The Ranger - Ace Atkins [28]
He and his buddy nearly ended up in jail for whipping the shit out of those sailors. Four months later, Caddy disappeared again.
“She used to call and ask for money,” the preacher said. “I didn’t even know that she’d been in Tibbehah County. I figured she was still in New Orleans.”
“Does your wife know we called?” Lillie asked.
“No.”
“You think she might know something?” Quinn asked.
“She knows less than me,” he said. “The last time I saw her was in New Orleans. I had wired Jill money at a grocery store on Royal Street. I waited till she came and picked it up, and followed her out. She looked just wild, with her clothes and hair. She didn’t seem to know me at first. When she did, she made wild accusations and said very hurtful things. She’s not my daughter. I don’t know who she’s become and would never want my wife to feel what I had felt.”
Quinn stood, feeling like he could not breathe.
“Now we have a name,” Lillie said, still sitting looking up at him. “We’ll try and run her through the system.”
“You understand if I don’t want to be notified,” the preacher said.
Lillie laid down her card and wrote her cell phone number on the back. “If you hear from her, please let us know.”
Quinn shook his hand with speed and left the building, finding some comfort out in the chilled early morning air. He wanted to punch the shit out of something but tried to calm his thoughts with breathing.
They always said that shit worked, and sometimes it did.
Lena had spent the last three days at a women’s shelter in Jericho, where they fed her three meals a day and gave her a bunk in the basement of the Baptist church among rows of folding chairs, golden choir robes, and two Ping-Pong tables. The fat wife of the preacher had taken particular interest in her, coming down the steps late at night with cake or pudding, high on the glory of the Christmas season, reading tracts of Bible stories from old Guidepost magazines and comparing Lena’s plight to that of the Virgin Mother. She told the fat lady she hadn’t been a virgin since she was thirteen, thank you very much, but she did appreciate the pudding. The woman would smile at her and pat her on the head, and for most of the day Lena was free to help out with dishes in the kitchen after prayer breakfasts and fold laundry of the other gals who were there, including a woman in her forties with a busted lip and a black girl about her age who was just about as knocked up and said she wasn’t no virgin, either. On that Sunday afternoon, after a supper of baked chicken and peas and sweet tea, Lena took a walk, promising the local counselor that she only needed some air and would not smoke, drink, or do intentional harm to herself or the baby.
She found herself in downtown Jericho, the sun headed down not long past four. The bare trees and old rusted tower looming over the squat buildings were dark and shadowed, as if they’d been sketched in pencil. With the four dollars left in the quilted coat she’d been given, sewn by the good sisters of the church, she ordered a hamburger and small milk shake at the Sonic Drive-In, sitting at a table up by the kitchen window, while the slots were filled with white boys’ muddy trucks and black boys’ sporty sedans jacked up on high silver rims.
The milk shake was what she needed, and, with less than a dollar left, she asked the waitress for an order of fried pickles. The woman set them down and didn’t even ask to be paid, Lena left somehow thinking that she’d been in a similar spot at one time or another.
Visiting hour was tomorrow, and if Jody, or Charley Booth or whoever he really was, didn’t want to see her again, she guessed she’d hand-crawl her way back to Alabama and ask for some forgiveness from her father, although her daddy had made it pretty damn clear she was not much use to their family as a common