Valley of Ashes (27 page)

“Thank you, Tanya. Same to you.”

I decided I’d give Cary another call, see if he was home and up for a walk with me.

I didn’t want to ask him for money, either. Not if he’d had to hit up his father for rent money because Bittler was fucking him over.

And we had plenty of food in the house, it was just milk and diapers we were short on.

I dialed Cary’s home phone but he still didn’t pick up. I left another message, packed up the girls again, and headed for the 7-Eleven out by his apartment. If Cary wasn’t home by then, at least I could leave him a note.

No way I was going to give Mormon boy any satisfaction by shopping again at
his
establishment. Although if I’d had a deer penis handy, I totally would’ve swung back through the place so I could make him eat the damn thing and then apologize.

Patronizing little petty-bureaucrat fuck.

C
ary still wasn’t home when I got to his apartment complex.

I’d only been there once before: an end-unit apartment in this seventies-Bauhaus complex up toward Table Mesa.

I remembered thinking it was the kind of place where graduate-student marriages would die loudly and often—neighbor kids no doubt adept at sleeping right through slammed doors, squealing tires, and the answering chatter of cheap bedroom windows rattling shut within their aluminum tracks.

I just stood there for a minute, trying to remember how many rows back his apartment was—fourth building out of six?

The sun was really hot now. I was glad I’d remembered a hat.

I pulled the girls’ wagon up a crappily poured curb cut and onto the sidewalk. Had to nip around the sun-bleached Big Wheel some preschooler had abandoned upside down on his front walk, one black plastic tire spinning slowly on its axle.

Cary’s truck was parked out in front of the fourth building back, but he didn’t come to the door when I knocked.

He kept his bike hanging from a big hook in the entryway ceiling, I remembered. I leaned out from the little front stoop and peered into the closest window, hands scooped around my face to block out the noonday glare.

No bike, and for all I knew he was out on some crazy daylong endurance ride.

I grabbed my notepad out of the diaper bag, then realized I hadn’t remembered to bring a pen along with it.

Goddamn genius, Madeline. Brain like steel wool that’s been sitting wet on the edge of a sink for about three weeks, rusting into slime-bits.

Oh, well, so I’d have to do the arson tour on my own. I could get in at least a couple of stops before I had to swing home and make lunch for the kids, anyway.

By the time I got back to my house, I felt like even more of an idiot. I was hot and thirsty and had to pee really badly, plus which the girls were cranky and starving.

What the hell had I expected to find, anyway? I’d checked the gas station, the open fields, and the block where the cars had burned. All of which had happened months earlier, of course.

There wasn’t an iota of indication that anything at all had happened in these locations. Except that the gas station was still abandoned.

And I’d figured it would be a shortcut if I walked part of the circuit on the Creek Path—avoiding traffic and having to wait at intersections.

Got myself nearly run down by a bunch of haggard marathon trainees for that bit of brilliant forethought.

Perfect.

Diapers and two gallons of milk had come to $19.47 at Cary’s 7-Eleven.

I should’ve gone to King Soopers.

The answering machine’s message light was blinking, but I got the girls fed and upstairs for their naps before I sat down to check the actual voice mails.

First was Ellis, just checking in: “Still hating your husband for you. Call me.”

Then Mimi, asking if I needed any follow-up info for my article about the neighborhood meeting.

The little digital-LED readout thing on the machine clicked from two to one—last message. I was expecting Cary, but it was my husband.

“Hey, Bunny,” he said.

My slightly inebriated husband.

I could hear lots of background chatter, wherever he was calling from. The chink of china and glassware.

A bar? Some fancy restaurant?

“Sorry I haven’t checked in sooner,” he said. “Things have been crazy busy here. Good, though. Think I have that chem-plant order sewn up.”

My forearms were stinging. I looked down and realized I’d gotten myself a nasty sunburn.

“Taking the bullet train back up to…” There was some drunken group shouting in the background, drowning him out. “… tomorrow morning. Good thing I read up on my Mishima, flying over here. Made some cultured chitchat with the locals.”

The sound got squishy, like he’d covered the mouthpiece with his hand. I thought I heard him say, “Be right there.”

Then everything was loud again.

“Anyway, Kobe beef tonight. You’d have totally dug it. Everything it’s cracked up to be.”

Yeah, great.

“I should take off,” he said. “Guys are waiting on me here. Love to the girls. Hope everything’s going great on the home front, okay? I’ll try to get you again when I’m back in Tokyo. If not, see you Tuesday.”

He rang off and I smiled to myself, heartened that he’d thought of me in the midst of everything else he was juggling, so far away.

And the girls and I had plenty of organic mac-and-cheese, diapers, milk, and cheddar and tortillas here. Plus three packages of frozen tortellini and two more boxes of waffles. Even broccoli and apples.

Supplies enough to last through Tuesday, at the very least.

I pushed down the little plastic button to disconnect, then tried calling Cary again.

Still no answer.

Mimi wasn’t home, either.

“Well, fuck all y’all anyway,” I said aloud to the empty room. “I’m taking a nap on the sofa.”

I didn’t sleep, though.

I was plenty tired enough, and it felt great to be horizontal with my eyes closed, but even so it was like the cogs of the conscious-mind machinery in my head refused to disengage.

And of course thinking to myself that the girls were going to wake up any minute—so this was my last chance to get any meaningful rest before nightfall—didn’t help the situation at all.

My sunburned arms felt all pinchy and weird, and I couldn’t get comfortable on the old decrepit sofa cushions. Not to mention the fact that their foam inserts were off-gassing a distinct miasma of petrified hummus and Cheese Nips.

I tried rolling over onto my other hip, but that meant I was facing the back pillows—only a six-inch gap between my nostrils and a wall of the sofa’s tired chintz.

Oh, gag: Cheese Nip
farts
. Seriously. Mixed with
Eau de
Dean’s socks and something else I didn’t even want to attempt identifying, though diapers came swimming to mind. Not the kind that were fresh out of the plastic Pampers packaging sleeve, either.

No wonder Setsuko had misted the place with lemon Pledge the other night. She’d been forced to it, in self-defense.

I twisted back onto my original hip, eyes still shut but facing out toward the living room again.

Better, but Mimi’s respirator would still come in handy right about now.

I thought about calling Cary again, but the fact that I couldn’t settle into sleep didn’t make me any less tired. Now it felt as though some really nasty rotten dwarfs had Super Glued my eyes shut. After packing sand behind my lashes and lids with their little tiny evil-dwarf shovels.

Hi-ho.

And my arms really hurt. I tried to remember if we had any Solarcaine in the first-aid kit upstairs. Or, you know, laudanum.

Good thing I’d been wearing a hat, anyway. But why the hell had I walked all the way to Cary’s?

Idiot
.

Think about something else. Get some goddamn sleep while you can.

I tried retracing my steps around the three fire scenes I’d visited, mentally. Brought up each in as much detail as I could muster.

The field up by Sanitas was full of grass and weeds again, like it had never burned. Tons of joggers and hikers on the trail through it, moving uphill and down.

Had the fire happened during the day? Hard to believe someone could have started one there without anyone seeing him. Not a lot of tree cover.

Have to ask Mimi about that.

There wasn’t anything at all to see on the blocks where the cars had burned. Just more cars parked along the same sidewalks. Nothing underneath—no scorch marks or whatever I’d thought I’d find there.

Old quasi-industrial-looking buildings that hadn’t seemed open for business. Nobody on the street, either.

So at least the guy had picked someplace where he hadn’t been likely to run into witnesses. And he hadn’t had to bring along any acetone that time, as Mimi had pointed out. Just matches and some rags to shove in the fuel tanks of the cars themselves.

Had it been a weekend when he did it? Would there be more pedestrian traffic around those blocks, come Monday?

I could always swing back by and check, though it didn’t seem like that would really tell me anything useful.

Same thing when I thought about the gas station: nothing at all useful.

I might as well have patrolled the streets of Boulder randomly, towing my red wagon. I could have eyed wandering vagrants with great suspicion to see if it made them act twitchy, or just cruised by them all nonchalant while sniffing for stray whiffs of accelerant.

Not like you could tell an actual vagrant from the vast majority of the CU student body, anyway. Or from the psychics who’d been in that banquet-hall place with me and Ellis.

A car schussed by, outside. Then the wind came up.

The trees were leafy enough that their boughs made a watery sound, instead of clattering the way they did when winter-bare.

Cary should have called me back by now.

I told myself again that I should get up and phone him.

But then I must have gone to sleep, because I started having a really, really bad dream.

And he was in it.

B
ittler was in my dream, too. And the warehouse, even though in real life I’d never actually seen the damn place.

Cary was inside. And I couldn’t get to him, even though I knew he was hurt.

Bittler told me not to bother, that it was Cary’s own damn fault. “You tried to tell him, but would he listen?”

“He’s
crying
,” I said, banging on these giant metal doors. “Help me!”

I could hear Bittler laughing behind me, and I turned around to tell him what an asshole he was, but he wasn’t there anymore.

And then I woke up—thrashing up to the surface of sleep like a drowning woman desperate to secure one last breath.

It hadn’t been Cary crying, it had been Parrish.

I hauled my ass off the sofa and jogged upstairs, pit of my stomach still clenched in cold knuckles of dream-fear, dream-helplessness.

I scooped Parrish up into my arms, whispering “shhhhh” in her ear, rocking her back and forth gently to quiet her.

“Winnie,” she said. “Pooh.”

“I can play you
Winnie-the-Pooh
downstairs,” I said. “Absolutely.”

I slid the video into our VCR and got the TV turned on, once Parrish was in the playpen.

Then India cranked up, weepy herself as she woke up alone in their room.

“Time to go get your sister,” I said, but Parrish was fully entranced with the antics of her favorite bear.

I hadn’t rewound the tape, so he was already singing, “I’m just a little black rain cloud…”

First India, then I call Cary again.

I let the phone ring eight times and listened to Cary’s voice on the machine.

Then I dialed again, twice more.

Nothing.

Where the fuck are you, dude? I’m getting worried.

I thought about calling Setsuko, but she was crocheting in Aspen or whatever, so that wasn’t going to work.

No answer at Mimi’s, either.

I was even briefly tempted to call the cops, ask them to check the warehouse, but though I knew where it was, I had no idea about the actual street address.