Free Cold Betrayal by J. A. Jance Page B

of her head, just the way Enid wore hers. She remembered that a woman with blond hair, kind eyes, a sweet voice, and a wonderful smile had been part of Enid’s childhood for a while. She was there for a time, and then she was gone. After she disappeared, Enid went to live with another family. Then when she was five and betrothed to Gordon, she had come to live in his household under the strict thumb of Aunt Edith. Once, when Enid had asked Aunt Edith who her mother was and where she had gone, Aunt Edith had replied that Enid’s mother was dead. End of story.
    Except it wasn’t. Last summer, Enid had broken one of The Family’s cardinal rules and had paid an unauthorized visit to the pig sheds. The two women who tended the Tower family pigs lived in a small tin Quonset hut near a similar building that housed their charges. Never referred to by name, they were known only as the Brought Back girls—girls who had attempted to escape The Family and had lived Outside before being returned home. According to The Family’s strictures, they were considered wicked and evil and were not to be spoken to under any circumstances.
    The Brought Back girls slept on straw mattresses in a shed with no electricity. They had a kerosene lantern and a wood stove. Their Quonset hut came with no running water or indoor toilet. The two of them wore faded, cast-off, and much-mended clothing that was handed down to them only when it was no longer fit for anyone else to wear. After dinner each night, they came to the back door of the kitchen to collect that day’s slop bucket for the pigs, bringing along two tin plates for the scraps that were their own dinner. Never allowed inside the house, they stood in silence on the back step, waiting until whatever leftovers happened to be available were doled out onto their individual plates.
    Older girls were assigned various household tasks and child-tending chores. Enid actually preferred doing dinner dishes to some of the other jobs—like sweeping, dusting, and shaking rugs. As a result, she was often in the kitchen when the Brought Back girls came to the house after supper to collect their evening meal—their only meal of the day.
    Enid had noticed that when Aunt Margaret was in the kitchen overseeing the cleanup, the amount of food heaped onto the Brought Back girls’ plates was far more generous than when Aunt Edith was in charge. The same thing held true for the other wives when it came their turn. They made sure that the Brought Back girls’ helpings were stingier than they needed to be.
    Curious, Enid had managed to ask enough questions to learn that one of The Family’s two in-house exiles was actually Aunt Margaret’s younger sister, someone who had once been betrothed to marry Gordon and who had run away months before the scheduled ceremony. No one ever mentioned how she had been found or returned to The Encampment, but clearly someone had gone Outside and retrieved her.
    For the first time, Enid began to wonder. She knew that on the rare occasions when girls ran away from The Family and didn’t come back, their disappearances were worse than if they had died. Their names were inked out of family Bibles and were never mentioned again. It was almost as though they had never existed.
    One afternoon, when Enid was charged with looking after some of the younger kids out in the play area, the electric fence around the pig-pen went down and some of the piglets escaped their enclosure. Enid and the children helped return some of the escapees to the pen, an act of kindness for which the Brought Back girls were effusively grateful. In the middle of all the excitement, Enid managed a quiet word with the one she had been told was Aunt Margaret’s younger sister.
    The woman’s clothing was filthy, and so was she. Her footwear consisted of a pair of taped-together men’s boots several sizes too large for her. Her hands were rough and callused. Her matted hair was spiked with twigs of straw. She was