Cold Springs (26 page)

25

“You need help with the box?” David Kraft asked her.

Ann was staring at the tarnished brass hand bell, wondering if she should take it. She remembered the old headmaster, a grizzled ex-hippie named Luke, handing it to her her first day on the job, telling her it had been a gift from Pete Seeger, back in the 1960s, when the teachers at Laurel Heights used to take the high-schoolers on field trips to civil rights protests and try to get the whole class arrested. They had helped Seeger sing, “If I Had a Hammer.”

Bell is yours now,
Luke had told her.
Ring it if you want, man.

Was it hers, or the school's? After twenty years, how could she tell the difference? Cleaning out her office was worse than the divorce. Leaving John had been in the middle of the night, a hastily packed suitcase and Mallory. Everything else John had taken care of for her—throwing it out, smashing it, burning it.

No . . . she wouldn't think about John. She wouldn't think about the night before last, in their old kitchen, surrounded by policemen, telling them too much.

“Ann?”

David shifted uncomfortably in the doorway, his wet blond hair raked back from his face, his expression like a first-grader's, hungry for approval. Ann found it ironic that the board couldn't find anyone else to be her watchdog. She was contagious, virulent. Only a former student would take the risk—a young man who'd worked the very first auction, who'd been there from the start to the end of her grand dream to rebuild the school. David Kraft, sad-eyed and apologetic, would be the last one to see her at Laurel Heights. He'd watch her pack up her personal effects, make sure she didn't steal any files, or the school silverware, or markers out of the supply cabinet.

She put the bell back on the desk. Let the next headmaster use it. Think positive—there would be a next headmaster. There would still be a Laurel Heights.

She took one more look around her office—her desk, which had never been bare before; the window that someone had left open overnight, turning her papers, now the school's papers, moist with fog; the halls outside empty and silent, all the students on winter break.

She told herself she wasn't officially fired yet, but in her heart, she knew it was over. She had only one more choice to make—her lawyer's office, or the plane to Texas.

She pressed her coat pocket and felt the electronic ticket receipt—purchased with her last working credit card.

I need you,
Chadwick had said.

For years, she had wanted him to say that. If she were honest with herself, the hope of reclaiming him had been part of the reason she'd called for his help with Mallory in the first place. Now her daughter was gone. She had paid too dearly for Chadwick to need her.

She hefted the cardboard box, found it sadly light—a few framed pictures of Mallory; the postcard she'd sent from Cold Springs, a dozen precious words spotted with tears or rain; a potted orchid; a scrapbook of photos the faculty had made for her last Christmas; and the Japanese curtain that had hung on her doorway forever—folded up, smelling of a thousand colognes and perfumes from every parent who had ever walked through it.

David stepped aside for her, held the door to the staircase that led down the side of the building. The playground was deserted—motionless swings, a scatter of milk crates and crumpled juice containers, a clutch of dodge balls in a puddle of rainwater.

David stopped her at the middle landing.

“Um, sorry,” he said. “I'll need the keys.”

Before she could swallow her shame, or even put down the box, the door behind them creaked open and Norma appeared at the top of the stairs.

“He calls me,” Norma said, pointing at David. “Tells me you're packing up. Ann, what the hell's the idea?”

David looked sheepishly at Ann, rubbing his arm as if Norma had punched him. “I just thought Ms. Reyes should know—”

“Shut up,” Norma said. “Thank you for calling. Now get out.”

David's face mottled. “I'm supposed to watch her. The keys—”

“I'll get the keys.”

“But—”

“Take your nose and put it in someone else's ass for a change,
pinche
weasel.
GET OUT!
”

Norma raised her purse like a blackjack and poor David fled.

As his car screeched away down Cherry Street, Norma said, “He's poison, you know. The little bastard.”

“You're too hard on him.”

Norma glared at her. “Where is it?”

“Where's what?”

Norma sifted her hand through the cardboard box. Then she reached into Ann's coat pocket and pulled out the airline receipt. “San Antonio,” she read. “Chadwick's idea?”

“I have to. Mallory is missing.”

“And you think running to Chadwick will bring her back?”

“You should be happy I'm leaving.”

Norma blinked. “You think that's what I want?”

“Isn't it?”

Norma reread the receipt, clutching it as if she wanted to rip it in half. Then she carefully refolded it, pinching the creases.

“Oh, Ann . . . I'm not happy.” Her voice was as wilted and defeated as the orchid in Ann's box. “I'm ashamed as hell. When Chadwick was here . . . the Laurel Heights money . . . I told him I thought you'd stolen it.”

Ann stared out at the playground. She tried to remember where the new art room would have been built. The library. The theater. Larger classrooms flooded with sunlight. Ten years of work, convincing skeptics, prodding the school board and pleading for extensions when the money was slow in coming. Ten years carrying a dream uphill.

“You thought I would do that?” she asked Norma. “Steal from the school?”

“That's not what I want to think. I want to think you're a stupid damned optimist. You asked me not to say anything about the money because you really believed you could fix the problem. Just like you admitted Race Montrose to the school. Just like you're going to Texas now because you love Chadwick and you believe he can save your child and you don't see why going to him makes you look guilty as hell.”

“You could stop me. You could call the police.”

Norma closed her eyes. “You didn't do it, did you?”

“What?”

“Race Montrose, his family.” There was an edge of desperation in Norma's voice. “You didn't keep the Montroses in my life to hurt me.”

“Norma . . . of course not.”

Ann longed to put down her moving box, to open her arms to Norma, reassure her friend, but she wasn't sure she had the courage. She wasn't sure she could keep going if she set the box down now.

A foghorn bellowed—a ship passing under the Golden Gate. She had always found it so easy to forget how close the ocean was, how tightly it hemmed them in.

“When Race came to me,” Norma said, “I tried to figure out why. And you know what? He was operating like you. He was apologizing, even though he'd never done anything to me. It was some kind of olive branch—for Katherine. You mentored him, Ann. He's learned to be like you. And the problem is . . . I need that stupid optimism of yours. If you go to Texas, I've got a feeling I'm not going to see you again.”

Ann tried to say something—to tell Norma her fear was ridiculous. But the look in her eyes, the look of a friend betrayed, closed her throat.

Norma dropped the flight receipt in the box. At the bottom of the steps, she picked up a wet dodge ball, threw it across the abandoned playground with such force it rattled the chain link fence on the opposite side, making the ivy shiver.

26

The gateway to the Allbritton ranch was a giant concrete horseshoe, flanked by American flags and wilted cardboard signs that read
GOD BLESS AMERICA.
A black mare was pushing up one of the signs with her muzzle so she could get at a patch of icy grass outside the metal tube fence.

Chadwick didn't bother calling from the security intercom. He knew the code, and he knew the only person at home would be the person they needed to see.

They drove in past acres of meadows studded with cactus, bright yellow stables, a lone ranch hand in the riding circle, morning mist wreathed around his boots as he trained an Arabian for the halter. Next to Chadwick in the passenger's seat, Mallory craned her neck to watch.

Chadwick turned uphill, into the circular drive of the ranch house.

The horse-head door knocker was plated gold. Chadwick had to bang a few karats off it before Joey Allbritton finally opened up, his pale Neanderthal features squinting in the sunlight, his boxer shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt giving off a stench like day-old pizza boxes.

“It's six in the—” His eyes got wide.

“Hello, Joey,” Chadwick said. “Staying straight?”

“Yes, sir,” he blurted, an old reflex. Then his face broke into a lopsided grin. “Chadwick? Are you really here?”

Chadwick had a momentary fear that Joey was going to hug him. Joey was a bear of a kid—a teddy bear, now, though he hadn't always been so. And his bad breath was the stuff of legends.

Chadwick rethought the word
kid.
Joey had to be at least twenty now.

“Your parents?”

Joey shook his head. “Kuala Lumpur. Or what day is it? Maybe Singapore. Doesn't matter. Dr. Hunter need another horse?”

“No. No horses.” Chadwick gestured toward the car. “I have a problem. Need your help.”

“Anything.” Joey looked toward the car, saw Mallory in the front seat, Jones and Emilio Pérez in the back—Pérez blindfolded, his mouth duct-taped. “Um . . . what kind of help?”

Chadwick didn't water anything down. He told the story, explained they were baby-sitting a would-be assassin and needed a quiet spot to talk to him.

“This guy shot at you?” Joey asked.

“Yes.”

“He messed with Survival Week?”

“Yes.”

Joey's eyes danced with excitement. “This guy is vulture meat. Let me get my shoes.”

Minutes later, they were following Joey's truck through the back acres of the ranch, past grain silos, fields tall with uncut sorghum. Like many local families, the Allbrittons did some farming, but they had apparently made the decision not to harvest their crops this year. With prices so bad, it was cheaper to leave the corn and sorghum and wheat standing. Chadwick had even heard rumors in town that some locals were plowing out huge mazes through the fields, charging admission for city folk to wander through. The profits promised to be much greater.

Joey's truck turned at the edge of a creek, rumbled down a dirt road to a barn set in a stand of live oaks.

Chadwick remembered the barn from his first trip to the ranch, three and a half years ago, when he'd picked up Joey for Cold Springs. The building was even more dilapidated now. Its roof sagged, and the once red walls had faded to dirty pink, paint peeling off in ugly patches like diseased skin.

Joey checked inside, then waved to Chadwick that the coast was clear.

“Walk with me,” Chadwick told Mallory.

He got her out of the car, leaving Jones to guard their guest of honor.

Inside the barn was a half-collapsed hayloft, a rusted pulley system hanging from the rafters. Spread out on a couple of hay bales was a sleeping bag—Cold Springs regulation issue, the kind white levels were allowed to take with them upon graduation. On the floor nearby was a Cold Springs gear bag. Chadwick guessed that if he were to open it, he would find all the supplies in order, just the way they were supposed to be for dorm inspection.

“Um, I just dump all my old stuff out here,” Joey said. “I don't come out here much.”

“Yeah, sure,” Mallory muttered.

“What?” Joey asked defensively.

“This will do fine,” Chadwick interposed. “Thanks, Joey. Go tell Miss Jones she can bring in our guest. It would be better if you waited outside. Better still if he didn't overhear your name.”

“Yes, sir.” Joey gave Mallory one more look, his eyes lingering on her Black Level shoes.

When he had gone, Chadwick told her, “Now would be a good time.”

“For what?”

“Back at the store, before Pérez came in, you wanted to tell me something.”

She stared at the Cold Springs gear bag, her cheeks turning red. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

Mallory stripped off her stolen quilt-patch jacket, pitched it across the hay bale. In the sleeve was a tear Chadwick hadn't noticed before—a perfect hay-colored circle, just above the wrist. A bullet hole.

“That kid Joey,” Mallory said, “he's a Cold Springs graduate?”

Chadwick nodded.

“That's what I'm training for? To be like him?” Her voice trembled, as if all her fear from their encounter with Pérez was just now coming to the surface.

“Joey runs his parents' ranch,” Chadwick told her. “He manages a five-million-dollar budget, provides the horses for Cold Springs, knows more about animals than most ranchers twice his age. You could do worse than end up like him; you didn't know him before Cold Springs.”

Mallory glanced over, trying to feign disinterest. “Why? What'd he do?”

“Last time I was in this barn, taking Joey into custody, those hay bales were stacked with fertilizer explosives. Pipe bombs. A box of grenades and an AK-47 Joey'd bought at a flea market. He was planning to blow up his high school—this was six months before the shootings at Columbine. If Joey hadn't gone to Cold Springs, he would've
been
Columbine. He would've been national news, and dead.”

The barn door creaked open and Mallory instantly tensed, like she was bracing for a blow.

Kindra Jones dragged Pérez inside, still blindfolded and gagged, hands cuffed behind his back.

Chadwick pulled him to the middle of the room and said, “Sit.”

Pérez remained standing.

Chadwick kicked his legs out from under him, and Pérez fell.

Chadwick knelt, stripped off the blindfold. Pérez's eyes blazed like a cornered wolf's.

“You're in the middle of nowhere,” Chadwick told him. “Scream all you want.”

Then he peeled the tape off Pérez's mouth.

Pérez just kept glaring at him.

Chadwick had stripped him of the Kevlar, thrown it into the woods off Highway 90. Now Pérez wore only his camo pants and T-shirt, which had rolled up to his ribs, revealing one of the massive bruises left over from Chadwick's gunshots, like an injection of chocolate under the skin.

“You could've killed us last night in the woods,” Chadwick said. “Why didn't you?”

Pérez let the silence build. The tape had left a thin red rectangle around his mouth that didn't match the square of his goatee. Finally he said, “What happened to the guy I was with—Julio?”

“Dead,” Chadwick said.

Pérez bunched his shoulders, straining against the cuffs. “He was a good man. Had a wife and kids.”

“He torched a building full of schoolchildren. Last night, he shot a fifteen-year-old boy.”

“Julio wasn't going to kill nobody. He was just supposed to pin them down, keep them busy.”

“While you killed me and got away with the girl.”

Pérez shrugged. “You surprised me. Moved too fast.”

Chadwick knew he was lying. Pérez could've had him cold. In the woods. And then again this morning, in the store.

“What about the girl?” Chadwick asked. “You mean to kill her, too?”

Pérez turned hard eyes on Mallory, who instinctively slid closer to Chadwick.

“She belongs with her father,” Pérez said. “I wasn't going to hurt her. I follow Mr. Z's orders.”

“And now?” Chadwick asked.

“What do you mean?”

Chadwick waited until he was sure Pérez wasn't faking ignorance. But his look stayed flat and steady. He really didn't know what had happened in San Francisco during his absence.

“John Zedman is missing,” Chadwick told him. “Presumed dead.”

Chadwick gave him the details, but Pérez seemed to be withdrawing into some memory of his own—some long-ago insult that could still make him furious.

“You son-of-a-bitch.” He struggled to kneeling position, his face beading with sweat from the effort. “You worked it together—you and this nigger bitch, didn't you? You killed him. Now you're gonna pin it on me.”

“Yo, Juan Valdéz,” Kindra said. “You call me ‘nigger' again, I'm gonna tape up more than your mouth. Understand?”

Pérez studied her with contempt, but he didn't try to get up. He looked at Mallory. “They killed your father, and you just stand there? You and that nappy-ass boyfriend of yours—you see what you brought down?”

“I'm going outside,” Mallory said. “I won't listen to this.”

“Yes, you will,” Chadwick said.

Her mouth trembled. She could've been six years old again, accusing a classmate of stealing her dessert.

Chadwick suppressed the urge to let her leave, to protect her from Pérez. Some instinct told him that he needed the two of them in the same room, listening to each other.

“Pérez,” he said, “the person who murdered John is the same person who blackmailed him, the same person who murdered Talia Montrose. I think you came to Texas planning to shoot me, and take the girl back to her father, but you had second thoughts. Something started nagging at you. Something told you I wasn't the right guy.”

“How the fuck you figure that?”

“Because if you didn't have reservations, I'd be dead.”

The fire cooled a little in Pérez's eyes. He sat back on his haunches, still straining against the handcuffs, but as if it were an exercise in frustration rather than getting free.

“I told Mr. Z—when he paid off Talia Montrose, I told him it wasn't her. She knew about the blackmail. She knew who it was. But she didn't have shit for leverage. Real blackmailer was somebody she was scared of.”

“Samuel Montrose is dead. It isn't him.”

“Race.” He turned on Mallory. “That goddamn punk is fractured in the head. I told you—”

“No,” Mallory insisted. “He isn't crazy.”

“You ain't got the sense to see it.”

“You said you would cut him into pieces.” Mallory's voice rose a half-octave. “He brought the gun to school because of you, and got expelled—and then his mom was murdered . . . It's all your fault.
You
killed her. You killed my father.”

Pérez was laboring mightily to hold his tongue. And, with a small twinge of surprise, Chadwick realized that Pérez did not hate the girl. His eyes were full of disappointment, bitterness, resentment—but not hate. Not the contempt you might show for someone you planned to kill. Pérez reminded Chadwick more of himself, in the days when he argued constantly with Katherine.

“Your dad was good to me,” Pérez said tightly. “I wouldn't hurt him. You think I'm the problem, then I pity you. I couldn't hurt him as much as you did.”

Mallory took a step back, retreating. She ran into the hay bales and sank onto Joey Allbritton's sleeping bag.

“Mallory,” Chadwick said. “Tell us what you were going to say this morning—about the person who blackmailed your father.”

“I wasn't . . .” She looked toward the barn door, as if contemplating escape, but Jones was there, silently guarding the exit. “It's just . . . the Montrose house. Katherine had taken me there before.”

“You mean before the night she died?”

“Twice before that. But the last time, the night she died—that was different.”

“She was depressed,” Chadwick said. “She was about to take her own life.”

“It was more than that.” She was shivering, her breath turning to mist as if all the cold air in the barn were condensing around her. “The first two times, she went there to see her boyfriend, Samuel. I was too young to understand it then, but I remember her smelling good—she would borrow perfume from her mother. She would smell like roses.”

Chadwick had a sudden, painful memory of Katherine, the night he picked her up from the Oakland police station—the smell in the car a profane mix of Norma's perfume and heroin smoke.

“The last time she took me,” Mallory said,
“that
night, she didn't wear perfume. She wasn't excited.”

“Of course,” Chadwick said. “She was clinically depressed.”

“No. That night, Katherine went for a different reason. She said she needed to talk to somebody. She never said Samuel. I think she went to see someone else, somebody who gave her the drugs that killed her.”

The silence was long enough for the tremor to reach every part of Chadwick's nervous system. “Who?”

Mallory took a quick glance at Pérez, making sure he was still bound. “Please—I don't know.”

“Your father's life may be on the line, Mallory. He might still be alive.”

“I know that. Christ, I
know
that.”

“Tell me what you're leaving out.”

Her eyes glittered with tears—sea-colored, like her mother's, but permanently seared with afterimages no fifteen-year-old should have.

“I don't know,” she pleaded. “Just let me go back to Cold Springs, all right? I never wanted to run. I swear to God, I want to finish Black Level. I
need
to go back.”

Chadwick looked at Jones. She mimed a push, a silent suggestion that he needed to back off the girl.

“So what now?” Pérez asked. “You kill me?”

Chadwick imagined giving Pérez over to the local deputies—the same deputies who had stopped Hunter on the road years ago looking for a convenient rape suspect. The same deputies who had been known to let illegal immigrants have accidents with doors, stairwells and nightsticks before turning them over to the INS.

Chadwick thought about his other options.

“You bring me in, man,” Pérez said, “you know what's going to happen. I'm gonna have to sell you to the cops. You're gonna have to sell me. You think either one of us is going to get a fair shake?”

“Put the blindfold back on him,” Chadwick told Jones. “The gag, too.”