Blood Stains Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the night shift around that time.”
    “Good,” Maria said. “Can you tell me what you remember about the place?”
    “I guess I remember a lot of things. I lived on the first floor near the back fire exit. Exactly what do you want to know?”
    “Do you remember a woman named Sally Blake? She would have been living there at that time.”
    “Sally Blake…Sally Blake… I don’t know if—”
    All of a sudden, Maria saw recognition dawning.
    “Oh, yeah, I remember her. Tall, curvy brunette with green eyes. Real looker, too.”

    His eyes narrowed. “You put me in mind of her,” he muttered, then took another bite of beans.
    A bean fell off his spoon and caught in his whiskers as he began to chew. Either he didn’t know it or didn’t care, but Maria couldn’t think for watching the bean as it jiggled up and down in the precarious perch on which it had landed. She grabbed a couple of paper napkins that had been left on the table by an earlier diner and handed them over.
    Montrose blinked, then grinned as he took the napkins and mopped at his beard.
    “Sorry…when you live on the street, you lose company manners.”
    “About Sally Blake,” Maria said, shifting the conversation.
    Montrose nodded. “She lived on the third floor…her and her little girl. I reckon she lived there at least six years. I remember when she brought that baby home from the hospital. Cutest little bit of nothin’ you ever saw. Had a whole lot of dark hair, just like her mama.”
    Maria’s stomach lurched. He was talking about her. It was surreal to be sitting here, talking to a stranger who had more memories of her life with her mother than she did. It made her want to weep, but she hadn’t come this far to screw up, and Montrose Benton was her first lead.
    “To your knowledge, was the child’s father ever in the picture?” she asked.

    Monty hesitated. Maria was guessing he was hedging his answers, pending how much she knew about Sally Blake’s past.
    “I know she was a prostitute,” she said, not bothering to hide the distaste in her voice.
    Monty’s expression shifted slightly, but Maria couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
    “She did what she had to do to put food on the table and a roof over their heads,” he said sharply.
    “There are other jobs,” Maria said before she thought.
    “If you have the education to back them up, then yeah, there are other jobs. But you have to be able to read and write to get them, and the way I remember Sally Blake, she couldn’t do either.”
    Maria was staggered. “You’re kidding.”
    Monty’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Not hardly, miss. It’s not the first time someone got passed through a school system without the proper skills,” he said. “She had a good memory, so I guessed she faked her way through as far as she could. Who knows? Besides, it’s not like she had anyone to speak up for her. She came up through the system.”
    “What do you mean, ‘through the system’?”
    “Welfare. She used to make jokes about the fact that the closest she’d ever come to Jesus was when she’d been found abandoned on the steps of a church.”

    Maria wanted to cry. Every judgmental thing she’d thought since learning about her mother’s background had just made a one-eighty shift. Her mother had begun life as an abandoned baby and been shuffled through the welfare system, and never even learned to read and write. God. The more she learned, the more tragic the story became.
    “What do you remember about her?” Maria asked. “Did you know her friends?”
    Monty laid down his spoon and leaned back in his chair.
    “Why all the interest in Sally Blake?”
    Maria had never said the words aloud, but something told her that if she wanted answers from Monty, she was going to have to answer some of his questions, as well.
    “I’m that little baby you remember her having. I just found out recently that she was my mother. I have no memory of her or of living at the Hampton Arms.