"She doesn't carry it," Opal said apologetically. "It's a house phone. She's got one of those old ones on the wall in the kitchen. When she's in the workshop out back she can't hear it."
"Then I need the address," Carla said.
"It's out on the Big Hill road. Past the Bighill store, past the church with the green roof, there's a gravel lane on the left with a mailbox shaped like a bass. You can't miss it, it's got a big fish on it. Her place is at the end." Opal looked at Dad. "That's forty minutes, Wade."
"Thirty-five," said Carla. She was already moving toward the door. Then she stopped, and turned around, and looked at me, and her face was a color I'd never seen it, a kind of grayish white, like paper that's been left out in the rain and dried. "June," she said. "Will you come with me? I'll understand if you don't want to be in a car with me. But you'll know it. If she's—if it's in pieces. You'll know which pieces. I won't."
I looked at Dad.
"Go," he said. "I'm going to stay here with Opal and go through every one of these bags, in case Nell left it, or it got mixed in, or there's another one, God knows what Ivy had in the cedar chest that I never saw. If I find anything I'll call." He held his keys out to Carla, and she looked at the F-250 through the little basement window, the ladder rack and the dually wheels and the long white hood, and shook her head.
"I can't drive that thing on Big Hill in the dark, Wade. I'll put it in a ditch."
"Then I'll—"
"You'll stay," she said. "You'll look. Somebody has to look here."
Opal, without a word, dug in her tote again and held up a set of keys on a fob that said HARLOW FORK HIGH SCHOOL BAND BOOSTERS.
"It's the blue Buick by the dumpster," she said. "It pulls left. Bring it back full or don't bring it back at all."
* * *
The Buick pulled left. Opal had not been exaggerating. Carla drove it with both hands at ten and two and her jaw set, correcting all the way down Route 25 toward Berea, past the outlet mall and the Cracker Barrel and the long dark fields where the cattle stood with their heads down in the dusk. The radio was stuck on a gospel station out of Corbin and neither of us could figure out how to turn it off, so a man with a beautiful baritone sang "Precious Memories" at us, low, for the first ten miles, and neither of us said a word about it.