Earth to Emily (22 page)

“Lead the way,” I said.

Four hours later, I was showered, safe, warm, and piloting Jack’s Suburban toward Alamogordo in sunlight made twice as bright by its reflection off the snow. Jack and Collin had vanished, so I had left Jack a note back at the house.

I borrowed the Suburban. Ava’s with me. I’m showing her around and taking her to eat. We’ll be back by midafternoon, unless I hear from you that you need us or the vehicle sooner. ~ E

Ava had stayed glued to my side since my return from Johnson’s Ranch, pumping me for information on the intrigue going on around her. Over donuts and coffee at Yum-Yum’s in Tularosa, I had finally gotten her up-to-date on almost everything: Betsy, Alan, the hush-hush situation with Greg and Farrah, dead people, my arrest, and even my now-ex-husband and Jack. Ava actively participated in stories, so it took a long time, even the short version. I had made it all the way in my narrative to my early morning excursion across the highway, which I was telling her about as I drove and she drank her second cup of coffee.

“Turn left to merge onto US 70 South,” Siri’s robotic voice commanded.

I obeyed. “Okay, so you know I went for a ride this morning?”

“Yah, mon.”

I smiled over at Ava. A wide zebra-print headband held her hair back from her lovely face. She’d tamed her curls into long waves, but it still had the volume of lion’s mane, and she hadn’t skimped on the eyeliner and lipstick. She dressed in her version of conservative wear for our excursion, which meant fabric covered all her skin, even if it was still fuchsia Lycra. Her spike-heeled, zippered black leather boots were the final detail to an ensemble that guaranteed she would not blend in the crowd today.

“I love hearing that accent,” I said.

“Well, we don’t want to Yank and sound flat and nasal like everyone else, do we?” she said, in a perfect parody of a Midwestern accent. The Virgin Islanders called stateside accents “Yank” talk, and Ava could switch in and out of her accents in mid-sentence.

“Even my Texas accent sounds foreign in these parts,” I drawled.

She switched back to her normal speaking voice. “So, lady, tell me ’bout you ride this morning.”

“I took Jarhead across the road to the ranch where Betsy was held hostage. I wanted to see if I could find a backpack that means a lot to her. The place was locked up, but one of the Alamogordo cops that’s working the case was out there.”

“At god-awful early in the morning? Why?”

“Checking up on the place, I think. Anyway, he took me through all the buildings to search for it.”

I set the cruise to seventy-five miles per hour and glanced in the rearview mirror at the lonely road behind me. Almost lonely. A big, dark blue sedan of some type had kept pace a few hundred yards back since we turned onto 70. It was still there. Odd. Would anyone have reason to follow us? And then I remembered Byron’s call. It wasn’t out of the question.

“You go in a deserted house with a strange man? Girl, you crazy.”

“He was a police officer.” Which didn’t necessarily mean much. “He was nice.”

“Nice? He probably looking at your bana then.”

“No! He wasn’t like that.”

She chuptzed. “All men like that. Some just more sneaky.”

I laughed.

“Hey, what that thing rolling by the side of the road?” She pointed at a tumbling mass of leafless bush.

“That’s a tumbleweed.”

“Those things real? And it moving fast. Even in the winter?”

“Year round. The wind out here is fierce.”

I hadn’t even noticed the tumbleweed until she mentioned it. Some things became part of the landscape after a while. Ava did have a way of making me smile.

She stared out the window, shaking her head. “This a strange place.” She looked back at me. “Go on with you story.”

“Okay, so where was I? Oh yeah, the cop let me search, but the place—the ranch house and outbuildings—had been picked clean.”

“Thieves like rob Jack’s place?”

“Just like. Although I’m sure some things went with the daughter and others into evidence first.”

Her accent thickened and her voice rose in pitch. “You tell Collin and he ’bout robbers dem across the way?” Dem after a noun was a form of island pluralization, although redundant in some cases, like this one.

“They were gone when I got back.”

“You best call.”

She was right. “When we stop.”

“Where we going, anyway?”

“The police say they don’t have Betsy’s backpack. I couldn’t find it at the ranch. And since I can’t ask the robbers, that leaves the daughter, Stella, as the next person to ask about it.” I turned to her. “So that’s where we’re headed. To visit Stella.”

“She know we coming?”

“She does. I found her on Facebook and messaged her.”

Ava drained her coffee and set the empty cup in the holder in the console. She dug in her purse and came out with a lipstick, then applied fresh fuchsia and pressed her lips together several times.

“I ready,” she announced.

Siri directed us the rest of the way to Stella’s new abode, with me checking the rearview frequently for a tail. I saw the blue sedan behind me a few more times, but when we made the last turn toward Stella’s, it went straight, and I breathed a sigh of relief. It felt safer to be in a residential neighborhood, with people all around. Not that it was the best neighborhood in town. It was mostly inexpensive apartments, although a few complexes were fairly new.

I parked at the curb and texted Jack:
I ran into Edward Brown this morning.
I left out the details.
He said Paul Johnson’s ranch got robbed. Thought you should know.

As if texting him had summoned messages from the heavens, another came in. Byron.

I turned my phone over as if the sight of it would blind me. “Spit.”

Ava looked up from her own phone, where her fingers had been flying. “Did you just say ‘spit’?”

I ignored the question. “That CPS investigator that thinks I took the teenage kids is texting me again.”

She arched her brows. “Well, you did, right?”

I ignored her again and read the text aloud. “Thanks for your voice mail. I would still like to talk. Please call when you can.” Well, I couldn’t possibly until Monday at the earliest, could I? That would be my story, anyway, and I’d stick to it. “Doesn’t sound like they’re sending the po-po after me yet. Ready?”

“Born that way.”

We got out of the car and headed up the sidewalk. Stella had lived the high life with her father, but her maternal grandmother, it appeared, didn’t provide the same standard of living. These apartments were okay—nice for the neighborhood, anyway—but still low rent compared to Stella’s old lifestyle. We walked through rock and cactus landscaping to the security panel. I pressed the buzzer for Unit 1222, which Stella had sent me via text. Someone buzzed us in without checking to see who we were. We scurried through the gate. No surprise, stucco covered the walls of the complex for an adobe look, here and on the outside, too. Inside, the apartments ringed an oval pool, which had a winter cover and a layer of snow on it. It looked barren with the large apron of concrete around it empty. Stella’s unit faced one of the narrow ends of the pool.

I rang the doorbell.

From inside, a female voice answered. “It’s open.”

***

Stella was prone on a leather sofa in front of the boob tube and didn’t rise to greet us. The length of her body and the way it draped across the couch hinted at her height. The scent of patchouli hinted at weed, but I didn’t notice any other evidence of pot. She wore a gray hoodie and drawstring sweat pants that had stains across the front, and her hip bones jutted above the fabric. She’d tucked her hair inside the hoodie, which held it away from her head, but it still poked out the sides of the front, covering some of her blanket of freckles. I remembered that hair, that improbable and amazing afro of hair.

“Sit anywhere,” she said.

“Hi, Stella. Is your grandmother here?”

“No. She’s addicted to bingo.” Her eyes cut to Ava then back to me. “Who’s she?”

“This is Ava, my friend from the Virgin Islands.”

Stella’s eyes narrowed. “For real? The Virgin Islands?”

“Yah, mon. I visiting New Mexico. Albuquerque next week. Hoping to make it up to Santa Fe and Taos after that.” Santa Fe and Taos were news to me.

Stella nodded. “That’s pretty cool.”

My jaw nearly dropped. This was the fourth time I’d been in Stella’s presence and she’d never said so much as “boo” to me before, but apparently Ava was pretty cool. Well, maybe I could use her approval of Ava to my advantage in this conversation. I started by upping Ava’s coolness quotient even further.

“Ava’s a singer. She’s here doing shows.”

Stella sat up. “That’s
really
cool.”

“Well, I away from my baby too long gigging, and the money shit, but I guess it cool.”

I noticed her accent had thickened. I wanted to hug her.
Go, Ava.

“Oh, you have a baby, too?” Stella’s voice took on a longing tone. How old was she, anyway, that she had baby fever? Seventeen? Far too young.

“Yah, she a beauty. Hard work, though.”

“I play guitar. And sing a little. I’m auditioning for a band after New Year’s. An all chicks kind of thing.”

I jumped in. “Good luck. You’d look amazing on a stage. Exotic.”

Another hungry look toward Ava. “You think so?”

Ava, the professional, nodded. “For true.”

Stella’s features softened. Maybe she was younger than I’d thought. “Thank you.”

I smiled at her. “You’re welcome. And I’m really sorry about all this with your dad.”

A frown pinched her face. “I hate that douchebag. I hope he rots in prison the rest of his life.”

I couldn’t argue with her about what a horrible person her dad was, but Mother taught me that if you can’t say anything nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all, so I didn’t. “I want you to know that you probably saved my life, and Betsy’s, and I appreciate it.”

Stella had played guardian angel to the immigrant children in the families her father had trafficked, dressing up like the Clown from the Apache Mountain Spirit Dancers. It had added some magic to their hard lives.

I added, “You make an awesome Mountain Spirit Dancer.”

“They’re real, you know. The Mountain Spirits.” Stella looked at me with narrowed, defensive eyes.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I’ve seen them.”

I’d seen one myself, on the runway as Jack came for Betsy and me in the Skyhawk. The Apache spirit had saluted me, and I him.

Softly, my back to Ava, I said, “Me, too.”

Stella nodded gravely.

“Betsy said to tell you hello.”

Stella’s face lit up, and she was beautiful, without warning. “Tell her hello for me. She’s cute.”

“Yes, she is. I hope to adopt her.”

Again, the hungry look. “That would be awesome for her.”

“She deserves some awesome. Losing her mom and her dad, being alone in a strange place.”

Stella’s eyes clouded. “Yeah.”

I knew she could relate. I didn’t know why her mother wasn’t in the picture, but she hadn’t been as long as I’d known the girl. Stella was one grandmother away from Greg and Farrah’s circumstances, from what I could tell.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Ava was texting and smiling, oblivious to our conversation. That was okay. I knew I could pull her back in if I needed her. Right now, Stella and I were rolling.

“Betsy lost something important to her at the ranch. A pink backpack. She never went anywhere without it,” I said to Stella.

“I remember it.”

“Do you remember seeing it after everything went down? After you helped me rescue her?”

Ava giggled, and we both looked at her. She noticed and said, “Oh, sorry. Message.” She held up her phone then lowered it and started typing again.

Stella raised her brows toward Ava but continued. “Yeah. I saw it in Dad’s barn office, you know, when that police guy let me go through and take all the stuff that was mine or special.”

My heart leapt. Hope. The backpack had been there after Johnson was arrested. “Do you know what happened to it?”

“Nah. I left it there. I’m sorry. I was getting my stuff.”

I allowed myself a moment of intense frustration. Jack and I had made multiple requests for the backpack through the task force, and we’d left messages for individual officers working the case. We’d called and left a voice mail on the phone out at the ranch. The task force said they didn’t have it, which I now believed, since Stella had seen it after the evidence collection was finished. But why hadn’t the officers called us back? It was there. All they would have had to do was tell us and someone from Wrong Turn Ranch could have run across the street and picked it up. And now? It could be anywhere, with anyone, or nowhere at all. I wouldn’t think that it had any value except to Betsy, but who knew what drove some people to take things that weren’t theirs? Once my backpack had been stolen when thieves broke into my car at Tech. All they’d gotten was spiral notebooks, loose change, a few pens, and a chicken salad sandwich I’d forgotten to eat that day. I hope they got food poisoning from it, I really do.

I covered my frustration with a smile. “Hey, you didn’t know we were looking for it. No problem.”

The doorbell rang again. Stella frowned. “Who’s there?”

“Manny.” The voice from outside the door sounded guttural and demanding, even in only that one word.

“Just a minute.” Her eyes flew wide and she whispered, “Oh shit. I look awful.”

“Who’s Manny?”

“This guy . . .” She jumped up. “I’ve got to go change.”

Ava put a hand on her hip. “Hold up.”

“Yes?”

“Did you know that boy coming?”

“Uh, no, uh—”

“Don’t you go jumping to please him when he not even man enough to call first. Tell him you got plans. Make him work a little. You worth it.”

Stella looked at me. I nodded.

“But, what if he doesn’t come back?” she said.

Ava chuptzed. “Then he garbage.” The way she said GAHR-bahj and drew out the second syllable made her pronouncement gospel.

Stella went to the door. She looked back at Ava. “That’s what you’d do?”