Live a Little

by Madeleine Reiss

  ‘How about I take you back to where you’re staying?’ Stacey asked. She peered at Lottie through dark-rimmed eyes. ‘You look real washed out.’

  ‘OK, if you’re sure it’s not too much trouble,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s a couple of miles back. A motel called the White Horse, with a blue, starry arch at the entrance to the car park.’

  ‘I know it,’ Stacey said, and Lottie followed her back to the truck. She was glad that she wasn’t going to have to retrace her steps in her dodgy flip-flops. Here was another sign, if she needed one, that she was losing it. Careful Carlotta would never have set out on a walk without being properly shod. She clambered into the truck.

  ‘I’ll just drive a little way further where there’s a place to turn,’ Stacey said. She was sporting dangling pearl earrings and a frilled-neck blouse, which looked incongruous with the black jeans and cowboy boots she was wearing. At least she has a passion, Lottie thought wearily as the road slid past. The sky was a pale, glimmering pink. She saw a telephone box with a toilet pan inside it and several shop dummies in fancy dress on the roof of a house and a bunch of gaudily painted cars with their bonnets planted into the ground like strange flowers. They passed a potential turning point and then another. Lottie began to get nervous.

  ‘We’ll need to turn soon, or you’ll have gone too far out of your way,’ she ventured.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Stacey answered. ‘I know the routes around here like the back of my hand.’

  ‘I really think we need to turn around,’ Lottie said after another ten minutes. Stacey didn’t answer, and for the first time Lottie began to feel alarmed.

  ‘I’d like to go back now,’ she said.

  ‘You may look like her, but you sure need to work on your patience. Do you think she wanted to stand around being stared at? Inside she was in turmoil, but she always managed to smile.’

  ‘You can just stop and drop me off. I’ll find my own way back,’ Lottie said. She didn’t have her phone with her. It was in her bag back in the room she shared with Tina. She was miles from anywhere with a woman who was living in a parallel universe.

  ‘Hold your horses. I’m just gonna take you on a visit.’

  ‘A visit where?’ Lottie asked, by now seriously worried. She felt surreptitiously for the door handle. At the speed they were travelling it was unlikely she would be able to escape without injury, but it was possible that Stacey might have to slow down at a junction, which might give her enough time.

  ‘Locked,’ Stacey said without turning her head. ‘Precaution against being jumped at traffic lights.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ Lottie tried to stay calm. No one knew where she was. Tina and Spike would discover her absence quite soon but they wouldn’t come looking for her for hours. She didn’t like to think about the explanation Spike might give to justify her wandering off by herself in the early hours of the morning, nor Tina’s reaction to it.

  ‘Why don’t we just stop and have a chat,’ she suggested. ‘We can talk about Diana.’

  ‘We’ve got hours and hours to chat,’ Stacey answered.

  Lottie wondered if it was possible to roll the window down and shout for help.

  ‘No one is going to hear anything,’ Stacey said, as if she could read her mind. She fiddled with the car stereo and then drummed her thumbs against the steering wheel to ‘Candle In The Wind’. The song was cloying at the best of times, and these were not the best of times.

  ‘Be reasonable,’ Lottie said. ‘You can’t just kidnap me like this. You’ll get into terrible trouble.’

  ‘I just love that! Be reasonable,’ she said, echoing Lottie’s plea in a weird approximation of an English accent.

  Lottie considered if it would be possible to knock her out with something and then take over the truck before it crashed. Perhaps there was some sort of implement under her seat. She ran her hand down the gap at the side and found nothing.

  ‘Keep all my tools in a box at the back,’ Stacey said, grinning.

  It was the grinning that made Lottie perilously close to panic. It’s possible that the whole decision about the wedding will be taken out of my hands, she thought wildly. At least I’ll never have to tell Dean.

  Just as quickly she told herself to keep a grip.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Stacey said, and Lottie saw out the window that they were back in Chloride – Stacey’s hometown.

  Chapter 23

  ‘HAVE YOU SEEN LOTTIE?’ Tina asked when Spike opened the door.

  ‘I thought she was with you,’ he answered. He had woken a few minutes before and assumed, on seeing the empty space beside him, that Lottie had returned to her own room.

  ‘I don’t think she has actually slept in her bed,’ Tina said, looking alarmed. ‘I crashed out straightaway and so I don’t know if she even came back to our room. The bed’s still made up. When did you see her last?’

  ‘It’s a little hard to say,’ Spike said, vaguely. He was reluctant to tell her what had happened between them.

  ‘You stayed up drinking together, right? What time did you go to bed? And where did Lottie go if she didn’t come back to the room?’

  Spike stared at her. He wasn’t yet properly awake and his brain was not fully operational. He ran his fingers through his hair and stared at the floor.

  ‘Well, we stayed up quite late,’ he said lamely.

  ‘Even if the two of you got totally hammered, you must have some idea of where she went afterwards,’ Tina said impatiently.

  ‘She came back to my room, because I had another bottle of wine in my bag.’

  ‘Why are you acting so bloody weird?’ Tina asked.

  ‘I’m still half asleep,’ he said.

  ‘So, she came back for some more wine. How long was she with you? You must know when she left.’

  ‘I think I must have dozed off,’ Spike said. Tina stared at him. She obviously thought he was being shifty.

  ‘So, you fell asleep and Lottie left at some unspecified time and never made it back to our room?’

  ‘Um, yes,’ Spike said. ‘Perhaps she couldn’t sleep and decided to go for a walk.’

  He thought it more than likely that Lottie had woken up, had some sort of a crisis about sleeping with him and decided to find some space to think. It was the kind of thing she might do. She was probably in some diner nearby, drinking coffee, trying to get her thoughts in order.

  ‘Who sets off walking down a road in the middle of the night? It’s just not something Lottie would do. Was she really drunk?’

  ‘Well, you know Lottie,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t really got much of a head for drink.’

  ‘If she was drunk it seems even worse that she went out somewhere else,’ Tina said. ‘Why would she not just have staggered back to bed?’

  Tina was clearly worried, but Spike was in an awkward position. It was entirely Lottie’s decision whether or not she told Tina what had happened; he didn’t see the point of admitting it now. Besides, he was fairly confident Lottie couldn’t be far away.

  ‘I’ll get dressed and we’ll go out looking for her,’ he said.

  *

  They drove down the road, slowing to check through the windows of shops and restaurants, incurring the wrath of other motorists as they loitered. After driving for half an hour, Tina stopped at a lay-by.

  ‘She can’t have walked further than this.’

  ‘Perhaps we should drive the other way,’ Spike said, so she turned the car round and set off back the way they had come, doing the same slow assessment of the places they passed. It was much hotter than it had been the day before and Tina could feel herself sweating. Lottie was just not given to behaving impulsively like this.

  ‘How about we park up and walk back to the motel and go into some of the restaurants she could have stopped at?’ Spike said. ‘She might not be sitting at a window seat, or she could have stepped out to go to the washroom or something.’ He was beginning to feel worried himself now. He didn’t think that Lottie
had been upset the night before. Perhaps she had woken up and regretted what had happened. He should never have taken on Tina’s challenge – which he knew now had started as a pathetic attempt on his part to rile her. He hadn’t really expected it all to go so far, nor that he would become genuinely attracted to Lottie. He felt more than a little ashamed of himself.

  ‘Even when we were kids, Lottie would never have run away,’ Tina said. ‘I ran away once and Lottie and Mia came to find me.’

  She remembered packing her rucksack, taking biscuits from the tin on the kitchen counter, scooping the contents of her pig-shaped money box into her hand and setting off into the drizzling night. She couldn’t remember now where she thought she was going, only the feeling that was in her, even at such a young age, that she wanted to be somewhere else. She didn’t think her parents had even noticed she was gone. It had been her sisters who, torches in hands, had navigated the stretch of common and the wild bit beyond the broken fence where she had taken shelter in an abandoned building.

  ‘It’s too damp to run away,’ Mia had said, putting her arm around her shoulders. They had eaten the biscuits by torchlight and then returned home hand in hand. Mia had lain beside her on her bed to make sure she didn’t run away again.

  ‘Soon you will be old enough to go anywhere you want,’ she had murmured, stroking Tina’s hair. ‘The world will be your oyster.’ It had been all there, even then – her desire to protect, to make right, to soothe. She had been born to it and had died by it. Tina felt the loss of her anew as a series of blows, a kind of ebbing and rising pain, each punch harder than the one before. I let her go, she thought. I opened my hand and she fell through.

  ‘Don’t get upset, we’ll find her,’ Spike said, taking her tears for fear. He put his arm around her and she leant into him.

  ‘She’s got to be somewhere nearby.’

  They stopped at each likely place and showed waitresses and bartenders and shopkeepers a picture of Lottie that Tina had on her phone. She was standing in the shop in her new orange dress, her hands at her waist – half pleased by what she looked like, half doubtful. Nobody they asked seemed to have seen her.

  They retraced their steps to the car.

  ‘Do you think we should call the police?’ Tina asked.

  ‘Let’s go back to the motel,’ Spike said. ‘She’s probably there wondering what the heck has happened to us.’

  *

  The truck drew up outside a house on the very edge of the town. In the headlights it looked to be a ramshackle sort of a place, with peeling wooden walls and an extension that had been fashioned from half a caravan that had been sliced down the middle and fastened to the side of the main building. Out front, a dog tethered to a length of chain was walking in circles as far as his restraint would allow him.

  ‘Here we are!’ Stacey announced, switching off the engine. Lottie wondered if she would have time to make a run for it when her companion opened the truck door. If she had been wearing decent shoes she would have had a better chance.

  ‘Booger there is extremely fond of giving chase,’ Stacey said. ‘He doesn’t get nearly enough exercise, with me away such a lot, so when I let him loose he moves like a bullet.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’ Lottie asked. She was cold and fear was making her arms and legs feel heavy. She tried to breathe deeply and tell herself she wasn’t in any real danger. The woman was unhinged but she surely wasn’t going to kill her.

  ‘I just want you to stay with me a while,’ Stacey said. ‘We can hang out and get to know each other.’

  ‘How about if I promise to come and visit you tomorrow?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to do that, are you?’ Stacey said. ‘What you are going to do is wait until I let you out of the truck and then you’re going to walk nice and quiet through that door. Then we can rest up and have a lovely cup of tea.’

  ‘If I come in for half an hour, will you let me go afterwards?’ Lottie asked.

  Stacey didn’t answer, just opened the door and got out of the truck. As she helped Lottie down, she kept a firm grip on her arm.

  On the way into the house Stacey unhooked the dog’s chain and instantly the creature was panting at her feet in an attitude of pleading readiness. Lottie could see a sore on the side of its neck where the chain had rubbed and its glistening, frantic eyes.

  ‘I’ll feed you in a bit, Booger,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to see to our guest first.’

  She unlocked the door and ushered her in, then locked the door behind them. After seeing the way the truck had been decorated, Lottie had been expecting something similar in the house, but when Stacey turned on the light, an extraordinary collage of images was revealed. Pictures of Princess Diana had been carefully cut out and glued and varnished to make up a mural that extended round the whole house. Every stage of her public life was represented, from doe-eyed ingénue in a transparent skirt to her wanton, leopard-skin lounge on the deck of a yacht. She looked coquettishly over her shoulder, leant despairingly against car windows and peeped dolefully from beneath the brims of a hundred unbecoming hats. She marched like an avenging angel in loafers and slid her shining shoulders out of cars and stared, with malevolent, kohl-rimmed eyes, into the camera.

  ‘In honour of your visit, I’m bringing out my best cups,’ Stacey announced, and set to with a great clattering in the kitchen area. Lottie looked around her for signs of a phone, but there was nothing in the room but a bed, a couple of chairs set around a table and a mad airborne army of Diana dolls hanging from the ceiling. There was one window but it appeared to be boarded over. She felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach.

  *

  When they got back to the motel, Tina rushed to her room – but Lottie wasn’t there. Spike went to ask the person at reception if they had seen Lottie leave, but the woman claimed not to have seen anyone.

  ‘I can’t really see the courtyard from my desk,’ the woman said, ‘and I can’t be hopping up and down every two seconds if I hear a noise.’

  ‘And did you hear a noise?’ Spike asked.

  ‘I might have heard someone go past at about three in the morning.’

  *

  ‘I think we should definitely ring the police now,’ Tina said when he came back to their room.

  Spike called 911 and was put through to the local station while Tina paced around wringing her hands.

  ‘And what happened prior to her disappearance?’ the police officer asked Spike. ‘Was there some kind of an argument or fight? Was there some reason why she would set off by herself at that time in the morning?’

  ‘There hadn’t been a fight,’ Spike said. ‘But it’s possible she was upset about something.’ He could hardly lie to the police about the circumstances of Lottie’s flight.

  ‘Should we perhaps ring the hospitals?’ he asked the police officer.

  ‘We’ll do that. You just wait there. She’ll almost certainly turn up soon. People mostly do.’

  ‘What did they say?’ Tina asked as soon as he rang off. ‘Are they going to start looking for her?’

  ‘They’re going to check the hospitals first,’ Spike said.

  ‘Oh my God. Perhaps she’s lying in a ditch somewhere. Cars hit stray dogs and coyotes all the time. Even if the driver had known it had happened, they probably wouldn’t even have stopped.’

  Tina was white-faced and tremulous.

  ‘Don’t think like that. Try and keep calm,’ Spike said.

  Tina turned on him. ‘This is my sister we’re talking about, of course I’m going to be worried! What were you saying to the police person about her being upset? What was she upset about?’

  ‘We slept together,’ Spike blurted out. He didn’t think he could keep it from her any longer. If Lottie didn’t come back soon, he would have to explain to the police why she had gone and Tina would find out anyway.

  Tina stopped her pacing and stared at him.

  ‘You did what?’ she asked, her eyes
wide and shocked.

  ‘We were both a little drunk, and it . . . it just happened,’ Spike said.

  ‘You are unbelievable!’ Tina said. She spoke slowly and deliberately. ‘You took advantage of her. You knew she was feeling conflicted about Dean and you swooped in there.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We both wanted it,’ he said. ‘And anyway, why the fuck should I have to explain myself to you? You’ve spent most of this trip forcing us together. You’ve only got yourself to blame that your plan worked better than you expected.’

  ‘I told you to back off,’ Tina said through gritted teeth. She was shaking with anxiety and fury.

  ‘You can’t just order everyone around. You had some twisted idea that you were in charge of what Lottie did or didn’t do. Her relationship was never your business.’

  Tina sat down on the bed and stared blankly out of the window. Spike felt suddenly weary at his own stupidity. He thought about Lottie wandering around in the middle of the night, confused and upset, and he berated himself for his carelessness.

  *

  Tina couldn’t believe the relationship between Lottie and Spike had progressed as far as it had. She was certain that Lottie had never been unfaithful to Dean before, and Lottie would never have slept with Spike on a whim. It just wasn’t in Lottie’s nature to do such a thing, however drunk she had been. She must have decided she cared for Spike more than she had been letting on. Tina was furious with him, but beneath her anger and her fear for her sister, another feeling was uncurling inside her. Although she had never admitted it, even to herself, she realised now that she felt proprietorial about Spike and the history they had shared. The truth was that the thought of Lottie sleeping with Spike unsettled her in some fundamental way that she didn’t really want to examine. Spike would not be a good partner for her sister – they were not at all compatible – but if Lottie had really chosen Spike over Dean, Tina couldn’t, in all conscience, prevent it. She had set the bloody thing in motion and would have to live with the consequences. Now that she knew that Lottie had had sex with Spike, it explained why she might have set off by herself in the dark. Her sister often resolved matters that troubled her by thinking things through as she walked. But why wasn’t she back by now? She must know that they would be worried about her.