Blood Orange (27 page)

No response.

“Did you sleep in the car?”

Nothing.

“Did you have good things to eat while you were away?”

“What’s the point of a question like that?” Dana asked.

The detective’s head dropped forward, and he stared at the
counter for so long the silence became uncomfortable. Dana wondered if she should apologize for interrupting him, or if there was
something he expected her to do.

He shifted forward on the chair. “Look, Bailey, your mother told
me that when you were going to school you learned all about policemen and firemen and the kind of work they do.”

For the first time Bailey turned her head to look at him.

“I’m a policeman. It’s my job to find people that do bad things.”

“You were stolen away from me,” Dana said, holding Bailey’s
heart-shaped face between her hands. “Stealing a little girl away
from her mommy and daddy is just about the most bad thing anyone can do.”

“That’s right,” Gary said. “But policemen can’t work alone. They
need helpers. That’s why I’m asking you these questions, Bailey. I
need you to be my helper.”

~”
Bay.

She had fallen asleep.

As Dana walked the detective to the door she told him about
taking Bailey to the beach and her new courage in the water. In the
foyer, she sat on the bottom stair, pushing aside the pile of unopened mail, as she told him what she had realized about herself a
few hours earlier. “Normally I’m a cooperative person. You might
not believe that because you’ve never seen me actually be helpful,
but it’s true.”

“What happened to you isn’t something you get over fast. Maybe it stays with you the rest of your life. I don’t know. Tell you the
truth, I never worked a kidnapping where the child was returned.”

She felt a surge of pity for him. “I’ve been hard on you. I’m
„
sorry.

He nodded, looking at her with narrowed, assessing eyes.

“And you know, it’s still crazy around here. Marsha Filmore’s living with us now.”

“In your house?”

“God, no. There’s an apartment over the garage.”

He shook his head, obviously perplexed.

“Marsha didn’t do anything.” Dana folded her arms across her
chest. “She’s a victim. Why should she suffer because she has lousy
taste in husbands?”

“You’re a strange woman, Mrs. Cabot.” He stepped around the
mail and opened the front door. “Every time you see a white van
you panic, but you destroy a piece of potentially important evidence
and `forget’ to tell me things, and then you let the wife of a child
killer come and live with you.”

“There’s a presumption of innocence, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Actually, I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I’ve been presuming
you’re innocent for months now.”

“Me? Of course-“

“My chief keeps saying I’m naive. Am I?”

Dana swallowed what felt like a marble.

“I mean, is it true, you’re acting weird because you’re still kind
of in shock? Or are you covering for someone?”

He leaned toward her.

“Do you know who kidnapped Bailey?”

David called to say he would be working late. Dana and Bailey
drove to Big Bad Cat for hamburgers and milkshakes. On the tenminute drive home Bailey fell asleep, and when Dana carried her
upstairs to bed she did not waken. Dana unlaced her shoes and
eased off her pink-and-white striped overalls. For one night she
could sleep in her underwear.

As she knelt beside Bailey’s bed watching her settle into deep
sleep, Dana replayed the conversation with Gary. She would call his
superior tomorrow and complain. She wanted him demoted, fired
for the crime of insulting her. At the least he deserved a reprimand. But she knew it would never happen. Gary and his superior thought
she was lying to protect someone. In a little while she would call
Lexy and say, “Can you believe what jerks they are?”

More than offended, Dana was hurt by the policeman’s suspicions. She thought of the person who had kidnapped Bailey and of
the picture with the noose carefully drawn around David’s neck.
Gary must think she was a monster to protect such a person.
Her stomach turned in disgust. She closed her eyes and rested
her forehead on Bailey’s mattress, letting the room spin around
her.

She wouldn’t call Gary’s boss. He had hurt and offended her,
but when she made herself replay the last few weeks she could not
blame him for misinterpreting her behavior.

Later she poured a glass of wine, intending to take it upstairs;
but she felt too edgy to sleep or settle down to watch television-simultaneously wrung out and wired. She walked around the house,
turning on all the lights, checking the locks on the windows and
doors downstairs, pulling the blinds and drapes. The house felt airless as a sealed box.

She put on a sweater and went outside to sit on the deck. No
sooner had she done so than she realized Marsha was sitting up on
the stairs. Without invitation she came down and sat beside Dana.

“He always come home late?”

“He’s got a lot of work.”

“Means you and the little girl are alone a lot. You lock your
doors?”

Dana asked, “Did you talk to the police?”

Marsha blew smoke out the corner of her mouth and shook her
head. “Must have been him knocked on the door, but I didn’t answer. I don’t have to talk to cops unless I want to.”

“This wasn’t about you. He wanted to know if you saw anyone at
the house. Maybe making a delivery?”

Marsha stubbed her cigarette out in an empty tuna can. “Someone in a white van stopped by. Put something through your mail
slot. “

Dana felt a huge relief. She was not paranoid. A white van had
been following her and Bailey. “A man or a woman?”

“Guy. Why? What’s happened?”

“We got hate mail today.”

“Because of Frank, I s’pose.”

“Would you be able to recognize the guy from the van?”

“Maybe.”

Dana went back into the house and called Gary. She left a message on his voice mail. “It was a white van,” she said, not bothering
to identify herself or hide the gloating in her voice. “Marsha
Filmore saw it, and she might be able to identify the man who came
to the door. She said she’d go down to the station, but you’ll have to
send a car for her.”

She wanted to tell David, so she rang his office, but the answering machine was on there, too. She hung up, gave Moby his nighttime biscuits, and turned off the kitchen lights. As she crossed the
foyer to go upstairs, she saw the pile of mail she had left on the floor.
She picked it up, sat on the bottom stair, and went through the
usual advertising flyers from grocers and drugstores, catalogs, billsa couple she had deliberately let slip the month before. There were
three manila envelopes, two of them official-looking and addressed
to David.

The third stopped her breath.

She recognized Micah’s bold, square printing on the bulky envelope. She stood up and walked into the living room. She turned on a lamp beside the couch and sat down, curling her feet beneath her.
As she turned the envelope over and over, her fingertips left damp
smudges. Finally she shoved her first finger under the flap, tore it
open, and tipped the contents out.

The striped sash to Bailey’s pink and lime dotted Swiss dress
dropped onto her lap. It was the dress she had been wearing the day
she disappeared.

1 he could not move off the couch. There were things she should
3be doing, important calls to make, but she was stuck in place.

The sash had come with a note.

Forgive me, Dana, for taking her. Without you I am a monster.

Where her stomach should have been there was a crater, a vast
cavity as if she had been hit by a meteor. One thing she knew: Micah
would not have hurt Bailey.

She’ll be okay, she’ll make it. Thank You, God.

Moby inched his black nose under her hands and gazed up at
her with questioning concern.

Loving me has made him a monster. She wrapped her arms
around the dog’s neck and sobbed until he squeaked and squirmed
and pulled away from her. He lay down at her feet, resting his head
on his neat front paws, his pointed ears pricked attentively.

I have to do something….

But she could not focus, could not carry any thoughts through to
the end. Except these:

Micah had taught Bailey to bodysurf.

He had been kind to her.

He would not have molested her, because he only took her to
hurt Dana.

Thank You, God.

The synapses connecting her brain and her muscles had shorted
out. She looped the pink and green sash around her neck like a scarf
and absently rubbed the nubby fabric back and forth against her
lips. She touched the dotted Swiss to her cheek and felt the fuzzy
dots, no bigger than ants. She held it to her nose and tried to inhale
something of Bailey, something of Micah. Her daughter’s kidnapper.

A spark of rage caught fire in her chest.

Call someone. Gary.

She remembered the expression on Gary’s face when he virtually
accused her of protecting Bailey’s kidnapper. Learning about Micah
would confirm his worst suspicions.

David.

The details of the scandal would be a gala for the press.

She shoved the note and sash in her pocket and walked into the
kitchen, turned on the tap, and, leaning forward, let the cool water
soak her hair as it ran across the back of her neck.

In David’s hierarchy of values, loyalty ranked above all others.
Dana had never doubted his fidelity although she knew he must
have had countless opportunities. Women loved power, and even
back in college David had it. But it wasn’t in him to cheat. Everyone
who knew David knew he could be trusted. He would not understand that in the language of her week with Micah there had been
no word for loyalty. In Florence nothing was real, everything was
fantasy.

Micah would be arrested and tried for kidnapping. The affair
would come out, and David would probably leave her, and the turmoil of it all would destroy Bailey.

She dried her hair and neck with a dish towel, then knelt to mop
up the mess she’d made on the tiles.

The way out of her situation was obvious. The answer to her
dilemma was silence. She would act as if the note and the sash had
never come in the mail. She sat back on her heels. For that to work
she had to make sure Micah never came near her family again.
Micah. Now when she said his name in her mind, she felt bug-eyed
with rage. Incendiary. She wanted to stand before him and let him
feel the heat of it. She would tell him to get out of San Diego and
never come back. If he came near her or anyone in her family again,
she would go to Lieutenant Gary.

This time she would not destroy the evidence. She would hide
the note and the sash in one of her shoe boxes as insurance.

If you ever come back, if you breathe a word of any part of this, I
will go to the police. I swear it on my daughter’s life.

Dana went outside and across the deck, up the stairs to the
garage apartment. She knocked on the door.

“It’s me, Marsha. Let me in.” She heard sounds from inside, and
the door opened. Marsha Filmore wore a black nightgown with
spaghetti straps. She held a bottle of scarlet fingernail polish in her
hand.

“I was doing my toes.”

“Look, I don’t have a lot of time to explain, but an emergency’s
come up and I have to go out. David’s working late, and it would really help me if you could babysit.”

Marsha laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“You. Asking me to take care of your little girl.”

If Dana had been able to think of an alternative, if Guadalupe
hadn’t been miles away in Tijuana, if she could have called Lexy
without making her curious-

“Can you do it?”

“Sure, sure. Just give me a second to change my clothes.”

Months before, when he had surprised Dana at Arts and Letters
in the middle of the night, Micah had told her he lived on the second floor of the old apartment house on the corner of Fourth and
Spruce. She nearly ran the light at Washington and Goldfinch, went
up University and down Fourth into the Hillcrest District, darting
through another intersection on the corner of Fourth and Robinson, swerving around pedestrians in the crosswalk. Driving fast
suited her anger and fed it. She knew herself, the way her mind
worked. If she did not get to Micah fast, doubt would worm its way
into her thoughts and she would begin to second-guess the deception she was setting in motion.