The Mural

by Michael Mallory

  The message ended with the recorded sound of a phone hanging up. There were three more messages from Yolanda, who Elley vaguely recalled meeting at one of Jack’s office functions, the last one coming in at 6:30. She probably continued to call Jack’s cell phone, too, but wherever Jack was, he was not answering.

  She slammed her fist down on the portable bar so hard that the bottles underneath rattled. Should she call the police? No, there wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. He hadn’t been gone long enough to be counted a missing person, and Blaise was right about pressing the kidnapping charge: it wouldn’t stick.

  Elley yawned heavily and scratched her head. She should at least make one last attempt to find him. It probably would not work, but she knew she should cover all the bases, just in case—

  Say it, goddammit; just in case this ends up in court.

  Fighting off an unexpected sense of sadness, she picked up the phone and dialed his cell. It rang three times and almost to Elley’s surprise, Jack answered it.

  He spoke only one word. It was not hello, or “This is Jack,” or “Yeah,” or any acceptable greeting. It was not a greeting at all, in fact.

  “Dani?” her husband’s voice said.

  Elley stood there unable to reply. Dani, short for Danica. In spite of herself, a tear formed in the corner of her eye and journeyed down her cheek. She hung the phone up, her exhaustion instantly transubstantiated into cold numbness.

  Elley Hayden made it all the way to the couch before her legs gave out, and she sunk down in a heap, cradling her head in her hands. He was not on a bender. He was not insane. He had not taken Robynn out of nuttiness.

  He was leaving her.

  She was not blameless, of course. Hell, the way her mother would look at it, she bore most of the blame, if not all. But she had not really expected that her professionally-oriented affair with Blaise would have resulted in this. She genuinely did not believe it would affect their marriage one way or the other, but clearly she was wrong. And while she believed that she was not wrong often, it had been proven more than once that on those rare occasions when she was wrong, she was not simply wrong, but WRONG!

  “Fuck,” she muttered, hearing the name Dani over and over again. It was not simply the name but the hungry desire she had detected in Jack’s voice as he said it. He had wanted it to be that woman who had called him last night, wanted it desperately. It was all in his voice, how much he had wanted it to be her.

  Elley felt a sharp, cold ache in her chest. She had right-halved the concept of splitting up with Jack for the last year, thinking about it, and even talking about it with a Janice from work over a Chardonnay lunch. It had seemed so casual then, such an abstract, no big deal. But now that it actually appeared to be possible, she did not know what to feel.

  She went to Jack’s bar and dug out a bottle of Chivas and some flat mixer from the tiny fridge underneath and made herself a piss-poor whisky sour, which did nothing to fill the cold emptiness inside her. Where in hell are you, Jack? Where in hell is Robynn? He had to be somewhere around her, this Danica woman. He must be back up the coast to that site he had been dispatched to last week. But where was it? She had not paid that much attention to him when he mentioned the name of the place.

  She was about to pour herself another one when she remembered his receipt basket on his nightstand in the bedroom. Whenever he had an expense, out of town or otherwise, he would habitually drop the receipt in that basket and then at some point in the future—usually when it was near overflowing and she nagged him into it—he would tally them up and submit them for reimbursement. Jack had no sense of money; none. If it had not been for her, he probably would be standing out on an off ramp now with a cardboard sign that read: Will inspect your basement for food. Wouldn’t it be just like him, though, if this is the one time he actually submitted his receipts in a timely fashion?

  She headed up to the bedroom and switched on the light. Was it her imagination, or was it colder in this room than anywhere else in the house? Glancing over at Jack’s nightstand, she saw that his basket was still full. Good. She took it and spread the contents out on the bed, looking for any from the last week.

  There it was, right on top: The Tide Pool Inn in San Simeon, a bill for $197, complete with address and phone number.

  The phone in the bedroom was on her side, so she sprawled herself over the bed to reach it, dialed in the number of the Inn, and waited for the youthful, but bored-sounding voice to answer: “Thank you for calling the Tide Pool Inn, how may I help you?”

  “Hi, has Jack Hayden checked in yet?” Elley asked.

  “How do you spell the last name?”

  Elley spelled, and the receptionist confirmed that Jack was there. “Would you like me to connect you to his room?”

  “No, thanks,” Elley replied, “but do you know if he has a child with him, a little girl?”

  “Oh yes, I remember them when they came in. The girl is staying with him in his room, and the woman has a separate room.”

  “The woman?”

  “Yes, I figured it was the girl’s grandmother.”

  “Her grandmother?” How the hell old was this Danica Lindstrom?

  “Ma’am, can you hold on for a moment?”

  “No, actually I can’t, thank you for your information.” Elley hung up.

  At once an explanation cut through the confusion. What if the woman he was with was not Dani at all, but Jack’s mother? She lived in Reno, which was close to the California border. What if Jack had contacted Rebecca Hayden, with whom Elley had an edgy relationship at best, and was arranging to meet up with her so that the two could best decide how Jack could abandon her and take Robynn with him? Christ, have I really been that bad of a mother? she wondered.

  Of course she hadn’t. She was the provider.

  Elley raced out of the bedroom and back downstairs to the small desk they kept in the den that was the official telephone location for the house. It was there that they kept a rolodex with family addresses and numbers. Elley quickly flipped through until she found Rebecca Hayden, followed by a number. The last she had heard, Rebecca was on death’s doorstep, but she had been at death’s door since the first time Elley had met her, and she no longer bought it. Rebecca would probably outlive her. She dialed the number and held her breath through three rings. Four rings. Five rings.

  At seven rings the line picked up. “What is it?” the woman’s voice answered. It sounded like Jack’s mother, but Elley had so little contact with her that she could not be certain. Lowering her own voice she said, “Nadine?”

  “Who?”

  “Is this Nadine?”

  “No, this is Rebecca, there’s nobody here named Nadine, and it’s two in the morning.”

  “Sorry.” She hung up.

  So it was not Jack’s mother who was with him. Elley did not even need to bother checking her own mother, who tried not to admit that she had a grandchild out of fear that people would think of her as old.

  Whatever was going on, she was going to have to check it out for herself, and get her daughter back in the process. And maybe Jack, if he was sane enough to bother with.

  Since she was still packed from the abortive New York trip, part of her wanted to get back in the car and head up to San Simeon right then and there. But she knew she couldn’t. Now that she knew where Jack and Robynn were, and that they were safe, her mind was calming down enough to let the exhaustion back in. She had to get some sleep, even if only a couple of hours’ worth. Then she’d head on up for the Tide Fucking Pool Fucking Inn at San Fucking Simeon.

  She only hoped her husband and whoever he was shagging were prepared for what was going to happen when she got there.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rob Creeley was unusually tired the next morning. He had drifted in and out of sleep for most of the night, trying to solve the puzzle inspired by that book he had perused during the night. By sunrise, it was still a puzzle. Creeley hoped he would have an easy day ahead
so he could take some time to do a little more research on a subject that he thought he already knew well: the history of Glenowen.

  “What’s up, Carl?” Creeley asked his officer upon walking into the tiny police station. “Nothing big, I hope.”

  “Big, no,” Carl Dorgan replied, “but unusual.”

  “Swell. Let me get some coffee then fill me in.”

  Despite Dorgan’s age and greater experience, there was no friction over Creeley’s being Chief. When the Glenowen Chamber of Commerce had stumped for incorporating the city and had actually managed to get it chartered four years back, part of the deal was the establishment of its own police department, created largely in response to some vandalism that had occurred in the town’s historic cemetery. Creeley figured it was being done by bored kids who had seen too many horror movies, and was no real threat to anyone, but if that was what it took for the creation of his job, then that was fine with him. Even though he had been an MP during his stint in the military, Creeley knew his qualifications to run the department weighed more heavily on the fact that he was a native son who knew the village and its people. For the rest there were extension courses at the university and the experience of Carl Dorgan, who had been lured over to Glenowen after being a San Luis Obispo Sheriff’s deputy for twenty-five years. But Dorgan had no desire to be in charge of things. He hated both paperwork and responsibility other than enforcing the law and protecting the citizenry. He was a good man and he had seen an awful lot in his half-century-plus, so if Deputy Carl Dorgan (whose old sheriff’s department title Creeley continued to use as a measure of respect) said something was unusual, you could believe it.

  Creeley poured out a cup of coffee from the stained Mr. Coffee in the corner and sat down at his desk. “Okay, Carl, let’s have it.”

  “There’s a woman in the back,” Dorgan said.

  “In the cell?”

  “There was nowhere else to put her. She appeared to be distressed and confused, and seemed to need a place to lie down. I made it as comfortable as I could for her.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her ID says she’s Danica Lindstrom,” Dorgan answered. “Lives in San Diego.”

  “What was she brought in for?”

  “She was reported driving erratically on the highway. Maybe booze or drugs, I don’t know. A couple of motorists saw her and thought she might need help, so they called 911 and I ended up with the call”

  “You check with the CHP first?” Creeley asked.

  Dorgan nodded. “They said she was close enough to town that I should deal with her.”

  “Wasn’t that nice of them? I guess I’d better talk to her.”

  “I think she’s still out,” Dorgan said. “It’s been quiet anyway.”

  “Did she say anything when you picked her up?”

  “Nothing coherent. She was kind of moaning like she was frightened or in pain. The only word she said sounded foreign. She kept repeating it over and over again, something like jacadin.”

  “Jacadin?”

  “That’s what it sounded like. Might be French. Maybe it’s a perfume, or something. Her car’s still out on the highway, ’bout a mile down, but I brought the keys with me. What do you want to do with it?”

  Creeley didn’t reply. Instead he repeated the word a couple times to himself. Then he got it.

  “Chief?” Dorgan tried again. “What about her car? Can’t just leave it on the roadside.”

  “Hmm? Sorry, I was thinking. Tell you what, Carl, you just get Jessie to take you out there and then you drive it back.” Jessie Lawler was the town’s reserve officer.

  “Not exactly regulation.”

  “We’ll bend the regulations for a good cause, okay?”

  Dorgan shrugged, and then got on the phone and called Lawler, who agreed to meet him in front of the station in ten minutes, then went outside to wait, which was fine with Creeley. “Jackadin,” he muttered. It was not a brand of perfume, and it was not French. It was English. It was a name.

  Creeley rummaged through the papers on his desk until he found the slip he was looking for, the one with the cell number of Jack Hayden. Then he went stepped back toward the small, hardly-ever-used lock-up. Carl was right; she was asleep, stretched out on a hard bunk. Attractive, too, from what he could see through the bars, tanned and fit, though he was surprised she didn’t do something with that hair. You would think that someone with a face and body like hers would at least try to make a friend of Miss Clairol. When the time came, Maria sure as hell would. But it did not seem to bother the mysterious Danica Lindstrom, so what the hell. If she wanted to have the whitest hair Creeley had ever seen on anyone under eighty, that was her business.

  * * * * * * *

  When Jack awakened that morning he found Robynn curled up in bed with him. It was not unusual for her to walk from her bedroom to his and Elley’s at home in the middle of the night, ostensibly because she was cold in her own bed, though occasionally she confessed to having had a bad dream. Jack spent the night dreamlessly, which he appreciated. He was having enough strange nightmares during waking hours, and he did not need any more of them during the night to deprive him of sleep. Someone, though, had called his cell phone at some ungodly hour of the morning, and he groped around in the dark until he found it, hoping it was Dani. But whoever it had been simply hung up, leaving him to fall back asleep. Maybe it was the sound of the ringing cell phone that had awakened Robynn and sent her over to his side of the room.

  The digital clock on the nightstand said it was after nine o’clock. This was the latest he had slept in a long, long time. He crawled out of bed, careful not to awaken Robynn, and grateful for the opportunity to jump in the shower without hindrance or distraction. He showered, shaved and dressed as quickly as he could, while forcing himself to ignore the covered-up picture on the wall, and then went back out into the room.

  Robynn was not even stirring. Cradling Oyster Cracker against her, she breathed deeply and rhythmically. Jack could not help but smile.

  Jack desperately wanted to sneak out to the lobby and a get a cup of coffee and a roll, or whatever they had to offer by way of a continental breakfast, but he was hesitant to risk having Robynn wake up in an empty room. Still, she seemed down so deeply. This was usually the time she was at school, but clearly she needed her sleep. She had had a pretty active day yesterday. Surely he could dash out and be back before she stirred awake. How long could it possibly take to run out and grab a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a stale donut?

  Just to be safe, he turned on the room’s television, muted the sound, and flipped until he found the local PBS station. Sesame Street was on, which was good. Then he took a sheet of motel stationery and wrote in very large, block letters: PUNKIN, I’M RIGHT OUTSIDE. DADDY. She was an early reader and he knew she would be able to get the gist of it. Then he drew a couple of hearts on the paper, folded it, and stood it tented on top of the TV. Then as quietly as he could, he opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  Jack stopped at the front desk and asked yet again if Dani had come in. “Do you want me to try the room, sir?” asked the clerk, now a managerial-looking woman.

  “No, that’s okay,” Jack said. “I’ll sneak up there in a bit and see for myself.”

  “I’ll just bet you will,” said a voice behind him. It was a voice he recognized, but could not believe he actually heard. It had to be his imagination, just like hallucinating the damned Western bar and the strange illusions in the picture.

  Slowly Jack turned around. If this was a hallucination, it was a damned good one, for standing right in front of him was Elley.

  Jack Hayden was rendered speechless.

  “Maybe we should both go up together and knock on her door,” she said, her eyes turning to hard, red agate. “Where is she, anyway?”

  Jack’s cell phone rang and he shut it off. He didn’t need the distraction right now. He was still attempting to think of something to say to his wife. All he could muster was:
“Asleep in the room.”

  “Alone?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?”

  “I flew back when I found out you’d snatched Robynn and run away. I’ve been on the road since four this morning, I’m tired, and I’m not in a good mood.”

  “Look, Elley—”

  “Jack, I swear to Christ, if you say, ‘I can explain everything,’ I’ll tear your balls off right here and now!” The woman behind the counter considered hiding under the desk for cover.

  “Don’t worry. There’s not much of this I can explain. Robynn’s down this way.”

  Jack led her to the room and opened the door quietly. Robynn was still blissfully asleep on the bed. Elley hovered over her for a moment, uncertain as to what to do. Finally she decided to let her sleep. “Just what the hell’s going on, Jack?” she asked softly.

  “I wish I knew. Come into the bathroom, I don’t want to risk waking her.”

  The two stepped into the motel bathroom and shut the door. Jack turned on the overhead fan in hopes of covering the sounds of what he feared would turn into a screaming match. “I’m not going to give you a bunch of bullshit excuses for my behavior, okay? It’s true that I’ve met someone.”

  “Thank you for not insulting my intelligence,” Elley said. “Though I would like to know why you picked someone old enough to be your mother.”

  “My mother? Are you talking about Althea Kinchloe?”

  “I’m talking about this Dani bitch.”

  A wave of latent defensive anger suddenly rushed up to the surface and nearly overwhelmed Jack. “You want to bust my chops over Dani? Fine. But first you look me in the eye and tell me you aren’t screwing Blaise Micelli.”

  Elley stared him in the eye, and then blinked. “That’s over.”