A Flower in the Desert (29 page)

Melissa was a California Girl. Being without a car had probably felt like being without legs. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me about her leaving here.”

“Well,” Sarah said, “she knew how difficult it was for us. The problem we were having with Julia. It was really her idea to leave. In a way, of course, we were relieved, but we also felt terribly guilty about it. It was like we were throwing her out on the street. But Melissa said it was only right that she go. She's the one who persuaded
us.
So we called, so
I
called a number in California—I used a pay phone—and I explained the situation. Melissa wanted to stay in town until the first of October—”

“Why?”

“She wouldn't say.” Sarah frowned. “She'd get like that sometimes. Not coy, really, but sort of … secretive. Mysterious. As though she were a spy or something.” Frowning again, she thought for a moment. “It was like she sort of had to dramatize herself, do you know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“It was just a way she had sometimes,” she said. “It wasn't really any big deal. It wasn't annoying or anything. Especially since five minutes later she'd be laughing about it, making fun of herself. And I guess she did have her reasons for not talking about it, whatever
it
was. Anyway, the people in California weren't happy with her wanting to stay here. They weren't happy with her coming here in the first place.”

“Because someone might've recognized her,” I said.

“Exactly. But they made arrangements for her to go somewhere else nearby, until after the first.”

“Where?”

She hesitated.

Larry said, “The people in California want you to promise something.”

I said, “What?” The question was a formality; I already knew.

Larry nodded. “We're supposed to use our own judgment. If we think it's the right thing to do, we're supposed to tell you. But they want you to promise that you won't go to the police with this.”

“I can't promise that. Right now, what I need to do is find Melissa and her daughter, make sure they're all right, and then make sure they stay that way. Protecting the Underground Railroad doesn't enter it for me. And, the way I see it, protecting Melissa from kidnapping charges is less important than protecting her life. The police have the numbers. There are more of them than there are of me. I may have to go to them. But I can promise that whatever happens, I'll keep names out of it.”

He took a breath, breathed out a long sigh. “Elizabeth Drewer's not very happy about this. But I told her this morning that I had to talk to someone. When I heard about the Polk woman, I almost went to the police myself. I mean, Melissa disappears, and then a few weeks later one of her best friends is killed. There has to be a connection.”

Evidently, they didn't know about Melissa's sister. I didn't tell them. They had enough to worry about.

“There is a connection,” I said. “So where was Melissa going?”

He looked at his wife. She nodded.

He told me.

I said, “And when did she leave from here?”

Sarah said, “On the twenty-seventh. But she wasn't going directly there. She wanted a break, she said. She was going to take Winona to a motel somewhere, just the two of them. For a day or two, she said. So the two of them could be alone together and watch cable TV. Just hang out, she said. It was part of the last fling she wanted to have.”

“Did she say which motel?”

“No. She didn't know herself. But it had to be one of the places in Taos. She wanted to go to Taos. She said she'd only been there once, just driving through. And Winona had never seen it. Nobody up there knew either one of them.”

I said, “When did you find out that she hadn't shown up at the other place?”

“Just today,” Larry said bitterly. “This morning. When we called California.” Anger ran along his voice, rasping it. “It's a monumental screw-up.”

Sarah said, “We never called and asked them. About Melissa. We weren't supposed to. We weren't supposed to have anything to do with anyone after they left here. Weren't supposed to ask about them. Maybe we should have. I think now that we should have, but we didn't. We were worried when we didn't hear from her, but we thought there wasn't anything we could do. And we told ourselves that maybe she just couldn't get to a phone. There's no phone up there, and we thought that maybe she couldn't get away.”

“How do they communicate with the people in California?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Pay phones, probably.” She frowned and said, “The woman up in Hartley. Deirdre Polk. Why was she killed?”

“I'm not sure,” I told her.

“Are you going to be able to find Melissa?” she asked me.

“I'll find her,” I said.

Twenty-Three

I
T WAS NEARLY THREE O
'
CLOCK WHEN
I finished with the Coopers. Larry Cooper drove me back into town and dropped me off on Palace and I walked across the street and up to the office. There were no messages on the answering machine. I picked up the phone, saw that the green light was still working, and called Hector. I gave him what I had on Melissa: the name on her license, a description of her car, the name of the dealer she'd bought it from. He asked me where I'd obtained the information. I said that I couldn't tell him. He said that was noble of me.

I didn't tell him, either, where she'd been going when she disappeared. That, I wanted to look into myself.

I called Rita and told her that I had a lead on Melissa, and that I wouldn't be able to get to her house by three. She would have to interview the Albuquerque woman on her own, I said. She said she thought she could handle that.

I called Roy Alonzo and got his machine. I left a message saying that I wouldn't be able to meet him at the Fort Marcy complex and that I'd call him later today.

Then I walked out of the office and over to the lot where I'd parked the loaner Jeep. I'd left it beside the attendant's narrow wooden shack, and Gerry, the attendant, told me that no one had gone near it all day.

Driving north again, I considered what the Coopers had given me. Useful information, perhaps, all of it. But what I still didn't have was Melissa Alonzo.

According to the Coopers, she had probably disappeared from some motel in Taos. That bothered me. Why hadn't she gone on to the next station on the Underground Railroad? Had she somehow learned about the Salvadoran? Had she learned about Cathryn's death?

But Cathryn hadn't been killed until the second of October. Melissa had left the Coopers on the twenty-seventh of September, and planned to spend only a day or two in Taos. So, assuming she'd kept to her schedule, it hadn't been the death of her sister that made her change her mind.

What had?

Had she decided, for some reason about which I knew nothing, to leave New Mexico, go someplace where no one knew her?

If she had, the trail I was following would dead-end in Taos.

I'd told the Coopers, as I'd told everyone else, that I would find Melissa. But it seemed that the closer I got to her, the more elusive she became.

Once again, I was worried. It seemed like I'd been worried for a long time now.

South of Española, just a few hundred yards beyond the turn-off for Los Alamos, I turned right, heading for the High Road to Taos. No one was following me.

The High Road was empty when I reached it. No cars coming at me, none behind. Just the blue sky above and the glaring sun and the fierce, absolute clarity of the light. Peaks and bluffs and valleys marched off to either side of me, their ragged edges only slightly softened by the blanket of snow. Despite its beauty, it was desolate country, lonely country.

I put a Tina Turner cassette into the tape player. Tina asked me what love had to do with it.

Beats me, I told her. But it was a damn good question.

I passed through Las Mujeras, the tiny Spanish mountain town where Norman Montoya lived, and for a minute or two I thought about stopping to talk to him. But Palo Verde, where I was going, lay only another twenty miles north, and I wanted to check that out. Afterward, I would go on to Taos, ask about Melissa at the motels, then head back south. If I had the time, I could talk to Montoya on the way back to Santa Fe.

Palo Verde was smaller even than Las Mujeras. A gas station, a general store, a post office, two or three dusty homes, all draped with snow and huddled at the bottom of a broad, snow-covered basin about five miles wide, encircled by white hills. I passed the store and drove for another two miles. There was no sign posted at the turn-off the Coopers had described, but tire tracks rutted the snow. I stopped the Jeep, locked the front hubs.

The road skirted some fields fenced with barbed wire, then wound off into the wooded hills. Up here, the trees were ponderosas, and the snow still lay heavily atop them and made them look like old men standing stooped and worn beneath tattered shrouds.

After going nowhere for a while, aimlessly ambling left and right among the towering trees, the road sloped down and ran along the north side of a wide white valley. Up ahead, on my right, I could see the place I wanted, a handful of wooden buildings crouched at the base of the southern hills, below the looming pines. Before them, small dark figures moved in the snow.

The road crossed a narrow creek that darkly swirled around snow-capped rocks, and then it ran another hundred yards between two more barbed wire fences and finally stopped before one of the largest of the buildings. This was a ramshackle two-story frame house running east and west, its siding weathered to a dull gray. There were four cars parked in front: a dented black Volkswagen Beetle, an old lemon-yellow Ford pickup, a boxy Dodge delivery van that had been painted long ago with psychodelic flowers, and a fairly new black Suzuki four-wheel drive. The tire tracks I'd been following stopped at the Suzuki, and its shiny hood was clear of snow. The other cars were still covered.

I parked the Jeep and got out. The air was colder here than it had been in Santa Fe.

The small dark figures I'd seen from afar were children. They played to my left in a kind of courtyard formed by three newer-looking, single-story buildings. Even painted a cheerful yellow, the buildings had the glum, institutional look of dormitories. But the children didn't seem to care. There were six of them, and although two stood warily watching me, the others were dashing around the snow, hurling handfuls of it at each other, laughing and howling. The stuff was too dry to pack well, and their snowballs disintegrated as soon as they threw them, leaving streamers of white dust drifting through the air.

Further to the left, and beyond the dormitories, stood a massive unfinished structure, its raw wood frame looking like exposed ribs. Men worked inside it, carrying lumber, hammering nails, sawing planks. None of them seemed remotely interested in my arrival.

To my right stood a large barn, as weathered as the house, its roof swaybacked from decades of ice and snow. In front of it, in an area enclosed by a tall chicken-wire fence, three brown goats, two females and a male, stood watching me with infinite patience and, like the workmen, an utter lack of curiosity.

Also watching me, but with curiosity, were two small boys standing by the fence. Maybe six or seven years old, both wore bulky winter coats and jeans and black rubber zip-up boots. The taller of the two held a long piece of wooden doweling; the other awkwardly clutched, under his arm, a stuffed panda.

I was suddenly reminded of the menagerie of stuffed animals in Winona Alonzo's room, back in Malibu. And I wondered, once again, where Winona was playing right now, and how she was bearing up beneath the weight of secrecy and stealth.

A long-haired man in a gray anorak came out of the dark shadows beyond the open door of the barn and called out, “Kids?”

The two boys turned to him.

“Come on,” he yelled. “Give me a hand here.”

The taller boy glanced back at me, muttered something to the other, and then the two of them trudged off through the snow, to the gate in the fence.

I felt abruptly like an interloper, felt that the man had called the children to him in order to protect them from my alien presence.

Perhaps he sensed this, for when he called out to me, his voice was cheerful. “Hi. Go on up to the house. They're waiting for you.”

“Thanks,” I shouted.

Snow crunching beneath my feet, I walked up to the rambling front porch, and then up its wooden steps. I knocked on the door.

A few moments later it was opened by a short woman wearing wooden clogs, black tights, a long polka-dotted black granny dress, and a white wool shawl-collared pullover, limp and loose, its too-long sleeves folded back over her wrists. Her thick hair hung in wild curls about her shoulders and it was threaded through with gray. The gray had to be premature, because her round and attractive face was unlined and she looked no older than twenty. She wore no makeup. With her shining brown eyes and rosy cheeks she seemed very alive and very healthy.