The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “Oh, yes,” she said brightly. “They were those old blue willow plates the diners all used to have. Weren’t too popular by then, though. Most places had started using that pale green Melmac. Lorene probably got those plates for a song.”

  “She probably did,” I agreed, giving her hand a squeeze before I headed out the door. “Reed, I think you’ve just saved the life of a woman vice presidential candidate. Have your grandson bring those clippings to you and get ready for a lot of company. You’re going to be famous.”

  “Then I’d probably better do something with my hair,” she said, grinning as Brontë and I dashed out.

  In the parking lot I called Rathbone at the hospital.

  “It’s Eldridge!” I yelled. “Tell the FBI to forget Jeffrey Pond and find Thomas Joseph Eldridge. I don’t know where he is, but his wife said—”

  The phone was making a crackling noise.

  “Hello?” Wes Rathbone said again. “I can’t hear you.”

  The battery, I realized, was dead.

  26

  Edom Revisited

  I found a pay phone next to Ralph’s Grocery in the shopping center across the street from the Sagebrush Resort.

  “Wes, my cell phone is dead,” I said after phoning the hospital, depositing ninety cents, and waiting for the hospital switchboard to contact the nurses’ station on Grecchi’s floor and then for somebody to go get Rathbone from the surgical waiting area. In a half a day I’d learned exactly why people love cell phones.

  “You have to recharge the battery,” he mentioned before telling me the latest. “Listen. Pond’s flown the coop. He never showed up at Megan’s place in Julian. We think he’s—”

  “Wes, it’s not Pond, it’s Eldridge!” I broke in. “Let me tell you what I just found out. See, Eldridge lived up in Anza for about two years when he was a kid around nine or ten. He was with his mother, Lorene, who called herself Smith but her real surname was Eldridge. She’d tried to kill her husband in Riverside and was on the run. She dressed T.J. as a girl, Wes, so if the husband or the police came around asking about a woman and a little boy, everybody would say they hadn’t seen a woman and a boy. But then the police and the husband caught up with them, and Lorene died in prison. T.J. went with the father, who was some kind of Bible-thumping survivalist, lived in the wild up there for years until—”

  “Blue, we’re sure it’s Pond,” Rathbone interrupted. “He fits the profile better than anyone else, he worked as a technician in a psychiatric hospital during a time when MAOIs were still widely in use, so he had experience with the drug and knew what it could do. He has motivation, and he ducked out of his father’s hospital room the minute his mother left and just vanished. The FBI went through his place and found several small containers of an unusual pink plastic substance they think may be symbolic trophies for his kills. The stuff is like a soft, stretchy glob. The theory is these things represent wombs to him. They’re all covered with his fingerprints. Looks like he sits around squashing them in his hands. Sick, huh?”

  I felt as if I were in Sri Lanka trying to define “Missouri” in English to a peasant. That certainty that you’re not going to be heard.

  “That stuff is Silly Putty!” I told Rathbone. “He’s into bodybuilding and he squeezes wads of it to build the muscles in his forearms. Wes, the killer is not Jeffrey Pond. It’s T. J. Eldridge. He was a medical corpsman in the service. He could have learned about MAOIs there or from Grecchi. But get this—he and his mother ran a diner up in Anza. Just a little place, mostly hikers and locals coming through, and they used blue willow plates!”

  “Blue, every diner in the country used blue willow plates at one time. And Pond’s mother has a kitchen clock made out of a blue willow plate. She told the FBI her husband made it for her years ago from the last of a set that had belonged to hermother. Those damn plates are everywhere. Hell, I think Annie has a blue willow cup and saucer her sister got her in Singapore.”

  “Wes, Thomas Eldridge’s father was some kind of religious fanatic who raised him alone up in the mountains after Lorene was arrested. The father kidnapped a female student from a college anthropology campout to be used by T.J. as a ‘wife.’ The father was going to rape the girl to ‘break her in’ for a fourteen-year-old boy, but T.J. had untied her hands and left the father’s old bolt-action rifle near her. She shot and killed T.J.’s father. Apparently the story was in papers all over the country thirty years ago. The woman who told me still has clippings. I mean, this can be proved.”

  “Okay,” he said, “if Pond turns up clean, then it’s Eldridge. I’ll put the word out, put this story out about Eldridge. Blue, are you sure this really happened, the father kidnapping the girl and the shooting? Who’s your informant? Where’d you hear this?”

  “A woman from Anza named Reed McCallister. She lives in a retirement center in Carlsbad now. The Sagebrush Resort.”

  “And how old is this McCallister?”

  “I don’t know, Wes, late eighties. But she was there.”

  “Late eighties. Great,” he said. “Blue, go to Roxie’s. I’ll call you there as soon as we get a statement from Grecchi. If she didn’t cut her own wrist, if Pond or Eldridge did it, she’ll tell us. There really isn’t anything else to do right now. Just relax.”

  The phone felt hot and slick in my hand as I hung it up. I was sweating, I realized. Because nobody was listening to me. I hate it when people don’t listen, when they don’t hear. It reminds me of the twelve thousand times I tried to tell my twin brother crime doesn’t pay. Probably he hears that in prison now, too.

  Next I called Roxie, who didn’t want to talk.

  “Blue, the authorities are handling things now,” she said. “Our part is over. And I meant it when I said I need some time alone to think.”

  So I didn’t tell her about Reed McCallister and the story of Thomas Eldridge. I just hung up and noticed darkness falling indifferently around me. The feeling was strange. I imagined it was like what the first tiny sliver of consciousness must have been for the first protohuman who experienced it. Long-armed and heavy-browed, she would have thought, I am, for only a split second and then, seeing no answering spark in the black, simian eyes of her companions, known that she was alone.

  In the phone booth I curled my fingers, apelike, over the palm of my hand and thumped my breastbone. This was what it would be like, then, I realized. This was what it would be like not telling my life to Roxie Bouchie. A primordial loneliness so intense it rocked me back on my heels for a second, made me gasp. But it didn’t really change anything. I still knew. And I had things to do.

  I went in the grocery and got some chocolate milk and enough tuna-vegetable medley from the salad bar for both me and Brontë. After we’d eaten in the truck I drove by the Eldridge house, which was dark and silent at five-thirty as neighbors came home from work, their automatic garage doors whirring in the dusk. I let the truck idle in the driveway for a few minutes, then killed the engine, got out, and knocked on the door. There was no one there and no sense that anyone would ever be there again. The posing couple BB and I had seen on these steps was gone. They wouldn’t be back, ever.

  Through partially open picture window blinds I could see the pink and green couch, the pale rectangles of paint where photographs of Kara Eldridge had once hung over a fireplace. Photographs of Kara cooking, caring for children, wearing a corsage. Behaviors acceptable for a woman. Except the little boy Zeke had said daddy threw a sandwich and broke one of the pictures. What had happened? I wondered. What had shattered that glass and a statue’s oblivion, and released the woman imprisoned within? And where was Kara now, and where was Thomas, who had spent two happy years as a girl thirty years in the past and now was killing women in the name of his father? The Sword of Heaven.

  I didn’t know what to make of Kara Eldridge. Had she known what her husband was? Had she even suspected that the man beside her in bed had changed from whatever he’d been when she married him and become monstrous? When did
he change? And why? And if Kara knew, when did she learn? And if she knew, why didn’t she tell somebody?

  “Because nobody would have believed her,” I said aloud in the warm, dry gloom of an October evening in Southern California. The farthest edge of the continent. From where there’s no place left to run.

  Nobody believed me, either.

  From Carlsbad it was easy to take a connecting county road to I-15 and head up into the mountains that way. It was dark by the time I reached the village of Julian and the Rainer/Nugent house on the side of a hill. No lights were on, and the tattered structure looked forbidding in the gathering shadows. Remembering the Boston terrier, Elsa, I left Brontë in the truck as I approached the door. When something hit me in the chest with a painful sting, I thought it was a bat, although bats’ radar prevents their running into anything and I knew it. My knit blouse was wet where the thing hit me.

  “Don’t take another step!” Chris Nugent’s voice boomed from the porch.

  “Chris, it’s Blue McCarron,” I yelled. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, Dr. McCarron, I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice answered as the porch light was turned on and I could see Chris and Megan standing there, Megan holding what looked like an assault rifle in firing position. The damn paint gun. The fluid soaking my blouse was red.

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “Where are the sheriff’s deputies and the FBI?”

  “They were here, but he showed up and they went after him,” Megan said. “Except I was afraid he’d doubled back. I mean, I thought you—”

  “Turn that light off,” I said. “Who showed up? What happened?”

  “It was Pond,” Chris Nugent said.

  “I shot him,” Megan Rainer added. “Or at least I think I did. The deputy said it will help them identify him if he’s gone into Julian and he’s covered with red paint.”

  “You shot Jeffrey Pond with a paint gun?” I said, incredulous. “Did you see him? Are you sure it was Pond?”

  “No, but everybody said it was,” Nugent answered. “We were watching from a window upstairs, saw somebody come out of the woods on the side of the house. Too shadowy to see him clearly. Megan had brought the paint gun upstairs and was ready,” he said proudly, wrapping a big arm over his wife’s shoulders.

  “I don’t believe this,” I said again. “Where are the children?”

  “They’re inside,” Megan answered. “We were about to leave, take the kids and stay in a hotel down the hill, when this happened.”

  I felt momentarily useful as I ran back to the truck and got the Smith and Wesson.

  “This is a real gun,” I told them when I’d joined them on the porch. “I want you to tape a large note to the door telling the authorities that you’ve taken the children to a safe place and will contact Wes Rathbone with the location and phone number of that place when you get there. Do it now. I’ll cover you as you get the children into your car. Everyone but the driver should lie on the floor until you’re out of this area. I don’t believe you shot a serial killer with a paint gun!”

  “Mom was really cool,” Joshua Nugent yelled from behind the screen door. “Can we take Elsa? We have to take Elsa.”

  “Absolutely,” I answered.

  The family of four and a Boston terrier dashed to their car as I ran beside them, aiming the little .38 at every shadow moving at the edge of the woods surrounding the house.

  “Did the man you shot have a gun?” I yelled as Chris gunned the engine.

  “I think so,” he answered. “He was carrying something that could have been a rifle.”

  “It was T. J. Eldridge,” I said, but they were too far away to hear me. And the shadows were suddenly too dense. Time to go. But go where?

  I couldn’t go home. The place was crawling with armed people waiting to capture or kill another armed person. I would only be in the way. Roxie’s place was out of the question. I wasn’t really wanted there, and so even though Rox would welcome me if she knew what was going on, I’d freeze to death standing on a drifting ice floe before I’d go anywhere near her, not that there are a lot of drifting ice floes in the mountains above San Diego. The First Law of the Heartland involves a cast iron and often disastrous pride. Probably handed down from Scots-Irish ancestors, it’s ludicrous, but if it’s in your head you have to obey it. And it’s definitely in my head. I’d go to a motel, then, I decided. A big one off the freeway where I could sneak Brontë in a side door after I’d registered. But first I had to do one more thing. I had to prove I wasn’t a fool, if only to myself.

  It was dark by the time I slowed to drive through Anza’s little main drag. Colored pools of neon light spilled across the pavement from the diner, the gas station, and the convenience store. A few people were about, but Anza was as peaceful and quiet as its chamber of commerce promised. Nothing much ever happened in Anza, I thought, unless you knew where to look.

  There was a late-model car parked a quarter of a mile up the road, but the old line shack seemed deserted when I stopped the truck outside and let Brontë run for a while in moon shadows. The air had the musky smell of the desert verbena growing in patches on the ground around the shack, and I assumed Brontë was responsible. She’d bruised the leaves with her paws while dashing around, causing the release of scent. A lot of people don’t like the resinous odor of desert verbena, which is like a mixture of sweet milk and tobacco, claiming something about the scent makes them nervous. The verbena seemed to be making Brontë nervous, because she kept sniffing the ground and running in circles, her growl a soft murmur. Maybe a rabbit had just scuttled past, I thought. Or her favorite lizard, the reclusive chuckwalla that blows up one side of its body in order to flatten the other side into a crevice. My last guess, as it turned out, was close enough.

  “Come on, girl,” I called after she’d run around for ten minutes or so. “Up in the truck. There’s broken glass on the floor in there and I don’t want you stepping on it. You wait here. Brontë, stay.”

  The .38 was lying on my sweatshirt on the floor of the truck cab, and I stuffed it in the waist of my jeans before pulling the sweatshirt and tennis shoes on. Then I grabbed the penlight I keep in the glove compartment. It would provide enough light to see what I wanted to see.

  The corrugated steel panel left smears of rust on my hands as I moved it away from the door, stepped inside, and clicked on the penlight. The torn magazine pages were still there, taped to the walls like pictures in a gallery. In the stillness I walked to my left, aiming the narrow beam of light on the images one by one. The two owls I’d seen before, torn from a child’s nature magazine called Ranger Rick. A pen-and-ink drawing of a dragon with the log line from a Goth magazine popular with teenagers who wear black. Pictures of corpses stacked in a woods outside Dachau in 1943. A stunning illustration from an edition of Sleeping Beauty depicting a murderous wall of thorns in which were imprisoned the skeletons of the princes who’d tried to rescue the sleeping princess and failed. A unicorn from a medieval tapestry, more owls, a heron, the raven illustration from a book of Poe. A photograph of a steaming, sulfurous creek from a travel promo for New Zealand, the water inked in black. Another dragon. I knew what I was looking at. I was looking at a vanished biblical nation called Edom.

  “‘And it shall be an habitation for dragons …’” I whispered, quoting from my old King James Bible.

  “‘… And a court for owls,’” another voice answered as frost raced in sudden sheets down my neck and arms and back.

  Oh, shit!

  Instinct wrapped my right hand around the grip of the snub-nose at my waist and I felt my thumb push the safety off as I turned toward the voice, gun in firing position. He was hunched behind the old counter at the far end of the structure. In the gloom I could see concave half circles behind his head where round rocks had fallen from a fireplace chimney. I could also see that he held a bolt-action rifle in both hands, braced on the counter and aimed at me. The counter protected most of his body. Nothing protected mine.
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  “Drop the gun,” he said evenly. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “If that rifle is your father’s, it’s so old it may not fire,” I answered, fighting to keep the panic out of my voice. “I’ll take my chances.”

  My right hand was hot and sweating around the gun’s grip, but it wasn’t shaking.

  “My father’s rifle was taken as evidence by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department at the time of his death over a quarter century ago and was never returned,” Thomas Eldridge told me, a note of approval in his voice. “The weapon in my hands is similar but new. Drop your pistol or you’ll force me to kill you.”

  The logic was unassailable. And nobody would hear the shots. I dropped the .38, which clattered on the cement floor.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “I’ll tie you up, then ease your truck over the lip of Nance Canyon back there. Nobody will find it until tomorrow, and I’ll be gone by then. I’ll be in San Diego at a pep rally for a woman who thinks she’s a man. I’ve already told them. There’s no secret about where I’ll be tomorrow. I’m going to kill her.”

  He wasn’t raving, wasn’t wild-eyed, or even agitated. If anything, he seemed tired. A sense of exhaustion was audible in his voice, the set of his shoulders. Coming out from behind the counter, he kept the rifle trained on me until he reached my gun, then leaned over and picked it up without taking his eyes from me.

  “Do you understand why I’ve had to do this?” he asked, holding me in the sights of my own gun now and stashing the rifle under the counter. He was wearing jeans, a green polo shirt, and a dark nylon windbreaker, which he was carefully removing. And he was splattered with red from head to toe. I could see the glint of moonlight on the military watch at his wrist. We might have been chatting somewhere. Casual acquaintances at a chance meeting just before which one of us happened to have lost a companion to a grisly accident involving a land mine. The red paint made him look like a ghoul.