Chapter 3

The cellar door opened Friday after dark.

"Up," Vernon said. He had rope in his hand.

Two days without food. My legs shook on the stairs. I made them work anyway. Falling down in front of Vernon never helped anybody.

He tied my wrists at the kitchen table. Not rough. Not gentle. The way he tied down a load.

Bertie came out of the back room with a coat. Dinah's old brown one, the one missing a button. She hung it over my shoulders without looking at my face.

"He won't pay full for froze goods," she said.

I sat there and hummed the five notes inside my head, over and over.

Headlights swung across the kitchen window.

"He's early," Vernon said, and went out.

His boots crossed the porch. Then they stopped.

More lights. Too many lights. The window went white, then red, then blue.

Out by the gate, a truck horn opened up. A big one. Then another, farther down the road. Long flat blasts that didn't stop.

A voice came through a speaker.

"Vernon Sloane. Sheriff's department. Stay where you are."

Bertie's hand clamped around my arm, nails in. I don't know what she wanted me for.

It didn't matter. The kitchen door came in with two deputies behind it.

Outside, the whole yard was burning with light. Three semi trucks stood across the gate, nose to tail, high beams on. There was nowhere to drive out of that yard.

A deputy walked me past Vernon. He was against his own truck with his hands behind him.

"That call Tuesday night traced to the Red Bird, Vernon," the sheriff was saying. "We've been sitting on this road since Wednesday."

Then a woman broke through the line of lights.

She ran badly in the snow, arms out, and went down on her knees in the gravel right in front of me like she didn't feel it.

Her hands went straight for the rope on my wrists. They shook too hard to work the knot. A deputy cut it, and she took my hands and rubbed them like she could rub the rope marks off.

"It's you," she said. "Oh God. Look at you."

Then she pressed her lips together hard and made her voice go slow.

"Baby, listen. I have to ask you one thing. Just one." Her breath was breaking up. "When you were two, you grabbed a curling iron off the bathroom sink. I turned around for one second. One second." She stopped, and put her voice back together. "It left a burn. Right here."

She touched the inside of her own right wrist.

"Do you have it?"

I had a mark there. A pale slick patch, old as I was. I never knew where it came from.

Burns were easy to come by, in my life. Maybe it was a curling iron. Maybe it was a stove, a pipe, anything.

I remembered what I decided in the cellar.

I turned my arm over and pulled the sleeve back.

She looked at my wrist and sat straight down in the snow.

"Cole." It came out of her with no air in it. Then she found the air. "COLE!"

A big man came out of the lights and stopped ten feet away. He didn't come closer. He stood in the snow with his fists at his sides.

"The scar," she said. "Cole, she has the scar. And the song. On the phone, she hummed it. My song. Nobody on this earth knows that song."

The man looked at me for a long time.

"Don't," he said. Quiet. Not to me. Maybe not to anybody. "Don't do this to us again."

He didn't come any closer. But he didn't look away either.

The woman pulled me against her. She was thin and cold and shaking, and she held on like the deputies would have to break her arms to get me back.

Nobody had ever held me like that.

I let her.

A woman in a puffy coat with a lanyard worked her way through the lights and crouched down next to us.

"Sweetheart, my name's Renata," she said to me. "I'm going to take you somewhere warm tonight."

The arms around me went tight.

"She's coming home," the woman holding me said.

"Marnie." Renata's voice was kind. It didn't help. "You know how this goes. Until the test comes back, she can't be yours."

The arms around me didn't loosen. Not one inch.

"Then draw the blood tonight."