A Flower in the Desert (37 page)

“A photograph of Winona?” Larry Cooper asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “The only picture I've seen of her was taken when she was a baby. I have no idea what she looks like now, and I'm looking for her just as much as I'm looking for Melissa. I thought that maybe you might have a photograph.”

He looked at his wife. The two of them sat opposite me, on their sofa. He looked back at me. “I'm sorry, but I don't take the kind of photographs you're talking about. Candid stuff. Family stuff.”

“But I do,” Sarah said. “And I think I do have a picture of Winona. I know I do.” She stood up. “I'll go get it.” She crossed the room, passed through the door that led to the rest of the house.

Larry Cooper asked me, “Are you any closer to finding Melissa?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“This is such an awful mess. I wish there was something more we could do.”

I wished the same for myself.

Sarah returned to the living room, crossed the room. She handed me a color print, and then pointed to one of the two small figures it showed. “That's Julia, our daughter. And that's Winona.”

Both girls stood facing the camera, spectacularly grinning in the sunshine. They were standing outside the house, in front of the woodpile. Julia was slightly shorter than Winona and wore her black hair in braids. Winona was blond, like her mother. Clutched under her arm was a large stuffed panda.

I had seen her, and the panda, two days before. With her hair cropped short, and wearing a pair of boy's pants instead of the pink dress she wore in the picture, she had been one of the two children I'd seen standing outside the commune's barn in Palo Verde.

I asked the Coopers if I could use their phone. Sarah told me that if it was a private call, I could use the extension in their bedroom.

“Joshua,” Rita said, “I don't think you should go up there on your own.”

“It's out of Hector's jurisdiction, Rita. He can't do anything.”

“What about the state police?”

“What can I bring to the state police? A photograph? And if they were willing to go in there, they'd probably have to notify the sheriff's department. According to Sam, he and the sheriff get along real well. Someone might warn him. If Melissa's there with Winona, they could both take off before I get to them.”

“If Melissa's there, why hasn't she contacted you? Why has she abandoned the Underground Railroad?”

“Maybe she's frightened. Maybe she spotted the Salvadorans and decided to stay hidden. I don't know. Listen. It's four o'clock now. By the time I get up there, it'll be dark. I'll take a look around. I'll be careful. But maybe I can find out what's going on.”

“I don't like it,” she said.

“I'll call you when I reach Palo Verde.”

“Call me
before
you go in.”

“Right.”

“Do you have your gun?”

“Yeah. It's in the car.”

“Good.”

By quarter to six I was back in Palo Verde. I called Rita from the pay phone at the deserted general store, told her I was going in. She told me to call back in an hour.

I kept the headlights on until the track swooped down out of the hills into the broad moonlit valley. After I turned them off, there was enough light reflecting off the snow for me to make out the ruts of the cars that had passed here before mine.

About seventy-five yards from the cluster of buildings, a dark stand of pines stood to the right of the road. I drove off the track, turned the car around, backed into the trees. Thinking that later I might want—or need—to leave in a hurry, I turned off the engine but left the key in the ignition. I opened the glove compartment, took out the revolver, slipped it into my jacket pocket. I opened the door as quietly as I could and stepped out into the snow.

There were lights burning in three of the buildings—in the main house and in two of the dormitories, including the dorm where, according to Sam, the children slept.

A direct approach would take me across an open field. I might be seen by anyone glancing out a window or stepping outside for a breath of fresh air. Crouching low, I scurried off to the right, toward the base of the hill and the black shadows of the tall pines. I felt extremely exposed as I scooted across the snow, but no one called out, no one took a shot at me.

I was wearing a pair of Justin muleskins—nice boots, but they weren't insulated and they weren't designed for scuttling through the drifts. A cold dampness began to reach my feet.

When I hit the trees, I slid between them, the boots slipping in the snow as I clambered up the slope. When I was ten yards into cover, I began to move along the flank of the hillside, toward the rear of the barn and the house. The inclined ground was rocky beneath the snow, and pitted with hidden holes. Twice my foot went plunging into drifts that climbed up to my thighs.

Behind the house, still among the trees, I could see through the back door into the illuminated kitchen. Four people sat at the table. I recognized three of them as workmen I'd seen coming from the meditation hall on Friday. No Sam. No Bilbo. No Freddy.

When I was behind the children's dormitory, I left the trees. Snow crunching loudly beneath me, I approached the building. A light was on beyond a long narrow window at eye level. Cautiously, I peered in.

Children sat on cushions on the floor, listening, as Freddy, who sat in an antique wooden rocker, read to them from a thin cardboard-bound book opened on her lap. Metal bunk beds, three of them, ran along the far wall. All the children were girls, ranging in age from three or four to ten or eleven, and all of them wore cotton pajamas. One of them was Winona. She sat somewhat apart from the others, the stuffed panda resting on her crossed legs.

I could see why, two days earlier, I hadn't realized that there was a girl beneath her boy's clothes. Without being at all unfeminine, her face owed something to her father's—her features were stronger than Melissa's, her jaw proportionally wider, her chin firmer. She would be a striking woman one day.

I backed away from the window and spent a few moments deciding how to handle this. I could keep skulking around, see if I could locate Melissa. I could wait until Freddy left, then wait some more to see if somehow I could isolate Winona.

But maybe Freddy wouldn't leave. Maybe she slept out here with the children.

And my feet were cold.

Might as well get this over with.

I circled the dorm. The building had two entrances, one at the far side that presumably led into the boys' section, and the one beside which I stood now. I slipped my hand into my pocket, wrapped my gloved fingers around the reassuring shape of the Smith & Wesson. I figured that with the revolver I was an even match for a single mother and six preadolescent girls. Keeping the gun in my pocket, I reached out my left hand and turned the doorknob. I pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

For a moment there was an absolute silence.

Then a girl screamed.

It wasn't a terrified scream—it was more the sort of wild theatrical scream young girls make when young boys invade the pajama party.

But it set some of the others to squealing and giggling.

“Quiet,” Freddy snapped. Calmly, she closed the book on her lap and then said to me, “What on earth are you doing here?”

I said, “You weren't entirely truthful with me, Freddy. I'm disappointed.”

A girl tittered. Another girl slapped her lightly.

“You're trespassing on private property,” Freddy said. She ran her hand back through her untamed gray hair. She was wearing the same kind of bulky clothing she had worn two days before: a long dress, a man's shapeless brown sweater.

“Winona,” I said. “Where's your mother?”

The young girl had clutched the panda to her chest, her hands pressed tight against its black and white fur. She looked from me to Freddy, then back to me.

Freddy said to the girl, “Mary, you don't—”

Winona said to me, “She got sick.”

I don't remember any more. It's possible that Bilbo said something before he clubbed me, possible that he warned me, or threatened me, but I doubt it.

I was lying on my side and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with my hands. My wrists hurt, but I couldn't bring them around in front of me to see what the problem was. The air held the strong ammoniac smell of goats, and it was cold.

I opened my eyes. In the wavering yellow lantern light, I could see across the dirt floor of the barn, strewn with straw and spotted with goat droppings, to where Bilbo and Sam sat on some bales of hay.

My head felt as though someone had kicked it down a stairway. I took a breath and, abruptly, I was nauseated. I vomited, and then, coughing, hacking, I rolled away from the mess I'd made. I tried to sit up, and my wrists screeched at me. They were tied together. I felt around with my fingers. Tied not with rope but with wire.

Sam looked at me over his shoulder, his gray ponytail swaying along his red mackinaw. He stood up from the bale of hay and crossed the dirt flooring and looked down at me. He shook his head sadly. “Jesus, man, what'd you have to come back here for?”

Bilbo still sat on the hay, eyeing me silently.

“Could you help me sit up,” I said to Sam.

He squatted down, eased my shoulder up, gently eased me back against another bale of hay. Leaning on it seemed to tighten the wire at my wrists, but it was better than lying in the dirt.

Sam stood up, put his hands in his pockets.

“This isn't good, Sam,” I told him. “People know where I am.”

“What the fuck you have to come back here for?” The barn door was wide open, letting in the cold black night, and Sam's breath made a cloud of white vapor before his face.

“For Winona,” I said. “And Melissa. Where's Melissa, Sam?”

He said nothing.

“Is she dead, Sam?”

He said nothing.

“We should off him,” Bilbo said.

“Shut up,” Sam told him. “We'll wait.”

Bilbo shrugged. “You know what the man's gonna say.”

I said, “Bilbo the one who hit me?”

Sam nodded.

“What did he use?”

“Gun.” He smiled, and the smile seemed almost embarrassed. “He doesn't like you very much, I guess.”

“That's a shame. I've gotten real fond of him.”

Bilbo seemed indifferent to this.

I asked Sam, “How long was I out?”

Sam took a brass railroad watch from his front coverall pocket. “Almost three hours.”

“Three hours? From a hit on the head?”

“Freddy gave you a shot.”

“A shot of what?”

He shrugged. “Some downer. She said it was safe.”

“She's a real Mother Teresa, that Freddy.”

He shrugged again. “She knows about drugs.”

I nodded. “You know, Sam, you're too smart a guy to be in this position. My partner knows I was coming out here. I was supposed to call her a couple of hours ago. By now she's notified the police.”