Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“She just goes out of state while she’s on bail?”

“I didn’t know there was a proscription on the bail. The prosecutor knows our attorney. We were a phone call away.”

“She left the state. What is it you don’t understand about that?”

I wasn’t sure what “that” was. But I knew I had made a terrible mistake. The anger I saw in her eyes had nothing to do with the issue at hand. Rosita and I were a personal affront to Miss Lemun­yon and the system that validated and empowered her. I thought of the nurse who came to our house with a psychiatrist in 1934 and took away my mother. I also thought of the death camp where I had found Rosita. Deviants and monsters ran the camps where families were sent up the chimney or turned into bars of soap, but they would have been powerless without the clerks who sat anonymously behind typewriters and gave them bureaucratic legitimacy.

“The fault is mine, Miss Lemunyon,” I said.

“What do you think ‘bail’ means?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Do you think it means permission to do whatever you want?”

Any answer I gave her would be the wrong one. I knew that. I also knew it was too late to turn the situation around. “Would you like to talk to our attorney? Maybe he can assure the prosecutor’s office that Mrs. Holland had no desire to be a fugitive.”

“She’s an alien?”

“A resident alien, that’s correct.”

“Her file has been flagged.”

“Flagged?”

“She’s come to the attention of the FBI. Where did you go in Louisiana?”

“Down by the coast.”

“You were there for business purposes, and you took her with you?”

“Yes, that says it.”

“I want to see the letter I sent you.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“You said you had not opened it. I want to see it. It should be in your mail.”

“You’re right,” I said.

I found her letter among a stack of unopened envelopes on the dining room table. I showed it to her. She placed a business card on the coffee table. “I want her in my office by eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

“We’ll be there.”

She got up from the chair. She brushed at her skirt and straightened her jacket. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“There’s a chance Mrs. Holland might not leave the building. I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she replied.

LINDA GAIL MET Roy in the lounge at the Shamrock. After they had a drink, he went up to the penthouse; she followed him twenty minutes later. From the balcony, she could see the nocturnal glow of the swimming pool and, across South Main, the oil wells that pumped night and day, as steady and reassuring as the beat of the human heart. Roy turned down the lights and undressed her and laid her down on the bed, then sat beside her and looked into her face. “You like the hotel?” he asked.

“Of course.”

He put his mouth on hers. His lips were cold from the whiskey and soda he had been drinking. He tried to put his tongue inside her mouth.

“Roy?” she said, turning away on the pillow.