Desert Crossing (16 page)

“Sorry,” I said miserably.

“Are we done now? Because, you know what, that guy is creepy as hell and I'd just as soon not run into him again.”

“I got his address,” I said.

“That's great. You can send him a card. Can we leave?”

“I want to go to his house.”

Kit grabbed my shoulders and pulled me away from the wall. “No way! No! Luce, listen to me. We're not going to his house. I don't know what his deal is. Maybe he's the guy who dumped that girl, maybe he's not. But there's something weird about him. We're not doing it.”

I slid out from under his hands and started to walk back to the car. “Listen, you're right, I have to be more careful,” I said. “I shouldn't have looked in his truck like that, not when he could walk out and see me.”

I stopped to wait for him, but he was still standing there scowling. “Kit, please. Listen a second. The police didn't find any ID on her, remember? No purse, no wallet. So somebody probably took it. Somebody
stole
it. And if that guy was the last person with her—the last person to see her alive—maybe he's the one.”

“Maybe he is. And guess what? Maybe we'll never know.”

I nodded slowly. “But we have to try to find out. At least, I do.”

“Why?”

I walked back and stood in front of him, looking into his eyes. “I don't know. I just do.”

He stared down at me, his forehead creased with frustration. Then his face changed, and in a careful way, he took a strand of my hair and tucked it behind my ear. “I don't get why this is so important to you.”

I turned away. “Well, I don't get why it was so important for you to kiss me if you were going out with Lara Fitzpatrick.”

“I wasn't the only one doing the kissing. If you remember.”

“I'm trying not to.”

I walked toward the car, then hesitated, my fingers on the handle. “So will you take me? To his house, I mean?”

Kit opened the door and climbed inside. He sat with his hands on the steering wheel, looking out at the dusty lot. “What if it's locked?”

“It won't be,” I said. “The truck wasn't.”

“You didn't find anything in the truck.”

“No.”

“What makes you think you'll find something in the house?”

I didn't answer. I watched his profile. His jaw tensed, softened, tensed again.

“If we go to his house, that's it,” he said. “Whatever happens. If we find something, we tell the police. If we don't, the whole thing stops. Okay? We go back to Beth's.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean it.”

“I said okay.”

I lifted my sketch pad from the back seat and tore out a page. Across the top I wrote
Wicker, R.R. #7, 4420 Brick Road, Castle, NM.

28

“So where are we going?” Kit asked.

“The town is called Castle,” I said. I fished the map out of the side pocket of the door and spread it across my lap. This part of the state was an empty yellow square crossed by a half dozen thin lines, the only roads. Castle had to be near one of those. I squinted at the town names. Tucumcari. Conchas. Mosquero. It might have been a foreign country.

“Here it is,” I told Kit. “East of here. About twenty miles.”

We turned onto another highway. Kilmore disappeared behind us. The flamboyant cactus sign looked cheap and brittle in the distance. We passed a trailer with laundry hanging limply from a clothesline. We passed a house with a weathered chicken coop and four gray hens scratching the dry ground.

“Do you think this is still Kilmore?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “The suburbs.”

Then we were surrounded by nothing.

It didn't take much time to cover twenty miles, especially compared with the long drive that morning. Soon we were approaching a gas station. The sign said “Castle Gas and Service.”

“What's the name of the road?” Kit asked, pulling up to the pumps. A stooped old man in blue coveralls came out of the tiny building and walked over to Kit's window.

“Could you fill it up with unleaded?” Kit said. “And we're looking for a road—” He turned to me.

“Brick Road,” I said. “And it says something else. R.R. 7. Do you know what that means?”

The man shuffled to the pump, ignoring me. When he came back to the window he tugged on his bottom lip, showing a crooked jumble of yellow teeth. “Rural Route 7. Brick Road. Same thing. It's the next right.”

“Thanks,” Kit said, paying him.

“It's not paved,” he called as we drove away.

The next right was miles farther along, and it turned out to be a bumpy dirt track winding down a slope.

Kit shook his head. “Look at this place. Castle. Where's the castle? Where's the frigging run-down shack? There's nothing here.”

“The house number is 4420.”

“Something tells me you can't miss it,” Kit said.

We jolted over the road, churning up clouds of dust.

“What if he was on his way home?” Kit asked. “He left the diner. He could be there right now.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring at my lap.

There was a house up ahead, a trailer. I leaned forward. “There, look, that's it.” But it wasn't; it was 4460. “So we're close.” I glanced at Kit. His brow furrowed in annoyance.

We passed three more houses in a little pocket, then another dull stretch of road. Far away, on a rise, I could see a white house flanked by outbuildings: a shed, some kind of garage. “That's it,” I said. No blue truck. A metal mailbox leaned crookedly on a pole, with the numbers 4420 on it. Kit pulled onto the dirt driveway.

*   *   *

Kit shut off the engine and we sat for a minute, looking around.

“See, there's no sign of him,” I said.

“Oh yeah? You're sure of that? What about the garage?”

I shook my head. “It's just got some kind of machinery in it. He's not here.”

“Okay, but we're not staying long. Do you understand?”

“Stop treating me like I'm six years old,” I snapped at him.

“I will, when you start showing more sense than that.”

We climbed the steps to the front door. I reached for the knob, but Kit stopped me. “You'd better knock,” he said. “What if somebody else is here?”

I hadn't even thought of that. What if he didn't live alone? And then what would we say? “We'll ask for directions,” Kit said, before I could open my mouth.

“You sound like you've done this before,” I said. I knocked on the door. We waited, listening to the silence.

“Okay,” Kit said. “I'll park behind that shed. In case he comes back. And listen: no messing around. We're in and out of this place. If we can even get in.” He walked back to the car, calling over his shoulder, “Is it open?”

I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Just give me a second.” I scanned the front of the house. The windows were all closed. Now what? I heard Kit start the car as I jumped off the porch and ran around to the side, breathing a sigh of relief when I saw a small window cracked four or five inches. It was above a propane tank, so I had something to climb on. I scrambled on top of the tank and pushed up the screen, opening the window all the way. Inside was a bathroom with soap-scummed blue tile.

I squeezed through the window, scraping my ribs against the frame and half climbing, half falling onto the toilet seat. Then I ran to open the front door.

“So it
was
locked,” Kit said smugly.

I didn't say anything.

He looked at his watch. “You've got fifteen minutes. That's all. Then we're leaving.”

“That may not be enough time.”

“It'll have to be. He could be on his way back. So get moving.”

I surveyed the house. It was small and messy, but strangely impersonal. There were no pictures on the walls, nothing on the coffee table but old newspapers and a half-filled drinking glass. The living room was cluttered with big, ugly furniture, a sofa and armchair covered in rust-colored velour. A crumpled T-shirt lay on the floor, a pair of wadded-up socks beneath the footstool.

“Don't touch anything,” Kit said.

“I'm not stupid, you know.”

“Thirteen minutes,” Kit said.

“Help me, then,” I said. “You look, too.”

“What are we looking for?”

I shrugged helplessly. “I don't know. A purse or a wallet, credit cards. Something of hers. Look in the kitchen. I'll check in the back.”

I walked down the dark hallway. I could hear Kit in the kitchen, drawers scraping and rattling. It was a tiny house, not much bigger than an apartment. There were two bedrooms, but one was filled with junk: an old fan, luggage, cardboard boxes, the kind of stuff you put in a basement. The other one was his. The bed was unmade, a clump of sheets, with the bottom sheet pulled loose from the mattress. There were dirty clothes in a pile on the floor, an empty bag of chips on the nightstand. I tiptoed through the mess, looking around. I knelt on the floor and peered under the bed. A shoe, a magazine. I pulled open the drawers of the long bureau and cringingly felt through their contents, trying not to disturb anything.

Kit appeared in the doorway, shooting a quick glance out the bedroom window. “Six minutes,” he said. “See anything?”

I shook my head. “Did you find anything in the kitchen?”

“Nope. All his stuff, nothing with a girl's name on it. He's a mechanic.” Kit held out a small white card. “Has his own business.”

“Put that back,” I said, pulling away. “And can you check the storage room? Maybe he hid something in there.” I closed the bottom drawer of the dresser. Only the closet was left.

I looked outside again; still no sign of anything. The road was empty. Pushing open the closet door, I scanned the rack of hangers. Jeans. Plaid shirts. A sweatshirt. Who was this guy? It was impossible to tell. It felt so odd being in his house, such an invasion of his private world. Except this world didn't seem private at all. Just blank and impersonal.

The shelf was too high for me to see what was on it. I reached up and groped along the edge. It was creepy, going through his things like this. I imagined his pale eyes watching me. I shivered. More clothes, a sweater. Then something hard.

I stopped. Stretching as high on my toes as I could, I pushed my fingers further onto the shelf.

There it was. A hard corner. It felt like a box.

“Kit,” I called. “Come here. There's a box, but I can't reach it.”

He came to the doorway, looking nervous. “Yeah? What is it? Time's up. We have to go.”

“Help me get it down.”

Kit reached up easily and grabbed it. A brown shoe box. He set it on the mattress. We looked at each other. “It's probably just some shoes,” he said.

“Yeah.” I sat down, lifting the lid.

It wasn't shoes.

It was a bright clutter of objects. At first it made no sense. A gold button. A dangling earring studded with turquoise. A purple barrette. Little things. Girl things. The kind you lose or leave behind. It made me feel strange, sorting through them. In fact, it felt stranger and stranger, like they weren't forgotten things at all. They were things that had been taken.

On purpose.

I froze, looking at Kit.

“What the hell…?” he said.

Two more earrings, without matches. I touched them, brushing them aside. A pretty decorated hair comb, wooden, with flowers painted on it. “This looks like what that waitress, Elena, had in her hair, doesn't it?” I asked softly.

Kit frowned, taking it from me. “Yeah, it does,” he said.

I felt like we'd stumbled into the cave of an animal. A secret nest scattered with bones and fur, the remnants of lives.

Then I saw it. A tiny silver shoe, covered in red sparkles.

I picked it up, staring at it. It dangled from a broken link.

“Shit,” Kit said.

29

I dropped it as if it were on fire. The charm clinked when it fell, hitting an earring.

“It's hers,” I whispered.

“Maybe not,” Kit said.

“Kit, it's hers! It's from the bracelet. Remember the other charms? They had links just like this.”

He nodded slowly, running his fingers through the jumble in the box. He picked up a small plastic vial. “What's this?”

It was a medicine bottle, unmarked, half-filled with pinkish-white tablets. I took it from him and unscrewed the cap.

“Aspirin?” I asked.

Kit shook his head. “We need to get out of here.”

His fingers closed over my hand. “Luce, we shouldn't even be touching this stuff. If this guy is some kind of pervert, I mean, if he did something to these girls, and that's how he got their stuff … well, this might be evidence or something. And we've put our fingerprints all over it.”

I pulled my fist free and dumped a pill into my palm, slipping it into the pocket of my jeans. “I know. You're right. But we can take this to the police. Maybe it's cocaine.”

Kit just looked at me. “You think
that's
cocaine? A pill?”

“Well, something else then. Something illegal.” I stared at the box again. “This is the guy, Kit. I know it. He did something to her. We've got to call the police. When they see the charm, they'll know—”

And then I stopped. The police didn't know about the charm bracelet. They didn't know because I'd taken it off the girl before they'd had a chance to see it.

The charm would mean nothing to the police.

I turned to Kit. “The bracelet,” I said. “They don't know about the bracelet.”

He looked at me, a long steady look, and took the bottle and cap from my hands.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Luce.” When I lifted my head, he was watching me with an expression in his eyes I didn't recognize. “It'll be okay,” he said. “But we have to go. Now.”