Ada's house still smelled like coffee burned down to sludge while she'd been waiting for her son, and we went through his room together taking down drawers like we might find him folded up inside one. His bed was made. His other pair of work boots sat by the closet door, laces still tied from the last time he'd pulled them off. Nothing in that room told us anything except that he had expected to come back to it.
"Why did you put him in the middle of your business," Ada said, not looking at me, her hands moving through a drawer of folded shirts without really seeing them. "He works freight. He doesn't give his word for men like Cal Mercer."
I sat down on the edge of the bed because my legs didn't feel steady enough to keep standing. "I asked him to go in my place. I had a delivery that ran late and I thought it'd be nothing. Tell Leon the deal still held, so he could open the envelope I'd already left there. Then drive home." I heard how small that sounded even as I said it. "I should have gone myself."
She turned around then and looked at me the way she'd looked at me since we were children, like she was deciding how much of the truth I'd actually given her. "Then you go get him," she said. "Not Mercer. Not whoever that man sends. You."
I was still sitting there when Wade Sutter's car pulled into her driveway, headlights swinging across the window, and I knew before he knocked that Mercer had sent him to bring me back rather than let me keep running my own search on my own time. Sutter and I had worked loads together for six years; he knew my habits better than my own sister did, and he came up the porch steps already talking before Ada had the door half open.
"Cal wants you back at the yard," he said, standing just outside the threshold with his hands loose at his sides in a way that wasn't casual at all. "Says there's no need dragging family into a business matter."
"My nephew is the business matter," I said, and I stepped past Ada and pulled the door mostly shut behind me so Sutter was talking to me on the porch and not to her through the gap. I didn't want him getting a look at her face, didn't want him forming any opinion at all about what she knew or didn't know, because whatever this was, I had decided in that half second that it would not reach into her house if I could keep it out.
I told Sutter I'd come in the morning, that I needed the night to settle my sister, and something in my voice must have carried enough iron that he let it go, though he stood in the driveway a moment longer than he needed to, looking past me at the lit windows like he was taking an inventory of who was inside. After his taillights cleared the end of the street I went back in and told Ada to pack a bag, that she'd stay with her cousin in Gulfport a few days until I knew more, and she didn't argue, which frightened me more than if she had.
I drove her myself, and on the way I took bills out of my own wallet, the ones set aside for my rent that month, and put them into her hand at a stoplight without either of us saying much about it. It left me with less than I needed and no clear sense of when I'd have more, but handing her money felt like the only true thing I could do that night, the only promise I could actually keep.
At her cousin's door, with the porch light catching the gray starting at her temples, Ada took my hand for a moment, not quite a thank you. "Don't tell me he'll be home tomorrow," she said, "unless you know it." I opened my mouth to say it anyway, and she shook her head before I could, and shut the door between us gently, the way you close a door on someone you still love but no longer fully trust.