Even Steven (11 page)

Gary had just described both of Russell's ex-wives. "How close were you to these screaming people?"

Gary and Mandy silently conferred again with their eyes. "Oh, I don't know," she said. "Hard to say in the woods, but I'd guess they were probably a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty yards from our campsite."

"And how far was your campsite from here?" Tim asked. Sometimes, Russell wondered if Tim thought his vocal cords might atrophy if he didn't exercise them enough.

Gary turned to George. "Well, we were more or less where you first saw us, so how far is that?"

"Half a mile, maybe? Straight up this path."

Russell paused for a moment, giving his brain a chance to make something of this information. How could an argument with a child cause a shooting all the way down here?

"When did you hike in?" Sarah asked. Now everybody wanted in on Russell's interview.

"Last night," Mandy said.

"From the top of the mountain or down below?"

"Down below."

"So did you pass the people who were camped here?"

Another silent conference. Gary said, "I remember seeing a camp here, but I don't remember seeing the people. I'm willing to bet, though, that at least one of them was a woman."

Please don't make me ask, Russell thought in the silence that followed.

'They had a cute little flower wreath hanging on the front of their tent," Mandy volunteered. "We commented on that as we passed by."

Russell looked down at the cards in his hand and started shuffling through them. "Ranger Rodgers, I don't suppose you remember how many of the campers on our short list checked in as a couple, do you?"

She answered without hesitation, "Six."

"Really?" Russell couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice. "You know this?"

Sarah smiled. "Photographic memory. Four-point-oh business grad from Harvard."

Why did this surprise him so much? He stuffed the cards into his jacket pocket. "Six. Well, that really will narrow down our initial search, won't it?" Then to George and the young couple: "Let's hike back up to where you were when you heard this yelling."

April Simpson checked her watch one more time, then walked to the tall windows to see if the used-car manager was anywhere in sight. It had been fifteen minutes since he'd taken her Geo on a test drive, and in that time, he should have been able to make a decision. April prided herself on the condition of that car, and she expected a top-dollar offer.

She dumped the cold coffee into the trash can, then checked the imprint on the bottom of the cup before tossing it in, too. The jack of spades fit in with the rest of her instant poker hand to give her a pair of nothing. Zip. No one could ever say that her luck was not consistent.

Scanning the horizon, past the sea of parked cars and the spiderweb of banners and little whirly-gigs overhead, she saw no sign of the fat manager in the ill-fitting suit. Across the lot, a pair of old folks drooled over a champagne-colored Caprice, while a hotshot sales guy drooled over them. April had happened to see the price tag on that boat of a car on her way in, and it angered her that people would even consider spending $40,000 on a vehicle-nearly twice what she made in a whole year, working two jobs. Before taxes. Jesus, life was unfair.

What did you have to make to afford a car like that? A hundred grand a year? As for grandma and grandpop out there, they were probably already retired and living off their investments, so that made them worth what? A million bucks? A half million, anyway. All the money in the world.

And April was trying to scrape together enough pennies to buy back her son.

The shame of it all gripped her insides with an iron claw, lacerating that part of her where faith resided. The world shouldn't have such extremes; there shouldn't be an opportunity for rich old people to be planning for their carefree retirement at the same moment when she didn't even know if her little boy was still alive.

The old couple looked pleased as they lifted their heads out of the Caprices trunk, and as the lady pointed to the sticker, her expression seemed to say, "Not bad at all."

April hated them both.

How could everything-everything-have gone so wrong in her life? What had happened to the days when she and her dad used to dream about her acting career? God knows she had the looks for it, with her lush auburn hair and long Scandinavian features, and she'd been the star of every show her high school produced.

The plan had always been clear: her father would continue to work double shifts for as long as it took for her to graduate from the North Carolina School for the Arts, and then, when she finally made it on Broadway, she'd build a special wing for him in her home in the Hamptons. Her dad needed to escape the mills, and after all the sacrifices he'd endured to make their life together decent and respectable- just the two of them-she owed him something better. She could see the desperate hope in his eyes whenever they dreamed aloud, and the mere fact that he had never said she was being ridiculous made the dream seem that much more feasible.

Never in all its thousands of iterations, however, did the dream ever include a tumor. She'd just completed her second full week of college in Winston-Salem when she got the call to fly home. Her father had collapsed in the front yard after mowing the grass, and the prognosis was as bleak as it could get. Cancer had been entwining his brain stem for years, the doctors told her. Even if he'd noticed the symptoms, there was likely nothing they could have done. As it was, they gave him two months to live.

He only took three days.

Just like that, she was an orphan at the age of eighteen. With one deft swing of his scythe, Father Time had left her an adult, in all senses of the word, and with adulthood came all the realities: her father was broke. Worse than broke, actually, with debts far exceeding his ability ever to dig himself out.

Unless his only daughter and only child had struck it big in Hollywood.

Those double shifts could have kept revenue flowing long enough and fast enough to cover his finances for a few years, she supposed, but when she really looked at the books he'd kept, the whole thing was embarrassing.

She could have walked away; should have, probably, but to allow everything her dad had worked for to be sold at auction seemed terribly unkind-sacrilegious, almost. He'd never once turned his back on her in life. How could she abandon him in death?

The logic of it all made sense at the time, even as her dad's business

friends tried to talk her out of it, but she'd inherited not only his penchant for dreams, but also his bullheadedness. April let all the unsecured debt just go away, and by reducing credit card debt alone, she was able to knock a hefty five figures off the depth of the hole he'd dug. That left her with the house, the car, and miscellaneous household gad- bought on time, most of which she got to keep gratis, if only because she dared the collections weenies at Sears and Monkey Wards to come and take their stuff away from a grieving orphan.

Each victory came after a vicious fight, but at least the victories were hers. "Come on by," she'd said enough times that the words became almost reflexive. "I'm sure the news coverage will be great

publicity for you."

But the fight for the washing machine and the refrigerator were just le warm-up bouts, and she knew it. The real war would be fought over mortgage on the house, on which only ten years remained unpaid. The bank manager, a pompous prick named Morgan, told her in no uncertain terms that her father had already missed three payments on the note and was technically already in default when he died. Morgan was just as sorry as all get-out that things weren't going well for her, but, well, business was business.

Morgan gave her two choices: she could walk away from the property, in which case the bank would foreclose and subsequently enjoy a 300 percent return on their original investment, or she could refinance the mortgage and try to make a go of it herself.

"What would the payments be?" she remembered asking.

The question prompted a flurry of activity as his long lady-fingers flew across the keys of his calculator. When he looked up, he was so damned proud of himself that she'd wanted to puke. "Looks like your P and I would be about eight-fifty a month. With taxes and insurance, maybe just north of a thousand."

"A thousand?" April had breathed. "Dollars? Every month?"

Morgan laughed at her reaction, and that moment lived on to this day-well, until earlier this morning-as the instant when she had come closest to killing another human being. "I'm afraid so, miss," he'd chuckled. "Is that more than you can afford at present?"

She could still feel the heat building in her face and neck as she sat there in the polished lobby of the Milford Bank and Trust Company. She knew deep in her gut that she should have just walked out, but even in retrospect, that wasn't possible. Not remotely so. "You arrogant shit," she'd said, louder than was proper in those surroundings, but then, that was sort of the point. She wanted the entire world to know how this asshole was treating her.

"Miss Fitzgerald, really" Morgan blustered. "I don't think-"

April never dropped a beat. "Yeah, it's more than I can afford. I'm eighteen years old, you prick. How am I supposed to afford a thousand dollars a month?"

As she'd hoped, every eye in the bank had turned toward her.

"My mother died four years ago, Mr. Morgan. My father died last week! They left me with nothing but this house."

"If you could just keep your voice down-"

"I'm not keeping anything down, Mr. Morgan! That's my house, and you're throwing me out of it! Is that the way you treat your customers?"

Throughout the bank, people eased their way toward the doors, even as the security guard approached. April turned on the blue-clad rent-a-cop and levelled her forefinger at him. "You touch me, asshole, and I'll sue you all the way into the next decade. I haven't done anything against the law here, and I'm going to have my say."

Morgan stood. "You're disrupting business, Miss Fitzgerald. If you don't stop, then I'm going to have to call the police."

"Call 'em," April dared. "Shit, at least I'll have a place to sleep. Your way, I won't even have that."

Morgan nodded to an assistant, who picked up the phone and dialled.

"I don't believe this is the way you make your living, Mr. Morgan. You should be ashamed of yourself."

"I'm not the one making a fool of myself, Miss Fitzgerald."

Oh, God, how she hated that man. If she'd had her little .25 with her that day, he'd have been dead for sure. But she didn't, and in the end, she left without changing anyone's mind. On her way out, she tossed off the challenge, "You know where I live, Morgan; at least for the time being. Feel free to send the cops on over."

It took sixty days for those cops to arrive, and when they did, it wasn't to arrest her. It was merely to throw her out onto the street. There were a lot of them, too, apparently alerted by her good buddy Mr. Morgan that she was a hothead. The efficiency of it all was stunning. They arrived at eight in the morning, and they descended like locusts, moving everything out of the house, and finally sealing the door with a huge padlock. The whole thing took less than an hour.

It wasn't till they were leaving that April thought to ask for a suggestion where to stay, but none of them seemed to have the time to answer. They just kept their heads down and did what they had to do.

Thus began the never-ending thrill ride down the shitter, spiralling ever faster toward the ultimate darkness that was her future. She marvelled that the memories were still so clear after nine years; how the pain they brought hadn't dulled a bit. She missed her father unspeakably, and she missed the comforts of her life growing up, but more than anything, she missed the hope that had once dominated her childhood. Sometimes, when she had a few quiet moments to rub together, she'd close her eyes and try to remember what that felt like.

She knew now, with the benefit of hindsight, that youth dies when you stop believing that you can affect the hand you're dealt at birth. The reality is, sometimes you just draw shitty cards, and no matter how much you plan, and no matter how hard you work to be good and to go to church and to think the right thoughts, there's nothing in the world you can do to get a reshuffle.

The sudden appearance of her Geo just outside the glass snapped April back to the present. She watched as the used-car manager pried his girth from behind her steering wheel, ignoring the anger in her gut that he'd readjusted everything to take his spin around the neighborhood.

An obnoxious little bell slapped against the glass door as Mr. Simenson waddled back inside the sales office. Despite the forty-degree weather, he'd managed to work up a sweat, and April found herself hanging back a bit to avoid whatever odor he might exude.

"I don't suppose you have maintenance records, do you, ma'am?" he asked, wedging himself into his squeaky metal chair.

April shook her head. "What land of records are you looking for?"

Mr. Simenson made a big deal of opening a file folder and leafing through the pages as he talked. "Well, I'll look at whatever you've got, but I'm specifically looking for any brake adjustments, oil changes, tune-ups, that sort of thing."