Echo Burning (6 page)

“So who does Ellie look like?” he asked.

“Them,” she said.

The waitress brought ice water and a pad and a pencil and an upturned chin and no conversation. Carmen ordered iced coffee and Reacher ordered his hot and black.

“She doesn't look like she's mine at all,” Carmen said. “Pink skin, yellow hair, a little chubby. But she's got my eyes.”

“Lucky Ellie,” Reacher said.

She smiled briefly. “Thank you. Plan is she should stay lucky.”

She held the water glass flat against her face. Then she used a napkin to wipe the dew away. The waitress brought their drinks. The iced coffee was in a tall glass, and she spilled some of it as she put it down. Reacher's was in an insulated plastic carafe, and she shoved an empty china mug across the table next to it. She left the check facedown halfway between the two drinks, and walked away without saying anything at all.

“You need to understand I loved Sloop once,” Carmen said.

Reacher made no reply, and she looked straight at him.

“Does it bother you to hear this kind of stuff?” she asked.

He shook his head, although the truth was it did bother him, a little. Loners aren't necessarily too comfortable with a stranger's intimacies.

“You told me to start at the beginning,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

“So I will,” she said. “I loved him once. You need to understand that. And you need to understand that wasn't hard to do. He was big, and he was handsome, and he smiled a lot, and he was casual, and he was relaxed. And we were in school and we were young, and L.A. is a very special place, where anything seems possible and nothing seems to matter very much.”

She took a drinking straw from the canister on the table and unwrapped it.

“And you need to know where I was coming from,” she said. “Truth is, I had it all completely backward. I wasn't some Mexican worrying about whether the white family would accept me. I was worrying about
my
family accepting this gringo boy. That's how it seemed to me. I come from a thousand acres in Napa, we've been there forever, we were always the richest people I knew. And the most cultured. We had the art, and the history, and the music. We gave to museums. We employed white people. So I spent my time worrying about what my folks would say about me marrying out.”

He sipped his coffee. It was stewed and old, but it would do.

“And what did they say?” he asked.

“They went insane. I thought they were being foolish. Now I understand they weren't.”

“So what happened?”

She sipped her drink through the straw. Took a napkin from a canister and dabbed her lips. It came away marked with her lipstick.

“Well, I was pregnant,” she said. “And that made everything a million times worse, of course. My parents are very devout, and they're very traditional, and basically they cut me off, I guess. They disowned me. It was like the whole Victorian thing, expelled from the snowy doorstep with a bundle of rags, except it wasn't snowing, of course, and the bundle of rags was really a Louis Vuitton valise.”

“So what did you do?”

“We got married. Nobody came, just a few friends from school. We lived a few months in L.A., we graduated, we stayed there until the baby was a month away. It was fun, actually. We were young and in love.”

He poured himself a second cup of coffee.

“But?” he asked.

“But Sloop couldn't find a job. I began to realize he wasn't trying very hard. Getting a job wasn't in his plan. College was four years of fun for him, then it was back to the fold, go take over Daddy's business. His father was ready to retire by then. I didn't like that idea. I thought we were starting up fresh, on our own, you know, a new generation on both sides. I felt I'd given stuff up, and I thought he should, too. So we argued a lot. I couldn't work, because of being so pregnant, and I had no money of my own. So in the end we couldn't make the rent, so in the end he won the argument, and we trailed back here to Texas, and we moved in to the big old house with his folks and his brother and his cousins all around, and I'm still there.”

The dying fall was back in her voice. The day her life changed forever.

“And?” he asked.

She looked straight at him. “And it was like the ground opens up and you fall straight through to hell. It was such a
shock, I couldn't even react at all. They treated me strange, and the second day I suddenly realized what was going on. All my life I'd been like a princess, you know, and then I was just a hip kid among ten thousand others in L.A., but now I was suddenly just a piece of beaner trash. They never said it straight out, but it was
so
clear. They hated me, because I was the greaseball whore who'd hooked their darling boy. They were painfully polite, because I guess their strategy was to wait for Sloop to come to his senses and dump me. It happens, you know, in Texas. The good old boys, when they're young and foolish, they like a little dark meat. Sometimes it's like a rite of passage. Then they wise up and straighten out. I knew that's what they were thinking. And hoping. And it was a shock, believe me. I had never thought of myself like that. Never. I'd never had to. Never had to confront it. The whole world was turned upside down, in an instant. Like falling in freezing water. Couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't even move.”

“But he didn't dump you, evidently.”

She looked down at the table.

“No,” she said. “He didn't dump me. He started hitting me instead. First time, he punched me in the face. Then Ellie was born the next day.”

 

The Crown Victoria
turned back into a normal Hertz rental behind a stand of trees eight miles off the highway, halfway between Abilene and Big Spring. The Virginia plates came off, and the Texas plates went back on. The plastic wheel covers were kicked back into place. The cellular antennas were peeled off the rear glass and laid back in the valise. The CB whips pulled clear of the sheet metal and joined them. The souvenir ball caps were nested together and packed away with the handguns. Eugene's mobile phone was smashed against a rock and the pieces hurled deep into the thicket. A little grit from the shoulder of the road was sprinkled onto the front passenger seat, so that the rental people would have to vacuum up any of Eugene's stray hairs and fibers along with it.

Then the big sedan pulled back onto the blacktop and wound its way back to the highway. It cruised comfortably, heading west, a forgettable vehicle filled with three forgettable people. It made one more stop, at a comfort area named for the Colorado River, where sodas were consumed and a call was made from an untraceable payphone. The call was to Las Vegas, from where it was rerouted to Dallas, from where it was rerouted to an office in a small town in the west of Texas. The call reported complete success so far, and it was gratefully received.

 

“He split my
lip and loosened my teeth,” Carmen Greer said.

Reacher watched her face.

“That was the first time,” she said. “He just lost it. But straight away he was full of remorse. He drove me to the emergency room himself. It's a long, long drive from the house, hours and hours, and the whole way he was begging me to forgive him. Then he was begging me not to tell the truth about what had happened. He seemed really ashamed, so I agreed. But I never had to say anything anyway, because as soon as we arrived I started into labor and they took me straight upstairs to the delivery unit. Ellie was born the next day.”

“And then what?”

“And then it was O.K.,” she said. “For a week, at least. Then he started hitting me again. I was doing everything wrong. I was paying too much attention to the baby, I didn't want sex because I was hurting from the stitches. He said I had gotten fat and ugly from the pregnancy.”

Reacher said nothing.

“He got me believing it,” she said. “For a long, long time. That happens, you know. You've got to be very self-confident to resist it. And I wasn't, in that situation. He took away all my self-esteem. Two or three years, I thought it
was
my fault, and I tried to do better.”

“What did the family do?”

She pushed her glass away. Left the iced coffee half-finished.

“They didn't know about it,” she said. “And then his father died, which made it worse. He was the only reasonable one. He was O.K. But now it's just his mother and his brother. He's awful, and she's a witch. And they still don't know. It happens in secret. It's a big house. It's like a compound, really. We're not all on top of each other. And it's all very complicated. He's way too stubborn and proud to ever agree with them he's made a mistake. So the more they're down on me, the more he pretends he loves me. He misleads them. He buys me things. He bought me this ring.”

She held up her right hand, bent delicately at the wrist, showing off the platinum band with the big diamond. It looked like a hell of a thing. Reacher had never bought a diamond ring. He had no idea what they cost. A lot, he guessed.

“He bought me horses,” she said. “They knew I wanted horses, and he bought them for me, so he could look good in front of them. But really to explain away the bruises. It was his stroke of genius. A permanent excuse. He makes me say I've fallen off. They know I'm still just learning to ride. And that explains a lot in rodeo country, bruises and broken bones. They take it for granted.”

“He's broken your bones?”

She nodded, and started touching parts of her body, twisting and turning in the confines of the tight booth, silently recounting her injuries, hesitating slightly now and then like she couldn't recall them all.

“My ribs, first of all, I guess,” she said. “He kicks me when I'm on the floor. He does that a lot, when he's mad. My left arm, by twisting it. My collarbone. My jaw. I've had three teeth reimplanted.”

He stared at her.

She shrugged. “The emergency room people think I'm the worst rider in the history of the West.”

“They believe it?”

“Maybe they just choose to.”

“And his mother and brother?”

“Likewise,” she said. “Obviously I'm not going to get the benefit of the doubt.”

“Why the hell did you stick around? Why didn't you just get out, the very first time?”

She sighed, and she closed her eyes, and she turned her head away. Spread her hands on the table, palms down, and then turned them over, palms up.

“I can't explain it,” she whispered. “Nobody can ever explain it. You have to know what it's like. I had no confidence in myself. I had a newborn baby and no money. Not a dime. I had no friends. I was watched all the time. I couldn't even make a call in private.”

He said nothing. She opened her eyes and looked straight at him.

“And worst of all, I had nowhere to go,” she said.

“Home?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I never even thought about it,” she said. “Taking the beatings was better than trying to crawl back to my family, with a white blond baby in my arms.”

He said nothing.

“And the first time you pass up the chance, you've had it,” she said. “That's how it is. It just gets worse. Whenever I thought about it, I still had no money, I still had a baby, then she was a one-year-old, then a two-year-old, then a three-year-old. The time is never right. If you stay that first time, you're trapped forever. And I stayed that first time. I wish I hadn't, but I did.”

He said nothing. She looked at him, appealing for something.

“You have to take it on faith,” she said. “You don't know how it is. You're a man, you're big and strong, somebody hits you, you hit him back. You're on your own, you don't like someplace, you move on. It's different for me. Even if you can't understand it, you have to believe it.”

He said nothing.

“I could have gone if I'd left Ellie,” she said. “Sloop told me if I left the baby with him, he'd pay my fare anyplace I wanted to go. First class. He said he'd call a limo all the way from Dallas, right there and then, to take me straight to the airport.”

He said nothing.

“But I wouldn't do that,” she said quietly. “I mean, how could I? So Sloop makes out this is my
choice
. Like I'm agreeing to it. Like I
want
it. So he keeps on hitting me. Punching me, kicking me, slapping me. Humiliating me, sexually. Every day, even if he isn't mad at me. And if he
is
mad at me, he just goes crazy.”

There was silence. Just the rush of air from the cooling vents in the diner's ceiling. Vague noise from the kitchens. Carmen Greer's low breathing. The clink of fracturing ice in her abandoned glass. He looked across the table at her, tracing his gaze over her hands, her arms, her neck, her face. The neckline of her dress had shifted left, and he could see a thickened knot on her collarbone. A healed break, no doubt about it. But she was sitting absolutely straight, with her head up and her eyes defiant, and her posture was telling him something.

“He hits you
every
day?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. “Well, almost every day. Not literally, I guess. But three, four times in a week, usually. Sometimes more. It feels like every day.”

He was quiet for a long moment, looking straight at her.

Then he shook his head.

“You're making it up,” he said.

 

The watchers stayed
resolutely on station, even though there was nothing much to watch. The red house baked under the sun and stayed quiet. The maid came out and got in a car and drove away in a cloud of dust, presumably to the market. There was some horse activity around the barn. A couple of listless ranch hands walked the animals out and around, brushed them down, put them back inside. There was a bunkhouse way back beyond the barn, same architecture, same blood-red siding. It looked mostly empty, because the barn was mostly empty. Maybe five horses in total, one of them the pony for the kid, mostly just resting in their stalls because of the terrible heat.