Free The Most Wanted by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

ahead, but I told you I’d be in touch.”
    “My mama’s here,” she said. “My mama is here, though.”
    “Well, that’s okay. I probably should meet her.”
    “Who is it?” called a voice from inside, a voice that sounded like the inside of a hundred bars at three a.m., with the lights just blinked on, revealing all the straw papers and beer spills on the dance floor. “Who’s there, girl?”
    I gently shouldered Arley aside and walked in. I still don’t know where I got the chutzpah—you have to understand people’s boundaries in my work, and respect is the thing you most need to keep in mind. But I did what I did.
    Rita was standing there, tapping her foot, watching a saucepan of water on the stove. When I saw her from the back, I thought right away she looked just like Cherry Ames, student nurse, in those books I used to read when I was ten. She had on the kind of starched and bleached uniform that seems so dated on a nurse today, it’s almost like a costume. And yet it’s somehow . . . what? Sexy? Baroque? Like seeing a nun under the age of sixty in full habit. When she turned around, though, I could see that Rita Mowbray’s cherry days were far behind her. She had a face like a good boot, seamed and browned and yet handsome in its way. Like the central casting version of the dance hall girl with a heart of gold, rubbed to a faint sheen between the stones of experience, she looked like a woman with a good memory for the way nature had made her. Shiny, long, thick hair in a heavy blunt cut swept her shoulders, but it was a parody color, yolk orange, like a farm-fresh egg. One of her index fingernails was varnished blue and spangled with stars. She said, “Can I help you?” Her accent was thick South Texas, the “yew” a couple of syllables long.
    “I’m Arley’s lawyer. I’m Anne Singer,” I replied, awkwardly covering the distance between us and holding out my hand, which she grasped delicately with three fingers—a thing that makes me want to slap women my age who do it. I couldn’t help but notice that under her cap sleeves, Rita Mowbray’s small arms were as incised with good muscle as Stuart’s were; she could probably have whipped me over one shoulder had she cared to. She was, if anything, shorter than I am, and slender, and she had the strangest way of looking, as if she were listening to a great dirty joke on a hidden earpiece. Her white smile was as cold and eager as a dog’s grin. It scared me. She scared me.
    “I didn’t know my daughter had a lawyer.”
    Arley cringed, seeming to shrink from her blossom-stalk carriage into a kind of crouch; even her hands crept up near her chest. I thought I’d got it then. She beat her. She’d let a succession of hang-arounds use the child sexually, perhaps so long ago Arley didn’t even remember. There was nothing in this room but fear, fear so dull and accustomed no one even seemed to recognize it as such anymore. No wonder the kid had turned to the first kind of shelter she’d ever encountered: she was a hungry heart on the half shell for the likes of Dillon LeGrande. As it turned out, I was right, and I was wrong. Rita Mowbray never laid a hand on her daughters or her son. She had never needed to.
    “I’m having me a hard-boiled egg,” she said pleasantly. “It’s my egg-fast day. I’ve had an egg-fast day once a week every week for fifteen years, and I never gained a single pound in my life.”
    “That’s remarkable,” I said, looking at the one egg in the pan. “I . . . ah, I’m sorry if I intruded on you.”
    “Shoot, no, that’s just fine,” said Rita. “I’m interested. I’m truly interested. Would you like to sit?”
    It was basically a picnic table. Without my having asked, Arley brought me a glass of water with ice and then sat down beside her mother.
    “My shift starts in half an hour,” said Rita.
    “Do you work at a doctor’s office?”
    “I’m a registered nurse, at Texas Christian. Surgical