Alma bit hard on her lower lip. Her eyelids became heavy, sagging over her eyes. She didn’t answer.
Instead, she whispered one last command, “Leave!”
With that, she walked back to the trailer, disappeared inside, and slammed the door behind her just as my own mother had the day before.
Hannah and I tarried for a moment, frustrated that we’d been turned away.
As we reluctantly left, I felt only regret, not any anger toward Alma. She was a good woman. My mother was a good woman. They lived by the rules they were taught as children. They lived lives they’d been assured would bring honor to their families, lives that guaranteed great rewards in heaven. Then the world invaded and changed the rules, and they lost much of what they held dear.
Alma Heaton and my mother were left adrift in a town where they’d once belonged. As the world continued to intrude, they would increasingly become the strangers, the outsiders.
And me? I had failed again. I knew no more than when I’d arrived in Alber. I had no grounding on what was truth, or what were lies.
“What do we know now? Anything that can help us?” Hannah asked when I turned on the Pathfinder’s engine. “What are we going to do?”
As sympathetic as I was toward my mother, toward Alma Heaton, toward all the women of Alber, I had no choice.
“We’re going to drive to the Coombs’ house to ask about Jayme,” I said.
“It’ll be the same.” Hannah sounded resigned. “Last time I was there, there was a terrible scene. Jayme’s mom screamed at me and told me never to return.”
“If they send us away, we’ll drive back to the Heatons’ and try again. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll go back to the Coombs’ house. We’ll keep pushing until we wear someone down. I’m not leaving until we know where Eliza and Jayme are.”
Hannah hesitated, and then asked, “Clara, what if Alma is telling the truth? Maybe my mind fashioned this terrible theory out of nothing but suspicion.”
That was something I’d considered. “You have reasons to suspect there is something very wrong. If this is all an innocent mistake, why didn’t Alma simply tell us what she knows?”
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “But I worry that I’m wrong, and that we’re putting ourselves and them through all this for no reason.”
“That’s the hope, isn’t it?” Hannah shot me a questioning glance, and I explained. “That would be the best possible outcome: that we’re wasting our time, because all three girls, Eliza, Jayme and Delilah, are safe.”
“But you don’t think they are?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “There’s something very wrong here.”
Sixteen
By the time the lock clicked and the door creaked open, Delilah had fallen asleep. She woke with a start. Early-morning sunlight sent fingers of light into the room from around the boarded-up window, and Delilah looked up to see the man staring down at her. In his hands he held her breakfast, another small bowl of gruel, a curious look on his face.
“How did you get the blindfold off?” he asked.
“I—”
She couldn’t decide how to answer. Maybe it didn’t matter. He didn’t look angry, only intrigued by how she’d managed it with her wrists chained behind her. She stared at him, his jowls, his thick neck, and his slicked-back hair. She noticed a single vein pulsing in his neck, a thick, rope-like cord that came out of his shirt collar and disappeared behind his right ear.
“I asked you a question.” He clomped toward her, his heavy boots creaking the worn wooden floorboards. “How did you get the blindfold off?”
“I rubbed it off,” she said.
“Rubbed it off?” he repeated, and she nodded.
“Hmm,” he said. “I haven’t had any of them do that before.”
He put the bowl down on the chair, then leaned over and pushed her face toward the wall with one rough, meaty hand while he yanked at the chains on her wrists and ankles with the other. Satisfied, he picked the bowl back up and announced, “Those seem okay.”
“They’re…” She stopped, tried to clear her throat. Her empty stomach painful from hunger, bile again worked its way up her chest. “I didn’t do anything with those. They’re tight. Too tight. They hurt.”
“I bet they do,” he said. He pulled the lone chair toward her. Once he had it positioned in front of her, he sat down. “You hungry?”
She nodded.
First he leaned toward her and pulled the blindfold off her head, threw it in the corner. When he did, the button fell out.
While he spooned the meager offering into her mouth, giving her barely time to swallow, she tried to decide if he looked familiar. She felt certain he wasn’t anyone she’d ever actually met, but he could have been someone she’d seen around town, maybe when she was with her parents, or at school. She wasn’t sure. Before the troubles, the exodus where so many of the fathers left, there were a lot of big men like him in town. They were her friends’ fathers, the loggers her father catered to at the mill.
She’d never paid much attention to any of them.
While Delilah ate, the man said nothing, just brought one tablespoonful after another to her lips and waited for her to take it. When she finished the last of it, he wiped her mouth with a paper napkin covered with cheerful pink and green flowers.
“Where’s the lady who usually feeds me?” Delilah asked.
“I
