The girl smelled bad but I didn’t mind. The odor reminded me of how I smelled just a few days before.
“How long have you been in there?” I asked after ten or twelve minutes of shivering and sporadic crying.
I’d ushered her into the kitchen, where she downed three big glasses of water between sobs and tremors.
“I don’t know … maybe a week, maybe more. He … he made me stay there for hours and told me I had to hold it for the bathroom. He only gave me three minutes in the toilet and then he’d put me back in the trunk. That’s when he’d give me a jar of water and two cookies to have in the dark.”
“Why?” I asked. “Was he mad about something?”
“I didn’t even know him. We met at the bus station. I only just got into town and he started talking to me near the gate. He was nice. He bought me lunch and said he owned a restaurant. He offered me a job. I thought I was lucky. We came to his house because he said he had the waitress uniforms here.
“Then he … he slapped me around, ripped off my clothes, and … and … and he made me get in the trunk. He said that when he got through with me I would do anything he wanted.
“But then, two days ago, I think, maybe three or four, he came in and he was shot in the shoulder. He handcuffed me to the chair and made me help him put on some bandages. He kept saying, ‘Damn niggers this’ and ‘Damn niggers that.’ I was so scared. I begged him to let me go, but he punched me and threw me back in.”
I noticed a blue-and-red bruise on the left side of her jaw.
“Then what?” I asked.
“I was hungry and I had to go, but he wouldn’t let me out. He told me not to make any noise or he’d kill me. I knew he would, so I just laid there and prayed. I never prayed before. Even in church I’d just lower my head but I didn’t say the words in my head.…”
“Did you hear what happened to him?”
“It was another man’s voice,” she said, looking up from the floor. Her eyes were blue and red, her skin pink with a hint of gray. “He was very angry and he hit Maurice. He kept hitting him and Maurice was begging him to stop. But he didn’t stop.…”
The flickering evil grin worked its way back into her face. At her early age she had already experienced hate deeper than I would ever know.
“What did the man ask Maurice?”
“He kept asking, where was the nigger? He kept saying that, over and over.”
“And did he open the trunk?”
She nodded and looked down again. “When I heard him I turned my head away and pretended that I was unconscious or dead or something. I thought he’d kill me but he didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I just heard the top open and felt the light on my eyelids. Then he closed it up again and I didn’t hear anything else.”
I sat back and watched the white slave in the mustard work shirt. Her hands were balled into useless fists, and a kind of tuneless humming came from deep in her throat.
“Did you have a suitcase when Maurice got you?”
She nodded and said, “He put it in the backseat of his car.”
“Where’s that?”
“In the garage.”
I stared at the girl for a long time. She twisted her shoulders to get away from the scrutiny.
“What’s your name?” I asked, mostly to relieve the pressure.
“Where did you come from, Sue?”
“Flagstaff … in Arizona.”
“Can you go back there?”
She shook her head miserably, and I wondered if what she was running from was worse than even Maurice.
“Did the man who beat on Maurice say any names that you remember?”
“He said something about a guy named Giles,” she said. “Just before he opened the trunk he said, ‘This is for Giles,’ and there was this sound like my brother’s cap gun.”
“Did you see the man through a crack or something?”
She shook her head.
“How old are you, Sue?”
“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in September. What are you going to do with me?”
She looked up again for that question.
I brought my palms to chest level and shook my head. “After what you’ve been through I will do whatever it is you want.”
Sue’s brows knitted as she tried to comprehend what I was saying.
“I want to get away from here,” she said.
“Okay. Where to?”
I might as well have asked her to recite the Old Testament backward. She shook her head and slumped forward.
“Listen, Sue,” I said. “You just went through some shit I can’t even imagine. That dude deserves to be dead. That man didn’t kill him ’cause of what he did to you, but there is some justice in the world. You need to go someplace where you can be safe and where maybe you know somebody, somebody you trust.”
“I have a … a cousin named Ginger. We were close when we were kids.”
“Where is she?”
“Sacramento.”
“You should call her.”
Sue stood up with sudden resolve and moved toward the black wall phone next to the counter.
“Not from here,” I said, touching her arm.
She skittered away from my hand and asked, “Why not?”
“Because there’s a dead man in this house and the police might check out who was called over the last few days.”
Sue stared at me, looking for some kind of duplicity in my words. When she couldn’t find any she wilted back into the chair and sighed in desolation.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said. “You’re going to go upstairs and take a shower; then we’re gonna go down to the train station, call Ginger, and buy you a ticket to as close to her as you can get.”
While the girl was upstairs in the bathroom I went out the back door, across a neglected concrete patio strewn with leaves and streaked with dried mud, over a patch of shaggy grasses, and into the garage. I’d retrieved the car keys from the dead man’s pockets, but the doors were unlocked. He drove a late-model forest green Cadillac convertible.
There was no suitcase in the car, but there was a straw bag set on a raw pine shelf at the back of the garage. Her white plastic purse was on top of it. I smiled at the trusting nature of careless youth. It occurred to me that if anyone ever treated Feather like Maurice had done to Sue, I would kill him without even a moment’s consideration.
The purse supported Sue’s story. Her last name was Hellinger and she lived until recently on North Post Road in Flagstaff, Arizona. I carried the small valise and purse back to the kitchen. Sue had half a pack of Winston cigarettes in her cheap purse. I was on my third one when she came downstairs from her ablutions.
Her hair was combed and the smell was gone. The odd thing was that cleaning herself up allowed me to see how plain her face was. Suffering, I concluded, sometimes accents and beautifies its victim.
The girl took the bag into the bathroom and changed. While she was in there I found a straw hat in Maurice’s bedroom closet. This I put on with the brim tipped over my face. Then I led the girl out to my borrowed Barracuda and drove within the speed limit while my heart was racing far up ahead.
“He was gonna make me into a whore, wasn’t he?” Sue Hellinger said when we were half the way downtown.
“That’s what it sounds like,” I said. “But it’s kind of crazy. I mean, why not find somebody who wants to do the work?”
My mind was all over the place. Between my official death and Evander, Jackson Blue’s comparatively simple problem, and the immensity of Sue’s suffering, I felt like a flea trying to wrangle an elephant.
“He would come and sit on the trunk sometimes and talk to me,” Sue said. When I had no comment she went on. “He sounded calm but it was crazy. He said it made him feel good when he was asleep at night to know that he had a girl locked in a box downstairs.”
She said many other things after that. None of which I wish to repeat or remember.
It took two hours to contact Sue’s cousin. She lived in a rented house with three other girls. After many tries we got Ginger’s work number and finally reached her after her lunch break. With coaching from me Sue explained that she got into trouble without giving any specifics. Ginger was a true friend and told her to come right up; a train would get in by midnight. We bought the ticket and waited near the track door.
“Should I tell Ginger what happened?” she asked.
“You’ll have a whole lifetime to ponder that question.”
“I mean,” she said, “you don’t want me to tell about you, right?”
“What’s my name?” I asked her.
“Um … I don’t know.”
“See? You could tell her all about what you know about me and the killer, because you don’t know a thing. And there’s no reason to go to the police, because Maurice is already dead.”
This assessment, for some reason, brought tears to the teenager’s eyes.
“Don’t worry, girl,” I said with my hands down by my sides. “You’re gonna live through this. You’re gonna be okay.”
By then it was time for her to board her train. I hailed a redcap. He was an older Negro with kind eyes and a slight limp. I tipped him five dollars and told him to help her all the way to a seat.
I had already given Sue the money from Maurice’s wallet. She smiled for me and turned to follow the redcap. As I watched them walk away I had the sudden impression that I was a dead man saying good-bye to a ghost.