Little Girl Gone (22 page)

Across the room on her dresser there was a business
card with Mr. Guerin’s name on the front. On the back Caro had written their father’s address and phone number in her swooping forehand.

Django wondered if his aunt was sick. She stayed in her room until the middle of the morning and when she left the house she didn’t pause on her way out the door to list a dozen things he couldn’t do or should be careful of. She just left, wagging her hand over her shoulder, saying she would be back.

Alone, he spent the morning wandering around the house, opening drawers and closets, poking his nose into cupboards. His snooping failed to uncover anything of interest, just sheets and towels, and plastic bins of junk he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting: heating pads and a hot-water bottle, a Water Pik and lots of sample-sized tubes and bottles of hand cream and mouthwash. The tidy ordinariness depressed him.

Mr. Guerin had said he would arrange to have the piano sent to Arroyo. Django wished it were in the house now.

His father had promised that when he completed five years of piano lessons, he would teach him to play the guitar. For a long time his twice weekly piano lessons were just a means to that end, but now he missed the piano in a way that was almost a physical need. He wished that he had asked Mr. Guerin to send it right away, the next day. When it came it would be both a link to his father and an escape, a way to pass time and lose time.

He sat on the couch and texted Lenny and Roid. He did not think they would answer him. They had their lives and he had his, a boring new life in Arroyo until he moved up to Los Gatos. That morning he had wanted to ask his aunt if she had called Huck, but she was so weirded out since they went to LA, he didn’t think she would know what he was talking about. After he moved north, Lenny and Roid would start paying attention to his texts. They would go crazy when they found out he had a helipad in the backyard and be begging him to send the chopper down to pick them up. Django might get Huck to do it, but no hurry. First he’d make his so-called friends wish they had been nicer to him.

He was in the kitchen thinking about lunch when the phone rang. He looked at the retro white instrument hanging on the wall and waited for the answering machine to click on. In school he had learned about an old-time scientist who trained dogs to respond when they heard a bell ring. He was like those dogs. The phone rang, and he automatically thought it was his mother. Automatically. She was dead—he finally believed that; but he was still like one of those stupid dogs. As soon as he heard the phone, her voice clicked on in his head.
Django, darling boy, it’s Momma.
There was nothing he could do to stop his response and he feared that when he was an old man he’d still hear
Django, darling boy, it’s Momma
whenever the phone rang.

“Django, you there?” It was his aunt. “Django, pick up the phone.”

She sounded even more tense than usual, and out of nowhere Django thought about the piano again, remembering the German piano tuner who came to the house several times a year. If he wasn’t in school, Django hung out with him the whole time, watching how he fingered the strings inside the big instrument, listening to the different tones they made as he loosened and tightened them, fascinated by his trade that was at once an art and a craft and yet neither of those really. Some of the sounds made Django wince, they were so off-key.

Aunt Robin said, “Okay, here’s the thing, Django. I’ve got to meet with Mr. Conway—the lawyer, you know? There’s some stuff I’ve got to settle with him.” She rushed from one sentence to the next, not stopping for breath. “And then, I’m not sure, but I think I’m going up to Temecula. Do you know where that is? It’s in Riverside County. I don’t know for sure if I’ll go but I didn’t want you to worry if I’m late getting home.” She stopped talking. Then, “This is too weird—I know you’re listening… Okay, so here’s the deal. I might go, I might not, and I’m not sure when I’ll get home. Or if I’ll go. It’s just something I might do. Spur of the moment. So, I don’t know how long I’ll be. You can fix your own dinner, right? There’s pizza in the freezer.” Another long pause. “Use the microwave, not the oven. And, Django, don’t go off on your bike. Stay home. The boxes of stuff we brought from the house… you should empty those, okay? You might find something to play with. Just don’t go off on your damn bike. Stay put, Django.”

Something to play with.
His aunt didn’t have a clue how funny she was.

He made two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He liked iceberg lettuce with PB and J, but the crisper was empty except for a few limp carrots. In Django’s home the refrigerator had been twice as big and always full of good stuff. Aunt Robin never had time to go to Whole Foods and no matter how often she went to the regular supermarket, there was never anything to eat. No cold cuts, no iceberg or good tomatoes, no juice boxes, no cookies. He made another sandwich and stuck all three in a plastic bag and put it in his backpack.

In his bedroom he found the money he’d taken from his father’s study and stuck the roll down deep in his jeans pocket. He didn’t care what Aunt Robin said; he was going to buy Foo. Madora might not want to do it at first, but when she saw a thousand dollars in cash, she would change her mind. He would tell her to use it to leave that freakazoid, Willis.

He ditched his bike behind a boulder and approached the house from the back, crossing the dried creek bed and pushing through a thicket of cottonwoods. His shoes scrunched on the sandy ground where the grains were as big as BBs; and gnats and no-see-ums swarmed around his head, exploring his ears and going for the moisture in his nose and at the corners of his eyes. From the treetops, the crows announced his arrival. He took off his baseball cap and flapped the bugs away, but they returned as soon as he stopped.

The trailer’s curbside door was open and Foo lay in the dirt near the steps, his bony head resting on his paws. Inside, Madora was talking to someone. Django heard only a few words every now and then, but it was her tone that interested him. It slunk down like a dog caught creeping up on a butter dish. It upset Django to hear her speak that way. She was his friend and he did not believe she could ever do something so bad she would sound that ashamed of herself.

The bugs were making Django crazy; plus he was curious, and he wanted to defend Madora, though he wasn’t sure against what.

He stepped out of the cottonwoods and into the clearing. Foo whirled and began barking. In a few steps Django stood at the trailer’s curbside door. Foo charged, barking and looking lethal, but when he realized it was his friend Django, he stopped barking, wagged his tail, and wriggled his back end.

With a quick glance Django took in everything of importance.

In the trailer, a stringy-haired girl lay on a cot, her hands cuffed in front of her and one leg dangling off the side with something around it and attached to a wire rope that ran across the floor and up the wall to an eye hook screwed into the skin of the trailer near the roof. Madora stood on a chair with a hammer in her hand, trying to pull out the hook.

“Hey.” He put one foot on the brick-and-board step up
to the door, but Foo stopped wagging his tail, growled, and wouldn’t let him go any farther. Django knew the dog and the dog knew him, but Foo was a pit bull and he decided not to push their friendship.

“Get out of here.” Madora waved her arms and almost fell off the chair.

Foo began barking again and the girl on the cot saw Django and started screaming for help. High in the trees, the crows announced trouble to the length of Evers Canyon. Madora jumped off the chair and ran to the door and tried to pull it shut. She stopped, listening. Django heard the sound of a big car coming up the road fast. He wished he’d stayed where he was in the cottonwoods, but he could not run away now and leave Madora. He wished Lenny and Roid were with him.

“This isn’t your business,” Madora said. “Go while you can.”

The way she leaned against the door, Django knew that she was still in pain. From her fall out of bed. He knew Willis had hurt her. A righteous rage flared up in him and burned away his fear.

The girl lunged off the cot toward the door, dragging her tether. Her screams were like nails down an old-fashioned chalkboard. A car door slammed and Foo shot off around the trailer, more barking. A man’s voice yelled for him to shut up.

“Go!” Madora cried.

“I’m not scared of him.”

“You should be!”

Willis wheeled around the corner of the trailer, looking twice as big as he had standing in the supermarket parking lot. Django felt the temperature spike ten degrees.

“What the fuck?” Willis gawked at Django and then at Madora. “You bitch! You stupid bitch!”

Django started to protest but no sound came out of his mouth. The temperature went up another ten degrees.

Willis looked up at Madora, standing three feet above him in the open door. He saw the hammer in her hand and the chair against the opposite wall. As the scene came together in Willis’s mind, it did the same in Django’s. Madora had been trying to pull out the eye hook to free the girl who was standing up beside the bed now, the slack of the wire rope gripped between her hands. She was lifting it, banging it down hard on the trailer’s wooden floor. Banging and banging and screaming.

Willis shoved Django aside and leaped up the steps into the trailer. The girl kept swinging the wire rope and banging it on the trailer floor like a maniacal fourth grader playing jump rope. Willis grabbed Madora by her hair and wrenched her backwards onto the floor at the same moment the wire rope caught him across the shin. He yelled and released Madora as he fell, clutching his leg where the wire rope had hit it. He staggered toward the girl, his hair loose and wild about his face. She banged and snaked the rope between them, screaming obscenities as Willis tried to dodge it. He glimpsed the hammer Madora had dropped,
and lunged for it at the same moment she did. Foo jumped from the ground into the trailer and dug his teeth into Willis’s ankle. Willis swung around, cursing, and drove his fist into the dog’s ribs, knocking the wind out of him, sending him tumbling out the door and onto the ground.

Madora screamed, “Foo!”

It happened so fast. Django saw her arm go up, and as Willis turned his head away from Foo and back to her, she slammed the hammer into the side of his head. Django watched Willis’s face. One moment he was raging, the next he was like a man who’d lost his glasses, squinting. He sobbed and fell over.

Nobody moved; nobody said anything. Foo jumped back into the trailer and lay down beside Madora and put his bull head on his paws, looking up at her.

Django returned to his senses before Madora and the girl. His thinking was like a man sending and receiving code at light speed and understanding it all, multiple messages simultaneously, making sense of it all in a way he never could on an ordinary day, under ordinary circumstances. He looked at the girl and the way the furniture was arranged in the trailer, the hook and the tether and the handcuffs, the hammer still in Madora’s hands. The plots of books and movies and countless television dramas sped through his mind. He recalled the stories he’d heard about abductions and kidnappings and young women held as captives in basements and closets and sheds. Good ideas and bad: he had no filter. In his mind he was the victims and the perps and the police
at the same time, and he was seeing a pattern. His thoughts combined and recombined and fell into place.

“We’re getting out of here.”

He stepped up into the trailer and grabbed Madora’s shoulders. He shook her and she stared at him, not blinking as her head bobbled. If her eyeballs had started spinning, Django would not have been surprised. “Pay attention.”

“I killed him.”

“You didn’t; he’s breathing.”

Madora and Willis had been keeping the tethered girl prisoner. The evidence of a terrible crime was right in front of Django but he didn’t care. In contrast to his cool and distant aunt, Madora had been warmth to him, a lonely girl who wanted his company and thought he was funny, as his mother had. With Madora he could show off and talk about his old life, about his mom and dad and Huck and his friends at school. So what if she didn’t believe him; she listened anyway.

The girl begged him to release her but he tuned her out.

His thoughts were everywhere at once, remembering, seeing, anticipating, leapfrogging and slipping sideways, kaleidoscoping too fast for close attention, and in the process creating brand-new thoughts.

Madora had been Willis’s accomplice.

No. He would never believe that. It could not have been that simple.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said. Half an idea, but the rest would come.

“He’s gonna die,” Madora wailed.

Django thought
concussion
but kept the word to himself. “No, but he’ll have a headache. That’s all.”

The girl on the bed started screaming again.

“Make her be quiet,” he told Madora. “I have to figure this out.”

But Madora was crying and helpless in her own way. She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around Foo.

By an act of will, Django shut out the noise and confusion and let his mind open like an old-fashioned blueprint unscrolling across a table. It was all there, the light-speed messages, the code, the media memories and news stories coming together and making sense like the plot of a Jett Jones adventure.

W
illis lay on his side with his head twisted at an awkward angle. In the fall he had driven his teeth into his lower lip, and blood had collected under his tongue and dribbled onto the trailer floor. Django held the back of his hand an inch from his mouth and felt a strong brush of air.

“I never meant to kill him.”

“I told you already. He’ll be okay. But we have to get out of here before he wakes up.”

“The police’ll catch us.” Madora covered her mouth. “I’ll go to jail.”

Django, now that he was thinking clearly, took a minute to look at the sepia stain of a bruise around Madora’s eye and cheekbone. He turned around and kicked Willis hard in the ribs because a man who would beat a woman was the lowest form of life in Django’s universe. He stood up straight, feeling tall for the first time in his life.