Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

by Sallie Bissell

  Logan perked up. “You already found her some parents?”

  “I’ve got three different couples lined up and waiting. Any one of them will do better by this little girl than you.”

  “When are they coming?”

  “As soon as I call them.” She fished out a bottle containing an inch of pink powder from the medicine chest and poured distilled water in it. “But first I need those papers from you. I can’t do a thing without them.”

  He pulled the forged birth certificate and parental surrender forms from his pocket as she shook up what now looked like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. He dropped the pages on the examination table. “See you in a couple of days.”

  “Where are you going now?” she asked in astonishment.

  “You said I could have the van for a couple more days after I brought the baby.”

  “You’re leaving right away?”

  “I need to finish a deal. I’m running on a timetable.”

  “I hope you run on that one better than you ran on this one.”

  He forced himself to smile. “I’ll be back later.”

  “You be back Wednesday, Duncan,” ordered Edwina. “I’m tired of your nonsense. And clean out my van before you bring it back.”

  Go fuck yourself, you old bitch, he thought as he headed toward the door.

  “Don’t you want to kiss your little girl goodbye? She’ll probably be gone by the time you get back.”

  “You kiss her for me, Edwina,” Duncan called over his shoulder. “Just tell her Daddy says to have a nice life.”

  Miles to the east, the child’s real mother was speeding down I-40 in a pickup, sipping from a thermos of herbal tea. After Ruth had left Jonathan, she’d hurried back to the camper, waking Clarinda, who’d fallen asleep over the latest issue of Cosmo.

  “Wake up,” Ruth had said. “We’re leaving.”

  Clarinda blinked. “But where are we going? Did Mary find the baby?”

  “Not that I know of,” replied Ruth, rolling up her sleeping bag. “We’re going to find Mary. Then we’re going to help her find Lily.”

  Clarinda didn’t budge from her cot. “I thought Gabe Benge was giving her plenty of help.”

  “I thought so, too,” said Ruth. “Apparently, that’s not enough.”

  Clarinda rolled her eyes, but got up and began stuffing her clothes into her backpack. Twenty minutes later, both women were packed and ready to go.

  “Here.” Ruth tossed her cousin the keys.”You drive. I need to get some sleep.”

  “I just took six aspirin,” Clarinda whined. “You know what these trees do to my sinuses.”

  “Okay, okay,” muttered Ruth impatiently, grabbing the keys and climbing into the driver’s seat. “Just get in. I’ll try to stay awake.”

  They pulled out of Dula’s parking lot and stopped at a gas station before they merged onto I-40. Clarinda used the bathroom and stocked up on cigarettes; Ruth bought a map and had her thermos filled with hot water.

  “What are you brewing tonight?” Clarinda’s nose wrinkled as they finally rolled up the access ramp to the highway.

  “Something to keep me awake,” Ruth said acidly. “According to this map, it’s about five hours to Christiana.”

  “That far? Hey, I’ll try not to doze off,” Clarinda said, crumpling up against the passenger door. Ten minutes later, she was snoring.

  Sipping her tea, Ruth sped on through the night. At first she drove erratically, nearly nod­ding off from sheer exhaustion, but as the herbal mixture she’d learned from Granny Broom worked its magic, she began to feel almost giddy with energy, as if she’d downed a pot of power­ful coffee. Suddenly in tune with every nuance of the highway, she drafted behind a log-toting semi through Knoxville, then zoomed solo past the smaller towns of Lenoir City and Harriman. As the night wore on traffic thinned out, and she was able to catch brief glances at the huge black bowl of sky overhead. She tried to spot Polaris, the star that had once betokened such good things for her and Jonathan. At Little Jump Off she could find it easily, shining directly over a notch in Hemming Ridge. Here, traveling west through unfamiliar country, she had no idea where it was. Just like Lily, she thought, bitterly.

  As she drove on through the night she began to see everything, from the lines on the highway to her whole life, with amazing acuity. Lily and Jonathan; Mary and Clarinda.

  “Some of them are true helpers,” she whispered, Jonathan’s words ringing in her head. “Others are simply clutter.”

  All at once an idea occurred to her. If she would just shake her life out like a quilt, all the clutter would vanish, and leave only what was important to her. Only that way would she get her family back. Only that way would her old life return.

  Amazed at the simplicity of the solution, she looked over at Clarinda. She was snoring loudly, slack-jawed from her six aspirin. Clutter, decided Ruth. Clutter of the worst kind. Abruptly she stepped on the brake and steered the truck over to the shoulder of the road. They lurched along the rough pavement, finally stopping just be­neath a sign for the next exit. As Clarinda struggled up from sleep, Ruth reached over and opened the passenger door. Laughing, she grabbed her cousin’s backpack and threw it into the darkness.

  “What’s going on?” cried the woozy Clarinda, shivering as cold night air poured in the open door. “Did we have a flat?”

  “Get out,” said Ruth.

  Clarinda frowned as if trying to square reality with whatever she’d been dreaming. “Huh?”

  “I said get out. I don’t want you in my truck anymore.”

  Blinking, Clarinda looked around to see nothing but a deserted highway and a sign indi­cating that the exit for some place named Crossville was one mile ahead. “Have you gone nuts? This is the middle of the night! We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

  “And it’s the perfect place for you.” Ruth looked at Clarinda’s shocked expression and started laughing all over again.

  “If this is your idea of payback, Ruth, it really sucks. I didn’t mean to give Lily away. I’ve told you a million times I made a fucking mistake!”

  “Your parents are the ones who made a fucking mistake, Clarinda. It turned out to be you.” Ruth pulled Jonathan’s lug wrench from be­neath the driver’s seat and pointed at her cousin. “Now get the bloody hell out of my truck!”

  The last vestige of sleep fled from Clarinda’s face. She scrambled out the door like a dog accustomed to dodging the furious kicks of its master. When she reached the ground she turned back toward Ruth, her arms spread in supplication.

  “Okay, Ruth,” she called, as if she’d just indulged her cousin in some bizarre game of revenge. “I’m out here alone, in the dead of night. I’ve got twenty-two dollars in my purse and no idea of where the hell I am. Does that even the score between us? Do you feel better now?”

  Ruth looked down at the woman who’d handed her baby to a total stranger—a piece of pure, unadulterated clutter if there ever was one. “Not quite yet, Clarinda,” she said sourly. “But twenty more miles down the road, I’ll probably feel just fine.”

  Reaching over, she slammed the door shut and gunned the engine, jamming the truck back onto the highway. She watched in the rearview mirror as her little piece of clutter cousin stomped her foot and waved her arms like a puppet and then disappeared into the darkness, just another piece of litter you’d pass on the highway without a second thought.

  Twenty-nine

  “HI, GABE. I’VE come to help!”

  Mary looked up from the dinette, stunned. It was past midnight and she’d just finished her ab­solute last sip of wine when someone had tapped lightly on the door. Gabe opened it to reveal Ruth Moon standing there, an odd grin on her face. Though she wore the same clothes as when Mary had last seen her, her demeanor had changed. Where before she’d moved leadenly, as if burdened with sorrow, now Ruth darted about lik
e a sparrow, her eyes bright and feverish. She’s lost it, Mary thought, her heart aching for the stricken woman. This has driven her out of her mind.

  “You two working hard?” Ruth eyed the empty wine bottle on the table. “Jonathan said I needed to come here and help you out.”

  Mary frowned. ‘’Jonathan told you to come here?”

  “Yes. He said since he couldn’t come help you out, I would have to.”

  “Where’s Jonathan now?” asked Gabe.

  “In jail,” Ruth replied. “Black eye, broken ribs.” She cast a sharp glance at Mary. “Broken heart, for all I know.”

  Oooooh, boy, thought Mary. This just gets worse and worse. “Come sit down and tell us about it, Ruth. I bet Gabe will make us a pot of coffee.”

  “Oh, I’ve got tea that works much better than coffee.”

  “Let’s do coffee first.” Mary looked conspira­torially at Gabe. “Some decaf. Then if we’re still thirsty, we’ll do tea.”

  While Gabe fished the decaffeinated coffee from his cabinet, Mary made room for Ruth at the dinette. In a moment she was telling them everything—that Jonathan had finally arrived in Tremont, but had gotten into same kind of fight with Sheriff Dula and was now in the Nikwase County jail.

  “He told me to go and find you,” Ruth said, her hard edge vanishing. “He said you would need my help.”

  “What kind of fight did Jonathan have?” Mary knew Jonathan’s temper well—slow to boil, but once it did, it could be explosive.

  “I was telling him about everything that happened. Then I showed him that first picture of Lily, and he went crazy.” Ruth gave a loud sniff. “He grabbed the sheriff by the neck and lifted him up off the floor.”

  Mary closed her eyes, filling in the rest of the blanks. Dula’s deputies had no doubt come to their boss’s aid, fists clenched, nightsticks drawn. “How badly was Jonathan hurt?” she asked softly.

  “Like I said, he’s got some broken ribs.” Ruth twisted the hem of her sour, milk-stained T-shirt. “It was horrible.”

  While Ruth stirred milk into her coffee, Mary gathered all the photos of Lily they’d re­ceived and spread them out on the table. As Ruth looked at them, the woman who’d just moments ago burst in like a firecracker seemed to grow smaller by the minute, as if the grotesque images on paper were leaching her very life away. Mary pointed to the last picture. “Remember when I last called you and we had such a bad connection?”

  Ruth nodded, lifting her coffee cup with shaking hands.

  “What I was trying to tell you was that Gabe and I may have found the place where this last photo was sent from.”

  “Where?”

  “Murfreesboro. A larger town, just up the road.” Mary wondered how she was going to explain this and not set Ruth off on some emotional nosedive again. “Ruth, I think I know who’s doing this.”

  “Not the porno guy in Atlanta?”

  “No. Somebody else. Someone who’s using Lily to set a trap for me.”

  Ruth almost dropped her coffee. “A trap for you? But why?”

  Mary took Ruth’s hand. How much should she tell of this to make it plausible? How much should she leave out, so as not to cause Ruth pain? She considered her options, then told much the same story she’d told Gabe, leaving out only the fact that she and Jonathan were making love when this whole horror had begun.

  “But why do you think this Logan is after you?” asked Ruth when Mary reached the end of her tale.

  “I don’t know. But I think it must be about something that happened a long time ago, something between him and my father.”

  “Did you tell Sheriff Dula about this?”

  “No. I left a detailed message with Chip Clifford, from the FBI.”

  “Do you think they’ll come in on the case now?”

  “All we’ve got is my conjecture. That’s not much to convince them that someone they think is dead might be alive.”

  Mesmerized, Ruth stared at the photos of Lily. Finally Gabe spoke.

  “Hey, what happened to your cousin? Did she ever get back to Oklahoma?”

  “I don’t know.” Ruth looked up at him, her eyes regaining their feverish gleam. “She might be in Oklahoma. She might still be in Tennessee.” She gave an evil little chortle. “She might be dead, for all I know.”

  “What do you mean, Ruth?” Mary asked, amazed. The woman had just cycled through three totally different personalities in the last twenty minutes.

  “On the way over here I finally figured out what was wrong with my life.” Ruth leaned over the table and whispered, as if letting them in on a major secret of the universe. “It’s clutter. You know? All the extraneous shit that just gets in your way. I was driving along and I started thinking about all the things and people I could do without and I looked over in the truck and there sat Clarinda, this living, breathing piece of clutter. So I just pulled over to the side of the road and got rid of her.”

  Mary flashed another look at Gabe. “What did you do, Ruth?”

  “I put her out,” Ruth replied triumphantly. “Threw her and her stupid backpack out of the truck.”

  “On the side of the interstate? In the middle of the night?” Mary was appalled.

  “Oh, she was just a mile from some town. You should have seen her. She came running after the truck yelling, waving her arms. I just gunned the motor and kept on going.” Ruth started to giggle, then her gaze fell on the photos of Lily. “If it hadn’t been for that sorry piece of clutter,” she muttered brokenly, her laughter turning abruptly to tears, “none of this would have happened.”

  Mary pulled Ruth close to her. She could feel her trembling beneath her filthy clothes. The last few days had taken a brutal toll on the woman. “Honey, would you like to take a nice hot shower? I can give you a clean T-shirt to put on afterward. It’ll make you feel a whole lot better.”

  “You think so?”

  Mary nodded.

  “Okay.” Ruth wiped her eyes, suddenly child-like. “If you say so.”

  “Come on, then. Gabe will get you going.” Gabe turned on the tiny shower and gave Ruth soap and a clean towel. As she bathed, he sat down across from Mary, his face pinched with concern.

  “Whoa,” he said softly. “Have we just gotten a glimpse of the new, improved Ruth?”

  Mary shrugged. “I’ve seen distraught mothers before, but nothing like this. I don’t much blame her for ditching Clarinda, though. Too bad somebody didn’t put her out before she ever got to Tennessee.’’

  “But don’t you think we ought to call somebody? The cops or the Highway Patrol?”

  Mary thought for a moment. Though her instincts told her Clarinda could probably survive a nuclear blast with nothing worse than a broken nail, Ruth had left her cousin in a potentially dangerous situation. “Of course we should,” she conceded. “I’ll call the state troopers and let them know there’s a wildcat loose on I-40.”

  Just as she reached for her phone, however, she heard the distinctive ring of the “William Tell Overture.” With a sinking heart, she read the screen.

  “Get Ruth out of the shower,” she told Gabe. “We’ve got another e-mail from Lily!”

  Forty-five minutes later, they stood back in the Kinko’s computer room, waiting for their new photo to come out of the printer. With her hair still damp from the shower, Ruth wore one of Mary’s T-shirts and a more rational demeanor. Both her crazed, frantic look and her zombie non-look were gone from her eyes, and she seemed her old herself again—intelligent, capable, and totally focused on finding her child.

  “Can you see Lily yet?” she asked Gabe, who was standing closest to the printer.

  “Hang on,” said Gabe. “It’s coming.”

  They waited the last agonizing seconds for the printer to finish. Finally Gabe grabbed the sheet of paper and held it up. This time Lily lay not in front of a gravestone,
but at the base of a statue, where a naked youth, cast in what ap­peared to be bronze, held two horses rearing over his shoulders. A tall obelisk rose behind him, with an angel gazing down on the trio from above. Lily lay wrapped in a blanket at the bot­tom of the structure, where someone had propped up a crudely lettered cardboard sign that read “Greetings from Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “Oh my God!” wailed Ruth. “My baby!”

  Mary turned to Gabe. “Do you recognize this statue?”

  “No. But if it’s Nashville, he’s still on the Trail of Tears.”

  “How far is Nashville from here?” asked Mary.

  “About forty miles.”

  “Come on!” Ruth pulled them frantically toward the door. “Lily might still be there!”

  An hour later, they stood at the base of Nashville’s memorial to the Civil War. Ruth had followed them in her truck, and they’d stopped only to buy a city map at a local gas station. When they realized that it failed to list any points of interest, Gabe had asked directions from a cabbie working the graveyard shift for the Music City Cab Company.

  “That’s on Granny White Pike.” The taxi driver pointed at the map.

  “Granny White Pike?” Gabe repeated the odd name.

  “Yeah,” said the cabbie. “Go to downtown Nashville, get on Broadway. Go south on Twelfth Avenue. It’s about three miles down the road, on the right. Spooky as hell at night.”

  The cab driver had been right. The statue stood in a small park at the edge of a residential area, soaring up into the night sky, the tall obelisk glowing white in the darkness. The bronze youth and his two horses scowled down upon them, huge and menacing, making Mary dizzy every time she looked up. An eerie silence hovered over the place, as if the Confederate dead still kept watch. The spot where Lily had lain was empty, as were the other three sides of the monument’s base.

  “Come on,” said Ruth, after they’d made a wide circle of the statue. “Let’s go closer.”