A Longer Fall (Gunnie Rose #2)(57)

Eli didn’t say anything about this, so I figured he was trusting me to do my work. He searched the suitcase very thoroughly (nothing) before relocking it in his magical way. We left the room after a final look around for papers or anything else that might give us a clue. Nothing.

Once we were outside, having handed Mrs. Girtley the key and repeated our conversation several times (some people don’t think saying something once is nearly enough), Eli said, “Quiet spot.”

I pointed to the paved path going around to the rear of the hotel. I’d looked out of Travis’s window to see there was a patio, deserted this time of the day.

There was one little area in some shade. That’s where we headed. Three wooden chairs huddled in this bit of shadow. We had to sit close together. Eli drew out the hairs. “Hold them,” he said.

I turned my palms up, slightly cupped, and he dropped the blond hair into my right and the dark hair into my left. Then he began to whisper.

My palms began to tingle. As I looked at Eli’s face, intent and serious, and felt his power, I felt proud to know him.

At the end of the spell, if that’s what Eli called it, he stood and said, “Come.”

I was up immediately, carefully stowing the strand of hair from Harriet into my right skirt pocket, stowing Travis’s in my left. We began walking. My purse, heavy with one of the guns, slapped my side.

“Does it mean they’re alive, if you can follow them this way?”

“No,” Eli said.

Eli was acting like he was blind except for the path only he could see. I had to steer for him. I took his arm and used pressure to control him. My hands were full with keeping Eli from bumping into someone or stepping out in front of a car. He wasn’t following a scent, like the bloodhound would have done. I don’t know what he was following, but he was definitely fixed on going that way.

Eli chose that moment to cross a street. I had to hold him back from stepping off the curb into the path of a car. It was like shepherding a very large sheep.

I was real glad there weren’t many people out.

“Eli,” I said. “Listen to me.”

He stopped walking. That was something.

“I’m going to get the car and come pick you up. Can you stand still here until I get back?”

Eli nodded without looking at me. He was holding on to the track. He couldn’t waver in his focus. Temperature was going up fast, and he was sweating.

It took me fifteen minutes to run back to the Pleasant Stay, run up to our room to get my gun belt, get in the car, and return. I was scared the whole time that Eli wouldn’t be there when I got back, but there he was. People were walking around him, giving him as wide a berth as they could, because he was simply still.

I had to jump out of the car and run around to open the door. Then Eli climbed in after I pulled Harriet’s gun from the back of his pants. He pointed forward, and off we took. I was driving slow so I wouldn’t miss a change of direction. If I turned the wrong way, I might jar him loose.

I had four guns now, but it didn’t seem enough.

We left downtown behind and drove through the pleasant streets where the people lived who had plenty. After that ran out, which didn’t take long, we were on gravel instead of pavement. These were folks who were less lucky. Their yards were messy and any cars were beaten and rusty. The children wore faded hand-me-downs. And they threw rocks, sometimes.

Then we were driving on packed dirt. We were among the shacks and shanties of the very poor. As far as I could see, the people in this neighborhood were all black. I knew there must be some white people just as poor, but even at the most desperate level the two races didn’t mix.

If we were in Texoma, this was where I would live. The houses were kind of cobbled together, most of wood with the shine of age and weathering, a few with walls or roofs of tin, some with a pen of chickens and a garden, one or two with a cow in the yard, and every now and then a mule. There was always a vegetable garden. Children of all sizes played outside. Some were lucky enough to have a tire swing or a baseball or a jump rope.

But all these pastimes stopped when we rode slowly by. The children didn’t follow us asking questions like kids in Segundo Mexia would have. These children stood in silent clumps as we passed.

These kids knew that white people in their part of town couldn’t mean anything good.

And still I drove with my silent Eli, very slowly, windows down to admit whatever breeze might happen by. The sweat trickled down my back and under my breasts. This skirt might have to be burned after today, and I wasn’t even thinking about the petticoat and the panties and the bra.

We drove at our creeping pace till there were open fields stretching far as the eye could see. The flat land was only broken by a little gentle roll here and there, or a strip of trees edging a bayou. The farmhouses were spaced wide apart and set back from the road, surrounded by trees. Some were real big and fancy, some were shacks, some were degrees in between.

A man passed us. He was riding a horse. He gave us a sideways look of alarm and urged the horse on. Odd. This was the only person we’d seen on this road, and he was going in the same direction we were.

We’d only passed the occasional farm vehicles rumbling down the road, and in the distance I’d seen small wooden sheds at the corners of the fields. I couldn’t figure out their purpose. I learned later that was where cotton was stored when it was being picked by hand. Then it would be loaded on a truck and taken to the cotton gin in Sally. Other than that, the vast landscape seemed empty except for the rider.