Sweetheart (30 page)

“I’m fine,” Susan said.

“Is something wrong with your nose?”

Susan could feel her face blush. Great. She sounded nasal. Perfect. “It’s sort of broken,” she said.

Derek paused. “Dude,” he said slowly.

The nurse would be back any minute. “So I’m supposed to keep this oxygen mask on,” Susan said, trying to get off the phone.

“There’s a Texaco in a town called Mills Crossing on 22,” Derek said. “It’s about an hour and a half off of 5. Sixty-five people. Guy I talked to said he pumped gas into a Jag last night at about eleven
P.M.
Didn’t remember the driver, but said the car had some sort of special wheels. Let me find it in my notes.”

Susan’s mouth went dry. “Sabre?” she said softly.

“Yeah,” Derek said. “What are those anyway?”

“I have no idea,” Susan said. “Listen, I’ve got to run.”

“Okay. Ian’s sending someone over. You know, to interview you and your mom.”

“Tell Ian to go fuck himself,” Susan said. She got her hairbrush out of her purse and started brushing her hair. The oxygen mask lay humming uselessly on the exam table.

“I’ll find a way to rephrase it,” Derek said. “Are you brushing your hair again?”

Henry walked in scratching his neck.

“I’ve got to go,” Susan said, hanging up.

“What’s going on?” Henry asked.

Susan started opening drawers in the exam room’s cabinets. “There’s a Texaco on 22—an attendant saw a silver Jag with Sabre wheels last night at eleven. Fits the time frame.”

“Mills Crossing?” Henry said.

Susan stopped, surprised. “Yeah.”

“We do police work, too. Flannigan just called Claire. We’ve had cops calling gas stations all over the state. A car like that? Sometimes people notice it.”

Susan opened another drawer and found what she was looking for—a cold pack. “What are you going to do?” Susan asked. She squeezed the pack until it cracked and started turning cold.

“Send a local cop over with a picture of Gretchen.” Susan zipped her purse up and slipped it over her shoulder. “Where are you going?” Henry asked.

Susan held the ice pack against her face. “I need to get some gas,” she said.

“You need to rest and take in oxygen,” Henry said. “There’s a fire up there. Mills Crossing will probably have been evacuated by the time you get there.”

Susan turned to Henry. Her face hurt. She felt like she was going to throw up. It was starting to affect her cheery disposition. “Bennett was trying to stop me from writing the Molly Palmer story,” she said.

Henry worked a finger along his upper lip. “Maybe.”

“He didn’t have to,” Susan said. “The
Herald
killed it. I’m going to find Archie. I’m going up the mountain, fire or not. You can stay here.” She walked through the doorway and turned back. “Or you can come.”

“Susan,” Henry said.

“Yeah,” she said, turning.

Henry smiled. “Did you want to stop by the Arlington and change?”

Susan looked down at the green scrubs she was wearing. “Right,” she said.

L
et’s go back into the bedroom,” Archie said. He stood up and held his jaundiced, swollen hand out to her. She looked vulnerable, lying there on the sofa, no makeup, her bruised clavicle visible at the neckline of the blouse. Maybe something or someone had turned her into a monster. Or maybe it was just who she was. Archie didn’t care anymore. It didn’t matter. The blackness was closing in. He had to act fast.

She took his hand and stood and he led her around the sofa.

“I try to be good,” Gretchen said. “You know that, right?”

“Yes,” Archie said gently.

They were near the banister now and Archie paused to tie his shoe. As he knelt, he retrieved the handcuffs he’d hidden in the bathroom and then stuffed in his sock. He’d counted on her hubris, believing she wouldn’t search him. It was her fatal flaw—she thought her control over him was absolute. But it wasn’t. Not quite.

In a swift motion he snapped one end of the cuffs on Gretchen’s slender right wrist, and snapped the other cuff around the wrought-iron banister. She reacted immediately, whipping her trapped arm in the air, pulling at the cuffs like someone staked to the bottom of the ocean, drowning. It was instinct. All animal. Archie took the moment to step away from her, out of reach. She snapped her head up at him. Her lips were wet, her eyes blazed. She swung at him, her fingertips almost brushing against his shirt. Her eyes darted back and forth, her mind working, looking for a way out. The red spots on her cheeks only made her look more beautiful.

She gathered herself, smoothing her hair with her free hand, lifting an eyebrow. “Darling,” she said slowly. “This. Is. A. Very. Bad. Idea.”

He didn’t say anything. It took all of his focus to concentrate on what he had to do. He left her and walked to the bathroom down the hall. It was a small bathroom, a toilet, vanity, and fiberglass shower all in close quarters. A watercolor print of a deer standing in snow hung over the toilet. The mirror above the vanity was surrounded with large round lights. He took a minute, hands gripping the counter, to steady himself through a wave of dizziness. His heart felt like it was beating too slowly. The pain in his side throbbed. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, knelt down, and opened the vanity drawer under the sink. Then he reached behind the extra rolls of toilet paper and found the small cell phone and folded piece of paper that he had hidden there that first night along with the cuffs.

He carried the phone and the folded piece of typing paper back into the living room, where Gretchen had twisted her body in an effort to get out of the handcuffs.

“They’re police issue,” he said. “They’re not going to give.”

She stopped moving and looked at him, her chest heaving.

He held up the phone so she could see it, and hit the
ON
button. The phone came to life with a series of chimes. Then he walked over to the bar and set it on the counter. They’d trace the signal. But it might take hours or days. He could have called Henry, but he didn’t want them to find him too soon, before the pills had had a chance to do their work.

He reached into his pants pocket and put the key to the cuffs next to the phone, where Henry could find it.

Then he poured the contents of one Vicodin bottle out onto the bar. The pills made a satisfying sound as they skidded across the granite and then stopped at his open hand. So here it was, finally. He’d thought about this so much over the past few years that it seemed almost anticlimactic. It felt familiar, natural. He’d been killing himself slowly ever since he’d been released from the hospital. Now he was just going to speed things up a little. The trick was to pace himself so that he kept enough of them down to kill him. He put one pill in his mouth and let it sit on his tongue, sucking on it until the bitterness filled his sinuses. He wanted to taste it. Eyes wide open. He wanted to experience every part of it. If he was going to die, he might as well know it. Gretchen had taught him that.

He scooped another couple of pills into his hand and put them in his mouth, licking the bitter chalky powder off his fingers.

“Archie,” he heard her say. “Don’t. There’s a forest fire. Can’t you smell it?”

He sniffed the air and smelled it then, like a campfire burning. He laughed. They were in the path of the forest fire. Fucking perfect.

“You can’t leave me here,” she said.

“They’ll find you,” he said. “And if they don’t, then we’ll both be dead.”

Y
ou’re not going to vomit, are you?” Henry asked Susan. She had her window down and was leaning her head against the car door. They had wound an hour up Highway 22, through the woods and occasional one-gas-station towns, and Susan felt carsick. The air was dry and hot, and the wind blowing through the open window blew hair in her eyes and chapped her lips. Every bump in the road reminded her of her broken nose.

“I’m fine,” she said in a nasal voice, swallowing some warm saliva that had pooled at the back of her throat. She didn’t know if it was Henry’s driving or the carbon monoxide poisoning, but her money was on Henry’s driving.

They had made good time. There was a caravan of cars coming down the mountain, but with the exception of Forest Service vehicles and fire trucks, very little traffic headed up. She’d seen no evidence of the fire yet.

Susan saw a green highway sign that read
MILLS CROSSING, POPULATION 52, PLEASE DRIVE CAREFULLY
, and sat up. “This is it,” she said. Mills Crossing appeared to be a gas station, roadhouse, a few old houses, and an “antiques shop” consisting of old dishes and paperbacks laid out on sheets in the roadhouse parking lot.

Henry flipped on his turn signal to pull across the highway to get to the gas station, but the line of cars coming down the mountain continued at a solid pace. Finally he put the siren on the hood, hit a button on the dash, and the siren whooped once. The cars immediately parted to let him through.

“Must be nice,” Susan said.

“It is,” said Henry.

He pulled up and parked next to the gas station. Susan counted eight cars waiting to get gas. A single attendant was manning the station’s two pumps. Oregon hadn’t had self-serve gas since the state had passed a statute against it in the 1940s. Back then the state was afraid people would blow themselves up. Now the statute was supposed to protect the environment, jobs, and old people who might succumb to fumes.

This guy looked like he would have been fine letting the customers risk it.

Henry and Susan got out of the car and moved between the bumpers of two SUVs to get to the gas pump. The attendant was Susan’s height, and didn’t weigh much more. His skin was tan and tough. He wore a T-shirt that read
SPOTTED OWL TASTES LIKE CHICKEN
.

“You Big Charlie?” Henry asked.

“Yep,” the little man said. He had a toothpick in his mouth and it rotated from one corner of his mouth to the other while he talked. “Cash only,” he said to a man in a VW bus. “Visa machine’s down.” The man in the bus handed Big Charlie a crumpled ten and Big Charlie inserted the nozzle into the bus’s gas tank and hit a lever on the pump. The pump’s dial meter began to rotate slowly. A woman in a Honda Element waiting for gas on the other side of the pump honked her horn. Big Charlie ignored her.

The traffic coming down Highway 22 was a caravan of Mon-teros, Subaru wagons, and Jeep Wagoneers, punctuated by the odd log truck. Some of the SUVs were hauling speedboats. Some had three or four bikes on the grille. But Susan noticed other cars, too, that were packed for more than a recreational holiday, with Hefty bags and boxes roped to the tops of their roofs.

Susan surveyed the line of cars, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.

Big Charlie took off his baseball cap, dabbed at his forehead with a rag, and put the cap back on. “They’re evacuating,” he said. His gray eyes flicked down to Susan’s burning American Spirit. “Some jackass tossed a cigarette,” he said. “Happens every summer.”

Susan glanced down at her cigarette and rotated it behind her thigh. “What?” she said, looking between Big Charlie and Henry. “It wasn’t me.”

The gas attendant jammed his thumb toward a
NO SMOKING
sign affixed to the gas pump.

“Sorry,” Susan said. She took one more quick drag and ground the cigarette out in a steel trash can filled with empty soda bottles, urine-soaked diapers, and other crap people stored up in the back of their cars on road trips.

Henry flipped open his badge and showed it to Big Charlie. “You saw a silver Jaguar?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Big Charlie said. The bus’s tank was full and he pulled the nozzle out, hung it back on the pump, and gave the bus a friendly pat on the windshield as it pulled away. “Nice car. Came through last night. I filled the tank with plus.”

“You remember who was driving?” Henry asked.

“A woman. I told the fellow on the phone, I mostly remember the car.”

“Can I show you a photograph?” Henry asked, holding Gretchen’s mug shot out.

Big Charlie tipped his head up so he could see the picture under the bill of his cap. “Might have been her.” He glanced up at Susan. “Might have been you. What’d she do?”

“She’s Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said.

Big Charlie greeted this with a blank stare.

“The Beauty Killer,” Susan said.

The woman in the Honda Element honked her horn again. Big Charlie didn’t flinch. And didn’t rush. “I’m more of a John Wayne Gacy man myself,” he said. He squinted at Susan. “You should put some ice on that.”

I
t was easier than he thought it would be. Maybe it was because his body was used to it. Maybe it was because his mind was ready to let go. He’d taken two bottles of pills now. He’d done it methodically. Three pills at a time. Washing each mouthful down with three swallows of Scotch. You got into a rhythm after a while. And he’d grown to like the taste of the Scotch. The heat of it filled him like bathwater. He wished he’d appreciated it more while he was alive. The thought made him smile. He probably couldn’t have afforded Scotch this good on his salary anyway.

“Please,” Gretchen said. “Stop.”

The remaining pills were on the counter. Archie arranged them into a little wagon train. Then lifted them, one by one. When he’d taken all the pills, he turned back to Gretchen.

She stood frozen, staring at him, her lips parted, her head slightly tilted. Her eyes were large, the whites pink from crying. She looked distraught, like a child who didn’t understand why she was being punished. Her desperation almost made him feel sorry for her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Commitment issues.”

“Uncuff me,” she said.

He shook his head.

Her entire face was red now, tears streaming down both cheeks. “I’ll tell them everything.”

“No you won’t,” Archie said. “I don’t know why.” He rubbed his eyes, which were feeling heavier by the minute. “But you won’t.”