Chapter 24: A Table of My Own

I gave Diane her quarter of an hour on Thursday, in the visiting room of the county jail.

Lucy sat beside me with a notebook, and Nate waited outside.

Diane wore an orange jumpsuit and no pearls.

Without them her neck looked thin and old.

"Ask," she said.

"The girl before me," I said. "At twenty-two. What was her name?"

Diane closed her eyes.

She said the name slowly, and Lucy wrote it down.

"She was a nursing student," Diane said. "I paid her a hundred thousand dollars to sign a paper and move to Arizona."

Lucy's pen stopped.

"Did she go to the police?" I asked.

"I made sure she didn't."

"Where in Arizona?"

Diane told me the town.

She told me the street, and the name of the lawyer who had arranged it.

I wrote nothing down.

Lucy wrote everything.

"Why are you telling me?" I said.

"Because you asked, and nobody asked her."

I stood up.

"I won't forgive you," I said.

"I haven't earned it."

"No," I said. "You haven't."

I walked out into the hall with my hands steady.

By the end of the week the prosecutor had a new file with that woman's name on it.

She called to tell me, and she sounded almost shy.

"She picked up on the second ring," she said. "She said she'd been waiting twelve years for someone to call."

On Saturday I set my own table.

It was a rented house on Linden Street, with a porch and a crooked gate.

The lease carried my name above Nate's, because I had signed it first.

I had started Monday at a dental clinic across the river.

My new manager had never heard of Slocumb Auto, and she asked me nothing at all about my husband.

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