Danny looked back at her. “Are you following me just to ask questions?” he demanded.
“I’m going to let my cat out. You said you shut him in the house. But I would like an answer to my question.”
“About the letter, you mean? I guess it could have been inside another letter, couldn’t it? Maybe my father wrote to tell Ma he was coming. We always call the matron Ma,” Danny explained. “All the orphans do except the new ones. Some of them won’t talk at all.”
“I guess they’re afraid—”
“Sure,” Danny interrupted. “I was, too. I was only four years old when my mother died and my father took me away in his car. He only took me as far as the orphanage. Then he said, ‘Get out!’ in a sort of funny voice. ‘Go on up to the door,’ he told me. So I did. By the time Ma opened it my father was gone.”
“And that was the last time you saw him?” Judy asked in surprise.
Danny nodded. He and Judy were walking together now. Through the trees, they could see the house with the boarded-up windows.
“The windows weren’t like that when we lived there,” Danny went on talking. “You could see out, and people on the outside could see in. It will be like that again when my father comes home. I don’t remember him very well, but I do know he promised to come back when I was ten. He keeps reminding me of it in his letters. He said by then he’d have a lot of money—”
“He didn’t say where he’d get it, did he?” Judy interrupted to ask.
Danny’s eyes blazed at her. “He’d work for it, of course. Where else would he get it?”