Little One

by Sarah A. Denzil

  She checked her phone. There was nothing from Adrian. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. It was another fifteen minutes to her hotel, and she was beginning to feel delirious with exhaustion. The car stopped and she almost told the driver to turn around and head back to Phoenix. Part of her wanted to get back on the plane, listen to some other woman complaining about her love life and run back to her husband in their beautiful home with the perfectly manicured garden.

  But she didn’t, because she’d called the police. She joined in the gossip. She’d contributed to the treatment of Mary Whitaker and her child. She thanked the driver. She dragged her suitcase up the hotel steps. She stumbled into the foyer and allowed someone to show her to her room. She sat down on the bed and her eyes trailed the beige walls and floral hotel art. Well, she was here. Now what?

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  She woke up at 3:00 p.m. the next day, having ignored the advice about jet lag and how to deal with it. There were no new messages on her phone. Her heart sank with disappointment and the harsh words spoken between her and Adrian echoed in her mind. Had she told him she was never coming back? Did he yell back, good? Unpleasant words bounced around her mind. His eyes bulged in her memories. She typed a text to him: Here, safe, because she couldn’t not tell him she was okay. No matter what had been said, she knew that her husband would be worrying about her. Even if he didn’t reply she knew. Barely a second or two after she sent the message, she saw that Adrian had read it. She waited another minute to see if he would respond. He didn’t.

  This was unlike him. He was never one to give her the silent treatment. She’d hurt him, deeply, by coming to Arizona, and she understood that. For once, she was ignoring it, purposefully, and she hoped that she was doing the right thing.

  Fran hauled herself out of bed for a shower. Her stomach was rumbling. She considered ordering room service, but instead dried her hair and headed down to the hotel bar, wandering the patterned corridors and feeling like she’d stepped onto the movie set of The Shining. There was someone new at reception, no doubt whoever covered the night shift left hours ago. It was a fairly small hotel without too many people milling around. It was the kind of mid-priced hotel that attracted those here for business, not pleasure. She seated herself at the bar and tried to remember how ordering food works in America. She’d been to Florida as a child and New York in her twenties and vaguely remembered that even casual drinks went on a bill. It also occurred to her that she hadn’t chosen her own meal for a while. Adrian handled all of the shopping and the cooking. Even though he only cooked meals he knew she liked, she didn’t often choose what they had. That struck her as important. Now she could have anything at all.

  She ordered a burger and Coke—when in Rome—and spent the time flicking through a guidebook she’d bought at the Phoenix airport. Most of it was irrelevant, but the taxi numbers would come in useful. Then she spent some time going over the routes out of the city towards Mary’s last known address before she travelled to the UK. At least until the burger arrived and her mouth began to water.

  It'd been a long time since she’d been this alone. She’d travelled solo before, back when she was younger and less introspective. This was a completely different affair. She was alone, and she’d lost the backing of her closest, dearest person. Fran shook her head slightly, bringing her thoughts to the task in hand. Adrian loved her and she loved him, perhaps it was best to leave it at that until she found the Whitakers.

  What did she want to do next? Her first day was almost over. There was no point travelling up to Mary’s old house now, it was past 5:00 p.m. No, she needed to go in the morning when she had more opportunity to look around. Instead, she checked the street view again, virtually roaming the area. She saw the Catalina mountains and the small town in the foothills. She could even drag the little stick figure up to the peak of Mount Lemmon and imagine herself hiking through the national park. Homesickness set in. The vistas were alien to her, scrubby brown reeds poking out between sandy rocks. Towering cacti and thin, spiky grass. She already missed oak trees, dry stone walls and sloping meadows of dewy green.

  This dry city was where Mary had grown up. She couldn’t imagine that young, fragile girl here in this decidedly less habitable area, with her pale skin and thin frame. Easy prey for a man like Elijah? She took Esther’s bible from her bag and skipped through the pages again. Father wouldn’t like this. Had both of them been indoctrinated into whatever Elijah believed to be true?

  Just as Fran was about to leave, her phone rang. Adrian was calling her through WhatsApp. He must’ve decided it was cheaper. Her heart skipped a beat as she snatched it up and placed it against her ear.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Can we be friends again?” she asked.

  He paused. It was a long pause. Too long. Her eyes welled with tears.

  “We’re never not friends. You know that.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I love you,” he said.

  But he didn’t say that he forgave her or that he supported her. He couldn’t say those words because he didn’t mean them. Fran told him she loved him and that she’d check back with him the next day. Then she hung up the phone and decided that she’d better make this trip worthwhile.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Fran awoke uneasily to the sound of her alarm blaring. It was 7:30 and she was determined to ignore the jetlagged insomnia of the night before. Instead of sleeping, she’d browsed television channels, bought chocolate from a vending machine, and stayed up until the early hours of the morning, sitting in a yoga position against the headboard, bare feet touching each other, wrappers scattered on the bed. She wouldn’t dream of such a thing at home.

  After a brisk shower, she made her way down to the lobby and asked the polite young man on the front desk to call her a taxi. He called her ma’am and told her to have a nice day.

  The taxi showed up and she gave him the address. It was about a forty-minute drive out of Tucson to a suburb called Dove Valley, a little further north than the Catalina Foothills. On the way there, the taxi driver pointed out the mountains in the distance, the jagged peaks of russet brown. Broken teeth rising above the valleys. She remembered what it’d felt like to virtually climb Mount Lemmon and see the canyons spreading out into the open space. Goosebumps spread up and down her arms. She’d come all this way. Maybe she was insane.

  When he turned off Route 77, the roads narrowed, and the houses dispersed. There were wire fences everywhere, blocking off areas of bristling bushes and skinny-legged cacti. Every now and then they came across a patch of colour—yellow leaves on a bush, verdant green grass—before the road turned into more of a dusty track. Fran saw the church, the tiny general store, the old trucks and occasional mobile home. Rickety mailboxes stood at the end of driveways.

  “Can I ask you a question, ma’am?” the driver said, his moustache appearing in the rear-view mirror.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “How are you gonna get back to the hotel? Because I don’t think you’ll be able to flag a taxi anywhere around here.”

  Fran chewed on the inside of her mouth. “Yes, that could be a problem. Maybe I could hire you for the day. Would that work?”

  “You mean sit around in a car in this heat?” he asked. “Hell no.” He laughed. “Stick around in Tucson and you’ll soon learn not to underestimate the weather. How about I pick you up in an hour?”

  Fran made an agreement with the driver and he passed her his card. She opened the door and stepped onto the sandy track, the heat from the sun immediately bearing down on her exposed skin. She’d slathered herself in sunscreen that morning, but the late-summer Arizona sun was still a lot to handle. The taxi left and she was alone in Dove Valley, feeling particularly pale and English in a straw hat and Birkenstocks.

  She stood before the beige fronted wooden house from her Google street view browsing. In person it reminded her of a Lego brick: squat, square and sharp at the
corners. She pushed her sunglasses up her nose and walked towards the door, opening and closing a metal gate on the way up the drive. Clumsy feet tripped over a scrubby bush, but she righted herself before she fell. The indignity of it made her heartbeat quicken.

  This was Mary’s last known address before she moved to England. A paint-peeled building with the mountains looming in the background, surrounded by a thirsty landscape. Fran noticed the tears in the fly screens across the windows, and the rot seeping into the boards around the front door. She stepped closer, sensing the stillness, the thin layer of dust beneath her feet, the settled nature of the place. It didn’t take long for her to realise that this house was abandoned.

  But nevertheless, she knocked on the door and waited. Then she peered in through the closest window. Her heart pitter-pattered. Cupping her fingers around her eyes to block out the reflection of the desert landscape, she leaned in. Flies buzzed around her. Sweat gathered along her hairline. She left patches of steam on the dirty glass.

  There was still furniture inside the house. She squinted through the tears in the screen, trying to make out whether someone still lived here. She didn’t think so. She saw a sofa against a wall, carpets, the occasional cabinet. There were no pictures, electronics or the general bric-a-brac you’d expect a person to own. Did Mary and Elijah move out without selling their home? Or had they been renting, and the owner hadn’t found a new tenant yet? Or was this Mary’s family home that had been left by her parents at some point?

  “Can I help you?”

  Fran let out an audible gasp. Her fingers clutched her chest so tightly that her knuckles went white. She turned around to find a woman around sixty years old in sports clothes and dark sunglasses staring at her with pursed, unamused lips.

  “Sorry, I was hoping to find Mary or Elijah Whitaker.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows when she heard Fran speak. But she didn’t comment on Fran’s accent. “Don’t know any Mary Whitaker but a family lived here for a while. Kept themselves to themselves and stayed about a month before they left. The place has been empty ever since.”

  Fran cautiously stepped forward, taking her phone out of her pocket. She scrolled through to a picture of Mary and Esther from their Chatsworth House visit. “Do you know her?”

  The woman lifted up her sunglasses to get a better view. “Yes, that’s her. And the child. Like I said, quiet family. Barely left the house, not that there’s much to do around here. Always seemed on edge. I’d be doing my daily steps around the street and catch her looking out through the window, watching. It was like she thought someone was coming.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Fran learned a few more scraps of information from the woman and gave her some contact details just in case she remembered more. She learned that the woman’s name was Patty, and she lived five houses down. She walked up and down the road every day for exercise, and her son was always late to pick her up and take her to Target.

  “She was a nervous thing. Pretty though. And the child was beautiful and polite, but I always thought it was odd she looked nothing like them,” Patty said. “He was decent. He always said hello at least, but she, the wife, never spoke. Little Miss Lemon Lips, I called her. She always looked like she was sucking a lemon!”

  Fran laughed politely and gently extricated herself from the conversation, telling Patty to call her if she remembered anything useful. Then, deciding to make the most of her hour, Fran walked up and down the street knocking on doors, holding up her phone and asking if any of the neighbours remembered Mary and Esther. It was a relatively fruitless task. Yes, they recognised them, no, they’d never spoken to any of them. They told her the same information as Patty. The Whitakers lived there for about a month, kept to themselves, and rarely went anywhere. There was only one person who gave her anything more than that, a slim-hipped young man in a dirty black t-shirt who lived the closest to the Whitaker’s house.

  “Oh yeah, I remember them.” He scratched at stubble on his chin. “They had some hot visitors.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gestured to the picture on her phone. “The girl, Mary was it? She had hot chicks visiting her all the time. Skinny, but cute, you know?”

  “How many visitors did she have? Lots of different people or the same person over and over?”

  “There were two,” he said. “One tall blonde with a nice ass. I mean, she didn’t show it off, but you could tell under those old-lady skirts. The other was a redhead. Flat chested but skin like alabaster.” He smiled wistfully. “Man, I should’ve asked one of them out.”

  “How old were they?”

  “’Bout the same age as your girl Mary here, I guess. Early twenties, something like that. Maybe like nineteen for the redhead. Has she gone missing?”

  “Kind of,” Fran said. She put the phone back in her pocket. “Is there anything else you remember?”

  “I was walking my dog Santo a few days before they left, and I saw the redhead go into the house. I saw her maybe three or four times during the month they lived here. About twenty minutes later I was bringing Santo back home and I saw ginger storming out of the house in some sort of fucking rage. Mary came out and followed her halfway down the drive, but the redhead got in her truck and drove off without even acknowledging Mary being there. Guess they had a fight or something.”

  “I don’t suppose you know the names of these women?”

  He leaned his weight against the door and shook his head. “Like I said, I missed my chance to ask either of them out. Hey, are you single?”

  Fran lifted up the hand with her wedding ring.

  “Damn,” he said, a crooked grin spreading across his face. “That’s a nice accent you’ve got there.”

  Fran rolled her eyes, but she had to admit he had a mischievous charm about him. “Did the women wear clothes that seemed odd to you? Like handmade clothes?”

  “I don’t know if they were handmade or not, but yeah they were kinda odd. These girls liked to cover up the goods, you know? Shirts done all the way up here.” He motioned to just below his chin. “Skirts down to the ankle. If you ask me, it just made them hotter.”

  “No one asked you,” Fran said, giving him what she thought was probably a grandmotherly glare. “Look, I’m giving you my number, but not for that reason, it’s because I need to find Mary Whitaker and you might remember something else that’s important. If you do, please call me, okay?”

  He took the card and winked. “Sure. Whatever you say. The name’s Francisco by the way.”

  “Oh, well, now I know it’d never work out between us,” she said. “My name’s Francesca.”

  Francisco just laughed.

  Chapter Fifty

  Back at the hotel, Fran basked underneath the air-conditioning unit in her room. For around thirty minutes she lay there, stripped down to her underwear, letting the cool air glide over her skin. Then she took out her notebook and wrote down the description of the two young women who had routinely visited Mary at her home in Dove Valley. She also made a note of the fact that Mary, Elijah and Esther had lived there for one month, but been visited three or four times by the women. These two women wore clothes similar to Mary. Modest, homemade clothes.

  That evening she ate at the hotel bar while trying to organise her thoughts on what she’d learned so far. The Whitakers lived in Dove Valley for one month. Before that, she didn’t know where they’d lived, but she estimated that it had probably been some sort of closed community given the kind of visitors they’d been having.

  The more she learned about this family, the more she began to wonder whether at least some of the gossip in Leacroft had been right. If Mary and Elijah had come from some sort of closed community that would make sense. It would explain Mary’s nervousness as perceived by neighbour Patty, and it would explain the tense relationship with her visitors, as witnessed by Francisco. But why would they lie about that in Leacroft? Had they feared prejudice from the village? They’d been right to, she
knew that much. The realisation saddened her. What if they’d come searching for a safe place and the village had rejected them? What if they felt like they didn’t belong anywhere now? What if she never found them at all and would never know where they went?

  That night she fell asleep dreaming of a long dirt track leading to a tall cactus. Esther’s body lay beneath it. She woke with a start to the blaring of her alarm. Every part of her body ached. She guzzled down water from the mini-fridge and got ready for her second day in Tucson. This time she wasn’t going back to Dove Valley, she was staying here in the city.

  There was a message on her phone from Adrian. A picture of a cup of coffee on the patio table with the caption: Morning. She smiled and sent back a picture of her hotel water and a chocolate chip cookie. Breakfast in Arizona.

  The right side of her bed was cold. She leaned back, trying to find a comfortable spot on the hard mattress. After Chloe had died, she’d rested in her husband’s arms for hours at a time, not sleeping, not talking, not crying. Fran’s fingers grazed the cotton sheets longing for the warmth of his arms. The ache in her body was a yearning for him, she realised that now. But she didn’t dwell on it for too long, she dressed and went to breakfast in the hotel.