But instead he came over with a red-hot hanger and stood so close to her face she could feel the heat of him through her closed eyelids the whole time she unbuttoned her shirt. He told her she better not ever charge more than he says and pocket the difference. Told her she wasn’t going anywhere.
Did he have to burn her?
Nah. She said just get through this and then you’ll go.
So she ran?
She was going to, but something happened and she didn’t need to.
What?
Sacramento came for Brenda.
A van pulled up, and three guys jumped out. Rose didn’t even know what she was seeing until they grabbed Brenda and hit her in the mouth and dragged her into the van with startling expertise, the back doors swinging shut as it sped around the block.
What did she do, standing there on the street?
She ran to the Golden Arms, stuffed her things into a garbage bag, and left before Pomeroy and Yo could get there.
Why?
She saw how to make Pomeroy pay.
How?
Sacramento.
THIRTY-TWO
Word of Rachel came in a letter from the Seattle Department of Social and Health Services, which had languished on his desk in the stack of pamphlets and newsletters and official correspondence he’d all but ceased even leafing through. He’d knocked over a stack of mail and his eyes lit on the Seattle DSHS seal on the envelope, and realizing what it might contain, ripped it open. The words swept by, he comprehended in bursts.
Dear Mr. Snow . . . not sure, but I believe we have your daughter, a girl by the name of Rose . . . Rose! . . . matches her description . . . in our Bremerton facility . . . would like you to reunite. . . . please feel free to contact me directly . . . Norman Butler, DSHS . . .
The letter was dated in August, a few days after the raid. Pete couldn’t understand why the guy bothered to type up a letter when he could have called. For a moment, he was too furious to read it again. Maybe he’d tried to call. Fuck. He probably did call and couldn’t get him. He should’ve left a Missoula number, the main office.
Rose.
The girl in Indianapolis had said she went by Rose. This was her.
He picked up his phone and dialed Butler at Seattle DSHS. It rang and rang and no one answered. He hung up, tried again. He listened until the ring tone through the speaker turned into a babble of water. He grabbed his keys, and drove ten hours to Seattle.
It was deep in the night when he arrived. He drove through downtown, got turned around, then properly lost. He stopped at a light, rubbed his temples and eyes.
Several blocks away, someone in a wheelchair hurtled down the paved hill. A figment of his quaking sleep-deprived vision. Or not. The chair and its occupant cut a long swath through the street, down and down like a suicidal star, and homed in on the judge’s car. The blinking streetlights lit the man amber as he continued on his trajectory through the intersection. He braked with fingerless gloves and knocked into the wheel well of Pete’s car, skidding alongside and coming to a rude stop at Pete’s window. A ribald assemblage of crooked, parted teeth, and cracked lips under a cankerous thin-haired skull. Pete tingled with inchoate terror. Was this motherfucker even real. The man put a gloved palm on Pete’s window and moaned out a few sentiments.
Pete gunned his car through the empty red light. The image of the lunatic was a long time leaving his mind. A revenant, a bad omen.
He caught a ferry to Bremerton. The DSHS offices were in an old marble building and caseworkers streamed in with the morning traffic and the lot soon filled. It began to rain, the sunrise overcome by gray slabs of stormwork, ominous thunder.
Pete ran inside. Clients already sat banked on the benches by the door, watching him shake water off his coat. The glass rattled in the panes at the rumbling outside like the concussions of a besieged city. Phones rang out unanswered it seemed. Pete slipped by the empty front desk with his lanyard badge around his neck and paced the floor, scanning cubicles and office nameplates for Butler’s desk. He found the cubicle and waited in a chair near it until the man himself approached, stirring a Styrofoam cup of coffee. A mustache like bowed longhorns, a doleful exaggeration of the expression produced by his jowls and chins, his sagged hangdog eyes, as though in some fundamental way the man were melting.
“Norman Butler?”
The man nodded.
“I’m Pete Snow. You sent me a letter about my daughter.”
Even Butler’s smile when he shook Pete’s hand had a somnolent quality, a kind of surrender to it, as if a handshake and greeting were a formality he’d rather not observe, but would be far too much trouble to rid from his human routine.
Pete explained who he was. Butler listened with narrow nods, his head tucked down as though it might turtle back into his chest cavity.
“So have you seen her?”
“Personally?”
“I mean is she here.”
“Hard saying.”
Pete waited for more explanation that was not immediately forthcoming. The man sat down at his desk almost as if they’d completed their business.
“Look, I just drove all the way from Montana. Waited all night for your office to open. I want to go wherever she is. Can you find out what facility she’s in?”
“When did you say you got my letter?”
“Yesterday. But you sent it in August. I didn’t realize what it was until yesterday.”
Butler leaned back, his chair cracking like a pair of knuckles.
“Well, there’s no telling where she is now.”
“Surely you can find out. A file?”
“The letter,” Butler said, thrusting out a large palm, fine long fingers. Pete gave it over. Butler sat at his desk and opened a thin drawer and plucked out a pair of reading glasses and took a good deal of time situating them on his face. He started to read, took the glasses off, cleaned them, put them back on, and resumed reading.
“I asked you to call.” Butler put his finger on this instruction in the letter, as if he would have Pete read the passage again.
“I know. I did. There was no answer.”
“I don’t work Mondays.”
“Right.”
They looked at one another. A realization crept over Pete that there was something deeply amiss with this man.
“I asked you to call so I could avoid having you take a trip if she wasn’t here—”
“Can you just tell me if she’s in your facility or not?”
“We have more than one facility, but none of them would have her for this long.”
“Well, where is she?”
“She could have had a court date and then would be in the juvenile facility. She could have been sent to one of the treatment centers. I have so many cases, you see.”
“Yes—”
“Or a long-term facility.”
“Okay, but—”
“Or she may have been released to an adult guardian in the community—”
“Norman,” Pete said, covering his eyes.
“Yes?”
“I don’t expect you to know where she is off the top of your head.”
“I’m just trying to tell you the possible outcomes, Mr. Snow.”
“Is there a way we can find out the actual outcome?”
Norman sighed out of his nose and stood. Pete followed him around the corner and down a row of cubicles to a locked door. He thumbed through several dozen keys on several interlocked key rings for several minutes. When the door swung open, he flipped on the light and stepped aside. A card table strained under the weight of hundreds of manila folders between two walls of filing cabinets.
“Her file is there,” Butler said.
Pete took off his coat and set it on the floor, there was nowhere else in the smallness of the space.
“There’s coffee in the break room,” Butler said.
Two pages. She’d given her name as Rose Snow. It made him think of blood, of someone dying in the snow. Sh
e’d been arrested for prostitution.
Prostitution.
He scanned the rest of the document in a fugue, without affiliation to what it described.
It was the only way.
“What did she need to go to the clinic for?” Pete asked.
Butler looked up at Pete and then took the file and read it over with his glasses and handed it back.
“It doesn’t say.”
“I know it doesn’t fucking say. Who’s this Yolando Purvis you released her to?”
“Purvis . . . ,” he said, chewing on his pen. “Why do I remember her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s an address here, I’ll just go—”
“Let me see.”
Pete handed the file over. Again with the fetching of his glasses from his shirt, the reading. Pete wanted to punch him in the face, he was so slow.
“Ah, right,” Butler said, nodding to himself like he’d figured out a portion of a crossword.
“What is it?”
“The Golden Arms is a young-adult transition facility. A place we have set up for street kids so they have an address, so they can get a job, et cetera.”
Pete pulled on his coat.
“You should go there,” Butler suggested.
No one answered when he knocked on the apartment door, so Pete waited in the hall. A wallpaper of repeating roses. A fire extinguisher behind glass. The powerful odor of something canned and meaty cooking on a hot plate.
No one came by, so he went out to a cafe around the corner. He ordered a brothy chowder of rubbery seafood that turned in his stomach. He watched through the bleary windows for her.
There was no answer at the apartment again. He searched for signs of Rachel, as if she’d have left behind a clue or written her name on the wall for some reason. As if she’d have left a trail of bread crumbs. Fairy tales bore troubling resonance now. Wolves and dark forests. He wondered was she scared, how scared.
His chest clenched around his heart and it wouldn’t release, and for a few moments he thought he would faint right there in the lobby, his rib cage slowly suffocating him like a great bony hand. He sat on the hall runner worn to a napless gray and swallowed deep breaths. Told himself things he would tell a client. That the anxiety would pass. That all was not as it seemed. Not as dire.
But it was as dire. Exactly as dire.
In the lobby, he thought about calling Beth.
He didn’t want to talk to her.
He didn’t want to be alone.
He dialed.
She answered and he told her where he was.
“I’m outside her place, waiting for her to turn up.”
“Where?”
A couple came in the front door of the apartment and crossed the lobby. A guy with shoulder-length black hair and a short and overweight vaguely Asian girl. They went up the stairs together. The only people he’d seen come or go.
“Seattle.”
“Seattle.”
She’d begun to softly sob.
“Is she okay?”
He thumped the receiver against his forehead.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes. This place is nice. She’s living with some people.”
“What people?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“How did you find her?”
He explained. Partially. Nothing about Rachel’s arrest.
“I’ve been praying for her every night, Pete. He’s been protecting her.”
She began to cry again. They were quiet a few minutes like this, him listening to her cry. He felt like bawling as well, but he was too keyed up watching the door. For her to walk in any minute.
“Why did you leave, Pete?”
“When?”
“When you were here. In Austin.”
“It . . . was time to go, Beth.”
“You should’ve come to church with me.”
“I’m gonna find Rachel. And then I’m gonna take her home.”
“With you?”
“She can live in Tenmile with me or Missoula or wherever she wants.”
His head swam, and he had to sit in the phone booth with his head between his legs.
“I keep feeling like I’m going to faint. My hands are tingling.”
“Pete?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to tell you about Jesus, Pete.”
He blew out long breaths.
“That’s where we lost our way, Pete. We gotta get right with Jesus.”
“Okay, Beth.”
“Keep your heart open.”
“Wide open, Beth.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
He set the receiver on top of the phone. Concentrated on his breathing.
RACHEL NEVER SHOWED UP. This did not prevent him from depicting it.
She comes in shaking off an umbrella.
She comes in shivering cold.
She comes in with someone else.
Then she sees Pete. She starts to cry. He goes to her.
Or she runs away. He runs her down, outside. She cries. He has her.
All night he sat there. People came and left, none of them her.
He tried the apartment again on the chance that she’d come in a back way. He was startled to see the black-haired kid that he’d observed in the lobby with the other girl answer the door. Up close it was apparent that his hair was dyed. He had the face of a skeptical cartoon rat.
“I’m looking for Rachel Snow,” Pete said.
The kid was twenty, early twenties.
“Sorry, man, wrong apartment.”
He started to close the door, but Pete stopped him.
“Rose. She goes by Rose.”
The kid wore no shirt, and a few bright scars rose on an otherwise immaculate pale torso. Pete could hear the girl at something inside, running water. There were candles. Cigarette smoke.
“Can I come in?”
“Nah, man, you can’t come in,” he said with a trace of amusement.
“You know her. Come on.”
The kid looked down and black dyed hair fell over his eye.
“I know she stays here.”
The girl from inside asked who it was. Pete half-hollered into the place that he was Rachel’s—Rose’s—father. Was she Yolanda. Was she the one to whom Rose was released when she got out of juvie.
The girl came to the door and glanced at Pete, and then she and the guy had a wordless exchange that verged into wordless argument. The guy threw up his hands and retreated inside. Yolanda invited Pete in.
“This is Pomeroy,” Yolanda said. Pete sat on the edge of the bed because there was no place else to sit except at the table in the kitchen, and Pomeroy occupied the sole chair, smoking and turning his cigarette in the ashtray to a throbbing red point.
“Your daughter isn’t here.”
“Do you know where she’s staying?”
“Nope.”
Yolanda tugged off her pajama pants and pulled on a pair of jeans. She took off her shirt, slung herself into a bra, and buttoned herself into a blouse. Pete looked at the floor.
“You might find her at the Monastery or down around Pike’s Place.”
Pete procured a small pad and pencil from inside his coat and wrote this down.
Pomeroy lit another cigarette and avoided looking at Pete directly. A panoply of bottles, compacts, brushes and combs, and jewelry on Yolanda’s bureau tinkled as she walked to him.
“How long was she with you two?”
Yolanda glanced toward Pomeroy who sat and studied the ashtray.
“Since August, I guess,” she said.
Pete stood and thanked them both. Told them what hotel he’d be staying in and asked that if they saw Rachel would they tell her that he was looking for her. Tell her where he was staying. Pomeroy mashed out his cigarette.
“Sure, man,” he said. “We’ll tell her.”
He went to Pike Street and Pine and trod all
over Capitol Hill. Nights he stood outside the Monastery and watched the kids and homosexuals and dancers mince about and smoke and trot off in small groups to do drugs or get some drugs or drinks. Kids who in Tenmile would have been at the Dairy Queen plotting quaint kinds of trouble, snapping bra straps, necking with second cousins. So young, these kids. Some of them looking no more than twelve, some riding skates. Occasionally a girl would cry or there would be a fight, a bloody upper lip, once a seizure, an ambulance, paramedics soaked in rainwater and amber light, the scene melting like a sand castle, rose-colored snow.
She was here.
He sat on a concrete berm just up the street from where very young girls got into cars with strange men and returned a half hour later. He doubted what he was seeing when Pomeroy and Yolanda arrived. Yolanda sat on a bike rack by the boom box, smoking and chewing gum, the girls shuttling between positions on the rack like ravens on a power line. Pomeroy off talking with other girls, young girls who seemed to be feeling out the scene, practically shouting to be heard over the traffic. Pete could hear snatches of the things Pomeroy said.
A whore turns eighteen, she can give blood instead of head.
I don’t play no games. You do what you want.
Sure, maybe we can use you later, come back around ten.
Yolanda slipped into the open door of a sedan. He wondered where were the police. What city would permit this outrage. Then a squad car pulled up and Pomeroy talked with the cops inside it pleasantly, leaning over the passenger door, pushing his jet hair behind his ear. Like he’d called them to report suspicious activity.
Pete harbored two contradictory thoughts: he wanted Rachel to appear, he thanked God she didn’t.
All day it threatened to drizzle but never much did. Pomeroy appeared on the concrete berm next to Pete, startling him.
“Are we gonna have a problem?” Pomeroy asked.
“Took me a while to realize what you were.”
Pomeroy shook his head.
“Monna need to know if we have a problem, man.”
“Yeah, we have problem,” Pete said. “I’m a disaster can’t wait to happen.”
Fourth of July Creek (9780062286451) Page 39