Chapter 6: Welfare Check

Dirk didn't say a word.

He put me behind him with one arm, the way you move a child out of a road, and zipped my sweatshirt up to my chin with his other hand.

He did it without looking at me.

His fingers shook against my throat.

"Inside," he said.

"Get Zuri.

"Lock the door."

"He knows I'm here."

"He knew where you were by Brainerd," Dirk said.

"Go."

I went.

I ran across the gravel with my coat clutched in my arms and my legs still unsteady, and I did not look at the gate.

Mason met me at the foot of the iron stairs.

He had put down his paperback and picked up the monitor, and his face was white.

"He's here," I said.

"I heard the engine," Mason said.

"Where's Dutch?"

"Coming," Mason said.

Dutch came out of the back hall in a flannel shirt, buttoning the cuff, with his glasses pushed up and a heavy wrench in his other hand.

He looked at my face, and then at my hair, and then at the door.

He understood the whole of it in one glance and said nothing.

"Mason," he said.

"The truck."

"On it."

"Across the road.

"Both lanes."

Mason went out at a run.

I took Zuri out of the crib before she could wake, in her blanket, and held her against me.

She sighed, and slept.

I went out on the steps with her on my hip, in the cold, because I would not hide in a back room from that man ever again.

The yard looked like a stage.

The one working floodlight on the grain elevator lit the chain and the gate, and the cruiser behind it.

A second patrol car had pulled in behind the first, with its lights turning blue across the snow.

A young patrolman stood beside it with his hand near his belt and the look of a man who has been told a thing and is beginning to doubt it.

Marcel stood at the chain, bareheaded.

He had always been handsome in a way that made people trust him.

Neat brown hair, an easy smile, a chin that took a razor well.

"Zora," he said again, and held out a hand across the chain.

"Honey.

"I've been out of my mind."

The wind took his words and carried them to every corner of the yard.

"There's a baby involved," he said, to the young patrolman.

"My daughter.

"My wife left with her in the middle of the night, and I've driven four hundred miles to find her."