Page 27
She didn’t ask why a Prospect townhome has medical waste disposal under the sink. I didn’t tell her it’s been there since the week prospect row went up and has never once been opened.
* * *
Sixty yards of gravel between prospect row and the gate. I’ve walked it four thousand times.
Raven came down off the main house porch with Silvy asleep on her hip. “Maren,” she said.
“Ma’am.”
“Raven. Nobody’s called me that in ten years and I’d like to keep the streak.” She didn’t put out a hand. Her arms were full and she’d already worked out that Maren wasn’t going to want one. “Fox’s wife. You’re the one who put Freak back together.”
“I closed a wound. He’s coming apart again on his own schedule.”
Raven’s mouth moved about a quarter inch, which for her is a laugh.
“How was the drive?”
“Forty minutes.”
“Anybody bother you on the road?”
“No.”
That was the whole interrogation. Not one word about how she was holding up or whether she was frightened or what a woman in scrubs was doing on this compound. Raven’s been on the receiving end of the other kind of question. She doesn’t hand it to anybody else.
Harlow shouted something from inside the house, at a volume that carried through two walls.
“Harlow,” Raven said, by way of explanation, and that was all the explanation required.
Then Marianna came across the yard. She was headed nowhere in particular, the way she goes, stopping twice for things on the ground that only she could see. Got to us and took my hand.
No hello. Her fingers went around my knuckles the way they’ve gone around my knuckles since she was about four, and I closed my hand on hers without looking down, because looking down makes it a thing and it isn’t a thing. It’s just Marianna deciding whose hand she wants.
Except this time somebody was watching her do it.
I felt Maren’s attention shift off my face and down to our two hands and stay there. Marianna tipped her head at her, the way she does when she’s tuning something in. “Maren,” she said.
“Hello.”
“Maren,” Marianna said again, satisfied, and smiled at her once and then drifted off toward whatever had caught her attention by the clubhouse steps, and my hand was empty.
Raven shifted the baby to her other hip. “She likes you,” she said.
Maren didn’t answer that. Smart. There’s no answer to it that doesn’t sound like a performance, and Raven would have heard the performance.
At the gate, Leo had the clipboard out before I got there. “Signing out,” I said.
“Nine-forty-one.” He wrote it himself, and got the time right without checking, and I noted that too.
Forty minutes back to the dry cleaner and she said about as much as she had on the way out. I pulled to the curb and left the engine running and she got out without waiting for me to come around, because she’d have hated that and we both knew it.
She went up the metal stairs. They sang under her. The light came on behind the curtain, and a shape moved across it, and then it didn’t move again.
I sat there longer than I had any business sitting there.
Then I drove back.
* * *
