Little Girl Gone (21 page)

He had a long day ahead and much to do before he and Linda could leave Arroyo. He would be sorry to disappoint Mrs. Howard, who would be in considerable pain follow
ing her back surgery. And there were other clients who depended on him, but none of this could be helped. His time in Arroyo had come to an end. He leaned against the car and did his thinking and planning there, while somewhere in the rocks the feral cats yowled.

He had always been a frugal man, there was money in the bank from Linda’s baby and the sale of the house in Buffalo, enough to cover expenses. And there would be a great many of those in the months ahead: identification papers, fake college documents and passports, tuition and books, transportation to Miami, airline tickets for two, plus meals, and Linda would need clothes. She would like to feel pretty and pampered. He had no idea what a house or apartment would cost on the island, but he suspected nothing would be cheap. He thought of Shelley and her unborn child and wished he had the time for her. The lawyer would pay top money for another baby, and she was so needy. But he was through in Arroyo. Done.

Madora was the only loose end, a worry, an irritant, a nasty bite that itched. She was angry with him for hitting her and, honestly, he did regret losing his temper that way, although she had needed to be chastised. She was angry with him for doing it and jealous of Linda. But she still loved him, underneath it all, and if he cared to, he could bring her around, cajole her and restore her trustfulness, her willingness to do as he asked, whatever that was. But it sounded like work to him, and he could not be bothered.

He would lock her in the trailer with food and water
and pay a couple of months’ rent in advance to keep the landlord off the property. If Madora rationed what he left her, she would not starve. And it would not hurt her to suffer a little. She would be a kinder, more understanding person if she lived for a while as Linda had. She might one day thank him for helping her to grow spiritually. Eventually the landlord would come looking for more money. And when he did he would find her. By then he and Linda would be far away.

M
adora had once had a cell phone, but she forgot to keep it charged and lost track of where she’d put it. Generally it lived in a basket on the kitchen table, but it wasn’t there one day when she wanted to call Willis, and when she told him he said she would lose her head if it were not attached. This was right after he brought Linda home, and all at once Madora was too busy to think about her phone. She didn’t need one anyway; she had no friends, no one to call.

She wished she had been more careful.

The morning after Willis abandoned her to spend most of the night with Linda, Madora sat on her rock and waited for the sun. She closed her eyes and focused her attention, tried to remember the sound of her mother’s voice on the telephone. Sometimes she caught a note of it but never for long enough to be comforted. Now that she had begun thinking about Rachel, she worried that she might have moved from the house in Sacramento and left no
forwarding address. Maybe her new marriage had gone bust and she’d married someone else. If this were true, she could be anywhere with any name and Madora would never find her. This thought pressed within her skull like a solid thing with pointed corners.

It seemed weeks since she had slept the night through. Willis had not given her the pain pills he promised, and she had hurt all night, waking every hour or so, conscious that Willis was not in the bed beside her. He had left for work that morning without speaking to her.

Wherever her thoughts went, they came back to one thing. She needed a phone to call her mother and ask her to send bus fare. Rachel’s response would be delivered to the mailbox, one of a dozen in a line at the corner of Red Rock and the county road. Mail was delivered around noon and Willis was always at work then. Every day until the money came, Madora would walk down early and wait for the delivery. Willis would never know. He would come home one day and see her empty closet.

The phone call was the first hurdle.

Madora had never spoken to anyone living in the houses and trailers along Red Rock Road. Willis liked his privacy, or so she had once believed. Now it was clear that what he liked was keeping a girl in the trailer with no one close about to hear her yelling for help.

The day was going to be a hot one. Already the air had ripples in it. Like curtains moving in the wind, she could step forward, part the air, and be somewhere else in the
time it took to make a wish. On the other side of the rippling air, behind the curtains, there was a world she had abandoned when she gave her heart to Willis. Kay-Kay was out there and her mother and hundreds of people she might have met, places she would have gone, things she might have learned if she had not given her life to Willis.

She had to find a phone, and there was no time to waste. The courage to turn her back on Willis and call her mother was fragile and certain to shatter if she took time for chores or thought too much about it. She remembered hundreds of phone calls to Kay-Kay in high school, conversations that lasted half the night. They had talked about homework and boys mostly. And gossip. If they had heard of a girl living at the end of a road without a phone or a television, taking care of another girl kept locked in a trailer, Madora and Kay-Kay would have laughed and asked each other how anyone could be so cracked.

Madora had to walk down the road and knock on the door of the first house she came to, no matter who lived there. Willis said three men lived in the first house, cooking meth. He had told her that one night he saw someone walking down the middle of the road, dead drunk and staggering. Maybe this was true, but she knew it could just as likely be a story he’d invented to keep her homebound. Now she didn’t care if there were drug dealers in the first house. She would go there anyway and take Foo with her. The dog was a softy, but a stranger would never know that.

There were many things she should do before she
started walking; but she dismissed all of them, ran back to the house and dug her mother’s phone number out of the dresser drawer where she kept it, put on socks and tennis shoes, and slammed the kitchen door behind her. If her back and hip had not been hurting, she would have run down the road ahead of her fear.

One hundred yards beyond the house, Red Rock Road curved left around a boulder the size of a locomotive. To the right, the canyon bottom was half a mile wide and covered with rough chaparral, thickets of stiff, unfriendly bushes, interrupted occasionally by boulder piles and the white fountains of the yucca. The road went straight for a quarter mile and then turned, bordering the wall of Evers Canyon.

The first house was well off the road, a little distance up the side of the canyon in a grove of scrub oaks. Madora stopped at the tire tracks that marked the driveway. A runnel of sweat ran down her forehead and into the corner of her eye. Foo sat on his haunches beside her, looking up as if in expectation of good times to come.

“We should go back,” she said but moved forward.

The road to the house was not intended for walking and Madora’s back and hip soon began to hurt her. In her experience there had never been a fire in Evers Canyon, and the lemonade berry and deerweed bushes on either side of the driveway grew high enough to cast pools of welcome shade with their dense branches of leathery foliage. She stopped often to rest. An alligator lizard skittered out from a pile of
rocks, startling her, and ran up the road ahead before darting into the litter of leaves beneath a chamise bush. Foo saw a rabbit and took off after it. The driveway dipped into a dry wash and then sloped up. Madora sat on a rock and rubbed her hip, wondering how much farther she had to go. At the top of the rise she saw the house again, and a few minutes later two or three dogs began yapping, small from the sound of them.

The house was trim and neatly kept, with a square of redwood deck out in front shaded by a bleached-out red-and-white-striped awning. A door and picture window faced the driveway, and a dusty Volvo station wagon parked in front bore a bumper sticker saying
Teachers Do It with Class
. A woman in Levi’s and boots opened the front door and stood on the deck. She rested her hands on her hips.

“I don’t like pit bulls,” she said. Two small, white dogs with woolly faces charged out from behind her and leaped off the deck, going for Foo as if they meant to kill him.

“He won’t hurt anyone.” Madora crouched and Foo ran into her arms, trembling and wagging his stubby tail. The little dogs made their stand a foot away, barking and showing their teeth.

The woman called a name, something that sounded to Madora like
Shrek
, and both animals ran back to her.

“Who are you?”

“I live up the road.” Madora felt fat and sweaty and ready to burst into tears. The little dogs had scared her. This woman scared her. The nervous hope vibrating through her body scared her most of all. “Can I use your phone?”

“How come I never saw you before?”

“I dunno.”

“What happened to your face?”

Madora put her palm up to her cheek to hide the bruises. “I fell out of bed.”

The woman harrumphed. “That’s a new one. You drive the big SUV?”

Madora nodded, feeling confused and exposed by her questions.

“You drive too fast.”

Madora pursed her lips together and nodded again.

“You can’t bring that dog inside.”

“I won’t. He’s good, though. He’ll just stay here and wait for me.”

The woman seemed to be thinking. “You drive that SUV too fast, you’ll run someone down. There’s dogs up and down this road.”

“Not me. I don’t drive it.” Not for months. This woman would think Madora was a freak or a monster if she knew that all she did was care for a girl locked in a trailer.

“Must be a hermit.”

Madora didn’t know how to respond.

“Come on in, then.” She held the screen door open with her foot. “It’s cooler inside.”

The air-conditioned house was a relief. After a couple of minutes in the house and a drink of water, Madora felt less stunned and took a moment to look around her. The room was sparsely furnished with a couch and chairs, but
the walls were covered with framed photographs, groups and portraits, of children at all ages. There did not appear to be room for even one more.

“I used to teach school. They gave me a golden handshake because of budget cuts.”

“I thought they were your children. And grandchildren.”

“Never been married.” The woman looked at the photos. “But I guess I had plenty of kids, huh?”

“My boyfriend says guys’re cooking meth around here.”

“Boyfriend.” She harrumphed again. “What’s he think of that face of yours?”

Madora wished she could hide from the sharp blue eyes.

“No meth on Red Rock. I’d call the cops if there were. There’s just me and a retired sailor who lives in a trailer and drinks too much, gets to wandering sometimes. A guy way back off the road raises emus. The big birds, you know? For their meat.”

Madora would have liked to see an emu up close.

“What happened to your phone?” the woman asked.

“I lost it.”

“They make them too little. I can’t even see the keys without my specs.” She patted the pocket of her plaid camp shirt and pulled out a pair of metal half-frames that she positioned near the tip of her nose. They magnified the size of her eyes, making her scrutiny even harder for Madora to bear. “I asked what your name was.”

“Madora.”

“I’m Ellie Dutton.” She stuck out her hand.

Madora rubbed her palm on the back of her shorts. She regretted not taking the time to comb her hair and brush her teeth. “Nice to meet you.”

Ellie handed her a small cell phone. Madora didn’t know which key to press first.

“You want me to dial for you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Madora handed her the slip of paper with her mother’s number.

“Where is this? I don’t know this area code.”

She also should have brought some money to pay for the long-distance call.

“Sacramento?” Madora said.

Ellie pursed her lips and made a clicking sound with her tongue against her palate.

“Okay,” she said, adjusting her glasses. “Shoot.”

Madora’s hands were slippery as she took the phone from Ellie and held it, her whole arm shaking as she listened to the sound of ringing in a room far away. She sat on the nearest chair, not waiting for an invitation.

“Hello.” It was the voice Madora had been trying to remember. Not sweet but not hard either, a mellow, husky voice. “Hello? Who is this?”

Me, Mommy. Me.

“Madora?” Rachel made a choking sound. “It is you, isn’t it? Madora? Oh, I know it’s you, honey. Talk to me, baby. Talk to me.”

Madora held the phone away from her ear and looked
at the display. A dozen thoughts ran through her mind, but the one that ran fastest, the one that wheeled and turned and screamed, was the one that said if her mother knew about Linda and the trailer, she would turn her back on Madora and never speak her name again.

She pressed the red button.

Ellie Dutton looked at her curiously.

“No answer.”

C
oyotes woke Robin a little before dawn. They often came at that hour, when the rabbits were in the garden feasting on chard and parsley. She put on slippers and went downstairs. She stepped outside armed with a saucepan and a big metal spoon and went up the path toward the vegetable garden. In the moonlight the rabbits skittered for cover. Yellow eyes of the wild dogs gleamed from the bushes. For an instant, she felt a primal fear, the residue of time beyond memory; and then a flood of something more than courage washed it all away, and she dashed at the pack, banging on the pan, yelling at the top of her lungs.

Did she dream this?

She woke feeling pinched and achy, as if she had not done more than skim the surface of sleep for seven hours. Overnight every doubt and worry and question that had arisen since Django’s arrival seemed to have taken up residence in her back and joints.