The Daughter They Abandoned Twice novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Terms

The crowd turns on her, Levi sets rules in the parking lot, she gives him the plate and the motel, and he finds the barrette in her purse.

For a moment nobody on the lawn made a sound.

Then a man near the front shouted, "You little bitch."

The shout spread through the whole crowd.

People stood up out of their folding chairs, and one of the candles hit the grass and went out.

"She helped them!"

"Twenty years!"

"Arrest her!"

I stood at the microphone with my hands open and said the only thing I had that was useful.

"A white van," I said. "Texas plate, K, L, W, seven, four, two, one."

The woman in the blue coat had stopped filming me to write it down.

Three people in the front row were writing it on their hands.

Levi's mother pushed through the chairs and came up the steps.

She was small and gray-haired, and she did not look at the cameras.

She looked at my face, and I knew she was looking for the braids.

"Where is my daughter?" she said.

"I don't know," I said. "I swear to you I don't know. I was left at a gas station the next morning."

She hit me.

It was an open hand across the cheek, and it didn't hurt as much as it should have.

I did not step back.

Levi got his arm around her shoulders and turned her away, and said something quiet into her hair.

Then he looked at me over her head, and he was not the man who had asked me to speak.

"Walk," he said. "To the lot. Now."

Two deputies in the same brown uniform had moved in on either side of me.

I let the one on the left take my elbow, and the lawn parted.

I walked down the middle of it, past a hundred faces.

A girl about twelve was crying, and she stared at me the whole way.

The parking lot behind the courthouse was empty and orange under the lights.

The deputies stopped at the edge of it, because Levi had come down the steps behind us and told them, "I've got her."

The one on the left said, "Devaney, this is a statement. We take her in."

"After," Levi said.

They went.

He stood in front of me with his jaw working.

Up close he was bigger than he'd looked on the steps, and the scar through his eyebrow was white.

"Twenty years," he said.

"Yes."

"You had a plate number for twenty years."

"I was six when I learned it."

"You were twenty-six when you could have driven to my mother's house." He said it low and quiet, which was worse than shouting. "You drove here every October. I've seen you. Behind the tree."

I had not known he had.

"You stood there with a cup of cider," he said, "and listened to her cry."

"I know."

"You don't get to say you know."

I kept my mouth shut.

He turned away and walked three steps and came back.

"Did you know what they were doing?" he said. "At six, in that van. Did you understand it?"

I wanted to say no.

But I had heard Marlene on the phone, and I had understood "the last two."

"Not all of it," I said. "Enough."

He closed his eyes.

"Here's how this goes," he said when he opened them. "You take me to every place you remember. The motel, the town, every name. You don't call anybody, you don't leave the state, and you don't lie to me once."

"All right."

"I'm not your friend. I won't be nice to you. I lead and you answer."

"All right," I said. "And you don't touch me, either, and you don't threaten me. I came here on my own."

He looked at me then, really looked.

I think he was the first person in twenty years who had.

"No touching," he said. "Fine. No lying."

"No lying."

It was the first time either of us had made a rule.

My phone had been buzzing in my pocket for five minutes with a number I didn't know.

I took out my purse to turn it off and my keys slid out of the pocket with it, and the little zipped inside compartment came open.

The barrette fell out.

It landed on the asphalt between his boots and mine, a small pink plastic butterfly with one wing chipped.

I bent down to get it, but he was faster.

He picked it up and held it in the light.

Levi did not say anything for a long time.

"This was in her hair," he said. "That morning. Mom had clipped it on herself."

"I took it off the walkway," I said. "When she ran."

"When she ran."

"I opened the door," I said. "I let her out. Garner caught her at the end of the walkway."

His thumb moved over the chipped wing.

"You kept it twenty years," he said.

"It's all I had of her."

He closed his fist around the butterfly, and for a second I thought he was going to put it in his pocket and never give it back.

I put out my hand.

He looked at it.

Then, slowly, he laid the barrette on my palm.

"Tomorrow, six a.m.," he said. "My truck. Bring everything."

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