he picked her mother up to take her out to dinner, but whenever he did, Eloise made it clear to him that it was neither necessary nor welcome for him to speak to the child. Gabriella was wicked, she explained to him vaguely more than once, so much so that she was reluctant to share the details with him. And he understood early on that befriending Gabriella was not the way into Eloise's good graces. If anything, it was wiser to avoid her, so after a while, he said nothing to her at all.
There had been a constant parade of men who came to see Eloise to take her out, but the man from California was the most frequent visitor. His name was Frank. Franklin Waterford. And all Gabriella knew about him was that he was from San Francisco, and living in New York for the winter. She wasn't sure why, and he talked about California a lot with her mother, and told her how much she was going to love it when she came out. And then her mother began to talk about going to Reno for six weeks. Gabriella had no idea where that was, or why her mother wanted to go there, and they never explained any of it to her. All she knew was what she overheard as they walked past her room, chatting animatedly on their way out, or what she could hear when they sat in the library late at night, drinking and talking and laughing. And she couldn't help wondering what she would do about school when she and her mother went to Reno. But there was no way to ask her about it. She knew that if she asked her anything, her mother would fly into a rage.
Gabriella just went on with her life, waiting for news and explanations, checking the mail every day when she got home from school, hoping to find a letter from her father, telling her where he was. But it was never there, and when her mother saw her rifling through the mail one day, the inevitable happened. But the beatings were a little less energetic these days, and slightly less frequent. She was too busy with her own life now to worry about “disciplining” Gabriella. Most of the time, she informed Gabriella that she was hopeless. Her father had figured it out after all, hadn't he? And she herself could no longer be expected to waste her life trying to make something of Gabriella. It wasn't even worth her time to do that. So she left Gabriella to her own devices, to fend for herself and, most of the time, make her own dinner, if there was enough food in the house to do it at all, which more often than not, there wasn't.
Jeannie, the housekeeper, left promptly at five o'clock every afternoon, and whenever she thought she could get away with it, she left a little something on the stove for Gabriella. But if she fussed over her, or “spoiled” her, or talked to her too much, the child paid a high price for it, and she knew that, so she feigned indifference, and forced herself not to think of what would happen to Gabriella after she left. She had the saddest eyes of any child Jeannie had ever seen, and it pained her just to look at her. But she knew better than anyone that there was nothing she could do to help her. Her father had disappeared and left her to work out her own fate with her mother, and Eloise was a hellion. But Gabriella was her child, after all. What could Jeannie possibly do to help her, except leave a little soup on the stove sometimes, or put a cool compress on a bruise the child said she had gotten in the schoolyard. But even Jeannie knew that schoolyard bruises didn't happen in those sizes and locations. There was a handprint on Gabriella's back once that looked like someone had drawn it on her, and Jeannie didn't have any trouble figuring out how it got there. At times, she almost wished the child would run away, she'd have been better off alone in the streets, than with her mother. All she had here were warm clothes and a roof over her head, but she had no warmth, no love, scarcely enough food to survive, and no one in the world to care about her. But Jeannie knew that even if Gabriella