Little Girl Gone (23 page)

“I’m going to get you out of this. You won’t go to jail.”

He did not know what laws he was going to break, but
he was pretty sure there were some. It was equally clear that whatever arrangement Madora and Willis had, when Django saw her on the chair with the hammer she wanted out of it. He would help her and in the process help himself; and if it all went south and he got arrested, Huck would help him. And Mr. Guerin. He was sick of being sad all the time and he did not want to think about death and the grave and car crashes anymore. He did not want to sit in Aunt Robin’s house and wait for his life to start again. He was ready to
do
something.

“Take that girl out to the Tahoe and put her in the backseat. And fix the seat belts so her hands can’t reach—”

“I know how,” Madora said.

Like the crows flying up, cawing a racket, and then finally coming to rest, silent and evenly spaced among the branches of the trees, his mind had settled too.

“What’s her name?”

“Linda.”

He stood over her. “Do you want to get out of here, Linda?” She stopped screaming. Her blank expression told him nothing. She was a zero unit. He leaned closer. Inches from her face he yelled, “Do you want to get out of here?”

Linda’s eyes and nose and mouth wrinkled together, and she burst into pitiful infantile crying that was almost worse than her screams. He looked over at Madora hunkered at the table now, her eyes as big around as fishbowls.

He was twelve years old but at that instant he was pretty sure he was the oldest person in the trailer. Except for Willis.

Jett Jones, Boy of the Future, versus the Dark Entity. He told Madora, “Use that dish towel to make a blindfold.”

Django thought he saw Willis’s fingers move.

“And hurry up.” There was definitely some twitching going on. “There’s gonna be a shit storm in about five minutes.”

He was nervous, but not afraid. And stronger than he had ever realized. He held Linda still while Madora tied the blindfold. She tried to raise her hands to pull it off, but they were still cuffed. She started screaming again. Not scared, just mad. The loop around her ankle was held together with a padlock.

“Do you know the combination, Madora?”

She shook her head.

“Shit.”

On the ground Willis groaned.

“Okay, here’s what I want.” He handed Madora the hammer. At first she shrank from taking it. Django pointed up at the eye hook on the wall. “Just get up there and finish what you were doing. Then loop the rope or whatever it is. She’ll have to carry it. Or you can. We have to get her to the car.” He looked at Linda, wishing she were not blindfolded. If she saw his face she would know that he meant every word.

“Girl,” he said, “if you don’t cooperate, we’ll just leave you here with him.”

When Linda was in the car, Django ran back to the trailer. He left the lights and air-conditioning on.
The generator would run until the fuel ran out. The cops would find Willis long before that. He nudged Willis’s foot with the toe of his Nike. His eyelids fluttered and he groaned.
A bad concussion,
Django thought, and for the first time he felt afraid of what he had gotten into. Willis needed a doctor and Django would make sure he got one. But he and Madora needed time first. Eventually Willis would regain his senses and remember seeing Django in the trailer and connect him to Aunt Robin. When that happened, Django wasn’t sure what would happen to him except that he would be in trouble. The biggest kind of trouble. For a second he thought about not following through with his full plan, but he knew that if he backed out now, he would always regret it. This was his opportunity and Madora’s too. He had to take it.

He dug in the pocket of Willis’s scrub pants and withdrew his wallet. He did not need money, which was lucky because the guy had only a couple of dollars. Django removed his identification. For a little while after the sheriff’s department found him, Willis would be a John Doe. He eased his hand into the shirt pocket and pulled out a cell phone.
Cheapo,
Django thought.
A throwaway.

And just what he needed.

He left Willis where he lay, locking him in the trailer. Madora stood at the Tahoe’s passenger-side door, her arms wrapped around herself. The midafternoon sun poured down on her, but she looked like she was knee-deep in winter.

“You’re driving,” Django said.

Her eyes opened wide. “I can’t. My license isn’t good.”

“You have to do it. I don’t even know where the gears are.”

“But, Dja—”

“Don’t say my name!”

“We can’t just leave him.”

“He’s a bad man. Keep telling yourself.”

Django knew the word that described a man like Willis. He was a sociopath. He had kept Linda captive, handcuffed and tethered her and made Madora live alone at the end of a road going nowhere, using her as a servant and almost as much a prisoner as the girl in the trailer. But what had convinced Django that Willis was a bad man and put in motion the risks he was taking now was what he’d seen when Willis charged into the trailer: the raw terror on Madora’s battered face. She hadn’t been confused or panicked or angry when she hit Willis with the hammer. She feared for her life.

He held up Willis’s throwaway phone. “When we get out of the county, I’ll call the sheriff.” And then he would toss the phone, keeping his own to use in an emergency.

He would tell the police there was a girl named Linda cuffed and blindfolded behind Arroyo Elementary School and a man in a trailer at the end of a gravel road. He would give them no details, just enough to get them to the trailer eventually. Though Django had taken Willis’s driver’s license and car registration, the police would figure it all
out eventually and be able to track the Tahoe. Django hoped all this would take long enough for him and Madora to get onto the crowded LA freeways.

But if something went wrong and the police caught them going north, he had his own phone, programmed with Mr. Guerin’s number. Home and office.

Madora persisted. “Where are we going?”

Django leaned in close and whispered. “To my brother. To Huck.”

R
obin’s father lived in unit number three of a single-story condominium complex called Oak Creek Haven: pale peach-colored stucco and a fake tile roof festooned with hoops of pink and red bougainvillea but no oaks or creeks that Robin could see. Nor did it seem like much of a haven, surrounded by four-and six-lane surface streets and big-box stores.

She sat in her car, staring at the traffic. In the cup holder next to her she could see her sister’s handwriting on the back of Mr. Guerin’s business card. Robin had programmed the address into her GPS and followed its directions, so precise and impersonal that they demanded obedience. She had driven to Temecula without thinking what she would do when she got there.

A double horse trailer paused at the corner and turned right on red. Robin could see a horse’s head looking out. It probably had no more idea why it was where it was at that moment than she fully understood why she was parked outside her father’s condo in Temecula.

Her last clear memory came from a time not long before he left home. It was cold in Morro Bay and a gusty wet wind chased the rag ends of a rainstorm across the sky, creating patterns of shadow and light across the lawn, where her father stood with his back to the house. Robin was in the living room, looking out the picture window. Behind her, Caro had spread the contents of her paper-doll box across the carpet in scenes: the prom, the vacation, the slumber party. Down the short hall connecting the front of the house and two bedrooms, their mother was cleaning the bathroom, filling the little house with the smell of ammonia.

“Can I go outside and help Daddy?” Robin yelled to her mother.

“It’s wet and cold and you’ve already got the sniffles.”

“But it stinks in here.”

“You heard me.”

Robin’s father was a slight and pale-skinned man who spent his weekdays under fluorescent lights at a desk in a bank in San Luis Obispo, his weekends in the garden. Sitting in the parking lot outside his condo, Robin remembered how narrow his back was as he stood beside the Eugenia bush that separated their house from the one next door. In her memory, the houses on both sides of Estero Street were similarly small and unremarkable, their facades and floor plans all the same.

All at once she saw her father’s back grow rigid, and she heard a sound, a scream loud enough to make Caro look up from her paper dolls.

“What was that?”

Robin did not answer; she was transfixed, watching him. His upper body torqued and his arm went back and up and she saw the hedge clippers leave his hands and go flying—blades over handles over blades—through the air and into the street, their sharp mouth open wide, as if they, and not her father, had screamed.

Two days later he left his family and Robin never saw him again.

She rested her forehead on the center of the steering wheel and counted backwards from one hundred. She reached zero and got out of the car. In the late afternoon, with a wall of rugged mountains blocking the ocean breeze, the air in Temecula was still and fumy and blazing hot. From somewhere on the other side of Oak Creek Haven she heard the plonk of a tennis ball and children’s voices making the kind of happy noise that meant a swimming pool in the summertime.

She had not called ahead to prepare her father. She wanted to see the look on his face when he opened the door, wanted to see if he recognized her immediately or if there was a moment—even a fraction of a moment—of confusion.

She entered the complex and followed a cement path between unimaginatively landscaped borders of succulents and salvia and more bougainvillea. Unit three had a tiny walled patio in front and a door with a decorative cage around the peephole. A pagoda-shaped hummingbird feeder hanging
from the eaves swung slightly as an iridescent bird whirred away, startled by her appearance. Moisture pimpled at the back of Robin’s neck. She rang the bell and then exhaled.

No going back.

The man who answered the door was even smaller than she remembered, maybe five feet eight on a confident day. What remained of his hair was still dark brown, cut militarily short. Behind a pair of glasses with shiny metallic rims, his eyes widened.

“Well,” he said. “Well.”

“You recognize me.” Embarrassed, she laughed. Of course he did. He was her father.

He opened the door wider, and she felt a breath of cool air and smelled spices as she stepped inside.

“You’re cooking chili,” she said and laughed again. Chagrined, self-conscious: these feelings should have been his. He was the one who had done the leaving; he was the one with something to be embarrassed about. “I remember your chili.”

But until that second, she had not.

“I didn’t like it,” she said, recalling that she and Caro had once fed theirs to the neighbor’s dog. “You seasoned it with vinegar.”

He nodded as if she had said something wise.

“You’re like your mother. Pretty.”

A splash of light flashed through a window and stung Robin’s eyes.

The condominium was nicer than she had anticipated,
spacious and full of light, furnished with a few simple pieces. Off the kitchen, a set of French doors opened onto what Robin saw was a second and larger patio. Above the table, a ceiling fan paddled lazily.

Frank Howard went into the kitchen, an area divided from the living room by a granite-topped bar and pony wall, and took a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator. Without asking if she wanted any, he poured a tall glassful over a pile of ice cubes and a sprig of fresh mint.

“Sugar?”

“I don’t like iced tea.”

“Pomegranate sun tea.” He put a teaspoon of sugar in the glass and stirred it. “Refreshing.”

“I won’t like it.”

He smiled. “You’re more like your mom than just your looks.”

This was a dig, and to prove him wrong, Robin sipped the iced tea. She did like it and managed a smile.

“I have something to tell you. Maybe you know already. It was in all the papers—”

His cheeks and jaw seemed to lose tone, adding years to his face. “I read it in
USA Today
.”

“You shouldn’t have found out that way.”

“Death is death. No matter how you hear about it, it’s never easy. There was a picture of Jacky in the entertainment section. With Keith Richards.” His face brightened. “He knew them all, didn’t he, Robin? It was like Caro married into rock-and-roll royalty.”

“Did you go to the funeral?” At the time she had been too stunned and confused to stand still for obits and homilies. “Apparently it was quite a show.”

“What about the boy?”

“He’s living with me now. He’s a sweetheart, actually. I like him.”
But I’m not sure he likes me.

“I saw him from time to time when he was little. Smart. And so confident. Just a tyke and he could carry on a conversation.”

“He’s miserable with me.”

“Under the circumstances, he’d be miserable no matter where he was.”

“I’m going to call Huck and persuade him to take him.”

“You’re sure you want to do that?”

“I’m old, I’m boring. At least with his brother he’d be entertained.” Put this way, it did not seem like a very good reason.

They sat, looking over each other’s shoulders to where their ghosts of Caro stood observing their strange reunion.

“Is there anything of hers you want? She left me most of the contents of the house.”

“No. I was only in it a couple of times. Too big. I never felt comfortable in Beverly Hills.”

This surprised Robin. She had thought her father and Caro were as close as he and she were distant. “I thought you were…” Now that she wanted to be specific, she wasn’t really sure what she had thought. “Tight?”

He laughed and Robin remembered her mother once
saying to him:
Not everything is a joke; not everything is amusing.

“Ask me what you want to know, Robin. You came and I’m glad. But there’s no easy way.”

“I wanted you to know about Caro.”

“Yes, but for that you could have called.”