Tula could hear her pulse thudding as her thoughts verified what she had sensed from the beginning: Frankie was to blame for this. The drunken woman with her man’s voice, her tattoos, her viciousness. Carlson had seen her giving Tula’s mother a cell phone how many months ago?
The girl couldn’t remember, but she now knew in her heart the truth of what had happened. The redheaded woman had victimized her mother. Only one of many. Frankie’s many sins lay scattered on the trailer floor, these profane photographs like discarded souls. The woman was evil.
Her body shaking, Tula got to her feet, aware that Frankie could return to the RV at any second. She had to get herself under control. For Tula to allow Frankie to see her weak and in tears would only give the woman more power over her.
She couldn’t allow that to happen. She wouldn’t allow it to happen.
Tula considered tearing the photo of her mother into tiny pieces. Instead, she folded it and put it into her back pocket, while, inside her, the revulsion she felt for Frankie was transformed into hatred, then rage. She had never experienced the emotion before. It created inside her a determination and fearlessness that was unsettling because, in that instant, Tula understood why soldiers in battle were so eager to kill.
As the girl hurried down the hall toward the kitchenette, it was difficult to keep her hand off the paring knife. She wanted to use the knife now. She wanted what she had imagined to happen: Frankie on the ground, the evil bleeding out of her.
Which was when the Maiden’s voice surprised Tula by saying, What about the stove? The giant showed you how to turn the gas on.
The girl was confused for a moment. To be so passionately focused on one subject, it was difficult to concentrate on anything else. But she tried, wondering, The stove? Of what use was the gas stove now?
Then she understood. Frankie had been smoking a cigarette. If the woman was still smoking when she walked into a room filled with propane, she would die.
For a moment, Tula was excited. But the Maiden rebuked her, telling the girl that the stove was better used as a diversion, because it was smarter.
The girl was disappointed, but she understand. If the RV caught fire, Victorino’s men, and Frankie, would be so surprised they might forget about Harris Squires for a few minutes. Maybe they would leave the giant alone long enough for Tula to free him, then they could escape together down the lane to the road.
No… not the dirt lane. Tula remembered that Victorino had sent two men to watch the road, so she and the giant would have to escape through the woods.
But escape without confronting Frankie? That seemed cowardly after what that evil woman had done to Tula’s mother.
The Maiden entered the girl’s head and comforted her, saying, God will judge her. Can there be anything more terrible than His wrath?
Tula wasn’t convinced. As always, though, she obeyed. Equipping herself for a hike through the woods, the girl put matches, two candles and a bottle of mosquito repellent in her pockets. Then she knelt beneath the sink and turned the gas valve until it was wide open.
At the stove, however, the girl hesitated. She had extinguished the candle she was carrying, but there were still two burning candles in the room. Secretly, she wanted to blow out the candles and hope Frankie was still smoking a cigarette when she opened the door. But there were no secrets with the Maiden, who told Tula, Hurry… the woman’s coming. Do it now!
Tula opened both valves on the stove, then ran down the hall, pulling doors shut to isolate the propane, including the door to the bedroom she entered, maybe slamming it too hard, but it was too late to worry now.
On the far wall was a window. Tiny, but big enough to wiggle through. Tula bounced over the bed to the wall, then flipped the lock, expecting the window to open easily.
It didn’t. The window frame was aluminum. Maybe it was corroded shut. Tula used all her strength, pushing with her legs, then tried cutting around the edges of the window with the paring knife.
It still wouldn’t open. As the girl stood there, breathing heavily, she could smell propane gas seeping under the door. She would have been less surprised by smoke and flames. Had the candles gone out, extinguished by the doors she had slammed? Or did the concentration of gas have to be higher before the candles would ignite it?
Tula didn’t know. She knew only that she had to escape from the trailer before Frankie came in, smelled the propane and realized that a trap had been set for her.
Next to the bed was a lamp. Tula grabbed it and swung the base of the lamp against the Plexiglas window, expecting it to shatter with the first blow. It made a sound like a gunshot, but the glass didn’t break.
Panicked because she had made so much noise, Tula began hammering at the window. Finally, it cracked, but the girl had to pull the Plexiglas out in shards, piece by piece, before the window was finally wide enough for her to crawl through.
She draped a towel over the opening so she wouldn’t cut herself, then dropped to the ground, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief to be free.
The feeling lasted only a few seconds.
As Tula got to her feet and turned toward the shack where she’d last seen Squires, a low voice from the shadows surprised her, saying, “You sneaky little slut. What did you use to break the window, a damn sledgehammer? I didn’t even have to go inside, it was so obvious.”
Frankie was standing at the corner of the RV, a towering shape silhouetted by headlights. Not smoking now but a pack of cigarettes in her hand.
Tula’s fingers moved to her back pocket, feeling the lump that was the paring knife. An edge of her mother’s photograph was sticking out, too.
“It’s because you scare me,” the girl said, trying to sound reasonable. “What I told you was true. I want to talk to you, tell you things I’ve never been able to tell anyone. But my body’s afraid because of the way you look. Why would someone as beautiful as you waste time helping someone like me?”
With her deep voice, the woman said, “Liar! The whole time, you were lying,” sounding furious but undecided as if she wanted to be proven wrong.
Tula focused her eyes on the woman’s black eyes, hand inside her back pocket, saying, “We should go inside and let me wash your blouse. I know how to get bloodstains out. Where I lived in the mountains, that was one of my jobs, washing clothes.”
In her mind, Tula was picturing Frankie pausing at the steps of the RV to light a cigarette, then opening the door.
The woman was staring back, perhaps feeling the images that Tula was projecting because, for a moment, the woman’s anger wavered. But then the woman caught herself, visibly shook her head as if to clear it and yelled, “What the hell’s wrong with me? You’re lying again! Don’t tell me what to do!”
Then the big woman charged at Tula, whose hand suddenly felt frozen, unable to draw the knife from her pocket, so the girl turned and ran.
Frankie sprinted after her, yelling, “Come back her, you lying brat! Just wait ’til I get my hands on you!”
For a woman her age and size, Frankie was quicker than Tula could have imagined. After only a few steps, the girl felt a jarring impact on the back of her head. Then she was on the ground, Frankie kneeling over her, using a right fist to hit the girl so hard that Tula didn’t regain full consciousness until she awoke, minutes or hours later, in the cookshack.
Woozy and dreamlike -that’s the way Tula felt when she opened her eyes. Nauseous, too. It took the girl several seconds to organize what she was seeing as her eyes moved slowly around the room. Overhead were bars of neon light. The sound of a motor running confirmed that the generator had been started. There was a strong odor of gasoline, too.
Tula wondered about that, making the distinction between the smell of gasoline and the smell of propane, which struck her as important for some reason.