Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  Janis called and broke into my happy reverie.

  “Something’s come up and I can’t make it when I said I would. Can we do it this evening instead? I’d really like to go with you. To—ah—get to know Trish.”

  A strange feeling told me it was better not to wait, that I should go over there myself. But I didn’t want to disappoint Janis; she was probably trying to show Beth that she could spare a little time for one of her charges.

  “Sure. I’ll just call to make sure she’s all right.”

  Trish was taking a nap, said Judy Margolin with disapproval in her voice. “She’s been sleeping practically all the time since she got here.”

  “Well, she’s probably tired.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Has she made any phone calls?”

  “Not as far as I know. There’s a phone upstairs, but like I said, she’s been sleeping.”

  “We’ll be over at seven or so then.”

  It was still raining, but I was restless and took the dog out again. I walked over to the Margolin’s house and looked at it. That odd little twinge hadn’t gone away. Somehow I felt worried about Trish and what she might do. I wondered if having a lawyer around would make Trish any more willing to tell me what she knew.

  The house looked cozy in the heavy rain, but the wind chimes clattered with an eerie sound. I told myself that I was just being stupid and went back to Janis’.

  Janis arrived home late, after seven, and seemed frustratingly preoccupied. I’d spent a slow afternoon reading and longing for the print shop. June might not believe me, but this self-imposed vacation was getting on my nerves.

  When we finally pulled up in front of the Margolin’s house, we found a scene of confusion. Art was wandering around on the porch with a flashlight. He was wearing an enormous yellow slicker that made him look like a large warning light. He was calling in a loud, anxious voice, “Patricia, Patti!” Judy was standing in the doorway with one of the children in her arms; the other held on to her dress with a scared expression.

  “Dammit,” said Janis. “Now we’ll have to go looking for her all over again. This could get tedious.”

  I walked up to the porch and asked Art, “When did she leave?”

  “She was sleeping while we ate dinner. We decided not to wake her. But when I went up afterwards she was gone. Patricia!” he called helplessly, as if she were a kitten who’d strayed. “Where are you?”

  A porch light next door went on and an elderly woman in a housecoat came out. “Art, is that you? What’s going on?”

  “My daughter’s run away,” he wailed through the rain. “My fifteen-year-old daughter from Seattle. Have you seen her?”

  The woman didn’t hesitate. “Twenty minutes ago I saw a car pull up and someone from your house run out and get into it.”

  My heart skidded like an ice cube in my chest. “Did you see who was driving? Was it a man?”

  “It was definitely a man,” she said.

  “Old or young. Was he bald?”

  She considered. “Older, I think. And he was wearing a sort of cap. I noticed the license plate though. I always notice the license plate because you can’t be too careful these days. It was from Washington State.”

  I was just in time to catch the eight o’clock train.

  37

  I GOT INTO SEATTLE LATE and didn’t sleep well, kept having dreams that someone was driving me somewhere down an unlit country road at night. Sometimes I was in the back seat and there was blood everywhere; sometimes I was in the passenger’s seat and couldn’t see the driver. How did I get here? I kept wondering, in that terrified, frantic way you do in dreams. Did I get in on my own? Where are we going, what’s going to happen to me? Is it my fault this is happening?

  In the morning I called Detective Logan, the first act of what was to be a long, frustrating day.

  Detective Logan wanted to know why I hadn’t told him about meeting Trish in Portland and why I hadn’t called the police there. Because I thought I could handle it myself was not the right answer. After we’d discussed my attitude, he grudgingly told me that they’d been watching Wayne and hadn’t seen him go anywhere. They were trying to get a search warrant. As for Karl, he seemed to have vanished completely.

  I decided to do a little more investigating on my own, in spite of Logan’s admonitions to “just leave it to us now.” Art’s next door neighbor had said the man who picked up Trish was older. I couldn’t imagine her calling Rob or willingly going with him, so it must have been Karl she chose to rescue her. Or Karl who had come anyway.

  I went back to his studio around noon. There was no answer to my knock and the door was firmly locked. Taking a chance, I tried a few other doors down the hall. Eventually I heard a “Yeah, come on in.”

  The studio I entered was the complete opposite of Karl’s: bright white and modern with a varnished wood floor and pale light streaming in through the tiny-paned windows. The man inside was standing near the windows, with a long pipe in his hands. On one end of the pipe was a bubble of blue glass and he was spinning it rapidly over a flame. As I watched, the blue sphere flattened and became a disk. He laid it aside and turned to me.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I wonder if you know an artist named Karl Devize?”

  He was a young man in jeans and a plaid shirt, cheerful and unremarkable. But his open, friendly face shut down when I mentioned Karl’s name.

  “Are you from the Health Department or the police?” he asked, carefully turning down the flame.

  “Well—neither. I’m just looking for a girl and I think Karl might know where she is.”

  “The last time I saw Karl, he was drunk out of his mind, puking in the hallway,” the young man said. “I’d be surprised if he answered his door these days. We’ve been trying to get him out of the building for the past three months. He’s supposed to be evicted next week. That’s probably why he’s not around.”

  “So you wouldn’t have noticed if he’d been gone last night, would you?”

  “No, I make a point not to notice what he’s up to. It’s usually too disgusting. When he first moved in he was pretty obnoxious, but he was interesting at least. Now he’s just sloppy.”

  “What changed him?”

  “Drugs and drink, simple as that. I gather he was dealing drugs for a while. I don’t know if he does now. I can’t imagine he’s together enough for that.”

  “Did you ever see a couple of young girls hanging around here, a Black girl and a white girl, about fifteen?”

  The man snorted. “Not exactly. He’s a faggot, for one thing. There used to be young boys sometimes, you’d meet them in the hall. But now I think he’s just in love with alcohol.”

  “What about a guy named Wayne? Wayne Hemmings? Is he gay too?”

  “Who knows?” He shrugged. “I think he was one of Karl’s protégés at first, but it’s hard to tell. You see them around together a lot, but I’m not sure if Wayne feels sorry for Karl or if he really gets a kick out of the guy.

  “It’s not that Wayne is an especially good artist,” the man went on. “I don’t know how he survives—probably dealing drugs—but he seems too smart to be hanging around with someone like Karl.”

  He picked up his long pipe again and put it to his lips. I took that as a sign that he’d told me all he knew. I thanked him and left.

  I tried Wayne’s apartment at the Redmond twice that day, but he either wasn’t around or wasn’t answering his door. It made me wonder how the cops could be so sure he was still in Seattle.

  That night June, Carole and I had dinner at my place. It was partly to make up for my absence and partly in honor of a letter from Penny, brought back from Nicaragua by a friend. June had received it while I was in Portland and suggested we all read it together.

  Carole arrived first. I expected a little mutual embarrassment, but she was breezy and bouncy as ever, more so because she’d managed to find a new lover in the last couple of days.
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br />   “She’s incredibly interesting, Pam,” Carole assured me, perched on a stool in the kitchen and shredding lettuce with dreamy abandon. “She’s been all over the world, like to Nepal and stuff. She tells these wonderful stories about trekking and sherpas and everything. I’m so envious.”

  “Wait a minute. Not Devlin?”

  “Oh, that’s right, she said she knew you slightly.”

  Slightly.

  “Another girlfriend?” June said when she heard, then remembered her manners. “Well, congratulations. I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

  “Oh, I think so,” said Carole eagerly. “Sometimes you just know, like practically in the first instant, if someone’s going to be right for you. Maybe that’s romantic, but I don’t care. We’ve already got a lot of plans—we’re going to go traveling together. Bali, I guess.” She made some Balinese hand movements to illustrate. “It’s a very artistic culture there. I know I’ll like it.”

  “Forget it,” June warned her. “Nobody’s going nowhere until Penny and Ray get back. Which brings me to the high point of the evening,” she said, brandishing the letter. “A communiqué from our revolutionary sister down on the coffee bean farm. Here,” she tossed it to me, “you do the honors.”

  I opened it and read aloud:

  “Dear Pam, June and Carole,

  “I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life. We get up at four a.m., before it’s light, eat some rice and beans and start walking into the mountains to pick. Sometimes planes fly overhead—American military mostly. We’re not far from the Honduran border and you really feel the contra presence. Earlier this week a man from the village where we’re staying was ambushed and killed; two weeks ago almost a whole village, mainly women and kids, was wiped out. A lot of people carry guns here—they have to. They stand on duty while we pick. We pick all day until about four o’clock, thousands of bright red beans. I know I’m never going to drink a cup of coffee in the same way again.

  “In the evenings we study Spanish and sometimes listen to talks on life before and after the revolution. I’m embarrassed by some of the Americans with us. They’re not used to such hard work (neither am I, obviously), and complain all the time. One guy is in training to be a photo-journalist, I think. He goes around with three cameras around his neck, trying to pose everyone.

  “The people are incredibly kind and patient with us. They keep saying, ‘Can’t you tell your government that we don’t want to fight with them, we just want to live our lives in peace? It was enough that we had to make the revolution. Now let us just live it.’ Something like seventy percent of their entire economy is going for defense right now. So many of the hopeful social programs of the last five years have had to be abandoned—all because of this stupid military threat from the U.S. The Nicaraguans consider us at war with them right now, though there are no American soldiers. Because of the economic boycott and because they’re constantly living with the fear of invasion. But it is a war—about 6,000 people were killed last year alone.

  “Ray and I are fine, though I’ve been sick a lot. At first I thought it was due to the high altitude or change in diet, but now it turns out I’m pregnant! [‘Pregnant!” I stumbled, then continued. ] I guess I’m going to keep it. I’d have to leave if I were going to have an abortion. And I don’t want one anyway. I hope you’ll all be happy for me. Pam, you’ll be an aunt! Must go now. Lots of love, Penny.”

  “Our Penny, a mother!” June marveled. “Well, well, someone to carry on the family business. What’s the matter, Pam, you don’t look too cheerful.”

  “It’s not that.” I didn’t know what I felt, actually. Glad for Penny, shocked, curious. I’d known it was bound to happen sometime. I just wasn’t prepared. I looked at the two women sitting across from me at the table—happily coupled in their different ways—and thought, Well, at least Hadley’s coming back.

  Carole left early to meet Devlin (They were going to a travelogue on Indonesia), but June stayed to help wash the dishes, and I told her about Portland.

  The main thing is,” I said, “is that I feel like I failed to get Trish to trust me. But I tried to be as nonjudgemental as possible. I’ve thought and thought about prostitution and I don’t feel put off, the way I once did. I don’t think badly of her—for anything she’s done or that’s been done to her.”

  “Maybe it’s more a question of her thinking badly of herself. You know how, when you’ve sunk down low in your own estimation, ain’t nobody can pull you back up. You’re suspicious when somebody is nice to you, you think they must be putting you on if they say you’re all right. Because inside you know you’re a piece of shit.”

  “I’ve never felt that, anyway not so much that I couldn’t fight back against those feelings.”

  “You’re lucky then, if you don’t get affected by a look on the street or somebody’s mean words—and feel inside somehow that you deserve it.”

  “You? June, I can’t believe it. You’re the strongest person I know.”

  “I’m also a Black person.” She paused and scrubbed hard at a pot, bending her sculpted dark head and neck over the sink. “But think about it—aren’t there times, when you’re reading a history book or looking at the newspapers and there’s some mention of how women can’t, women never—and in spite of knowing that that’s all wrong, you think to yourself, Women can’t, women never?”

  “When you put it like that—who hasn’t?”

  “I don’t go along with those who say things like all women are prostitutes,” June continued, “cause we get married to support ourselves or have to trade sex for favors. But I believe you have to think about it sometimes from that angle. Ain’t no woman alive who’s living her life the way she wants to, the way she could be living it. If you think about it that way, you won’t have to use words like ‘nonjudgemental.’ Because, when it comes down to it, you be in the same boat, honey. And we’ve all got to sink or swim together—never mind the mixed metaphor.” June drained the water out. “So you don’t have any idea where whoever it is could be hiding her?”

  “The only thing I haven’t tried today is calling her mother.”

  “Why don’t you? I’ll hang around.”

  Melanie was home alone and answered on the first ring. She was disappointed to hear it was me. “I’ve been waiting for Rob to call for hours. He didn’t come home to dinner. I don’t know where he can be.”

  “Is that like him?”

  “No,” she said immediately, then her worry got the better of her. “Well, he has been acting strange lately. I don’t know what’s come over him the past week. He says he’s looking for work and then he doesn’t come home. He doesn’t want to talk to me about it, that’s the worst part. I don’t blame him really. It’s not easy to find a job these days.”

  “Melanie…” I paused. What I was going to ask her was hard. “There was never anything between Rob and Trish, was there? From Rob’s side. He didn’t…”

  “No!” She was outraged. “How could you think anything like that? I would have known. I mean, I told him about Art—he knew how much that would have upset me.”

  “Is that one reason you let Trish go out of your life so easily and stopped seeing her? Because you were afraid it would happen again? Because Rob convinced you she was a whore and nothing but a whore, and he couldn’t be responsible for what happened?”

  “I didn’t let her go easily. It wasn’t easy. I don’t know how you can say such things. You’re not a mother, or you’d know. It’s never easy.”

  “Then help me,” I said. “Help me find her. Is there any place at all you think she could be? That somebody could have taken her?”

  Her anger was spent and she was crying. But finally she said, “I don’t know. But if she’s with Wayne… we have a cabin up above Index, in the Cascades. Wayne used to go up there until Rob made him give back the key…”

  “Where exactly is it?”

  She was reluctant to give me directions. “I don’t know i
f Rob would like it. You going there.”

  “It may be a question of saving your daughter’s life. At this point I don’t know what somebody might do to her.”

  “But Rob…”

  “Stop thinking of Rob for a minute and think of Trish. Please, Melanie.”

  She gave in and told me where the cabin was, probably not so much because she really believed that Trish was there, or that Trish was in danger, but because she was used to yielding. Or perhaps that was wrong. Maybe she really did think Rob had done something to her daughter and was just too afraid to say it.

  38

  INDEX WAS IN THE MOUNTAINS, a tiny town on the Skykomish River. It took us over an hour to get there, in spite of June’s speed. There was snow and ice on the road; the night seemed very black. Index had a population of 169, according to its sign, a few stores and city buildings, a gas station and a tavern. Only the tavern was open.

  “Go up the winding road on your left out of town,” Melanie had said. “It’s about two miles, but you may not be able to get through if there’s a lot of snow.”

  She was right. Halfway out of town the road became undriveable. June wanted to turn back. “If we can’t get through, neither could anybody else, especially not dragging Trish along.”

  “They could have walked. She might have gone willingly and he didn’t have to drag her. They might have had snowshoes.”

  “They could have, but we don’t. I say we go back to Index and call the Washington State Patrol.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “We’ll look stupid if she’s not there.”

  “We’ll look stupid if she is there and if the guy has a gun or something. In fact, we may look dead.”

  “Well, you can go back, but I’m going on. At least to see if there’s a light in the window or anything.” I got out of the car.

  “You are too damned stubborn for your own good,” she called after me. “Besides, you know I’d never let you go up there alone.”