FOUR
The damn fool of a sheriff had been no help at all, Imogene thought bitterly to herself. He had refused, at first, even to go talk to the old fool in the drugstore. But she had insisted, firmly controlling the growing sense that something was terribly wrong with Cora, and he finally had strolled across the street with her at his heels.
Pete had stuck to his story—she’d known he would—and the stupid sheriff had seemed to believe him! He refused to search the back room or scour the town for Cora, telling Imogene that he had dealt with runaways before. They usually came back home, he said, especially when it got dark and they got hungry enough. Imogene hadn’t had the courage to tell him that Cora’s going home was the one thing she was afraid of. Then the sheriff, who was almost as old as Pete, if not older, left her in the charge of a drooling semi-idiot named Dooley whose chief function, it seemed, was to chew tobacco and try to spit within a narrow ring of near misses around a filthy spittoon. She abandoned the office and returned to the park bench on the now dusky lawn.
Downtown was all but deserted by seven-thirty, leaving only an occasional passing automobile to distract her from her continuing stare at Pete’s Sundries and Drugs. She saw Pete himself lock up and walk down the sidewalk about ten minutes after she returned to the bench, and she toyed with the idea of going over and breaking in and giving the small store a thorough searching. She knew Cora was no longer in there, but there might be something there, something to prove to the stupid sheriff that she wasn’t crazy. But she didn’t know what.
She also knew that staring at the shop wouldn’t take her back to the morning when the sun was shining and Cora had looked so beautiful sitting on the green grass, and she recognized that her continual gaze wouldn’t bring her daughter out of the shop at this late hour. But she didn’t know what else to do. She groped around in her bag and found the empty cigarette pack and wadded it up in a tightly clenched fist and tried to ignore the hunger pangs that were attacking her stomach.