The Most Wanted (43 page)

“Then I’ll go out there every day. And I’ll do some work at night. You know I work best then, anyway. Then I’ll go back to sleep. Remember the night I was putting up the sign—”

I thought my heart would divide neatly in two on me . . . But all I said was, “I remember. Oh Charley, it worked. My wish on the broken window.”

“You didn’t know that then.”

“Maybe I did. Just not in my head. Otherwise, why did I buy this dump?”

“It was a pretty obvious way to get my attention.”

I put my head on his shoulder. So I knew Arley would be safe, even if Charley would be exhausted. But even as I made plane reservations, I dithered. It was a terrible time to leave. Desiree was now blatantly colicky. Arley was thin and pale. But with Charley and Jeanine making daily visits and phone calls, and with Jack Becker’s assurance that his state police cruiser prowled past the cabin twice a shift, I felt reassured.

On the day before I left, Patty visited my office. “You’re going to look for a new job, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You don’t have to say that. I know you are.”

“I’m really not sure, Patty. I don’t much like Florida.”

“But who could bear to give up Stuart?” She smiled.

Who, I thought, indeed?

“I just know you’re going to move,” she told me, mooning around my office, rearranging my pens and my files. “How am I going to stand it here without you? Who’s going to make up the annual list of the worst names for babies born out of wedlock?”

I made arrangements for Jeanine to drive me to the airport—I didn’t think it was right for Charley to take me. The night before I left, I stayed with Arley at the cabin. And I called my sister.

“Remember the goyish carpenter?” I asked.

“Did he sue you?” she snapped back.

“No. It’s worse than that.”

“Did he make a pass at Arley?”

“Cold.”

“At you?”

“Uh . . . you’re getting warmer.”

“You made a pass at him!” The triumph in her voice subsumed all concern for an instant—we are, after all, sisters. But she quickly righted herself, asking necessary questions, making comforting noises. “Are you sure he’ll be . . . stimulating enough?” she asked.

“He’s pretty stimulating.”

“You know what I mean, Anne.”

“He’s not like Stuart. And with him, I’m not like . . . that. It’s different. The parts with words aren’t as fast. But the parts without words go deeper.”

“I want you to promise not to beat yourself up,” Rachael told me finally. “This is not a bank robbery, Anne. This is not murder.”

“We’ve done that here,” I said. “Why couldn’t Stuart have found a job in Utah? They have the death penalty. And you can have more than one spouse. . . .”

“I think Stuart would mind.”

“Charley wouldn’t.”

“Anne.”

“I know. I’m kidding. But what I mean is, so far as I can tell, what he wants is . . . to make me happy. That’s what he wants most.”

She paused so long I thought we’d disconnected. And then she said, “Well, that’s not everything. But it’s . . . it’s plenty. And maybe,” she added, her voice gathering speed with the kind of snottiness you can get only from a sibling, “maybe Stuart moved to Florida because he wanted to get away from you, Anne. Maybe you can’t quit because he already fired you.”

“Oh Rachael. You’re so comforting.”

“Well, Annie. I love Stuart.” She paused. “But you’re my sister. It’s your happiness I want most.”

Arley was waiting outside when I hung up. She patted my arm, and we sat on the steps, inhaling the dry, scentless air, a prescription for perfect respiration, a sort of distillation of everything good about Texas. Then Desiree piped up, and we both went inside. I headed for Desi’s crib, but Arley said, “She’s in my room again. It’s easier.”

Desi lay next to Arley’s bed in a cradle I had never seen. It was, in fact, not quite a cradle but something more substantial, a sort of big sledlike crib with curved ribs and shallow rockers, winged at the ends like runners.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, marveling.

“The . . . the thrift shop in Uvalde. Charley took me the other day.”

“How could you have afforded it, Arley? It must have cost—”

“It wasn’t so much.”

“It looks like it’s handmade.”

“It is.”

“What kind of wood?”

“It’s mesquite. Charley says it’s mesquite.”

I could hardly imagine that. Mesquite is a thorny little red-brown twisted tree—the kind of thing you expect to see in old movies with Charlton Heston playing a biblical prophet. Even in bloom, a mesquite never looked quite finished to me, not in the way a maple tree looks finished, no matter what season. But this baby bed was made of mesquite subjected to some kind of alchemy. Its colors rippled from the tan of hill soil to mauve to the ruddy shade of potter’s clay we saw in our tire ruts along Ocatilla Creek. And the way it felt . . . It felt like the skin under Desi’s chin. “Well, it’s absolutely beautiful. Does Desi like it?”

“She loves it. She sleeps better. A little better.” Arley looked up at me. “You’re going in the morning.”

“Only for two days.”

She looked past me, up at the thickets on the ridge. “I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.”

“You have all the phone numbers.”

“Ten thousand numbers.”

“And Charley will come every day.”

“He’s threatening to sleep on the floor, Annie, you got him so worried.”

“I know I’m being ridiculous. But I do worry about you. . . .”

“You wasted so much time on me, you don’t want to give up now, huh?”

“Yep.” I hugged her and scooped Desi up out of that satiny bed to kiss her head. “You got a great deal on this bed, Arley. I’m going to have you buy our house furniture.”

“Hmm,” she said, and hugged me back. Then she added, “You know, Annie, I called my mama a couple of weeks ago.”

“You did?”

“Yep. I thought she’d want to know at least something about the baby. And I wanted to say I was sorry about Langtry. I wanted to ask her if she knew more. I didn’t think I’d do it. But I did. It was like . . . I had to.”

“That was good of you. No matter what she said, honey, it was a good thing for your soul that you did it.”

“She didn’t surprise me any.”

“I can tell you don’t mean she didn’t have any more news.”

“Right. I mean, she didn’t surprise me the way she acted toward me.”

“Well, she is how she is.”

“She just asked about where I was, was I staying in a fancy hotel, like the police said. Was I even in Texas. And then she said she reckoned we all had trouble deep down in our blood, and why’d I have to go and mix it with more trouble and pass it on.” We both looked down at Desiree, her sleeping mouth at work on one of her dimpled knuckles. “She’s the worst person I ever knew, Annie.”

“She’s hardly the worst person, Arley. There’s plenty worse she could have inflicted on you.” I said that, but I didn’t know if I believed it.

“No,” Arley said. “She’s the worst because she doesn’t even care enough to hurt you.”

I stopped by Azalea Road in the morning to kiss Charley good-bye. I didn’t want to talk about my trip, so when I took my mouth off his, I accused him of sweet subterfuge. “Thrift shop, indeed,” I told him. “That crib was made by some genius, Charley. You must have called in some favor to get that.”

“Which crib?”

“The crib. The crib Arley says you got for her at a thrift shop.”

“She told you we got it at a thrift shop?”

“Yeah, sure. The thrift shop in Uvalde.”

“I told her not to tell you that.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to worry about this, Anne.”

“What? What the fuck am I not supposed to worry about?”

“I’m taking care of it.”

“What?”

“Arley found that crib on the porch one morning. She didn’t know where it came from.”

“It was like the flowers.”

“The flowers?”

I chewed my lip. “Nothing. Forget it. You’re saying Arley didn’t tell anyone about the crib. Not the detectives. Not anyone.”

“No.”

“No? No? Did you go along with a kid who was dumb enough to fall in love with a psychopath? Charley, get out of my way. I have to change these reservations—” I picked up my duffel bag.

“Anne, I want you to go ahead and see Stuart. It’s wrong not to. We have to go ahead with our lives. Stuart too.”

“He’s out there, Charley. Dillon’s waiting for me to leave.”

“Anne, Dillon LeGrande is only a person. There’s no evidence he’s anywhere near here—”

“Then who left a baby cradle on the step of what is essentially a safe house? A place nobody even knows exists, supposedly, except the owner and Jeanine and her dad and the police . . .”

“I don’t know, Anne, but think a little. Dillon might have worked for a carpenter for a couple of years, but he’s hardly out there working in the woodshop between armored-truck heists.”

“So maybe he stole it.”

“Yes, a guy on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list taking out time to knock over country antique stores run by little old ladies with blue rinses . . .”

“Well? Is that impossible? Maybe the little old ladies aren’t around to tell anymore. Maybe they’re buried in shallow graves in those good ol’ Texas piney woods, Charley. Look what happened to Arley’s sister.”

“Anne, slow down a minute. I can tell you why Arley didn’t tell the police.” I stopped and set my duffel bag down on the tiled floor. “She didn’t want them to take the crib. She didn’t want them to lock it up and put powder on it to check for fingerprints and destroy the finish. She wanted it for Desiree.”

“What if it’s Dillon?”

“Well, we talked about that. If Dillon left it, what was to stop him from walking right in then and butchering her and the baby, if that was what he wanted? Or taking them away? She said, Arley said . . .”

“What?”

“She said, ‘Dillon knows if he wanted me, he could’ve had me.’ ”

“Oh God,” I said. “Oh my God.”

“Anne . . .”

“Well, I’m not going.” Jeanine was standing on the porch, watching us argue.

“Anne, listen.”

“Are you always this calm?”

“I’m not calm. And I was a lot less calm when she told me about this. But I thought it over—”

“And now you think she’s right?”

“I do. I know it feels scary. But I’m still going out there to stay with her until you come back. And—”

“Promise me.”

“Don’t say that, Anne. It sounds like you think I don’t care about her.”

“I know you do! But what can you do, anyhow? Are you taking a machine gun with you? What if he comes for her?”

“If he was coming for her, he wouldn’t have left that bed. And I am going to tell the police about it, get them there, watching round the clock. That’s what I was going to say when you interrupted me.”

“You are?”

“Yes. That’s what I decided when I thought it over. You don’t have to do everything.”

You don’t have to do everything.

All the way to the airport, I leaned my forehead on the cool glass of the passenger-side window and chewed my fist.

“You’re involved with Charley, aren’t you?” Jeanine asked. “That’s what that was all about.”

“I am, but that’s not what that was all about,” I told her.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” she said. “I can’t believe it. I should be going out with Charley. You were paired off already. . . .”