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“That’s going to be beautiful.”
“Hell of a thing to be knitting on a day when the temperature’s s’posed to be in the nineties, but cold weather always comes… or did, they got the climate so screwed up it’s hard to tell what’s gonna happen from one year to the next. But if the snow flies and the lake freezes, someone’ll buy this at the church sale. I have more put away, plus scarves and mittens. I get good money for these things, more than Yardley makes, but working at the impound keeps him out of my hair… and me out of his, I suppose. Works both ways. Fifty-two years is a hell of a long walk from the altar, let me tell you. And some of it’s stony. Now how can I help you?”
Holly tells how Keisha got to know Ellen Craslow, and how Ellen just dropped out of sight: there one day, gone the next. “I put her name out to the other Craslows who are on Twitter, but so far I’ve only heard from one, and he was no help.”
“Nor will any of the others, based on what I know about her. She’s gone anyplace but Traverse, Georgia. She is a sweetie, Miz Gibney—”
“Holly. Please.”
Imani nods. “A sweetie, smart as a whip, and strong. She’ll find her way.”
“You say she won’t go back to her hometown, where I assume she has people. Why is that?”
“There’s family, all right, but she is dead to them and they to her. You won’t get anything on Facebook.”
“What happened?”
For what seems like a long time there’s only the click of Imani’s needles. She’s frowning down at the yellow sweater. Then she looks up. “Is your kind of investigator bound by confidentiality? Like a lawyer or a priest or a doctor?”
Holly thinks this isn’t a real question but a test. She has an idea Imani knows. And in any case, it doesn’t matter. Honesty really is the best policy. “I have some degree of privilege, but not as much as lawyers or priests. Under certain circumstances I’d have to talk to the police or the district attorney’s office about a case, but they aren’t involved in this.” Holly leans forward. “What you say to me stays with me, Ms. McGuire.”
“Call me Immi.”
“All right.” Holly smiles. She’s got a good one. Jerome tells her she doesn’t use it enough.
“I’m gonna take you at your word, Holly. Because I cared for that girl. Certainly felt sorry for her troubles. I just want you to know that I’m no tattletale and no backfence gossip.”
“Noted,” Holly says. “May I turn on my phone and record this?”
“No you may not.” Click-click go the needles. “I don’t think I’d tell you at all if you were a man. I’ve never told Yard. But women, we know more than they do. Don’t we?”
“Yes. Yes we do.”
“All right, then. Ellen—she was always an Ellen, never an Ellie—she was in her family’s bad books ever since twelve or thirteen, when she gave up eating meat, or any meat products. Total vegetarian. No, that’s not right. Total vegan. Her family was part of one of those hardshell bunches, the First Unreformed Church of I Know Better, and when she quit eating flesh they quoted the Bible at her left and right. The pastor counseled her.”
Imani puts a satiric emphasis on counseled.
“I’m a fallen-away hardshell myself, and I know you can always find scripture to support what you believe, and they found plenty. In Romans it says the weak person eats only vegetables. Deuteronomy, the Lord has promised you shall eat meat. Corinthians, eat whatever is sold in the meat market. Huh! They must have loved that one in Wuhan, where this damn plague came from. Then when she was fourteen, they caught her with another girl.”
“Oh-oh,” Holly says.
“Oh-oh is right. She tried to run away, but they brought her back. Her family. Don’t suppose you know why?”
“Because she was their cross to bear,” Holly says, thinking of times when her own mother said something similar, always prefacing it with a sigh and an Oh, Holly.
“So. You know.”
“Yes I do,” Holly says, and something in her voice opens the door to the rest of the story, which Imani might not have told her otherwise.
“When she was eighteen, she got raped. They wore masks, those stocking things people wear when they go skiing, but she recognized one of them by his stutter. He was from her church. Sang in the choir. Ellen said he had a good voice, and didn’t stutter when he sang. Excuse me.”
She raises the back of one hand and wipes at her left eye. Then the needles resume their synchronized flight. Watching the sun flash on them is hypnotic.
“You know what they kept talking about? Meat! How they were giving her the meat, and didn’t she like it, wasn’t it good? Wasn’t it something she couldn’t get from some girl? She said one of them tried to put his doodad in her mouth, told her to go on and eat the meat, and she told him he’d lose it if he did. So that boy fetched her a wallop upside her head and for the rest of the business she was only about a quarter conscious. And guess what came of that?”
Holly knows this, too. “She got pregnant.”
“Indeed she did. Went on down to Planned Parenthood and got it taken care of. When her folks found out—I don’t know how, she didn’t tell them—they told her she wasn’t part of the family anymore. She was ex-com-mu-nicated. Her daddy said she was a murderer no different from Cain in Genesis, and told her to go where Cain went, to the east of Eden. But Traverse, Georgia, was no Eden to Ellen, furthest thing from it, and she didn’t go east. She went north. Worked ten years’ worth of blue-collar jobs and wound up here, up to the college.”
