When they walk through the museum, the orphans are in their beds. Electric lamps glow on three nightstands. A faint wisp of electric heat floats from the ceiling. It feels about sixty-five degrees in here, instead of the nighttime fifty it is outside. Daryl wonders if there's power in the entire museum.
The youngest children are already asleep beneath their covers. Two of the older ones sit cross-legged on a top bunk playing checkers, and they're passing back and forth one of Daryl and Carol's giant pixie sticks. Three more empty, colorful straws rest in a trashcan. "Hey, my turn!" says a boy in the bunk below them, who slides out of bed and reaches up for the straw.
Two more kids lie stomach down on their beds flipping through comic books. A boy, who looks to be about thirteen, quickly tucks a Playboy magazine under his pillow as they pass by his bunk.
Sheriff Garland stops walking. "You kids were supposed to save that candy for tomorrow."
"Sorry, sir," one of the kids says.
"Did the little ones who are asleep even get any?"
"It'll just rot their teeth," replies one of the checker-playing boys.
"Is Nanny gone?"
"She turned in," the boy who hid the Playboy answers.
"See the lights are out in half an hour, then."
"Yes, sir."
Little Terrence is on his bed with his baseball cards neatly spread out, as if he's organizing them. "Sheriff," he asks as they pass, his voice small and quiet. "Did you tell the captain? About me skipping school again this morning?"
Sheriff Garland chuckles. "No, young man, I did not. But I assure you the captain doesn't care about those kinds of trivial infractions."
Relief washes over the young boy's face.
"School is for your own good, you know," the sheriff tells him.
"Yes, sir."
They exit the room, walk through a darkened area of the museum, and then toward a light in the "museum offices" hallway. The captain sits at his desk now, with Daryl's bottle of whiskey opened and an ounce poured in a glass.
Garland walks Daryl in and forces him to sit down in the chair across from the captain's desk. Daryl has to sit forward slightly so he doesn't lean back against his cuffed hands.
Garland closes the door and sits in the chair next to Daryl's. A white-and-black, U.S. Navy dress service cap rests atop a haphazard stack of files on the desk. The captain, who somehow looks like an even bigger man when sitting, picks up the whiskey bottle and pours an ounce into a second, empty glass. He pushes the glass across the desk to Sheriff Garland, who thanks him and picks it up. "Cheers on your find, Gar," the captain says, raising his glass, "even if you lost the horse."
Garland clinks his glass, sips, and hisses.
"But this is all we're drinking," the captain insists, pointing with one finger to the bottle. "Because that's at least two blow jobs, three titty fucks, and one good pussy pounding right there." He lets out a bark of a laugh.
Garland looks slightly annoyed and says, "You ever feel like you're taking advantage of their addiction?"
A scowl darkens the captain's face. "I feel like I'm allowing them to serve a productive role in our society."
"Productive?"
"Very productive, Gar. Men outnumber women two to one at Jamestown, and they get restless if they can't find an outlet. And restless men do desperate things. We can't all be so lucky as to find ourselves a war bride."
War bride? Daryl's mind churns around the term. If he'd heard it before talking to that inmate, he might think Jamestown raided other camps and took the women as unwilling captives. But that doesn't seem likely to him, given that they execute for rape. The sheriff's "war bride" is most likely one of the two pregnant women who was left behind in the camp that raided Jamestown, which would explain why the boy who called him daddy looked nothing like him.
"Do you ever feel you're taking advantage of her?" the captain asks.
"Of my wife?" replies the sheriff, with a sharp edge to his voice.
"Well, why do you think she married you, Gar?" A low chuckle rumbles in the captain's throat. "For love? She was pregnant, and she needed a provider for her child, for herself, and for that old, nagging mother of hers. She was in a new place, and she was frightened, and she wanted the nice sheriff to protect her. It's just a different kind of prostitution."
Out of the corner of his eye, Daryl watches the sheriff's reaction. A line jumps in the man's jaw, and his eyes darken just enough that the last of the blue seems to vanish from the gray. But he remains silent.
"Besides," the captain continues, "those ladies in the brothel are free to stop offering their services anytime and to go to work farming in the fields or cleaning fish on the docks. But they don't want to. Now that's dirty work!" The captain laughs again, like a thunderclap. "Hell, Gar, don't you wish you could make a living fucking? I sure as shit do."
Garland takes another small, silent sip of his whiskey.
The captain finally focuses his attention on Daryl. "Where are you from?" His voice is friendly, almost jovial. It has a natural rumble to it, but not the intimidating boom Daryl expected from an interrogation.
"Ain't from nowhere."
"Where's your permanent camp?"
Daryl sticks to the story he and Carol agreed they would tell if they ever ran into strangers. "Don't have no permanent camp. Just been wanderin'."
"Why didn't you have any camping gear, then?" the captain asks. "Tents?"
"Got sleepin' bags. 'S all we need. Find places to stay."
"For how long have you been wandering?"
"Since the start."
"Where'd you find the booze?"
"In houses," Daryl answers. "In a winery. And 'n a bar."
The captain looks at Garland. "I saw where the wine was from. On the label. I thought to look it up on a map." He taps a finger on his forehead and smiles as though proud of his ingenuity. "That winery is over two hundred miles from here. Too far for some supply runner or spy to bother traveling in this day and age. He might be telling the truth."
Sheriff Garland sips his whiskey slowly, and Daryl thinks maybe they're going to buy his not-from-anywhere story. But then the sheriff lowers his glass to his knee, and without even looking at Daryl, coolly asks, "How do you have horses that are so well shoed, so freshly shoed?"
Oh shit.
"It looks like they've been shoed within the last three weeks," Sheriff Garland finally turns his gray eyes to Daryl. "If you don't have a camp, and you don't have a blacksmith, how on earth did you manage that?"
"Grew up on a farm," Daryl lies. "Know how to shoe a damn horse. Can find horses shoes lyin' round barns easy."
"And do you know how to tan leather, too?" Sheriff Garland asks. "Because one of your saddles was at least a decade old, but the other one looks like it was handmade sometime in the last four years."
"I can tan leather," Daryl says, and that, at least, is not a lie. "Can hunt. Tan a hide. Tan any damn thing."
"And stich saddle bags, too, I suppose," Garland says casually, before taking another small sip of his whiskey. He sets the glass again on his knee. "With an electric sewing machine. A sewing machine that did not appear to be anywhere among your supplies."
Carol made those saddle bags in the Kingdom, using one of the three sewing machines in their seamstress shop. "Looted them bags from a store," Daryl lies.
"A store that sews together saddle bags using old quilts?" Garland asks skeptically.
Daryl shrugs. "Ya know. That novelty shit they sell in them old town stores."
"One of those boutiques," the captain says, nodding and raising his glass, "where everything costs five times as much as it should."
"Yeah," Daryl agrees. "'Zactly."
"It's plausible." The captain turns his hazel eyes from Daryl to Garland. "Don't you think?"
"No."
Daryl can't figure out if they're playing good cop / bad cop or if the captain is just that much less perceptive than the sheriff.
"You think he's lying?" the captain asks.
"Oh, I know he's lying," Garland replies.
The calm, self-assured way Garland says that rattles Daryl's resolve more than a punch in the face could have. "Look," Daryl says, because he's sure there's no way he's going to be able to convince the sheriff he didn't come out of some camp recently, "A'ight. Was in a camp once. In Charlottesville. At Monticello. But we ain't in that camp no more. Left three weeks ago 'cause food was runnin' out and people was getting' sick. 'N we shoed the horses 'fore we left."
When the lie is out, Daryl senses he's just dug a deeper hole than the one he was trying to climb out of. He never should have said a word. When they question Carol, she's going to have to play along with a lie she didn't even know he told. Maybe they already have questioned Carol. Maybe that's why the sheriff left him in that cell for so long and wouldn't tell him anything. And maybe when they questioned her, she told them a different story.
What has he done?
The captain, with his elbows on the desk, leans his massive frame forward. He raises one bushy, black eyebrow. "Then why did you lie and tell us you weren't from a camp?"
"'Cause I don't want ya raidin' Monticello."
"We don't raid camps," the captain says indignantly. "I run an honorable operation here! And we certainly aren't bothering to travel that damn far." He sits back and looks at Garland. "He could be telling the truth. He sure doesn't look like he's been living in a camp recently. He looks like he hasn't had a bath in weeks."
Daryl just washed up in the creek two days ago. Why's everyone always saying he looks like he never bathes? But at least it's working to his advantage here. They just might buy his revised story after all.
Sheriff Garland quietly finishes his last sip of whiskey. "No," he says as he sets his empty glass down with a light clink on the metal office desk. "Their camp isn't in Monticello. It's near Washington, D.C."
Shit.
How the fuck does he know that?
If he hurt Carol to get that information…if he so much as laid a finger on her –
"How the fuck do you know that?" the captain asks.
Garland opens his light brown, suede vest, reaches into an inside pocket, and pulls out Carol's map, the one she's been using to plot their journey. But they didn't mark those maps. It's not as if they circled their camp on it.
"They've been tracing their route on this map with their fingertips," Garland says. "I was able to pick up the residue by dusting with cocoa powder. It made a rather distinct line." He spreads open the map to reveal their routes plotted out in dark black ink.
"That doesn't look like cocoa powder," the captain says.
Garland closes his eyes briefly, and then opens them. "No, John. That's ink from a fountain pen. After I saw the routes, I brushed off the powder and marked them."
"Oh."
That's when Daryl decides it isn't a routine. The captain is just that dense. Daryl has trouble believing he ever got promoted to the rank of captain in the U.S. Navy and again wonders if he created his own backstory.
"You've come a long way," Garland tells Daryl. "And we want to know why. Just tell us the truth, if you want us to trust you, if you seek peace with us."
And what if Daryl does tell the truth? Tells them that he and Carol were…what? On vacation? That they left a safe and well-defended home and travelled hundreds of miles in search of Carol's family roots? If they think he's lying now, they sure as hell are going to think he's lying when he tells the truth.
Unfortunately, the truth may be the only card he has left to play. So Daryl plays it. He doesn't mention the Hilltop, Alexandria, or Oceanside, and he doesn't offer any details about the Kingdom, but he gives a basic outline of the truth. He tells them his camp knows nothing about Jamestown and would not mean it any harm if they did. He and Carol were only coming here, Daryl assures them, to trace Carol's family roots, to find out about her great-great-great grandfather, who was presumably one of the original inhabitants of colonial Jamestown.
And when the card is played, Daryl steadies himself. His muscles tighten in preparation for his captor's response, and he slowly raises his eyes to the captain's.