Little Girl Gone Read Online Free Page A

don’t want you getting wet, catching a chill. It’s pretty bad out there. I’ll come back for the tea. Don’t trouble yourself.”
    “Just tell me first. Did you plan this out ahead of time?”
    He had never hit her, never even threatened her, but sometimes Madora felt the possibility of violence flow between them like an electric current.
    “I’ll tell you the truth, and will you then be satisfied or will I have to keep explaining myself?” He sighed like a porter putting down his load after a long day. “I’m not going to lie, Madora, about how much this hurts me, your doubt. After all we’ve been through and all we’ve been to each other, you still don’t trust me. When the person I love most in the world doesn’t trust me or believe in me, do you know the pain, Madora? Trust and love, they’re almost the same thing. If you don’t trust me, it means you don’t love me. You
can’t
love me.”
    The wind rose, whining up Evers Canyon and moaning in the eaves of the house, driving the rain hard against the windows. A draft came in at the floorboards and ran like a spider up the back of Madora’s leg. Along the creek somewhere a branch broke off a cottonwood, sounding like a pistol crack.
    Willis sat, resting his elbows on his knees. “Maybe I should have told you before, but it happened too fast. I didn’t do a lot of thinking or planning.”
    And yet he had a mattress and blankets in the trailer, waiting. Madora let the thought slide away, out of her mind forever.
    “I admit, I’ve been watching Linda for a couple of days. Every time I went into Arroyo she’d be standing by the longstoplight near the freeway, holding up this feeble little sign saying she’s pregnant and hungry, and today when I saw her, in the pouring rain, I knew I had to bring her home.” His dark eyes looked into Madora’s, and she read in his expression a deep and inexpressible longing to be understood. “And I knew—I
thought
I knew—you’d want to help her too. I guess I just totally misunderstood.” He stood up. “If you really want me to, Madora, I’ll take her back to town. But is it okay if she eats? First? She needs
something
.”
    Awash with shame, Madora laid her hand against his cheek. The goodness of the man brought tears into her eyes. “You’re right; you did the right thing. We’ll make the trailer comfortable for her.” Madora would not think about the mattress and blankets laid out in advance or consider the implications of the padlock. “You go along and get her settled. When you come back I’ll have her tea ready.”
    And the flannel pajamas.

Chapter 4
    A few miles away, in the town of Arroyo, Django Jones dreamed of his mother. She was wearing her favorite red dress with the pleats that flipped out around her knees, and her hair shimmered with lights of silver, copper, and gold. Django had a green garden hose in his hand and he was spraying her and she was laughing. Her laugh was like light, like rain, like water splashing over rocks.
    The room in which he awoke—it was the third morning now—was a quarter the size of his bedroom at home, and he could tell from the boxes shoved into the closet and corners that it had been a kind of utility room before his arrival. Across the room on a beat-up old dining room table, Django’s backpack reminded him that he was going to school that day whether he wanted to or not. He tried to imagine Arroyo Elementary School, K through eight, and he knew he wasn’t going to like it.
    He fished his laptop off the floor beside the bed, powered on, and checked the time against the clock on thetable. He had half an hour before he needed to get up. As he logged on, his hands trembled with hope.
    First he Googled
Jacky Jones
, his father, and there were many new entries: bios and obits and memorials, a lot of people writing about how they knew him when he was the hottest guitarist out of England in the early seventies. He scanned these quickly. A woman wrote about