1990 - Mine v4 (26 page)

Laura gave her hair a quick brushing. She forced herself to look at her face in the mirror. Her eyes had a glassy shine: either excitement or insanity, she couldn't decide which. But one thing she knew for sure: waiting in this house, day after day, for word about her baby would surely drive her over the edge. Mark Treggs might not know anything about the Storm Front. He might not have any information at all that could help her. But she was going to Chattanooga to find him, and nothing on earth was going to stop her.

She put on her black Reeboks, then deposited the automatic pistol and the box of ammunition in her suitcase, along with her hairbrush.

The pile of cut-up photographs caught her attention.

She swept them into a trash can with the edge of her hand. Then she picked up her suitcase, got her tan overcoat, and walked into the garage. The BMW's engine started, a throaty growl.

Laura drove away from the house on Moore's Mill Road, and she did not look back.

The Pennywhistle Player

CHATTANOOGA is A CITY THAT SEEMS STOPPED IN TIME, LIKE A Rebel's rusted pocketwatch. The broad Tennessee River meanders around it, interstates pierce its heart, railroads connect the warehouses and factories with those in other places; the river, interstates, and railroads enter Chattanooga and leave it, but Chattanooga remains like a faded damsel waiting for some suitor long dead and buried. She turns her face away from the modern, and pines for what can never be again.

The huge mass of Lookout Mountain rises over Chattanooga, the faded damsel's dowager hump. It was Lookout Mountain that Laura saw before she saw the city. Its appearance, at first a looming purple shadow on the horizon, made Laura's foot heavier on the BMW's gas pedal. At eighteen minutes after one she pulled off the interstate at Germantown Road, found a pay phone with a phone book, and looked upM. K. Treggs. The address was 904 Hilliard Street. Laura bought a city map at a gas station, pinpointed Hilliard Street on it, and got the gas jockey to tell her the best way to get there. Then she was off again, driving in the bright afternoon sunlight toward the northeastern side of Chattanooga.

The address was a small woodframe house in a nest of similar houses across from a shopping center. It was painted pale blue, and the house's postage-stamp-size lawn had been turned into a rock garden with a pebbled walkway. The mailbox was one of those plastic jobs with redbirds on it. A rope and tire swing hung from a tree branch, and in the driveway was a white Yugo with rust splotches. Laura pulled her car in front of the house and got out. The chill breeze ruffled her hair, and made the six or seven wind chimes that hung from the front porch's rafters clang and bong and jingle and clink.

A dog next door began to bark furiously. Big brown dog behind a chain-link fence, she noted. She walked up onto the porch and rang the doorbell, surrounded by chimes.

The inner door opened, but the screen door stayed closed. A slender, petite woman with braided brown hair peered cautiously out. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Laura Clayborne. I called you from Atlanta."

The woman just stared at her.

"I called you at eleven," Laura went on. "I've come to talk to your husband."

"You're… the lady who called? You came from Atlanta?" She blinked, the information sinking in.

"That's right. I can't tell you how important it is that I see your husband."

"I know who you are." The woman nodded. "You're the one whose baby was taken. Mark and I talked about that. I knew I'd heard your name before!"

Laura stood there, waiting. Then the woman said, "Oh! Come on in!" She unlatched the screen door, and opened it wide to accept Laura.

In her college days Laura had been in many dorm rooms and hippie apartments. Her own apartment had been pretty much "hippified," or at least what passed for such at the University of Georgia. The house immediately took her back to those days. It was full of cheap apartment furniture, with crates serving as book and record cases, a big orange beanbag chair with
UT
emblazoned on it, and a beige sofa that looked as if it had been slept on for quite a number of years. Vases with dried flowers stood about, and on the walls were actual, genuine, real McCoy black light posters, one showing the astrological signs and the other depicting a three-masted ship against a full moon. A wood carving on one wall read LET IT BE. Laura was sure she smelted strawberry incense and lentils cooking. Fat, half-burned candles — those kinds with intricate wax designs and varicolored bands on them — were arranged on a countertop, next to books that included the works of Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen. Laura could look through a corridor and see a poster at the end of it:
War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
.

The sensation of stepping back into time might have been complete for Laura except for some GoBots scattered on the floor and a Nintendo atop the television set. The woman with braided hair scooped up the GoBots. "Kids," she said with a toothy smile. "They leave stuff everywhere, don't they?"

Laura spotted a Barbie doll clad in a doll-size shimmery white gown, leaning against a record crate full of battered-looking album jackets. "You have two children?"

"Right on. Mark Junior's ten, and Becca's just turned eight. Sorry the place is a wreck. Getting 'em off to school some mornings's like a tornado passing through. Get you some tea? I've just made some Red Zinger."

It had been years since Laura had tasted Red Zinger tea. "That would be fine," she said, and she followed the woman into the cramped little kitchen. The refrigerator had peace signs painted all over it in vivid colors. The crayon drawings of children were taped up.
Love You, Mom
was printed on one of them. Laura looked quickly away from it, because a lump had risen into her throat.

"I'm Rose," the woman said. "Pleased to meet you." She offered her hand, and Laura shook it. Then Rose went about her task of getting cups and pouring the tea from a brown clay pot. "We've got raw sugar," she said, and Laura told her that would be fine, too. As Rose got their tea ready, Laura saw the woman had on Birkenstock sandals, staple hippie footwear. Rose Treggs wore faded jeans with patched knees and a bulky seagreen sweater that was a dozen rubs away from giving at the elbows. She was about five feet tall, and she moved with the quick, birdlike energy of petite people. In the kitchen's sunlight, Laura could see the hints of gray in Rose Treggs's hair. The woman had an attractive, open face and freckles across her nose and cheeks, but the lines around her mouth and at the comers of her dark blue eyes told a tale of a hard life. "Here you go," Rose said, giving Laura a rough clay cup with a hippie's long-jawed, bearded face molded into it. "You want lemon?"

"No, thanks." She sipped the tea. Few things in life remained the same, but Red Zinger persevered.

They sat in the living room, amid the relics of a bygone age. Looking around at it all, Laura imagined the voice of Bob Dylan singing "Blowin' in the Wind." She could feel Rose watching her, nervously waiting for her to speak. "I read your husband's book," Laura began.

"Which one? He's written three."

"
Burn This Book
."

"Oh, right. That's sold the best. Almost four hundred copies."

"I reviewed it for the
Constitution
. "The review, however, had never been printed. "It was interesting."

"We've got our own publishing company," Rose said. "Mountaintop Press." She smiled and shrugged. "Well, it's just a typeset machine and some stuff in the basement, really. We sell mostly by mail order, to college bookstores. But that's how Benjamin Franklin started, huh?"

Laura leaned forward in her chair. "Rose? I have to talk to your husband. You understand what's happened to me, don't you?"

Rose nodded. "We saw it on the news and read about it, too. Blew our minds. But you don't look like your picture."

"My baby has been stolen from me," Laura said, holding the tears back by sheer willpower. "He was two days old. His name is David, and I… I wanted a child very badly." Careful, she thought. Her eyes were burning. "You know who took my baby, don't you?"

"Yeah. Mary Terror. We thought she was dead by now."

"Mary Terror," Laura repeated, her gaze fixed on Rose's face. "The FBI's looking for her. But they can't find her. It's been twelve days, and she's disappeared with my son. Do you have any idea how long twelve days can be?"

Rose didn't answer. She looked away from Laura because the woman's intense stare made her nervous.

"Every day can stretch and stretch until you feel as if it's never going to end," Laura continued. "You think the hours are stuck. And at night, when it's so quiet you can hear your heart beat… at night it's the worst. I've got an empty nursery in my house, and Mary Terrell has my son. I read your husband's book. I read about the Storm Front in it. He knows someone who was a member of the Storm Front, doesn't he?"

"That was a long time ago."

"I realize that. But anything he could tell me might help the FBI, Rose.
Anything
. As it is, they're spinning their wheels. I can't take many more days of waiting for a phone call to tell me if my David is alive or dead. Can you understand that?"

Rose released a long breath and nodded, her face downcast. "Yeah. When we heard about it, we had a long talk. We wondered how we'd feel if somebody took Mark Junior or Becca. It would be a heavy trip, that's for sure." She looked up. "Mark did know a woman who belonged to the Storm Front. But he didn't know Mary Terror. He doesn't know anything that would help you get your baby back."

"How can you be sure about that? Maybe your husband knows something that he doesn't think is important, but it could be of real value. I don't think I have to tell you how desperate I am. You're a mother. You know how you'd feel." She saw Rose frown, the lines deepening. "Please. I need to find your husband and ask him some questions. I won't take much of his time. Will you tell me where I can find him?"

Rose's teeth worked her lower lip. She swirled the Red Zinger around her teacup, and then she said, "Yeah. Okay. There's a phone number, but I didn't give it to you because they don't like to go out and track down the custodians. I mean, it's a big place."

"Where does your husband work?"

Rose told her where, and how to get there. Laura finished her tea, said thank you, and left the house. At the front door Rose wished her peace, and the chimes stirred in the chill breeze.

Rock City was perched atop Lookout Mountain. It was not a suburb of Chattanooga, but rather a tourist attraction of walkways winding between huge, wind-chiseled boulders, a waterfall plummeting from a sheer cliff, and rock gardens with benches for the weary. Signs with bearded elves pointed out the admission gate and the parking lot. On such a cold day, even with the sun shining, the lot was all but empty. Laura paid her money in a building where Indian arrowheads and Confederate caps were on sale, and she was told by the clerk that Mark Treggs was probably out sweeping the path near the Swinging Bridge. She started off, following the walkway over, around, and sometimes even through the center of gargantuan rocks, the denuded bones of Lookout Mountain. She easily got through a crevice called Fatman's Squeeze, and she realized she was losing the weight of pregnancy. The pathway took her up into the sunlight again, out of the freezing shadows of the stones, and she at last saw the Swinging Bridge ahead of her. There was no one on the path, though. She crossed the bridge, which indeed did creak and swing, a gorge full of rocks about sixty feet below. She continued along the path, her hands thrust into the pockets of her overcoat. She didn't see anyone else anywhere. One thing she noticed, though: the walkways couldn't have been cleaner. And then she came around a curve and she heard it: the high, birdlike notes of a pennywhistle.

Laura followed the music. In another moment she found him. He was sitting cross-legged atop a boulder, his rake and broom leaning against the stone, and he was playing a pennywhistle and staring toward a vast panorama of pine woods and blue sky.

"Mr. Treggs?" she said, standing at the boulder's base.

He kept playing. The music was slow and gentle, and sad in a way. A pennywhistle, Laura thought, was an instrument played in circuses by clowns with tears painted on their cheeks. "Mr. Treggs?" she repeated a little louder.

The music stopped. Mark Treggs took the pennywhistle from his mouth and looked down at her. He had a long dark-brown beard peppered with gray and his hair hung over his shoulders, a blue baseball cap on his head. Under thick, gray-flecked brows, his large, luminous hazel eyes peered at Laura from behind wire-framed granny glasses. "Yes?"

"My name is Laura Clayborne. I've come from Atlanta to find you."

Mark Treggs squinted, as if trying to get her into focus. "I don't… think I know…"

"Laura Clayborne," she said again. "Mary Terrell stole my baby twelve days ago."

His mouth opened, but he didn't say anything.

"I read
Burn This Book
, "she went on. "You talked about the Storm Front. You said you knew someone who belonged to it. I've come to ask you —"

"Oh," he said. It was a boyish voice that did not go with the gray. "Oh, wow."

"For help," Laura finished.

"I saw you on the tube! My old lady and I both saw you! We were talking about you just last night!" He scrambled down off the boulder with surefooted ease. He was wearing a brown uniform and a jacket with Rock City stenciled in red on one breast pocket and Mark on the other. Treggs stood about six three and was as skinny as a spider monkey, his face all beard, wild eyebrows, and goggly eyes behind the glasses. "Man, what a trip! I swear, we were talking about you!"

"I saw Rose. She told me where to find you." The cup, she thought. The face on it was his.

"You went to my
house
? Wow!"

"Mr. Treggs? Listen to me. I need your help. You know someone who belonged to the Storm Front. Is that right?"

His goofy smile began to fade. He blinked a few times, regaining his equilibrium. "Oh," he said. "That's why you're here?"