Chapter 2

Judd dragged me through the kitchen door by the collar.

"Found the rat at the Red Bird," he said. "On the phone."

Bertie was still up. She was always up when I came back from somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.

She didn't say a word. She crossed the kitchen and took my coat off me herself.

The hot dogs came out first. "Stealing again." The back of her hand caught me across the ear and the floor came up to meet me.

I stayed down. Down was safer.

She kept searching. Sleeves. Waistband. Socks.

On the ride back I had worked the flyer into the plastic bag under my sock. It bought me nothing.

The bag crackled. She pulled the flyer out and unfolded it, and the whole kitchen went quiet.

"Vernon. Get in here."

Vernon came in with his beer. He looked at the flyer. He looked at me. He looked at the flyer again.

"You look at that drawing," Bertie said. Her voice had gone thin. "Tell me that's not her face."

"Could be any skinny kid," Vernon said.

"There's a reward on it. Reward means lawyers. Lawyers mean police." She folded the flyer with two shaking hands. "It doesn't even matter if it's her. It matters who comes asking."

She hauled me off the floor by the front of my shirt.

"What did you tell them?"

I hadn't made a sound in two years. Bertie knew that better than anybody alive.

She was the reason.

She still shook me and screamed the question into my face, and I still couldn't answer, and that made her shake harder.

"She can't talk, Ma." Judd was grinning by the door. "She just breathed at them."

Bertie let go of me. She stood there a second, breathing hard.

Then she lifted the plate off the stove and dropped the flyer into the fire.

I watched the little girl with the fat cheeks curl up at the corners and go black.

The phone number went last.

"Put her down below," Vernon said. "I need to think."

I walked to the cellar door on my own. Walking on my own was better.

At the top of the stairs I kept my hands folded against my chest, away from the frame. Two winters ago I grabbed that frame, and Bertie brought the door down anyway.

My fingers still fold wrong.

The dark was the same as I remembered. The last time I spent a night down here, I still had a voice.

The floorboards over my head weren't much. I could hear everything.

"—five years I fed that child. I gave her Dinah's room. I put Dinah's clothes on her, off Dinah's own hangers, and she goes calling strangers behind my—"

"Don't start with Dinah."

Silence for a while.

I didn't know much about Dinah. There was a stone behind the church with her name on it. Bertie took flowers there once a month and came home worse.

The first winter, she used to stand me in the kitchen in a dead girl's dress and stare at me like I'd stolen something.

Maybe I had. I never found out what.

"So what do we do," Bertie said.

"She goes back where she came from," Vernon said. "I'll call the Preacher."

Nobody brought food on Wednesday.

That was fine. I knew how to be hungry. I lay in the dry corner and hummed the five notes, so quiet the dirt could barely hear them.

Somewhere out there, a woman had screamed a name three times.

I didn't know if the name was mine. The girl on that flyer had fat cheeks and a laugh and people with reward money. I had a mark on my neck that matched a drawing.

Marks can match. It doesn't have to mean anything.

But down in that dark, I decided something anyway.

If that woman ever found me, I would be her girl. Whoever her girl was. However much lying it took.

Because her girl got screamed for. Her girl got looked for, five whole years.

Nobody had ever looked for me.

Thursday night, boots crossed the kitchen floor. The wall phone clicked and spun. Seven numbers.

I put my ear against the cold stair rail.

"It's Vernon Sloane." Pause. "Sloane. Copper Hollow. The one from five years back."

Pause.

"The girl. Yeah. No, no trouble. We just got no more use for her."

Pause.

"Small, but she works. Doesn't talk at all. That's a plus in your line, I'd figure."

A long pause. His boot tapped the floor, slow.

"I paid twelve hundred for her." Tap. "Fine. Eight. Eight and we're square."

The chair creaked.

"Friday night. Come after dark. Cash."

He was about to hang up. Then he stopped.

"And Preacher. Bring rope this time."

Pause.

"She bites now."