It was a long, low, two-story motel the color of a manila folder, with a sign out front on a pole that had been bent by the wind so that the neon palm tree leaned out over the road as though it were trying to see something. The marquee said WELCOME HUGO FAMIL ES WEEKLY RATES RED CROSS VOUCHERS HONORED. The traffic on Rivers was already heavy. The parking lot was full of cars that had been through the storm. Children's clothes hung over the second-floor railing to dry. Somewhere a radio was playing WWWZ, low, the morning man saying the curfew was lifted in North Charleston but still in effect on the islands, and Toomer sat in the van for a minute with the engine off listening to him before she got out.
Room fourteen was on the ground floor at the end, by the ice machine, which was humming and dripping on the concrete. The curtain was open a crack and there was a light on. Toomer knocked.
The woman who opened the door was in a white uniform, the pants and the tunic, with white shoes, and she was holding a hairbrush in one hand and a hair tie in her teeth. She was a small, quick, solid woman somewhere around forty, with her daughter's eyes and a crease between them that looked like it had been there a long time. She took the hair tie out of her mouth.
"You're the lady from the pound," she said.
"Marguerite Toomer. Yes ma'am."
"Dessa said you'd come." Viola Gadsden looked back over her shoulder into the room, where Toomer could see two double beds, one made and one not, a hot plate on the dresser beside a jar of peanut butter and a box of saltines, a little TV on the wall bracket with the sound off, and a child sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed in a long Smurfs T-shirt eating dry Cheerios out of a Styrofoam cup. Beside the child, on the bedspread, was a blue backpack with a Red Cross sticker on the flap. "Let's talk out here."
She came out and pulled the door almost shut behind her and they stood by the ice machine. Viola Gadsden finished putting her hair up while they talked, quickly, without a mirror, pinning it, the way a woman does who has done it ten thousand times in the dark.
"I know why you're here," she said. "Dessa came in last night and cried until one o'clock in the morning. She told me everything. The dog, and the rich people, and the backpack. I know."
"Then you know it's him."