Tea Cups & Tiger Claws (33 page)

With no choice but to wait out the forty-eight hours until his arraignment, Mack stayed just this side of crazy by concentrating on his next move instead of on the endless loop of what-ifs that flickered in his head. He talked out loud to himself, scribbled ideas onto a notepad, and made collect phone calls by the dozen in an effort to keep tabs on Millington, and anyone else who might’ve heard from Sarah.

The hardest phone call went all the way to Montana, on the outside chance that Sarah, or someone who knew Sarah, had tried to pass a message to him through his parents. As a young hotshot
, Mack had entertained silly daydreams about returning home like a hero. Instead, he called collect as a prisoner in county jail. He told his mom the whole story, from beginning to end, and, no surprise, she started crying. The surprise came when his dad got on the phone and said, “Mack, you’re a good man and I know you did right from beginning to end.” If Mack never remembered another word from his dad, he knew that he’d remember those words forever; they meant a lot to him. They didn’t, however, bring Sarah back home; so he said his goodbyes and got back to business.

Sometimes people just want to get lost,
he knew that, but Sarah had told Millington to meet her at the jail and then she never arrived. She’d just dropped out of sight. Even if she’d decided to chuck everything and skip town, she would’ve at least called.

This
thought soon led him in a different direction. What if she’d gotten into trouble and had had the chance to make only one quick phone call? She hadn’t called the fiancé or the lawyer or Mr. Perkins, he knew that much, but what about his own number? Maybe she’d left a message for him on the answering machine at the Sunny Slope wrangler house. She used it all the time to capture the odd detail that escaped mentioning in person: “Oh yeah, Gitanto threw a shoe, if you give me a dollar I’ll tell you which one,” or “Flash took another midnight stroll through Aunt Judy’s flowerbed. She wants him executed at dawn but I think a sturdier latch will do.” She had the number memorized and knew if she didn’t reach him in person, he’d at least get the message. The more he thought about it, the more he saw Sarah calling that number if she’d gotten into a scrape. It became the starting point for the plan he intended to pursue after he got out of jail.

At
9:00 AM on the final day, he sat on the bench in his cell, stared at the guard station, and waited to be called for his one o’clock hearing. Ten o’clock came, and then eleven. He asked a passing guard what time he’d get transported to the courthouse. He told Mack to ask his lawyer. At twelve noon he asked again, this time the guard said they were doing the paperwork right then. That sounded good; paperwork primed the pump for everything around there. But then nothing happened. At one o’clock he started making a ruckus.

To the unsmiling guard who sauntered down to his cell,
Mack said that he had to get to court immediately. The guard again mumbled something about paperwork, and Mack went into his cheesy jailbird routine. He said he knew his rights and he demanded to be taken to his hearing. The guard took a deep breath, looked down his nose at him, and said, “Do you want to go to court or do you want to go free?”

“What?”

“Veronica Newfield says you didn’t kidnap her. The D.A. is dropping the charges.”

T
hat’s how Mack got out of jail, into Roger Millington’s blue Cadillac, and up to Sunny Slope Manor’s front gate, where the two men stared for a moment. The place looked different. The gate had been moved in about twenty feet and had a new camera mounted to the adjoining brick column. A new guard house, a miniature replica of the manor’s tower, stood next to where the gate used to be. A man with a holstered gun and a navy blue uniform slowly got up from a stool in the new structure and approached the car. No more electronic keypad entry for Dorthea’s new castle; she had armed guards.

Without any pleasantries, the guard
, who had a southern accent, checked a clipboard, told Mack he didn’t work there anymore, and that he had no business on the premises. When Mack said he wanted his belongings, the guard got disturbed, like he’d just witnessed a two-eleven in progress of the worst kind. Then he went back into the guard house and picked up the phone.

“That guy needs to lay off the Dragnet,” said Millington.

After a brief phone conversation, he returned and said, as if delivering a Supreme Court decision, that Mack had been cleared to retrieve his belongings—by escort. Soon after that an electric cart with two more gun toting guards buzzed down the long driveway. Mack said goodbye to Millington and, under the suspicious eye of Joe Friday, walked through the gate and got onto the back of the cart. The guard in the passenger seat then got up and sat back down next to Mack.

On the way up he saw newly planted poles
outfitted with security cameras lining the long driveway. A large wooden spool of electric cable lay by the side of the road, as well as a pile of construction debris. When they came abeam the manor, he looked for Sarah’s Mustang but only saw a limo. A new building, still under construction, stood at the far end of the manor, next to the library. Ernest, dressed in a safari outfit and with a rifle on his shoulder, marched back and forth across the front lawn. Things had changed.

“What’s
up with the new building?” asked Mack.

“That’s the new security center,” blurted the driver. The
other guard, the one sitting next to Mack, cleared his throat and stared unhappily at his co-worker.

“Have you seen
Sarah Evans around?” asked Mack. “That’s Veronica’s cousin and I need to tell her something.”

Neither guard said a word this time.

When they pulled up to the wrangler house, Mack jumped off and headed for the door before being cut off by the guard who’d been seated next to him.

“Your stuff’s been boxed and loaded into your truck,” he said, as he handed
Mack the keys and nodded toward his truck. The other guard got up and stood next to the cart. Mack walked to his truck, got in, and started the engine. He looked up at the manor and thought about how he’d like to crash through the door, grab Dorthea by her turkey neck, and squeeze it until she talked. When one of the guards got impatient and started walking toward him, he slowly pulled out of the driveway and drove up the hill He looked again for any sign of Sarah and then continued on down the other side and out the gate. Throttling Dorthea might’ve felt good but that didn’t make it smart. He needed to stick to his plan, to check the answering machine for a message from Sarah. It sounded lame, he knew, but it was all he had.

He drove
down to Sarah’s house, backed into the driveway, and dropped the tailgate. The first box he grabbed had a giant M written on it in black marker. That’s a big help, he thought. Must be stuff from the M room. It held his beat up pots and pans. The next box had a giant O on it and held records and a record player. What idiot packed this stuff? Probably Mr. G-man from the front gate, who used a secret code to keep Mack’s Hank Williams records from falling into enemy hands. Why couldn’t there be a plain old B box—as in bedroom—where he’d kept the answering machine?

The next one had the number
417 on it, plus the name F. Prince written near the bottom corner. I’m glad you’re proud of your work, mister, but I don’t think you’re quite ready to graduate from moving and packing school, thought Mack. Good old number 417 held clothes and bathroom stuff, of course.

He got f
rustrated and started to slide boxes, some marked, some not, to the edge of the tailgate, where he opened them, and dumped the contents onto the driveway. The occasional sound of breaking glass didn’t faze him, and he soon had the answering machine in hand. But he didn’t have an outlet. He tugged on the garage door. It didn’t budge. He tried the back door. No luck. He walked down the driveway to the front porch where he found an outlet to the left of the front door. He plugged it in and a bright red number two started flashing. He pushed the button, heard a beep, followed by his mother’s anxious voice warning him that the man on the news said that California might fall into the ocean, followed by another beep and his mother reminding him not to forget his dad’s birthday, followed by a long beep. End of messages.

That was it, his master plan, a product of forty eight hours of hard concentration. What an idiot.
He should’ve wrung Dorthea’s neck when he’d had half a chance.

When he rounded the corner on his way back to the garage, something in the flowerbed caught his eye.
It had daisies and butterflies on it…like Sarah’s hippy purse. Sarah’s purse! He grabbed it in nothing flat and recognized it without a doubt. He’d seen that purse a hundred times, had made fun of it two hundred times.

Then
reality hit. For the last several days he’d been fearing the worst but had never stopped clinging to hope. Even as the painful facts continued to stack up against Sarah, he’d hoped for them to turn into a harmless set of strange circumstances, or a silly misunderstanding that everybody laughed about after she came home safe and sound. Even if it had been little better than a desperate, fairytale kind of hope, this orphaned purse now took away even that. Sarah didn’t accidently get lost, or fly to Hawaii to recharge, or go away to care for a sickly aunt. Somebody had taken her.

A slip of paper stuck out of the unzipped purse. He pulled it out.
One side had a receipt and the other had some note signed by an F. Prince. Wait a minute, he thought, he’d just seen that same name written on one of the moving boxes…unless all the worry had done a number on his brain. He went back to the pile, turned over a few boxes, and, sure enough, found F. Prince, written plain as day. And just like that, like an unstable mental patient, his emotions made another wild U-turn. He didn’t know F. Prince from Adam, and the note didn’t make any sense at all, but finding that name in both Sarah’s purse and on the box had to be more than a coincidence. For good or bad, it had to mean something.

He t
rampled over clothes and books and cans of food in his search for boxes that had writing on them. Besides the mysterious name, he had two Os, an R, an M, and the number 417. Ok. What did it mean, or, better yet, what did it spell? Room? Moor? No, it had to be room. Room 417…but besides Sunny Slope Manor, none of the buildings in town had four stories…except the hotel. Dorthea Railer’s hotel.

H
e jumped into his truck and sped away.

Sarah stood as close to the table as her shackle allowed, peered through the darkness, and tossed the lasso at the apple core. It missed, off to right of the target. She reeled it in, aimed, and tossed again. Another miss. She’d caught it once, but the lightweight loop, made from the yarn of her mom’s orange sweater, had slipped over the top when she tried to pull it in. Now she had some of Bob’s broken bones twisted into the yarn to add weight.

The
kidnapper had never come back. Sarah wondered if maybe Queen Dorthea had told him to let her starve to death. She’d been down there without food for three or four days, she didn’t know for sure. Her water had almost run out, too.

At first she
’d kept her head together. She sharpened the bone and thought about what needed to be done. And repeatedly told herself to be brave. After a couple days, though, the hunger pangs clawed their way from the pit of her stomach to the top where they dug in for a serious protest, and she started to think about prime rib and pepperoni pizza and fried chicken. And a withered apple core left behind by a lunatic kidnapper.

Bull’s
eye. The loop had it surrounded. She gently pulled. The apple core slid and rolled along obediently. Then it came to a joint in the table and stopped. With a few jiggles of the line, it came out and rolled to the next joint, where a few more jiggles brought it to the edge of the table. Now she could go easy or rough. Easy meant a gentle tug, a fall to the floor where it hopefully bounced forward, and then throwing the lasso over it again to bring it the rest of the way. If it bounced backwards, though, under the table, she’d never find it in the complete darkness of that part of the room. Rough meant trying to jerk the fish all the way into the boat. She’d definitely lose it in the darkness but stood a good chance of having it land somewhere nearby. She gave the line a quick, strong tug and then waited for the slightest clue as to the outcome. Nothing. She got down on her hands and knees and groped around until she found the pathetic little prize, the pursuit of which had consumed who knew how many hours of her life.

She rubbed off the dirt and eyed
her next meal. Her mom used to give thanks for every meal…and for everything else too, even dumb things like sunshine and good grades and finding the car keys. Now Sarah had a few things to add to the list: food, light, blankets, bathtubs, and toilets. She’d be happy to thank God all day long for those things…as soon as he gave them to her.

With a snap, she bit the apple core in half, and chewed methodically
. She savored the sweet dried flesh and the bitter seeds. She relished the sensation of real food in her mouth, from the fibrous, chewy stem, to the waxy, tough skin that tickled her gums, and even the dirt that crunched loudly in her ears. It tasted good, all of it.

~~~

“Dorthea wants to kill me,” mumbled Veronica, as she lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling. “Nanny said so.” Quite a few murderers now stalked Veronica, in her drugged imagination. They floated in the air and peered through her third floor bedroom window. They conspired at midnight outside her door. Thanks to Nanny, though, Veronica now saw Dorthea as the most dangerous of the lot.

She’d known all along, from the very beginning, that Dorthea wanted things—who doesn’t?—
Veronica had just never cared enough to worry about it. Even now, with things looking worse than ever, she still couldn’t say for sure how much she cared. So what if the old lady wanted her dead. Death didn’t seem like such a bad place. She’d gotten most of the way there without any trouble at all. Why not just let go and let Dorthea have her way? It looked easy enough.

Then again…maybe
she didn’t want to die. It’s not like she’d gotten beat by something serious. She got beat at the spoiled heiress game, the very sport she liked best. This time, though, when things got out of control, nobody jumped on board the rich bitch freight train to put on the brakes, so she rode it all the way to the bottom. That didn’t mean she liked it down there. And it didn’t mean she wanted to stay there, either.

She picked up the crayon picture from the nightstand. Underneath her first grade effort, her mom, in her usual artistic way, had drawn a little girl in a polka dot dress, go-go boots, and a cape flying through the air. “For my
super girl who can do even more!!!” she’d written. Veronica carefully studied the words and ran her fingers over the three hearts that formed the dots on the exclamation points. For the first time since the funeral, as she studied that coloring book tear out, Veronica remembered her mother. She saw the things she knew so well: the craziness, the distraction, the sometimes wicked shrewdness; but she also saw, as if for the very first time, the absolutely incredible way that her mom had loved life and all the people in her life. Her mom loved life and she never loved it more than when she got to share it with those she cared about. That’s why she embraced Sarah so tightly, not because her own child didn’t measure up, but because life was just too wonderful to leave anyone out. And that’s why she refused to let go of Aunt Abbey, even though she practically lived on another planet. Her mother’s love had been huge, bigger than huge, and yet Veronica had been blind to it.

She looked
again at the picture and mouthed the words, “For my super girl who can do even more!!!” Then she put it down, wrapped her shaking hands around Dorthea’s lousy wedding present, and stood up. She haltingly walked into the bathroom and dumped the coke down the drain. Then she got back into bed and waited for the bugs to start crawling all over her brain.