Echo Burning

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 thekitchen. 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.”
    She was quiet for a beat. Then she nodded.
    “There’s more to tell you,” she said.
    He looked away.
    “The crucial part,” she said. “The main point.”
    “Why should I listen?”
    She took another drinking straw and unwrapped it. Flattened the paper tube that had covered it and began rolling it into a tight spiral, between her finger and thumb.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I had to get your attention.”
    Reacher turned his head and looked out of the window, too. The sun was moving the bar of shadow across the Cadillac’s hood like the finger on a clock. His attention? He recalled opening his motel room door that morning. A brand-new day, ready and waiting to be filled with whatever came his way. He recalled the reflection of the cop in the mirror and the sticky whisper of the Cadillac’s tires on the hot pavement as they slowed alongside him.
    “O.K., you got my attention,” he said, looking out at the car.
    “It happened for five whole years,” she said. “Exactly like I told you, I promise. Almost every day. But then it stopped, ayear and a half ago. But I had to tell it to you backward, because I needed you to listen to me.”
    He said nothing.
    “This isn’t easy,” she said. “Telling this stuff to a stranger.”
    He turned back to face her. “It isn’t easy listening to it.”
    She took a breath. “You going to run out on me?”
    He shrugged. “I almost did, a minute ago.”
    She was quiet again.
    “Please don’t,” she said. “At least not here. Please. Just listen a little more.”
    He looked straight at her.
    “O.K., I’m listening,” he said.
    “But will you still help me?”
    “With what?”
    She said nothing.
    “What did it feel like?” he asked.