The other voice on the recording was the voice of Captain Wendell Pruitt, the man who ran the county jail where I had cooked breakfast for fifteen years, and what he said made me set down my coffee with a shaking hand. “Colt, you handle the wife your way, and I will handle the paperwork. Nobody in this county is going to listen to a girl with a bruised mouth.” Raylene stopped the recording and looked at me from the kitchen floor with her little boy asleep in her lap.
“Mrs. Moye,” she said, “I have six months of this.”
Outside, the engine of the deputy still idled at the end of my drive. I stood at the window and watched the exhaust curl up into the cold morning. On the telephone, the agent from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, a patient man named Tolliver whom I had fed pork chops every Friday for years, was telling me to stay calm and keep my doors locked. He said he was already in his car. He said it would take forty minutes. I said we would be right here, and I put the phone in my apron pocket.
Those forty minutes were the longest of my life. I made grits for the boy, whose name was Micah, and he ate them in the lap of his mother with his small fist wrapped around the spoon. Raylene told me everything in a low flat voice. She had married Colt at nineteen. He had been charming. By the second year he was breaking her phone, by the third her arm. She had taken the recordings by hiding the phone in an air vent, week after week, until she had enough, and then she had run barefoot in the night.
A cook who has fed a hundred officers at a county jail learns exactly which ones to trust, and exactly which ones eat their eggs too fast.
Agent Tolliver arrived at half past eight with two other cars and no sirens. He walked up my steps, took off his hat, and knocked as gently as a deacon. I let him in. He sat down at the kitchen table across from Raylene and listened to the first recording from beginning to end, and I watched his jaw tighten. When it finished, he said quietly, “Miss Raylene, you are safe now. Nobody in this house will be harmed.” Then he stood and went outside to deal with Deputy Strickland.
I watched through the window. Colt got out of his car with his sunglasses on and his hand on his belt, grinning. Agent Tolliver spoke to him for perhaps a minute. I saw the grin fade. I saw the other two agents step around to either side. I saw Colt look at my house, at the window where I stood, and I did not step back. He took off his sunglasses, then, and his face was gray and young, and he put his hands behind his back like a man who had known all along it would end like this.
The captain was arrested that afternoon at the jail, in front of three inmates and a pot of my own coffee. The investigation that followed lasted eight months and reached further than anyone expected. Four deputies lost their badges. A judge recused himself. Two other women, who had gone to the same office for help years before and been turned away, came forward with stories of their own. Raylene testified for two days, in a gray dress I helped her buy, and she did not once look away from the man at the defense table.
Colt Strickland was sentenced to fourteen years. When the judge read the number, Raylene let out a breath that seemed to come from the bottom of her feet. Micah, who was three by then, sat on my lap in the front row and asked in a loud whisper whether the bad man was going away. I said he was. He said, “Good,” and went back to his crayons. Several people in the gallery wiped their eyes, including a local deputy who had been the first to speak up.
They stayed with me for a year. The spare room, where I had kept the sewing machine of Booker and a stack of old quilts, became theirs, and I moved the army bed out to the shed. Raylene took a job at the packing sheds, as I once had, and then began night classes at the technical college. She had always wanted to be a medical assistant. In the evenings we sat on the porch while Micah chased fireflies, and I told her stories about Booker, who could not carry a tune.
On the day she moved into her own apartment, a small clean place near the college, she hugged me at the door for a very long time. She said I had saved her life. I said no, she had walked a mile in the dark barefoot with a baby, and that was no small thing. She laughed through her tears. Then she handed me a box tied with a ribbon. Inside was a framed photograph of the three of us on the porch, the boy between us, grinning, with a sunset behind.