“Better,” I lied. Getting knocked unconscious wasn’t like on TV. As a kid, I’d watch private eye Joe Mannix get knocked out every week, wake up a few minutes later and carry on without taking so much as an aspirin. But there was a sizeable bump on the back of my head, and it pulsed with pain.
“Maybe you should go to the hospital,” Claire said. “There’s a small one in Groverton. You could go there. You might have a concussion, you know.”
“No, no,” I said. “I think I’m okay.” I paused. “You got any Tylenol?”
“We’ll have to watch you tonight,” Trixie said. “Wake you up every once in a while, make sure you’re okay.”
I gave her a tired look.
“You can’t drive back today, Zack,” she said. “It might not be safe, getting hit in the head and all.” She paused. “You’ll have to sleep here tonight.” She tried to say it neutrally, but her words seemed to carry some extra meaning.
“I hope the couch is okay,” Claire said. “Miranda’s in the guest room.”
“What?” I said, wondering if there was still someone here I’d not met yet. “Who’s Miranda?”
“That’s me, Zack,” said the woman I knew as Trixie. “We might be able to get you something more comfortable than the couch.” And I saw that twinkle in her eye, the one I’d seen shortly after I’d first met her, before I knew how she made her living two doors down from our house in Oakwood.
“So, what’s your real name?” I asked. “You’re Trixie, but you’re also Miranda, but I think you might also be Candace.”
Her eyebrows went up at the mention of the third name. “You’ve been asking around,” she said, impressed. “But my real name, the one I was born with, is Miranda.”
“Miranda,” I said softly. “What would you like me to call you?”
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe it’ll be easier for you to just keep calling me Trixie.”
“Okay,” I said, “Trixie.”
Don Bennet, his green tractor hat sitting on the table next to his coffee cup, said, “Listen, I’m sorry about all this.”
“Sure.”
“You threw a real scare into us. We’ve always been afraid someone might figure out the connection, come looking for…Miranda, or Katie.” The little girl was in the next room, watching cartoons. “And now, knowing there’d been trouble, we were kind of on edge.”
I took a sip of my coffee. It was hot, and I blew on it. Quietly, I said, “Would you have done it, Don?”
“Hmmm?”
“Would you have killed me?”
He ran his hand over his mouth, and I could hear his rough palms going across his whiskers like sandpaper. “Yeah,” he said. “If I had to do it to protect Katie, yeah, I’d have done it.”
“You ever killed someone before?” I asked.
Don Bennet shook his head very slowly. “Shit, no.” The question surprised him. “I’m a machinist. Worked on the Ford line for a while, building vans. Now I work in Groverton, fix tractors.” He took a sip of his coffee. “I would hope I’d never have to do anything like that. But a man does what he has to do to protect his family.”
Trixie wanted to know how I’d found her. The gas station receipt, I said. From the center console of her GF300.
“Shit, that was pretty careless, wasn’t it?” she said, then, worried that Katie might have heard her obscenity, glanced over her shoulder into the living room, where the little girl was flipping the channels. I heard Bart Simpson crack wise.
“Put it back on six!” Claire shouted.
“It’s The Simpins,” Katie said.
“Your show’s on six!” She shook her head. “She’s not watching The Simpsons yet.”
Trixie, ignoring the exchange, said, “I was afraid I’d left some clue on the GPS thing. I’ve programmed the route to get up here before, but I always delete it from the trip record, to be safe.”
“I haven’t even used that thing,” I said. “I haven’t got a clue how it works.”
“Actually, I’m kind of surprised the cops let you take the car.”
“They didn’t, at first,” I said. “But once the forensics people were done with it, they gave it to me.”
Claire was serving the chocolate cake. It was still pretty frozen, and I had to force my fork in, but it was still good. I’d had no lunch, and despite the headache, was ready to eat.
“So,” I said with some formality, looking at Trixie, “maybe you’d like to tell me what’s going on. I mean, I’ve come all this way and all.”
She smiled at me, reached over and touched my hand. “Claire’s my sister,” she said. Claire, who’d gotten up to put some dishes in the sink, looked at Trixie over her shoulder. “And Don here is my brother-in-law. And”—she nodded toward the living room—“you’ve met Katie. My little girl.”
“You told me, a long time ago,” I said, “that you didn’t have any children.”
“I remember,” she said. “I guess, first of all, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. I wanted to protect her. And also, a large part of me doesn’t feel I deserve to be called a mother.”