“I don’t know,” she said. “The faces were . . . fuzzy or something, hard to take in.”
Finley struggled for their features, something she could hold on to, but she couldn’t bring them to the surface of her consciousness. She just kept hearing the little girl, seeing her struggle to get free.
“She fought,” said Finley. “That’s why the man didn’t come back and kill the others himself. She fought him every step of the way.”
NINE
A man came in the morning. A stranger. At first, Penny wasn’t even sure what she was hearing, a loud crunching, the hum of something. Then she realized it was a car on the long drive. Penny felt a deep startle, a jolt of fear, as she stood at the pump. Then she ran to her hidden room next to the barn, as she’d been taught to do, and closed the door, watching through the gap.
The car pulled up slowly and came to a stop. A man sat at the wheel, staring down at something, then looked up and around him. She gasped as he got out of the car. It wasn’t her daddy, but he looked kind of like her daddy did—tall and strong, with clean clothes and shiny hair. He wasn’t dirty and wrinkled with a big gap in his teeth, and dirt under his nails, like Poppa.
He was more like the people she used to see in the world before. He had nice shoes and strong shoulders, shoulders you could ride on. And arms that hugged and never hurt. She knew she wasn’t ever supposed to show herself, to talk to anyone. If she did, Poppa said he would leave this place and find her mommy and daddy and kill them both. She knew he could do it. She’d seen him do things that she tried to forget as soon as she saw.
Even so, there was a voice in her head.
Show yourself to him, the voice said. Her feet moved, leaned toward the door.
Poppa came out on the porch, his filthy overalls hanging, his baseball cap askew. He had a face full of white stubble and cheekbones that jutted like cliffs and eyes that sunk like dark canyons into his head, and she knew he smelled rank when you got up close—sweat and cigarettes.
“Hey, there,” the clean man said. He lifted a hand, gave a nervous smile. “Sorry to trouble you. But I’m lost.”
“Where you headed?” asked Poppa. He could be so nice to people, even to Penny. He gave her Baby, the rag doll with the missing button eye that she slept with every night. Sometimes he rested his big hand on top of her head, like her daddy used to. They fed her, gave her clothes. They weren’t always bad.
“I’m looking for a town called The Hollows,” the clean man said.
“Yeah,” said Poppa with a squint and an understanding bob of his head. He stayed rooted on the porch. “You took a wrong turn back at the river. You need to shoot left instead of right, then it’s about twenty miles north.”
“The creek?” said the man squinting. “At the bottom of the hill?”
She moved quickly. There was a door in her room that led to the barn, one that couldn’t be seen from the outside. It was where they hid her when she first came here and the people were searching. She could hear them, but she stayed quiet, Poppa’s threats that he’d kill her, kill them, kill her family keeping her bound and gagged. Now, she pushed out that door. Bobo had showed her how. She walked softly, stood at the tall doors that led outside. Hurry. Now.
“You don’t have one of those computers?” Poppa said. His voice had taken on a darker tone. “With the directions?”
The clean man had a beautiful black car, a BMW, which she knew because her mommy always sighed when she saw one. My dream car, she’d say.
The man laughed a little, held up the device in his hand. “My phone died. We’re lost without technology these days, aren’t we? Literally.”
Poppa didn’t say anything. He didn’t like computers. It was the first thing he did; smash her iPod Touch.
“Well,” said the man, turning back toward the car. “Thanks—and sorry again to trouble you.”
Penny pushed the door and it emitted that long creak, just as she knew it would. She moved into the light even though she didn’t want to. The man saw her, his polite smile fading a little, brow wrinkling.
“Hey there,” he said. “Hey, little one.”
She didn’t say anything, just stared at him. She didn’t have a voice anymore, could hardly get any words out, as if they’d all dried up, blown away like leaves. He took a step toward her, the sun dappling golden through the trees. If only she could say: Help me! Take me home! She took a step closer, the words were right there.