One of them, Rick she thought, shot a round into the ceiling. “Give us the cash!” he shouted.
The man looked at her, but she couldn’t meet his gaze. One of them came up behind him and jabbed the barrel of the gun into his back. “Hurry up, old man.”
Emma looked from one to the other, but the worst part was, she couldn’t tell which was Eli. They all wore jeans and black sweaters. Beneath those ski masks, all their eyes looked black.
Bob Simon was remarkably calm as he walked back to the counter. Rick had pointed out that Bronco Liquor had been robbed three times in the last year. It wouldn’t even faze the old man, he’d said. Bob Simon pushed a few buttons on the cash register and Rick ran around behind him and grabbed the cash. “This is it?” he shouted, holding up a few twenties.
“You idiots,” the man said. “You think I’m gonna keep a lot of cash on hand? I’m no fool.”
Rick slammed the butt of the gun into the man’s neck and Emma screamed. Bob Simon crumpled to his knees and one of the boys shot a hole through the shop window.
“Neither am I.” Rick grabbed the man’s arm and dragged him toward the back.
Emma fell to her own knees and started rocking. Suddenly Eli was there, crouched down and holding her. His eyes through the holes of the mask were not black, as she’d thought, but a deep, bottomless green. She looked over his shoulder in time to see Bob Simon get to his feet and press a button near the back door before he went through. His eyes met hers, but all she did was take a deep, long breath.
“This is crazy,” she said, and then she was laughing. She was laughing so hard, urine seeped through her panties.
“Hold on,” Eli whispered. “Just a few minutes more.”
It wasn’t just a few minutes. It was forever, time enough to change indelibly, before Rick ran out, waving the cash in the air. Bob Simon was not with him, and Emma laughed harder.
“Grab her,” Rick said. “She’s losing it. Come on.”
Eli grabbed her arm and pulled her outside. The others were far ahead; Rick had already leapt in his car. Eli dragged her along, but her feet kept slipping out beneath her. Somewhere along the way, when they heard the sirens, she slipped right out of his grasp.
“Come on, Emma. Come on.”
He ran faster, but she slowed. By the time Eli had jumped in the Mustang, she was a hundred feet behind him. She couldn’t have moved if she tried.
She heard Eli screaming for her, but Rick just took off. Someone threw a twenty out the window and it landed right at her feet.
Bob Simon ran out then, his lip bleeding, but not suffering from any bullet wounds that she could tell.
He reached her side just as the police car pulled up. She expected the man to beat her, but all he did was hand her over gingerly to Cal Bentley and his partner.
“Got herself mixed up with the wrong crowd,” Bob Simon said. “But that doesn’t mean there’s no penance, little lady.”
Emma looked up at Cal Bentley’s somber face. He had to know who was behind this, but he was never going to prove it, not if she had her way. She hadn’t given up everything after all. She hadn’t given up Eli.
“Come on.” Cal escorted her to the police car. “I’m telling you, Emma, you’ve given me one hell of a headache.”
Savannah and Jake planned to leave for San Francisco on Saturday. Sasha had been buried, and Savannah was not sticking around to bury anyone else. She was going to leave while her father seemed healthy, while there was still a chance everything might work out fine.
Jake was determined to go with her, but she noticed he didn’t box up any furniture. Even though he packed a few suitcases, he still did not look like a man capable of going anywhere. He had lived at his cabin so long, he coughed up yellow pollen in springtime, and in autumn the tips of his dark hair turned gold. His skin had deepened to the color of fifty-year-old ponderosa pine, and probably his roots ran just as deep. Probably, if she tried to move him, he’d die.
She was only slightly better at pretense. She went through the motions of leaving without her daughter, of going on without any idea where Emma was or what she was doing, but only the childless were fooled. The mothers she passed in town took one look at her and burst into tears. She gave off some kind of panicky stink that made fathers clutch their toddlers and vow to cut back their hours and stop wasting time. There had been plenty of moments over the years when she’d bristled at being a mother, when all she’d wanted was her own life back. Well, now she had it and it didn’t fit her. It was a twenty-year-old’s life, tight and flashy, and she was a thirty-six-year-old with twenty extra pounds of devotion and a preference for loose clothes. The only kind of life she was interested in now was the type she could cut into pieces and serve as lessons and comfort to her daughter.
Early Friday morning, when her car was fully packed, she could have gotten behind the wheel, but instead sat down on the porch steps. Jake came up from his workshop, the dogs at his heels, moths and red earth clinging to his shirt, as if they could make him stay.
“He’ll be one lonely ghost,” he said, sitting down beside her. Savannah took a deep breath, because otherwise she was going to start telling the truth. She was going to look straight in his eyes and tell him this had never been meant to last. She could put him up in a whitewashed apartment in San Francisco, but he was still going to reek of despair. You can’t cure a man of sadness, but worse than that, Savannah had the feeling heartache was contagious. Whenever she sat this close to him, she felt on the verge of either tears or loving him, and both were unpleasant, both stung going down.
The phone rang in the cabin and, after a moment, Maggie came out. When she called her honey, Savannah knew there was trouble.
“Honey, it’s the sheriff,” Maggie said. “He wants to talk to you.”
Savannah ran into the house. She didn’t need to look in her mother’s eyes to know that whatever had happened, she would never live it down. Everything that followed would be her fault.
She picked up the phone. “Cal?”
“Now listen,” the sheriff said. “First of all, Emma’s all right.”
Savannah went stiff. “Oh, God. What happened?”
He told her about the liquor store robbery, all the way to the point where he led Emma to a county jail cell. “She’s in custody. She’s not cooperating about who was with her.”
“Oh, come on. You know damn well—”
“Right now I can’t prove anything, and Emma’s telling me it was some boys from Phoenix. Boys she didn’t meet until a couple of hours before the robbery. Other than that, she’s not talking, except to call her father. He’s already caught a flight out.”
Jake had come in behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. Savannah’s head was pounding, and now the pain went right between her eyes. She dropped the phone and rushed outside. She got in her car, but had forgotten her keys. She looked up and found her mother standing beside the car, jingling her key ring.
“Move over,” Maggie said. “You’re in no shape to drive.”
Savannah slid over, and Jake got in the backseat. Doug started toward the car, but Maggie shooed him away.
“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “This road kills you and you know it. I’ll call you as soon as we know anything. Go rest.”
He turned around petulantly and Maggie backed out of the drive. Savannah had forgotten she was wearing a beret, until it fell off when she put her head between her knees.
“You were right, Mom.”
“Well, of course,” Maggie said, “but there’s no sense going into that now. What you’ve got to do is go in there fighting. Your job is to get her out of this.”
They got to the county jail in an hour, but couldn’t see Emma until visiting hours at noon. While they were waiting in Cal’s office, Harry burst in. He looked like the Harry she remembered, dressed in jeans and a crisp white shirt, ready to take on the world. There must not have been enough time to grease his hair or find all his rings. He hardly took a br
eath before he started yelling.
“How could you just let her go? Are you insane? What kind of mother lets her fifteen-year-old daughter run away? Why the hell didn’t you call me? I had a right to know.”
Jake stepped forward, but Savannah squeezed his arm. “It’s what I would have wanted at her age,” she said. “To be trusted.”
“She is fifteen goddamn years old!” Harry said. “You don’t trust teenagers. You rein them in. You protect them. You knew exactly who she was with. That boy is a menace. You can thank yourself for what happened.”
“Mr. Shaw,” Cal said, but Harry ignored him. He yanked Savannah’s arm.
“You stupid fool,” he hissed.
Savannah lowered her head, because even though he was crueler than he should have been, he was also right. She picked at her fingernails, but had already stripped off the last bit of ruby-red nail polish on the drive down.
Cal came around his desk. “Just calm down. You’re both upset. I understand that. Let’s just keep it calm.”
“Oh, I’m calm,” Harry said. “Calm enough to see that Emma doesn’t need any more of this mystic mumbo jumbo. She doesn’t need someone patting her hand while she’s bleeding and telling her everything works out all right in the end. Emma needs someone who just gets the goddamn bandage and fixes the cut. She needs someone who can take over and get her out of this, now. Emma needs me.”
Maggie had been standing by the door, but now she came forward. “I never liked you much, Mister Used-Car Salesman, and now I’m fairly certain I hate your guts. Emma made a rotten choice, that’s for sure, but she’s got the courage to protect that future convict, and if you can’t see the beauty in that, then you’re blind as a bat.”
Harry just stared at her, then turned to Cal Bentley. “We must be able to do something here. She’s no threat to society. You know that. She got swept up in somebody else’s plot. I’ll pay back the stolen cash, with interest. I’ll get her out of town and keep her there. I’ll take full responsibility.”
Cal stepped back, but not before Savannah saw relief flicker across his eyes. Not before she knew she had lost. Harry was absolutely right. Emma did not need mother devotion or a tarot card reading telling her how things might turn out. She did not need any of the things Savannah could give her. She needed her father.
“I’ll have to talk to the prosecutors and Bob Simon,” Cal said. “In the meantime, Savannah can see Emma now. Mr. Shaw can come next.”
He picked up the phone and asked someone to show Emma to the visitor’s booth. Then he led Savannah to a narrow room with small windows and black phones lining either side. In the last booth, Emma sat hunched on a stool on the other side of bulletproof glass.
“My God,” Savannah said, “is it necessary to keep her here?”
“It’s a felony.”
She picked up the phone. “Emma?”
Emma didn’t even look up. She looked thin as a wire and already snapped.
Savannah whirled around. “Come on. Why can’t you just go arrest those boys?”
“Talk to her,” Cal said. “Right now I’m looking for four juveniles from Phoenix, none of whom have any outstanding features or names that she can recall.”
Savannah turned back to the booth. She put her hand on the glass and beat on it until Emma looked up. She pointed to the phone and finally Emma picked it up. “Emma Shaw, don’t you dare do this.”
Emma looked at her head-on and said nothing, and Savannah could see that she did dare. Even if Savannah had the means to save her, it was plain as day that her daughter wouldn’t let her.
“It’s not doing Eli Malone any good to protect him,” Savannah said. “Don’t you see? You’re not helping him.”
Emma stood up slowly, then reached into her pocket and took out a crinkled, sweat-stained card. She held the Lovers up to the glass.
“I’ll give this to the guard to give to you,” she said. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”
Harry Shaw paced up and down the courthouse steps, whirling around whenever a police car drove up. Cal Bentley had been gone two hours—more than enough time to convince that liquor store owner to drop the charges. A dirty wind was picking up, slapping his ankles with leaf and newspaper debris, and a few smoky raindrops glanced off his forehead. A guard stood at the door, making sure he didn’t go back inside. He’d been escorted out when he drove two clerks to tears with his ranting. When he glared at a couple leading their pale-faced teenage son inside, the guard walked down the steps.
“Take your hysterics somewhere else,” the guard said. “You think you’re special? Shit. This kind of thing happens every day.”
Harry stomped across the street to a delicatessen. He wasn’t hungry, but he could go for a black coffee. He had his hand on the door when he looked through the window and spotted Savannah, her mother, the psycho, and another woman sitting inside.
He started to walk the other way, then suddenly whirled around. That other woman had curly hair pulled back with a familiar gold clip. She had on a Donna Karan suit he had bought her last Christmas. He pushed open the door and walked in.
“Melinda?” he said.
His wife stood up. “I found your note and took the next flight out. I brought brownies.” She gestured to a white box, the kind Grendel’s Bakery in Danville used. “They’re Emma’s favorite.”
Harry just stared at her. She must have had to rush like crazy to get here so fast, but she still looked polished in her green linen pantsuit. She’d been at the salon when he’d gotten the call from Emma, getting her ringlets cut to the size of penny rolls.
She held out her hand. Probably, she was waiting for him to tell her how grateful he was that she had come, but Harry was not grateful, not one bit. Her being here just made this whole disaster more real.
When he didn’t take her hand, Melinda simply took his. “You poor thing. Sit down. I’ll order you tuna salad.”
Harry sat beside her and jumped whenever she patted his arm. He put his hands flat on the table, but they kept trembling anyway. Melinda ordered him lunch, plus a glass of Cabernet for herself, which came in a jelly glass.
“It was one hundred and eighteen at the airport in Phoenix,” Melinda was saying when the waitress brought his tuna salad. “I can’t understand how people live in that. You’d get heatstroke just going out for the paper.”
Savannah looked up. “It’s always best to fall in love in summer. You can’t sustain lies in heat like that. Doubt just shrivels up.”
They were quiet for a moment, then Maggie tapped her fingers on the table. “What kind of bullshit is that? It was horrid. Phoenix is another word for hell.”
Melinda reached over and touched Harry’s arm. “What did you think when you lived there?”
Harry looked down at her hand, the mauve fingernails, the red freckles beneath her knuckles. He honestly thought he might cry, but instead he just removed his arm. “The only thing I think,” he said slowly, “is that this is a ridiculous conversation to be having when my daughter is in jail.”
Melinda looked down at the table, but before anything else could be said, a spoon hit the bottom of Harry’s chin.
“Hey!” he said.
Savannah had already stood up. “Let me tell you something, Harry Shaw. You can hire all the fancy lawyers in the world to get custody of Emma. You can get restraining orders galore. But if you can’t learn to be kind, my daughter’s not getting anywhere near you. I’ll kidnap her if I have to. You understand me?”
She stormed out of the restaurant. Maggie was laughing as she got up after her. The psycho said nothing, just tossed a couple of bills on the table, certainly not enough to cover the tab, and walked out.
Melinda sat silently beside him. She was crying onto the white box of brownies.
“Look,” he said. “I’m stressed, all right? My daughter’s in a jail cell across the street. You’ve got to cut me some slack.”
She turned to him so quickly, she didn’t have time to right her
face. For a moment, she looked no more familiar than an angry stranger on the street, the kind he’d always kept his distance from. She looked like a wife who’d had just about enough.
“I came all the way out here. I wanted … No more slack, Harry. I’ve been cutting you slack for years, and now I’m done.”
“Melinda—”
“When you rode out here on your white horse, did it ever occur to you to ask me if I’d be willing to have a fifteen-year-old girl who can’t stand the sight of me in my house?”
Harry sat back. The waitress brought two take-out boxes, then just left them on the table when she saw their faces.
“She’s my daughter,” he said. “I thought I didn’t have to ask.”
“Well, you do.”
Harry began putting the tuna salad in the Styrofoam boxes, even though he would never be able to touch this food again and he was on a committee back home to ban Styrofoam.
“I’ll tell you something,” Melinda said loudly, stopping conversation in the booths around them, something she would never do back in Danville. “Just because a woman is in the Junior League and doesn’t tell every stranger who comes along her troubles doesn’t mean she doesn’t have any. Being nice is not the same thing as being happy. I may not read fortunes, but I can tell you you have no future with me if things don’t start changing right this second.”
Harry went to twist one of his rings and realized he’d forgotten to put them on in the rush to get to Arizona. He wore only his silver wedding ring, the one he couldn’t polish regularly, because he couldn’t get it off his finger.
He pushed the food to the other side of the table. He waited until conversation around them had picked up again, then he took Melinda’s hand.
“Look at me, Melinda,” he said quietly. “How many chances am I going to get to be her hero?”
Melinda looked up, and he realized he had never seen her without makeup. He had no idea of the natural color of her hair. She’d been put together when he met her and she’d stayed that way. He had figured if she was unhappy, she would let herself go like everybody else, she would give him some sign.
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