A few more miles of silence fell.
Allie reached into the front pocket of her jeans, grasped her quarter-ounce gold coin, and quietly slid it out. She reached over for Bea’s hand, and when Bea opened her hand in surprise, Allie pressed the coin into her palm.
She wondered if Bea could feel her hand shaking.
Bea mouthed the words “Thank you,” and Allie nodded.
Twenty minutes, or an hour, or two hours later—time was a hard entity to pin down in Allie’s brain—they arrived in a coastal town of fairly good size, somewhere along the Puget Sound. A town they had not seen in their travels. It might even have been a small city, but Allie had no map now, and no idea what city it was.
Bea stirred next to her, and Allie knew they both felt it. That sense of over-ness. Allie thought about the hundred rock cairns on the log at Ruby Beach and wondered if all those “ducks” really did signify the end of the road.
“Well,” Bea said, “that was a nice adventure while it lasted.”
“Yeah,” Allie replied. “It really was. While it lasted.”
For what might have been half an hour, Allie sat alone in an empty room. It was a strangely plain room. Tan walls. A table with one chair on either side. A ceiling fan that made an irritating amount of noise. No windows. No clock.
Allie wondered if the lack of clock was done on purpose, to make time feel stretched and surreal. To put pressure on whatever unlucky fool had to sit here and wait, not even knowing for what.
Meanwhile Allie felt nothing, as far as she knew. There was no resistance inside her. That much felt clear. It was bad, what was happening, but Allie’s whole being was in a state of utter surrender. As if her heart and gut had fallen down a very deep hole. No part of her was actively trying to get out, or even prevent more falling. It was just over.
In time the door opened.
The woman who walked in wore plain clothes, but her pants and suit jacket were a police-uniform shade of blue. She had long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Allie thought she might have been forty. There was a calmness about her. In her face, in her movements. It didn’t feel like a satisfied calm. Allie would not have assumed she was a happy woman. But she presented herself as unruffled and low key.
She sat down on the other side of the table and began to make notes on a clipboard.
“You’re Alberta Keyes,” she said after a few seconds.
“Yeah. I think we nailed that.”
The woman’s eyes flickered up to Allie’s, but she did not otherwise react.
“Officer McNew,” she said. “I want you to tell me everything you can about what happened.”
“Why I ran away, you mean?”
“And what kind of danger you were in after you left the group home.”
“How did you know I was in danger?”
“I was just talking to your friend. She’s your biggest fan and supporter; I hope you know that.”
“It wasn’t her fault at all. Please don’t charge her with anything. Please. She didn’t know I was a runaway. Or that I was underage. She might even say she did, because she thinks she might like jail, because she’s homeless. But I don’t think she’d like it. I don’t think she knows what she’d be getting herself into.”
The woman leaned back and chewed on the end of her plastic pen. It was the first sign that everything was not placid all the way through her being.
“You’ve been incarcerated?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you don’t know what she’d be getting herself into, either.”
“I feel like I was just starting to know, though. Getting pulled out of my house and stuck in that home with that crazy roommate. And then being kidnapped. I know how it feels when somebody else controls you and there’s nothing you can do about it. And I don’t want that for Bea. She doesn’t deserve that.”
“Neither did you.”
In that moment, just that suddenly, Allie’s tears let go. She hadn’t felt them coming. Hadn’t known they were in there, waiting to be cried.
“Please just put me in juvie and leave her alone,” she sobbed.
The officer got up from the table and left the room. Allie cried in solitude for a moment, wondering what the sudden exit meant. Then the woman was back, extending four tissues in Allie’s direction.
“Thank you,” Allie said.
“I doubt your friend is in any trouble. Lot of people will pick up a runaway or homeless teen. It’s not always for nefarious purposes. Usually they just want the poor kid off the street. We would’ve liked it a lot better if she’d called someone in law enforcement, or brought you back. But she had no bad intent. We’d likely charge her if she’d lied about your whereabouts. You know. To throw us off the track and keep us from finding you.”
Which I almost had her do, Allie thought. But she said nothing.
“Or if she contributed to your delinquency in some way.”
That seemed to hang in the air a moment. The gravity of the soft prod for information felt self-evident.
“Like what?”
“Gave you alcohol or something along those lines. But she didn’t, right?”
Allie sniffled. Then, much to her surprise, she laughed. Just a short bark of a laugh. “I think I might have contributed to her delinquency. But not so much the other way around.”
Officer McNew smiled a crooked smile. “I thought as much. But I needed to hear it from your own mouth. I’ll go ask somebody to drive her back to her vehicle. You want something to drink?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
“Soda?”
“No, thanks. I don’t want all that sugar.”
“Diet soda?”
“Oh, definitely no,” Allie said, shuddering slightly. “That’s just about the only thing that’s worse.”
“We have coffee, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. It could moonlight as paint stripper.”
“Maybe just water,” Allie said.
The officer walked out, leaving Allie alone again with the noisy ceiling fan. And all that stretchy time.
When Allie finally had been wrung dry of words, the officer sat back, stretching her writing hand to counteract cramps.
She read over what she’d written, or at least scanned over it.
“Think you could find that house in Sherman Oaks again?”
“I doubt it. I was asleep when he drove me there. It was dark when I got driven out, and I was all in a panic. I don’t even know for a fact it was Sherman Oaks. Just that Jasmine said that’s where Victor lives.”
“And I suppose license numbers would be asking too much.”
“Sorry,” Allie said, resisting an urge to knock herself in the head with her own fist. “I feel so stupid. Here I’ve been thinking I want to do something to help other girls who get themselves in that position, and I could’ve helped a lot by just memorizing a license plate, but I didn’t do it.”
“There are ways you can help,” McNew said. “But that’s for later.”
“Like what?”
“Sometimes girls go around and give talks at schools.”