“If I had to pick . . .” Crow tapped Abra’s picture. “She’s got a certain look in her eyes. A steamy look.”
Jimmy puzzled over this for a moment, decided it was dirty, and guffawed. “Does it help?”
“Yes. Can you print these pictures and make sure the others have copies? Particularly Barry. He’s Locator in Chief on this one.”
“I’ll do it right now. I’m packing a Fujitsu ScanSnap. Great little on-the-go machine. I used to have the S1100, but I swapped it when I read in Computerworld—”
“Just do it, okay?”
“Sure.”
Crow picked up the magazine again and turned to the cartoon on the last page, the one where you were supposed to fill in the caption. This week’s showed an elderly woman walking into a bar with a bear on a chain. She had her mouth open, so the caption had to be her dialogue. Crow considered carefully, then printed: “Okay, which one of you assholes called me a cunt?”
Probably not a winner.
The Winnebago rolled on through the deepening evening. In the cockpit, Nut turned on the headlights. In one of the bunks, Barry the Chink turned and scratched at his wrist in his sleep. A red spot had appeared there.
4
The three men sat in silence while Abra went upstairs to get something in her room. Dave thought of suggesting coffee—they looked tired, and both men needed a shave—but decided he wasn’t going to offer either of them so much as a dry Saltine until he got an explanation. He and Lucy had discussed what they were going to do when Abra came home some day in the not-too-distant future and announced that a boy had asked her out, but these were men, men, and it seemed that the one he didn’t know had been dating his daughter for quite some time. After a fashion, anyway . . . and wasn’t that really the question: What sort of fashion?
Before any of them could risk starting a conversation that was bound to be awkward—and perhaps acrimonious—there came the muted thunder of Abra’s sneakers on the stairs. She came into the room with a copy of The Anniston Shopper. “Look at the back page.”
Dave turned the newspaper over and grimaced. “What’s this brown dreck?”
“Dried coffee grounds. I threw the newspaper in the trash, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I fished it out again. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.” She pointed to the picture of Bradley Trevor in the bottom row. “And his parents. And his brothers and sisters, if he had them.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He had freckles, Daddy. He hated them, but his mother said they were good luck.”
“You can’t know that,” Dave said with no conviction at all.
“She knows,” John said, “and so do you. Get with us on this, Dave. Please. It’s important.”
“I want to know about you and my daughter,” Dave said to Dan. “Tell me about that.”
Dan went through it again. Doodling Abra’s name in his AA meeting book. The first chalked hello. His clear sense of Abra’s presence on the night Charlie Hayes died. “I asked if she was the little girl who sometimes wrote on my blackboard. She didn’t answer in words, but there was a little run of piano music. Some old Beatles tune, I think.”
Dave looked at John. “You told him about that!”
John shook his head.
Dan said, “Two years ago I got a blackboard message from her that said, ‘They are killing the baseball boy.’ I didn’t know what it meant, and I’m not sure Abra did, either. That might have been the end of it, but then she saw that.” He pointed to the back page of The Anniston Shopper with all those postage-stamp portraits.
Abra told the rest.
When she was done, Dave said: “So you flew to Iowa on a thirteen-year-old girl’s sayso.”
“A very special thirteen-year-old girl,” John said. “With some very special talents.”
“We thought all that was over.” Dave shot Abra an accusing look. “Except for a few little premonitions, we thought she outgrew it.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Maybe she shouldn’t have to be sorry,” Dan said, hoping he didn’t sound as angry as he felt. “She hid her ability because she knew you and your wife wanted it to be gone. She hid it because she loves you and wanted to be a good daughter.”