Valentine(69)

She runs back to the kitchen and starts pounding the phone switch so hard Corrine can hear it in the garage. When Mary Rose returns—still no phone, goddamn it—her face is the color of old embers, or the fine gray dust covering Potter’s workbench. That’s out near our ranch, Mary Rose says. Her blue eyes go flat. I know who took her.

You know this man, Mr. Belden? Corrine glances at the note. Debra Ann spoke of him once or twice, but I thought he was one of her imaginary friends.

That’s not his name, Mary Rose says flatly. I know who he is. She runs back across the street and disappears into the house. Less than five minutes later, she is standing in Corrine’s driveway, rifle clutched in one hand, several loose cartridges in the other. I told the girls to stay put and call Suzanne Ledbetter the minute the phones are back on, she says.

Corrine holds out both hands, palms up. We need to put that in my trunk.

Mary Rose shakes her head. We have to go.

Drops of sweat roll down her forehead and her hair lies flat against her neck. Corrine is standing less than a foot from her neighbor, close enough to catch a whiff of grease and body odor, and to see that her pupils are enormous, an eclipse ringed by her pale blue irises. We don’t want to scare anybody, Corrine says, and I have my pistol in the glove box if we need it.

He’s going to kill her, Mary Rose says, and for a moment Corrine thinks she may be right. But D. A. has seemed fine this summer, purposeful and busy, she has even stopped pulling out her eyebrows. If this man hurt her in any way, there were no signs. And there is something else eating at Corrine—a note Debra Ann showed her earlier in the summer. Thank you for helping me. I am great full. Where’s this from, Corrine had asked the girl, and D. A. said he was part of her summer project.

We don’t know anything, she tells Mary Rose. Debra Ann said he was her friend.

Well, what the hell does she know? Mary Rose shouts. She’s a little girl and he’s a—her voice breaks and goes hollow—monster.

Bastard, Mary Rose spits the word out, as if she’s just swallowed a glass filled with vinegar. The rifle is clenched in her hand, knuckles streaked white and red. She is lit with rage and purpose.

Deadly, Corrine thinks. She takes a deep breath and tries to sound calm. We don’t yet know what the situation is. Debra Ann might be running away.

What in the hell is wrong with you? Mary Rose looks at Corrine as if the old woman has lost her mind. Strickland wanted Aimee, but he got D. A. instead. And it’s my fault.

Whatever air Corrine has wrestled into her lungs disappears completely, and she reaches toward Potter’s workbench. When she shoves aside the gardening tools and presses her hand flat against the table, the dust and cobwebs that have gathered over the long spring and summer take flight. Heat and dirt again fill her lungs and she coughs into her shoulder. I can’t do this, she thinks.

Let me put that weapon in my trunk and I’ll drive us out to Penwell. She stands up straight and reaches for her neighbor’s hand, but Mary Rose jerks away from her. Whose side are you on, old woman?

Please, Corrine says. Again she reaches out, but Mary Rose is already running back across the street, where she leans the rifle against her car and digs wildly through her purse. When she finds her keys, she grabs Old Lady and sets it on the passenger seat. She drives off without so much as a glance in Corrine’s direction.

*

The Whitehead Ranch is three miles south of Penwell. Close enough to walk to, as Glory Ramírez did, and if you had walked those miles with her, you might have grabbed onto the barbed-wire fence that separates the railroad track from the makeshift grave, a single row of large caliche stones piled one on top of the other, and the smaller, unmarked grave that is only a few yards away—a dog that belonged to one of the workers, an infant killed by fever, a small child who got bit by a rattlesnake. And if you weren’t paying attention, or you were looking behind you, you might have fallen over the pile of rocks, as Glory did. You might have watched the wind move through the grass with the same dread in your belly. You might have looked back at the place you had walked away from and opened your mouth, only to find you were unable to speak. It is at the smaller grave where Glory sat down and picked the gravel from the palm of her hand, and it is there Jesse Belden hoists D. A. Pierce onto his shoulders and braves those wild grasses still being whipped and tugged by the last of the dust storm, so she can see the gravesite she’s been telling him about all summer.

*

Corrine is an unrepentant leadfoot, accustomed to going at least twenty miles over the speed limit even when she’s in no particular hurry. Now she drives down the I-20 like death itself is chasing her. The speedometer’s needle trembles between eighty and eight-five miles an hour, but Mary Rose’s white sedan is moving faster, and the distance between the two cars grows until the younger woman is at least a half mile ahead.

With the storm moving south at ten miles an hour, the women drive into a cloud of red dirt and bone-colored caliche dust. As they approach Penwell, the wind turns fierce and Corrine’s car begins to shake. The motion roils her stomach, reminding her that she has not eaten today, that she is thirsty, that she drank too much last night and every night since Potter died, that she is an old woman completely unprepared to stop the world from coming apart at the seams.

When they were standing in Corrine’s driveway and Mary Rose spat out that word—bastard—her voice was flat as the land Corrine is looking at now, and her heart fell to her feet. She has heard this tone of voice a few times in her life, usually but not always from a man or group of men. And although Mary Rose is angry and afraid, and there’s a little girl driving around with a man they don’t know, it occurs to Corrine why Mary Rose’s tone of voice sounds so familiar.