Chapter 32
Violet slouched in a booth at Bessie’s Diner with a decent view of the police station diagonally across the street.
She held a mug of smoldering-hot coffee, amazed she hadn’t been turned away at the door, and even more so that she hadn’t been asked to leave in the hours she had occupied the booth.
She’d come in around breakfast, and now folks were finishing late lunch.
“You thinking about something else to eat?”
Violet clutched her coffee and smiled at the waitress. Despite the black-and-white cow on the diner’s menus, she thought this might actually be Bessie. The place had customers, but not enough to warrant more than one waitress and one cook.
“Thanks for being so patient with me,” Violet said.
The waitress raised her eyebrows and lowered her voice. “Honey, you came in here looking like you been through the war. I’m not gonna ask how your morning went, nor last night neither, but it’s pretty clear you needed a little break.”
“You’re an angel.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say there’s a man involved.”
Violet glanced out the window at the police station. “Isn’t there always?”
The waitress understood. “So that’s it.” She smiled sadly. “You’re not the first girl to park in one of these booths and wait for her troubles to start up again.”
“It’s not like that.”
“You’re not the first girl to say that, either.”
Weary, Violet smiled. “Maybe it is a little like that.”
The waitress tapped the menu on the table. “The ham and eggs you had this morning won’t get you through the day. How about a chicken salad sandwich? I make up the chicken salad myself. Put it on two slices of rosemary sourdough and it’s just dandy.”
“You make that rosemary bread yourself, too?”
“Baked it at five o’clock this morning,” the waitress said.
Violet stared at her. “If I were a man, I’d marry you.”
“You’re not the first girl to come in here and say that, either.”
She walked away without taking an order, which led Violet to assume she was about to have chicken salad on rosemary sourdough.
If there was a fat, tangy pickle on the plate, she’d consider herself in heaven, at least long enough to eat her lunch.
After that, it was back to this hell she’d gotten herself into by falling in love not once but twice.
The train wreck had left her without a change of clothes.
She wore dark gray woolen trousers and the sweater she’d borrowed from a stranger’s suitcase and never returned.
Her coat had been on the train as well, lost in the wreckage.
The outfit would have been plenty warm if the stolen VW hadn’t run out of gas, forcing her to walk two hours into Crowson in a rainstorm.
Some of the mud and blood from the scene at the crash site had stained, but it was blotchy and drenched, and that made it difficult to distinguish from the dirt.
Her short boots were soft black leather, perfect for travel this time of year, far more stylish than Elkhart had demanded, but at least they’d been comfortable until the rain had soaked them.
The hours in the diner had dried her clothes, but the boots were still wet inside.
Her feet hurt from walking so far in them, and they’d tightened as they dried, until at last she’d taken them off and hidden her feet under the table out of embarrassment.
Someone dropped a spoon. The metal clattered loudly, and a middle-aged couple holding hands across their table jumped a bit, turned to look at the door, and generally looked guilty enough that Violet assumed they were not local, that they’d met here because it was out of the way and their spouses would never know.
Ordinary life. Ordinary people.
How much would they scream if they’d seen what she’d seen?
Her view of the police station included the side of the property, where Alfie and Benjy stood in the rain.
In the sullen, gray daylight, they looked carved of stone, some kind of lawn ornamentation.
Alfie’s bright orange hair lay flat, rain-slicked to his scalp, turned dark by a soaking.
The boy seemed smaller than before, like damp cloth plastered to bones.
Violet watched them, and they watched the police station, waiting for a chance at Malcolm and Jennie, waiting for a chance to get their hands on Maggie’s body.
She glanced at the clock behind the lunch counter.
It had the Bessie’s logo painted on the face.
The passing hours had pressed their weight on Violet, but still it shocked her to see it was past two o’clock.
Her pulse quickened. The time to get them out of jail had come and gone.
Another couple of hours and it might be too late.
“Here you go, honey,” the waitress said as she slid the sandwich plate onto the table.
Violet thanked her, gratified to see her lunch did come with a pickle.
The rosemary baked into the bread smelled wonderful.
As she took her first bite, she wondered if the money tucked inside her brassiere would be enough to pay the bill for both breakfast and lunch.
Anytime she traveled, she put a few dollars there just in case her purse might be stolen.
On this trip, she hadn’t even carried her purse.
She’d had some other money in her traveling bag, and otherwise, she’d relied on Malcolm.
Seven or eight dollars. She figured the little billfold in her bra was that much, at least.
Nothing to be done about it now. The sandwich was just as delicious as the waitress had promised.
When she glanced up, Alfie and Benjy had moved.
The rain sluiced off them as Alfie bent and whispered something in the boy’s ear, then stood and resumed his vigil. Benjy tucked his hands into his pockets as if he might be walking home from school, and quick-stepped to the sidewalk in front of the police station. He turned left and hurried away.
“No,” Violet said.
“What’s that, hon?” The waitress had returned. She slid a glass of water onto the table.
Violet thrust her fingers down into her blouse, plucked out whatever dollars were there, tossed them on the table, and slid out of the booth, nearly knocking the waitress over.
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
She was halfway to the door when she realized her shoes were missing, forcing her to dart back and duck under the table to retrieve them. Dirty and disheveled, she knew she must be a spectacle, but it didn’t slow her down.
“Sorry,” she said again.
The waitress wore a sad smile. “Good luck, sweetie.”
Violet rushed out with boots in hand.
The wind had picked up. The rain slashed down at an angle, so heavy it felt vengeful, as if she’d angered it by taking the time to get dry.
Her feet splashed in puddles as she raced in pursuit of that little boy, but it didn’t take her long to catch up to him.
He might be stronger than ordinary children, but his legs weren’t any longer.
She followed along as he turned a corner, past a butcher’s and a hardware store.
Back on the main street, there was a bakery and clothing store and even a little bookshop, but she’d found what seemed the more practical, rudimentary block in this little town.
The boy crossed the street toward a Union 76 gas station, cut across the parking lot, and made his way to what appeared to be a deep gully.
He vanished down into the gully, and Violet broke into a puddle-splashing run to make sure she didn’t lose him, praying there’d be no broken glass in the parking lot.
A man behind the counter inside the station glanced up from a magazine.
He looked at her as if she were out of her mind, and maybe she was, but when she got to the edge of the gully, she crept slowly, boots still in hand, not making a sound above the wind and rain.
A shallow brook rushed along the bottom of the gully.
The water flowed into a concrete culvert, a tube about five feet in diameter.
She poked her head up, trying to make out where the water might come out, but it looked as if the culvert passed under the road and then beneath several railroad tracks before running out into another gully quite a ways off.
It would be dark down there, where the water flowed. No sunlight at all.
She watched Benjy splash into the brook and dart into the culvert, so small he didn’t need to duck, and then she sat on her behind and forced her wet feet into her too-tight boots, picturing in her mind the moment Alfie had whispered instructions to that child—words that had sent him here. Sent him down into the dark.
Words for their masters.
Punished by the rain, she slid down into the gully and managed to stop herself before her boots would have splashed into the brook.
They were already wet and ruined, but the water would be cold, and that would have been the last straw.
She hurried along the edge of the brook, eyes narrowed against the rain, trying to peer into the utter darkness of the culvert.
The concrete throat yawned wide. The first few feet allowed the dim gray daylight to enter, but beyond that, she could see nothing, and that was where the boy had gone.
Instinct had made Violet rush down after him—partly in fear for him and partly out of the need to learn more about the monsters—but her steps began to slow, and then she stopped, staring at the dark.
The culvert’s mouth whispered with the voice of the brook, but something else moved in the dark, heavy and wet and waiting.
A shudder of despair passed through her.
“Benjy!” she called. “Come out of there! Don’t let them have you like this.”
Back in the darkness of the culvert, something scoffed.