driver was a raggedy, nearly toothless white woman wearing yellow boots and a strange sort of home-sewn poncho. She let Bad ride in the cart among her potatoes and string beans, and even gifted me a sack of them when she let me off near Brattleboro.
“Don’t know where you’re headed, but it seems far.” She sniffed, then offered: “Keep your dog close, don’t take rides from men in nice cars, and steer clear of the law.” I suspected she’d fallen through the cracks, too.
I made it across the New York State line just as the day purpled into dusk. I’d only taken one more ride, perched in the back of an empty logging truck with a dozen or so stolid, sawdusted men who did their best to ignore me. One of them fed Bad the leftover rinds from his bacon sandwich. He raised one hand in a sort of salute when they left me standing at a crossroads.
I slept that night in a three-sided sheep shed. The sheep baaed suspiciously at us, watching Bad with their queer, sideways eyes, and I fell asleep missing the soft sounds of Jane and Samuel beside me.
I dreamed of white fingers reaching toward me, and a fox-toothed smile, and Mr. Havemeyer’s voice: They’ll never stop looking for you.
It took me five days, three hundred miles, a road map stolen from the Albany train station, and at least four near-misses with local law enforcement to reach the western edge of New York State. I might’ve traveled faster, except for the wanted poster.
I’d stopped at a post office on the second morning to mail Mr. Locke’s letter, after some sweaty-palmed hesitation outside. But he deserved to know I wasn’t trapped forever in a desolate, foreign world, didn’t he? And if he tried to come after me, my letter would lead him on a rather inconvenient detour to Japan. Locke didn’t know there was another way home, a back Door just waiting to be unlocked.
I pushed the letter across the counter, and then I saw it: a fresh white poster tacked to the wall. My own face looked down from it, printed in smeary black and white.
MISSING CHILD. Miss January Scaller, seventeen, has gone missing from her home in Shelburne, Vermont. Her guardian urgently seeks information relating to her whereabouts. She has a history of hysteria and confusion and should be approached with caution. She may be in the company of a colored woman and an ill-behaved dog. SUBSTANTIAL REWARD OFFERED. Please contact Mr. Cornelius Locke. 1611 Champlain Drive, Shelburne, Vt.
It was the picture from Mr. Locke’s party, the one my father had never liked. My face looked round and young, and my hair was so ferociously pinned that my eyebrows were slightly raised. My neck stuck out from its starched collar like a turtle tentatively looking out of its shell. I checked my own reflection in the post office window—dust-grimed and sun-darkened, my hair suspended in an unruly knot of braids and twists—and thought it unlikely that anyone would recognize me.
But still: a chill, creeping fear slunk up my spine at the thought that every stranger on the street might know my name, that every police officer might be looking for the timid girl in the picture. It seemed to me the Society hardly needed their masks and feathers and stolen magics when they had all the mundane mechanisms of civil society at their fingertips.
I stuck to the winding back roads after that, and took fewer rides.
By the time I reached Buffalo, though, I was hungry and worn enough to take a risk. I staggered into the front office of the Buffalo Laundry Co. and begged for paying work, half-expecting to be tossed out into the street.
But apparently there were three girls out sick and a big load of uniforms recently arrived from the reform school, so the proprietress handed me a starched white apron, informed me that I would earn thirty-three and one-half cents every hour, and placed me under the jurisdiction of a muscly, humorless white woman named Big Linda. Big Linda looked me over with an expression of deepest misgiving and set me to shaking out wet clothes and feeding them into the mangle.
“And keep your damn hands away from the rollers, if you like your fingers,” she added.
It was hard. (If you don’t think laundry is hard, you’ve never lifted several hundred soaked wool uniforms in the steamy heat of a washroom in July.) The air felt like something you drank rather