Harry popped the saliva-soaked rag back into her mouth and let her gnaw on it in muffled rage. “I told you,” he said to me. “She’s not going to be of any use. We may as well turn her loose and make a run for it.”

“I’m not going to run away from a little old lady,” I said, jaw set firm. “I’ll smack some manners into one if I have to, but I’m not going to flee from one. It’s undignified.”

“What do you plan to do, then?” He said it with a hint of warning that implied, all threats aside, he would prefer that no actual manners-smacking took place.

I positioned myself so that Eliza could stare me down all she liked. I wanted her to look at me. I wanted her to remember how much she hated me, and my mother before me. There was a chance I could use that fury to my advantage.

“Eliza, who’s your friend in Florida?”

She stopped squirming and gnashing her teeth against the rag. Her eyes shrank to tiny, mean slits, and she slowly shook her head back and forth.

“Okay,” I said, “that’ll work. I’ll just ask yes-or-no questions and you can shake your head. That’ll work fine.”

At that, she threw her nose into the air and stared at the ceiling. I might have expected as much, but her refusal did not daunt me. I could get a knee-jerk reaction out of her, and that was something. It was more than “nothing.”

I decided it was safe to act on my assumption that her correspondent was male. “Tell me, Tatie. Your friend in Florida. You’ve known him for a very long time, haven’t you? We found some stuff in your room that tells us you’ve known him for fifty years, if you’ve known him a day.”

Her eyes didn’t release their death grip on the ceiling, but she didn’t huff as though I’d said something stupid and wrong. Her hands had instantly gone into hard-knotted fists where they were strapped to the armrests, and it was not because she was tied inhumanely.

“Is he a family member?”

Nothing. Not even a twitch at the corner of an eye.

“This swamp water he’s sending you, it’s some kind of medicine?” She continued her steadfast policy of nonreaction, so I wiggled the cork loose and smelled at it again, squinting down the neck of the bottle. “I have a hard time believing that. And you take this regularly?”

“It’s for her rheumatism,” Harry reiterated without enthusiasm. Eliza pivoted her head just enough to glare over at him instead of the ceiling, then permitted herself a half nod.

“I don’t buy that. Not for a second.”