Jo hadn’t seen Daniel since their encounter in the Laureltown bar several weeks earlier, although they had been talking on the phone quite frequently of late. When he pulled up in the black limousine, she was waiting in the covered parking lot near the river. She’d cut the padlock from the chain across the entrance with Henry’s ancient bolt cutters and driven the GMC to the far corner of the lot. She opened the roll-up door as Daniel got out to open the back door of the limo. The girl looked scared when he took her from the back seat and led her to the truck. For a multi-millionaire’s kid, she looked like any other. Pink runners, white jeans and a T-shirt with a cartoon figure on it. Her blonde hair in a ponytail. She had pierced ears, Jo noticed. Not unusual these days for her age.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, her voice thin with fear.
“To meet your mother,” Daniel said.
“I don’t believe you.”
Daniel didn’t say anything else and neither did Jo. Inside the truck, bolted to the floor at the front of the box, amid the hampers of tomatoes and bags of potatoes, was a bucket seat, salvaged from a van Henry had once driven to market. They put the girl in the seat and fastened the seat belt. Both the seat and belt had been Henry’s idea.
“You get her phone?” Jo asked.
Daniel nodded and took a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it over. There were two phone numbers there, one each for the girl’s mother and father. Jo looked at the numbers and put the paper in her shirt pocket.
“Please let me go home,” the little girl said. She was crying now, growing desperate. As she spoke she wiped the tears from her cheeks with her fingers.
“You’ll be home in a couple of days,” Jo told her. “Don’t get out of that seat.”
“Please,” the girl said again.
“Be quiet,” Jo said.
She closed the door and latched it. She stood looking at Daniel as he got into the limo and drove off across the lot. Jo walked around and got behind the wheel of the GMC. She listened for a moment for any sounds suggesting that the girl was moving around. She put the truck in gear and headed for home.
Henry was waiting when she got there, standing at the bottom of the steps to the porch, as if he’d been there for hours. He had a look of uncertainty as she pulled up, a look that suggested that he’d been holding out hope that Jo would return alone. Every time he’d wavered in the past week Jo had shown him the tape she’d made of Sam Jackson’s rant, which was enough to make even an old hippie’s blood rise.
Henry was reassuring the little girl as soon as Jo rolled up the door. She had remained in the seat, as she’d been told, but she was obviously frightened beyond words. Her breathing was shallow and rapid.
“You’re going to be okay,” Henry was telling her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you. You can unbuckle now.”
“I want to go home,” the girl said. But she did what she was told.
“You will,” Henry promised. “In a few days. Now come on.”
The girl got to her feet but held back. Jo watched from outside the truck. It was obvious that the little girl, so reluctant to enter the truck back in the city, was now just as nervous about leaving it. It had suddenly become her sanctuary.
“Let’s go,” Jo snapped.
They had a room ready for her at the rear of the farmhouse. There was a bed and a dresser and a table and chair, all that she would need for a couple of days, although Henry had been adding things to it for the past week—pictures of horses and other animals, a vase of petunias, books that had belonged to Jo and various other grandchildren from a couple of decades past. He’d even picked up a bar fridge in town at a second-hand place and stocked it with juice and snacks. There was a single window in the room, overlooking the old barn and the pasture where the goats grazed. Henry had nailed steel mesh over the outside of the window, and over the bathroom window next door.
Jo held back and allowed Henry to introduce the little girl to her cell, as he had been referring to the room in his frequent moments of doubt over what they were doing. Now he was explaining things that didn’t require explaining.
“There’s your bed. And there’s a table there and a chair. And that’s a little fridge, with juice and stuff.”
The girl stood in the doorway, looking at the room. She turned and glanced back to Jo, in the hallway, then took a couple of steps toward Henry. “If you let me go now,” she said softly, “I’ll make sure you don’t get into trouble. Please.”
From the hallway Jo saw Henry’s resolve begin to crumble. The little girl was intuitive in choosing Henry. Jo had been thinking the kid might be a bit of a dullard, given her bloodlines, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Jo walked into the room and the girl looked at her, eyes wary.
“Sit down and be quiet,” Jo said.
Henry shot Jo a look but she ignored him. “Sit down,” she said again.
The little girl sat in the chair. Henry walked to the bureau and picked up a brass cowbell that had been on a shelf in the old milk house for as long as Jo remembered. He brought it over to the girl and clanged it loudly a couple of times.
“If you need to use the bathroom, just ring this,” he said. “We might be outside working, but we’ll hear you. Do you know what this is?”
The girl shook her head.
“It’s what they call a cowbell. A mother cow would wear this around her neck in the pioneer days so she wouldn’t get lost. This bell here is over a hundred—”
“All right,” Jo said. “She doesn’t need a history lesson.”
Henry gave Jo another look of reproach and, after putting the bell in the girl’s hand, walked out of the room. The kid sat staring at Jo. She seemed a little less freaked out now. Maybe the bell did it.
“You’re going to be here a couple of days,” Jo said. “You need to keep quiet. You start screaming and nobody is going to hear you anyway. You understand that?”
The girl nodded.
“All right.” Jo left, locking the door behind her.
Henry was waiting in the kitchen. “She’s a child and she’s frightened out of her mind. You need to be considerate of that.”
“We knew she was going to be scared, Henry,” Jo told him. “We’re in it now. She’ll figure it out that we’re not going to hurt her.”
“It might help if you weren’t mean to her.”
“This isn’t Disneyland.”
Henry fell silent and glanced out the kitchen window, his teeth worrying his bottom lip. Jo could tell that he wanted to complain further but couldn’t think of a way to do it. After all, he was part of it. All he could do was repeat his words. “Can’t you see she’s scared?”
“How scared is she, Henry?” Jo demanded. “As scared as those kids in the schoolyard in Laureltown? Compared to those kids, how frightened is she? She’s in a room with a bed and a fridge and a cowbell. How frightened is she?”
“It’s not a contest,” he said.
“It’s not summer camp either,” Jo said. “We’ve been through this. If this is going to work, I can’t become her friend. I can’t allow myself to care about her. Now I’m going to have something to eat and then we have to load the truck for morning.”
She went into the fridge for some leftover chicken and began to make a sandwich on the cutting board. Behind her she felt Henry slip from the room. The hallway ran behind the kitchen and she could plainly hear him enter the kid’s room to tell her again that she was going to be all right. He asked the little girl her name and she told him it was Vanessa but sometimes people called her Nessa. Then she asked Henry his name.
“Jesus, Henry,” Jo muttered under her breath. “You’re not going to tell her.”
But he didn’t. He asked her if she wanted a chicken sandwich and she declined. He reminded her about the food in the fridge and then Jo heard him leave and lock the door. He came back into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of his homemade wine. He drank it while Jo ate the sandwich and after they went out together to load the truck for the following day.