Kaye pulled the Toyota truck to the side of the rutted dirt road and dropped her head onto the wheel. The rain had stopped, but they had nearly gotten their wheels stuck in mud several times. She moaned.
Mitch threw open the door. “This is the road. This is the address. Shit!”
He flung the crumpled piece of paper into a wet ditch. The only house here had been boarded up for a long time, and half of it had slumped into cinders after a fire. Five or six acres of weed-grown farm ground surrounded them, sullen behind a veil of low mist. Streamers of cloud played hide-and-seek with a watery sun. The house was bright, then dark, beneath the coming and going of those wide gray fingers.
“Maybe he doesn’t have her.” Kaye looked at Mitch through the open door.
“I could have transposed a number,” Mitch said, leaning against the cab.
His cell phone rang. They both jerked as if stuck with pins. Mitch pulled the phone out and said, “Yes.” The phone recognized his voice and announced that the calling party’s number was blocked, then asked if he would take the call anyway.
“Yes,” he said, without thinking.
“Daddy?” The voice on the other end was tense, high-pitched, but it sounded like Stella’s.
“Where are you?”
“Is that you? Daddy?” The voice went through a digital bird fight and steadied. He had never heard that sort of sound before and it worried him.
“It’s me, honey. Where are you?”
“I’m at this house. I saw the house number on the mail box.”
Mitch pulled a pen and pad from his inside coat pocket and wrote down the number and road.
“Stay tight, Stella, and don’t let anyone touch you,” he said, working to steady his voice. “We’re on our way.” He reluctantly said good-bye and closed the phone. His face was like red sandstone, he was so furious.
“Is she okay?”
Mitch nodded, then opened the phone again and punched in another number.
“Who are you calling?”
“State police,” he said.
“We can’t!” Kaye cried. “They’ll take her!”
“It’s too late to worry about that,” Mitch said. “This guy’s going for bounty, and he wants all of us.”
So many pictures in the hall leading to the back of the house. Generation after generation of Trinkets, Stella assumed, from faded color snapshots clustered in a single frame to larger, sepia-colored prints showing men and women and children wearing stiff brown clothes and peering with pinched expressions, as if the eyes of the future scared them.
“Our legacy,” Fred Trinket told her. “Old genes. All those arrangements, gone!” He grinned and walked ahead, his shoulders rolling with each step. He had a fat back, Stella saw. Fat neck and fat back. His calves were taut, however, as if he did a lot of walking, but pale and hairy. Perhaps he walked at night.
Trinket pushed open a screen door.
“Let me know if she wants lunch,” the mother said from the kitchen, halfway up the hall and to the left. As Mrs. Trinket dried a dish, Stella saw a dark, damp towel flick out of the kitchen like a snake’s tongue.
“Yes, Mother,” Trinket murmured. “This way, Miss Rafelson.”
He descended a short flight of wooden steps and walked across the gravel path to a long, dark building about ten paces beyond. Stella saw a doghouse but no dog, and a small orchard of clothes trees spinning slowly in the wind after the storm, their lines empty.
Along would come Mother Trinket, Stella thought, and pin up the laundry, and it would be clothes tree springtime. When the clothes were dry she would pull them down and stuff them in her basket and it would be winter again. Expressionless Mother Trinket was the seasonal heart of the old house, mistress of the backyard.
Stella’s mouth was dry. Her nose hurt. She touched behind her ears where it itched when she was nervous. Her finger came away waxy. She wanted to take a washcloth and remove all the old scents, clean herself for the people in the long outbuilding. A word came to her: prensing, preening and cleansing. It was a lovely word and it made her tremble like a leaf.
Trinket unlocked the door to the rear building. Inside, Stella saw fluorescent lights sputter on, bright and blue, over workbenches, an old refrigerator, stacked cardboard boxes, and, to the right, a strong wire mesh door.
The voices grew louder. Stella thought she heard three or four. They were speaking in a way she could not understand—low, guttural, with piping high exclamations. Someone coughed.
“They’re inside,” Trinket said. He unlocked the wire door with a brass key tied to a dirty length of twine. “They just finished eating. We’ll fetch the trays for Mother.” He pulled the mesh door open.
Stella did not move. Not even the promise of the voices, the promise that had brought her this far, could persuade her to take another step.
“There are four inside, just like you. They need your help. I’ll go in with you.”
“Why the lock?” Stella asked.
“People drive around, sometimes they have guns…take potshots. Just not safe,” Trinket said. “It’s not safe for your kind. Since my wife’s death, I’ve made it one of my jobs, my duty, to protect those I come across on the road. Youngsters like you.”
“Where’s your daughter?” Stella asked.
“She’s in Idaho.”
“I don’t believe you,” Stella said.
“Oh, it’s true. They took her away last year. I’ve never been to visit her.”
“They let parents visit sometimes.”
“I just can’t bear the thought of going.” His expression had changed, and his smell, too.
“You’re lying,” Stella said. She could feel her glands working, itching. Stella could not smell it herself, could not in fact smell anything her nose was so dry, but she knew the room was thick with her persuasion scent.
Trinket seemed to deflate, arms dropping, hands relaxing. He pointed to the wire mesh door. He was thinking, or waiting. Stella moved away. The key dangled from the rope in his hand. “Your people,” he said, and scratched his nose.
“Let us go,” Stella said. It was more than a suggestion.
Trinket shook his head slowly, then lifted his eyes. She thought she might be having an effect on him, despite his nose plugs and the mints.
“Let us all go,” Stella said.
The old woman came in so quietly Stella did not hear her. She was surprisingly strong. She grabbed Stella around the ribs, pinning her arms and making her squeak like a mouse, and shoved her through the door. Her book fell to the floor. Trinket swung up and caught the key on its string, then slammed and locked the gate before Stella could turn around.
“They’re lonely in there,” Trinket’s mother told Stella. She wore a clothespin on her nose and her eyes were watering. “Let my son do his work. Fred, maybe now she’d like some lunch.”
Trinket