“Cat got your tongue?” Nadine asked.
I smiled at her, not really feeling it yet, but closer. “Sorry. Got lost in my thoughts there for a moment. Your story is powerful.”
She nodded. “But all that is in the past. Are you ready to go?” she asked, yanking me the rest of the way out of my head.
“Sure.” I fished a twenty and ten from my wallet and stuck them in with the bill, then slid it to overhang two inches past the edge of the table, but centered precisely.
“Wait, you can’t get that.” Nadine grabbed her purse.
The waiter appeared out of nowhere and took the folder like a trout taking a fly.
“I already did.” I smiled and stood up. “Want to come with me to see the duplex I’m hoping to lease?”
She got to her feet, towering over me in high-heeled boots. “My kids are in school, and I’ve got nowhere to be for a few hours. Why not?”
Nadine drove her Harley, following me south on Soncy Road toward a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town. After a mile or two of stoplights, I veered left onto Hollywood, through former prairie on both sides of the road. Other than a few real estate signs, there were no marked improvements to the land I’d known since childhood, until we came to a cluster of houses on the left. Even once we’d turned into that neighborhood, I couldn’t see much change to the land’s former condition, other than houses plopped down onto square plots of snow-speckled brown grass. The houses themselves were nondescript: brick flanked on each side by mirror-image driveways and entrances. The vehicles out front were mostly midrange hybrids and electrics, a far cry from what you’d find in old Amarillo. I pulled in behind a Ford Focus and got out. Nadine rumbled to a stop behind me and parked at an angle to the curb.
A pregnant woman stood in the doorway on the right side of the house in a flannel empire-waist maxi dress and a heavy gray shawl.
“Hello,” she called out and waved.
I raised a hand in greeting, waiting for Nadine to dismount and join me. We walked up the sidewalk together.
“I’m Emily,” I said, holding out a hand, which the woman took. “This is Nadine.”
“Nadine, Emily, I’m Sara Edwards, one of the homeowners. Nice to meet you.”
“You, too.” Nadine shook Sara’s hand.
Sara tucked her chin-length brown curls behind one ear. “Shall we go inside?”
“Absolutely,” I replied.
The three of us walked to the far side of a tiny entryway with earth-toned ceramic tile floors. The tile ended at each edge of the entrance and gave way to neutral tan carpet. We stood on the edge of the large space that held the living room, dining area, and kitchen, with windows all across it to a barren backyard.
As I admired the maple kitchen cabinets in a natural finish, the light granite countertops, and the stainless steel appliances, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A little girl flew high in a swing, kicking her feet, being pushed by a teenage boy. Another girl about his age sat in another swing, twisting side to side with her toes on the ground. They looked familiar but were too far away to recognize for sure out of my peripheral vision. I glanced away from the kitchen and looked for them, and they were no longer in the yard—if they were ever there. I sidestepped and put my hand out, suddenly feeling dizzy.
Movement in the kitchen caught my peripheral attention again. Three dark heads in stairstep height, six hands busy washing and drying dishes. I switched my gaze quickly from the backyard to the kitchen. No kids.
What was wrong with me? A psychotic break? Normal people didn’t see imaginary kids in strangers’ houses. I put my fingers to my cheek to refocus myself and studied the interior décor.
The walls in the kitchen and the other two rooms were a tasteful-if-nondescript almond with crisp white trim. My Dallas condo had been white, black, and silver to suit Rich’s taste, so this would be a refreshing change for me. I lowered my hand and swiveled to look in either direction off the foyer. Hallways jutted toward doorways beyond.
The faint laughter of children bounced toward me down one hall. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears; that, or see if Sara had any Valium.
Sara’s voice pulled me back into the real world. “My husband and I are moving into a bigger house.” She put her hand on her enormous belly. “Number four. We need more space. But he’s always wanted to own rental properties, so here we go, right?” She beamed, revealing perfect white teeth.
“Congratulations,” I said, as I tried to peer down the hallway without drawing attention to myself. Maybe there really were people down there. Sara’s kids, perhaps? But why did I think it had sounded like Betsy’s laugh?
“Thank you,” Sara said.
Nadine shot me a “gag me” look with her index finger jabbing into her mouth behind Sara’s head, but I barely noticed, my mind on the tricks my imagination was playing on me. Seeing people that weren’t there? Hearing sounds that weren’t real? Maybe it wasn’t a psychotic break; maybe the curry was spoiled, and this was food poisoning.
Sara put her hand on my arm. “Is it just the two of you that would plan on living here? Not that we have anything against lesbians, of course.”
Nadine set down the framed picture she had lifted from a low table in the entryway. “Good to know.” She took a deep breath, raising her shoulders an inch.
I hurried to prevent Nadine from going any further. “Us either. But, it’s only me. Nadine’s providing me with moral support today.”
“Ah. Well, it’s a lot of house for one person.”
The sound of Betsy’s voice broke through for a moment, and I fought not startling and widening my eyes in reaction. “Can I have the bedroom with the purple butterflies?” her little voice asked. “Farrah can share with me until she moves away.”
Just like that I was certain, as certain as I ever could be. I would get this house and adopt Betsy and help Greg and Farrah and have it all, dang it, because I could pull this off and everybody would be the better for it.
“No,” I said to Sara. “It’s the perfect amount of space. I’ll take it.”
Nadine raised her eyebrows, and I flashed her a weak smile.
Chapter Eleven
Hours later—per Greg’s instructions—I pulled my Mustang flush alongside an unremarkable apartment complex in the center of town. I eased forward until I was as near as I could get to the stairs on its north side. Twilight had fallen, and the meager lighting cast an eerie glow on the hulking brick building and asphalt lot around it. Red, green, yellow, blue, and orange lights blinked from a lone window on the upper floor. Somewhere behind me, an engine revved. Glasspacks, loud enough to wake the neighborhood.
Greg and Farrah had taken refuge here with a young man who had aged out of the foster system, a guy Greg had lived with in a previous foster family. It was a decent enough solution to their desperate situation the night before, but obviously their problems had morphed from those of mere runaways in the dead of winter into those of a much more dangerous kind.
The passenger-side back door opened suddenly, and I squeaked. I whipped my head around in time to see Farrah’s tiny figure scoot across the backseat and Greg’s bigger but still-too-thin body follow her. Each teenager wore black, head to toe. Greg shut the door softly, and Farrah laid her head on Greg’s legs. He lowered his to her back, which put them well below the bottom of the windows. They were hidden, unless someone walked right up to my car.
“You scared me to death. I never even saw you guys out there,” I said.
“Sorry,” Greg said.
“Thank you,” Farrah added.
“You’re welcome.” I hadn’t even put my car in park yet, so I eased off the brake and made a wide left back to the parking lot exit. “Do you need anything in town before we drive out to Heaven?”
“Heaven?” Farrah’s voice rose in pitch.
“Sorry. Bushland. Where I live. Heaven is my boss’s nickname for it.”
“Why?”
“It’s west of to
wn, and he says that makes it halfway to the Heaven that is New Mexico.”
“Is New Mexico Heaven?”
I laughed, turning left on Paramount toward I-40. “Parts of it are quite lovely.”
“We need to get where we’re going, quick, before someone sees us,” she said.
Her words made my skin prickle. I checked my rearview mirror, getting a fix on the cars behind me. Black Ford F-150. White minivan of some type. Silver Camry. “Greg said the shooter saw you guys. Do you think he knows who you are? Or followed you?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know—did he call you by name?”
Neither kid answered. I let the silence linger as I merged onto I-40 going west. “Have you seen him before?” I scanned the rearview for cars again. The minivan was still behind me. I cut my eyes back to the road, then stretched upward to catch the kids in the rearview. It didn’t work, so I adjusted the mirror until I could see their faces. They were both staring back at me. “Well?”
Farrah answered. “We can’t talk about it.”
“Why?” Silence met my question again, like a brick wall. Then it hit me. “You guys don’t trust me.”
“Nothing personal.”
“Then why’d you call me?”
“We trust you more than anyone else.”
“How come?”
“Remember that time when we met you?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“We could hear you out there, you know, talking to that CPS guy. Walter or whatever.”
“Wallace.”
“Yeah. Anyway, he didn’t want to come in the house, because he wouldn’t break the rules, even though you guys were looking for a lost little girl, and she could have been in there.”
“Right, so?”
“So, you were. You were brave enough to go in by yourself, too. So, we trust you, mostly.”
I laughed. “Most people would reach the opposite conclusion from that story.”
Greg’s deeper voice— not by much—said, “Not us. And it’s not just about trust. If we tell you, then you could be in trouble.”
I met his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Greg, if you’re being watched, whoever it is assumed you’ve already told me, as soon as he saw you get in this car. Don’t kid yourself.”
I looked away to check the road and then back at him again. He stared at me and nodded, his head sideways over Farrah’s shoulders, but he didn’t say anything else. They looked so young and vulnerable. Remembering that they’d been seeking a ride out of town at the Love’s the night before, I recalled that the newspaper article I’d read that morning mentioned public indecency issues at the truck stop. I cringed. They’d probably come closer than they’d known to a lot more than witnessing a murder.
I watched the road again. “So, at my house, there’s one other person. My mother. But it’s cool. You guys can stay in my room, and she’ll never know you’re there.”
“No one else can know about us,” Greg reminded me.
I chose my words carefully, not wanting to overcommit. “I understand.”
As we exited Amarillo proper, we passed the iconic Cadillac Ranch on our left, or at least we passed where I knew it to be. It was too dark to see the ten angled Cadillacs planted in the dirt, every square inch of each covered in a rainbow of spray-painted graffiti that would be partially obscured by snow right now. I saw them every day, sometimes more than once, and I knew them by heart.
I checked behind us again. No white minivan. No nothing, no nobody, as far as I could see. If the murderer had been watching them, he or she didn’t seem to be following us now. And if CPS or the police had been onto their whereabouts, they would have been doing more than watching. Maybe the kids were being paranoid that they’d been recognized, that the murderer was searching for them, even following them. Or maybe they weren’t.
Acid churned in my gut. I was out on a limb here, transporting known runaways from the same state system I was trying to get permission from to foster and adopt, on the heels of getting myself arrested on charges of inappropriate behavior with a child, however bogus. Going behind Wallace’s back, too, and smack dab in the commission of a crime, maybe even a felony if harboring underage runaways was as illegal as it felt. Risking Betsy’s adoption. Putting myself squarely in the sights of the same killer that was after Greg and Farrah. Yeah, I was way out on this limb, to its very tip with the bough bending toward the ground as far as it would go, and the loud crack of it snapping in two only a heartbeat away.
But my heart told me I had no choice, and I would have to have faith that it wouldn’t break.
***
I parked a few minutes later in front of the little white house on fifteen acres where I lived with the maternal half of my gene pool. Once again, I checked the side-view mirror. No headlights. I scanned the street ahead of me. No chatty neighbors out braving the cold temperatures. Our porch light had burned out the week before, and I meant to replace it, but kept forgetting. Now I was glad I’d procrastinated. Under cover of darkness, we ran to the house. I put a finger to my lips, and two heads nodded.
“Mother?” I leaned my head in the front door and listened for a reply. I knew she’d made it home before me. Her Civic was out front, and I smelled pot roast cooking.
“In the kitchen.” Her perky voice ended on two descending singsong high notes.
I motioned Greg and Farrah in ahead of me. I whispered to the two young people. “Down this hall, first door on the right.” I used a half shout for my mother. ”I’ll be in there in a second. Gotta run to the bathroom first.”
“Okey dokey,” she sang.
I scurried ahead of the kids to my room, the kitchen noise and hall carpeting muffling what little sound we made. My feet were like raindrops; theirs were as silent as dew. I may have trained to be Sacajawea, but they’d had a lot more real-world experience at becoming invisible and soundless. We entered my Western-themed room and I pulled the door shut behind us, turning the knob so that the latch wouldn’t click as I eased it closed. I flipped on the bedside table lamp, and low light bathed my childhood bedroom. Green and brown-clad cowgirls rode horseback across every fabric surface—the wall included—twirling their lassos against a red background.
Greg made a prune face, like he’d gotten a snoot of vinegar. “Holy shit, this room is—”
“Really cool.” Farrah smiled for the first time since I’d known her.
My mother kept the house a sweltering eighty degrees in the winter, yet neither Greg nor Farrah removed their black knit caps. The ends of her pixie hair curled around the edges of hers. Her smile sparkled from her eyes like onyx.
Greg shook his head. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.” The boy’s hair, lighter than Farrah’s, showed below the edges of his cap, and it was longer and stringier, like a young Kurt Cobain. So was his body. I’d have to feed him while he was here—a lot.
Farrah turned to me. “I love horses.”
“Me, too. As you probably guessed, this was my room when I was a lot younger.” And now, for the time being, anyway. My divorce had left me essentially destitute. I planned to move out when I had enough cash, which I hoped would be soon. “We can make spots for you to sleep on the floor in here with me for tonight, and figure out a better plan for tomorrow.”
“Thank you.” Pink spotted Farrah’s cheeks, the only color besides her lips on her entire body. “We know you could get in a lot of trouble for this. We won’t let it happen.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Greg lowered his voice. He couldn’t be more than fifteen, and Farrah younger than that, and the affectation made him sound even younger.
“Yep. We just have to keep you guys a secret from everyone.” Especially Wallace. He would be fired or even arrested if he didn’t report the runaways back to the authorities. “Okay, I’m going to see my mother so she doesn’t come looking for me. There are blankets and pillows in the closets, the password’s taped to the monitor for the desktop, and there are books down the
re.” I pointed to the bottom shelf on my nightstand. “Lock the doorknob, and I’ll be back soon, with food.”
They nodded, and I slipped out the door, shutting it quietly behind me. On the other side, I leaned against it and drew in a huge breath and held it, counting to five-one-thousand, then let it out. I pasted a smile on my face. It felt wrong, and I tried again. Better. I walked to the kitchen.
The kitchen décor made my bedroom seem blah. Red cedar paneling competed with gold Formica countertops and wallpaper of blue and purple flowers and twirling green vines. The chrome-legged table had a Formica top, too, but green. It could drive a woman to drink, which sounded like a good idea about now. I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the box wine.
“How was your day, Mother?”
“You’ll never believe it, but Pastor Robb announced today that he’s leaving. Only this must have been in the works for a while, because we’ll have a new pastor by Sunday. And it’s a woman! I’ve never worked for a woman before.”
Mother doubled as the secretary and most fervent worshipper at the Panhandle Believers Church, with a belief system older than she was by several decades. She wiped her hands on a frilly white-skirted apron longer than her skirt. Even with the homespun apron, she looked like an aging Vegas showgirl. Mother had a penchant for stilettos, and she didn’t like to cover too much of her long legs if she could help it. She never went in public without a full face of Mary Kay and half a bottle of Aqua Net—White Rain would do in a pinch—holding her baby-fine blonde hair perfectly in place.
I pulled a glass tumbler from the red cedar cabinet. “Want one?”
“A smidge.” She indicated about a sixteenth of an inch with her finger and thumb.
“So, that’s pretty big news. How are the Believers taking it?” I grabbed a second glass and poured her smidge and my own full up.
Earth to Emily Page 8