"I'll stop for the night somewhere in Virginia. I'll be there by lunchtime tomorrow."
"Mrs. Bennet," said Petronella Searcy, slowly, "I've got to tell you, honestly, I looked at the security camera on the driveway after we talked. Just the driveway one, it's in the agreement. There are six people in that house right now. Two cars. Six people. A tall older gentleman with a cane, a younger couple, a teenage girl, a woman in a Columbus Crew T-shirt, and a little boy about eight or nine. If you come down, you'll be seven."
Gussie stopped with her hand on the handle of the suitcase.
"A little boy," she said.
"Brown hair. Red swim trunks. He was carrying a bucket bigger than he is."
Gussie stood very still in the upstairs hallway of her house, in the stripe of sunlight that came through the window at the end of it and lay across the carpet runner like a ruler, and she understood that she did not have the photographs after all. She had some of them. She did not have all of them.
There were no little boys in her family. Not one.
"Ms. Searcy," she said, "count me as six."
"Ma'am, I can't. That makes seven. The county..."
"Count me as six," Gussie said, "and let me worry about who's seven."
She left Kettering at one fifteen with the blue suitcase in the trunk of the Buick, a cooler on the passenger seat with two turkey sandwiches and a bag of grapes and a thermos of iced tea, and the route printed out on three sheets of paper from the computer, because she did not trust the phone to talk to her in a calm voice for nine hundred miles. She took 35 east to Interstate 70, and 70 to Columbus, and then the long diagonal down through the hills of West Virginia, where the road went up and down like a sentence with too many commas.
She had not driven this far alone in her life.
She found she was not afraid of it. She had been afraid, she realized, somewhere around Charleston, of something else entirely for most of the last twenty-six years, and the fear of driving through West Virginia in a 2011 Buick was so much smaller and plainer and more honest a fear that it was almost restful. You watched the lines. You watched the trucks. You stopped when you were tired. Nobody was pretending.
She stopped at a rest area outside Beckley and ate one of the turkey sandwiches at a concrete picnic table under a sign that told her about coal. A man at the next table, a trucker in a sleeveless shirt with a tattoo of a hummingbird on his shoulder, asked where she was headed, and she said, "The beach. My family's already there," and he said, "They didn't wait for you?" and she said, "Apparently not," and he laughed so hard he had to put his drink down, and after a moment so did she.
It was the first time she had laughed about it, and it loosened something.