Willis looked up at Madora, standing three feet above him in the open door. He saw the hammer in her hand and the chair against the opposite wall. As the scene came together in Willis’s mind, it did the same in Django’s. Madora had been trying to pull out the eye hook to free the girl who was standing up beside the bed now, the slack of the wire rope gripped between her hands. She was lifting it, banging it down hard on the trailer’s wooden floor. Banging and banging and screaming.
Willis shoved Django aside and leaped up the steps into the trailer. The girl kept swinging the wire rope and banging it on the trailer floor like a maniacal fourth grader playing jump rope. Willis grabbed Madora by her hair and wrenched her backwards onto the floor at the same moment the wire rope caught him across the shin. He yelled and released Madora as he fell, clutching his leg where the wire rope had hit it. He staggered toward the girl, his hair loose and wild about his face. She banged and snaked the rope between them, screaming obscenities as Willis tried to dodge it. He glimpsed the hammer Madora had dropped, and lunged for it at the same moment she did. Foo jumped from the ground into the trailer and dug his teeth into Willis’s ankle. Willis swung around, cursing, and drove his fist into the dog’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him, sending him tumbling out the door and onto the ground.
Madora screamed, “Foo!”
It happened so fast. Django saw her arm go up, and as Willis turned his head away from Foo and back to her, she slammed the hammer into the side of his head. Django watched Willis’s face. One moment he was raging, the next he was like a man who’d lost his glasses, squinting. He sobbed and fell over.
Nobody moved; nobody said anything. Foo jumped back into the trailer and lay down beside Madora and put his bull head on his paws, looking up at her.
Django returned to his senses before Madora and the girl. His thinking was like a man sending and receiving code at light speed and understanding it all, multiple messages simultaneously, making sense of it all in a way he never could on an ordinary day, under ordinary circumstances. He looked at the girl and the way the furniture was arranged in the trailer, the hook and the tether and the handcuffs, the hammer still in Madora’s hands. The plots of books and movies and countless television dramas sped through his mind. He recalled the stories he’d heard about abductions and kidnappings and young women held as captives in basements and closets and sheds. Good ideas and bad: he had no filter. In his mind he was the victims and the perps and the police at the same time, and he was seeing a pattern. His thoughts combined and recombined and fell into place.
“We’re getting out of here.”
He stepped up into the trailer and grabbed Madora’s shoulders. He shook her and she stared at him, not blinking as her head bobbled. If her eyeballs had started spinning, Django would not have been surprised. “Pay attention.”
“I killed him.”
“You didn’t; he’s breathing.”
Madora and Willis had been keeping the tethered girl prisoner. The evidence of a terrible crime was right in front of Django but he didn’t care. In contrast to his cool and distant aunt, Madora had been warmth to him, a lonely girl who wanted his company and thought he was funny, as his mother had. With Madora he could show off and talk about his old life, about his mom and dad and Huck and his friends at school. So what if she didn’t believe him; she listened anyway.
The girl begged him to release her but he tuned her out.
His thoughts were everywhere at once, remembering, seeing, anticipating, leapfrogging and slipping sideways, kaleidoscoping too fast for close attention, and in the process creating brand-new thoughts.
Madora had been Willis’s accomplice.
No. He would never believe that. It could not have been that simple.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. Half an idea, but the rest would come.
“He’s gonna die,” Madora wailed.
Django thought concussion but kept the word to himself. “No, but he’ll have a headache. That’s all.”
The girl on the bed started screaming again.
“Make her be quiet,” he told Madora. “I have to figure this out.”
But Madora was crying and helpless in her own way. She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around Foo.
By an act of will, Django shut out the noise and confusion and let his mind open like an old-fashioned blueprint unscrolling across a table. It was all there, the light-speed messages, the code, the media memories and news stories coming together and making sense like the plot of a Jett Jones adventure.
Chapter 25
Willis lay on his side with his head twisted at an awkward angle. In the fall he had driven his teeth into his lower lip, and blood had collected under his tongue and dribbled onto the trailer floor. Django held the back of his hand an inch from his mouth and felt a strong brush of air.
“I never meant to kill him.”
“I told you already. He’ll be okay. But we have to get out of here before he wakes up.”
“The police’ll catch us.” Madora covered her mouth. “I’ll go to jail.”
Django, now that he was thinking clearly, took a minute to look at the sepia stain of a bruise around Madora’s eye and cheekbone. He turned around and kicked Willis hard in the ribs because a man who would beat a woman was the lowest form of life in Django’s universe. He stood up straight, feeling tall for the first time in his life.
“I’m going to get you out of this. You won’t go to jail.”
He did not know what laws he was going to break, but he was pretty sure there were some. It was equally clear that whatever arrangement Madora and Willis had, when Django saw her on the chair with the hammer she wanted out of it. He would help her and in the process help himself; and if it all went south and he got arrested, Huck would help him. And Mr. Guerin. He was sick of being sad all the time and he did not want to think about death and the grave and car crashes anymore. He did not want to sit in Aunt Robin’s house and wait for his life to start again. He was ready to do something.
“Take that girl out to the Tahoe and put her in the backseat. And fix the seat belts so her hands can’t reach—”
“I know how,” Madora said.
Like the crows flying up, cawing a racket, and then finally coming to rest, silent and evenly spaced among the branches of the trees, his mind had settled too.
“What’s her name?”
“Linda.”
He stood over her. “Do you want to get out of here, Linda?” She stopped screaming. Her blank expression told him nothing. She was a zero unit. He leaned closer. Inches from her face he yelled, “Do you want to get out of here?”
Linda’s eyes and nose and mouth wrinkled together, and she burst into pitiful infantile crying that was almost worse than her screams. He looked over at Madora hunkered at the table now, her eyes as big around as fishbowls.
He was twelve years old but at that instant he was pretty sure he was the oldest person in the trailer. Except for Willis.
Jett Jones, Boy of the Future, versus the Dark Entity. He told Madora, “Use that dish towel to make a blindfold.”
Django thought he saw Willis’s fingers move.
“And hurry up.” There was definitely some twitching going on. “There’s gonna be a shit storm in about five minutes.”
He was nervous, but not afraid. And stronger than he had ever realized. He held Linda still while Madora tied the blindfold. She tried to raise her hands to pull it off, but they were still cuffed. She started screaming again. Not scared, just mad. The loop around her ankle was held together with a padlock.
“Do you know the combination, Madora?”
She shook her head.
“Shit.”
On the ground Willis groaned.
“Okay, here’s what I want.” He handed Madora the hammer. At first she shrank from taking it. Django pointed up at the eye hook on the wall. “Just get up there and finish what you were doing. Then loop the rope or whatever it is. She’ll have to carry it. Or y
ou can. We have to get her to the car.” He looked at Linda, wishing she were not blindfolded. If she saw his face she would know that he meant every word.
“Girl,” he said, “if you don’t cooperate, we’ll just leave you here with him.”
When Linda was in the car, Django ran back to the trailer. He left the lights and air-conditioning on. The generator would run until the fuel ran out. The cops would find Willis long before that. He nudged Willis’s foot with the toe of his Nike. His eyelids fluttered and he groaned. A bad concussion, Django thought, and for the first time he felt afraid of what he had gotten into. Willis needed a doctor and Django would make sure he got one. But he and Madora needed time first. Eventually Willis would regain his senses and remember seeing Django in the trailer and connect him to Aunt Robin. When that happened, Django wasn’t sure what would happen to him except that he would be in trouble. The biggest kind of trouble. For a second he thought about not following through with his full plan, but he knew that if he backed out now, he would always regret it. This was his opportunity and Madora’s too. He had to take it.
He dug in the pocket of Willis’s scrub pants and withdrew his wallet. He did not need money, which was lucky because the guy had only a couple of dollars. Django removed his identification. For a little while after the sheriff’s department found him, Willis would be a John Doe. He eased his hand into the shirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone. Cheapo, Django thought. A throwaway.
And just what he needed.
He left Willis where he lay, locking him in the trailer. Madora stood at the Tahoe’s passenger-side door, her arms wrapped around herself. The midafternoon sun poured down on her, but she looked like she was knee-deep in winter.
“You’re driving,” Django said.
Her eyes opened wide. “I can’t. My license isn’t good.”
“You have to do it. I don’t even know where the gears are.”
“But, Dja—”
“Don’t say my name!”
“We can’t just leave him.”
“He’s a bad man. Keep telling yourself.”
Django knew the word that described a man like Willis. He was a sociopath. He had kept Linda captive, handcuffed and tethered her and made Madora live alone at the end of a road going nowhere, using her as a servant and almost as much a prisoner as the girl in the trailer. But what had convinced Django that Willis was a bad man and put in motion the risks he was taking now was what he’d seen when Willis charged into the trailer: the raw terror on Madora’s battered face. She hadn’t been confused or panicked or angry when she hit Willis with the hammer. She feared for her life.
He held up Willis’s throwaway phone. “When we get out of the county, I’ll call the sheriff.” And then he would toss the phone, keeping his own to use in an emergency.
He would tell the police there was a girl named Linda cuffed and blindfolded behind Arroyo Elementary School and a man in a trailer at the end of a gravel road. He would give them no details, just enough to get them to the trailer eventually. Though Django had taken Willis’s driver’s license and car registration, the police would figure it all out eventually and be able to track the Tahoe. Django hoped all this would take long enough for him and Madora to get onto the crowded LA freeways.
But if something went wrong and the police caught them going north, he had his own phone, programmed with Mr. Guerin’s number. Home and office.
Madora persisted. “Where are we going?”
Django leaned in close and whispered. “To my brother. To Huck.”
Chapter 26
Robin’s father lived in unit number three of a single-story condominium complex called Oak Creek Haven: pale peach-colored stucco and a fake tile roof festooned with hoops of pink and red bougainvillea but no oaks or creeks that Robin could see. Nor did it seem like much of a haven, surrounded by four-and six-lane surface streets and big-box stores.
She sat in her car, staring at the traffic. In the cup holder next to her she could see her sister’s handwriting on the back of Mr. Guerin’s business card. Robin had programmed the address into her GPS and followed its directions, so precise and impersonal that they demanded obedience. She had driven to Temecula without thinking what she would do when she got there.
A double horse trailer paused at the corner and turned right on red. Robin could see a horse’s head looking out. It probably had no more idea why it was where it was at that moment than she fully understood why she was parked outside her father’s condo in Temecula.
Her last clear memory came from a time not long before he left home. It was cold in Morro Bay and a gusty wet wind chased the rag ends of a rainstorm across the sky, creating patterns of shadow and light across the lawn, where her father stood with his back to the house. Robin was in the living room, looking out the picture window. Behind her, Caro had spread the contents of her paper-doll box across the carpet in scenes: the prom, the vacation, the slumber party. Down the short hall connecting the front of the house and two bedrooms, their mother was cleaning the bathroom, filling the little house with the smell of ammonia.
“Can I go outside and help Daddy?” Robin yelled to her mother.
“It’s wet and cold and you’ve already got the sniffles.”
“But it stinks in here.”
“You heard me.”
Robin’s father was a slight and pale-skinned man who spent his weekdays under fluorescent lights at a desk in a bank in San Luis Obispo, his weekends in the garden. Sitting in the parking lot outside his condo, Robin remembered how narrow his back was as he stood beside the Eugenia bush that separated their house from the one next door. In her memory, the houses on both sides of Estero Street were similarly small and unremarkable, their facades and floor plans all the same.
All at once she saw her father’s back grow rigid, and she heard a sound, a scream loud enough to make Caro look up from her paper dolls.
“What was that?”
Robin did not answer; she was transfixed, watching him. His upper body torqued and his arm went back and up and she saw the hedge clippers leave his hands and go flying—blades over handles over blades—through the air and into the street, their sharp mouth open wide, as if they, and not her father, had screamed.
Two days later he left his family and Robin never saw him again.
She rested her forehead on the center of the steering wheel and counted backwards from one hundred. She reached zero and got out of the car. In the late afternoon, with a wall of rugged mountains blocking the ocean breeze, the air in Temecula was still and fumy and blazing hot. From somewhere on the other side of Oak Creek Haven she heard the plonk of a tennis ball and children’s voices making the kind of happy noise that meant a swimming pool in the summertime.
She had not called ahead to prepare her father. She wanted to see the look on his face when he opened the door, wanted to see if he recognized her immediately or if there was a moment—even a fraction of a moment—of confusion.
She entered the complex and followed a cement path between unimaginatively landscaped borders of succulents and salvia and more bougainvillea. Unit three had a tiny walled patio in front and a door with a decorative cage around the peephole. A pagoda-shaped hummingbird feeder hanging from the eaves swung slightly as an iridescent bird whirred away, startled by her appearance. Moisture pimpled at the back of Robin’s neck. She rang the bell and then exhaled.
No going back.
The man who answered the door was even smaller than she remembered, maybe five feet eight on a confident day. What remained of his hair was still dark brown, cut militarily short. Behind a pair of glasses with shiny metallic rims, his eyes widened.
“Well,” he said. “Well.”
“You recognize me.” Embarrassed, she laughed. Of course he did. He was her father.
He opened the door wider, and she felt a breath of cool air and smelled spices as she stepped inside.
“You’re cooking chili,” she said and laughed again. Chagrined, self-conscious: these
feelings should have been his. He was the one who had done the leaving; he was the one with something to be embarrassed about. “I remember your chili.”
But until that second, she had not.
“I didn’t like it,” she said, recalling that she and Caro had once fed theirs to the neighbor’s dog. “You seasoned it with vinegar.”
He nodded as if she had said something wise.
“You’re like your mother. Pretty.”
A splash of light flashed through a window and stung Robin’s eyes.
The condominium was nicer than she had anticipated, spacious and full of light, furnished with a few simple pieces. Off the kitchen, a set of French doors opened onto what Robin saw was a second and larger patio. Above the table, a ceiling fan paddled lazily.
Frank Howard went into the kitchen, an area divided from the living room by a granite-topped bar and pony wall, and took a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator. Without asking if she wanted any, he poured a tall glassful over a pile of ice cubes and a sprig of fresh mint.
“Sugar?”
“I don’t like iced tea.”
“Pomegranate sun tea.” He put a teaspoon of sugar in the glass and stirred it. “Refreshing.”
“I won’t like it.”
He smiled. “You’re more like your mom than just your looks.”
This was a dig, and to prove him wrong, Robin sipped the iced tea. She did like it and managed a smile.
“I have something to tell you. Maybe you know already. It was in all the papers—”
His cheeks and jaw seemed to lose tone, adding years to his face. “I read it in USA Today.”
“You shouldn’t have found out that way.”
“Death is death. No matter how you hear about it, it’s never easy. There was a picture of Jacky in the entertainment section. With Keith Richards.” His face brightened. “He knew them all, didn’t he, Robin? It was like Caro married into rock-and-roll royalty.”
“Did you go to the funeral?” At the time she had been too stunned and confused to stand still for obits and homilies. “Apparently it was quite a show.”
Little Girl Gone Page 18