Daddy had said that someone was already here in Indianapolis to meet them, had just started out for the Marriott, and he had to call at once and send that person to Jolie instead. Then he realized that when Mother woke this morning and was changed, she might have given his phone number to the Arcadians, whoever they were. He didn’t know if they had the capability to find him by his burner phone once they knew the number; but he could not take a chance, would destroy it as soon as he had hung up and had used another phone to call the person en route. He also didn’t know if, with the burner number, the wrong people might be listening this very minute; he didn’t think they could be, but he didn’t want to name the person who was coming for Jolie or give her a description. He said only that the right person, the person he was sending, would know Jolie because Jolie was seventeen, beautiful, about five-six, and black; and Jolie would know the person who came to her could be trusted if that person told her something that only she and Daddy knew.
Their rapid-fire conversation ended and Daddy was gone before Jolie quite realized that the phone in her hand could no longer reach him, for he was switching off and would soon smash his own disposable cell.
She was even more isolated than she had been just two minutes earlier. Now there was no one she could call. Not her grandmother, not Aunt Tandy in Madison, because maybe they had become like Mother and Twyla. Jolie couldn’t be sure that she could trust them.
The next five minutes were five eternities, and she tensed as each new arrival came through the front entrance of the hotel. She liked to read all kinds of books, and she read her share of spy novels, but she was no good at this cloak-and-dagger stuff, too edgy for it.
The right person, the contact, turned out to be the last one Jolie would have expected. A blonde in a white blouse and a black-denim jacket and black jeans. Hard to tell her age—maybe forty, maybe fifty. Her black boots featured elaborately carved leather with bright-blue inlays, and she wore dangly diamond earrings even in the middle of the day. She walked directly to Jolie, who stood up as she approached, and in what might have been a Texas accent, she said, “Darlin’, when you were the littlest girl, your daddy made up funny stories just for your ownself and no one else, stories about a mouse sheriff name of Whiskers.”
Jolie liked the woman on sight and might have trusted her a little even if she hadn’t known about Whiskers the mouse sheriff.
“How’re you doin’, child?”
“I’m a mess. Scared, sad, sick in my heart, but hanging on.”
“Me and you, we’ll hang on together,” the woman said. “I’m Nadine Sacket. Your daddy’s at our place in Texas. We’re takin’ you to him. But plans changed all sudden like, so now we’re goin’ there roundabout. When we’re in the taxi, we don’t use names, and nothin’ we talk about will be what’s really happenin’ with us. You get me, darlin’?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Nadine had arrived in a taxi, but she didn’t want to depart here in one. They left by a side entrance. Never using the sidewalk along the street, they crossed from the grounds of this hotel to the parking lot of a neighboring hotel. At the new place, Nadine hailed a cab, which they took downtown to the convention center.
From there they walked to the Westin Indianapolis, the largest and fanciest hotel that Jolie had ever seen. Although Nadine wasn’t a guest, she somehow engaged the concierge to help her book a rental car, and it wasn’t half an hour before they were on the road in a Cadillac Escalade.
“We were goin’ to scoot y’all—you, your mom, and your sister—right over to the airport here and then out, but when this ugliness raised itself up, that couldn’t work anymore. Maybe the bad hats aren’t crawlin’ all over the terminals by now, but later they’ll be lookin’ through all the video there, tryin’ to find where you went and who with. So you and me, we’ll drive to St. Louis, about four and a half hours without a tailwind. By then, Leland and Kelsey will be waitin’ there with the jet, and we’ll slip right down the sky to home.”
On top of everything else that had happened this day, the speed and confidence with which Nadine took the current situation in hand both reassured Jolie and left her a little disoriented. “Who’re Leland and Kelsey?”
“Leland’s the rascal wedded me when I was but nineteen. Kelsey Bodine was sent to us down to the ranch when he was fourteen, as dour as a mortician with constipation when we first met him. That boy didn’t know a mule from a horse from a pony back in those days. Thought himself slow-witted, which was the worst of the lies the world had told him. He’s twenty-three now, works with us and copilots with Leland every time Leland goes up. You’ll probably like old Kelsey. I know he’ll like you, considerin’ there’s not a boy with eyes and heart who wouldn’t.”
“You have your own jet?”
“Now, darlin’, don’t you go expectin’ a big seven-forty-seven tricked up like some palace in the sky. It’s just a little old Learjet, hauls about a dozen, but it’s a darn cozy way to get around.”
For Jolie, that trip to St. Louis was like a drive from a graveyard after a funeral, marked by sorrow and anguish and worry about the future, but it was also just the littlest bit as engaging as Harry Potter’s first trip from platform nine and three-quarters in King’s Cross station to Hogwarts School. Nadine was a talker: She talked about herself and Leland, about the Sacket Home and School, as well as about a dazzling variety of other things, and she got Jolie to talk about herself, more than she had talked about herself in ages. Yet by the time they arrived at the private-craft terminal at St. Louis International and boarded the Lear and were airborne, Jolie couldn’t remember more than a fraction of what either of them had said. When her life was in the hands of Mr. Sacket and Kelsey Bodine, a crushing weariness overcame Jolie. Not having slept well the past two nights, she thought she would never sleep well again, considering what could happen to you in your sleep. However, she fell sound asleep as they slid down the sky to Texas.