Chapter 28: The Ditch

Hattie's POV

Dean was already down the loft ladder with his boots in his hand when I reached the barn.

"I heard the phone," he said. "Where?"

"The Haskell place. Now."

I put Daisy's sleeping weight into the widow's arms on the porch, and she said nothing but "Go."

We took my truck.

I called the deputy from the road, and a tired dispatcher said he was forty minutes out on a call at the county's far end.

"She's loading a child into a truck right now," I said.

"Ma'am, he'll come as fast as he can."

I hung up and drove faster.

Jesse had called back twice on the way.

"I'm going to block the lane," he said the second time. "She can't get a flatbed past a truck."

"Don't get in front of her."

"Hat, I'm not going to get in front of anything. I'm going to park."

When we turned in at the cottonwoods, his truck sat crosswise in the Haskell lane with its flashers going.

The man from Havre stood on the gravel with both hands up and his cap in one of them.

"I haul stuff," he told us before I'd stopped rolling. "Nobody said a thing about a kid. I'm not doing this."

He walked past us down the county road toward his own rig.

Jesse stood at his open door.

"She's got Birdie in the pickup," he said. "She went round the back of the house."

"Where's the back go?"

"A hay field and a creek."

I could already hear the engine.

Lottie's pickup came around the corner of the house with its lights on high, and it didn't turn for the lane.

It went straight across the yard, through a wire gate, and into the pasture.

Her taillights bounced out across the dark grass toward the old county road on the far side.

"Dean," I said.

"I'm in."

Jesse was back in his truck before I had turned the wheel.

We went through the gate after her, one behind the other.

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