by Meg O'Brien
I know that voice, Abby thought. Who is it? I know that voice.
Then she was gone.
13
Boiling sun scorched her left arm. The air was so hot and thick she could barely breathe. A heavy weight pressed down on her chest and lungs.
A fly buzzed. A fly buzzed, and then I died.
Was that right? she wondered numbly. Didn’t Emily Dickinson write that, or something like it?
It might have been Millay. She was so morose at times. But no—
“Stop it, dammit, stop it!” she cursed at the fly. “My head hurts!”
Oh, God, it really hurts.
She tried to raise a hand to stop the incessant buzzing, but her hands were paralyzed. Opening her eyes, she saw blood on her shirt. Blood on the wheel.
Steering wheel.
Lifting her head, she saw that her hands were cuffed to the wheel of her rental car. The cuffs were silver metal, like police issue.
It all flooded back.
Someone had struck her with something. She wasn’t out long, because she remembered her mouth being taped, and a hood being placed over her head. She remembered being dragged across the backyard of that house. They must have dragged her all the way down the street to her car. Her back felt as if she’d been tossed into a fire. But the hood and the tape were gone. As consciousness returned full force, the intense pain brought a scream to her lips.
The fly stopped buzzing. Everything became still, then the noise began again.
But it wasn’t a fly. Now that she was fully conscious, the noise was much louder than that.
What, then?
Machinery. A bulldozer or something, working nearby. It had stopped for a second or two. Did someone hear her scream?
Hope changed to horror as she saw what was coming directly at her. Not a bulldozer, but one of those machines with a giant scoop. The scoop was filled with junk—pieces of rusted metal, like parts from something. Before she could scream again the scoop rose up, then dumped its load. Tons of scrap metal rained down on the car’s roof, making a hellish noise. Some of it poured through the half-open driver’s window, scraping and covering Abby’s legs and feet. The scoop backed up, lifted another load and moved toward her again. Another two scoops and she’d be covered, buried. She’d suffocate. No one would ever find her.
A sudden, horrific thought: What did they do with scrap metal, or with something as large as a car? Did they set them on fire, like they did in garbage dumps?
No. They crushed them. Crushed them into blocks of metal that were a thousand times smaller than the original waste. Like a giant trash compactor.
This time she let loose with a scream born of deep-down, mortal fear. With every ounce of strength she could summon, Abby thrashed about, yanking at the handcuffs in sheer panic, then beating her head against the horn, trying to make it work. The scoop came closer and closer, rose up and—
Stopped.
Abby was still screaming and her wrists were bloody. Fresh blood from her head dripped into her eyes and down her face.
But there was a man at her window, peering in.
“Goddamn!” he yelled. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
Her door was yanked open, the pieces of scrap metal pulled aside. The man swore again as he saw the handcuffs. “My God, who did this to you?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Never mind. I’ll be right back.”
Moments passed when her mind went dead, but then she heard a loud metallic snap, and another. Her hands came free from the wheel, and she felt herself being pulled from the car. The man lifted her gently, but her back still seared with pain. She couldn’t help crying out.
He was speaking to someone else. “Call 911. This woman needs a hospital. Who are you?” he asked.
She looked into his eyes. “Angel,” she answered before bursting into tears. But she didn’t mean herself. She meant him.
At first, Abby thought she was dreaming. She lay on a cloud, and the only sound from the spheres was the beating of her heart. She began to count the heartbeats—one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand—as if they were seconds ticking away her life. When a woman’s voice sounded above her and Abby saw she was dressed in white, she thought it must be God. It was reassuring to know at last that God was indeed a woman. Reassuring, yet in some ways surprising.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time,” she said without words, understanding that God was good at telepathy. “You know, about why childbirth has to be painful, and why women have to have periods for forty years even when they don’t plan to have children. Oh, and about people, and why we eat your cows—”
A nasty prick in her butt brought her out of delirium, assuring her that this couldn’t be heaven, after all. It must still be her life on earth.
In other words, hell.
She didn’t have time to wonder why that thought had come to her. A familiar voice sounded close to her ear. “Abby? Abby, wake up. It’s me, Ben.”
Her lips felt stuck together. She tried to moisten them with her tongue, but it felt like sand. “Ben?”
“You’re at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Abby. In Phoenix. You’re going to be all right.”
“How…?”
“The hospital found my number in your purse and they called me,” he said.
She tried to ask him a question, but her mind kept closing down. Drifting off. When she finally said something, it made no sense. “The chickens…they’re out of the coop.”
She knew it made no sense because of the way Ben half smiled. “They’ve got you pretty well doped up,” he said. “You had to have stitches in your forehead, but you’ll be all right.”
She tried to lift a hand to touch his, but couldn’t. Moving her head to the side, she winced. Memories of being shackled in the car came back as she saw the restraints at her elbows. Panic rose in her throat. “Get these off me!” she tried to yell, though her voice was dry and rasping. “Get them off!”
Ben put a calming hand on her arm. “It’s okay. They’re to protect your back. They put them on you so you couldn’t move around too much. I’m sure they’ll take them off now that you’re awake.”
“My wrists,” she said, taking a deep breath. “They hurt.”
Ben nodded. “It looks like you really fought those handcuffs, Ab. The nurse put some kind of ointment on them. That’s why the restraints are at your elbows instead of your wrists.”
“Handcuffs,” she said. Something important about the handcuffs. But she seemed to be drifting in and out.
“You learn anything?” a different voice said.
Abby forced her eyes open.
Lessing. The FBI agent, at the doorway.
Of course, she thought with sudden clarity. That’s why Ben was here, too. They wanted to find out what she’d learned about Alicia—if she’d found her, or knew where she was.
Abby closed her eyes again and feigned sleep. But the mere fact of doing that made her really drift off. She struggled against it. Help me not to say anything while I’m out, she prayed at the last minute. Help me…
14
The morning sun blazing on her face woke her up, and for a moment she thought she was back in the car again. Panic rose in her throat, but then a young woman in a striped nurse’s aide uniform came to her bedside.
“Hey, how we doin’ today, Ms. Northrup?” the aide said.
“I don’t know about you, but I feel like shit,” Abby answered, with so much lucidity and force it surprised her.
“Sorry.” The girl smiled. “You must be gettin’ better. That’s what they say when a patient gets grumpy.”
Abby tried to smile back, but it hurt her forehead to do so. She looked at the girl’s name tag. Noreen. “Can you help me sit up, Noreen? And get me a mirror?”
“Yes to the first. Not so sure you really want a mirror.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Pretty awful,” Noreen said as she raised the head of the
bed. “I could get you one of those black veils like in the old horror movies, if you want. You could walk around like that and nobody’d ever know.”
Abby stared. “Is this what passes for a bedside manner these days?”
Even, white teeth flashed in the young aide’s dark face. “Just tryin’ to get a smile out of you, Ms. Northrup. You’re not gonna be smilin’ when you look in that mirror.”
Abby couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “You are the meanest, most sadistic nurse’s aide I’ve ever seen. How old are you, anyway?”
“Thirty-two goin’ on fifty,” Noreen said.
“No, really.”
“That’s the truth. I’ve been doin’ this work goin’ on fourteen years now.”
“But, you…” The woman looked like a high school student.
“It’s the genes,” Noreen said. “You got ’em, too, I can tell. What are you, a Pisces? Pisces get younger every year, you know.”
Abby sighed. “Mirror. Please.”
Noreen shrugged and took one from the bedside stand. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said gently.
Abby took the mirror and studied the stitches on her forehead. Part of her hair had been shaved to accommodate them.
“They told me,” the aide said, “that you got those hitting the steering wheel of a car to get somebody’s attention. Tryin’ to blow the horn, they said. That must’ve taken a lot of guts, Ms. Northrup.”
“More like desperation. Did they tell you what happened to me?”
“Those two men who were here? They didn’t even look my way.” She folded her arms. “I sure did notice them, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I may be speakin’ out of turn—”
“Hey, why stop now?” Abby said.
“I just don’t think they’re very good friends,” Noreen said.
“To each other?”
“No, to you. I may be wrong, but I sure wouldn’t trust ’em.”
“Really? Why do you say that?” Abby asked.
“I don’t know…instinct, I guess.”
Abby never discounted instinct. It was instinct that had made her distrust the woman at the house last night, and instinct that made her go back there.
It might not have been a smart move to return there without help, given the circumstances, but her instinct had been right. Something was wrong about that house, and she still couldn’t be sure Allie wasn’t there.
“Did I say anything to those men when I was unconscious?” Abby asked.
“Well, I wasn’t in here all the time, of course,” Noreen said, straightening up the sheets. “But I did hear you say a couple of things. Something about Las Vegas, I think. And some kind of tree.”
“A tree? What kind of tree?”
“Hmm.” The aide looked off into space and seemed to be thinking back. “Sorry, I just can’t quite remember.”
“Was it a willow tree?” Abby prompted.
“Yeah, that’s it!” Noreen smiled widely. “I wouldn’t worry about it, though, ’cause that’s when you were still pretty out of it and didn’t make much sense.”
“In what way?”
She grinned. “You said you spoke to the tree.”
Abby didn’t smile. “And how did the men react to that?” she asked.
“Not the way I would’ve thought,” Noreen said. “You know, like it was funny or weird or something. They just looked at each other, then hightailed it out of here like bunnies with their tails on fire. Haven’t been back since.”
Noreen folded her arms again and frowned. “Friends don’t do that to a friend in the hospital. Do they?”
“No. You’re right, Noreen. Friends don’t do that to a friend. Whether they’re in the hospital or not.”
According to Noreen, paramedics had brought her in, and a man came along right after them. From her description, Abby was sure it had to be the man who’d found her in the car. Noreen confirmed that.
“Jenny, down in ER, is a friend of mine. She told me this guy told the police he’d been hired by a company in Prescott to clean up this junkyard and get rid of everything in it. He said he didn’t know you or anything about you, and when he saw you there it was a real shock.”
“Did the police believe him?”
“Jenny said they let him go, so I suppose they figured if he was nice enough to call 911 and get you here, he must have been all right.”
Noreen, who turned out to be a wealth of information, also told her that a Dr. Blake had examined her the night before, and wasn’t due to see her again till late afternoon.
“I know I teased you about the stitches, but that was just to get your juices going.” Noreen patted her hand. “Dr. Blake had Dr. Morrissey—he’s a plastic surgeon—come in and do your stitches. Dr. Morrissey said you’d be fine in a few weeks. He left orders for injections for the pain last night, and pills for after you woke up. He’ll be back this afternoon to see you, too.”
“I think I remember the plastic surgeon. Nice brown eyes and a soft voice? It’s all kind of hazy.”
“That’s Doc Morrissey, all right,” Noreen said. “Look, I’m getting off my shift now, but the day shift should be in soon with your meds. Now, if they don’t take care of you right today, you yell out loud and clear. Don’t take nothin’ from nobody. Hear?”
Abby heard. She just wasn’t going to be here long enough to worry about it.
She stuffed her empty stomach with Jell-O and saltines from her lunch tray, pulled on her blood-stained clothes and took her purse out of the closet. Checking, she found that there were still cards and money in there.
So she hadn’t been robbed, thank God. Still, she thought it odd that her attacker wouldn’t have taken all he could, to at least make it look like a robbery.
She looked up and down the hall. The nurses were all busy with charts or on the phones, and the aides must have been busy with patients. The hall was relatively empty. She walked in the opposite direction of the nurses’ station to an exit door and took the stairs all the way down to the parking lot. As she stepped outside, the heat hit her like a blast from a furnace.
It was a small hospital, on a medium-size lot, but she was too exhausted after all those stairs to walk around it in the heat looking for her rental car. Belatedly, she realized there was no point in doing that, anyway. Lessing or Ben would have had it towed somewhere so that Forensics could go over it.
Out on the scorching pavement, she watched three cabs pass her by and reminded herself never again to fall for the old saw, “It’s not that hot because it’s dry heat,” when applied to a hundred-and-seven-degree Arizona day. She was about to give up and go look for a used-car lot when a cab finally stopped.
“Take me to a good real estate office, please,” she said, sliding into the cool, air-conditioned haven.
The driver, a woman with long black hair who looked of Mexican descent, said, “Okay, but you’re not gonna rent a house with that face.”
Geez. Was everybody an insult comic around here?
Then she realized why the other cabs had passed her by.
“How come you stopped for me, if I look that scary?” Abby asked.
“I used to have a husband who beat me up, too,” the driver said.
“But I don’t—” Abby began, then shut up.
The cab pulled up to a curb about five minutes later, and she saw the sign, Delgado Realty. It was a store-front office on a street with pawn shops, check-cashing companies, forty-nine-dollar mattress sales and greasy-spoon cafés.
“This can’t be the best Phoenix has to offer,” she said to the driver.
“It may not be as fancy as some,” the driver said, “but my cousins own it.” She smiled. “They’ll treat you right, even with that face. Just tell them I brought you here.”
Abby felt half cautious and half grateful. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Angelita,” the woman said. “That means angel, but my ex used to call me the Devil’s Sp
awn.”
“You were lucky to get away from him, then,” Abby said, thinking of the women who came to the Prayer House for sanctuary from similar partners.
“Get away?” Angelita scoffed. “Hell, I killed the bastard.”
Abby didn’t know quite what to say.
“You never get away from them, you know,” Angelita said. “Not as long as they’re alive. They track you down and they kill you for leaving them. I just got to mine first.”
“And you got away with it?” Abby asked, shocked.
“You might say that. I got three years because it was self-defense, and I’ve done my time. It was worth it to be free of the bastard.”
Abby handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “Here. Keep the change.”
She pushed it away. “Nah, it looks like you’re having a bad time. You keep it.”
Abby didn’t want to insult her by refusing. “Thank you,” she said, and began to step out of the car.
“They have to learn that, you know,” Angelita said.
Abby paused. “What?”
“That they can’t treat us like that and not get killed for it. Then maybe they’ll stop. If the law doesn’t do it—and they don’t, most of the time—we’ve got to do it ourselves.”
Again, she didn’t know what to say. Either Angelita was the smartest woman she’d ever known—or just plain crazy.
“Angelita,” she said, searching for words and not finding any profound ones, “you are something else.”
“Remember that,” the driver said, grinning. “You send that sucker who roughed you up my way, and I’ll kill him, too.”
15
The desks and old wooden file cabinets in the real estate office were scarred and piled high with thick manila folders. The room seemed clean, though, and smelled like the library in the Prayer House, with bookcases along one wall filled with old and new volumes. As Abby entered, the only person in the room looked up and smiled.
“Help you?”
“I’m not sure. Angelita sent me. My name’s Abby,” she said.
The man stood, towering over her, and stuck out his hand. “I’m Jimmy Delgado, Angelita’s cousin. Have a seat.”