Disturbed Ground by Carla Norton Read Free Book Online Page A

apron and looking around for something to wrap them in. "And I just have more than we can eat. Please. Won't you take some home? You do like tamales, don't you?"
    Judy, who had a weakness for all things Mexican, from the artifacts that decorated her home to the dream vacations that lay just out of reach, accepted with thanks.
    "You know," Dorothea was saying, "I'm planning on taking everyone to Mexico with me the next time I go down for a visit."
    This was a surprise. "Everyone? You mean everyone in the boarding-house? The entire household?"
    "Uh-huh. Everyone. Bert and everyone else. We'll all go down and visit my family. They live just outside of Guadalajara, you know, and I think we'd all have a good time."
    "I see," said Judy, trying to digest this. "Well, how would you be getting down there?"
    "Oh, John Sharp will drive us down," Dorothea replied airily.
    Beth thought this was wonderful But Judy gave the landlady a quizzical look. She could scarcely imagine Bert as a tourist. Surely it was unrealistic to expect him to navigate in a foreign city. He could get lost.
    It was a brief exchange—a bit peculiar, even eccentric—but nothing ominous. Judy didn't really take it seriously. She let the subject drop.
    Now that Bert was doing so well, Judy felt that she and Beth could back off a bit. His condition had miraculously improved, and now she had other, more pressing problems.
    And so did Dorothea Puente. If she was unpredictable, she was also clever. Watching, waiting, she methodically wove together elements of a plan that stretched into the months ahead. It was an intricate web, pleasing in its complexity.
    This spring, the white-haired landlady had big plans for her yard. On several occasions she called her favorite cabdriver, Patty Casey, and asked that she drive her to landscape supply stores, where she purchased building materials, plants, seeds, and ready-mix concrete.
    Of course, this little old lady, hardy though she was, didn't plan on doing all the yard work herself. Much as she enjoyed gardening in the cool morning air, for any heavy labor she always called the Sacramento Valley Correctional Center (SVCC). A halfway house for convicts with just a few months left on parole, it would send out work crews of nonviolent offenders, and Dorothea paid them each twenty dollars a day for doing odd jobs around her house.
    Not many private individuals were even aware that a halfway house could supply laborers. But Dorothea Puente was conversant with ex-cons; she knew about parolees and work furlough. In fact, she knew many things that others did not.
    Parolees worked at the F Street house off and on during the months of April, May, and June. As the air grew hot and the season turned the dry corner toward summer, the grounds were transformed. Sinewy workers arrived early and left late, sweating over their labors. Mrs. Puente directed them and John McCauley supervised as they continued painting, cleaning, digging trenches, mixing and laying cement, even building a shed in the yard.
    At noon, the landlady always invited the young men upstairs for a midday meal—an unnecessary but highly welcome gesture. And over lunch, she revealed a secret side of herself. "I know what it's like, being an ex-con," she confided, "because I've been in prison myself."
    To these men who'd endured hard times and were hoping for better, Mrs. Puente was a kind soul who didn't condemn them for past mistakes. She gave them a chance. One wiry young fellow named Don Anthony even said she was "like a mother."
    Some may have found it refreshing that the old landlady was investing so much effort in her yard (this wasn't one of the nicest neighborhoods after all, and few on the block seemed to sweat much over their property), but the landlord next door, forty-eight-year-old Will Mclntyre, wasn't thrilled about his neighbor's noisy projects. It seemed endless, he thought. For nearly two years now, he and his tenants had put up with Puente's racket. It