Racing the Devil by Jaden Terrell Page B

she married Calvin, and I can tell you it was no nine months before Tara was born.”
    “Tara?” I frowned. “I thought Katrina was the older girl.”
    “Katrina is Calvin’s by his first wife. Don’t ask me about her. They never talk about her. As I understand it, she just packed her things one afternoon and left. And no one’s heard from her since.”
    One wife dead, one vanished. Calvin, it seemed, was batting a thousand.
    Ms. Birdie clucked her tongue against her teeth and went on. “Poor Amy. Here she was, seventeen years old, with a brand new baby and a five-year-old who wasn’t even hers. No wonder she was overwhelmed.” She plucked at her blouse, which puffed out where it tucked into her skirt. “When it got to be too much, Amy used to bring those little girls over here to stay with Henry and me. The girls would dress up in their little costumes and perform for us. Which, naturally, Calvin said was a sin. Let me tell you something, Mr. McKean. A man like that, the kind who sees evil everywhere? Well, that’s a man with sinning in his heart.”
    I nodded without answering. The words were flowing, and I didn’t want to interrupt.
    “It was hardest on Katrina, I think. She was always a lonely little thing—old for her age, if you know what I mean—and Amy . . . well, I think she always felt Katrina was a little bit of a stranger. Not that she was unkind. Just . . . distant.”
    I nodded, feeling a surge of pity for a little girl who’d been abandoned by one mother and rejected by another. A child who might be vulnerable to a kindly-looking predator with candy and a camera.
    “When the girls were both in school, Amy thought she might like to go to work, but Calvin wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted her at home, and that was that. If she felt unfulfilled, he said, she could use her talents to create a perfect pot roast.” She shook her head in disgust. “Pot roast. I was a good wife, Mr. McKean, but if Henry had tried that with me, he would have been buried with that pot roast firmly lodged in his backside.”
    “I take it Amy didn’t see it that way.”
    “Amy didn’t know how to say no.” She sighed and smoothed her skirt across her thighs. “Then about six months ago, they joined this new church. It must have been Calvin’s idea, because it’s all about how women are supposed to be subservient little doormats and how they’re all— we’re all—Jezebels, tainted with the sin of Eve. Never mind that Adam committed the same sin, and proved he had no backbone to boot.”
    “Jezebels, huh.” I wouldn’t touch that one with a ten-foot pole.
    “Anyway, Amy went along with it. But she just kept getting sadder and sadder, until finally, her doctor put her on some kind of medicine for it.”
    “Do you know what kind of medicine?”
    “It’s that one I keep reading about in the news.”
    “Prozac?”
    “I think so. But she stopped taking it.”
    “Really. What happened?”
    Her eyes glistened, two jet beads in a face as wrinkled as a withered apple. “She went out and got herself a job at a travel agency. Windrider Travel. It wasn’t about the work . It was about him not thinking she was anything of value. Calvin just about hit the ceiling. I mean, sparks flew out of that house. Amy was in tears when she came over here the next day, and I told her, ‘Honey, you are worth more than this. When the good Lord set us here, he made Eve for a helpmeet, not a doormat.’ And she said to me, ‘Ms. Birdie, you are right.’ ”
    Her eyes brimmed, and a tear rolled down her nose and hung trembling from the tip. “I loved that child, Mr. McKean. She had her problems, but she was a good person.” She leaned toward me and half-whispered, “I don’t know this for a fact, but I think she might have been planning to divorce him.”
    “Ms. Birdie, this is a hard question,” I said. “But I have to ask it—”
    “I know.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Was she seeing anyone? Well, I don’t know for