by Jan Burke
She nodded her understanding.
I started to worry that somehow the shooter would find some way to catch up with us. The woman was still armed, after all, and dressed as a police officer. Maybe she’d carjack a vehicle from someone, or use some shortcut I didn’t know about.
I reached into the glove compartment and found a first-aid kit. It contained a cheap pair of round-end scissors.
“I’m going to cut your hands free first so you can work on the rest,” I said to Carrie. “I want to try to get us farther away from that woman.”
She nodded enthusiastically.
I cut the tape between her wrists and left the scissors where she could reach them.
Unless you’re wearing goggles or a helmet with a face shield, driving without a windshield is not the freeing experience you might expect it to be. All kinds of grit, grime, and insect life came blowing up off the road. I made another stop and searched for my sunglasses.
By then Carrie had shaken the circulation back into her hands, cut the tape from her ankles, and bravely ripped it free from her face.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” I asked, handing her the blanket so that she could use it to shield her face and eyes from debris.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, cautiously touching the tips of her fingers to the marks left on her face by the tape. “I’m just kind of scared.”
“Something would be seriously wrong with you if you weren’t. I’m sorry about the rough ride. But I think we’ve lost them, whoever they were.”
“My uncle Giles,” she said angrily.
“What?”
“Uncle Giles,” she said, pulling her feet up onto the edge of the seat and rubbing her ankles. “He runs the school. Fletcher Academy.”
I tried to let that sink in as we turned onto what looked like a promising road.
“On the phone, he was talking to someone named Cleo,” I said. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
“No.”
“A woman. Tall, athletic, short brown hair. Probably in her late twenties. At first I thought she was a man.”
“A woman who looked like a man?” She thought for a while, then said, “I have a lot of cousins, and I haven’t met all of them, but I can’t think of anyone who looks like that.”
If you asked me to retrace the route I took from there, it would require hypnosis to pull the memories out. I really didn’t have a clear idea of where the hell I was at any given moment, or where I was going. An aerial view of my progress would have made me look like the mouse voted least likely to find the cheese.
Eventually I ended up on Pearblossom Highway. We attracted a certain amount of attention, which I hoped would lead to some cell phone calls to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, but I kept driving until I found a minimart gas station that was fairly busy.
We were both dirty and dehydrated, and I suppose our hair made it look as if we had tunneled out of a fright-wig factory. I found my wallet and went inside with Carrie. She took hold of my hand, which was fine with me — I wasn’t exactly feeling all that steady myself. I asked the clerk to please call the sheriff’s department, because someone had shot at us and blown out our windshield. He peered out at the van, then made the call. He was solicitous after that, allowing us to use the restroom to wash up a bit, not charging us for the bottled water we wanted to buy, and even letting me use the phone. A cynic might say that it was only about five bucks’ worth of kindness, but to us, after about three hours of terror, it seemed as if we had found the most generous soul on earth.
Frank, as it turned out, had been looking for me by the time I called.
“We were supposed to have lunch, remember? Then Lydia said you had hurried out, and I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone….”
“Sorry, but a dead man’s got it now. I was abducted. With Blake Ives’s daughter. We’re okay now, though. I think.”
I should have broken it to him differently, but I wasn’t thinking all that clearly by then. Now that I was out of the way of immediate harm, reaction was setting in.
I interrupted his own quite understandable reaction and said, “I’m borrowing someone’s phone, so I can’t talk long. Can you come out to the sheriff’s station in Palmdale — maybe see if you can get Zeke Brennan to come along with you? I’m not in as much trouble as I was in an hour ago, but I think I’ll need an attorney. And I…” I took a deep breath, struggled to stay calm. I tried to give him a condensed version of my day so far. He interrupted, asked for the phone number I was calling from, and wanted me to tell him exactly where I was and to give him the name of the store. So I handed him over to the clerk, who provided all of that information, then handed the phone back to me. He was looking at Carrie and me in wonder.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked.
“Getting there.” I asked him to call Blake Ives, and to try to reach Roy Fletcher, who might still be at Graydon Fletcher’s place. “And if he’s got a girl named Genie with him, I think that might be Caleb’s sister — Oh, here’s the sheriff’s department,” I said, seeing a cruiser pull up. “Oh, and the Express.”
“The Express is there?” he asked with some heat.
“No, but will you call them?”
“Maybe. That may cause some difficulties. Let me talk to the deputy.”
Apologizing to the clerk, I waited for the deputies to come inside, then handed the phone to one of them saying, “It’s for you.”
Before he took it, he asked his partner to wait outside with us.
Carrie, who had stayed huddled next to me, was trembling as we walked out. I put an arm around her shoulders, and her tears began to fall. Part of it was undoubtedly just the scare setting in, as it was for me as well, but it occurred to me that she had probably never been this far from home or around so many strangers at one time.
“You okay?” I asked. “Sure you aren’t hurt?”
“What will they do to me?” she whispered.
“Do to you? What do you mean?”
“I mean, who will I live with?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe your father, Mr. Ives. Or they may find someone for you to stay with while they sort things out. They’ll probably try to contact your… your dad, and I know they’ll try to find out where your mom is.”
She looked away from me, then started crying hard. She curled back into my shoulder. I tried to think of words that might soothe her, and decided just to let her cry. I don’t think she had any more real hope that her mom was alive than I did.
After a time, she quieted.
“Do you have kids?” she asked in a small voice.
“No, I don’t.”
“Don’t you like them?”
“Oh no, I like them a lot. Why do you ask?”
She turned red. “Maybe they’d let me stay with you.”
I hugged her shoulders. “I would love to have you stay with us, but I don’t get to decide that. Besides, you might not like it — I have a husband, a friend, three dogs, and the fattest cat you ever saw living at my house. Here, I’ll show you.” I opened my wallet and flipped to the photos of Frank, Deke and Dunk, and Cody. “I don’t have pictures of our friend Ethan or of Altair yet. They’re just visiting.”
She asked questions about the animals and Frank. We only spent a few minutes doing this, but somehow it had a calming effect on both of us.
OVER the next several hours, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Huntington Beach Police Department, and the Las Piernas Police Department all wanted to talk to us. So did a tremendous number of members of the media, although they didn’t get much more than footage of us leaving the LASD Palmdale Station. They made up for that by talking to neighbors in Huntington Beach (“very quiet,” “kept to themselves”) and getting aerial shots of an abandoned BMW and the removal of remains from the desert.
The bodies of Giles Fletcher and Bonnie Creci/Victoria Fletcher had been found half a mile from the border of the Angelus National
Forest, a half-mile that kept the Park Service and the FBI off the list of our questioners.
Frank arrived with three passengers. I had expected Blake Ives and my attorney, Zeke Brennan, but I was amazed to also see Graydon Fletcher, who was hanging back a bit.
As he hugged me, Frank whispered, “You okay?”
I nodded.
“Don’t worry about Graydon.”
When Blake Ives was introduced to her, Carrie smiled uncertainly and said hello. When she saw Graydon, she ran to him, shouting, “Grandfather!” and burst into tears as she hugged him.
I had to admire Blake Ives. He was overjoyed to see her, weeping, in fact, but he didn’t push or make a scene. He patiently waited while Graydon comforted Carrie.
Graydon soothed her, and when she had calmed down again, he said, “Carrie, do you know who Mr. Ives is?”
She nodded.
“I’m so happy that he’s found you,” he said. “We all have lots of questions about how you were separated, and I know you’ve had an upsetting day. But he’s a good man who has been hoping to see you for so many years, and I wanted to come to let you know that no matter what else has happened today, this part of your life will be just fine. Meeting your father is a reason to rejoice.”
She looked back and forth between them, then said to Blake, “I read Ms. Kelly’s story about you in the paper. It’s… nice to meet you.” She held out her hand.
He took it and, although I could see it was killing him, refrained from doing more than gently shaking it for a moment.
He came down to eye level with her. “Carla — I mean, Carrie — do you want me to call you Carrie?”
She thought about it and said, “Does it hurt your feelings?”
“No,” he said softly.
“Okay, well, if you don’t mind, Carrie’s what I’m used to hearing. I like the name Carla, but I might not remember you’re talking to me when you say it.”
“Carrie it is, then. I look forward to getting to know you again. Mr. Fletcher has been telling me about you on the way here. He’s right — we’re both so glad you’re all right and weren’t hurt too badly, and we both want to make sure you’re happy and safe — that’s what matters most to both of us, okay?”
“Thank you,” she said. She looked to Graydon. “Where’s Dad?” She blushed and said, “I mean…”
“It’s okay,” Blake said.
“I don’t know where he is, Carrie,” Graydon said. “I’m worried about him and your brothers and sister. I have a lot of questions to ask him, but mostly I’m worried.”
“Mom…”
“I’m sorry.”
That brought on the tears again. Somehow, in that upset, she let Blake comfort her, too.
A pair of Fletcher’s sons who were lawyers arrived, apparently on their own initiative. Graydon refused to follow their advice about not saying anything, and simply told them to be quiet or wait for him in the lobby. I guess he still held some power as the patriarch, because they shut up.
Graydon couldn’t explain — for her benefit, or to the various law enforcement officials who wanted to know — why Giles Fletcher had taken his niece and a newspaper reporter hostage. He couldn’t imagine any reason for Giles to harm Bonnie — whom he referred to as Victoria — or anyone else. He had been shocked, he said, when reading the morning paper to see the story about Blake lves. “I didn’t see the paper until late this morning, but I immediately recognized Victoria’s photo, and while I wasn’t quite so sure about Carrie, of course, I could see the resemblance. I — I wanted to talk to Roy. I’ve been leaving messages for him.”
“He didn’t go to your house?” Carrie asked.
“No, honey, he didn’t. Is that what he said he would be doing?”
“Yes.” Her forehead wrinkled in worry.
Carrie told the story of her morning, including some parts I hadn’t known. Except for her fear and a quality of innocence, one could easily forget she was a child — her vocabulary was beyond that of a number of adults I know, and so was her intelligence.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “I think Dad put a sedative or something like that in Mom’s drink.”
“Tell us more about this,” Graydon said, looking grim.
SO we heard about the Bloody Mary, the mortar and pestle, the pills. Joe Travers, the detective from Huntington Beach, was madly taking notes. Travers either had kids of his own or had questioned children before, because his manner with Carrie quickly won her over. I suppose the fact that no one was trying to stop her from being honest with him helped.
With Zeke Brennan’s able advice, I was able to be honest, too — I just didn’t tell anyone how much I’d wanted to kill Cleo. I was glad for Zeke’s guidance. People who make lawyer jokes should think about how well they’d do with trial by ordeal.
Graydon Fletcher said the name Cleo was familiar to him, although he had not seen her since she was a teenager. “I don’t know if it’s the same person,” he said. Then he pretty much described her exactly, in a younger form.
“Where could we find her?” the detective asked.
“I have no earthly idea. But I will ask my family members to cooperate completely with you.”
An urgent bulletin was issued regarding Roy Fletcher and the children who were with him. The Huntington Beach police were searching for photos. None were on the walls of Roy Fletcher’s home, but Carrie mentioned a digital camera. “Dad kept a few of our pictures on his computer,” she said, although she couldn’t provide a password. That frustrated her, but then she said, “Wait! My camera. Remember, Grandfather? You gave it to me the last time you came to see us. I took our pictures.” She described where it could be found in their room. “Genie might have taken it with her, though,” she cautioned, “when she put my things in the car.”
I marveled as she told us about Genie’s Plan B, thought up on the spur of the moment when she found my voice mail was full. None of these kids were dull-witted.
“Do your brothers and sister look like you?” Detective Travers asked.
“No, we were all—” She broke off and gave me a questioning look. She was already wondering if anything she knew of her family history was true.
“Mr. Fletcher,” I said to Graydon, “Carrie was raised to believe that she was legally adopted at birth. She’s since realized that Bonnie — Victoria — was her birth mother. Do you know any of the details of the adoptions? Did you ever see adoption papers?”
“Why, no. So many of my children have gone on to become adoptive or foster parents… oh.” He looked stricken and fell silent.
Priorities were agreed upon, and the first was to find Roy Fletcher and the children — their legal status was less important than finding them alive.
The next was to locate Cleo Fletcher. When I mentioned that she was dressed as a Las Piernas cop, I was told that Officer Dennis Fletcher’s uniform (reported stolen weeks ago from Fletcher’s Dry Cleaning) had been left behind in the car, and presumably she was wearing something else now. So far, no one knew where she had gone since I saw her dive away from the BMW.
When we were all talked out, a question arose regarding Carrie. Blake had all the papers to prove he had the right to legal custody, but apparently he had studied up on reunions like these and was taking it slowly. As a result, Carrie had gone from being wary of him to being openly curious. She sat next to him and talked to him while I was being questioned separately.
By the time we were calling it quits for the day, a social worker was on the scene as well. When she asked Carrie what she would like to do, Carrie looked at Graydon, and even at me, then turned to Blake and said, “I’m not three anymore.”
“No,” he said, “you’ve grown up.”
“It might be fun to see Squeegee again. And there’s this song I want to ask you about….”
WHEN she left, Graydon Fletcher seemed to age before my eyes.
“Dad,” one of his attorney offspring said, “we’d better get you home.”
>
“Yes,” he said, “yes.” But before he left, he took hold of my arm with a gnarled hand and reassured me that he was going to do all he could to discover what Giles and Cleo and Roy had been up to. He repeated this reassurance to the Las Piernas detectives.
“Please, please don’t judge the rest of us by their actions,” he said, and released my arm.
I wanted to trust him. I wanted to believe him.
If I hadn’t met Cleo and Giles earlier in the day, I might have been more open-minded. Instead, I wondered if Graydon Fletcher’s family was helping Roy and Cleo flee the country while he distracted us. If they had escaped, they probably had two young boys and a girl with them. A girl who might be Caleb’s sister — living proof of Mason Fletcher’s innocence — with them.
CHAPTER 47
Tuesday, May 2
3:50 P.M.
HIGHWAY 138
CLEO had familiarized herself with the area she had chosen in the desert, so she knew which way she must travel to reach any sort of dwellings. She was in good physical condition, if a little scraped up, and the hike had not been difficult, even carrying her duffel bags. She had stolen a car, a small Honda, from the first home she found. The fuel gauge was nearly registering empty. She didn’t want to risk being videotaped by a gas station security camera, so she drove that to the edge of the nearest cluster of homes that passed for a neighborhood out here. She abandoned the vehicle after thoroughly wiping off anything she had touched — and she had been careful not to touch many surfaces. The Honda would keep police busy searching this area.
Stealing the motorcycle had been easy. She would have preferred to steal a car, but the owner of the motorcycle had been the most careless of his neighbors, and she didn’t have a lot of time to spare. The coveralls had helped her move from house to house without causing alarm — she moved in a determined way, a meter reader or other workman. Opportunity presented itself on her fifth try.
The motorcycle was kept in a garage, but the garage was unlocked. The bike’s key was in the ignition, and the helmet sitting right on it. She mentally called her unknown donor of transportation a fucking idiot.