Exit Row

by Judi Culbertson

  “Sí, sí.”

  There was a long pause, and then finally a breathless Eve. “Hello?”

  “Eve? It’s me. Sorry to bother you on vacation.” He wasn’t, of course. “But I have to know if Coral’s okay.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Never mind that. You never should have taken Coral down there!”

  “What are you talking about? She’s not down here. I put her on the plane last Sunday.”

  “Eve, she wasn’t on the plane. Or the one after that.” As you very well know.

  “She never got home? Is this one of your tricks?”

  “I didn’t come all the way to New Mexico for a trick. Listen to me! Is there anyone else she might be staying with? If she’d gotten off the plane at the last minute?” Give me the name of anyone, some boy she was enamored with, someone for whom she would miss the flight home.

  “Are you saying that Coral is missing?”

  “Eve, she never got to New York.” The heat of the sun through the windshield was making the sweat slide down his face.

  “But how could that be? And you’re in New Mexico? Have you been to the house?”

  “That’s how I found out where you are.” For a moment he felt comforted that someone else cared as much about Coral as he did.

  “Are you staying in my house?”

  “Of course not. I’m at an inn in Santa Fe.”

  “Where? How can I get in touch with you?”

  “You have my cell phone.” Even though you refused to give me your new number.

  “Dom, I don’t get it! What if she’s been kidnapped? I’m coming back.”

  “Back to Taos?”

  “Of course back to Taos. There’s no way I can stay here now.” She calmed down enough to say, “Call me as soon as you find her!”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  IN THE NEXT block, Jackson watched the Sentra pull away from the curb.

  He was reaching for the ignition to turn the Lexus on when his phone rang and he looked down at the screen instead. Mandy.

  “Jack? That girl you’re following was in the shop looking for you.”

  “For me? That’s why she went in? I thought she was just . . . ”

  “She knows your name. That you work for Day Star.”

  He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Oh, God. She was at the Pueblo too. I didn’t go in, but—what if she was talking to Sylvia?”

  “She could have been. Not that Sylvia knows anything to tell her.” The reproof in her voice made him flinch.

  “You’re still blaming me for something I had to do.”

  “Had to?”

  “You know she’d made me promise to let her know how it went. And the truth is so terrible it would kill her.”

  “Come on, Jack. You lied because Day Star told you to lie. You think if you go along with this, they’ll let you fly. It’s never going to happen.”

  “That’s not true! They said as soon as all this dies down.”

  “What happens when Christmas comes and Sylvia is expecting her grandson to come home?”

  He had no answer.

  “Or before then, if she contacts the college and they say he never showed up. Maybe they’ll send letters wanting to know where he is.”

  “But we won’t be living here. Anyway, doesn’t she have something wrong with her?”

  “Emphysema. What—now you’re hoping she’ll die before she misses Clayton?”

  “Of course I’m not. She’s like my grandmother too! I’m the one who should have died. I never should have taken that money.”

  “But that was a bonus! For bravery, they said.”

  The money—the thirty thousand dollars—was the only thing Amanda understood. He knew she would not let him give it back.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “It won’t be forever.”

  Wouldn’t it? His bruised leg still ached, though he was fortunate not to have broken any bones, but he dreaded sleep because of the dreams. Heads without bodies placed in crevices in the mountains. One little girl’s, which had been calling for soda, started screaming, “Blood! I want blood!”

  Last night he had been on the plane again, but with everyone dancing in the aisles, laughing and happy, like they were at a party. He knew if they kept on moving that way, it would make the plane crash. He kept yelling at them to sit down in their seats, but it was as if they couldn’t hear him.

  Mandy kept telling him it was the nitrous oxide. “What you can’t remember is trying to break through in your dreams.”

  “But why am I being punished? I didn’t put dirt in the fuel line. It was sabotage, it had to be! Someone who doesn’t want us to get that wilderness charter.”

  “It won’t be forever,” she said again now.

  She didn’t know the worst. And he was not going to tell her.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THEY MET FOR dinner at the Jackalope Café, a restaurant with dark pine walls and oil paintings of Western landscapes. Because it was early, they were able to get a table in the back where they could talk.

  But no one had anything to say. They sat silent, exhausted and disheartened. Fiona had nothing to contribute. The ride back from Taos had been somber. No more talk about Territorial architecture or native building materials. Dominick seemed to have finally accepted that Coral was missing.

  Coming into Santa Fe, he decided he had to file a missing person’s report immediately.

  Fiona pointed out that Santa Fe was not the place to do it. “She hasn’t even been here, as far as you know. Taos would be more logical.”

  Then he wanted to turn the Sentra around, but Fiona would not let him. In part because she thought it would be hopeless, in part because she was tired of driving through mountains. “We’ll talk about it at dinner. We’ll make a plan.”

  He’d given her an outraged look. “This isn’t a committee decision! This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

  “And my—and Lee. Look, we’ll try to reach Maggie and see what her father remembers. There has to be an explanation.” Although Fiona had dialed Maggie’s number numerous times during the day, there was never any answer. “You said yourself that all we’ve turned up are people who made the flight okay. Coral’s probably fine.”

  “So where is she?”

  Being held by terrorists, which none of you believe in. They had not talked for the rest of the trip.

  THE GROUP ORDERED dinner listlessly.

  “You look sunburnt,” Rosa said to Dominick. “Even over your tan.”

  Fiona nodded. “The sun is closer to earth here.” It sounded like a geography lesson. “Or maybe it’s the thinner air.”

  “And it’s dry,” Greg put in. He was wearing his striped polo shirt. “It really dries out the snot in your nose. I’ve got to keep cleaning mine out.”

  “TMI, Greg.”

  “Fiona? Welcome to the real world.”

  If her Uncle Eimer had been there, he would have reassured them that it was always darkest before dawn. And over the carafe of white wine and pitcher of Dos Equis, the mood normalized slightly. Fiona told Rosa and Greg what they had learned at the Taos Pueblo.

  Rosa pulled out her electronic cigarette. “Do you think this Jackson actually exists?”

  What kind of a question was that? “Well, his wife and Mrs. Black Hook seem to think so.”

  Rosa blinked at her patiently. “I mean, exists now. You couldn’t find him, and his wife wasn’t cooperative.”

  “Mrs. Black Hook said she saw him after the flight. He told her that her son had gotten on the bus to Boulder okay.”

  “See?” said Dominick. “It shows the plane got there just fine.”

  But Rosa leaned back in her chair and looked wise. “Maybe if you were struggling to eke out a living on an Indian reservation, and someone offered you, say, ten thousand dollars to tell people something, you might figure, what’s the harm?”

  “Ten thousand dollars usually
means harm to someone.” Fiona was suddenly furious at Rosa’s cynicism. “And she hardly seemed like the type to lie. You met her, Dominick.”

  “I thought she was very nice.”

  Rosa raised her hands in surrender. “Okay, she wasn’t bribed. But I have to tell you something else.” She put it off for a moment while she dipped a newly served shrimp into a green sauce. “I went to Susan’s today, as you know. There didn’t seem to be anyone inside so I talked to her next-door neighbors, and they told me she was very ill with liver cancer, stage four.”

  Fiona sucked in her breath.

  “But the neighbors thought she had left for New York anyway. I told them she had never arrived, so we went in her house to look.”

  “And you found her?”

  “Well, she wasn’t in the house. So then we checked her garage. She was in the car. She’d turned on the gas because of the pain, because she was dying anyway.”

  “What? She killed herself? And you were the one who found her?” Fiona couldn’t make it seem real.

  “We called the police, and they came right away. I was there most of the day. Frank—the neighbor—drove the Explorer back, and I came with his wife in their car. They were so nice; they took care of everything. They knew her better than I did, of course.” She stared at the tabletop, morose.

  Fiona reached over and squeezed her hand. “Had you ever met her before?”

  “Not in person. But we talked on the phone a lot. Especially lately. I can’t believe she never told me how sick she was.”

  Dominick learned forward urgently. “So she was never on the plane?”

  “No. She never left Santa Fe.”

  “That’s why her name was in parenthesis,” Fiona said. “Because she never made the flight.”

  “Yeah, she was a no-show,” Greg said.

  “She’s hardly a ‘no-show.’ It’s not like she blew the flight off.” Yet, in a way, that was what she had done. “How did you make out today?” Fiona asked.

  Greg looked wary. “With what?”

  “With whatever you were trying to find out.”

  “Yeah, you know what? Even if you know someone’s post office box number, they won’t tell you where he lives! And even if you have his cell phone number, the phone company won’t give you the address. What kind of rinky-dink town is this?”

  “A law-abiding one,” Fiona said mildly. “Did you try finding him on Google?”

  “Yeah, the usual shit. I’m looking for a place anyway, not a person. Dimitri’s apartment. He’s got some stuff I need.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Are you always this nosy?”

  Fiona reached for one of the last two shrimp. “Let me get this straight: Your friend’s missing, and you want to break into his apartment and take stuff?”

  “Easy, Fiona,” Dominick cautioned, lifting a hand.

  “It just sounds strange to me.” No wonder no one would give you the information. I wouldn’t either.

  “He’s got something I need, okay?”

  “Okay.” Fiona closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, there was more food on the table. She had ordered blackened redfish, but when she saw it she couldn’t imagine picking up a fork and eating it.

  “Tired?” Rosa asked sympathetically.

  “I guess.” Tomorrow it would be almost a week since she drove to MacArthur Airport to pick up Lee for a celebratory dinner—to celebrate his return to her and discuss their plans for finding an apartment. A week. She had been out here three days herself, and what did she have to show for it? Nothing but contradictions and lies. She was still no closer to knowing what had happened than she had been standing at the kiosk in Islip-McArthur Airport.

  “Bon appétit!” Rosa announced. She seemed determinedly cheerful. Would she be leaving now that she had found out what had happened to Susan?

  Fiona realized how abandoned she would feel.

  They ate in silence for several minutes, but then she said, “We need a better approach. We need—”

  “A psychic,” Rosa said.

  “We need to pull in the police and the FBI,” Dominick corrected her. “We need them to find my daughter.”

  Fiona had been going to say, “To talk to people along the route and see if they’ve seen or heard about anything unusual.” But she considered their suggestions. “Okay. First we use a psychic to tell us what happened. Then when we know, we go to the police.”

  Dominick shook his head. “I’m not waiting. I’m going to the police now.”

  “And you can ditch the psychic,” Greg said.

  “No, no, the police use them all the time.” Rosa leaned forward earnestly, forearms on the deep red tablecloth. “A man in one of Susan’s books could look at someone and see the rest of that person’s life. The police used him to pick up information at murder scenes.”

  “Where does he live?” Fiona asked.

  “Oh, nowhere around here. South Carolina, I think.”

  “But isn’t Santa Fe supposed to be some kind of center for mystics?”

  Greg snapped his fingers. “Right! We’ll just look in the New Age yellow pages.”

  “You really think it works?” Fiona asked Rosa, ignoring him.

  Rosa considered, sipping the last of her wine. “I think some people have an extraordinary way of grasping bits and pieces of things. It’s uncanny. And sometimes a hint is all you need.”

  Greg put his head in his hands dramatically. “You really think some psychic is going to tell us what happened? What if she gives us bad information? That’s worse than no information at all.”

  “Well, we don’t know anything now, so what’s the difference?” Fiona turned to Dominick, who was taking out his wallet to settle up, and reached into her purse for her own. “Day Star isn’t going to admit anything. They’ll point to people like Dr. Seelander and Maggie’s father and Jackson and to the FAA, who says the plane came in. They’ll give the police a doctored manifest that shows Coral and Lee weren’t on the plane. I think we should go to the police, but they won’t investigate a plane no one says is missing.”

  “But people are missing!” Dominick cried. “We haven’t actually talked to anyone at the Denver airport to find out what happened when the plane got there. How many people were on it or anything else.”

  Fiona nodded. “Good point. We could get up early tomorrow morning and drive to Denver.”

  “And see a psychic tonight,” Rosa insisted.

  Greg looked as if he was going to object again, but then seemed to reconsider. “You think she could tell me where Dimitri’s apartment is?”

  “She’d probably tell you to look in the white pages.” It was a bad joke; Fiona knew they didn’t have a reverse directory for cell phones. She started to stand up, but was distracted by Rosa. She was waving at a woman in a fringed buckskin dress who was overseeing the tables, a woman in her fifties whose hair was pulled back in a gray braid that reached her waist. Fiona had identified her as the owner earlier.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked when she reached them.

  “Perfect,” Rosa said. “But we need a good psychic.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  PAOLO RECCHIA LIVED far up Canyon Road, past the galleries and artists’ studios and cafés. By the time the two women reached the residential neighborhood, Rosa was out of breath. “I’m not used to this,” she gasped.

  “I thought you went to the gym.”

  “I do. For Stretch ’n’ Sculpt and water aerobics—not mountain climbing.”

  Because the restaurant owner had assured them it was only a short walk, they had not gone back to the inn for the car. Fiona had imagined she meant five or six blocks.

  “I’m so sorry about Susan,” she said. “What a sad way to end.”

  “I think she had a different idea about dying. Maybe it was because she wrote so much about death, but she seemed to act as if it was no more than checking out of a hotel. That you just went on to your next destination.�
��

  Fiona shivered.

  “What makes me feel so badly for her is that she was finally getting the recognition she deserved. Okay, part of it was the story—it’s very dramatic. But Susan did a beautiful job writing it. And then her body betrayed her.”

  “How long had you known her?”

  “I’d been her editor for seven years, and we had a very friendly relationship. She was going to stay at my house. It wasn’t as though our publisher was rolling out any red carpets; I’d worked hard to get her the TV spot, and we hoped things would take off from there.” Rosa stopped walking for a moment. “It can’t be much farther. Have you ever been to a psychic?”

  “Once. At a bridal shower. It was supposed to be light entertainment.” She laughed. The woman, a tarot card reader, had smelled of musk and carried her cards wrapped in black velvet. During Fiona’s five minutes, the reader had laid out the cards, then reared back a little. “You’re not the bride, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” She frowned at the layout. “You have an eventful life ahead of you.”

  “Lots of travel?”

  “If you want.”

  “Am I going to be happy?”

  “Who’s happy?” The woman shrugged. “Better to keep busy like I do.”

  “What did she tell you?” Rosa asked.

  “She was glad I wasn’t the bride.”

  “Well, this man sounds impressive.”

  “I guess.” She would have to try not to act skeptical. But she was no believer.

  When they told the restaurant owner what they wanted, she had mentioned Paolo Recchia, then said, “But he’s booked for months. Maybe for years. I can ask around for someone else.”

  “No,” Rosa said firmly. “We need the best. Can’t you just call and see if he’s had any cancellations? We’re very flexible as to time. And we’ll pay.”

  She made it sound like a bribe, but the woman treated it good-humoredly and left to call. She returned with a slow smile creasing her face. “Nine fifteen. He said he was expecting you to call.”

  Despite herself, Fiona felt a chill. “How do you know?”