“I’m sure,” I said and I suddenly remembered that it had been a long time since I was inside our house. Also for some reason I decided I had better go quick to see if Charlotte Ann was still asleep or if she had waked up and maybe had gone herself somewhere.
“Let’s go look,” I said to Mr. Everhard and started to run fast, with him and his worried face right after me.
All the way through the orchard to the big Bull Thistle and the gate, not bothering to wait for Mr. Everhard, I was thinking over and over, “Mrs. Everhard had been taking a nap while her husband was away and when he came back she was gone and he couldn’t find her ... gone and he couldn’t find her and she was crazy—emotionally ill and—and our Charlotte Ann looked enough like her dead baby, Elsa, to be her twin—enough like her to be her.”
I tried to run faster and couldn’t. Instead of flying along like a bird in a hurry, I felt that I was just crawling like a Swallow Tail butterfly’s ugly, reddish-brown larva crawling along a lance-shaped parsnip leaf in our garden—which is the kind of leaf a Swallow Tail’s larva likes to eat best.
Hurry ... hurry ... hurry....
If ever I hurried, I hurried then—or tried to.
I darted past the big, red, two-inch wide thistle blossom, not even stopping to glance at it to see if there might be another Swallow Tail fluttering around it, through the still-open gate and past the front doorstep, around the house, past the grape arbor to the back screen, which I remembered now I hadn’t locked from the outside like I should have.
She’s got to be there, I thought. Why, she could have toddled out that door and gone to the barn or even out to and through the front gate and across the dusty road and through the woods to the spring and the creek and she didn’t know how to swim!
She doesn’t know how to swim!
Then I thought what if Mrs. Everhard had gotten one of her spells and decided that Charlotte Ann really was her baby and had come to get her and had run away with her—kidnapped her! She’s got to be there in her crib asleep—got to be!