“I get tired of that, all the time being told I’m too innocent, or too nice, or too retarded, or whatever it is, to know what’s going on,” Billy flashed. “Like believing in Jesus, and wanting to do good in the world, automatically makes you an idiot. So—just to show you I’m not all that nice, I decided to find out what Bron was up to with Pat. There’s a closet in Pat’s room that connects to the next room—it used to be a big office suite or something, with a john or something in between the two rooms, but, anyway, I went in there, in the closet, and I heard the whole thing, Bron saying he needed a hundred grand for April, Pat laughing in this nasty way, ‘You been hanging around the Kid too much if you think his family will part with one red cent for your brat.’
“Then I guess Bron showed him the frog picture, and Pat said, that proved jack shit—” Billy turned crimson as he repeated the phrase; he looked at me fleetingly to see whether I was shocked. “And Bron said, oh, he had a recording of it all, on account of Marcena Love had been with him when Pat asked him to do the dirty work, and she had everything on tape, she recorded everybody’s conversations so she’d have an accurate record. So then Pat told him to wait outside for a minute. And he made a phone call and repeated the conversation, and then he called Bron back in and said, okay, he thought he could help him out after all. He said Bron should bring the truck over to Fly the Flag after he made his Crown Point drop-off—that he wanted to inspect that first load of sheets Zamar had made to see if they could be salvaged, and someone from the family would be there with a check, that it couldn’t be, like, out in public, because the family didn’t want to be involved. So I decided to go to Fly the Flag and see who showed up from the family.”
“Where was Josie while all this was going on?” I asked.
“Oh, I was waiting in the Miata.” It was the first time Josie had spoken—it was almost as though she hadn’t been there.
“In the Miata? It’s a tiny two-seater!”
“We had the top down.” Josie’s eyes were shining with pleasure at the memory. “I crouched behind the seats. It was so fun, I loved it.”
On a cold November afternoon, yes, fifteen, close to death and to love at the same moment—that was fun.
“How did Marcena get into the car, then?” I asked, trying to figure out how all these people had ended up together.
“Bron picked her up in the truck. She was interviewing someone, or looking at something, I don’t know what, but he told me he was going to get her, and he wanted to know was it okay if she drove my car. See, before I heard Grobian and Bron talking, we—Josie and I—were planning to run away to Mexico together, find Josie’s great-aunt in Zacatecas. We were going to take the train downtown to the Greyhound station. Josie doesn’t have an ID, so we couldn’t fly, and, anyway, if we flew my dad’s detectives would find us. We were going to take the Greyhound to El Paso and then hitchhike to Zacatecas.
“But then I decided I had to go back to Fly the Flag first—I had to see who from my family would be there, and I didn’t want Bron to know I was doing that. If I had known what they were going to do, I’d never have brought Josie, you have to believe that, Ms. War-sha-sky, because it was the most awful—” His shoulders started shaking; he was trying not to sob out loud.
“Who came?” I asked in a matter-of-fact voice.
“It was Mr. William,” Josie said softly after a minute, when Billy couldn’t speak. “The English lady, she drove up in Billy’s car. Mr. Czernin dropped us, see, over at the train station on Ninety-first Street. The factory is only, like, six blocks from the station. Billy carried my backpack, and we walked up, we picked up a pizza and stuff, and then we just went into the factory.”
She kept talking in the same soft voice, as if she didn’t want to startle Billy. “The big room where Ma used to sew, it smelled from the fire, but the front was still okay, you know, if you didn’t know the back was gone, you’d think it was still okay. So we waited, it was, like, I don’t know, three hours. It got kind of cold. And then suddenly I heard Mr. Grobian’s voice, and he and Mr. William came in. We hid under one of the worktables—the electricity was off because of the fire, and they had this big, portable work light they turned on, but they couldn’t see us.
“And then April’s dad came in with the English reporter. They talked back and forth, about April’s surgery, and what Mr. Czernin had done for Mrs. Jacqui and Mr. Grobian, and Mr. William, he said to the English lady, Mr. Czernin say you have—I mean, Mr. Czernin, he says you have a recording of all this?
“And the English lady, she said she had a tape recording, but she was just going to read them the—I can’t remember the word, but she’d written it all down, copied it from the tape recording, I mean. Because she said they couldn’t have her tape recorder, she knew what would happen to it if she let them at it.