The Daughter They Abandoned Twice novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: Back Room
We took two rooms at a motel on the highway outside Sallisaw, with a door between them.
Levi propped his side open with a chair and told me it was so he could hear me if I ran.
I told him I had nowhere to run to.
He didn't answer that.
At nine that night I was sitting on the edge of the bed with the heater rattling, and I had been staring at the same patch of carpet for an hour.
He came through the door with two paper cups.
"Vending machine," he said. "It's terrible."
I took one and drank it.
It was terrible.
"There's a little girl in that church," I said.
"I know."
"She's eight. Marlene said it loud enough that I would know she meant it."
"Then we call the state." Levi sat down in the chair, and his knees nearly touched the bed. "Child welfare, the county, the state investigators. I'll make the calls tonight."
"And Marlene gets a phone call before they've found the road."
He looked at me.
"She has a church," I said. "She has the sheriff's wife in her choir, the mayor's cousin in her pews and eighteen kids in a county program. They won't raid a pastor's pet ministry on a story from the girl they all just watched her hug."
"You think they'd bury it."
"I think she'd have an hour's warning, and she knows how to use an hour." My voice had started to shake. "She's done this before. I was in the van. I know what an hour does."
Levi put his cup down.
"What would she do with the child?" he said.
"Move her."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Garner always had somewhere."
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