Robin was so concerned about the dogs she didn’t even think about the gate until she was in front of it. Of course it was locked, and much too tall to scale. Not to mention the spikes on top. Robin considered ringing the bell on the intercom and using some excuse, like a UPS delivery, to get herself inside, but she didn’t want to arouse anyone’s suspicion. She was standing there, trying to come up with something better, when she heard the sound of tires on gravel. She crouched against the wall as the gate opened and the Jeep, with Mitchell at the wheel, drove out of the grounds and down the street. Still in a crouch, so she wouldn’t be seen in the Jeep’s rearview mirror, Robin scrambled through the gate like a giant crab before it slid shut again. Then she sprinted up the winding road, darting through the trees. When the house was in view, she stopped to catch her breath and to survey the scene. There were no cars in the driveway, no gardeners’ trucks in sight. Robin ran around to the back of the house and pressed herself against the stucco wall beneath the kitchen window. She could hear the dogs making a racket inside. “Please, please don’t let them out,” she whispered to no one in particular, and of course she started to sweat buckets.
The window ledge was just above eye level, and there was nothing around to stand on. Robin jumped as high as she could and got a quick glimpse, through the open window, of Lupe sitting at the center island, reading a magazine. She had a flash of herself looking through the Thompsons’ kitchen window the night after the accident. Once again she wanted in, badly, but for a very different reason. She jumped again, and this time Lupe was yelling at the dogs, who leaped and clamored around her. “Basta, locos!” she yelled, swatting at them with her magazine. Robin jumped a third time and the kitchen was empty. Then she heard a door slam and the two dogs were right there, snarling and backing her against the wall. There seemed to be a hundred of them. Robin squeezed her eyes shut. She was drowning in perspiration, and her belly was clenched in a cramp worse than any period she’d ever had. The dogs brushed restlessly against her legs, snorting and growling low in their throats. Robin crossed her arms over her chest, something her father had once told her was a way of letting an animal know that you aren’t a threat. “Daddy, Mommy,” Robin murmured. She was still holding the unopened bag of chips when she crossed her arms, and the crushed foil thundered against her thundering heart. “Nice dogs,” she said hoarsely, “good dogs,” the way the guy in that movie did before he tossed the Dobermans the doped meat. She wished she could remember the names of these monsters—it might fool them into thinking she was an old friend—but she could hardly think of her own name right then. “I come in peace,” she added weakly, but that was from another movie, she realized, about cowboys and Indians.
Robin would have stood there forever, not moving at all, until she died, or the dogs did, if it wasn’t for Phoebe. She had to get into the house, she had to save her. Taking a deep, whistling breath, she opened her eyes and lowered her arms to her sides. One of the dogs sniffed her clenched fingers with its slimy nose, while the other one checked out the bag of chips. Up close like this, Robin could see the terrible and fascinating details of their faces: the way the whiskery hairs on their brows twitched, and the flickering smiles on their ragged, glistening jowls. Slowly, slowly, she moved her hands until they were both gripping the bag. She tried to tear the foil across the top, but it probably would have been easier to crack a safe. The last time she’d bought a bag of this stuff, she remembered, she’d worked on it forever before it gave. She didn’t have that kind of time now. Maybe she should just throw the sealed bag on the ground and let them tear it apart with their fangs. The thought of those fangs made her shiver, and she tugged once more, with all her might, and the bag ripped apart. Some of the chips flew out, and the dogs scrambled for them like pigeons chasing bread crumbs. She started to walk away from the wall in the slow motion of dreams, absently eating one of the chips herself as she went. The dogs followed her, with their heads down, while birds swooped overhead between the trees and a couple of squirrels came out of hiding to look for a handout. Robin was like that statue in front of the St. Francis Academy back in Newark, the one with all the stone animals around it, and the birds, real and fake, perched on its head and outstretched arms. St. Francis of L.A. It wasn’t that she’d lost her fear. It still made her sick to look down at the dogs on either side of her, at their broad, rippling backs, their dangling, dripping, wolflike tongues. Her mouth was so dry she almost choked on the vegetable chip, and she counted her steps aloud as she walked, to keep herself from going too fast, to keep from screaming. If one of the dogs had started barking then, or made a sudden move toward her, she would probably have taken off in a panic. But they didn’t, and she didn’t.
Now she just hoped that Lupe had left the door unlatched when she let the dogs out. Robin put her hand on the knob and turned it. It went all the way around and the door opened with only a little shove. The dogs scooted in ahead of her and ran to the kitchen. She waited anxiously with her back against the door, expecting some exclamation of surprise from Lupe, but all she heard was the muffled roar of the vacuum cleaner, coming from the direction of the guest room.
Robin tiptoed toward the stairway, the way she had the day she discovered the nursery. The dogs came out of the kitchen and caught up with her before she was halfway up the stairs. She felt her heart pitch when they reappeared, and she could hear it beating in her ears the rest of the way. The hallway was empty. That woman, Hester, was sitting in front of her computer, tapping on the keyboard. Robin silently ordered her not to turn around and she seemed to get the message. Cynthia’s bedroom door was half open and Robin and the dogs slipped inside. The blinds in the nursery were closed. Robin was afraid to look in there, afraid to discover that Cynthia had taken the baby with her on location, or that Maria had her out somewhere for a walk. Phoebe was right there in the beautiful white crib, though, fast asleep, with her little butt in the air. “Shhh,” Robin whispered to the dogs, to the sleeping baby, to herself. If the baby cried, if the dogs barked. Master, master, master!
Robin snatched a handful of Pampers and a folded blanket from the changing-table shelf and jammed them into her knapsack. When she bent over the crib, Phoebe rolled onto her back and opened her eyes abruptly, the way a baby doll blinks awake. “Shhh,” Robin said again. “It’s only me.” Phoebe smiled, sat herself up, and raised her arms. Robin picked her up and cuddled her for a moment. Her skin was still warm from sleep, and sweet-smelling, although her diaper felt heavy to Robin’s experienced hand. “Wanna go bye-bye?” Robin said.
She’d almost forgotten about the dogs, who circled her excitedly now, to Phoebe’s great amusement. Robin carried her to the doorway of the bedroom and glanced up and down the hallway. All clear. And all quiet, too, she realized. When had the vacuum stopped droning? Holding the baby tightly against her chest, as if they were dodging gunfire, she ran down the stairs to the front door, with the dogs running alongside her. “Stay!” she said, and pulled the heavy door open. The dogs looked at her longingly, but they obeyed. Robin didn’t even take the time to close the door behind her, and as she raced across the driveway toward the trees, she could hear Lupe cry out, “Hey, muchachos! Who let you in, eh?”
At the big gate, Robin reached one hand through the bars to ring the bell on the intercom. Long moments passed before she heard a crackle of static and then Lupe saying, “Hola! Quien es?” “It’s me—Linda!” Robin shouted. To her surprise, Linda’s voice was almost as easy to do as her signature.
“Linda!” Lupe exclaimed happily, and after several heartbeats, the gate began to slide open.
29
Crazy Like a Fox
LINDA STEADIED HER SHAKING hands and dialed Cynthia’s number at work. The voice-mail message came on at the other end: “You’ve reached the office of Cynthia Ster—” She hung up before it could play itself out. She dialed Cynthia’s home number next and Lupe answered the phone, shouting and crying something in Spanish, and then Cynthia came on the line. “Wh
o is this?” she demanded.
“It’s me,” Linda said. “What’s wrong? Has anything happened to the baby?” She started to cry in anticipation of Cynthia’s answer. Of course something had happened to the baby. What else could this be about?
“Linda, did you take her? Is she with you?” Cynthia asked.
“What do you mean, is she with me?” Linda sobbed. “I’m at work. Oh, God, she’s not missing, is she? Cynthia?”
But Cynthia only said, “You’d better get over here,” before she hung up.
Linda’s hands flew around her face now like terrified birds. She clasped them together and wrung them into submission. Then she dialed her own apartment number. Let Robin be there, she prayed. Let her answer the phone and say something insolent and relieving at once. Sure, I took the baby—she’s right here with me. What’s the big deal? She’s my sister, isn’t she? But Linda only heard her own idiotic taped message. “Hi, this is Linda. Robin, Phoebe, and I are all busy right now, but—” She slammed the receiver down, grabbed her purse, and went limping out of the office.
Mitchell was waiting next to the car in the parking lot, exactly where she expected him to be. It was a habit of privilege, she realized, like expecting someone else to cook and serve your meals, to do your laundry, your every bidding. She had learned to take things from others with only a few pangs of conscience, to say thank you graciously in two languages: Thank you for everything, Cynthia. Muchas gracias, Lupe, Maria. Had she made some unspeakable bargain?
“Mitchell! What happened?” she said, and he shook his head and said, “I don’t know. Jesus. Lupe went upstairs and the baby was gone from her crib.” He gave Linda a sympathetic glance as he opened her door, and they didn’t speak again as he zipped in and out of traffic all the way to Cynthia’s.
The gate to the estate was wide open. As the car went up the gravel driveway, Linda remembered her mother saying something about closing the barn door after the horse was stolen. Or did she remind Linda to close the front door behind her, saying that they didn’t live in a stable? What difference did it make what she’d said, and why was Linda thinking about that now? She knew that her mind was traveling everywhere but in the direction of disaster, that she was only, barely, keeping herself from hysteria. My baby, my baby. Mitchell pulled up to the house and Linda jumped out and ran into the vestibule, where the dogs bounded up to greet her. She shooed them off. What kind of watchdogs were they, anyway, if they let a kidnapper in and out? Lupe and Maria were standing there, weeping and clinging together. “Where is Cynthia?” Linda asked. “Donde esta la señora?” Her voice was as high and thin as a bat’s.
“Ahí,” Lupe said, pointing behind Linda.
Linda turned around. She didn’t recognize Cynthia at first. The blond hair, her own state of panic. It was a moment from a bad dream, or from an even worse movie, the kind where the insane murderer, clutching a butcher knife by then, turns out to be the heroine’s best friend, or her boyfriend in drag. If human blood could simply stop dead in its circular route, Linda’s did right then. Those familiar eyes, so darkly intense, so unfriendly, were even scarier than the unfamiliar blondness. “Where is my baby?” Linda said. “What have you done with her?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Cynthia said. “I told you I don’t know where she is.” Her expression hadn’t changed, but when Linda walked purposefully in her direction she flinched, as if she expected to be struck.
Linda went right past her to the stairway Of course she had left her cane at the office in her haste, and she hadn’t climbed any stairs, with or without assistance, since the accident. It was as if she had forgotten how; she paused, looking down at her own two feet. Right, left. I left my wife and forty-eight kids! Left, right. Right in the middle of the kitchen floor! She hadn’t thought of that silly marching rhyme since childhood, when it had helped to prod her reluctant feet toward school every day. I’m losing my mind, she decided, as she gripped the banister and pulled herself up onto the first step. Her bad knee buckled a little, but she held on and went up another step, and then another.
“Don’t you understand English?” Cynthia yelled from the foot of the stairs when Linda stopped midway for a moment to rest. “She’s not up there!”
Linda resumed her climb. It took a long time to get to the top, and she was exhausted and slick with sweat when she got there. “Phoebe!” she called, and she lurched through Cynthia’s bedroom to the dressing room. God. She felt woozy and had to shut her eyes for a moment and lean against the wall, the wall with its nursery-rhyme paper. When she opened her eyes and looked around her, everything was still there—the wallpaper, the shelves of dolls and toys, the Mother Goose lamp, the beautiful, empty, canopied crib. This was a carefully planned room for a permanent tenant. Linda ran her hands over the crib sheet, hoping to catch some of the baby’s warmth there, but the sheet was cool, even to her icy hands. Oh, Robin, Linda thought, forgive me.
Going downstairs was just as difficult as going up, and in her reckless rush Linda tripped and almost fell headlong down the whole flight. Cynthia was waiting for her in the kitchen. “Well? Are you satisfied?” she asked. She was actually smiling, in a grisly way. Then she reached for the cordless phone. “I’m calling the police,” she said.
“No, don’t!” Linda said, putting her hand over Cynthia’s. “Maybe—”
Cynthia shook off Linda’s hand. “Maybe what?” she said. “Who are you trying to protect—your Chicano boyfriend? Your JD stepdaughter? Those people she’s such pals with?”
Everyone Cynthia mentioned with such obvious disgust, Linda longed to see, to speak to at that moment. “Maybe you’d better think about protecting yourself,” she said. She wasn’t certain what she meant by that, but Cynthia grew pale at her words and slowly lowered the telephone receiver. Linda picked it up and called home again. Again, her own recorded message. She called the Thompsons’ next, and Jewelle answered the phone. Linda said, trying to keep her voice under control, “This is Linda Reismann, Robin’s mother? Is she there, by any chance?”
“No, she’s not,” Jewelle Thompson said. “In fact, I was just going to call you and ask if you’d seen Lucy. Maybe they’re together somewhere.”
Linda began to cry again. “Jewelle,” she wailed. “My baby’s missing!”
“What do you mean, missing? Did the girls take her somewhere? Now hold on, Linda, don’t cry, okay? Lee and I will be right there.”
“I’m not h-home,” Linda said. She recited Cynthia’s address. “Please come and get me. Please,” she begged. She hung up and dialed Nathan’s number next, hoping she’d find Robin hiding out there, but he didn’t answer. “Oh, God, what will I do?” she murmured, pacing the length of the kitchen with the phone in her hand.
“Why don’t you try and pull yourself together,” Cynthia said sharply.
“Why don’t you get out of my life!” Linda shouted back at her, and flung the phone across the room. It hit the refrigerator and then bounced to the floor at Cynthia’s feet, where it lay, humming ominously.
By the time the Thompsons arrived in their station wagon, Linda was waiting outside for them, pacing again and shivering. They put her between them in the front seat and sped away. Lee drove and Jewelle kept her arm around Linda’s shaking shoulders, saying, “It’s all right, honey. You’ll see. Everything’s going to be all right.”
At first Linda thought the apartment had been robbed, with the dresser drawers pulled out and emptied like that, and those papers all over the sofa and the living-room floor. Was Robin kidnapped, too? She combed through the mess in the bedroom, with Jewelle’s help, feeling completely confused and crazed with anxiety. All the thoughts she didn’t want to think started crowding into her head: the story of the Lindbergh baby; the little boy who disappeared years ago on the way to school in New York City; that whole busload of children, somewhere down South, taken on a terrifying joyride. And every week, it seemed, there was a television movie based on another family’s tragedy
Lee Th
ompson walked slowly into the bedroom. He had picked up the papers in the living room and was scanning and sorting them. “What’s this detective stuff about?” he asked Linda. He handed her some of the papers and she sank onto the bed with them and began to read. None of it made any sense at first, and then, suddenly, it all made total, horrifying sense. The letter from William Sterling. The letter to Cynthia from her lawyer. And the detective’s report: five pages that summarized Linda’s entire recent history. Her job at the Newark Fred Astaire’s. Her marriage to Wright, his death, and her trip West with Robin. Their illegal stay in Paradise. Linda’s pregnancy. Her various, short-lived jobs. Her affair with Manny, and then with Nathan, and even her one horrendous date with Mr. Albano! Various purchases were noted, including the lacy thong panties she’d bought on a silly impulse at Frederick’s of Hollywood, soon after she got the job at Cynthia’s. It all sounded so sordid the way it was written. Sexually active widowed white female. A pregnant dance instructor, cocktail waitress, and cashier in a liquor store, sleeping around on short acquaintance. Men practically dying at her feet, one of them violently. The kiss of death. A sentence in the middle of one page read: “On April 29, 1992, the first night of the riots in South-Central LA., subject left minor children in the care of a neighbor she hardly knew, and drove, in her nightclothes, to that troubled area for an assignation with her current, married paramour.” That information could only have come from Regina Clark, who still acted so neighborly near the mailboxes. But how did they know about Mr. Albano, and the panties? Linda must have been followed, maybe everywhere, without ever becoming uneasy or suspicious. So much for feminine intuition.
There was a lot of information about Robin, too—her habitual truancy, her hitchhiking, something about shoplifting, and, of course, the accident and its aftermath. The wording implied that Linda left her children with just about anyone handy, that she’d turned Robin over to the Thompsons without ever having met them, and that Cynthia, another virtual stranger, had complete charge of Phoebe for months. It also mentioned that Linda had accepted numerous gifts of cash and material goods from Cynthia while the infant was in her care, as if a trade of some kind had been arranged. I can explain everything! Linda thought, and then wondered if she could, if some impartial judge or jury would stay impartial very long in light of her seemingly wayward past, her less-than-impeccable present. What would anyone think of a pregnant cocktail waitress in hot pants and cowboy boots, a woman who slept with someone else’s husband and made impulsive decisions without any apparent regard for her children’s welfare? Linda sat dispiritedly on the bed with the papers strewn around her, reading the last page. She would not have been surprised to discover they’d gone even further back into her life, and nailed her for the juvenile offenses of loneliness and daydreaming, for lying to her mother and going to a rock concert, for wishing herself into a grownup future. Well, here she was, here she was.
Tunnel of Love Page 32