“Hi there,” June said brightly, walking up to the counter. “I’m looking for a company called SafeSecure. One of their employees gave me this address.”
The permanent frown got deeper. “I’d have to look them up,” said the large woman. She rolled her chair over to her computer and tapped on the keyboard. “Yep, they’re a customer. Although I don’t know why they’d send you here. We’re just a mail forwarding service.”
“Where do you forward their mail to?”
“We don’t physically forward anything,” said the woman. “We just scan everything and put it online. The customer logs on with a password.”
“Can you give me a billing address?”
The large woman shook her head. “Everything’s electronic, paid automatically by credit card. They could be on the moon for all I know.”
Peter said, “What about a mailing address for the credit card?”
“I can’t tell you that,” the woman said sharply. Her frown had turned into a scowl. “Our customers pay us for their privacy. It’s time for you to go.”
“One of their people left something at our house,” said Peter. “We’re just trying to return it. Is the mailing address on the credit card the same as the mailing address here?” That’s how Peter would have set it up. A closed loop, leading nowhere.
The large woman’s eyes dropped to the computer screen. “Yep,” she said. And she must have pushed a button somewhere, because the door at the end of the long room opened and a man came through. He was tall, dark, and ugly, and about three sizes larger than Peter. He wore a skin-tight T-shirt that showed off his muscles, and he glared at Peter like he was having a bad day.
“Evah’ting okay, Trish?” He sounded like Ziggy Marley’s mean uncle.
“These people were just leaving.”
So they did.
? ? ?
BACK ON THE ROAD, June said, “Pretty slick back there, asking about the credit card.”
“I was curious,” said Peter. “It seemed like something I might use someday.”
“You never told me where you live.”
Peter looked out the window. “I move around a lot.”
“Do you have a family?”
“My mom and dad live in northern Wisconsin. No brothers or sisters.”
Peter knew she wasn’t exactly asking about his parents. It was part of this thing they were dancing around. “My folks took in stray kids,” he said, “ever since I was little.”
“What, like a halfway house?”
“Nothing official. More like small-town gravity, an invisible force attracting troubled kids. A few were really wild, but most of them just had shitty parents. This kid Tommy, he was eight years old and his mom burned him with her cigarettes. He lived at the farm behind our property. And Deidre, she was fifteen and pregnant and her dad kicked her out of the house.” He shook his head. “January in northern Wisconsin, ten below and the wind howling off Lake Superior.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Sounds like an education.”
“Definitely.” He smiled then, remembering Deidre. “Pretty exciting for a twelve-year-old boy, having a pregnant teenager in your house. I fell pretty hard for Deidre.”
She gave him a look. “This isn’t some kind of fetish, is it?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “Part of it was knowing what she’d done to get pregnant, the whole idea of sex. But mostly she was just, you know, beautiful. The way all pregnant women are beautiful.”
June kept looking at him, but differently now.
“Anyway, my mom always had a big pot of soup on the stove, homemade bread in the oven. It was a small town, and word got around, not just our town but the ones around us, too. Mrs. Ash would feed you, would take you in. Her cousin was the county police dispatcher, and she made sure the word spread. So, once or twice a year, some kid would appear on the front porch, stay for dinner, and somehow still be there for breakfast. No questions asked, but sooner or later, they’d start to talk. If they stayed more than a few days, my dad and my uncle Jerry would put them to work on the Saturday crew, boys and girls both. Teach them how to do something useful, frame a wall or wire a light switch. Hang siding.” He smiled. “A couple guys stayed long enough to learn how to build cabinets. We were like the world’s smallest trade school.”
“Didn’t people ever show up to take their kids home? I bet that could get ugly.”
“Yeah, people get weird about their kids,” said Peter. “It’s an ownership thing. Tommy’s mom came by with an ax, a lit cigarette hanging out of her mouth. The burns on Tommy’s arms were barely scabbed over.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. My dad kept a shotgun by the back door. My mom has the cops on speed-dial. Tommy stayed with us a few more weeks. By then we’d found his grandmother in Green Bay.”