The Wishing Garden (33 page)

She closed her eyes. She knew exactly what she was supposed to do in this situation: Call the police, hunt down her daughter, then take her home or perhaps to her father’s, until she could be tamed. And she knew what she was going to do, which was sit on this mountain awhile, and let the sun warm her through. If Emma was willing to give up everything for that boy, then, mother or not, Savannah was going to root for her. The strongest love charm in the world was also the hardest to invoke: She would have to take after her mother and do the most unlikely thing.

It was after two by the time she got back. Her father was knee-deep in the soil he’d asked Jake to haul up yesterday. He had a packet of spinach seeds in his hands.

“He should get a good fall crop,” Doug said. “I just wish we’d gotten up here sooner. We could have planted those Roma tomatoes your mother loves.”

Savannah knelt in the dirt beside him and laid her head on his shoulder. For the first time in weeks, his skin had a fine coating of downy hair. He hadn’t even draped one of his usual blankets around his shoulders.

“There, there.” He sprinkled the seeds in a shallow trench. “It’ll all turn out all right. I’ve got this feeling.”

She kissed his cheek and helped him cover the seeds. He looked past her, to the unfinished bench beneath a ponderosa.

She followed his gaze and spotted a sheet of blue paper tied to the back of the bench. “Another poem for Mom,” she said.

“Not this time. That one’s for you.”

If he hadn’t been kneeling there, smiling with anticipation,
Savannah might never have moved. She had every reason to believe he was getting better; he’d managed to start the garden, even go for a short walk now and then. Yet every time she looked at the things he’d given her, the silver charm that read “World’s Best Daughter” and a basket of vegetable seeds she had yet to plant anywhere, she got a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had to hold something more solid than the flimsy flesh of his arm.

She didn’t want him to give her one more thing she’d cling to after he was gone.

Doug gestured for her to go on, though, so she went to the bench. She untied the paper and read it.

She folded the page into quarters, then eighths. She didn’t look up for a long, long time. Then she walked to her father and tucked her face into his neck while she cried her heart out.

Within ten minutes of their arrival at a motel off Highway 69, Eli and Emma were ratted on by the manager. Cal Bentley pulled into the parking lot and spotted the
Corvette immediately, but he didn’t get out. That boy had no luck; he never had and probably never would.

Cal lit one of his contraband cigarettes and sucked in even harder when he thought of the tirade he’d get from Lois. She never made her usual Saturday night pot roast when she caught him smoking. Instead, she tried to balance the damage done by cooking tofu and falafel, two things no amount of mustard and Worcestershire sauce could turn edible.

He kept an eye on the dingy outer hallway. He’d just gotten off the cell phone with Savannah. If she wanted to let her fifteen-year-old daughter loose with a boy like Eli, that was her problem. His problem was making sure a boy on the run didn’t do something stupid. His problem was harder.

Mistake number one: The kids hadn’t gone more than fifty miles before stopping. Mistake number two: They’d pulled into a motel right by the side of the highway, where anyone could make out the black glow of Eli’s Corvette. Mistake number three: They’d paid the motel manager by cash, which was always suspicious, and signed in under John and Jane Doe, which was just plain ridiculous. The manager had waited no more than five minutes before phoning Cal.

Cal had one hell of a headache. He’d had it since yesterday, when Dan Merrill had called to give him a list of houseboaters who’d lived on Wawani Lake at the same time as the Pillandros. Dan himself had located a man who, years ago, found Jake’s wallet, along with a yellowed tooth, washed up on shore. Dan had wanted to bring Jake in for questioning.

“You’ve got nothing,” Cal had told him.

“What about the hole in the dead guy’s skull?” Dan had asked. “What about the fact that this skeleton was Jake’s stepfather, and one son of a bitch to boot?”

“I’m telling you, get your facts in order first. You’ve got nothing here. You hear me?”

But Cal knew exactly what they had. The day before Roy Pillandro had disappeared, his wife, Cheryl, had been treated at Phoenix Memorial for broken bones, and then seen by a neighbor at her old house in Phoenix, where Jake was still living. And yesterday, Cal had checked on some of those names Dan had given him and spoken to Mrs. Alice Lane.

“Roy was a brute,” Mrs. Lane had said. “An all-out animal. Cheryl never said a word, but I mean, how do you hide bruises all over your face? We weren’t deaf, you know. We heard the screaming.”

“Do you recall what happened when Roy disappeared?”

“Recall it? I was there that night. I was watching television, then all of a sudden there was shouting, then a loud bang. I ran outside, but when I called over, a man’s voice said Roy had just gotten crazy with a firecracker. Ha! That was no firecracker. That was a gun going off. I caught a glimpse of the man who shot it, too. Tall, dark-haired, but just a kid. Twenty or so.”

“Could you identify him now?”

“Oh, I doubt it. It was fifteen years ago. And he jumped back into the shadows so fast, it was hard to notice anything other than his dark hair. But when you find him, you tell him I’m glad he did it. That night was the first good night’s sleep I’d gotten in years.”

They had motive, mounting circumstantial evidence, and a probable witness, but Cal was obviously losing his mind because even if Jake had killed Roy Pillandro, he didn’t particularly care. On top of that, he was sitting here in front of a motel, letting a couple of runaways think they’d gotten off. His heart just wasn’t in it anymore. He’d gotten so old and soft,
when Eli and Emma finally skulked out of their room, he decided then and there to let them go. When Eli took off his jacket and wrapped it around Emma’s shoulders, Cal smoked his cigarette down to the stub. When they got into the Corvette and huddled together before peeling out, Cal turned on his radio to the oldies station and sang “Blueberry Hill” at the top of his lungs. When the song was over and the kids were long gone, he got on his cell phone and called Lois.

“Honey,” he said, “slip into something pretty. I’m taking you out to lunch.”

Eli was breathing hard as he skidded out of the motel parking lot. Cal Bentley was sitting in his squad car not fifty feet from them. Eli’s hands slipped off the wheel as he turned the corner and drove toward the signal at the highway on-ramp. The light was red, and his lungs were on fire. Emma was pale as fresh paper, looking into the rearview mirror.

“See him yet?” Eli said.

“No.”

“Fuck. He’s playing us.” He gunned the engine. The light was going to stay red forever. Finally, he just blew through it. He headed up the on-ramp and waited for the lights and sirens, but they never came.

He was doing sixty in seconds, then seventy, seventy-five. He swerved into the fast line, cutting off a Suburban loaded down with a family of blonds. He couldn’t have slowed if he tried. Finally, Emma got up on her knees and turned around in her seat.

“He’s not coming,” she said.

“Yeah. Right.”

Eli floored it. He was doing eighty-five and not about to stop. He had pawned a couple of stereos just to stay the night at that lame hotel, and now the cops
were on to them. Fearlessness had kept his bones strong all these years, and now he could feel them splintering. He wished he had a home to go to. For the first time in years, he wished someone else was in charge.

“Really,” she said, turning around. “He let us go.”

Eli let up on the accelerator. He started shaking and couldn’t stop. He didn’t like this one bit. He fully expected himself to act crazy, but when cops started doing it, the whole system went to hell. Next thing you knew, Cal would be taking bribes, Eli’s dad would be getting sober, and he’d be crying in Emma’s lap. Everything they’d pretended to be would blow up in their faces.

“We’ll go to Flagstaff tonight.” He despised the tremor in his voice and sucked on another cigarette to stop it. “I’ve got a friend there who can put us up for a few days. Then we’ll meet Rick. He thinks we can score at least a grand, maybe more, from the liquor store. That’ll get Rick his powder and us out of this fucking state.”

“Why do we have to rob that liquor store? Let’s go somewhere out of town.”

“Rick knows the combination to the safe. That’s where the real stash is. His brother was a cashier there. We’ll be in and out, Emma. No one’s gonna catch us.”

Emma nodded, but she kept looking over her shoulder, and he didn’t blame her. The cop wasn’t there, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t closing in on them fast. That didn’t mean they weren’t headed for disaster anyway.

 F
IFTEEN
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HE
F
IVE OF
S
WORDS
, R
EVERSED
M
ISFORTUNE OF A
F
RIEND
 

T
he only evidence Doug had been in the garden was two shoe prints in the soil. When Jake called his name, Doug disappeared so fast into a thicket of pines, not even a hound could have tracked him. He pressed his back against the bristly trunk of a ponderosa and by the time Jake went back inside and slammed the door, he was covered in sap, and laughing out loud.

He had never thought he would be good at espionage, but maybe every man had a bit of James Bond in him, especially when it mattered this much. Jake wanted the last two designs for the bench, and no doubt he wanted his privacy back too. But Doug had already decided he was never leaving the cabin. He feigned sleep whenever Jake peeked into the loft, and escaped for walks when Jake came outside. He wasn’t going anywhere, not when the air up here was pure oxygen, his blood running clean as Jake’s well water, and on good days he could walk nearly a mile.

In fact, he had decided on the next symbol for the bench, and he would tell Jake in another week or two, to keep the man happy. He wanted the sun carved in, deep and dazzling. The blazing sun that had given life to his garden, then threatened to take his own. The sun he still couldn’t get enough of, despite what it had done to him.

He turned his face to it now and wasn’t blinded. He could stay out in the sun all day and not get burnt. The one benefit of dying was that nothing else could hurt him now. They ought to send him into battle; he could detonate bombs at close range and stop bullets with his teeth. Better than that, he would move the enemy to tears; one whiff of his spoiled breath and young, hearty men would start packing for home.

He was giddy, too. This morning, when Savannah had laid out her cards for him, he’d put his hand over hers. “Now,” he’d said, “go get the other ones.”

She had looked up quickly, then simply went to her bag and pulled out another third of the deck. She mixed them in with the others, then he reshuffled. She laid them out stiffly, but then she smiled.

“Oh, Dad. Do you see this? It’s the Ace of Cups. That means fulfillment. A favorable outlook. It means you’re going to be all right.”

“I never doubted it.”

And he hadn’t. He was going to be all right, one way or the other. He hadn’t gotten worked up over the cancer, and he wasn’t getting worked up over this apparent remission. Sixty years in this world had taught him things were never as bad or as good as they appeared, and either way, life worked out as it should.

He walked to the meadow. He was not leaving, not when the sun was this warm and the grass waist-high and soft, and the old dog needed him. Sasha was right on his heels. When he lay down in the grass, in the
blunt shadow of Kemper Peak, she lay down too, her gray muzzle on his chest.