She turned back to look at me. “I don’t know for sure, but she left for school, then, an hour later, she came back. She put her toothbrush in her backpack, and a few things, you know, her pajamas, stuff like that. When I asked where she was off to, she said, to see April, but, well, you know, after all these years I know pretty much when Josie is lying to me. And besides, April, she was coming home from the hospital today. Mrs. Czernin, she wouldn’t have let Josie come over to the house, not with April so sick.”

“Any idea where they’d go, Billy and Josie?”

Julia shook her head. “All I know is, he wouldn’t take her to his house, you know, the rich place he lives with his ma and his daddy, ’cause, you know, they don’t want him dating no Mexican girl.”

I talked to her for a few more minutes, but she’d clearly told me all she knew. I squeezed her hand again, firmly, the dismissal squeeze. “I’ll see you Thursday at three o’clock, Julia. Got that?”

She whispered something that might have been assent. When I got up to leave, I saw a shadow move across the baby clothes lining the middle of the room: Rose had been listening in. Maybe just as well. Maybe it was the only way she’d learn a few things about her own daughters.

26

Annie, Get Your Gun

I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Supposing Billy and Josie are holed up down here, we might find them by finding his little sports car, assuming it’s on the street.” I did some arithmetic in my head. “There are probably only forty or forty-five miles of streets to drive up and down; we could do that in four hours, less if we skipped the alleys.”

Mr. Contreras and I were in the Mustang, where we’d fled from Rose’s overheated emotions. Almost before I’d left the room, she’d begun upbraiding Julia for not telling her own mother what she’d reported to me: “Did I raise you to be a liar?” she’d shouted, before whirling around to demand that I lose no time in finding Josie.

“Where do you suggest I look, Rose?” I’d asked tiredly. “It’s midnight. You say she isn’t at April’s. What other friends would she go to?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think. Sancia, maybe? Only Sancia, she was really Julia’s friend, although she and Josie—”

“I’ll check on Sancia,” I interrupted, “and on the other girls on the team. What about any relatives? Is she in touch with her father?”

“Her father? That gamberro? He hasn’t seen her since she was two. I don’t even know where he’s living right now.”