He said nothing. She opened her eyes and looked straight at him.
And worst of all, I had nowhere to go,” she said.
“Home?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I never even thought about it,” she said. “Taking the beatings was better than trying to crawl back to my family, with a white blond baby in my arms.”
He said nothing.
“And the first time you pass up the chance, you’ve had it,” she said. “That’s how it is. It just gets worse. Whenever I thought about it, I still had no money, I still had a baby, then she was a one-year-old, then a two-year-old, then a three-year-old. The time is never right. If you stay that first time, you’re trapped forever. And I stayed that first time. I wish I hadn’t, but I did.”
He said nothing. She looked at him, appealing for something.
“You have to take it on faith,” she said. “You don’t know how it is. You’re a man, you’re big and strong, somebody hits you, you hit him back. You’re on your own, you don’t like someplace, you move on. It’s different for me. Even if you can’t understand it, you have to believe it.”
He said nothing.
“I could have gone if I’d left Ellie,” she said. “Sloop told me if I left the baby with him, he’d pay my fare anyplace I wanted to go. First class. He said he’d call a limo all the way from Dallas, right there and then, to take me straight to the airport.”
He said nothing.
“But I wouldn’t do that,” she said quietly. “I mean, how could I? So Sloop makes out this is my choice. Like I’m agreeing to it. Like I want it. So he keeps on hitting me. Punching me, kicking me, slapping me. Humiliating me, sexually. Every day, even if he isn’t mad at me. And if he is mad at me, he just goes crazy.”
There was silence. Just the rush of air from the cooling vents in the diner’s ceiling. Vague noise from the kitchens. Carmen Greer’s low breathing. The clink of fracturing ice in her abandoned glass. He looked across the table at her, tracing his gaze over her hands, her arms, her neck, her face. The neckline of her dress had shifted left, and he could see a thickened knot on her collarbone. A healed break, no doubt about it. But she was sitting absolutely straight, with her head up and her eyes defiant, and her posture was telling him something.
“He hits you every day?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “Well, almost every day. Not literally, I guess. But three, four times in a week, usually. Sometimes more. It feels like every day.”
He was quiet for a long moment, looking straight at her.
Then he shook his head.
“You’re making it up,” he said.
The watchers stayed resolutely on station, even though there was nothing much to watch. The red house baked under the sun and stayed quiet. The maid came out and got in a car and drove away in a cloud of dust, presumably to the market. There was some horse activity around the barn. A couple of listless ranch hands walked the animals out and around, brushed them down, put them back inside. There was a bunkhouse way back beyond the barn, same architecture, same blood-red siding. It looked mostly empty, because the barn was mostly empty. Maybe five horses in total, one of them the pony for the kid, mostly just resting in their stalls because of the terrible heat.
The maid came back and carried packages into the kitchen. The boy made a note of it in his book. The dust from her wheels floated slowly back to earth and the men with the telescopes watched it, with their tractor caps reversed to keep the sun off their necks.
“You’re lying to me,” Reacher said.
Carmen turned away to the window. Red spots the size of quarters crept high into her cheeks. Anger, he thought. Or embarrassment, maybe.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, quietly.
“Physical evidence,” he said. “You’ve got no bruising visible anywhere. Your skin is clear. Light makeup, too light to be hiding anything. It’s certainly not hiding the fact you’re blushing like crazy. You look like you’ve just stepped out of the beauty parlor. And you’re moving easily. You skipped across that parking lot like a ballerina. So you’re not hurting anyplace. You’re not stiff and sore. If he’s hitting you almost every day, he must be doing it with a feather.”