speak low

“Come here,” the woman Evelyn says. She reaches out with one hand – its perfectly manicured nails are all split to the bleeding quick. “Come here, sweetheart.” Her hands are cold. After the fever-feeling of the past few days, it’s almost nice – she tidies the stray crooked hairs back from Katherine’s forehead, cool as a nurse.

“What took you so long?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. We’re going on a little drive.”

She ought to feel sorrier than she does. She hasn’t seen any of her things in weeks, none of her dresses, not so much as a comb. There are places for girls like her. The man Gittes made sure of that, made sure she went straight to juvenile hall with no stops along the way. She’ll go away to anywhere at this rate, anywhere but here with its never-ending examinations and where the doctor’s instruments are always cold, where they’ve taken away her suitcase, where you can hear the younger girls crying all night. If her grandfather is dead, let him be dead.

Evelyn clasps her to her breast, like she’s a little girl, and the tips of her cold, cold fingers pass over Katherine’s cheek like a string of pearls. Evelyn smells like wet earth and salt water and magnolia flower, like a cloud of perfume staining the wrist of a pair of white leather gloves; her hair hangs limp over her face, dripping hairpins. Beneath the luminous fringe is something dark and ugly, but Katherine can’t make out what it is. The car is idling on the concrete drive, the passenger side door hangs open at a drunken angle and in the passenger’s side seat there is a folded paper map with a single bloody thumbprint on it like the X that marks the spot.

They’re going somewhere far away from Los Angeles.