The Billionaire's Obsession: Catching His Savior

The Greyhound bus hissed to a stop at the edge of Silver Creek, Ohio, and Jessie Compton stepped into the rain. She didn't bother pulling up her hood. The water was already seeping through the worn canvas of her sneakers, turning the cardboard in the soles to pulp.

She walked past the shuttered auto plant, past the liquor store with its neon sign flickering OPEN, past the Methodist church where Brenda made her sit in the back pew every Sunday. The trailer park was three blocks down, past the drainage ditch that flooded every spring.

Her trailer sat at the end of the row, number 47, the aluminum siding dented from where Ricky had backed his truck into it last summer. Two cardboard boxes sat in the mud in front of the door. The flaps were open. Rain had already turned the bottom layer of clothes into a sodden mass.

Jessie stopped. She looked at the boxes. She looked at the door.

The lock was new. Brass, shiny, utterly wrong. The old lock had been silver, scratched, the key sticky with peanut butter from Ricky's fingers.

She tried the handle anyway. It didn't turn.

"Open the door."

Her voice was flat. She didn't shout. She'd learned early that shouting gave them satisfaction.

The blinds in the window twitched. She saw Vince's face in the gap, the jowls, the cigarette dangling from his lip. He mouthed something at her, grinning. She read the words on his lips: "Get lost."

Jessie raised her fist and hammered on the metal door. The sound was huge in the rain, hollow and desperate. She hit it again, feeling the vibration shudder up her arm. Her palm stung. She kept hitting it.

The blinds opened wider. Brenda appeared beside Vince, her hair in curlers, her mouth moving fast. She held something up to the glass. Bills. Fives and tens, crumpled, the kind she kept in a coffee can under the sink.

Jessie stopped pounding. She understood. The bed. Her mother's bed, the only thing of value in that tin can of a home. They'd sold it. They'd sold it for grocery money and lottery tickets and whatever else kept them floating between welfare checks.

"Where's the doll."

It wasn't a question. Jessie spoke through the glass, her breath fogging the surface. She knew they could hear her. The trailer was too small for secrets.

Ricky squeezed between them, seventeen years old and soft in the middle from Brenda's casseroles. He reached into his pocket-his front pocket, his jeans too tight, the gesture obscene-and pulled out the ceramic doll. Her mother's doll. The one with the painted blue eyes and the real lace collar that had survived three foster homes and the fire that took the Comptons' house.

Ricky held it by the head. He waggled it at her, his tongue poking through the gap where he'd lost a tooth to Vince's fist.

Jessie's vision narrowed. She felt the heat start in her chest, the familiar warning