Dark Lie (9781101607084) (4 page)

I saw my purse plopped on the seat, my plastic shopping bag plopped on the floor. I lifted the purse. No phone under it. I leaned over and clawed at the bag to move it in case the phone had fallen on the floor. A horn sounded behind me.

No phone.

I dumped my purse onto the passenger seat. An embarrassment of private items fell out, but no cell phone.

Three or four more horns added their plangent tones to the first.

Blinking at the green light and open road ahead of me, I stepped on the gas and turned left onto the interstate's eastbound ramp, trying to think. I'd lost sight of the van, but it couldn't be very far ahead of me. What had become of my phone? Had it slid under the seat, or slipped down between the seat and the passenger door? I couldn't look either of those places without pulling over and stopping the car. Meanwhile, the man in the van would be taking Juliet farther and farther away from me.

My right foot made the decision for me, pressing on the accelerator as I roared up the ramp. I needed to catch up with that van. Needed at least to get in sight of it. A giant hurtful fist of need had clenched around my heart, making it cry like a toddler when the parent threatens to leave it behind. I had to find Juliet.

And in order to do that, I was going to have to drive even faster than before. Traffic on the interstate averaged around seventy miles an hour. Merging, I pushed the Kia up to seventy, seventy-five, feeling it shaking, poor little car; I could actually see the hood vibrating. I moved into the passing lane. Seventy-eight, seventy-nine—

POW
, like a gun blast, and simultaneously a sound as if the Velcro that held the world together had just ripped apart. Everything in front of my eyes went crazed and blank. Hurtling along at eighty miles an hour, I couldn't see the road—had I gone blind? No, blindness should be black, not ribbon blue. In no way could I comprehend what was happening, but my right foot, once again more intelligent than my mind, pumped the brakes as I ducked to peer through an inch or two of daylight at the bottom of the windshield. Something huge had crashed into the rest of it, covering it, and all the glass had alligatored, would have shattered if it hadn't been held together by a layer of safety plastic. I could just barely see to keep the Kia under control as I braked while swerving toward the median, coaching myself:
Slow down—don't roll it, Dorrie!
Wrestling with the steering wheel, I bumped onto the grass and blundered to a downhill stop.

I turned the car off.

For a moment I just sat there, listening to the sound of my own heavy breathing and the whoosh of cars swishing by at seventy miles an hour. And staring at my own car hood, which for some reason had just tried to enter the passenger area via the windshield. Maybe it wanted to sit on my lap.

Nothing made sense.

And that man still had Juliet.

The thought got me moving while my heart was still pounding like my father thumping his Bible. Fighting my own shock, I opened the car door, lurched out, then leaned on the door, staring so hard I barely noticed the pain in my lupus-eaten joints. Why would my car hood fly open and turn itself inside out on top of my Kia's windshield and roof? Sam was going to be furious when he saw the damage.

All I could do now was call the police with the frustratingly little information I had regarding Juliet's whereabouts. And ask them to send a tow truck for me. I limped around to the other side and opened the passenger door to get the phone, which had to have slipped under the seat or beside it.

But it still wasn't there.

And I still couldn't believe it. I got down on my knees and peered under the seat, searching with my hands. Phone.

Not. There. On my knees in the grass by the passenger seat, I packed wallet, checkbook, pill bottles, pens, junk ad infinitum back into my purse in case I had somehow missed seeing the phone. But I bared the seat and it still wasn't anywhere.

It was gone.

Cell phones don't just walk away by themselves.

I stood up, lips pressed together, starting to comprehend. “That bastard,” I whispered between clenched teeth.

If you loosen somebody's hood latch, what happens when they accelerate up to eighty?

“That consummate bastard.”

The kidnapper. Smarter than I'd given him credit for. Had seen me tailing him, even though he had no reason to think anybody might be following. During the minute I'd spent in the bathroom, he had taken care of me very quickly and simply.

And efficiently. I could have crashed. I could have been killed.

Now I'd lost him.

Where was he taking Juliet?

* * *

Sam White hardly ever got out of the machine shop before seven p.m., even on a Saturday, but today he made a point of leaving before six. Dorrie would be pleased. Driving home in his freshly washed Chevy Silverado, Sam thought about taking her out for dinner. He hated to waste money on restaurants, especially those overpriced steak-and-seafood places Dorrie favored, but he knew he ought to do it anyway. He'd noticed Dorrie had been acting kind of quiet lately, a little bit down, and once again he was getting that stupid feeling she wanted to leave him.

A feeling he had never mentioned to anyone, of course, not even to Pastor Lewinski and especially not to Dorrie, because it was nonsensical. Even when she was really angry at him, which happened seldom, she had never threatened to leave him. And she'd never shown the least indication of possible infidelity. Sam knew where she'd be and what she'd be doing just about every hour of every day, and whenever he'd phone or stop by, yep, there he'd find Dorrie, right where she'd said she was going to be, at the church or the grocery or whatever. She'd never given him any reason to worry the way he did. It was just . . . sometimes, even though she was right by his side, he felt as if she were far, far away. Sometimes, looking at her, Sam wondered what she was thinking, but he was afraid to ask.

Like when she sang in the church choir on Sundays. All the other women would be watching the director and smiling, but Dorrie would be staring sad-eyed out a window, gazing at something only she could see.

He wished she would sing to him. It was her voice that had startled his heart like a song he could never forget.

Her voice, even before he saw her, even though her words were ordinary. College. Finishing his bachelor's in business administration, Sam had been sitting in Appreciation of Modern Art, which he had been taking only because three credits of “culture” were required for graduation. He had been thinking about what lay ahead, a job of some sort, when a softly resonant voice speaking from the other side of the classroom had captured all his attention.

Something in him deeply recognized something in the voice, and he still remembered the exact words. “It bothers me that they put Monet in those heavy, ornate frames when his water lilies are so light and free. The frame kind of imprisons the painting. To me, anyway.”

Sam, to whom none of this made much sense, had looked over to see a girl whose beauty he recognized at once, unlike any lipstick advertisement and unlikely to be noticed by anyone fashionable, but ineffably like the beauty of the Mother of God, modest and innocent.

“How would
you
frame the Impressionists, Miss Birch?” the professor had asked.

“With feathers,” the girl said, and then laughed at herself, melodious as a wood thrush. “I don't know. Why must their art be framed at all?”

Gazing at her, memorizing her, Sam failed to follow the rest of the conversation. But on the way out of class he caught up with the girl, who wore her hair simply and her skirt long. “I liked what you said,” he told her.

She smiled readily and looked up at him with the most amazing eyes, brown-green with hidden depths, like a still pool in a forest. The way she walked, the way she turned her head to talk with him, she made him think of a deer, while every other girl seemed like a cow to him. She asked him, “Do you like Monet?”

“I don't know yet. I never heard of him before today.” This, Sam realized, was not the most intelligent-sounding thing he had ever said, but Sam White did not know how not to be honest.

The girl's smiling mouth quirked at the corners, somehow tender. “You're taking the course to fill a distribution requirement.”

“Yes.”

“What would you rather be doing?”

“Building something. Fixing my car.”

She nodded with utter acceptance. That was one of the things that he soon came to love best about her, that she never made him feel klutzy, uncool, a doofus, the way most girls did. Her modesty meshed perfectly with his honesty.

“I bet there's art in fixing in a car,” she said.

“How?”

“Well, liking art fixes me every day.”

“It
does
?”

“Sure. I get to
see
more.”

He had never met anyone else like her. Dorrie Birch. And she had helped him see more, ever since that first meeting. With her help and companionship he had seen the shape of interspace, he had seen Seurat beyond the dots, he had seen green sky in sunsets, he had seen the brilliant white and tan of a pinto-barked sycamore tree against a cobalt sky, he had seen the different colors in the pebbles beneath his feet. What he could not see, dating Dorrie, was why she still lived at home with her parents, who seemed not to trust her or even like her much. He sensed some sort of mystery there.

Remembering this, driving the Silverado home from work, Sam felt dismally that the mystery had deepened, if anything, over the years. “God,” he asked as if he were talking to a passenger in his Silverado, “could you help me understand my wife?”

Sam often talked to God in this spontaneous way, because he had been raised to believe in the power of prayer. He prayed routinely twice a day, in the morning driving to work and in the evening driving home, times when he was alone, and prayer strengthened him in his purposes; he expected no other answer.

He did not tell Dorrie he ever prayed about her, because she would not have liked it. Her parents had prayed over her too often the wrong way, like Pharisees.

“What is it, God?” Sam murmured. “What's making her sad?”

There was something otherworldly about Dorrie. Something deeply innocent, something that made him feel as if she required protection. Not that she wasn't smart. She'd been a straight-A student when he'd met her, and even more impressive, she seemed to really get something out of Pollock and Matisse and that weird guy, whatsisface, Escher. Dorrie understood paintings and music and books, stuff like that, but sometimes she didn't seem wise to the real world.

And at the same time, paradoxically, Sam couldn't help feeling as if she knew something he didn't. He sensed something hidden about Dorrie. Something fugitive.

Nothing new, Sam reminded himself as he steered the Silverado. It was a mystery, an enigma, that had attracted him to her in the first place. Dorrie shy yet bold, Dorrie who would sing softly but skylark true as they walked across campus, sad songs with strange words he had never heard before. “I wish I were a tiny sparrow, and I had wings, and I could fly. I'd fly away to my own true lover, and all he'd ask, I would deny.” And there were other ones: “She'd her apron wrapped about her and he took her for a swan,” a girl whose lover shot her dead with an arrow, and “Black, black, black is the color of my true love's hair,” with a red rose growing up from his grave.

Odd.

She still sang those songs and others sometimes, in the pickup cab with him, around the house, even walking in the mall. And she still wore long, swinging skirts—Sam's Mormon upbringing made him cherish the conservative way Dorrie dressed, rare and commendable in this day and age. Then there was something secret about her, silent and almost ashamed, that had piqued his curiosity, had made her seem even more beautiful than she was—and Dorrie had indeed been beautiful, in her own distinctive swanlike way. A quietly, classically, darkly beautiful girl.

It was too bad that lupus had messed up her skin and made her put on weight, but it bothered him only because it bothered her. He sympathized with her discomfort, but heck, he was getting a bit hefty in the belly himself, and as far as he was concerned, Dorrie had gotten big in all the right places. Sam considered her womanly, guitar shaped, her firm-waisted figure good to look at and heavenly to hold. So what if the lupus had changed her face, turning it round and puffy with some scars from itchy rash, some white patches from loss of pigment? It could do that, but it could never change her eyes, amazing to gaze into. Nothing about her appearance could make Sam love her more in the deepest way, love her for who she was: a lyrical woman who sang folk ballads, a beauty-hungry woman who loved anything with wings, a brave woman who seldom complained, didn't want any special treatment, kept on keeping on.

“God, is it the lupus that's making a silence between us?”

Dorrie had lupus really bad, so bad that it could possibly give her systemic problems that might eventually kill her. Maybe it was a sense of her own mortality that gave Dorrie a faraway look sometimes. Maybe he was worrying about what was on her mind when he should be worrying about her dying.

Maybe
she
was worried about dying.

Sam shook his head hard.
Don't go there.
But at the same time he whispered, “God, I promise I will make more of an effort if you please don't take her away.” Definitely if Dorrie hadn't started supper preparations, Sam would ask her whether she wanted to go out to the Red Lobster or Hoss's or someplace.

One of these days he ought to bring her flowers. . . . Well, he'd consult God before making that sort of a change. Up until now, flowers, cards, hugs and kisses, that stuff just made him feel uncomfortable, didn't seem to fit into the context of their churchgoing lifestyle or their marriage. But Dorrie ought to be able to tell he loved her, which he did. And that he was faithful to her, which he was. He gave her a nice home, and she could call off work whenever she wanted, and his insurance took care of her medical bills. He and she got along. They didn't quarrel. Well, maybe once in a while because he wanted kids and she wouldn't agree to adoption, but still, she'd never just walk out on him. Not the way she was raised.