Page 35 of The Most Wanted

“You’re just a kid,” I said. “I haven’t even told my sister this yet.”

  “That’s different,” Arley said.

  “I haven’t told Stuart.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sure he knows.”

  “What?”

  “If he doesn’t know it’s Charley, he knows it’s something, and you have to help him figure it out. People always know when the other person starts to change.” She leaned over and stroked the ball of Desi’s feet, watching her toes bend like a dancer en pointe. An unfamiliar car rattled past the opening of the dirt road, and Arley flinched. Was she thinking of Dillon, feeling for the sorcery of their connection, wondering if it still held true?

  “How do you feel when you think of breaking up with Stuart?” she asked.

  “Sad. Afraid.”

  “How do you feel when you think of leaving here? Of leaving Charley? And . . . us?”

  “I don’t think about that.”

  “I think you should go see Stuart,” she said. “Don’t you think you should?”

  I knew I should; I said that I would. After Christmas.

  Stuart couldn’t go home for Christmas because of the new job, and since I’d been to New York just months before, I used the excuse of Desiree being too small to travel and Arley having no one else, and I spent my holiday in San Antonio. Charley gave me strict orders not to show up at my house for the two days before Christmas Eve, and I complied, though there were suspicious conversations on the telephone at the cabin several times when I was there, replete with smothered snickers and whispers, Arley then insisting, “It was just some salesman or something. . . .”

  But on Christmas Eve, Jeanine and Arley arrived at my office with Desi, nestled in her car-seat shell, a Santa cap the size of a child’s sweat sock on her head.

  “We’re here to pick you up,” Arley said. “No arguments.”

  “My car’s here,” I said.

  “No it isn’t,” Arley answered. “We’ve taken care of that.”

  “Put yourself in our control, Anne,” Jeanine told me, steering me through my office door and closing it firmly.

  There are twenty-eight casements at Azalea Road, and Charley had lit a candle in each one. For the thirty-two-paned bay window, he had fashioned a menorah from a huge potted cholla, each of eight cactus arms adorned with an oil candle in a fragile foil cup. Inside, courtesy of Charley’s pal at The September Garden, was a Chinese feast laid out on the library floor, across three yards of snowy linen tablecloth, with chopsticks for ten. Patty Flanagan joined us for a while, and Tarik came with a girlfriend—a Filipina beauty who must have weighed eighty-five pounds soaking. Jeanine brought the pediatrician, but he left early. When his shift ended at eleven, Jack Becker and his partner, a cute black kid named Pedro, who couldn’t take his long-lashed eyes off Arley, showed up to help us eat the leftovers. Arley gave me a journal to record my dreams, its cover embossed with cows jumping over the moon. I gave Arley a camera, a saucer bouncer for Desiree—her whole body, at that point, would have fit through one of the openings for the legs—and a basket full of lotions, potions, and soaps, all lavender, Arley’s favorite scent. After midnight, Arley and Desi fell asleep on the library floor, curled on the Amish quilt Jeanine had given me. Since the water in the downstairs bath had needed to be disconnected temporarily, for the third time, Charley and I brushed our teeth with champagne and peed in the yard, and then we lay down upstairs, where the nubs of fat white candles still burned bravely on the sills.

  “I’m . . . going to Miami in a couple of weeks,” I told him, deciding at that moment that, indeed, I was. “I need to see Stuart and to talk all this over with him.”

  “That’s going to hurt,” Charley said.

  “I know. But until I do, I don’t think that I—that we—can go forward.”

  “I have a present for you,” he said then.

  “Besides the festival of lights?”

  “Yeah. But I’m pretty sure it’s in bad taste. And I don’t want you to think . . . well, what I want you to know is this, Anne. I bought this for you a while ago, and I wanted you to have it even if you left. And if you decide to do that, I still want you to have it.”

  The ring was silver, a skeleton mermaid fashioned so that her own graceful hands lovingly held the flukes of her long tail. “It’s a Day of the Dead symbol for fertility,” Charley said. “Not . . . that kind of ring. Not a promise. Just a love ring. I want you to have all the love you want, Anne. And here, I hope.” He slid it onto my finger, and I curled, speechless, against his warm chest. Lucky me, I thought. How had so many unlikely ingredients simmered up such a kettle of turmoil in just one year, since Stuart and I had thrown our wish rocks through the windows of Azalea Road? It was even stranger to tell than to live. And where, in all of it, was the late Anne Singer, she of sound mind?

  “Will you look out for Arley while I’m gone?” I asked Charley.

  “You know I will. She can stay at my place.”

  “She won’t do that. She’d think it was an inconvenience to you.”

  “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 woul
d 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—”

  “An
d 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. . . .”

  “You want to go out with everybody, Jeanine?”

  “Everybody with a body like Charley’s.”

  “That’s not all there is to it—”

  “What there is to it doesn’t hurt though . . .” I couldn’t even chuckle. And I couldn’t explain. I was so reluctant to get on the plane that I left my bag sitting with Jeanine’s purse, and she had to run to catch up and give it to me. I didn’t even put out my hands to take it, just sat there and, the first chance I got, ordered a Bloody Mary, though it was nine-thirty a.m.

  Stuart picked me up at the airport, and I didn’t know what happened that same night until many hours later. In fact, no one knew.

  There is a little arroyo near Trinidad, Texas, where hundreds of hopeful border runners heading for el norte have scratched a tunnel under a section of fence. It’s been filled in with a backhoe, and even with paving, dozens of times. But a new passage in the crumbly soil always seems to open up. The country around that dry spot was so remote that it wasn’t until the wee hours of the following morning that fellow INS patrols found the two border guards, one of them dead. Med-flighted, the man with the shattered left shoulder survived. He identified Dillon without hesitation. Apparently unarmed, Dillon had come strolling up as if to vault over the fence, down the gully into Mexico. As the two guards wheeled their all-terrain vehicle and shone the lights down on him, calling for him to halt, Dillon’s small masked companion—authorities believed it was Spirito—opened up with a thirty-aught-six from a clump of shrubbery, nailing both guards on the first volley. It was a coward’s move, a back shot. What the wounded man remembered was Dillon shouting for the gunman to stop.