He watched it go across her face: relief, and terror, and something underneath both of them that looked a great deal like grief. She put her hands flat on the table to stop them shaking.
"Then I have to tell you fast," she said. "Before he comes back. So you know. So somebody knows."
"Okay," Tom said. "I'm listening."
It came out of her in a low, rapid stream, the words tumbling over each other, the way water comes when you finally pull a stone out of a dam.
Her mother's name was Lacey. Lacey Pike. She was in the women's prison down in Las Vegas, serving three years for possession with intent to sell, and she had been there since February. Curtis had been her mother's boyfriend for almost two years before that. When her mother got arrested, Curtis had told the social worker that he was Wren's stepfather, which was not true, and that she would stay with him and keep going to school in Eureka, which was not true either. The social worker had been overworked and had a hundred other cases and had believed him, or wanted to. She had come out to the diner exactly once.
"He took my phone in March," Wren said. "He said I was running up the bill. I haven't been to school since spring break. He says I'm homeschooled now. I'm not. I just work here. Every day." She swallowed. "I've got a sister. Jess. She's twenty-one. She's in nursing school in Salt Lake. She left when she turned eighteen because she and Mom fought all the time, and Curtis doesn't let me call her. He says she abandoned us. He says if I try to go to her, the state will put me in a group home, and I'll never see Mom again."
Tom's jaw had gone tight. He made himself unclench it. "How long has the coffee thing been going on?"
"Since June that I know. Maybe longer." She glanced at the kitchen door. "There was a German man in June. He had a big BMW with all the bags on it. Curtis gave him free coffee. Then a couple days later the sheriff came by asking if anybody had seen him because they found him asleep at the rest area, like, passed out, and his bike was gone and his wallet. He didn't remember anything. They thought he had heatstroke." Her voice dropped even lower. "And then in August there was an older man and his wife, on a trike. The wife didn't drink the coffee. She had iced tea. But he drank it, and he got sleepy, and he went off the road about twenty miles from here, into the ditch. He broke his arm and a bunch of ribs. Darrell was following them. He stopped and called it in, like he was a good Samaritan. He was so proud of himself after. Curtis laughed about it."
"Jesus," Tom said.