Dark Lie (9781101607084) (6 page)

“My African violets—”

“Forget about them.” An enormity: African violets are difficult, fragile, but properly cared for, they can live forty years. Abandoning them was like abandoning children. But Father barked, “Let's
go
.”

So we drove out of Appletree and passed through dusk into darkness along a bewilderment of country roads. I looked at my father's black narrow-brimmed hat, my mother's stiffly starched white prayer bonnet. I wondered whether they had packed any clothes for me. Neither of them turned around. No one spoke.

Finally I ventured, “Where are we going?”

“Shut up.” My father.

Then I knew for sure that whatever had happened was my fault. And although I did not yet allow myself to think it, I sensed that I would never see Blake again.

Somehow my parents had found out.

How, I had no idea. They didn't tell me. They didn't accuse me, they didn't threaten me; they didn't speak to me at all. Once we stopped at a drugstore for a few things. Famished, I stared at a display of junk food cupcakes in plastic wrappers, but I didn't dare to ask for any. We drove on in the dark, and no one suggested supper. I had not yet fully realized that I would never see my home again, but somehow I already knew they had left my T-shirts and sweatpants, my teddy bear, my pink plush flamingo wearing a magenta tutu—everything dear to me.

Except the very dearest.

But only because they didn't know.

I still had my love notes from Blake; those I carried with me in a pocket of my three-ring binder, always, and they were all that would remain of everything I cherished. I sat in the backseat of the car clutching myself and shivering—

Stop it, Dorrie,
I ordered myself, gripping the Kia's steering wheel.
That was a long time ago.
Now I was the one in the front seat, and not just a passenger like my mother either, but driving. Driving the car long after dark. On my own. I was thirty-three years old, for gosh sake; why did I still feel weak and shivery?

“Because you haven't eaten, dodo head,” I told myself aloud.

Yet I couldn't eat, not with my stomach wadded into a fist of anxiety. I wouldn't be able to think of eating until I found a phone and called the police and got them moving. I had to make sure they would find Juliet before—

Before nothing. It was a kidnapping. There would be a ransom demand. That was all.

The interstate felt lonely now. I turned off my four-way flashers.

APPLETREE EXIT,
read the sign, with an arrow pointing the way for me in case I didn't remember how to get there.

* * *

I crawled along country roads for the next twenty minutes and never passed a gas station, a convenience store, anything except benighted farmhouses and fields. And I began to wonder whether I'd taken a wrong turn, because, actually, I didn't remember how to get to Appletree.

I'd repressed a lot since we'd left. The last thing I remembered clearly was my mother bursting into the motel bathroom the next morning as I peed, thrusting a paper cup between my legs to catch the urine. Utterly startled and embarrassed to tears, I clamped my legs together a moment too late.

“When's the last time you had a period?” my mother demanded.

Sobbing, my hands folded over my lap, I shook my head. I didn't know. Mom probably knew. Trust Mom to keep track of my periods.

Mom opened a box and dipped a kind of paper stick in the urine.
PREGNANCY TEST
, the box read. I just sat on the commode—that was what my parents called the toilet, “commode”—because I didn't want to wipe in front of her. She lifted the strip and looked at it.

Her face went ugly. My mother, ugly. “You
slut
!” she screamed at me, and she slapped me so hard she split my lip.

After that, my memories got really blurry. I vaguely remembered pleading with my mother and father that the boy loved me and he would marry me. But my father hit me when I tried to speak Blake's name. I'd never seen Father so furious. I was never to speak of, or to, “that sinful, fornicating young man” again.

But—but Blake and I were in love. He was my prince. We were supposed to be together forever.

Instead, I was to be locked away like a princess in a tower.

I hadn't even given him some little thing to remember me by. A keepsake.

We hadn't even said good-bye.

What would become of him?

He would be so distraught he might kill himself.

It was all my fault.

I was not allowed to contact anyone in Appletree to tell them where I was or what had happened.

Somehow there was a strange new house. I spent months locked in a strange new bedroom lacking any of the amenities of a princess's tower. Then there was the baby, born and given away the same day. Then six more weeks locked in the room, although by this time my mother was once again baking warm treats and offering them to me. Then a strange new high school, and once again Father asked me what I had learned, but he locked my room after I went to bed, and I was never allowed out of the house at night. As if night had ever had anything to do with it.

Then college, much the same. No driver's license. No car. My mother didn't have a license or drive a car; why should I? I took the bus to campus. My father picked me up at an appointed place and time to drive me home, asking what I had learned in class. My mother gave me cookies or brownies or pastries just as delicious as ever, then sent me to my room. Rather than eat them, I flushed them down the toilet, then dreamed of Blake.

I wondered what had happened to him. Was he alive? Was he okay? Had he graduated from high school? What was he doing? He was a poet, I fantasized, living somewhere at the edge of the world, in the wilds of Alaska or on an island in the ocean. He didn't need to grow up and be like my father, wear a narrow-brimmed hat, spend his days selling prefabricated farm and storage buildings. Blake would never work for anyone. He didn't seem to need to eat, or follow any of the usual rules. It was as if he had been created, not born. No way was he imprisoned by family as I was.

Living at home was more like just existing. I didn't really live except inside my mind. Nothing I felt was valid to my parents—the only people close to me—so I no longer allowed myself emotions.

No wonder the months are mostly blank in my mind. Years, really. Until I got out of my locked room and away from my parents by marrying Sam.

* * *

As soon as he had let himself into the empty house, Sam phoned Dorrie's cell. But she didn't pick up. He got her voice mail, her gently musical voice telling him she couldn't take his call right now.

Why wouldn't she pick up? She always picked up. Her phone seldom left her purse and her purse never left her arm.

He tried three more times before he left a typically understated message: “Hi, Dorrie, it's Sam. Got home from work, wondering where you are? Please call me.”

He wished the darn phone wouldn't switch over to voice mail after only five rings. Wished it would keep ringing and ringing until she
had
to answer. But he failed to consider what might be the implications if a cell phone rang in the weeds behind a BP station and nobody heard.

After the first few minutes, Sam found that he couldn't sit down. Pacing the empty house, he phoned some neighbors and some women Dorrie knew from church, asking whether they had seen Dorrie or knew where she was. No, they hadn't, and no, they didn't, but Sam could tell by the extra courtesy in their voices that he was overreacting. Dorrie probably had a flat tire or was stuck in traffic, for gosh sake. A couple of hours late meant nothing.

But she was hardly ever late, even by a couple of minutes.

Forcing himself to stay off the phone for a while in case she was trying to phone him, Sam walked into the bedroom to change clothes, pulled off his tie and tossed it onto the bed, then forgot what he was doing and walked out of the room still in his business suit and wing-tip shoes. Downstairs again, finding himself in the family room, he sat on the edge of his lounge chair and tried to watch the news on TV. Stock market down. Floods in Georgia. Suicide bombing in Pakistan. In late-breaking local news, possible abduction of the daughter of District Attorney Don Phillips . . . but the details were sketchy, and Sam couldn't focus or sit back and relax or even sit still. He got up and emptied the clean dishes from the dishwasher, stacking them by size in the cupboards. Then methodically, starting in a sensible way at the back, he loaded the dishwasher with dirty coffee cups from the sink. He found himself pausing, teaspoons in hand, to listen for the sound of Dorrie's car in the driveway.

The phone rang. He jumped to answer it.

Telemarketer.

Sam slammed the phone down on the guy's spiel, then stood breathing deeply, surprised at himself. Never before in his adult life had he been so rude. Okay, he wasn't LDS anymore—the world said “Mormon,” but Mormons said “Latter-Day Saints,” “LDS”—not since he and his parents had kind of lapsed so he wouldn't have to go on the two-year missionary tour of duty. Then later, in order to get married in peace with Dorrie's parents, he'd joined Dorrie's church, which was strict, but it was an LDS carryover that he still didn't swear, drink, gamble, or lie. He didn't even allow himself caffeine. All of which made him unsure whether his bad manners and worse feelings were forgivable under the circumstances. He knew he ought to pray outside the Silverado for once, but he didn't feel as if he had either time or patience to talk with God right now. Rigidly he stood beside the phone, trying to regain control. No, he told himself, no way, he was not going to go snooping in Dorrie's closet to see whether clothing and luggage were missing. There was no reason for him to think she might have left him. None.

Maybe she was at church for some meeting or something.

On Saturday night? Sam knew better, but he called the church office anyway. An answering machine welcomed him to leave a message, but Sam didn't want to talk to it. He hung up, then called Pastor Lewinski at home.

“Hello, Sam, how are you?” Lewinski was a thoroughly nice young guy, kind of weedy-looking in a freckly redheaded way, thin, narrow-jawed, maybe just a trifle light in his loafers. That didn't matter to Sam. Live and let live, and anyway, he liked Lewinski. The pastor's Sunday messages generally spoke of love and joy within the comforting limits of God's embrace. Funny how the same church could include all kinds of people, such as Dorrie's gloom-and-doom parents, when the pastor wasn't that way at all.

“I seem to be missing a wife.” Sam tried to make it light. “Any idea where she could be?”

But Pastor Lewinski couldn't help. No, there was nothing involving Dorrie going on at the church. No, the pastor hadn't seen her today. In a wry tone that indicated he realized the unlikeliness of his suggestion, he asked, “Is it at all possible that she's gone to visit her parents?”

Lewinski knew Dorrie's parents, of course, because they were longtime members of the church. Old-school. They, not Dorrie or the pastor, had required Sam to join their church in order to marry their daughter. They, of course, were the first people Sam should have called regarding Dorrie's whereabouts, and the last people on earth he wanted to call. Whenever Sam had to deal with Mother and Father Birch, he ended up shaking his head, wondering how in God's name Dorrie—sweet, tolerant, patient Dorrie—had ever been born of such a narrow, negative woman and man. Dorrie excused them to him by saying they had gotten worse with age.

“Hello.” Dorrie's mother. Her voice sounded just as usual: flat and comfortless, like her bosom.

Sam found himself speaking too brightly. “Hello, Mother Birch, this is Sam. How are you?” Feeling like a hypocrite for asking.

“The same.”

“By any chance is Dorrie there?”

“Candor? No. Why should she be?”

“Because she isn't here.” Instantly Sam wished he'd bitten back the retort. If Dorrie's parents got worried, he'd feel bad. If they didn't get worried, he'd feel even worse.

“I should have expected that.” Deep disapproval resonated in Mother Birch's voice.

“What? Why?”

“Because of the power of the devil in her.”

The old witch, she didn't sound the least bit concerned, only critical. But Mother Birch often said judgmental things about Dorrie. Up until now Sam had ignored them.

This time he demanded, “How can you say such a thing? What has Dorrie ever done that was so bad?”

He heard a mirthless snort. “Look under her mattress.”

“What?”
The old meat cleaver was nuts.

“Look under her mattress. That's where she hid the filth she read—”

Sam burst into nervous laughter. “Romance novels? Mother Birch, I know all about them.” Most evenings, while he watched TV, Dorrie read a novel—not just romances, sometimes pretty highbrow stuff—and it never ceased to amaze him how she entered into the novel the way she could enter into a Pre-Raphaelite painting, totally in another world, deaf to the voices of the news anchors and the new-car advertisements.

“Filth,” repeated the old woman stonily. “Devil only knows what she keeps there now. You look.”

Sam had no intention of looking under Dorrie's mattress. He took a deep breath, then asked calmly, “Mother Birch, do you have any idea where Dorrie might have gone?”

“In that automobile you went and got her? To hell. Pray for her soul.”

Sam preferred to worry about his wife's physical safety. “You pray for her,” he said as gently as he could. “I'm going to call the police and the hospitals to see whether she's been in an accident.”

FOUR

T
hings look very different when you're a couple of decades older, the adult at the steering wheel, not the child in the backseat. When I drove my ruined car into Appletree, nothing seemed familiar. Not that the town had grown; if anything, Appletree seemed to be decaying. It should have been about closing time for the shops on Main Street, but—what shops? I slowed my Kia to a crawl, peering around, trying to make sense of shadows. If there were shops anymore, they closed early. The heart of the town seemed hollow and empty, as if night were somehow much later here than elsewhere. The Victorian-era town clock still stood at the square, but one of its faces read 9:35, another read 10:17, the third read 9:52. . . . I didn't look at the fourth face on the clock's ornate blockhead. Appletree's dark silence combined with my overstressed condition made the three-story buildings of downtown seem to loom déjà vu surreal. I felt a chill, as if Appletree itself were my enemy, a stalker, lying in wait for me, plotting to abduct me.

Stop it, Dorrie,
I told myself.
You're wigging out.
Light-headed. In need of food. And also, I realized at that moment, going into a stress-induced lupus flare. As soon as I paid attention to myself, I could feel the fever skewing my perception. I could feel the fiery red rash popping out on my face, the membranes in my mouth and nose ulcerating. I could feel every joint starting to swell, aching even more than usual.

Still crawling along in the Kia, I fumbled a couple of Tylenol from my purse and gulped them dry, having long since learned to take pills without water, on the go, as casually as most people partook of fast food. As soon as I possibly could, I needed to take my heavy-duty lupus meds, or I'd end up in the hospital.

But not yet. Those pills would knock me out, and I had to be able to function. I had to drive a car. I had to keep going until Juliet was safe.

I had to find a place where I could phone—

Whoa! Was that really a public phone on the next corner?

Sure enough, it was, standing one-legged, like a stunted metal stork.
NO PARKING
signs stood guard on my side of the street, so I turned in at the cross street—not a street, really, but a side road too narrow to park along. I passed a large brick building, apparently deserted, its windows boarded up with plywood, then pulled into a gravel lot behind it.

And nearly screamed.

The van!

Or for a moment, as my headlights caught on it, I thought it was the van. With its rear end toward the street, it stood by itself in a far corner of the premises, the only vehicle there besides mine. I slammed on my brakes, gawking at it, not so sure now; was it the right color? Hard to tell in the dark, but it seemed to be some light neutral shade, spectral in the glare of my headlights. I eased my Kia closer to it, and yes, the chrome lettering on its back doors read
DODGE RAM
. Yes, stripes of darker paint ran along its sides. My heart pounded harder—

But then I shook my head, angry at myself. Where was the ram logo I had seen on the wheel cover? This van had no logo, no wheel cover, and no spare wheel. Moreover, any dunce could see that this van was a derelict with four flat tires and no license plate, a junker left to rust in the weeds that had sprung up in the elbow of the parking lot's rotting plank fence. This heap probably didn't even have an engine in it.

Scolding myself,
Dorrie, you can't go seeing that van everywhere,
I swung my steering wheel all the way around and stepped on the gas. In order to park near the public phone, I scooted the Kia to the other end of the parking lot from the derelict van, close to the abandoned brick building.

And received what may have been the nastiest shock of my life.

Sweeping the concrete foundation of the boarded-up building, my headlights illuminated a sizable sample of graffiti printed in crisp black letters on the pale exterior of the basement. It read:

CANDY GOT LAID HERE

* * *

Bless my right foot, it stamped on the brake before I crashed into the wall. In that moment I found out what the word “thunderstruck” meant. A bolt of lightning out of the black sky couldn't have incapacitated me more. None of my other faculties functioned at all as I sat staring.

CANDY GOT LAID HERE

It still said the same thing.

Nothing made sense. I wasn't dead and laid to rest. Nobody except Blake had ever called me Candy. And where was “here”? This building—

Oh, God.

It was the library.

I recognized it now, lopsided old edifice, the way one recognizes a face without being able to describe the exact features. With a jolt like an earthquake's aftershock I viscerally remembered this utilitarian Victorian pile, which had been a cigar factory before it had become the Appletree Public Library.

Where I used to go rather frequently after school.

CANDY GOT LAID HERE

A fist of fire clenched my heart, and my vocabulary comprehension improved again as I found out what the word “mortified” means. It means wanting to die.

God. Who had painted that—that—that slap in the face?

Not Blake. It couldn't have been Blake.

But who else knew?

Grandpa knows all about it.

That was ridiculous. I'd never even met Blake's grandfather.

It must have been that girl, the one who had tried to warn me off. Spying. Jealous. Mean.
She
must have written it.

CANDY GOT LAID HERE

Had my parents seen it, way back then when we lived here? Had Mom maybe gotten Dad to drive her down to the library so she could check on me, see whether I was really going there every day after school? They had parked the car here, and—dear Lord, no wonder they had rushed home, packed their bags, left town for good, and never told me why. They were trying to spare me—

No, wait, was I losing my mind? Letting myself think as if this had all happened yesterday, letting that babyish whimper wind out of my mouth, letting my buttocks clench as if I expected to be spanked
. Get a grip, Dorrie.
That misery was seventeen years ago.

Yet—

CANDY GOT LAID HERE

It should be faded, worn away, nearly gone. But it looked freshly painted. Not spray-painted either. Brush printed. Big angular lettering.

Nothing made sense. Either time had slipped off track or I had gone insane. Either way, this place was to blame. Appletree. Making me crazy. Panic kicked me in the gut; I had to get out of here.

Shaking, I whipped the car around and gunned it toward the old parking lot's single entrance/exit. Jouncing, scraping asphalt, I bolted onto the side street—

Saw the pay phone.

God Almighty. Juliet.

For a few minutes I had completely forgotten about her. I hated me. Every second of time passing put her in worse danger. Where was she? What was happening to her?

I had to get to that phone.

NO PARKING,
read the signs.

What I should have done was just stop the car in the middle of the empty street. What I actually did showed how badly that graffito was making me lose it. Muttering, “No Parking, Schmarking, Farking,” I aimed my poor Kia at the curb, pushed the gas, whammed my way up onto the sidewalk, and stopped beside the public phone.

There, dammit.

Dammit? Where had that come from? I never swore.

Darn it. I turned off the car and tried to get out.

My body didn't want to function. For all the usual reasons, lupus aches and pains and fatigue, but beyond that, I felt as if I'd just been punched out. I reeled like a drunk from my car to the phone, then had to lean against its Plexiglas housing as I dialed 911. By the light of the corner streetlamp I looked at the palm of my left hand for the license number I'd written there, the magic number that would make the police find and stop the kidnapper, wherever he was.

It wasn't there.

I stared and squinted. Detail was hard to see in the peckish streetlamp light. Hard to see when my eyes stung with weariness and unshed tears, hurting almost as badly as my heart. That license number had to be there.

But no, it wasn't. I'd sweated it off while gripping the steering wheel or I'd worn it off wrestling with my smashed hood or I'd wiped it off in the grass when I had squatted in a benighted bush to relieve myself. Remorselessly all the various forces of entropy had removed it from me. It was gone.

Moreover, I was standing there holding a silent phone to my ear.

No dial tone.

But—but I didn't know what to do if I couldn't call the police.

I hung up and tried again.

Still no dial tone.

With shaking hands I fumbled in the bottom of my purse—whoever had designed that purse ought to be hung by the toes—and I found the car keys, for once, when I wasn't looking for them, and then, finally, some change. I shoved a number of coins into the phone and tried again.

Still nothing.

The telephone's cord had a kink in it. I straightened it. I listened for a dial tone again. None. Quite gently I hung up the phone, drooped against it, and stared into the night.

Now what?

A few hours and a few traumas earlier I would have thought,
Find another way to phone, come on, get moving,
and I suppose I might have done so. But even such a simple alternative no longer seemed sensible or possible. What I wanted now was someone to help me.
Help me.
God, I wished Sam were there. I'd seen him buy meals for homeless people, I'd seen him change flat tires for strangers, I'd known him to help down-on-their-luck employees with personal no-interest loans, no questions asked, no blame and no shame. Somehow Sam had come out of his religion ingrained with kindness. So much the opposite of my parents. With the regretful certainty of hindsight, I knew I should have trusted him with my secret from the start. If I had, maybe he'd know where to find me.

But he didn't know.

And there didn't seem to be anybody else around. I'd seen a few cars passing, but nary a human face in Appletree's decaying core. Appletree had never been a place where Saturday night counted for anything, and now it was so quiet it seemed sinister. I felt like a corpse waiting to be discovered, but no one was likely to trip over me till morning. Too punch-drunk to move or think, hanging on to the otherwise useless phone for support, I gazed blindly into the darkness behind the former library. That lumpen Victorian mass of brick cast a large shadow.

Not quite dark.

Funny pale blue flashing light.

Faint. I wouldn't have noticed it if the parking lot behind the deserted library weren't so black.

Sapphire blue strobe flash, very faint. Blink. Blink.

From inside stupid metal bread loaf.

Derelict van.

Dodge Ram. Pale. Darker stripes along the sides. Looked just like . . .

Sapphire blue strobe flashing.

A lightning-bolt jolt of panicked joy stood me straight on my feet. What adrenaline could do was amazing. I don't even remember lunging into my car and finding the flashlight Sam had put in the glove box for me. Instead, I remember discovering the flashlight in my hand as I ran toward the van, keys jangling as my purse jounced on my arm, that and the
chuff-chuff
sound of my cheap sneakers on gravel loud in my ears. At the same time I must have regained vestiges of good sense, because I slowed to a walk, flicked on the flashlight, and scanned the dark corner I was heading into as if I might trip over a body.

My heart pounded, and I started to shake, suddenly convinced that Juliet lay dead in that van.

I couldn't stand to look.

But I had to do it.

Trying to move silently—as if I hadn't already thundered across the parking lot like a rhinoceros—I walked softly up to the van and aimed the flashlight beam in the side window.

Seats, floor, rubber mats on the carpet. Nothing more.

I breathed out.

I scanned the interior, limped to the passenger-seat window, scanned some more. Nothing. No papers, no plastic shopping bags, none of the usual debris.

No dead leaves either, or mouse turds, or bird nests.

Good upholstery. Good carpeting. Protected by mats.

Abandoned van, my hind foot.

I shone my flashlight on the flat tires. The weeds grew up around them, yes, but some weeds also lay squashed under them.

Huh. He'd let the air out of the tires. Removed the license plate. Removed the spare wheel, stowed it someplace. And now nobody would give the van a second glance. This guy was smart.

I still hadn't seen the source of the blue flashing light. Flicking off my flashlight, I waited until the darkness seeped back and once more I could see the faint sapphire glow come and go, come and go. From under the driver's seat. I couldn't see what was causing it.

It didn't matter. I knew.

Juliet had been carrying her newly purchased bauble in her hand when the kidnapper had hit her on the head. She'd dropped it when she fell. It had rolled under the driver's seat, where he hadn't noticed it. Its flashing hadn't caught his attention in daylight. By dark its battery was dying. He'd overlooked it.

I knew all this as clearly as if I'd been there and seen.

And at the same time I knew it was crazy. Why would the kidnapper have brought my daughter here, to Appletree, of all places?

But the question caused a door to slam and lock in my mind.
Don't go there.
Quickly I decided the Appletree connection had to be a coincidence. Stranger things had been known to happen.

* * *

Sam muttered to himself, “I can't face this.”

Yet he knew he had to.

He flung open Dorrie's closet door.

And released his breath almost with a sob. There stood Dorrie's old flower-fabric suitcase, right where it belonged. There hung her big soft dresses and tops and skirts, posy-print calico, peach, pale green, denim blue with daisy trim. Taking mental inventory of the closet, Sam didn't see a thing missing.