I scroll down to R SARKAR (EMERGENCY ONLY). I press the corresponding key for Rudi’s home number. After a few rings I hear that voice.

“Lucy, this is a first. You’re calling me at my house. I am extremely flattered, to say the least.” Sarkar’s soothing baritone is in full seduction mode.

“Don’t be flattered just yet. I’m calling to ask a favor,” I say.

“For you, I would move the world.”

“Well, not the world. But how about moving your Lexus?”

“You want me to buy you a Lexus?”

“No, I want you to loan me that big, beautiful blue Lexus of yours. Just for a few days.”

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Look,” I say. “If there’s going to be an application form, I’ll borrow a car from someone else. All I know is that I don’t trust my Hyundai to make it beyond five miles from my house. And I’m going a little farther than that.”

“Very well. Of course you can take my car on your little trip.” He pauses, then he goes in for the big one. “Would you like me to accompany you? As you know from experience, I am a very good driver.”

“Absolutely not,” I say. “Where I’m going, you wouldn’t exactly fit in.”

“Ah, someplace like a lady’s spa, eh?” he asks.

“Not quite. But I hope I can relax there and come back feeling really refreshed.”

“Will you have company on this journey? A man, perhaps?”

“A young man,” I say. “And that’s it for the questions, please. Any more and I’ll just contact Hertz.com.”

“My car is now your car.”

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

SOMETIMES A BODY JUST needs to go back to where she came from. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m going home, home to Walkers Pasture, West Virginia.

My boy, Willie, and Willie’s dog, The Duke, are along with me, and my worries are seat-buckled into Rudi Sarkar’s midnight-blue Lexus, playing Catch Me If You Can with the radar machines on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Walkers Pasture is just a tiny slice of a town a few miles from the Ohio border, but it’s home, and it’s the place I visit when my brain needs straightening out. And does my brain ever need straightening out right now. I need a rest from the likes of Leon Blumenthal and Rudra Sarkar, and the army of guards and doctors and cops who have surrounded my life.

Even just on the road to home I can feel my West Virginia twang returning.