The Laura Cardinal Novels (61 page)

It was a beautiful drive—lots of desert and mountains and few signs of civilization, except for the crosses.

The last time Laura had been out this way, she’d counted over a hundred roadside crosses between Tucson and the town of Why, Arizona. Most deaths were due to alcohol or speeding or both—the road shared by illegal aliens, pot smugglers, Border Patrol, tribal members, and college students driving down to Rocky Point for spring break. At the trading post in Gu Achi, besides the rack of potato chips and shelves of condiments and cold cases of drinks, there were shelves upon shelves of wreaths, crosses, and flower arrangements.

A cottage industry.

Laura didn’t make it as far as Why, though. She ended up in a Chevron station somewhere in the sticks, staring at the cracked mirror in a tiny bathroom that smelled of cleanser. A high sash window cut into the white-washed brick was open, and a navy curtain blew inward along with the sound of tires on pavement outside.

Laura heard the noise, but her attention was on the mirror because—

Half her face was gone.

That wasn’t exactly true. One side of her face looked normal, but the other was like smooth, flesh-colored clay. If she squinted hard she could see faint etchings in the clay where her left eye should be.

The watery light was back, bouncing around the edge of her vision. Closing her eyes didn’t do her any good.

What was going on? She’d managed to push down her worry last night at the Spanish Moon, and it had gone away. She’d ridden it out. But now half her face was a featureless mask.

Take a deep breath. Don’t panic.
It had gone away before; it would go away again.

She walked into the bathroom stall, closed the toilet seat lid and sat down. Kept her eyes closed. The lights, blinking on and off like a neon sign, hammering brightly, a curved shape, like a salamander.

The words running through her mind: macular degeneration, detached retina, blindness,
brain tumor
.

Somebody outside, jiggling the door handle.

The lights blinking.

She got back up and stared at the mirror. It looked the same. Her features wiped away; half her face like flesh-colored plastic.

The person outside knocked on the door.

“Somebody’s in here!” Laura yelled. Thinking how incongruous it was, saying somebody was in here, when she was the somebody. Talking in third person as if she were watching herself from above.

Panic taking over. She couldn’t drive. She was stuck in an old Chevron halfway between Tucson and the Mexican border, and she couldn’t drive.

Shit
.

Time going by. Her breath coming high in her chest, sweat breaking out on her face, the lights going on and off at the edge of her vision.

She’d bought herself some time, but eventually whoever was out there would knock again.

It came sooner than she expected.

She rinsed her face, opened the door, and nearly ran over the small woman with the tiny dog standing there, poised to knock again.

“Took you long enough,” the woman said.

Laura ignored her and walked across the asphalt to the 4Runner. She got in after several tries with the key, leaned back on the seat and closed her eyes.

Ride it out.

“You need to get that looked at,” a voice said next to her.

She opened her eyes. Frank Entwistle sat in the passenger seat, his elbow cocked on the passenger door.

“What’s going
on
with me? Do you know? Because if you know, please enlighten me.”

“I
don’t
know, kiddo. But it’s not good. You need to see a doctor.”

“Well, I can’t do it now. ”Was it her imagination or were the lights starting to go away?

“No, you can’t do it now, but the problem with you, is once this thing clears up, you’ll try to forget it ever happened.”

“No, I won’t.” But she knew it was true.

“That’s the way people are. They go from crisis to crisis. They do just enough to get by, and then when things pile up and the bad shit happens, they wonder why. But you’re worse than most. You know that, don’t you, kiddo?”

She glanced at him, sitting in the passenger seat, wearing a white guayabera shirt and those old-man polyester pale blue slacks, white shoes. His “retirement clothes.”

The lights beginning to calm down. She leaned up and looked in the rearview mirror, and was relieved to see that she now had two eyes, a nose, and a full mouth.

Relief poured over her like warm water.

Entwistle stared straight ahead.

“You’re like that guy in
Sixth Sense
,” she said. “He didn’t know he was dead either.”

“Hey, I’m not stupid.”

“Then why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to move on? What’s holding you here?”

Entwistle shifted in the seat, pulled down the sun visor, and looked at himself in the mirror there, smoothed back the loose wave of white hair over his forehead. “I know I’m dead. That’s the difference between you and me. I know when it’s time to face facts.”

“Facts,” Laura said. The lights were now officially gone. She looked at her watch; it had lasted twenty-five minutes. She was all right now. According to Frank Entwistle, she was now cleared to cruise onward until the next crisis.

“You been thinking about what we talked about before?”

“What, you mean about not throwing stones? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The glass house, kiddo. Thing is, you’re vulnerable. You’re sitting in there in your glass house and everyone can see in, but you don’t seem to know that.”

“You’re talking in riddles.”

“No, I’m not. You need to slow down, figure this out, before it takes you over.”

“What? What’s going to take me over?”

“Your fear,” he said.

Sonoyta, on the Mexican border, was a hot, dusty, noisy town. Driving through it was like driving through the middle of a chariot race. Following the signs, Laura bore left and then right over the Rio Sonoita Bridge, following the right hand side of the Y, which turned into Mexican Route 8, a two-lane asphalt road arrowing south and west through the desert. The signs were in Spanish, the distances marked in kilometers. The speed limit signs were also dependent on kilometers rather than miles, so Laura erred on the side of caution and went slower, as the speed limit laws in Sonoyta were strictly enforced. Waiting for the lights behind her eyes to come back, relieved when they didn’t. As she drove toward the coast, the land became dryer and more barren. She passed a roadside shrine to the Virgin at the base of a cinder cone. A green and white
Angeles Verdes
pickup was parked in the turnabout. The Green Angels patrolled the highway to help out motorists.

The ground on both sides of the highway turned sandy, choked with dusty-looking saltbush. To her right, although she could not see it yet, was the Gulf of California. Soon vendors appeared along the road in the shade of makeshift ramadas. Then came a few houses, then businesses: the beginning of Puerto Penasco—Rocky Point.

It was getting late in the afternoon when the highway turned into the busy, palm-lined thoroughfare, Juarez. She drove past brightly colored houses, strip malls, and little parks, and turned left at the police station.

To get to Las Conchas, an Americanized community outside Rocky Point, Laura had to take a graded dirt road. Late afternoon, the golden light distilled from the heat of the day hung like a haze over the pale saltbush clogging the roadsides. At this time of day, the undulating dunes looked like crystallized salt. The dunes seemed to stretch all the way to distant mountains, which were blue cutouts pasted against the dusty cerulean sky. She drove up to the gatehouse and explained without showing her badge that she was here to talk to Jillian North at Casa del Mar.

The slight Mexican man in his security guard uniform nodded and waved her in. She followed a maze of wide roads through more dusty-looking shrubs, this time interspersed with squares of green indoor-outdoor carpeting and poles with flags—a golf course. To her right, beyond the two-story Spanish-style beach houses, she could see tantalizing glimpses of ocean, shimmering like a pale blue satin ribbon under the lowering sun.

The houses were expensive but eclectic—every place was different. Money was no object, but in many cases taste was. Turrets and winding stairs and tall stucco walls, rooms that looked like add-ons, Spanish tile, lots of white and blue—everyone had built his or her own dream house. The result was a sort of Rube Goldberg version of a Mexican village.

But the ocean, brimming in between the tall blank walls of plaster—the ocean was perfect.

Laura found Casa del Mar on the road closest to the estuary. She parked on the sand out front, crunched her way up to the walled courtyard, and rang the bell in the gate. Casa del Mar was a modern version of a Mediterranean villa, grandiose but too new to be taken seriously. Cobalt blue tile on the roof, blue tile lining the rosette-shaped windows.

She heard a door squeak open and light footsteps.

One side of the door pushed open, and a sunburned blonde girl in her early twenties peeked out. Her nose was peeling.

“Jillian North?”

“Yes.” Then her eyes widened as she realized who Laura was. She actually started to push the gate closed.

Laura put her foot out. “May I come in? It was a long drive down here.”

Jillian stepped back. Petite and pretty, with long, bleached hair parted in the middle, she wore a lime-green flowered bikini that showed all her curves.

Laura entered a bricked courtyard, a closed garage on the right and the front door on the left. A bougainvillea grew in a large olla, tied to a stake.

Jillian led her into the house, asking her to wipe her feet first. Sand was everywhere.

The door let onto a huge room. The air conditioner was on high. Pigskin equipale chairs, copper pots hanging over a kitchen island, Mexican masks on the walls, Talavera vases and sink bowls. Decorated by Jillian’s parents, no doubt. Photos on the wall, mostly of children from several years ago—Jillian and her siblings? But what dominated the room was the wall fronting the ocean, French doors set into a bank of picture windows. A deck outside, and steps down to the beach, the ocean only forty feet from the entrance, rolling in, deep, dark blue in the slanting evening light.

Beach towels stretched out on the chaise lounges on the deck. Two of them.

“Where’s Shana?”

Jillian backed up a step. “She’s not here. I told you—”

“I know what you told me.” She nodded toward the chaises. “You use both those towels?”

“Uh-huh.” This kid was not a good liar. She was even worse in person than on the phone, her face turning red.

“I know she’s here.”

“No, she’s not. She just left.”

“Left?”

Jillian nodded vociferously. “A couple of hours ago.”

“To go into town?”

“No. For good. She’s not coming back.”

“You tell her I was looking for her?”

The girl rubbed one lacquered-toed foot against the other. “She knew you were looking for her, but that’s not why she left. We—she didn’t think you’d come all this way—she wasn’t worried about you.”

“Why’d she leave then?”

“Bobby came and got her.”

“Bobby Burdette.”

“Uh-huh.” Jillian sailed over behind the cooking island. “Can I get you something to drink? Ice water? I think there’s some sun tea somewhere.”

Laura glanced at the granite counter. Three blown-glass margarita glasses, their dark green rims frosted with salt but otherwise empty.

“Margaritas look good.”

Jillian glanced guiltily at the glasses.

“How did Bobby know where Shana was?”

“She called him.” Mild defiance.

“
She
called
him
? I got the impression she was trying to get away from him.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I thought Shana was scared of Bobby.” A shot in the dark, but what the hell.

“If you mean they had a falling-out, well, yeah.”

“What do you mean by a falling-out?”

“He, uh, slapped her. She said that was it as far as she was concerned. So I asked her if she wanted to stay with me for a while, and she said yes.”

Something not right here. “If that was it, why did she call him?”

“She missed him. Besides, it was only a slap. It wasn’t like he beat her up or anything.”

“But bad enough for her to say ‘that was it'?"

“She was upset. But they decided to make up, and now they’re more in love than ever.”

More in love than ever
.

Laura could picture the conversation, and it gave her a pang. She remembered what it was like to be completely immersed in guys and wanting to look like a magazine cover. Spending a half hour putting on makeup, figuring out what to wear. Talking to friends about boys boys boys, getting racier and, let’s face it, dirtier, as they grew older. Getting drunk and crying and wishing that they could run away to Vegas and get married, that somehow it would all work out.

Her mind turning to her own tangled feelings about Tom Lightfoot. “You really think they’re in love?”

Jillian shrugged. “She sure acted like it.”

Laura could see them: two beautiful girls at the age where they were as close to perfect as possible, like living Barbie dolls, lying on beach towels on the deck, toasting their belly buttons in the sun and talking about love. Getting each other worked up. A margarita turning to two, then three, turning the world into a fantasy.

Egging each other on, wanting what they could not have.

Shana, beguiled by the bright sun, the sparkling waves, the alcohol, the distance. Forgetting why she was scared. Thinking:
All I have to do is pick up the phone and call, and I can hear his voice
.

In her alcoholic haze, spurred on by a like mind, Shana would be lulled into a sense of security.
I’ll call him and just hear his voice. That’s all. Just talk to him. That couldn’t do any harm, could it?

And Bobby, who didn’t strike Laura as stupid, would convince her that he should come and get her. A tarnished knight on a white horse.