The Most Wanted

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  The police had come for me at the fairgrounds, but I’d already left for home.

  He’d broke out, my husband. He’d broke out of prison and killed a man.

  It had all happened a few hours before, along about when I got the FedEx, before the dance. But it took a while for the police to connect Dillon with me, or to figure Dillon might try to come to me, and then more time to figure out where I actually was. It was four of them, Annie said. Kevin LeGrande. That Indian kid who was in the robbery. And this guy who used to be a dental student. He was in for selling drugs, and he never got as far as the fence before he got shot. Someone saw them, I guess, and called out, and this guy panicked and ran. He wasn’t hurt bad, though. He was the one told the officials at Solamente River how they planned it, mainly him and Dillon, if his word was to be believed.

  What they did was start an electrical fire in the laundry, and then when the supply driver came in from the truck to check out the smoke, they knocked him out real quick, using a phone receiver they had hidden in a sock. Then they drove away in his truck, wearing his clothes, toting his ID. Outside the gates, they ditched that laundry van. Kevin told the police later it didn’t go fast enough.

  The man who got killed was a federal marshal. He wasn’t even on duty. He just heard the bulletin on his radio when he was coming home from the Wal-Mart. He saw Dillon and Kevin hot-wiring a car in a parking lot, and he went over. What Kevin said was that the Indian guy, Spirito, jumped out of the backseat so fast you could hardly see it was a person and barreled into that poor man’s midsection with his head, and then one of them got hold of his gun, one of those new plastic laser-type police guns that looks like a toy. The marshal had three grown kids.

  I don’t think any of us slept that night.

  Sometime during the night, Annie answered the phone, and I picked it up at the same time on the extension in my bedroom. I should have hung up. But then I heard the voice, and I realized it was the same man from our wedding at the prison, the one who came in to check Dillon and me in the trailer. I remembered him, because he seemed so mad at Dillon and so sad for me.

  “Ray,” Annie said, like her heart was breaking.

  “Lot of beneficial effect on LaMaggot from this close and supportive relationship you described . . .”

  “Ray Henry, do you think that I ever wanted this?”

  “I think you could have listened to me, Anne. I think you could have just once trusted the fact that I had a sneaky feeling about this all along, and not even a smart New York lawyer . . .”

  “Don’t. Don’t. That’s cheap.”

  “I know.” The warden sighed. “I know.” He stopped, and I almost hung up then, I would have, but they’d have heard the click. “Anne, the police have to know if this bird told the little girl anything. Anything she knows . . .”

  “She doesn’t know a thing, Ray Henry. I swear on my life.”

  “Because if she does . . .”

  “She’d have told me, Ray . . .”

  “Okay. Okay. Anne, I knew that marshal. I knew his wife. A finer man . . .”

  “Please, Ray Henry . . . Please. I know I have to hear it. I deserve it. . . .” She started to make little noises, almost puppy noises. My own eyes filled. Oh, Annie.

  “Don’t cry, Anne. Don’t cry now. No one’s blaming you.”

  “I blame myself.”

  “Just ask Arlington again. Anything. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She hung up. I hung up.

  When the police caught up with Kevin the next morning at his mother’s, they called us right away. Kevin said he never imagined anything would get out of hand the way it did. He said he was filled with shame. He should have just done his time and been out in a year, and not listened to Dillon. He should never have listened to Dillon, who always got him in trouble, he said.

  When they caught him, Kevin had that gun right there with him.

  But he said it was Dillon did the shooting.

  So far as I know, no one ever saw Spirito again. He’s still on the Most Wanted list. Jack Becker, Jeanine’s boyfriend who’s a cop, and that one lady from the FBI, said Spirito was the smartest of all of them. She said Spirito was probably speaking Spanish by nightfall, and he’s probably speaking Spanish today.

  Dillon was smart too. He could have crossed over the border to Mexico too that same night, and he probably did, because we know he tried later. If he had, he could have disappeared and never come back. He didn’t come back because he was too stupid to lose himself in Mexico. He came back because he wanted something else even more than his freedom. Or so I guess.

  That night, I wanted to go out and climb on Annie’s lap and have her rock me like I was a child. But I couldn’t. I was going to be a mother myself; my kid days were over. And, worse than that, I was so ashamed. I’d already caused Annie more trouble in a few months than I’d ever caused anyone else in my whole life. And me not even hers.

  Maybe, if I had let Annie comfort me, I’d have remembered about the card I got by FedEx. I’d have given it to the police. I know I would have, not that it would have done a stick of good. But it wasn’t until a few nights later that I even remembered the card. I found it tucked between the pages of the book I’d been reading. I picked it up and held it to my cheek, where it seemed to burn, like a brand. Then I put it back. It’s probably there still.

  Cell Dreams

  Late at night: I am dreaming, something wild

  pushes me along like a pebble in the path

  of a dust devil, something unbroken in me—

  or too much broken, crazed they say. My life

  is a walk through an electrical storm—each hair

  stands up, each cell is charged with this current;

  there is nothing behind me and nothing ahead.

  Later: cheap whiskey redemption scalds my throat,

  brings peace in the night.

  Later yet: headlights (now I’m dreaming

  of you) and a thousand miles of highways, the night

  juiced up with music—lonely cowboys, angel girls,

  and death, a 2:00 A.M. country preacher,

  testifying, rocking in the spirit (we have to),

  stop at the motel, tear back the sheets, tumble

  and tangle together, call out, “Oh

  Lord!” while above us stars burn

  holes in the black night.

  Dillon Thomas LeGrande

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Annie

  ONCE WE GOT her into the apartment, the reporters found themselves on a cold trail. They could still bother me, but after a while even they wearied of sitting in the outer office, chatting with Lilia while she washed the philodendron, and they didn’t show up anymore.

  Then they tried to pursue other avenues to the “truth.”

  After all, it was a pretty swell little story—the desperate outlaw and his pregnant child bride. What really drove Dillon’s odyssey into legend, besides the way he anointed himself with his new name, was unfortunately a testament to my consummate skill as an advocate—no shit, no fooling, as Arley would say: it was the poetry some pinhead found read into the record of the lovers’ court proceeding.

  I hit the roof when I found out that the story of Arley and Dillon’s lawsuit, and the poem, had made the nightly national news.

  That was just the beginning. It got worse, as these things tend to do. A San Antonio anchorwoman received a neatly chronological file of Arley’s and Dillon’s poems. At fifteen years old and eight months pregnant, Arlington Mowbray LeGrande had the signal distinction of seeing her poetry appear in People magazine, next to a photo of her in her track silks, legs up to heaven, braid snaking down over one shoulder like a patent-leather python, looking far too saucy and worldly to be Arley at all. Every time something surfaced with Dillon, until the night of the fire and even long afterward, the poetry was part of it. Some loon even set “What’s True” to music, including some of his own lyrics about the hell in a lonely cell, which o
nly served to point up how talented Dillon actually was. And of course, every time there was a new chapter in the legend of “The Highwayman,” there was another spate of Arley photos—stolen ones of her pregnant, sitting on my back balcony, of her and Elena at the fiesta, but always, and especially, her track photo.

  Her comment the first time she saw it, by the way, was typical: “I love that picture! I never saw it. Was it yearbook? It’s better than the other one. Can I get a copy?”

  The People headline read “Good Girls and Bad Boys” and it pretended to examine the facts of several cases of the recent past. But mostly it focused on Arley, and on the kind of social milieu, not to mention the kind of legal counsel, that would bless the entry of a young teenager into a maximum-security prison to have sex with a man twice her age. Everyone at Women and Children First had a copy or two. The board members were, to a woman and a man, deeply thrilled, I’m sure. Ray Henry sent me a tear sheet, with a note on a prison letterhead, requesting my autograph. I never replied.

  Stuart bought me a gift that month: a Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter compact with a plastic grip and, according to the literature, “a metal slide and fixed sights.”

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” I asked him, horrified.

  “You know, our life together has given me the chance to say things I really appreciate the chance to get to say,” Stuart replied. “Like this: Annie, get your gun. If this loon is laying for you and thinks you’re the one keeping his bride away from him, you will thank me for carrying a heavier purse for the next few days, until they get him.”

  “Stuart, I couldn’t fire a gun to—”

  “Save your life?”

  So off we went with Jeanine’s sweet cop boyfriend, Jack, to the range the following Saturday. Turns out, I am a very good shot—something I, too, have to admit I never imagined saying.

  It was a swell month all around: the first month Dillon was on the run, the first month Arley looked really vastly pregnant, the hottest single month in a star-studded cavalcade of hot months in the history of a hot state. Utilities conked with eerie prescience on just those streets where thugs were strolling past electronically alarmed liquor stores. Old people melted in stucco slums, and my office racked up a lifetime tally of spousal-abuse injunctions. There was no downtime and scant rest, but my whole being was focused on Arley’s welfare.

  As the days passed, the best efforts of the state police and the FBI turned up no clue whatever to the whereabouts of Dillon and his buddy Samuel Sanchez, aka Spirito. It turned out that Spirito had been trucked over to Solamente only a month earlier, after his conviction in connection with a knife fight at the boys’ farm where he’d spent quiet days among the alfalfa since the robbery with the LeGrandes. When Dillon didn’t show up at my house, or Rita’s, or at the First State Bank of Texas, early publicity began to wane, only to be stoked up again by the poetry, but Arley, grieving and huge, was largely untouched. I couldn’t keep her from watching the ten o’clock news, and her face was a textbook of guilt and panic as she did, playing and replaying the video tapes we made, freezing them on Dillon’s image from booking photos. She was worried—she told me exactly once, and I went bananas, which I’m still sorry for—that someone would hurt Dillon before he got a chance to explain.

  I didn’t want her out of my sight. Arley’s getting her “own place” seemed a ridiculous risk now. But Jeanine and Stuart convinced me that she’d actually be safer from Dillon in one of the apartments set aside for birth mothers by Jeanine’s agency, Casa de Niños. Because the circumstances under which young women surrendered babies were often rough, the apartments secured by the agency with private and public funds were frequently shifted from complex to complex, and no one except the social workers and adoptive parents were given the address. The day Jeanine took me over to The Terrace—which, she pointed out persuasively, was only six minutes by car from my own front door—it looked so familiar I couldn’t believe I’d never been there: behind similar apartment facades, I’d iced dozens of swollen eyes for my clients. The inevitable decline of those facades was visible in the trappings of cheap newness, the brave teal-colored shutters and window boxes, at The Terrace. It looked great, but it was like clothing from Fashion Bug—glamorous on the racks, washing up shapeless in a few months. In a year, these little boxes would look just like the buildings over on Alameda, where it seemed like half my clients lived, the grass worn bald by kid herds, doors slack as broken jaws. But by then, I comforted myself, Arley would be out of there, living, somehow, with me on Azalea Road, or in Florida, or somewhere at college—though she was far too young for college—or, at any rate, not here.

  Worried as I was, and miserable as Arley was over Dillon, the few weeks she spent at The Terrace were probably the most peaceful time of her life. Another child her age would have been intimidated, indeed overwhelmed, by the work and care required. For Arley, it was unprecedented leisure, a beach picnic. When I look at Donnie, my nephew—he’s the age now that Arley was then—I can’t get the images to line up. Donnie’s an ordinary slothful middle schooler. He has to be reminded to brush his teeth and change the sheets on his bed every couple of months. He and my brother-in-law routinely go to swords’ point over a science project, and then Don spends a whole night gluing little silver sugar balls on a Styrofoam globe to represent the structure of the atom or something while his son sleeps on the couch. But for Arley, the interlude at The Terrace was the first time in her entire life she’d been responsible only for herself. Even while she lived with Stuart and me, Arley was the dictionary definition of conscientious. She did all the laundry; we never had to sweep or dust. I used to point out to Stuart how having her there actually lightened our load considerably, and basically for the price of her food. (He didn’t agree—Arley, he said, made him feel “invaded.”)

  Seeing the joy with which she encountered her little apartment, one morning at dawn when we moved her over there, under the watchful aegis of an unmarked city squad car, was a witness to me. I felt both grateful and guilty, which, given my personality, often amount to the same thing. The decor was sheer eighties tack—“new earth tones” from top to bottom. But Arley loved the nubbly pumpkin-colored sofa, which made me itch just thinking about it, and she lovingly unpacked her poetry books, her leather-bound volumes, and all the tchotchkes she’d bought at Goodwill: a china zebra, a rainbow piñata for above the baby’s bassinet, a lamp in the shape of a Conestoga wagon. She bustled about, round as a hen, a child playing house. Though I checked on her by phone twice a day and saw her almost daily too, she loved being alone—alone, but no longer Rita Mowbray’s indentured servant. I found myself thinking of Arley’s wedding picture, which she kept next to her bed in a heart-shaped frame made of pounded tin that Elena had given “them” for their wedding. It was a beautiful thing, especially given how their still-girlish tastes seemed to run to objects with decals of kittens or rock singers. I thought of Arley in that picture, wearing Elena’s homecoming dress and the red-and-black cowboy boots she had to give up wearing after her feet swelled in the second trimester, and the ragged jacket she insisted on draping over her shoulders because, she told me later, it was something blue. She’d been smiling in that picture as though she were leaving the pavilion with an Oscar clutched in her fist. Despite the way I felt about Dillon LeGrande’s influence on her life, whenever I saw that picture, I remember, I wished, for Arley’s sake, that I could reverse the swoop of the clock hands with my fingertip—give her back the joy, however illusory, she enjoyed when Dillon was mostly a concept, safely tucked away in Solamente River Prison, along with the excitement of her first self-centered moments, moments nobody ever deserved more. Nonetheless, with every day I was more sure that Arley was better off with him gone—I knew nothing of the notes, or of her fear and helpless feeling of responsibility for what Dillon had done. It seemed unlikely Dillon would be heard from again, at least if he was as bright as he seemed.

  I’d encouraged Charley, by then, to give up on
making Azalea Road look spruced up for a wedding and simply get it ready to be lived in. I made ruthless choices: did I want tables and chairs or central air? (Central air, definitely.) By the time Arley, Stuart, and I moved in—I still thought it would be possible for Stuart to find work in Texas, maybe as a lobbyist—we would have a clean, cool, well-lighted space with practically nothing in it.

  Because we wanted to speed up the moving-in date, or so I told myself, I’d started going to the house to help Charley. When I talked about Arley and my fears, he did what no man had ever done with me. He simply listened. The questions he asked were real questions. He didn’t give me advice. He didn’t tell me not to worry. He just listened. He encouraged me to bring Arley along, and sometimes, I did.

  Working with Charley in those days, days stiff with tension on all other fronts, gave me a peaceful pleasure. We’d stand side by side, him high on a ladder, me below, slapping on old-fashioned whitewash Charley had mixed. Sometimes we’d stand there, painting, for hours—and once we realized that the compounds in the paint wouldn’t harm the baby, Arley helped, too. With the swoosh and scratch of the big flat brushes the only sound under the candied melodies from the old phonograph, it wasn’t difficult to feel we’d drifted into a different century, a benign past in which we were a family, for whom preparing our homestead was life’s most urgent priority.