“No.” Her voice had an edge to it.
“You were telling Button about it.”
“That was just a story.” Loudly now.
“But if the story were real, about a real place and a real time, would you like to go back there?”
“No! It was a story! I want to go home. I don’t want Turkish delight or cyclopedias, I want to go home to Aba and Button and Mr. Carpenter!”
I gritted my teeth and kept walking. How do you persuade the beaten dog it would be better off with someone else? Perhaps you couldn’t. Perhaps it wouldn’t.
It was about six o’clock by the time we saw the truck and trailer. “I can walk now,” Luz said. I didn’t say anything. “Let me down, Aud.”
Stay in the world, Julia had said, but there were so many different worlds. There was one where I put Luz in my truck and we drove off to Little Rock, where I placed her with social services. There was one where I took her to Atlanta and she lived with me. There was one where we stopped by the truck and I got in and she kept walking, back to Jud and Adeline.
I set Luz down. “You can walk to the truck.”
“I don’t want to get in the truck. I want to go home.”
“I’m very tired, and I don’t want to leave the truck out here. If you get in, I’ll turn it round and take you home.”
“Swear on the Holy Bible?”
“I don’t have a Bible.” I switched to Spanish. “But I swear on my own name that if you get in this truck, I will drive you home to Aba.” Aud rhymes with vowed. Another promise hanging around my neck.
“Today?” English. The language of mistrust.
“Right now.”
“And you won’t lock the doors?”
I should never have offered to buy her Turkish delight. “No. No one is going to lock a door on you ever again.”
As soon as we pulled up outside the farmhouse, she tore into the house and slammed the door behind her. I switched off the headlights and the engine, turned on the dome light. It seemed very bright. I pulled the Glock from my waistband and put it in the glove compartment. After a while I opened the glove compartment again and took out a folder and my phone. I looked at the phone. There was no one to call. The engine ticked.
The front door opened again. Adeline Carpenter. She took one step out and stopped. I turned the light off, put the phone back, picked up the folder, and climbed down. The pain was constant now. I could hang on perhaps another hour.
“Luz says… well, I can’t make head nor tail of it, but she’s here, and you’re here…” She waved vaguely with her left hand, and her eyes were brilliant and glassy. “And your face…” She pulled an inhaler from her apron pocket and sucked hard. I thought for a moment she might pass out.
“Mrs. Carpenter, may I come in? We have a lot to talk about.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We sat at the kitchen table, on our third cup of coffee. The same stew still simmered by the stove but the room looked flatter and harsher in electric light. Luz was with Button, watching Jud work on the truck. Adeline had watched while I cleaned the grit and blood from my face and smeared the graze with antibiotic ointment. She gave me ibuprofen for the pain. Her breathing improved as I washed away the evidence of violence. I hadn’t mentioned my knee or ribs.
I had given Adeline an edited version of what had happened, up to the point where Luz and I walked back from the woods, and her confusion was mounting.
“So Miz Goulay’s in a car in the woods?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s not coming back?”
“When she wakes up, she’ll untie Mike, and they’ll both spend a fair amount of time searching for the car keys, which they won’t find, after which they’ll have to walk out. They might walk the wrong way, but it shouldn’t be cold enough tonight to do them any harm.”
“But she won’t…” She took a moment to breathe. “She won’t be coming back after Luz?”
“No.”
“And…” She used her inhaler again. Breathed. Another snort. The color came back to her face. “She won’t go to the police?”
“No. If the police were called, she would have a lot of explaining to do.” The list of charges a good lawyer could level at Goulay would be long, beginning with kidnap of a minor, trafficking in illegal immigrants, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit… “Jean Goulay will never bother you again. Luz will stay here, with you and your husband and Button. If that’s what you want.”
“Yes! And her… Mr. Karp?”
“He’s in a persistent vegetative state, the kind of coma from which you never wake. He’ll get weaker and weaker and then die.”
“She told the truth about that, then.”
I opened the folder, spread out Luz’s birth and adoption certificates, her passport and medical reports. “The only people on this earth now responsible for Luz are you and your husband. And me.”
She frowned. “Where did you get those?”
“From George Karp’s apartment.”
She reached out and touched the birth certificate with a fingertip. “In New York. Miz Goulay said he was beaten half to death, but she didn’t say who by.”
“George Karp was not a good man.”
She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she was agreeing or simply acknowledging what I’d said. “You weren’t here on vacation, were you?” she said.
“No.”
“And it wasn’t just chance that you came by when we ran out of gas.” She was breathing fast, but this time it wasn’t asthma. “You told a pack of lies to get into my house.”
“I had good reason.”
“You lied, just like that Goulay woman. You even lied about having cancer.”
“I never said I had cancer.”
“Don’t you get clever with me! You know what you meant for me to think.”
“Listen to—”
“No, Miz Aud Thomas or whoever the heck you are, I’ve had my fill today of being bullied and lied to. You’re sitting in my kitchen. I don’t have to listen to one word you say.” She folded her arms and leaned back in her chair. Adeline discovers strength through righteous anger. Shame she hadn’t been able to break free of the Kind Christian Lady persona a little earlier.
The stew simmered peacefully for a while. The dishes on display were a willow pattern; one had a carefully mended crack. Under the table, my knee was swelling.
Eventually she couldn’t stand it. “Just what is it you want with us?”
“A bargain. You don’t want Luz to go, and Luz doesn’t want to go, but you can’t afford to keep her. I can help.”
“Why would you want to do that? What’s Luz to you?”
“My motives have no bearing on the matter.”
“They do for me.”
If I sat here another hour, I wouldn’t be able to drive. “Did you know that the legal age for marriage is fourteen in Georgia, and just twelve in Delaware?” She kept her arms folded, but now she looked uncomfortable. “Wasn’t too hard to put two and two together, was it? Don’t get righteous with me. You have no moral leg to stand on.”
Another pause. “What do you mean, help?”
“Luz stays here. I pay you and untangle the immigration situation. When she’s eighteen she gets to choose her own life.”
She half unfolded her arms, bewildered now. “But why?”
I ignored that. “We’ll come to an agreement, write a contract, a covenant. For the money I send I’ll expect certain things.”
“Why should I trust you? I don’t know you. I don’t even like you.” Heady stuff, freedom. But her timing was inconvenient.
“You don’t have to like me. I don’t have to like you. We simply have to abide by an agreement. For example, one of my conditions would be that she goes to school. A good school.”