When Didi touched it, Laura winced. “Sorry,” Didi said. “There’s no other way.”
She began to pull the finger out straight, and Laura screamed behind the washrag.
Again Laura passed out, which was a blessing because Didi could do the work quickly, getting the splint into place and securing it with Band-Aids. She had just finished the index finger when Laura’s eyelids fluttered. Laura spat the rag out, her face yellowish-white. “Sick,” she gasped, and Didi rushed to get a trash can up to Laura’s mouth.
The ordeal wasn’t yet over. Didi splinted the thumb, another exercise in torment, and wrapped the hand with gauze bandages, the pressure again making Laura groan and sweat. “You don’t want to go through life with a claw, do you?” Didi asked as she cut the gauze and began a new layer. Laura breathed like a slow bellows, her eyes vacant and clouded with pain. “Almost got it wrapped up,” Didi said. “That’s supposed to be funny.” It wasn’t, really. In the morning the bandages would have to be changed, the wounds cleansed again, and they both knew it.
“Lucy,” Laura whispered as Didi finished the wrapping.
“What? Lucy who?”
“Lucy and Ethel.” She swallowed, her throat parched. “When they were…wrapping the candies…and the candies started coming faster and faster off the conveyor belt. Did you see that one?”
“Oh, yeah! It’s a scream!”
“Good show,” Laura said. Her hand was a seething mass of fire and anguish, but the healing process had begun. “They don’t…make ’em like that anymore.”
“I liked the one where Lucy was in Las Vegas and she had to walk down a staircase with that big headdress on. Remember? And the one where she puts too much yeast in the bread and it shoots out of the oven like a freight train. Those were great.” She cut the gauze and taped it down with a couple of Band-Aids. “It always killed me when Lucy tried to get a part in one of Ricky’s shows, and he blew up at her in Spanish.” Didi rested Laura’s bandaged hand against the ice pack. “I watched those with my mom and dad. We had a TV with a round screen, and the damned thing was always shorting out. I remember my dad on his knees trying to fix the set, and he said, ‘Didi, the guy who can figure out how to keep these things working is going to make a lot of money.’”
“Why?” Laura asked weakly.
“Why what?”
“Why did you join the Storm Front?”
Didi rolled the remainder of the gauze up and closed the box of Band-Aids. She put the scissors and the other items atop the room’s cheap dresser. Beyond the window, Didi could hear the high waspish whine of the freezing wind. “What do you expect me to say?” Didi finally asked when she saw Laura still watching her. “That I was a bad kid? That I pulled the legs off grasshoppers and beat kittens with baseball bats? No, I didn’t grow up like that. I was president of the home economics club in high school, and I made the honor roll every semester. I played piano for the youth choir at my church.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t a monster. The only thing was, I didn’t know what was growing inside me.”
“What was that?”
“A yearning,” Didi said. “To be different. To know things. To go places my folks only read about. See, you take Lucy: if you only watched shows like that on TV, night after night, soon you’d start thinking that’s all the world had to offer. My folks were afraid of real life. They didn’t want me out in it. They said I was going to make a fine wife for some local boy, that I’d live maybe three or four miles from their front door and raise a houseful of kids and we’d all get together for pot roast on Sundays.” Didi opened the curtains and looked out the window. Snowflakes spun before the light; the cars in the parking lot were frosted over. “They were amazed when I said I wanted to go to college. When I said I wanted to go to college out of Iowa, it was the first day of a long cold war. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to stay put. I was a fool, they said. I was breaking their hearts. Well, I didn’t understand this then, but they needed me between them or they wouldn’t have any common ground. They didn’t want me to grow up, and when I did…they didn’t know me anymore. They didn’t want to.” She let the curtains fall. “So I guess part of why I left home was to find out what my folks were so afraid of.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, I did. Like any generation, they were terrified of the future. Terrified of being insignificant and forgotten.” She nodded. “It’s a deep terror, Laura. Sometimes I feel it. I never got married—oh, bourgeois disease!—and I never had a child. My time for that is over. When I die, no one’s going to cry at my funeral. No one’s going to know my story. I’ll lie under weeds near a road where strangers pass, and no one will remember the sound of my voice, the color of my hair, or what I gave a damn about. That’s why I’ve stayed with you, Laura. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“I want you to get your baby back,” Didi said, “because I’m never going to have a child of my own. And if I can help you find David…that’s kind of like he’s mine, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Laura answered. She could feel herself drifting away from the world, on waves of raw pain. It was going to be a long, terrible night. “Kind of.”
“It’s good enough for me.” Didi got Laura a cup of water and gave her two aspirin. The fever sweat glistened on Laura’s face again, and she groaned as her hand pulsed with white-hot agony. Didi drew a chair up beside the bed and sat there as Laura fought the pain as best she could. What was going to happen tomorrow, Didi didn’t know. It depended on Laura: if she was well enough to travel, they ought to be heading west again as soon as possible. Didi got up after a while, and took the plastic bag out to the ice maker for a refill. While she was there, she found a newspaper vending machine, and used her last change to buy an Iowa City Journal. Back in the warm room, the smells of iodine and sickness thick in the air, Didi got Laura’s hand situated on the ice pack and then sat down to read.
She found the story of the crash on I-80 on page three. The body, a male, remained unidentified. “Not much left to work from,” the coroner had remarked. Except that the car, a late-model BMW, had a Georgia license plate. Didi realized that by now the tracing of the tag would be done and the FBI would know whose car it was. The police-beat reporters would smell a new scent on an old story, and pretty soon Laura’s picture would start showing up in the papers again. And Mary Terror’s picture, too. The death of Earl Van Diver might well make Mary and the baby front-page news once more.
Didi looked at Laura, who had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Any picture of the old Laura that appeared in a newspaper wouldn’t resemble the woman who lay there, her face pinched with anguish and tough with determination. But if Mary and the baby were back prominently in the news, that meant more of a chance for someone to recognize her. And more of a chance that some Smokey with a macho complex might spot her, do something stupid, and get David killed.
She turned on the TV, keeping the volume low, and she watched the ten o’clock Iowa City newscast. Coverage of the wreck was there as well, and an interview with the milk tanker driver, a fat-cheeked man with a bloody bandage on his forehead and a glazed stare that said he’d had a peek into his own grave. “I seen this van and the other car comin’ and the highway patrol right behind ’em,” the driver explained in a quavering voice. “Maybe doin’ eighty, all three of ’em. The van was flyin’ up on my tail and I tried to get over in the right lane and then wham the car hit my tanker and it was all she wrote.” The newscaster said the highway patrol and state police were searching for a dark green van with a Georgia license plate.
As Didi listened to the rest of the news, she picked up a notepad with Liberty Motor Lodge and a cracked bell printed across the top. With a motel pencil she wrote Mary Terror. Then Freestone, and three names she had memorized long ago: Nick Hudley, Keith Cavanaugh, Dean Walker. Beneath the third name she drew a circle, put two dots in it for eyes and the arc of a mouth: a Smiley Face, like the button she’d seen on Mary’s sweater there at the lumber
yard.
The troopers would be on the sniff for Mary’s van. They’d be out in droves tomorrow. But they might also be looking for a stolen Oldsmobile Cutlass with a Playboy bunny decal on the rear windshield. It wouldn’t hurt to scrape that damned thing off, do away with the hanging dice, and, while she was out in the cold dark, swap license plates with one of the other cars parked outside. How many people looked at their plates, especially on a frigid gray morning? The scissor blades might work to loosen screws as well as the prongs of an engagement ring. If not, then not.
Didi tore off the notepad’s page, folded it, and put it into her pocket along with the diamond. She destroyed the next two pages, getting rid of the indentations. She put on her second sweater and her gloves, checked again on Laura’s hand—blood coming up through the gauze, but there was nothing more to be done but freeze it with ice—and then Didi went outside to do things that told her she still had the instincts of a Storm Fronter.
6
Sanctuary of Wishes
PIGS WERE SEARCHING FOR a dark green van with a georgia license plate?
Good, Mary thought. She was half dozing, her feet up on the Barcalounger and the TV on before her in the cozy little den. By the time the pigs found the van in Rocky Road’s barn, she’d be long gone with Drummer.
Her stomach was full. Two ham sandwiches, a big bowl of potato salad, a cup of hot vegetable soup, a can of applesauce, and most of a bag of Oreo cookies. She had fed Drummer his formula—warmed on the stove, which he appreciated—burped him, changed his diaper, and put him to sleep. He’d gone out like a light, in the bed shared by Rocky Road and Cherry Vanilla.
Mary watched the TV through eyelids at half mast. Pigs were searching, the newscaster had said on the ten o’clock news from Iowa City, sixteen miles west of the farmhouse she’d invited herself to visit. Baskin was the name on the mailbox. Mary used to buy ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in Atlanta. Her favorite flavor was Rocky Road. He’d looked like Rocky Road, dark-haired and chunky, enough of a roll of flab around his belly to make him soft and slow and oh-so-easy. His wife was blond and petite, with rosy cheeks. Cherry Vanilla, she was. The fourteen-year-old boy was dark-haired like his father, but more wiry: Fudge Ripple, she figured he’d be if he were a flavor.
There were family pictures on the paneled walls. Smiling faces, all. They no longer smiled. In the garage were two vehicles: a brown pickup truck with a University of Iowa sticker on the rear bumper, and a dark blue Jeep Cherokee. The Cherokee was roomy and had almost a full tank of gas. All she’d have to do is move her suitcases, the baby supplies, and her Doors records from the van, and she’d be ready to roll. An added prize had been finding Rocky Road’s gun cabinet. He had three rifles and a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, with plenty of ammunition for all of them. The revolver would join her own Magnum when she packed the Cherokee.
Mary had taken a shower. Had washed her hair and scrubbed her face, and carefully cleaned her wounds with a solution of rubbing alcohol and warm soapy water that had left her gasping with pain on the bathroom floor. Her forearm wound looked the nastiest, with its raw red edges and its glint of bone down in the crusted matter, and her fingers from time to time would convulse as if she were clawing the air. But it was her torn thigh that kept oozing blood and hurting like a barefoot walk on razor blades. Her knee had turned purple and had swollen up, too, and the bruises advanced all the way to her hip. Mary had packed cotton against the wounds, put bandages from the medicine cabinet on top of those, and bound her forearm and thigh with strips of torn sheets. Then she’d put on one of Rocky Road’s woolen bathrobes, gotten herself a Bud from the refrigerator, and eased herself into the Barcalounger to wait out the night.
The newscast’s weather segment came on. A woman with blond hair sculpted into a spray-frozen helmet stood in front of a map and pointed to a storm system growing up in northwest Canada. Should be hitting the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids area in thirty-six to forty-eight hours, she said. Good news for the ski resorts, she said, and bad news for travelers.
Mary reached over beside her chair and picked up the road atlas she’d found in Fudge Ripple’s room, there on his desk next to his geography homework papers. It was opened to the map of the United States, showing the major interstate highways. I-80 would be the most direct route to San Francisco and Freestone, taking her through Iowa, Nebraska, curving up into Wyoming and down again into Utah, through Nevada and finally into northern California. If she kept her speed at sixty-five and the weather wasn’t too bad, she could make Freestone in another couple of days. When she left here depended on how she felt in the morning, but she wasn’t planning on spending another night in a dead man’s house. The telephone had rung five times since she’d herded them into the barn at six o’clock, and that made her nervous. Rocky Road might be the mayor or the preacher around here, or Cherry Vanilla might be the belle of the farm-life social set. You never knew. So it was best to clear out as soon as her bones could take the highway again.
She was weary, and she ached. Growing old, she thought. Giving in to pain and getting weak.
Ten years ago she could have strangled Bedelia Morse with one hand. Should’ve beat her to death with a piece of wood, she thought. Or shot her with the Magnum and then run the van over the other bitch. But things had been moving so fast, and she’d known she was torn up and she was deep-down scared she was going to pass out before she and Drummer could get away. She’d figured the pit bulls were going to finish Laura Clayborne off, but now she was wishing she’d been certain.
I panicked, she thought. I panicked and left them both alive.
But their car was gone. The dogs had done a number on Laura, at least as bad as the damage done to herself. Should have killed her, Mary fretted. Should have run over her with the van before I left. No, no; Laura Clayborne was finished. If she was still alive, she was gasping in a hospital bed somewhere. Suffer, she thought. I hope you suffer good and long for trying to steal my baby.
But she was growing old. She knew it. Growing old, getting panicked, and leaving loose strings.
Mary slowly and painfully got out of the lounger and limped back to check on Drummer. He was sleeping soundly on the bed, cuddled up in a clean blue blanket, the pacifier clenched in his mouth, and his cherub face scraped from friction with the floorboard. She stood there, watching him sleep, and she could feel fresh blood oozing down her thigh but she didn’t mind. He was a beautiful boy. An angel, sent from heaven as a gift for Jack. He was so very beautiful, and he was hers.
“I love you,” Mary whispered in the quiet.
Jack was going to love him, too. She knew he would.
Mary picked up her bloody jeans from the floor and reached into a pocket. She brought out the clipping from the Sierra Club newsletter, now stained with spots of gore. Then she limped back to the den, and the telephone there. She found a phone book, got the area code she needed, and dialed directory assistance in northern California. “Freestone,” she told the operator. “I’d like the number of Keith Cavanaugh.” She had to spell the last name.
It was rattled off by one of those computer voices that sound human. Mary wrote the number down on a sheet of yellow notepad paper. Then Mary dialed directory assistance a second time. “Freestone. I’d like the number of Nick Hudley.”
It joined the first phone number on the sheet. A third call: “Freestone. Dean Walker.”
“The number you have requested is not available at this time,” the computer voice said.
Mary hung up, and put a question mark beside Dean Walker’s name. An unlisted number? Did the man not have a phone? She sat in a chair next to the phone, her leg really hurting again. She stared at Keith Cavanaugh’s number. Did she dare to dial it? What would happen if she recognized Jack’s voice? Or what if she dialed both numbers and neither voice was Jack’s? Then that would leave Dean Walker, wouldn’t it? She picked up the receiver again; her fingers did their clutching dance, and she had to put the phone down for a minute until the spasms had cease
d.
Then she dialed the area code and the number of Keith Cavanaugh.
One ring. Two. Three. Mary’s throat had dried up. Her heart was pounding. What would she say? What could she say? Four rings. Five. And on and on, without an answer.
She hung up. It was a little after nine o’clock in Freestone. Not too late to be calling, after all these years. She dialed Nick Hudley’s number.
After four rings, Mary heard the phone click as it was being picked up. Her stomach had knotted with tension.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice. Hard to say how old.
“Hi. Is Nick Hudley there, please?”
“No, I’m sorry. Nick’s at the council meeting. Can I take a message?”
“Um…” She was thinking furiously. “I’m a friend of Nick’s,” she said. “I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Really? What’s your name?”
“Robin Baskin,” she said.
“Do you want Nick to call you back?”
“Oh, no…that’s all right. Listen, I’m trying to find the number of another friend of mine in Freestone. Do you know a man named Dean Walker?”
“Dean? Sure, everybody knows Dean. I don’t have his home number, but you can reach him at Dean Walker Foreign Cars. Do you want that number?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “Please.”
The woman went away from the phone. When she returned, she said, “Okay, Robin, here it is.” Mary wrote down the telephone number and the address of Dean Walker Foreign Cars. “I don’t think they’re open this late, though. Are you calling from the Freestone area?”