebody who had a key to the house,” Peter insisted. “We found your son at the beaver dam, and he told us all about it. He’d missed his lunch at the orphanage, and so we stopped at the Beverly—”