Elizabeth's Daughter (26 page)

  She went to her room, sat on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands. Her heart was palpitating but she wouldn’t let that interfere with the image she just saw
–
she wanted to burn it into her mind’s eye. She didn’t know what it meant, but she was sure that it would become clear to her. She pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt and went back downstairs.

  “I’m going driving now,” she told Gail. “Keep the home fires burning.”

  “I always do.”

  Elizabeth drove farther and farther away from home. She drove up and down El Toro Road, but no matter where she looked, nothing made her feel she was closer to Amy.

  She went home for an hour after dusk, then got back in her car.

  She drove back to El Toro Road, winding in the hills among the housing. Glancing at the car clock she saw it was nearly midnight. As she drove around a city park, a sudden dense fog came up off the grassy plateau of the park and seemed to practically walk toward her. She drove her car slowly. There was no fog at all among the houses across the street.

  The fog stole across the road. Elizabeth stopped at a stop sign, glancing in her rear view mirror. Coming towards her through the fog in the street was a white sedan. Elizabeth refused to give in to the fear.

  The car pulled up slowly on her right side. Elizabeth peered into it, but she only saw an unclear shadow of the person with short dark hair and wearing large, dark-framed glasses. The car pulled away from the stop sign and drove into the fog.

  Elizabeth followed. Unlike the night before, the driver seemed to pay no attention to Elizabeth. They returned to El Toro Road and the white sedan turned right, toward the Santiago Mountains. Elizabeth followed.

  The farther they went, the denser and whiter the fog became. The white sedan drove faster and faster, but Elizabeth kept following its red tail lights. She careened at sixty around curves that the small car ahead seemed to be taking in a leisurely fashion.

  Suddenly, instantly, the car ahead disappeared, in the night, in the fog.

  Elizabeth slowed down and looked around. The fog was stealthily lifting and she saw she was just a few feet from the Silverado Canyon turnoff. She had no idea what she should to, where she should go. So she turned around and headed for home.

*   *

“Peter wants you to call the minute you get home,” Gail said as Elizabeth walked in the door.

  “Oh? Did something....”

  “No. He said no. He just wants to hear your voice.”

  “He wants to make sure that I’m still in one mental piece.” She dialed Peter’s number. “Hi. It’s me.”

  “Elizabeth,” Peter said, concern in his voice, “Gail tells me you’re driving all over the place and....”

  “And that I’m acting a little coo-coo? I guess it’s true. But the... whoever it is, has been visible to me two nights now. I won’t let go. No one else has any information. Do you?”

  “No,” Peter answered candidly. “Absolutely nothing has gone on here.”

  “So, whether I’m crazy or not, I’m still the only one with any sort of lead. I think I’m hanging on pretty well, given... everything.”

  “I think so too, Elizabeth,” Peter said. “But please,
please
,” he went on, “don’t do anything to endanger yourself. If you don’t get a good night’s sleep tonight, you should let Gail or me go driving with you tomorrow. It’s only logical. You won’t help Amy if you get hurt. Or even if you’re at such a low energy level that you can’t function well.”

  Peter was absolutely right. “Okay, I’ll try to be reasonable tomorrow.”

  “Should I come over so we can talk about what’s been happening?”

  “Thanks Peter, but, no, not right now. I’m exhausted. And I don’t want to diffuse the energy.”

  “Okay. But I’m coming over tomorrow. Gail invited me for dinner.”

  “Excellent! We’ll see you then.”

  The next morning Gail and Elizabeth were sitting quietly at the breakfast table after a quiet night. Neither Tony nor the mystery person had telephoned.

  The front doorbell rang. Elizabeth jumped up and met Mrs. Vargas at the door. Tearfully, she ushered her into the kitchen.

  She finally saw the other side of Elizabeth’s face, and her still swollen, purple eye socket. “Did Tony do that to you?”

  “Yes. He hit me, and I told him that we were through and that he had to leave. For revenge, I guess, he kidnapped Amy. I’ve been driving around, hour after hour, looking for him.”

  Mrs. Vargas’ expression became very sad. “I’m very disappointed.”

  “Well don’t be disappointed in Elizabeth,” Gail defended. “She’s turned herself inside out to be Amy’s mother. If you’d just let her adopt Amy in the first place when you saw the three of us were a perfect family, instead of making Elizabeth feel she had no alternative but to marry the first person who asked, this would never have happened.

  “Look at her!” Gail went on, heated. “Beaten, abused, stitches in her hand and knee, sleepless, worried, and traumatized, and see how calm and rational she is? She’s so amazing.”

  “Oh, Gail,” Elizabeth protested, “don’t upset Mrs. Vargas.”

  “No, no,” Mrs. Vargas said. “I’m glad to hear her testimonial, I trust Gail’s instincts.”

  “If you must be disappointed in someone,” Gail continued, “be disappointed in me. I’m the one who left the door to the garage unlocked and forgot that Tony had a garage door opener, which is how he got his hands on Amy. Elizabeth was at work expecting that I keep up my end of protecting Amy.”

  “Mrs. Vargas nodded. “Unfortunate. Unfortunate all around. So, what’s been taking place?”

  Elizabeth told Mrs. Vargas about the events of the previous days, including the two paranormal events Peter had with Elizabeth’s grandfather.

  “When my grandfather, or who, or whatever it was, told Peter that Amy’s real name is Amethyst, which Peter had absolutely no way of knowing, I was convinced that something spectacular was happening.”

  “Perhaps” Mrs. Vargas said carefully, “people pick up bits of information from someone they care very much about. That is, I suppose a person as close to you as Peter is, and as sensitive and intelligent as he is, would be able to psychically access Amy’s real name and even tie it together with a lucid dream with a man like your grandfather in it. But I don’t believe it goes any farther than that.”

  “A few days ago, Mrs. Vargas, I would have said the same thing. I’m just an ordinary person who’s greatest desire is to live an ordinary life. But events larger than me have been taking place, and I can’t deny them with some usual explanation such as mere sensitivity and dreams.” Elizabeth told her about the previous two nights, the dense fog, the white sedan, the driver with short dark hair and large glasses.

  Mrs. Vargas appeared to become agitated by Elizabeth’s story as it progressed. When she stopped, Mrs. Vargas asked, “Where did you get that information?”

  “What?” Elizabeth was stunned by Mrs. Vargas’ quietly disapproving voice, a tone she had never heard from her.

  “Those details, how did you come up with them?”

  “Why, just exactly as I said,” Elizabeth answered candidly. “The way I told you.”

  “There is no way that you could know... let me tell you a story,” Mrs. Vargas said, becoming her calm self once again. “One day I got a call from a young mother asking me if I knew of any financial assistance to help her provide medical attention for her infant. I visited her and she told me her story, which no one, besides myself, has ever heard.

  “She had wanted nothing more than to have a child, although she had no man in her life. Working second shift as a word processor in a big empty building and living with her mother, there was little probability that she would ever meet someone. But still she wanted a baby.

  “An attractive man left work every day just as she came on to her shift. He noticed her looking at him and one day he asked her to lunch. After a dozen “lunches,” she was pregnant. She told him about the pregnancy, but she realized she didn’t love him, and didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. In any case, the day after she told him, he quit work and disappeared.

  “When her baby, Amy, was born with a club foot, the woman took on a second job, and spent the rest of her time writing letters and making telephone calls to try and get financial assistance for surgery and medical treatment. She had to spend most of her money on baby sitters and she worked herself into the ground.”

  Mrs. Vargas paused for a moment. “She loved Amy with all her heart and soul, much as you do. But tragedy struck one night when an unusually dense fog rolled in. She apparently became disoriented in the fog, driving off the road and into a lamp post. She died instantly.

  “Amy’s grandmother could not afford to provide for her. Without her daughter’s income, she had to go on welfare herself. Anyway, she wanted nothing to do with Amy, blaming the poor baby for her mother’s untimely death.

  “Amy’s biological mother had short black hair and wore large, dark-rimmed glasses. She drove a small white sedan.”

Chapter XXX

After Mrs. Vargas left, Elizabeth went to her room, exhausted. She fell asleep and immediately began to dream. She saw the white sedan, she followed it up El Toro road again. She turned on the car radio
–
a young woman’s voice said, “I chose you to be Amy’s new mother because I saw in your heart and soul you would have the same love for Amethyst I have.”

  The white sedan turned onto the Silverado Canyon Road and in her dream, Elizabeth followed. The white car disappeared.

  Elizabeth woke up, still exhausted. The dream had taken as much out of her as if she’d actually gone through the experience. She got out of bed and prepared for the long-night’s drive.

  She headed directly for Silverado Canyon Road. The sun was setting behind her and all the trees glowed, bathed in the sun’s golds and pinks and oranges, the sky a deepening blue. Birds fluttered about, and Elizabeth saw a squirrel scamper from a branch on one tree and leap across to the neighboring tree.

  Everything in this idyll was ageless and beautiful. Elizabeth wished with all her being that she could enjoy it.

  She felt herself moving, suddenly, through that odd, static atmosphere. The interior of the car became charged. She slammed on her brakes as she hurtled headlong into a cabin.

  But as she pulled onto the shoulder, gasping with palms sweating, she saw that the cabin was translucent. Dark brown, with a brown shake roof and three steps leading up to the front door. There were two gigantic fir trees, one on either side of the cabin, the same cabin that had superimposed itself on the baby’s carpet.

  And now she knew, without a doubt, this was where Tony was hiding with Amy.

  This cabin must be here in the canyon
–
somewhere.

  Elizabeth drove the two miles up to the little village of Silverado Canyon. Then she drove the narrow, winding road that snaked among the cabins on the hillside. But they were all cheek by jowl. None of them had the space around them of the one in Elizabeth’s vision. None of them had the giant matching fir trees.

  She continued up the canyon to the next berg of cabins. They were even more unlikely, as they were not even on a hillside.

  Night had fallen and Elizabeth could no longer see to continue her search. She went back down to Lake Forest and home, buying maps of the area at every filling station she passed.

  Gail greeted her at the door. “Oh, Lizzie, I’m so glad you’re home.”

  “Why? Has something happened?”

  “No. I wish I could say yes, but no. I just mean, you’re wearing yourself down to nothing with all this driving around. And you’re not accomplishing anything. At least it’s only ten o’clock tonight instead of one a.m.”

  Elizabeth began spreading out the maps on the living room floor.

  “What are those for?” Gail asked.

  “I’m going to find Amy tomorrow morning.”

  “How?”

  “From all the information I’ve been given.” She got down on the floor and started studying all the roads in the Silverado Canyon. Silver mining had gone on in those mountains one-hundred years ago and there were perhaps cabins that hardly anyone knew about, up in the hills, abandoned. A perfect place for someone who wanted to hide.

  Elizabeth penciled out three nearly invisible lines
–
dirt roads, she surmised on one of the maps, then highlighted them on another, larger map.

  She pointed at those three infinitesimal lines. “On one of these roads, that’s where Tony is hiding Amy. On a hill, in a dark brown cabin with three steps up to the door and two huge fir trees, one on either side of the cabin. That’s where my baby is. I’m going to bed.”

Chapter XXXI

Elizabeth set her alarm for four-thirty. It would be light enough by the time she got to Silverado Canyon to see the cabin. She got dressed and tip-toed to the garage. As she drove she thought about Tony, not in his right mind. Perhaps he even had a weapon.

But she couldn’t stop now. The police had not found Amy. She’d left enough in the hands of others. Amy was her responsibility, and she was taking charge.

  She put the map she had folded down to the three obscure roads across the steering wheel, studying it, hoping another vision would come to her. But it did not, and before long she was at the Silverado Canyon turn off.

  All three of the roads were far up in the foothills of the mountains. Elizabeth drove through the winding sleeping village of Silverado Canyon, as day dawned, fresh and beautiful. But Elizabeth had no mind for nature now. She
knew
she was close to Amy.

  Finally she came to the first road and turned onto it, driving over un-drivable terrain. “This is a road?”

  There was nothing but thick vegetation on both sides of the road and not the slightest hint of any sort of building anywhere. The terrain did not look right either, it was too flat. But Elizabeth followed the bumpy ruts until they became indiscernible and finally were completely grown over.