And Now She's Gone(69)
“Who cares, babe?” Gray said, still pee dancing. To Big Man: “I really need to go.”
“Yeah, whatever, go. Down the hall.” Big Man nodded behind him.
“Oh, wait,” Nick said. “I have an email with the reservation.”
As Nick fumbled around on his phone, Gray quickstepped past the ancient television set, which was displaying a scene with a bottle blonde spanking a cop handcuffed to the bumper of a squad car. She glanced at the faded green couch and the beaten bookshelves sagging beneath the weight of a trillion DVDs and videocassettes. A bag of Fritos, dead blunts, and a filled ashtray on the coffee table explained Big Man’s perfume—even with the pitched ceiling, she was getting a contact high simply by hurrying through the living room.
No porno movie played in the bathroom. But the thought of putting any bare part of herself near any spot Big Man had placed his bare parts made Gray’s bladder shrivel, making the true need to relieve herself a distant memory.
There was nothing remarkable in the green-tiled room. There was a framed, yellowing picture of the Palm Springs tram hanging above a snow-covered mountain. There was a pine-tree-shaped cake of soap that hadn’t melted and looked as new on this day as it had the day the Carpenters purchased it from J. J. Newberry after Jimmy Carter’s presidential inauguration.
But there was …
“That,” Gray whispered.
That was a box of L’Oréal hair color. Black Sapphire, like the box in Isabel’s condo. Big Man had a lot of hair, but not on his head.
She lifted the lid on the clothes hamper.
A bloody towel. A bloody white shirt.
She gasped.
The hamper’s top dropped.
She froze.
Waited … Wondered … Whose blood—
No pounding fist on the door.
Gray flushed the toilet, ran the tap, then flicked water on the perfect bar of soap. She opened the window—just an inch, just enough to open later. Back in the hallway, she glanced at the ceiling in search of a door that led to an attic, an attic where a woman could hide—or be hidden.
Nothing.
She looked down at the hardwood floor, for a rug that bumped up or sat crooked and hid the entryway for a basement.
There were no tumbled balls of hair. No chew toys. No dog smells. There were no random bits of kibble, nor was there an empty water bowl in a corner.
Back at the front door, Big Man and Nick were still talking, going on now about the Dodgers’ chances of making it to the World Series.
Gray peeked into the bedroom, hoping to spot the Mary Ann with the Vogue cheekbones in bed with a book of crossword puzzles on her lap. There was no Mary Ann—just a fuchsia and black Nike duffel bag in the corner of the room and a queen-size bed with linens so funky she could smell them from the doorway.
Smiling, she strolled back to the living room. “Thank you so much, kind sir. I was three minutes away from drowning.”
Big Man said, “No problem.”
Nick grinned at her. “We figured it out. This is 3871, not 3811 Pine Cone Drive.”
Gray gasped. “I am so sorry, sir.”
Big Man flicked his big paw. “These roads get twisty as fuck up here, and there ain’t no lights nowhere.”
Back in the Yukon, Nick took off his Buddy Holly glasses. “See anything?”
Gray took out a bottle of hand sanitizer and squeezed a pool in the middle of her palm. “A box of hair coloring—Black Sapphire, like the box back at Isabel’s. There was a woman’s gym bag in the bedroom, and … there’s a bloody towel and shirt in the laundry hamper.”
Nick lifted his eyebrows. “Shaving accident?”
“He’d have no head if he’d done that. What about you?”
“His name’s Bobby and he has a dog paw tat right here.” Nick pointed to his shoulder.
“A dog lover?”
“He’s a Blood. You should be brushing up on your gang lore.”
“One thing at a time.” She paused, then added, “Why the hell is church-girl Tea keeping company with a Blood?”
“Guess you need to find that out. Shall we stay and see what he does?” Nick was already adjusting his seat to “Sleep.”
As Nick slept, that television light in the cabin never dimmed and Bobby’s shadow didn’t move again. She thought about Sunday’s threatening text messages and her life with Sean Dixon. She thought of her succulent garden and her red Jaguar, her subscriptions to Vanity Fair and Glamour. Had Sean stacked them on the coffee table for her eventual return? Had he sold her car? Before she’d thrown away her iPhone, he’d left pleading voice mail messages begging her to come back home. He’d forgiven her, he’d said, and he chalked it up to both of them being exhausted and taking out their anger and stress in different ways.
Sean’s way of dealing with stress and anger usually left her bleeding.
Like the time he’d pushed her down on the second-story deck off their bedroom.
Or the time he’d punched her in the head with one hand while he kept his other hand tight around the steering wheel.
Gray would never forget the time he shoved her so hard that she crashed through the kitchen glass door. That had been a barn burner.
She had come out of their relationship with scars, chipped bones, a spooked spirit, and hearing that sometimes dimmed. More than that, she’d had to forsake her hard-earned name, given to her by a wonderful, infertile couple who’d loved her enough to adopt her.