Blood Money Read Free

into the squeezer and watched the juice collect in the bottom. “How old are you?”
    “Eighteen.”
    Jane remained undecided. In certain circumstances, a sixteen-year-old would say she was eighteen. In others, a twenty-two-year-old might. “Who told you to look for me?”
    “Celia. She said you would remember her.” She looked hopeful. “Or somebody named Terry.”
    “Celia Fulham?” It didn’t seem possible. Maybe Celiahad moved north, or maybe Jane had detected the lie easily. “Where did you meet her?”
    “Florida.”
    Jane was frustrated to hear the right answer because it didn’t settle anything. Celia Fulham was a social worker in northern Florida. Jane had met her seven or eight years ago, when the mess that had been a child’s life came to Celia’s attention. The child’s name had been Terrell James Arbogast, and at the end of that there had been a Roman numeral … had it been IV? It had been bestowed on him with the unintentional irony that always seemed to stick to people like his parents. When Celia had met them, they were being hunted by the sheriff, not for the frauds they had committed in selling bogus cases of Chanel No. 5 in a parking lot, but because they had not paid him his customary fee for fleecing the locals. Taking the boy into the system would not have made him safe but turned him into a hostage.
    Celia Fulham had hidden the family in her own house, and begun to track down a rumor she had heard a year earlier at a workshop in Atlanta. The rumor was that in those instances when the system simply had no way of protecting a child or removing him from an environment that was about to kill him, the system wasn’t necessarily his last chance. There was a woman who could make people disappear. “You came all the way up here from Florida,” said Jane. “And Celia told you my address.”
    “No,” said the girl. “She told me an address in Deganawida. I went there and rang the bell, but nobody was there. But she said that if you moved or something, they would know at the reservation.”
    It was another frustrating answer. Celia Fulham had been part Seminole, and had asked Jane if she had Indian blood. Jane had broken an inflexible rule against letting people know anything about her personal life. Jane measured the water and sugar by eye and tasted the mixture, then added the ice and handed the lemonade to the girl. She had expected to be able to distract the girl with it so she couldstudy her, but the girl took a sip without taking her eyes off Jane. “You don’t believe me,” she announced.
    “Sure I do,” said Jane. “There is no way that you could have learned that Celia knew me unless Celia told you.” The girl had really seen Celia, but that didn’t mean Celia was right about her. There had to be some other way, some sensible solution that Celia simply hadn’t thought of. Jane wanted to say, “I’m not Jane Whitefield anymore. People who are about to die don’t come to me anymore and ask me to make them vanish. I can’t leave my husband and take on your problem. I made a promise.” Maybe if she knew more, she could figure out a way to help this child without risking her own chance for a new life. “What made you go to Celia?”
    The girl said, “I went to her because she was nice to me once a few years ago, when my mother had a fight with her boyfriend and the police came. Celia said that if I was in trouble I should come back.”
    When Jane heard the word “mother,” she felt a half-second of hope—that’s right, she’s a kid, so there’s a mother—but the rest of the sentence dampened it. “Where are your parents now?”
    “My father … I don’t know about him. He was just another boyfriend, and he took off when I was a baby. My mother, she had some trouble a couple of years ago and …” The girl shrugged placidly. “You know. She’s a doper.”
    So much for the mother. “How long has she been in jail?”
    “A year and a half, about, counting