Free The Exiled by Christopher Charles Page A

Protective.”
    “Of you in particular?”
    “Of anyone she cared about. But yes, of me in particular. And of Daniel. She brought Mrs. Hardin out of retirement, made her salary part of my stipend. Mrs. Hardin works with Daniel every day. There’s no other resource for him here. How could you call that anything but pure kindness on Mavis’s part? And she’s never wanted a thing from me beyond what we’d agreed to at the beginning.”
    “What was that?”
    “She advertised a kind of fellowship or grant—I’m not even sure what to call it. She had this loft above her store in a small town in the New Mexico mountains. Whoever she chose could live there with free rent and a small allowance. In exchange, they’d give a few classes in the community and look after the store now and again. You had to submit a letter of interest and some slides. Mavis never said it, but I think I’m the only one who applied. It was supposed to be for the summer—June through August. That was three years ago.”
    “Sounds like fate.”
    “It was what I needed at the time. A clean break.”
    “From?”
    “My own drama. And Daniel’s. Really, Mavis gave me what she wanted for herself. She had fantasies of starting over—selling the store, dumping Jack, moving to Buenos Aires.”
    “She said that?”
    “More than once.”
    “Why Buenos Aires?”
    “It’s beautiful and cheap. And she spoke enough Spanish to get by.”
    Raney made a mental note.
    “What about the community service?”
    “It was something she would have loved to do herself. She wanted to teach, work with children. But she had horrible stage fright. The thought of getting up in front of a group of people, even a group of toddlers, made her sick to her stomach. That might have been the saddest fact of her life.”
    Raney tried to sound casual:
    “She never had children of her own?”
    “No. Jack couldn’t. And he refused to see a doctor.”
    No, Raney thought. He saw hookers instead. Mavis parsed out her secrets. She told her lover about her husband’s penchant for whores, told Clara about the dreams she hadn’t realized. Had she told anyone about her son?
    “So she had you teaching classes at the store?”
    “No—that was my idea. I did it to bring in a little extra money. Very little. Saturdays I teach kids up at the reservation, at the community center they built alongside the casino.”
    “Do you enjoy it?”
    “Now I love it. At first it made me uncomfortable. I felt like a missionary, like a white girl putting a face on history. But Mavis kept saying: ‘No, you’re sharing a skill with fellow human beings. That’s all.’ She donated thousands of dollars’ worth of supplies to the center.”
    Mavis was compensatory all the way around: desert a son, take in a grown daughter; make money trafficking, funnel some of it to the reservation.
    “What about her mood? Any changes in the last few weeks?”
    “I don’t really know. She kept to herself more than usual. I hardly saw her. When she was at the store she spent most of the time in her office. And then there were those trips.”
    “Trips?”
    “She started going away overnight. Two, sometimes three times a week. Sometimes she was gone a couple of days.”
    “Had that ever happened before?”
    “No, never. She said she wanted to turn part of the store into a gallery. She told me she was scouting for talent.”
    “What did you think of the idea?”
    “Not much, to be honest. For a gallery to thrive, there has to be more than one. There has to be a scene. This is a place people come to when they want to escape a scene. But if anyone could have made it work, it’s Mavis. And I’m not just saying that. She had to be a good businesswoman just to keep this place going.”
    She found a way to subsidize, Raney thought.
    A guttural scream reverberated from the back of the apartment.
    “Shit,” Clara said.
    She ran down the hall, shut Daniel’s door behind her. The sound swelled, then subsided. After