As the waitress and Mrs. Fischer exchanged pleasantries, I spotted the stack of flyers on the counter beside the cash register. MISSING! the headline declared. Under that, a question: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE CHILDREN?
Here they were—the three faces from my vision. Now the flyer gave me names to go with them. The eight-year-old boy was Jessie Payton, the six-year-old was his sister Jasmine, and the ten-year-old girl was Jordan.
Having noticed my interest in the flyer, Sandy said, “Makes me sick to think about it.”
When I looked up, unshed tears stood in her sea-green eyes. I said, “When did they disappear?”
“Between seven and eight-thirty yesterday evening. It’ll soon be twenty-four hours. That can’t be good, no trace of them by now.”
“How did police figure the time?”
“A neighbor, Ben Samples, saw the back door open, knew something wasn’t right, went to check. Eight-thirty he found poor Agnes.”
“Agnes?”
The salt tide in Sandy’s eyes overflowed. She couldn’t speak. I understood why, earlier, she’d felt that laughter was not appropriate and why her voice had contained a note of sorrow not commensurate to her description of the desert carpeted in bright flowers.
From a nearby stool, a burly man in khakis and a checkered-flannel shirt, whose coffee had been refilled a moment earlier, spoke up. “Agnes Henry. Reverend Henry’s widow. Sweet lady. Did babysittin’ to stretch her Social Security. Paytons’ trash cans are kept to one side of their back porch. Ben Samples, he notices a lid is half off one. Just enough porch light, so when he happens to look down, he sees a face in there. Agnes. Stabbed through the heart, stuffed in the can like garbage.”
Wiping her eyes with a Kleenex, Sandy said, “Chet, good Lord, what’s the world coming to, helpless children all over snatched away the same day?”
“It’s comin’ to the bad end it’s always been comin’ to,” Chet said solemnly.
For a beat, I didn’t understand them, and then I did but wished that I had it wrong. “All over? Other children? Where?”
Chet turned more directly toward us on the swiveling stool. “Two in Bakersfield, one up to Visalia.”
All those diner smells that had been so appetizing congealed now into a greasy, meaty malodor, as though beneath every shining moment of culinary delight, the repressed knowledge of the slaughterhouse waited to assert the sacrifice that was the source of that pleasure. The aroma of coffee now had the bitter smell of an emetic.
“Two in Winslow, Arizona,” Sandy said, “and four from one family in a suburb of Phoenix.”
“Four more in Vegas,” Chet said. “Kidnappers killed the parents to get at the young’uns. And one from Cedar City, up to Utah.”
“Seventeen altogether,” I said.
“Maybe even others nobody knows of yet,” Chet said. “This smells like terrorism. Don’t it to you? Who knows where it ends?”
Mrs. Fischer crossed herself, the first indication of a traditional faith that I had witnessed from her, although I’d never seen anyone make the sign of the cross with jaws clenched tight in anger and eyes as fierce as hers were just then. Maybe she prayed the rosary every night, or maybe this terrible news reminded her of the Catholicism of her childhood and of why she’d once felt a need for it.
“All these things happened in so many jurisdictions,” Chet explained, “nobody saw the pattern till late this mornin’, early this afternoon. By then those kids they could be anywhere.”
“They’ve got to be connected, don’t they?” Sandy asked. “The TV news says they’ve got to be.”
“Not a ransom demand for a one of them,” Chet said. “That gives me a bad feelin’. Don’t it you?”
“My folks are staying with us till there’s some kind of end to this,” Sandy revealed. “Dad, Mom, Jim—they all have guns, and we’re schooling at home for the time being.”
On the road all day, with no interest in the radio, we had not heard the news. Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.
Not having heard the news, I had been drawn to Ernestine’s to make an important discovery, and this was it. The Payton kids were not the only souls in peril. Some demented group was trawling the West for children, to bring them together for burning or to kill them otherwise, on a stage before a select audience more perverse than I cared to consider.
With my paranormal abilities, perhaps I might be the only one who could find the abductees in time to save them. This obligation was so heavy that I didn’t know if I had the shoulders to carry it. I have had successes but also failures, because whatever else I might be, I am first and foremost human, and the tendency of our fallen kind is to fall again. To fail so many innocent children—or any of them—would leave me in a dark place, perhaps even blacker than the emotional slough through which I suffered in the weeks immediately after I lost Stormy Llewellyn. I had no choice, of course, but to try.
The likelihood of failure seemed greater than usual, however, because I was one against what seemed to be phalanxes of enemies, and singularly brutal enemies, at that. More troubling than their numbers and bloodthirstiness, they were not the usual scapegraces, criminals, psychopaths, and sociopaths. They might be all of those things, yes, but they were also something more dangerous. At least two of them, the rhinestone cowboy and his stone-faced viper-eyed associate, possessed some paranormal abilities—or supernatural knowledge—unique to them.
Sandy gave Mrs. Fischer her change.
Mrs. Fischer deposited a few dollars of it into a clear-plastic collection bucket for the Special Olympics, which stood near the cash register.
Sandy wished us a safe journey.
Mrs. Fischer plucked a couple of complimentary cellophane-wrapped hard-candy mints from a plastic bowl beside the Special Olympics bucket.
I opened the door for Mrs. Fischer.
Mrs. Fischer gave me one of the mints.
Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and of those around you seems to be unremarkable, the appearance of ordinariness is an illusion, and just below the placid surface, the world is seething.
Twenty
NOT ALL DESERTS ARE HOT ALL THE TIME. THE HIGH ones can be as cold in winter as a Canadian plain. We were near the end of winter, but a chill had come with nightfall. The breeze smelled faintly of the rain that we had outrun but that soon would catch us again.
A huge tricked-up Harley-Davidson stood next to the limousine, basic black but, in the light from the diner, bright with intricacies of chrome.
The couple standing by the motorcycle, taking off their helmets, looked nothing like Hells Angels. Perhaps fifty, tall, muscular but lean, clean-shaven, the man had a salt-and-pepper lion’s mane of hair. He was character-actor rather than lead-actor handsome, his face subjected less to emollient lotions and toning gels than to wind and sun, and never to Botox. The woman might have been forty, with the high cheekbones, proud but chiseled features, and polished-bronze complexion that suggested she had floated into this world from the headwaters of the Cherokee gene pool. If Soldier of Fortune magazine had merged with Vogue, these two might have been models in those pages. I would have bet my liver that neither had the smallest tattoo or love handles, that they didn’t care what anyone’s opinion of them might be, that they didn’t give a thought to fashion yet owned not a single unfortunate item of clothing, and that they didn’t tweet in any sense of the word.
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In a baritone voice as mellow as fifty-year-old port, the man said to Mrs. Fischer, “We heard on the grapevine that Oscar completed his tour of duty and went home.”
Mrs. Fischer hugged the woman and said, “He finished his last spoon of the best crème brûlée we ever had, and the maître d’ said nobody who ever died in that restaurant before had passed away more discreetly.”
As the man hugged Mrs. Fischer, he said, “Oscar was always a class act.”
“How’s his mom coping?” the woman asked.
“Well, dear, you don’t get to be a hundred and nine without having taken the world on your shoulders a time or two.”
Offering his right hand to me, the man said, “My name’s Gideon. This is my wife, Chandelle. You must be Edie’s new chauffeur. You’re Thomas, aren’t you? May I call you Tom?”
“Yes, sir.” I shook his hand. “But I haven’t taken the job yet.”
Mrs. Fischer said, “He’s very independent, self-reliant.”
“That’s the way, isn’t it,” Gideon said.
“That’s the way,” Mrs. Fischer confirmed.
When the motorcyclist smiled, his countenance crinkled in the most appealing way, as if all the good weather he had ever known had been stored up in his face but none of the bad.
From somewhere came a memory that I at once put into words. “Chandelle is French for ‘candle.’ ”
Her smile was as warming as her husband’s, much more luminous than a single candle.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Tom and his girlfriend, Stormy, once got a card from a carnival fortune-telling machine that said ‘You are destined to be together forever.’ ”
“I would take that very seriously,” Chandelle said.
“I do,” I told her.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Stormy passed away young, but he’s still faithful to her and believes in what the card said.”
“Of course you do,” Gideon said. “What kind of fool would you be if you didn’t believe in it?”
“Several kinds, sir.”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Mrs. Fischer said, “we’ve got something of a crisis to deal with, a real life-or-death thing, and Tom here is eager to get into the thick of it, though I suspect he thinks he’ll be dead by morning.”
“Exhilarating,” Gideon said.
I said, “Yes, sir, to an extent it is.”
Chandelle and Gideon kissed Mrs. Fischer’s cheek, and Mrs. Fischer kissed their cheeks, and I kissed Chandelle’s cheek as she kissed mine, and I shook hands with Gideon again.
Carrying their helmets, like figures more suited to a dream than to Barstow, the couple moved toward Ernestine’s. After a few steps, Gideon looked back and said to Mrs. Fischer, “Will we see you in Lonely Possum, come July?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she assured them.
“And it is for the world,” Chandelle said to me. “I hope we’ll see you there, too.”
“I’m certainly intrigued, ma’am.”
“Call me Chandelle,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”
They went into the diner.
The Harley-Davidson was an impressive machine. It looked as if it should be quietly purring like a well-fed and contented panther.
Mrs. Fischer got behind the wheel of the limousine.
I, known to the grapevine as her chauffeur, independent and self-reliant, rode shotgun. That’s the way.
Mrs. Fischer unwrapped her mint, popped it into her mouth, and started the car.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I said, “Better stop for gas, ma’am.”
“One tank’s full and the other nearly so, dear.”
“How can that be? We’ve been on the road a lot today.”
“I believe I told you about One-Ear Bob.”
“You told me a little bit about him.”
“When I finish this mint, maybe I’ll tell you more.”
As we took the entrance ramp to Interstate 15, heading east, I said, “How do you know Gideon and Chandelle?”
“I introduced them to each other.”
“You’re a real matchmaker, ma’am.”
“I enjoy making people happy.”
“Do they live around here?”
“They have a home in Florida, but mostly they’re on the road.”
“They’re always around these parts in March?”
“Oh, no, they don’t have a schedule of any kind. They just go where they feel it’s necessary for them to go.”
“Did you know they were in Barstow?”
“No, dear. It was a pleasant surprise to see them.”
“Sort of like Andy Shephorn pulling us over.”
“Sort of like,” she agreed.
“Gideon has a great voice. Is he a singer? She looks like she might be a dancer.”
“Well, they do all kinds of things, child.”
“All kinds of things?”
“Many, many things. And you can be sure that those two always do the right thing.”
“July in Lonely Possum, huh?”
“It can be fiercely hot, but lovely nonetheless.”
No sooner were we on the interstate than the sky caught fire, and the entire desert seemed to leap in surprise, repeatedly, as it was revealed by reflection and then cast back into darkness and then revealed again. Thunder so furiously concussed the night that it seemed the Mojave might break under the blows and collapse into some cavernous realm over which it had been a bridge for tens of thousands of years.
Raindrops as plump as chandelier crystals rapped the limo and stymied the windshield wipers until Mrs. Fischer turned them up to their highest speed. Soon the droplets diminished to the size of pearls, but the fireworks continued for several minutes and with uncommon violence.
When at last the heavens went dark and quiet, when the storm seemed content now with merely trying to drown us, Mrs. Fischer said, “Quite a display. I hope it didn’t mean anything.”
I half knew what she intended to convey with those words. “I hope it didn’t mean anything, either, ma’am.”
“You still have a fix on him, Oddie?”
“The cowboy. Yes, ma’am. He’s out there. We’ll find him.”
The lightning and thunder had rattled us back into the bleak mood into which we had fallen while speaking with Sandy and Chet at the cash register in Ernestine’s. We rode in silence, brooding.
Mr. Hitchcock kept making cameo appearances in my tangled skeins of thought, the way that he had slyly inserted himself into one scene in each of his movies. I returned, as well, to consideration of rats and coyotes, and to those lines from Eliot. Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. I had read the poet’s Four Quartets at least a hundred times, and I understood them in spite of their demanding language and concepts. But I suspected that these lines kept running through my mind not because of what they meant within the poem, but because they expressed, with power, a warning about some threat that I intuited but could not consciously define.
Strange how the deepest part of us isn’t able to speak more clearly to the part of us that lives only here in the shallows of the world. The body is entirely physical, the mind partly so and partly not, being both the dense computer circuitry of brain tissue and the ghostly software running in it. But the deepest part of us, the soul, is not physical to any extent whatsoever. Yet the material body and the immaterial soul are inextricably linked this side of death and, so theologians tell us, on the Other Side, as well. On the Other Side, body and soul are supposed to function in perfect harmony. So I guess the problem on this side of death is that when we fell from grace back in the day, the body and soul became like two neighboring countries, still connected by highways and bridges and rivers, but each now speaking a different language from the other. To get through life successfully, body and soul must translate each other correctly more often than not. But in the limo, leaving Barstow, I c
ouldn’t quite interpret that warning from the deepest part of me.
As we rocketed along the rainswept interstate, miraculously not hydroplaning off the pavement and into a stand of cactuses as the laws of physics would seem to have required, Mrs. Fischer said, “Wherever it is these child-stealers are holed up, you can’t go in after them with just that pistol or either of the other two I have with me. You’ve got to weaponize yourself better than that.”
“I don’t much like guns, ma’am.”
“Does it matter whether you like them or not?”
“I guess it doesn’t.”
“You do what you have to do. That’s who you seem to be to me, anyway. You’re one who does what he has to do.”
“Maybe that’s not always what I should do.”
“Don’t double-think yourself so much, child. You had a good dinner of properly fried food, and if you want to live long enough to have another one, you’ve got to weaponize properly.”
The rain fell so hard that, in the headlights, the entire world seemed to be melting. The vaguely phosphorescent landscape shimmered as though every acre of it must be liquefied and in motion, seeking a drain into which to pour itself.
“Ma’am, the closest town of any size where they might sell guns is back in Barstow. And they don’t just let you put your money down and walk out ten minutes later with a bazooka or whatever it is you think I need. There are waiting periods, police checks, all that.”
“That’s certainly true in Barstow and in Vegas, but there’s a lot of territory between the two.”
“A lot of mostly really empty territory.”
“Not as empty as you think, sweetie. And some places out there, nobody bothers much with waiting periods and the like. What we need to do at this particular time in this particular place is take a side trip to Mazie’s and get what you need.”
“Mazie’s? What is Mazie’s?” I asked with some doubt and a little suspicion.
“It’s not a whorehouse, though it might sound like one,” Mrs. Fischer said. “Mazie and her sons, Tracker and Leander, do a bit of this and that, and they do it all well.”