Sister, Brother, Stranger

Chapter 1: Release

The gates of the Leland County Juvenile Work Farm were nothing more than two posts of creosote-soaked pine connected by a cattle gate, the kind any rancher in Kansas would recognize. No razor wire. No guard tower. The state didn't bother with those things for boys convicted of property crimes. The wheat fields on every side were prison enough—two hundred miles of flat earth in every direction, with no town closer than nineteen miles and no bus line closer than thirty. A boy could run, sure. He'd just have nowhere to go.

Virgil Crandall stood at those gates on the morning of June 14, 1953, with everything he owned in a canvas duffel bag the farm had issued him eighteen months prior. He was seventeen years old, five feet ten, and twenty pounds lighter than when he'd arrived. His hair had been buzzed to the scalp every two weeks for the duration of his sentence, and it was just now growing back in uneven brown patches that made him look like a dog recovering from mange. His hands were rough and cracked from fieldwork, and there was a scar across his left palm from a combine blade that the farm's nurse had stitched shut with regular sewing thread.

He did not look back at the barracks.

A black Ford sedan idled on the gravel road beyond the gate, its engine ticking in the morning heat. Leaning against the driver's door was a county officer named Emmett Dawes—a thick, tired man in his fifties with a gray crew cut and a short-sleeved white shirt already damp under the arms. He had the look of someone who had driven a long way to do a job he considered beneath him.

"Crandall?" Dawes said, though there was only one boy standing at the gate.

"Yes, sir."

"Put your bag in the back seat. We've got four hours of driving."

Virgil opened the rear door and set his duffel on the bench seat. The car smelled like cigarette smoke and the chemical sweetness of a pine air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror. He climbed into the front passenger seat and closed the door.

Dawes got behind the wheel, put the car in gear, and pulled onto the road without ceremony. The work farm shrank in the side mirror—a cluster of low wooden buildings surrounded by wheat, looking less like a correctional facility than a failing homestead. Virgil watched it diminish and then turned to face the road ahead.

"Your file says you've got a sister," Dawes said after they'd driven ten minutes in silence.

"Pearl. She's ten."

"She's been staying with a neighbor. A Mrs. Kessinger, out on Rural Route Four."

"I know where she's been staying."

Dawes glanced at him. "Mrs. Kessinger has made it clear she's done. She was supposed to keep the girl for six months, and it's been a year and a half. She's been writing the county every week for the past four months asking when someone's coming to collect."

Virgil said nothing. He'd received three of those letters himself, forwarded by the county with no comment. Mrs. Kessinger was a widow in her sixties who raised chickens and considered children a species of pest roughly equivalent to coyotes. She'd agreed to take Pearl only because the alternative was the state home in Topeka, and even Mrs. Kessinger had enough conscience to flinch at that.

"Your plan?" Dawes asked.

"My aunt in Duluth. She's agreed to take us both. I've got it in writing."

"Minnesota."

"Yes, sir."

"That's a long way."

"Greyhound runs straight through. Thirty-one hours from Wichita."

Dawes grunted. "The social worker's coming on the twentieth. Six days from now. If you and the girl aren't settled somewhere stable by then, she goes to the state."

"I know."

"I'm telling you because boys who come out of the farm tend to have optimistic ideas about time. Six days sounds like a lot. It isn't."

Virgil turned to look at the officer. "I've been counting days for eighteen months, Mr. Dawes. I know exactly how long six days is."

Dawes didn't respond to that. He reached for the radio dial, found nothing but static and a farm report out of Hutchinson, and turned it off again.

They drove west through the Kansas flatlands, past fields of winter wheat already turning gold and farmhouses set back from the road like afterthoughts. The sky was enormous and pale blue and cloudless, the kind of sky that made a person feel both free and insignificant at the same time. Virgil had spent eighteen months under that sky, working rows of sorghum and milo from dawn until the heat became dangerous, and then again from four in the afternoon until dark. He knew every mood of it—the way it turned green before a tornado, the way it went white in August when the humidity sat on the land like a wool blanket.

He would not miss it.

"What were you in for?" Dawes asked, though the file was right there on the seat between them.

"Joy-riding."

"Whose car?"

"A Buick Roadmaster belonging to a Mr. Harold Teague of Emporia."

Dawes waited.

"My brother Denny took it," Virgil said, because the man clearly wanted the story. "He was twenty. I was fifteen. He picked me up from school in it and told me our mother had bought it. I believed him for about ten minutes, and then I told him to take it back. He wouldn't. When the sheriff caught up with us, Denny ran. I was sitting in the passenger seat doing homework."

"And your brother?"

"Gone. He'd been gone a lot even before that. After our mother left, he just—" Virgil stopped. He didn't like talking about Denny, because talking about Denny meant talking about their mother, and talking about their mother meant arriving at a place in his chest that felt like a hand squeezing his lungs. "He wasn't around to take the blame. So I took it."

"You could have told the judge."

"I did tell the judge. The judge said someone had to answer for it, and I was the someone who was there."

Dawes made a sound that might have been sympathy or might have been indigestion. "Welcome to the justice system, kid."

They stopped for gas in McPherson, where Dawes bought two bottles of Coca-Cola from a machine outside the filling station and handed one to Virgil without comment. Virgil drank it standing in the shade of the gas station's overhang, watching the road. It was the first Coca-Cola he'd had in eighteen months. The sweetness of it almost hurt.

When they got back in the car, Virgil noticed the trunk lid wasn't sitting flush. It was raised perhaps a quarter of an inch, as if the latch hadn't caught properly.

"Your trunk's not shut all the way," he said.

Dawes glanced in the rearview mirror. "It does that. Latch is worn out." He reached down and pulled a lever near his seat, and there was a click from the back of the car. "There."

Virgil didn't think about it again for another hundred miles.

They reached the Crandall property at half past two in the afternoon. Property was a generous word for it—forty acres of hardpan outside the town of Cedarville, population three hundred and shrinking. The house was a two-bedroom clapboard structure that had been white once and was now the color of old bone. The porch sagged on the left side where a support post had rotted through. The yard was dirt and crabgrass, with a single cottonwood tree that provided shade to no one because it grew on the wrong side of the house. Behind the house, a barn that hadn't held livestock in a decade leaned eastward at an angle that suggested it was waiting for permission to fall down.

Virgil's father had died in that barn in 1948, of a heart attack, alone, at the age of forty-one. His mother had lasted two more years before leaving for what she called "a situation in California" and what Virgil understood to be another man. Denny had been nominally in charge after that, which meant no one was in charge, which meant Virgil raised Pearl from the time she was six until his arrest at fifteen.

The family truck—a 1941 Ford pickup, green, with a cracked windshield and a temperamental clutch—sat in the dirt driveway where Virgil had last seen it. It looked like it hadn't moved in eighteen months. The tires were low but not flat. A bird had built a nest on the driver's side mirror.

Dawes parked the Ford sedan behind the truck and cut the engine. "Mrs. Kessinger's place is a mile north. She's expecting you to come get the girl today."

"I will."

"You've got the aunt's letter?"

"In my bag."

Dawes reached into the file on the seat and produced a carbon-copy document. "This is your release paperwork. The social worker's name is Mrs. Wynn. She'll be at whatever address you give the county on June twentieth. If you're in Duluth, she'll coordinate with a Minnesota office. If you're still here—" He let the sentence finish itself.

Virgil took the paper, folded it carefully, and put it in his shirt pocket. "Thank you for the ride, Mr. Dawes."

"Don't thank me. Just get that girl somewhere decent."

Dawes started the engine, backed down the driveway, and pulled onto the county road. Virgil watched the black Ford until it was a speck on the straight road, and then until it was nothing at all.

He stood in the yard of his childhood home and breathed.

The air smelled like dust and dried grass and the faint chemical tang of the fertilizer plant twelve miles south. A meadowlark was singing somewhere in the field beyond the barn. The sun was directly overhead and the heat was the thick, still kind that settles on central Kansas in mid-June like a punishment.

Virgil went inside.

The house was exactly as he'd left it, minus whatever Mrs. Kessinger had taken for Pearl. The furniture was sparse—a kitchen table with three chairs (there had been four; Denny had broken one in a fight with a wall), a sofa with a spring poking through the left cushion, a bookshelf made of cinder blocks and planks that held a Bible, an almanac, and a set of encyclopedias missing volumes D through G. The kitchen had a hand pump for water, an icebox that hadn't held ice in two years, and a woodstove. The bedroom Virgil had shared with Denny contained two cots with thin mattresses. Pearl's room—barely bigger than a closet—had a child's bed with a metal frame and a window that looked out on the cottonwood tree.

Everything was covered in a fine layer of dust. A family of mice had taken up residence in the kitchen drawer where his mother used to keep dish towels.

Virgil set his duffel on the kitchen table and took stock. In the bag: two changes of clothes, a toothbrush, the letter from Aunt Ida in Duluth, forty-three dollars in cash that represented his earnings from the work farm at twelve cents an hour, and a photograph of Pearl taken at school when she was eight. In the photograph she was smiling in a way that showed the gap where her front teeth had been, and she was wearing a dress that Virgil had sewn himself from a flour sack, badly, because there was no one else to do it.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he put it back in the bag and walked to Mrs. Kessinger's.

The mile between the two properties was a dirt road lined with fence posts that no longer held wire. Virgil walked it quickly, his work-farm boots raising small clouds of dust with each step. He could see Mrs. Kessinger's place from halfway there—a slightly more prosperous version of his own, with a chicken coop and a kitchen garden and curtains in the windows.

Pearl was sitting on the porch steps when he arrived.

She was bigger than he'd expected—of course she was; she was ten now, not eight—and her hair was longer, pulled back in a braid that someone had done with more care than Mrs. Kessinger typically showed. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and no shoes, and she was reading a road atlas that was bigger than her lap.

She looked up when she heard his boots on the gravel.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Virgil had imagined this reunion a hundred times in his cot at the work farm, and in every imagining, Pearl ran to him and he picked her up and swung her around and everything was immediately all right. But Pearl didn't run. She set the atlas down carefully on the porch step, stood up, and looked at him with an expression that was equal parts relief and accusation.

"You're late," she said.

"I know."

"You were supposed to be here at noon. Mrs. Kessinger made me eat lunch and I wasn't hungry."

"The drive was longer than they said."

Pearl studied him. Then she walked down the steps and across the yard and put her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his shirt and held on.

Virgil put his hand on the back of her head and closed his eyes.

"I'm here now," he said.

"I know," she said, muffled.

Mrs. Kessinger appeared in the doorway—a thin woman with steel-colored hair and the permanent frown of someone who believed the world was a series of impositions. "She's been packed since yesterday," she said. "There's a suitcase and a box. The box is books."

"Thank you for keeping her, Mrs. Kessinger."

"I did what was asked of me. I won't pretend it was easy. That child reads until two in the morning and asks questions I'm not equipped to answer."

Pearl pulled away from Virgil and gave Mrs. Kessinger a look that was, for a ten-year-old, remarkably diplomatic. "Thank you for the eggs," she said.

"You're welcome. Don't come back for more."

Virgil carried the suitcase and Pearl carried the box of books, and they walked back down the dirt road to the Crandall house in the late afternoon light. Pearl walked close enough to Virgil that her shoulder bumped his hip with every few steps.

"We're going to Duluth," Virgil said. "Aunt Ida's expecting us."

"I know. You wrote me."

"I'm going to sell what I can from the house—the stove, maybe the truck if someone'll buy it—and we'll take the Greyhound from Wichita. We need to be at Aunt Ida's by the twentieth."

"That's six days."

"Yes."

"That's enough time."

"It is if nothing goes wrong."

Pearl looked up at him. "Things go wrong a lot."

"Not this time," Virgil said, with a confidence he did not feel.

They reached the house and Virgil set Pearl's suitcase in her old room, which she inspected with the critical eye of a returning landlord. She wiped dust from the windowsill with her finger, opened and closed the window to make sure it still worked, and tested the mattress by sitting on it and bouncing once.

"It smells like mice," she said.

"There are mice. I'll deal with them."

"Don't kill them."

"Pearl—"

"Put them outside. They were here first."

Virgil sighed and went to check on the truck.

The truck was where the plan hinged. If it ran, he could drive it to Wichita, sell it there for maybe fifty dollars—it wasn't worth more—and use that plus his forty-three dollars to buy two Greyhound tickets and have enough left over for food on the trip. If it didn't run, he'd have to find another way to Wichita, which would eat into his money and his time.

He opened the hood and checked the battery, the belts, the fluid levels. Everything was low but not empty. He cleaned the bird's nest off the mirror, pumped the tires with a hand pump from the barn, and tried the ignition.

The engine turned over once, coughed, and died.

He tried again. Same result.

On the fifth try, with Virgil's jaw clenched so tight his teeth ached, the engine caught and held. It ran rough, knocking and shuddering, but it ran. He let it idle for ten minutes and the knocking subsided to a steady, unhealthy rattle that he decided to interpret as functional.

He was under the truck checking for leaks when he heard voices.

Not Pearl's voice. Two voices, both male, coming from the direction of the county road.

Virgil slid out from under the truck and stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. Coming up the driveway were two young men he recognized immediately, and the sight of them turned his stomach to ice.

The first was Floyd Nolan—eighteen, lean, with sandy hair that he wore longer than the work farm allowed, which meant he'd been growing it out in anticipation of leaving. He had a narrow, mobile face built for expressions of false sincerity, and he was grinning the grin of someone who believed the world owed him something and was about to pay up. He wore the same kind of work-farm-issued clothes Virgil did, but he'd already rolled his sleeves up and undone his top button, as if shedding the institution one gesture at a time.

Behind him, like a mountain following a stream, was Roscoe Stanley. Nineteen years old, six foot four, two hundred and forty pounds, with skin the color of dark coffee and hands that could palm a basketball without trying. Roscoe had been at the work farm for auto theft—a charge that, like Virgil's, was more complicated than the paperwork suggested. He rarely spoke. He followed Floyd with the resigned loyalty of a draft horse yoked to a cart it didn't choose.

"Virgil Crandall!" Floyd called out, spreading his arms as if greeting a long-lost friend at a train station. "What are the chances?"

"What are you doing here, Floyd?"

"Now that is a story." Floyd reached the truck and leaned against it with the easy familiarity of someone leaning against his own furniture. "A story involving resourcefulness, physical discomfort, and the generous trunk space of a 1949 Ford sedan."

Virgil stared at him. "You were in the trunk."

"We were in the trunk."

"Of the county car."

"Of the county car. Which, I have to say, is not designed for two passengers in the luggage compartment. Roscoe here is not a small man. I've got a boot print on my kidney."

Roscoe said nothing. He stood behind Floyd with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground.

Virgil's mind raced. Dawes had driven him directly from the work farm. That meant Floyd and Roscoe had gotten into the trunk before Dawes arrived to pick Virgil up—probably during the night, when the car was parked at the farm's administration building. They'd ridden four hours in a closed trunk in June heat. The fact that they weren't dead was a testament to either luck or the poor seal on the Ford's trunk latch.

"You escaped," Virgil said.

"Escaped is a strong word. We relocated."

"They'll come looking for you."

"Eventually. But the farm does roll call at six a.m. and it's now—" Floyd looked at the sky as if it were a clock. "Three-ish? So they've known since this morning, but they don't know we were in the county man's trunk. They'll search the fields first, then the roads. By the time they think to check where that car went, we'll be long gone."

"Gone where?"

Floyd's grin widened. "Kansas City."

"No."

"Hear me out."

"No. Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying. I've got six days to get my sister to Duluth, and I'm not getting mixed up in anything that puts that at risk."

"Virgil." Floyd put his hand over his heart. "I'm not asking you to get mixed up in anything. I'm asking for a ride. One day. Drive me and Roscoe to Kansas City, drop us off, and you never see us again. It's barely out of your way."

"It's a hundred and eighty miles out of my way."

"A hundred and sixty. I checked."

"I don't care if it's ten. The answer is no."

Floyd nodded slowly, as if considering this. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a set of keys—two keys on a plain metal ring. Virgil recognized them instantly. They were the keys to the truck.

"Where did you get those?" Virgil said, and his voice went flat and dangerous in a way it hadn't been since the day Denny left him sitting in a stolen Buick.

"They were in the ignition. You really shouldn't leave keys in the ignition, Virgil. It's how cars get stolen. I would know."

Virgil took a step toward Floyd. Floyd took a step back, still grinning, and held the keys up higher.

"I'll give them back," Floyd said. "The minute you agree to drive us to Kansas City. One day, Virgil. Twenty-four hours. And here's the thing—" He lowered his voice, as if sharing a confidence. "There's a safe-deposit box in Kansas City with eight thousand dollars in it. My father's money. He died last year and left it for me, but I couldn't get to it because I was picking sorghum for the state of Kansas. Eight thousand dollars, Virgil. I'll give you five hundred just for the ride. That's enough to get you and your sister to Duluth in a Pullman car instead of a Greyhound."

Virgil looked at Floyd. He looked at Roscoe, who was still studying the ground. He looked at the keys in Floyd's hand.

"Give me the keys, Floyd."

"One day."

"Give me the keys or I'll take them."

Floyd glanced at Roscoe. Roscoe didn't look up, but his shoulders shifted slightly—a small adjustment that communicated a great deal about what would happen if Virgil tried to take anything by force.

Virgil understood. Floyd was the voice; Roscoe was the weight behind it. It had been the same at the work farm. Floyd talked his way into trouble and Roscoe's presence kept anyone from doing much about it.

The screen door banged, and Pearl came out onto the porch.

"Who are they?" she asked.

"Nobody," Virgil said. "Go inside."

"They're wearing the same clothes as you."

"Pearl. Inside."

Pearl didn't go inside. She sat down on the porch step and picked up her road atlas and opened it to a page she'd apparently been studying. "Kansas City is a hundred and seventy-three miles from here," she said, without looking up. "On Route 56 to Route 50, then north on 71. About four hours in a truck that old."

Floyd looked at Pearl, then at Virgil, and his grin became something closer to genuine delight. "I like her."

"You don't talk to her," Virgil said. "You don't look at her. You don't acknowledge her existence."

"Virgil. I'm not a monster. I'm a man with a simple business proposition."

Virgil stood in the dirt yard of his dead father's house and did the math. Without the truck keys, he couldn't drive to Wichita. Without driving to Wichita, he couldn't sell the truck or catch the Greyhound. He could walk to town and call the sheriff, but that would bring the law to his door on his first day out of the work farm, and the social worker would hear about it, and there went his custody case. He could try to hotwire his own truck, but the ignition on a '41 Ford wasn't simple, and he didn't have the tools.

Floyd had him. Floyd knew it. Floyd was watching him do the math and waiting for the answer with the patience of a card player holding a winning hand.

"One day," Virgil said.

"One day."

"You get your money, I get five hundred, and we part ways in Kansas City. Then I drive straight to Wichita and catch the bus."

"That's the deal."

"And you give me the keys right now."

Floyd tossed him the keys. Virgil caught them and put them in his pocket, deep, where they pressed against his thigh.

"We leave at first light," Virgil said. "You and Roscoe sleep in the barn. Not the house."

"The barn it is. I've slept in worse."

"I know you have. That's what worries me."

Virgil went inside and locked the door—a gesture more symbolic than practical, since the lock was a hook-and-eye that a strong wind could defeat. Pearl was at the kitchen table, her atlas open to a map of Missouri.

"Who's Floyd?" she asked.

"Trouble."

"What kind?"

"The kind that smiles while it picks your pocket."

Pearl considered this. "And the big one?"

"Roscoe. He doesn't say much."

"Is he dangerous?"

"I don't think so. Not on his own."

Pearl traced a route on the map with her finger. "If we go to Kansas City, we could take Route 71 north afterward. It connects to 35, which goes all the way up through Iowa and into Minnesota. We wouldn't have to go back to Wichita at all."

Virgil looked at her. "Since when do you know highway routes?"

"Since I had eighteen months with nothing to do but read Mrs. Kessinger's atlases. She had four of them. I memorized the good parts."

"The good parts of an atlas."

"The highways. The distances. The places where routes connect." Pearl looked up at him with an expression that was pure earnestness. "I can get us anywhere, Virgil. Just tell me where we're going."

Virgil sat down across from her and put his hands flat on the table. "We're going to Duluth. That's the only place we're going. Kansas City is a stop, not a destination. We drop Floyd off, we get back on the road, and we don't look back."

"Okay."

"Promise me you'll stay close and do what I say."

"I promise."

"And don't trust Floyd."

"I don't trust anyone I just met," Pearl said. "That's basic."

Virgil almost smiled. Almost.

He made them dinner from what he could find—canned beans from the pantry, slightly stale crackers, water from the pump. Pearl ate without complaint, which told him more about Mrs. Kessinger's cooking than any words could. After dinner, he checked that the truck's tank had enough gas to reach Kansas City—it was a quarter full, which would be close—and laid out their plan for the morning.

They'd leave at five. Reach Kansas City by nine or ten. Floyd would do whatever Floyd needed to do with his safe-deposit box. They'd be back on the road by noon, heading north. If they drove hard, they could reach Iowa by nightfall, and Duluth by the following evening. That would leave them three full days of cushion before the social worker arrived.

It was a good plan. It was a reasonable plan.

Virgil lay on his cot that night and stared at the ceiling and tried not to think about all the ways it could go wrong.