Mom decided what we were going to do first, by saying, “I promised Roy’s mother we’d drive him home right away.”
That did seem like the best thing to do and so in a little while all of us including Mom and Charlotte Ann, were in our car driving up the road to Dragonfly’s house. It took quite a few minutes for Mom and Pop and me to calm Dragonfly’s mother down—she was so upset. I helped as much as I could, taking as much blame as I thought would be safe—not wanting Pop to start wondering where his razor strap was. But I didn’t want that little spindle-legged, crooked-nosed little guy to have to have a licking for doing practically nothing, which it looked like maybe his mother was excited enough and nervous enough to give him.
“You know how boys are,” Mom said. “They get ideas of things they want to do, and they think afterwards.”
Pop helped a little by saying, “Even our own son does unpredictable things once in awhile. Isn’t that right, Bill?”
It was too dark there in the shadow of the big cedar tree that grows close to Dragonfly’s side door, for Pop to see me frown, but I decided to look up the word “unpredictable” in our dictionary as soon as I got a chance, just to see what kind of things I did once in awhile, hoping they weren’t as bad as such a long word made them sound.
“It’s my fault, he got his pajamas all wet,” I thought it was safe to say to Dragonfly’s worried mother. Then I told her a little about the girls at the spring and how they probably thought Dragonfly was me. I didn’t tell her I thought maybe her innocent son was mixed up in our watermelon mystery, or she might have had insomnia that night even worse than another pajama-dressed boy’s mother.
From Dragonfly’s house we drove back toward ours, turned into the lane that goes down the south side of our farm and stopped at the place in the fence where the elderberry bushes were, the very same place where not more than two hours ago the noisy oldish car had been parked.
Say, when Pop’s flashlight showed him the hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, he was as angry as I have ever seen him get. He just stood there at the side of our car, with the moonlight shining on his stern face, his jaw muscles working, and I knew every other muscle in his body was tense.
“It’s hard to believe anybody would be that mean,” he said.
“Bob Till is mean enough to do anything,” I answered, but Mom stopped me before I could say another word. “You’re not to say that!” she ordered me. “We’re going to give that boy a chance. We’re NOT going to believe he did this, until we have proof.”