On the Run (25 page)

“The thing is, if something is true, it’s true whether we believe it or not,” I pointed out. “The truth doesn’t change just because we don’t believe it. Like the world was always round, even when people believed it was flat.”

“And tomatoes were always edible, even when people thought they were poisonous.”

“A fortunate awakening,” I agreed. “Otherwise we’d be making spaghetti sauce out of . . . what? Turnips?”

“I’ve been thinking sometime I might like to go to Israel and . . . get a feel for where all these events happened.” A considered pause, then, Mac being Mac, he added, “If they did happen.”

It’s times like this when I wish I were eloquent and brilliant, able to come up with words that blaze like diamonds on black velvet. Because what came out of my mouth was, “I’ve known people who went there and were baptized in the Jordan. I always thought that would be nice.”

Nice
. A word with all the eloquence and brilliance of a third grader writing about his summer vacation.
We went to
Yellerstun Park. It was nice.

“Haven’t you already been baptized?” Mac asked.

“Oh yes. But doing it again in the very river where Jesus was baptized, that would be . . . beautiful.”

Which earned me a thoughtful look but no comment.

Mac’s appointment for more X-rays was set for Tuesday morning, which meant he had to leave on Monday afternoon to drive back down to Hugo. When he returned depended on what the X-rays showed and what the doctor had to say. Possibly Tuesday evening, he said, but maybe not for several days.

On Monday morning Abilene and I decided that before he left we should take advantage of his presence so we could run into Dulcy without leaving the ranch untended. At the post office I picked up the mail I’d had forwarded to General Delivery. Some of it was well-traveled by the time it reached me, going first to the Madison Street address, forwarded to my niece’s in Arkansas, again forwarded on to the mail-drop place in Little Rock, and finally here. The better to confuse Braxtons, just in case, because earlier incidents had suggested they might have a spy-eye in the postal system.

However, the most important item among those well-traveled missives was only a notice that it was time to have my teeth cleaned. Less traveled but more important was a chatty letter from my grandniece, Sandy, telling me she’d won several more gymnastic medals and asking if I was wearing the toe ring she gave me.

We went to the feed store to pick up emu food, then on to the grocery store. The Northcutts’ well-stocked shelves and freezers were supplying most of our needs, but we still wanted some fresh fruit and milk and, since emu eggs seemed to be off limits, fresh eggs in a carton. At the checkout counter, Abilene stepped over to the magazine rack while the cashier slid our items across the scanner. Then I remembered something.

“Abilene, I forgot cottage cheese,” I called over to her. “Could you run back and get a carton?”

The cashier glanced up. “Are you Abilene Morrison?”

Abilene dropped the copy of
Farm and Rancher
in surprise. My fingers fumbled on the ten dollar bill I was digging out of my purse.

“I-I’m Abilene Tyler.”

“Oh. Some guy was in here a couple days ago trying to locate an Abilene Morrison, and I told him I didn’t know anyone by that name. But Abilene is kind of unusual, you know, and when I heard her—” she nodded toward me, “call you that—”

She broke off, I suppose because we were both staring at her as if she’d just pointed a finger at Abilene and yelled, “There, that’s her, that’s the Wicked Witch of the West.”

“Yes, it is an unusual name, isn’t it? But parents name their children all kinds of strange things these days, don’t they? Butterfly and Tiara and Orion, even Lizara. Wouldn’t that be awful? It practically invites being called Lizard-face or something like that.” I was babbling, of course, trying to distract the cashier but at the same time figure out how to find out more from her.

Abilene was more direct. “Did he give his own name?” she asked.

“I don’t think so . . . ummm, no, I’m sure he didn’t.”

“What did he look like?”

“Oh, medium height. Kind of wiry built, I guess.” She shrugged. “I think he was wearing a baseball cap. Just kind of everyday looking, you know?”

I glanced surreptitiously at Abilene. The description could fit anyone from the guy behind us in line to the killer on last week’s TV news. But I had the uneasy feeling it also fit a specific someone she knew.

“Did you see what he was driving?” Abilene asked.

The cashier looked mildly annoyed at this barrage of questions, as if she wished she’d never mentioned a guy asking for an Abilene. She reached for my ten dollar bill. “No.”

“Did he say why he wanted to find this Abilene Morrison?” I asked.

“If she”—jerk of cashier’s thumb at Abilene—“isn’t Abilene Morrison, what difference does it make?”

“Just curious.” I gave her my sweetest LOL smile.

“It was something about needing to get hold of her because her parents had been killed in an accident.”

“Well, that . . . that’s certainly too bad for . . . that Abilene.” I glanced at Abilene, my own reaction a little shaken. Her jaw had clenched, but she didn’t show any other reaction. “How long ago was this guy in here?” I added.

“Oh, three or four days, I guess.” The cashier was already working on a stack of frozen TV dinners the guy behind us had tossed on the moving conveyer.

I picked up one of our plastic sacks. Abilene grabbed the other one. She turned toward the phone just outside the door.

I silently held out my phone card, but she shook her head. Instead she put the call through collect, using the Abilene Morrison name when the operator asked who was calling.

The call didn’t last long. Abilene never spoke another word except to say, “Thank you,” at the end.

“No one answered?” I asked.

“Oh, there was an answer, all right.” Her tone was bitter. “My stepfather. When the operator asked if he’d accept a collect call from me, he said, ‘Nobody here wants to talk to her,’ and hung up.”

Perhaps not as shocking as if she’d learned her parents were actually dead, which they obviously weren’t, but still shocking. The stepfather must know by now that she’d disappeared, but instead of being glad to hear from her,
this
was his response.

“I’m sorry.” I put an arm around her waist and squeezed. “Would you like to use the phone card and try again a little later? Maybe you could get your mother.”

“No. Let’s go on home.” She grabbed the sack at her feet and strode toward the motor home.

I hurried after her. I’d spotted a small beauty salon on the far side of the grocery and had been thinking maybe I could talk her into getting her hair styled, but this wasn’t the time for that.

So here we had it. The good news and the bad. The good news was that her parents weren’t dead after all. The bad news was that her stepfather was still as big a jerk as ever. And the second bad news, the much worse bad news, was that Boone had been right here in Dulcy looking for Abilene, complete with a phony story he’d concocted to arouse sympathy for the search.

Neither of us spoke until we were off the main road.

“It had to be Boone, didn’t it?” I said. “And you figured he was lying even before you called your folks.”

Abilene nodded. “I know Boone. It’s the sneaky kind of thing he’d do.” She looked under control, but her voice broke when she said, “But how did he find me?”

“He hasn’t found you yet,” I reminded her.
And he isn’t
going to if I have anything to say about it.
“Would his former wife . . . what was her name? MaryLou? Would she tell him anything?”

“No . . . Well, I suppose she might, if he gave her a sob story about my parents being killed and he needed to get in touch with me to let me know,” Abilene said reluctantly. “But she didn’t know anything
to
tell him. I didn’t put a return address on the card I sent to Lily—”

“But there would have been a postmark.”

An incriminating postmark. And MaryLou, wanting to be helpful to Abilene in the loss of her parents, had told Boone where the card had been sent from.

“Is there any chance that could have been Boone camped out there in the woods and sneaking over to spy on us?”

Abilene gave me a startled glance. It was obviously a possibility she hadn’t considered. But after a moment she shook her head. “No. Boone doesn’t have that kind of patience. If he actually knew where I was, I-I’d probably be dead by now.”

Abusive husbands didn’t always go on to kill their wives, of course. But some did. And after Boone’s threats and what he’d already done to her arm . . .

“Which means he must not have found out anything helpful when he was snooping around Dulcy asking questions. So it’s quite possible he’s decided you were just passing through when you mailed the card to Lily.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

The
yeah
was hopeful, but the
maybe
held dread.

This also suggested, since Boone had come looking for her, that our optimistic brainstorm that the insurance had bought him a new Porsche was mistaken. Or he was out for vengeance anyway, simply because that was the kind of guy he was.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked when I made the last turn onto the rough gravel of Dead Mule Road.

“About what?”

“Boone. Do you want to move on?”

She hesitated, as if she were tempted, but then she shook her head. “I can’t just up and leave. Frank is depending on me to look after the emus. And I don’t think you should be out there at the house alone.”

Actually, I was thinking about
both
of us picking up and disappearing into the night. But she was right; we’d made a commitment to Frank. I admired her sense of responsibility and appreciated her concern for me, but surely taking care of emus and the Northcutts’ place wasn’t more important than Abilene’s life.

What do you think, Lord? Should we stay or move on? I need
some advice here.
A thought came.

“I have an idea,” I said slowly. “We could send the kids something else. Maybe you could draw them a little picture or something. Except we’ll have Frank Northcutt mail it from down there so it will have a Texas postmark. Then, still trying to be helpful, MaryLou will probably pass that information on to Boone.”

“Or I could send something directly to Boone, so he’ll be sure to see the postmark!”

That sounded even better, and we did it. Abilene still had a key to the wrecked Porsche. It probably wouldn’t be of any use to Boone, but we wrapped it in a piece of paper and put it in a stamped envelope addressed to him. Then we put that inside another envelope addressed to Frank, along with a note asking Frank to mail it the next time he was in Dallas.

Would the key postmarked from Dallas send Boone off on a wild goose chase? Maybe! Dallas was a big place to look.

Mac left right after lunch. We gave him the envelope addressed to Frank, and he said he’d mail it from Hugo. Before he left, Mac donated a little present to the emu egg in its bath-towel nest: an old-fashioned ticking clock to give it a sense of heartbeat.

Which gave me a warm view of the caring behind Mac’s own heartbeat.

“Watch out for attacking yaks,” I called when he waved from the motor home.

“See you in a day or two,” he called back.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

But a peculiar lightning bolt ripped across my mind even as I said the words.
Nope, never gonna happen.
I brushed the jolting thought aside, annoyed with the groundless negativity, and replaced it with an energetic wave. “We’ll make strawberry ice cream next time!”

26

Mac was hardly a noisy person, but the place felt unnaturally silent after he was gone. I scoffed at the idea that what I really meant by
silent
was
missing him
and industriously applied myself to organizing the manila folders and looking for anything that might help Frank Northcutt. I ran across a file with several articles about the coming worthlessness of paper money, with ideas for other investments. Gold was most often suggested, lending credence to the idea that the Northcutts may have invested all that cash in gold coins. Also suggested were diamonds and other precious gems (easily transportable, but beware of widely different values depending on cut and clarity), and platinum. Stay away from silver (too bulky) and antiques, which would be worthless in hard times.

No doubt excellent advice, although on my Social Security income I was hard put to invest in anything more than a good buy on toothpaste.

I did have to give the Northcutts credit for being organized in one area. They had a folder containing receipts and guarantees on everything from the freezers to a chain saw to an expensive pair of sterling silver nose-hair clippers. I wondered if Mikki had appropriated that item. Actually, I hoped so. I wasn’t eager to run into used nose-hair clippers, sterling silver or not.

Abilene came in from doing yard work at about 4:00. She brought cold lemon sodas for both of us and dropped into a chair at the dining table. I could tell she had something on her mind, and I was afraid I knew what it was: Mac. She wanted to know more about our relationship and how I felt about him, and I wasn’t certain myself.