I gave my statement at the Temple Police Department at 4:30 that afternoon. A detective named Sandra Moody typed it up while I talked. She had reading glasses pushed up on top of her head and a coffee mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST GRANDMA.
When I was done, I asked her the only question that mattered.
“Is she okay? The little girl?”
Detective Moody looked at me over the top of her computer screen for a long moment.
“I can’t discuss an active investigation, Mrs. Bixby. I’m sorry.”
“Can you just tell me if she’s alive?”
She hesitated. Then she reached across the desk and patted my hand.
“Go home and get some rest,” she said. “You did a good thing today.”
That’s all she would say.
I went home to my apartment on West Avenue H. A one-bedroom in a brick complex with a pool nobody uses. I sat in Harold’s old recliner with the lights off and stared at the television without turning it on.
I watched the local news at ten. There was something about a child being located safe on I-35 north of Waco. No names. No details. Just one sentence, and then they went to the weather.
I didn’t know if it was her. I prayed it was. I didn’t sleep.
The next morning, I sat down at my kitchen table with my reading glasses and a yellow notepad and did the math. That’s what I do when I’m scared. Harold used to tease me about it. “Loretta’s doing her numbers again,” he’d say. “Somebody hide the calculator.”
My Social Security check is $1,420 a month. Harold’s railroad pension pays me $610 a month as his widow. My rent is $1,050. My Medicare supplement is $186. My blood pressure medicine and my arthritis pills, even with the Part D plan, run about $90 a month. Then there’s groceries, electric, car insurance on my old Buick, the phone.
The greeter job paid me about $1,600 a month after taxes. It was the difference between living and just getting by.
I had $11,812 in my savings account at First State Bank. Harold and I had saved it a little at a time for thirty years. It was supposed to be for my funeral, so the kids wouldn’t have to pay for it.
I wrote all the numbers down in a column and drew a line under them.
Without the job, I’d be eating into that savings by about $400 a month. Maybe more. It would last me two years, if nothing went wrong.
I told myself it was fine. I’d find something else. I’d done the right thing. That had to count for something.
I didn’t know yet that the worst part hadn’t even started.
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