* * *
Two days.
Didi had been gone for nearly two damned days.
The house wasn’t cold, but Remmi, chilled from the inside out, had turned on the gas fire, watching the flames flicker and hiss as she rocked in the tattered chair, the baby in her lap. She wanted her brother to fall asleep, but that wasn’t happening. Adam was fussy, not taking the bottle she offered, instead staring up at her and gumming the nipple, chewing on the rubbery tip as if he knew something was wrong. He was right, of course. Didi hadn’t returned. Not yesterday, as she’d promised, nor today. So when? What had happened? As Remmi stared at the flames, she had the eerie and unwelcome feeling that she might not ever see her mother again.
At that thought, the lump in her throat grew, and she swallowed it back and refused to give in to tears. Miserable, her worry inching toward fear, she pushed against the carpet with her bare toe, keeping the motion slow and steady. She smiled down at the baby, hoping to comfort him, while inside she felt a deep, welling fear. What had happened to Didi? She’d flown out of here on a mission, but . . .
Please, please, let her walk through the door, Remmi had silently prayed for hours, but so far, her pleas had fallen upon deaf ears. God wasn’t listening.
Seneca, too, had disappeared. Remmi had called her. Seven times yesterday, and ten today. Seneca wasn’t answering or returning Remmi’s panicked calls. She fed Adam from the store of bottles and watched the clock. Her mother had said she’d return within twelve hours.
She’d either lied or been detained or . . .
Don’t even go there; don’t think like that! Remmi told herself, as the clock in the kitchen ticked away the seconds of her life; Didi was fine. Okay. Just delayed or maybe . . . distracted. But she’d show up. She always did.
And she always called. Right? So why hasn’t she?
Remmi glared at the phone, willing it to ring.
But the house remained silent, the only sounds the tick of the clock, the creak of the rocker, the rattle of the windows as a desert storm kicked up and the wind raced through this hardscrabble neighborhood, and the ever-increasing beat of her heart.
Had Didi planned to ditch her oldest daughter, leave Remmi with the infant for good? No, Remmi didn’t believe that, wouldn’t believe it, despite Didi’s erratic behavior.
But she lied, didn’t she?
About the meeting in the desert.
About Ariel being with Trudie.
About so many things.
All of your life, Didi has bent the truth to suit herself. Take, for example, that she’s never told you anything straight about your father. Or her own family. It’s been lie after lie after lie.
How can you trust her? How?
“Oh, shut up!” Remmi said, startling Adam. The nipple fell from his lips, and he screwed up his face, beginning to cry in earnest. “Oh, honey, no, no, no,” she whispered, picking him up and cradling him as she walked—paced, really—in front of the fire. “It’s all right. It’s gonna be all right.” She kissed the downy top of his head.
What should she do?
Call the police?
No. Not yet. Didi would kill her if she found out . . . well, if she ever returned. And then they’d take Adam from her and shove her through Social Services into some strange foster home, a separate one from her infant brother. No thanks.
Call Noah?
What good would that do? Besides, she’d tried several times and had never connected with him. If he wanted to talk to her, he could call or come by. Obviously, he wasn’t interested in her, probably never really had been.
Her heart cracked a little, but she ignored the pain. She barely knew the guy. Besides, he was a loser. Otherwise, he would have checked on her when she hadn’t shown up the other day.
Unless he thinks you stood him up when you didn’t show . . .
For the millionth time, Remmi glanced at the fire. Stared into the flames. Thought of the fiery blast in the desert. And the gunshots. Someone had died last night, Remmi was sure of it. Died! Violently. Didi had switched out the babies—that much was certain—and whoever had been in that other car, the man whom Didi had referred to as the twins’ “daddy,” had expected to be handed a baby boy. Not a girl. That’s why the twins had been dressed in the wrong clothes. It had to be. Remmi was almost sure of it—that Didi had switched out the babies on purpose to fool the “daddy” and probably make him pay more for his son. But the guy had cheated Didi, pulled a scam of his own, conning her just as she’d conned him, by leaving her with a briefcase of phony, useless bills.
And he’d died for it.
Someone had killed him in that car. Murdered him and, either by intent or by mistake, had taken the life of the child that was assumed to be Adam.
Oh. No.
She had been so caught up in her own misery, her own fears for herself and her mother, worrying about when Didi would return, that she had ignored the horrific fact that possibly the murder that had gone down in the desert was about Adam. She stared down at the child in her arms, the innocent baby, a twin without his sister. “Oh, God, no,” she whispered when she thought of what might happen to this little one if he were truly at the center of all this, possibly a target himself. “Oh, baby, I won’t let that . . .” She didn’t finish the thought as the phone rang and she leapt to answer it.
Didi had finally surfaced. Her heart soared and relief flooded through her. She almost cried, “Mom!” as she snagged the receiver from its cradle on the wall, but at the last second, Remmi bit her tongue, found a way to restrain herself, and didn’t say a word.
“Didi?” a rough, irritated male voice demanded. “Didi? Are you there?” He hesitated, and Remmi placed the voice. Harold Rimes, her mother’s boss at the club. “What the hell’s going on? Where are you? Last night, okay, you said you were sick, and fine, Tanya did her thing, covered for you, but what about tonight?” A pause. “Are you there? Damn it all, I’m expecting a crowd tonight. You’d better show, Didi. If you value your job, which apparently you don’t.” He let out a long breath and, when he spoke again, was more conciliatory. “Tanya’s not you, and the regulars, they expect, well, you know . . .” Another pause, and he was furious again. “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Just show up, Didi!” He hung up with a sharp click. Shaken, still holding Adam, Remmi replaced the receiver slowly.
Didi hadn’t even called Harold to tell him she wouldn’t be in. This was not good. Not good at all.
Again, she looked at the baby, and Adam gurgled up at her, all big eyes and innocence. She almost cried. “That’s it,” she said with finality. She packed him into his carrier, stuffed his clothes and hers into a suitcase, found water bottles and baby formula, a huge box of diapers, some snacks and soda and carried everything, including her brother, out to the Toyota.
Money.
She needed money.
And maybe a credit card or two.
Propelled by the thought, she hurried back inside the house and to her room, where she found the tips she’d saved from Biggie’s Burgers, where she worked part-time, coins and bills she kept in a jar. She stuffed the jar into her backpack. It wasn’t enough. But she knew where there was more. Without a second’s hesitation, not listening to a tiny voice that said she was stepping over an invisible line that could never be crossed again, she beelined to her mother’s bedroom and closet, where she found a locked box and dragged it down. After locating the key in the earring compartment of Didi’s jewelry display, she unlocked the box that held Didi’s money from tips and her few valuable pieces of jewelry. As the lock turned and the box opened, Remmi nearly gasped. Holy moley! She’d found the mother lode! A lot of money in bigger denominations than the bills Didi’s fans left in her tip jar.
Remmi decided these were the real bills the con artist had seeded into the phony ones. Didi had culled the good ones out. At least Remmi hoped so. She made sure the extra credit cards were still in the bottom of the box, along with her great-grandmother’s diamond ring and a gaudy br
ooch that Didi had sworn was made of genuine rubies and emeralds. Maybe. Right now, Remmi didn’t have time to consider their worth. Then there was a small, spiral-bound address book that had more names crossed out and erased than still existed. But it could come in handy. Remmi decided to keep it. She locked the box again, pocketed the tiny key, then hauled everything back to the Toyota.
She thought about the computer. She’d love to take it, but the monitor was bulky, and the modem wouldn’t work without a hookup. The CPU would take up too much space, and as much as she loved the secondhand machine and hooking up to the net, she just didn’t have room for it.
ID. You need ID. Your smiling picture on your high school ID isn’t going to cut it.
She slid behind the wheel and told herself that when she got to wherever it was she was going—and she had no idea where that was right now—she’d inquire around and find some way to get some ID that said she was old enough to drive. She glanced at her reflection in the mirror. She looked fifteen, no older. “Fresh-faced,” that’s what she’d always heard about herself. Well, fresh-faced wouldn’t do. “Just a sec,” she called over her shoulder to the baby in his carrier, then she raced back into the house, found a suitcase in Didi’s closet, and filled it with her mother’s costumes, dresses, bras, stockings, gloves, and wigs, then went to work in the bathroom. Beneath the mirror rimmed in lights, she snagged not one, but two, makeup cases and filled them with all of Didi’s makeup. Brushes, sponges, and applicators. Mascara, lipstick, foundation, rouge, blush, eye shadow and liner—all of the feminine ammunition that was in Didi’s personal arsenal went into the bags before Remmi hauled them and the suitcase back to the car.
By this time, the baby was wailing.
She ignored him and twisted the key in the ignition. The Toyota sparked to life. Tearing out of the driveway, she told herself to slow down, calm down, and not attract any attention. The last thing she needed was to catch the eye of some cop watching traffic.
Where to? she asked herself as she drove onto the main road. East to what? Texas? Amarillo? Dallas? West to L.A.? She knew no one there, and she would have to contact someone, right? To the south was Mexico, but could she cross the border to a foreign land? Her high school Spanish was good enough for the classroom, though she was hardly fluent. What kind of documentation would she need?
And if you get there, will you ever be able to get back to the U.S.?
Deciding to shelve the Mexico idea, she drove steadily, away from the heart of downtown, where traffic was congested. Her hands were clammy over the wheel, her pulse pounding in her eardrums, her mind racing. She turned on the radio as she came to a spot in the road where she had to make a choice. East or west. Chris Isaak was singing, and she recognized the song: “San Francisco Days.”
It was playing as a huge green road sign indicated that San Francisco was many miles away. Far, but far enough? Mentally, she calculated that it would take her all night to get there. So what? She needed distance from Las Vegas, and she also needed time to think, to plan.
Now that she’d left the house and the phone, how would Didi know where to find her? She swallowed hard. There were mobile phones—digital devices that were becoming more popular by the day. Each year, with advances in technology, the phones were becoming smaller, sleeker, and more convenient. Certainly, they were the wave of the future. Remmi could see that, but Didi had been death on them.
“Who needs to be in contact with the world all the damned time?” she’d said on more than one occasion when Remmi had mentioned that one of her friends at school had one.
Once, while seated at her makeup mirror and removing the thick foundation with a cotton pad and some kind of cleaner, Didi had kept her gaze fixed on her reflection as she’d said, “If you ask me, a high school kid with access to a phone day in and day out? That’s a recipe for disaster.”
“But they’ve even got small ones that flip closed, kind of like a clam,” Remmi had argued, and her mother had laughed.
“What? Why?”
“So you can snap it closed. It fits in a purse or pocket.”
“And it comes with a separate bill, something we don’t need. We already have one phone bill. Trust me, that’s more than enough.”
Remmi had leaned a jean-clad hip on the bathroom counter near the sink. “But if I had a phone, you could always reach me and—”
“You?” she’d said, surprised, glancing up at her daughter, her eyes narrowing as if she’d just realized that Remmi might have a mind of her own, one with separate opinions from her mother’s. “You think you need a phone?” She’d been shaking her head as she’d plucked a tissue from a box on the counter. “No way. I know where you are.” She wiped foundation from her fingertips. “At least I’d better.” Tossing the dirtied tissue into an overflowing wastebasket beneath the table, she turned back to the mirror and frowned at her reflection. Her gaze had met her daughter’s in the mirror, and as if reading the stubborn set of Remmi’s jaw as rebellion, she added, “No mobile phone. Not in this house. A computer’s bad enough.” A pause. “Got it?”
“Got it,” Remmi repeated, but inwardly she decided that her mother was just being stubborn, set in her ways, and a bitch to boot. She didn’t understand the coming technology and didn’t want to. Didi loved to glorify the past, to wear nostalgic clothes to pretend to be some has-been beauty queen from the fifties and sixties. She lived in a dream world. Also, probably because of Remmi’s quiet obedience in school and at home, Didi thought she had complete control over her daughter’s life. But she was wrong. Remmi was sick of doing whatever Didi wanted, tired of being the “good girl” who was always so responsible, did what she was told, a stellar student destined for a scholarship to, at the very least, a nearby college.
On the very night of the cell phone conversation, Remmi had turned a corner—maybe, more correctly a U-turn—in her life. No more doing what Mom told her, and it all had started with Remmi slipping onto the Internet, using her mother’s credit card to “surf” on the aging computer she’d begged her mother to buy despite Didi’s worries about being hooked up electronically to “God knew what.” Remmi had also started sneaking out with the Toyota at 2:00 AM, once Didi got home from work and had crashed for the night. From that point on, Remmi had taken the car when she could, always filled it with gas, and defiantly wondered if Didi would ever wise up.
If Didi had noticed the change in her daughter’s attitude, she’d never mentioned it, and Remmi had been careful to keep her grades up because she truly believed that her school record was her ticket out of Las Vegas and away from her mother, despite Didi’s own wishes.
Because they were at odds with her own.
Didi had insisted no daughter of hers was going to move out at eighteen and make the same mistakes she had, but Remmi thought it was more that Didi would have herself a built-in babysitter; she’d found out she was carrying twins on the night of their last discussion about Remmi’s life after she graduated from high school.
“You’ll stay here with me and the babies. Live in the house, so there’s no rent or utilities to pay, and save money in the process. There are good schools here in Las Vegas,” she’d said, as if her decision were final, not understanding that in the past few months, Remmi had ached to get out from under her mother’s thumb. Once the babies had arrived, it had only gotten worse. As much as Remmi loved her tiny brother and sister, she wasn’t ready to be a mother or even a handy free babysitter.
Now, she glanced into the back seat.
She would get a cell phone, so that she could call the home number and leave a message or keep trying Seneca.
And Noah? Are you going to try to get in touch with him, too?
“No,” she said aloud and surprised herself, the car lurching as she’d been so vehement she’d inadvertently hit the gas instead of cruising steadily at fifty-five miles an hour. She brought the speedometer down. But she was certain she’d never try to contact Noah Scott again.
Everything had chang
ed. Her own life had blown up in the desert two nights ago, as surely as that fireball had consumed the other car. Now she was mother, father, nursemaid, whatever, as well as half sister, to the little boy strapped into his infant carrier in the back seat of this rattletrap car.
Tightening her grip on the wheel, she stared straight ahead to the spot where the twin beams of her headlights illuminated the pavement. There was a steady stream of taillights as she, along with all these other strangers in their vehicles, moved in a red river through the mountains and the dark night. The others, those in pickups, sedans, vans, and SUVs, all had destinations, she supposed, while she was driving blind through the night and heading to a future that was murky and dark.
CHAPTER 9
OH2 stared down at the man lying in the hospital bed. Not even sixty years old, but looking ancient with tubes running in and out of his body, his skin milky pale, his pajamas rumpled. A motorized wheelchair with a headrest was positioned near the bed, proof that Oliver Hedges was still able to move around a bit, if only with the help of aides and, of course, the chair, an electric marvel, the best money could buy. Still, he was a pathetic figure, a far cry from the robust, helicopter-skiing, deep sea diving, mountain climbing, rugged adventurer he’d been so recently, a mere shadow of the athlete who forty years earlier had thought he might become an Olympian, a bi-athlete due to his strength in cross-country skiing and his deadeye aim with a rifle. He’d been edged out of the competition, losing his anticipated spot to the nineteen-year-old son of Norwegian immigrants, who was an inch taller, a bit faster on skis, and a slightly better shot. Losing his chance at competing as an Olympian had been one of Oliver Hedges’s few failures in life. And a stinging lesson he’d never forgotten.
And look at him now.
A carcass of his former self.
Wasn’t that just too damned bad?
In his firstborn’s opinion, the old man lying in room 124 of Fair Haven Retirement Center deserved every moment of pain and mental anguish he experienced—the greater the agony, the better.