The business district faded away as she drove, morphing into more of a highway setting, amber pastureland on either side, two lanes in each direction. Plenty of cars. Where had all these cars been when this girl was needing a ride?
“Tell you what I’ll do,” Bea said. “Next little town up is Morro Bay. We’ll stop there and find you a police station. I’ll let you off at the station and you can tell them that crazy story you just told me, and maybe they can make sense of it.”
The girl said nothing in reply.
In time, Bea looked over at her face. The bulk of the immediate fear had drained away now, leaving this young thing looking heartbroken and lost.
“Damn,” Bea uttered under her breath. Now she would have to feel sorry for the kid.
“I can’t go to the police.”
“Why can’t you? If it was as bad as you say? Kidnapping is a serious crime.”
“But I don’t know anything that would help them catch the guy. I didn’t get his license number. I don’t know who he was.”
Bea felt her brain flash back to that moment in the BuyMart parking lot, lying on the pavement. The way she had told that nice young man how it wasn’t worth calling the police because she hadn’t gotten a look at her mugger.
“Takes a scammer to know a scammer,” she said, still whispering.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. That’s not a ‘can’t,’ what you just said. You don’t really say, ‘I can’t go to the police’ because you might not have all the info they’ll need. That’s more of an ‘I’m not sure how much good it will do.’ But you said you can’t. Why can’t you?”
A long silence. Bea did not look over at the girl, because she didn’t want to feel sorry for her again. Once you get involved in all that empathy, life just gets so darned complicated.
“Because I’m a runaway. I ran away from the system. So they’d put me in juvenile detention. You know, like jail, but for kids. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong. Except run away. But I had to. This girl was going to kill me. Or at least hurt me really bad. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“My, my,” Bea said. “The world is just full of people who want a piece of your hide, isn’t it?”
She heard a gentle sigh from the passenger seat. Then silence.
Then, “Oh! A kitty. Hello, kitty!”
Bea glanced over to see Phyllis craning her neck out from underneath the seat and looking up at this girl. This child full of unlikely stories. It surprised Bea that Phyllis didn’t stay hidden, because normally the cat was an excellent judge of character.
“I saw the kitty sleeping on your dashboard when you drove up. But everything was so panicky and weird, and it’s like I forgot about the cat or like it didn’t exist at all. Like I dreamed that part. Because, really, that’s not such a common thing. Most people don’t drive around with their cats. Dog, maybe. But not cats. I guess because—”
Bea interrupted the girl’s breathy nonsense.
“Wait. If you’d done nothing wrong, you wouldn’t have been in the system to begin with.”
“No, not that kind of system. I was never in the prison system. It was the child protective system I had to run away from.”
Bea watched the little girl scratch the cat’s head, especially behind the ears. She heard Phyllis begin to utter that familiar, hoarse, uneven purr.
“I guess I don’t blame you for not believing me,” the girl said.
“It doesn’t matter what I do or don’t believe. I’m just taking you to the next town. I don’t have to hear your life story. I don’t have to judge what is or isn’t true. I’m just dropping you off, and we can leave it at that.”
They drove in silence for several minutes. Bea was grateful for the break.
In time she saw Morro Rock in the distance, and the three smokestacks that sat at the edge of the bay. She and Herbert had come here once for an anniversary. To get away from the heat, and enjoy the ocean.
“I’ll say one thing for you,” the girl said, startling Bea. “If you ever do get carjacked, I feel sorry for the guy who tries it. You were really fierce. Threatening to crash the van and kill us both. Wow. Brave.”
Bea squirmed within the observation for a moment, feeling her face redden.
“I can be tough when I need to be,” she said, knowing even as she said it that it had not been true in the past. Not even the fairly recent past.
Bea pulled into one of several gas stations on Morro Bay Boulevard, just off the highway. She didn’t need gas. More like directions. But she didn’t want to get out of the van and leave this strange intruder alone with everything she owned.
Instead she powered down her window and waited for someone to step out of the mini-mart.
“What are we doing?” the girl asked.
“Trying to find someone who can tell us where the police station is.”
“I told you. I can’t go to the police.”
“That’s none of my concern. I said I’d take you to one, and that’s what I’m going to do. I won’t stay around to see if you go inside or walk the other way, because it’s not my business anyway. We’re strangers to each other, in case you need reminding. We’re about to part ways, and then what you do has no bearing on my life after that.”
They fell into awkward silence.
A woman in her forties stepped out of the store and crossed in front of Bea’s van.
“Excuse me,” Bea called. The woman stopped and looked around. “Do you happen to know if there’s a police station around here?”
“It’s just the next block that way,” the woman said, pointing away from the highway. “Right here on Morro Bay Boulevard.”
“Thank you,” Bea said, and powered up the window. “You can walk from here,” she told the girl.
They sat in silence for a time. Too long a time. The girl had her head bowed, looking down at her own lap. Bea wanted this cord cut now. Not a moment later. The girl was a stranger, and Bea intended to keep it that way. Worse yet, she felt herself dangerously close to the line of having to care.
“Go,” Bea said.
The girl sighed and opened the passenger door. Stepped down. She looked back at Bea, her eyes wet with emotion.
“Hurry and close the door before the cat gets out,” Bea said.
The girl did as she’d been told.
Bea pulled out onto the boulevard and headed back toward the highway. Between it and her was a traffic roundabout, and Bea swung around it to the right, planning to pick up Highway 1 north, toward Cambria and Big Sur. Now that was a pretty stretch of coastline.
She glanced at the girl in her rearview mirror. She was walking along with her head down, clearly not in a hurry to get anywhere. Not surprisingly, she was headed in the opposite direction from the police station.
Bea missed the turn for her highway on-ramp while she was watching, and had to take another full loop around the traffic circle. She saw the girl make a right onto a street called Quintana, because there was nothing directly ahead of her but highway. Nothing suitable to pedestrians.
Bea sighed. She swung a right, then pulled up beside the child. She powered the passenger window down.
“Have you eaten?” she asked.
The girl shook her head.