She hadn’t given a last name yet. She was holding that back till she decided if she was going to trust me with it. Beryl was about forty, with dark hair cut short, on the thin side, and she was wearing a serious but slightly shabby loose-fitting blue dress with a belt and no style. She kept her purse on her knees and her knees tight and together. She had nice blue eyes and had probably once been very pretty. She also had a blue-yellow bruise on her cheek the size of a large peach.

I had somewhere I had to be in a little over an hour, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurry this woman. She needed to take her time. She needed someone to listen to her story.

“I have a picture,” she said, opening her purse.

I waited. The air conditioner buzzed and I pretended it wasn’t hot.

“Here.”

She handed me a little photograph that looked as if it were taken in one of those automatic camera booths you find in malls.

The girl was definitely pretty. She had blond, straight hair, was wearing a green sweater and showed a fine set of white teeth. She looked grade-school young.

“Adele,” Beryl said, looking toward the window as if her daughter might suddenly appear.

It was my turn to nod.

“How’d you get hurt?”

She touched the bruise on her check and said,

“Fell in the bathroom of the motel.”

“Tell your story, Miss…”

“Mrs.,” she corrected looking down at her purse. “Husband moved out when Adele was little. Driver.”

“His name is Driver?”

“No,” she said with a sigh. “His name was Dwight. Tow truck driver.”

“He was a tow truck driver,” I prompted.

“Still is, I think. Few minutes back, I lied.”

“You lied?”

“To you. Said I fell in the motel.”

She started to raise her hand to the bruise on her face and changed her mind.