A Flower in the Desert (30 page)

She grinned at me. “Hi. Are you the private detective?”

I smiled. She had that kind of grin. “I'm one of them,” I said.

She laughed. “Hey, pretty good. I'm Freddy.” There was some Texas in her voice. She held out a small warm hand and I shook it.

“Joshua Croft,” I said.

“Come on in.”

I walked into the broad living room. A threadbare red Oriental carpet. William Morris—style curtains open at the double-hung windows. Victorian furniture, bulky and tasseled, that had possibly come with the house. Like the furniture at the Coopers, it had all been lived in. But this stuff was beginning to take offense. One chair cushion canted slightly to the left. Along the sofa's arms, padding had begun to work its way through the fabric. Still, the room had a homey quality to it. It was bright with the white light bouncing off the snow outside, and it was spotlessly clean. A fire flapped in the fieldstone fireplace, and the air was scented with cooking smells. And also with the smell of patchouli oil, something I hadn't run across since the early seventies. The woman was wearing it.

She said, “I sent Bilbo to get Sam. He should be here in a few minutes.”

“Bilbo?”

She grinned. “Corny, isn't it? Poor guy never got over Tolkien. Come on into the kitchen. There're some things I've got to do.”

I followed her down a narrow hallway into an enormous kitchen. A door to my right, lace curtains at the window, led outside. A long trestle table ran down the center of the room, and there were enough chairs arranged around it to seat fourteen people. Salad vegetables were piled up at one end of it, beside a thick butcher's block cutting board, a gigantic wooden salad bowl, and a chef's knife. There were several acres of counter space and a throng of cabinets, all of them painted with red enamel. Along one wall hung a collection of stew pots and saucepans and frying pans and griddles. The floor was linoleum, checkered with red and white squares. Squatting atop the huge gas stove were two large pots, one of them battered aluminum, the other black cast iron. The cooking smells were stronger in here, and I remembered that I hadn't eaten lunch.

Freddy swept over to the stove and plucked the lid from the cast iron pot. A cloud of steam billowed to the high ceiling. Still holding the lid, she tilted her hip slightly, comfortably, then picked up a wooden spoon and dipped it into the pot, stirring. She turned to me over her shoulder and she grinned. “Hey, I'm sorry, my mind is scattered today. As usual. What's your name again?”

“Joshua. Joshua Croft.”

“Well, Joshua Croft, you hungry? The rice isn't done yet, but this is.” She peered into the pot. “It's kind of a soup, I think. Or maybe it's a stew.” She turned back to me. “Are you a carnivore?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Me too,” she confided. “But only secretly. My secret vice. Everyone else around here is a grazer. I've gotta sneak off to the Burger King in Taos every couple of weeks or I start to thinking I'm chewing my cud.” She nodded to the pot. “This is pretty good stuff, though. Got just about everything in it. Tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, celery, onions. Even parsnips.” She grinned. “Are private detectives allowed to eat parsnips?”

“They're our secret vice.”

She laughed. “So you want some? Hey, c'mon, don't start being polite. If you're hungry, eat. Warm you up.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Great.” She opened a cabinet, stood on tiptoes, took down a heavy china soup bowl. She opened a drawer, took out a stainless steel soup spoon. A ladle hung on the wall to her right, beside some long metal spoons and spatulas, and she lifted it, scooped up some of the stew, and carefully poured it into the bowl. She set the ladle alongside the wooden spoon, then opened another drawer, snagged a folded cloth napkin. She carried everything over to the table.

“Sit,” she said. “I hope you don't mind, I've gotta get the salad ready.” She glanced at the outside door. “Bilbo better get back here pretty quick and set the table. The wolves'll be showing up soon. Want a beer?”

“No thanks,” I told her. I sat down where she'd set the bowl, and she sat down at the table's end, in front of the salad vegetables. “Eat,” she said, and picked up a head of Boston lettuce.

I tasted the stew.

She leaned slightly forward. “So how is it?”

“Good,” I said. It was. “Very good. It's got some oregano in it.”

“Not too much?”

“Perfect.”

“Good,” she said. “The Mediterranean touch,” she said, and began tearing leaves off the lettuce. “You don't look like a private detective.”

“What do private detectives look like?”

“Oh, I dunno.” She tore each leaf in half along its width, then tossed the halves lightly into the bowl. “Kind of sleazy and sad. Except on TV, where they're all hunky dreamboats.”

“Have you met many private detectives?”

She looked over at me and grinned. “Hey. Cool. Am I being interrogated?”

“No. We private detectives call this a conversation.”

She grinned. “Technical term, huh? Y'know, you eat too fast. You should chew your food more. Sam said you're looking for that Alonzo woman?”

“Cool,” I said. “Am I being interrogated?”

She laughed again and then she looked at me gravely. “Seriously. She got lost?”

“I don't know what happened to her. I know she was supposed to show up here.”

She nodded. “Yeah. She never did. We thought she'd just changed her mind or something.”….

“Has that ever happened before?”

She shook her head, not in negation but in refusal. “Sorry. Sam says we're not supposed to talk about that.” And then, as though to make up for the refusal: “You sure you don't want a beer or something? I could make some tea?”

“No, I—”

The door opened and two men came in. The first was in his forties and he was big, taller than I, and wider, and he wore an open red mackinaw over a gray plaid flannel shirt and denim overalls. A weathered, clean-shaven, craggy face. A broad forehead, bristling black eyebrows, pale blue eyes, a hooked nose, a wide friendly mouth. His long gray hair hung between his shoulders in a ponytail.

The second man was shorter and younger, in his late twenties, and he wore work boots, jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and a leather bomber jacket. Close-cropped curly black hair, two or three weeks' worth of black beard. His eyes, set back in their sockets, were dark and intense.

“This is Joshua,” Freddy said. “The big guy is Sam and the other one there is Bilbo.”

Sam smiled and crossed the floor, his right hand outstretched, his left waving me back into my chair. “No, man, don't get up,” he told. “Finish your food.”

I shook his hand. Bilbo, hands in his jacket pockets, silently watched me.

“He's finished,” Freddy said. “He's almost as big a pig as you are. And you're getting snow all over the floor. Why don't the two of you get out of here, so Bilbo can set the table. Bilbo, stop standing there looking like Rasputin. Get the plates.”

Sam grinned at me. “Jesus, man, I can't stand a bossy woman. Come on. I'll show you around the spread.”

I stood up and turned to Freddy. “Thanks for the food.”

She grinned. “Hey. Glad you liked it. Bilbo, the plates.”

Bilbo had unzipped his jacket. Now he took it off and hung it on a hook by the door. Something heavy in the pocket thumped against the wall.

It didn't have to be a gun. And even if it was, it was none of my business, so long as he wasn't pointing it at me.

But just the possibility that it was a gun made the kitchen suddenly seem less cozy and domestic, and suddenly made me feel again like what I was, an outsider.

“Come on,” Sam said to me, still grinning.

I followed him and nodded to Bilbo, whose intense dark eyes shifted away from my glance.

Outside, Sam pushed the door shut, turned, and slipped his hands into the pockets of his mackinaw. “This way,” he said, lifting his chin toward the east. We crunched through the snow, circling the house.

“Bilbo's a little weird,” he told me. “Used to be a junkie and he's still not real housebroken. But he's good people.”

We walked along the east side of the house. The children were gone now and, except for their rumpled tracks in the snow, they might never have been here. Sam nodded toward the low yellow buildings. “One on the right there is a dorm for the kids. Boys on one side, girls on the other. Thing in the center is the school. We've got a guy here, Bennett, he's a certified teacher, so we're okay with the state. Third building's for the folks can't fit in the big house.”

“The kids are raised communally?”

He grinned at me. “Right, man, that's what a commune's all about. Name of the game. Nuclear family just doesn't cut it. Mom and day lay all their sad little trips on the sprouts. Guilt. Neurosis. Sexual hangups. And how can two people meet all the needs that a sprout's got? This way, the grownups balance each other out. And there's like a pool of emotional and psychological resources the sprouts can draw on.” He took his hands from his pockets, held them before him as though he were shaping a ball of dough. “And the sprouts get a sense of community. They're part of a large, interconnected group. It's all organic.” He slipped his hands together, fingers interlocking, to show me what
organic
looked like.

He put his hands back into his pockets and we walked on. We were walking toward the unfinished wooden structure, and six or seven people were walking toward us. I had thought that all the people working on the building were men, but I saw now that two were women, one a blonde in her thirties, the other a young brunette who could have been a teenager. Like the men, they wore jeans and bulky winter coats. The men looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties and most of them had long hair and beards and, like the young people back in the Plaza at Santa Fe, seemed to have suddenly materialized here from some earlier and less complicated era. But everyone looked as healthy as Freddy, and most of them smiled and nodded at me as they passed. Only one or two—the young brunette among them—eyed the interloper suspiciously.

“How many kids do you have here?” I asked him.

“Fifteen right now,” he said, and put his hands back in his pockets. “Ten adults.”

“Have most of the kids been here long?”

“Born here, some of them. But people come, people go. Part of the process, man. Change, movement. Nothing stands still. Ruth—that's Freddy's little sprout—she and Freddy only came here last year.”

“Freddy's married?”

He smiled at me. “Like her, huh? No, man, Freddy's on her own.” The smile became a grin. “Watch out. She's one tough lady. A pistol.”

“What about you? Any of the kids yours?”

He shook his head. “I got a son, nearly grown now, but he's back in Portland with his mom.” He grinned again and shook his head, as though embarrassed by this failure. “Like I said, man. Nuclear family doesn't cut it.”

We had reached the wooden structure. Two wooden steps led to a wood flooring supported all around by a two-foot foundation of cinder block. Sam stopped walking and looked up at the building. “This is our new project. Meditation hall. We'll rent it out to groups from Santa Fe and Taos. Retreats.” He turned to me. “Makes for good vibes, man, people on the property meditating. Lots of energy.” He grinned. “The extra bread won't hurt, either.” He waved a hand at the flooring. “Take a load off.”

I walked across the snow and sat down on the unfinished wood. Sam sat down beside me.

“What can you tell me,” I asked him, “about Melissa Alonzo?”

He shook his head. “Not a thing, man. She was supposed to be here at the end of September. She never showed.”

“That didn't bother you?”

He shrugged. “We offer a place to stay, man. Someone doesn't want it, that's
their
decision.”

“You didn't notify anyone that she hadn't turned up?”

He nodded. “Yeah, well, I probably screwed up there. I admit it. See, the thing of it is, I was never too big on the idea anyway, being part of this Underground Railroad deal. I was afraid it was gonna bring the heat down on us. Some of these people, it's the feds lookin' for 'em. FBI, man. That's heavy. That we don't need. We got a real good relationship with the local fuzz right now. Well, shit, man, we should. We been here almost twenty years. Anyway, sheriff knows we don't take runaways—minors, I mean—and we keep our noses clean. No drugs, no booze except for a beer now and then. I didn't want to jeopardize that.”

“Why did you?”

He grinned, shrugged. “I was outvoted, man. It's a democracy. Everyone else was hot on the idea. Gotta go with the majority. Anyway, when the chick and her sprout didn't show, I just figured she changed her mind. People do that. But looks like I screwed up. If anyone should've called the people in California, it was me.”

“Has it ever happened before, that someone just didn't show up?”

He looked off for a moment and then he looked back at me. “Shit, man, you're puttin' me on the spot. The people out in California, the ones I talked to this morning, they told me to go ahead and talk to you about the missing chick. But they don't want me talking about anything else. I got to honor that.” He shrugged. “Thing of it is, this place is blown now anyway.”

“Because I know about it?”

“Right. They can't take any chances.” He shrugged again. “So maybe it all worked out for the best.”

“It hasn't worked out that way for Melissa Alonzo.”

He frowned, looked down. “No. No, man, it hasn't.” He turned to me. “You think she's okay?”

“No. I think she's in trouble.”

“Shit,” he said sadly. “Bummer. If I can do anything, man, to help, you know, you tell me.”