A Flower in the Desert (15 page)

“That's quite all right,” she said. “You have a job to do, after all.” She smiled a coy, girlish smile that seemed out of place in these circumstances, and on that Kewpie-doll face, and then she indicated the Louis XIV chair opposite the loveseat. “Please sit down.”

I sat. I shifted slightly on the thin cushion. Louis XIV, despite his reputation, must have been a stoic.

“Would you care for a drink?” she asked me brightly. “Or perhaps a coffee?”

“A glass of water would be fine.”

“Annabella, would you see to it?” She lifted a glass that had been sitting beside her on the end table and she smiled shyly, almost apologetically, at the Hispanic woman. “And could you bring another, please?” The glass was half full, ice cubes and a pale amber liquid that I assumed was scotch. I also assumed that for her the glass was half empty. She moved and spoke with the exaggerated precision of the alcoholic who's had a few drinks but who wants to, who still needs to, maintain a front of polite sobriety.

But it wasn't my place to judge her. She'd lost two daughters, one of them only last week.

As the Hispanic woman left the room, Mrs. Bigelow took a polite sip from her drink and smiled that girlish smile again. “So. How may I help you, Mr …. I'm so sorry, what was it again?”

“Croft. I was wondering—”

“Croft, of course, yes. My silly memory. I must be getting old.” This she said with a kind of hopeful flirtatiousness, seeking a denial.

I smiled my neutral smile and said, “I was wondering, Mrs. Bigelow, whether you'd heard anything from your daughter Melissa since she disappeared last August.”

The drink in her right hand wobbled as her left hand flew to her chest. Her eyelids fluttered for an instant and then she looked quickly around the room, as if for assistance. She looked back to me and said, “But I thought … you said, you told Annabella that this was about Cathryn.”

For a moment I regretted my deliberate ambiguity at the front door. “Maybe there's been a misunderstanding, Mrs. Bigelow. I'm an investigator licensed by the state of New Mexico. I've been hired to locate Melissa.”

She sipped at her scotch, less politely now. She cocked her head, a quick, birdlike movement. I wondered then if she'd been the figure I thought I'd seen behind the window as I approached the house. And, if she had been, who or what had she been expecting? And why had she darted away?

“An investigator?” she said. “Not a police investigator?”

“A private investigator.”

“From New Mexico?”

“Santa Fe.”

She smiled a small dreamy smile. “Melissa always said that it was so very beautiful there.” Then she remembered herself, and she remembered me. “But we don't talk about Melissa,” she said. “None of us. Not to anyone.” She said this by rote, as though it were a lesson learned so long ago that she'd forgotten who taught it to her, and why. And then—perhaps curiosity had gotten the better of training—she asked me, “Who hired you? Roy?”

“His uncle.” I explained the arrangement I'd made with Norman Montoya. “Mr. Montoya is concerned about Melissa and Winona's welfare.”

“But what—oh, thank you, Annabella,” she said, and gave me a quick complicitous glance. The Hispanic maid, or housekeeper, or whoever she was, had returned to the room, carrying a tray with two glasses. She held out the tray for me, and I took my water and thanked her. Mrs. Bigelow drained what was left of her drink, delicately set it on the tray, delicately lifted its replacement. She and I didn't speak to each other until after the other woman had left.

Then, delicately, she set her drink on the end table. “Mr. Croft, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about Melissa.”

I thought that she could. I thought that she wanted to, or that at least a part of her did. Why else had she given me that look, why else had she gone silent while the other woman was in the room?

But I knew that I could be wrong. Maybe complicitous glances were a part of her repertoire of flirtation, and held no meaning beyond that.

I took a sip of my water. Since there was nowhere to set down the glass without crushing some cuddly little creature, I held it in my lap. “Mrs. Bigelow,” I said, “your daughter Cathryn received a post card from Melissa not too long before her death. Did you receive a card too? Or any other form of communication?”

“I … Mr. Croft, you're asking about personal matters, family matters. I really can't talk about them. Perhaps if you spoke to my husband.” She looked down, eyelids fluttering, and again I was reminded of a little girl. Which was the idea, of course—to disarm me with her vulnerability. I suspected that it was something she had done all her life, something she did now reflexively, without thinking.

Absently, she smoothed down the fabric that lay along her thigh.

“I did talk to your husband,” I said. “This morning. He wasn't very helpful.”

She looked up at me. “Cal's a good man,” she said defensively. “A kind man, gentle and generous. It's just that Melissa has … disappointed him so. We tried so hard, both of us, but she wouldn't listen to anyone. We thought that she'd change after she married Bill.”

“Bill Lester?” I wasn't particularly interested in Bill Lester, but at least I'd gotten her to talk. “He was a partner in your husband's firm, wasn't he?”

She nodded. “And a wonderful man. And madly in love with Melissa. I thought at first, you know, that he might be too old for her—she was only twenty, and Bill was all of forty-five. But Cal was certain that things would work out, and for a little while it seemed he was right. They seemed to get along so well together. But it ended so quickly. In less than a year.”

She lifted her drink, sipped at it, looked away. “Things would've been so different if she and Bill had worked out.” She sighed. There was genuine emotion in the sigh, but there was also the high school theatricality of a young girl. She was a woman, it appeared to me, who had survived by means of her affectations, or who thought she had, and who probably had difficulty determining what was real in herself from what was artifice. So did I.

I said, “How did you feel about her marrying Roy Alonzo?”

Thirteen

S
HE TURNED BACK TO ME. SHE
spoke without any hesitation now—whether because of the alcohol or because of a simple need to talk. “Well, you understand that we weren't sure about it, of course. When you've lived in this town as long as we have, you tend to be a bit … wary of movie people, you know. Actors, especially. You hear so many terrible things. Drugs, infidelity. And worse. But Melissa was
so
terribly happy.”

She sipped at her drink. “Even Cal had to admit she was happy. We thought, the two of us did, that Melissa had finally settled down. Finally found herself. And then when Winona came, such a beautiful little girl, it seemed that everything was perfect. A happy marriage, that beautiful, beautiful child. And then we started hearing those terrible stories …” With another quick birdlike motion, she shook her head, as though denying the truth of the stories, or that such stories could exist.

“What stories?” I asked her.

“Horrible,” she said, making a little girl's face of horror. “Absolutely disgusting.” She took another drink. “I really couldn't repeat them, and I'm sure you wouldn't want to hear them. They were complete fabrications, of course.
I
knew that. But they disturbed Cal, and he confronted Melissa with them. Well, Melissa lost her temper—it's possible that Cal was a bit too brusque, he can be that way sometimes. He doesn't mean to be, it's just the way he is. One thing led to another and the two of them had a terrible row. And both of them are so stubborn. Melissa is a lot like Cal that way.”

She drank from her glass. “They didn't speak to each other for a year or so, until she and Roy divorced. I tried to mediate between her and Cal, tried to bring the two of them back together—we were a
family
, after all—but …” She shrugged an elaborate shrug of hopelessness: What's a woman to do?

“They spoke again after the divorce?”

“They reconciled, yes. I was so pleased. And then …” She looked down again, sadly, and without the girlish affectation.

The whiskey was beginning to affect her careful pronunciation: words slightly slurred,
s
's turning into
sh
's.

I prompted her, “And then Melissa accused Roy of abusing Winona.”

“It was
horrible
,” she said. She looked away and quickly shook her head again. “
Horrible.
”

“Your husband wasn't pleased about Melissa's accusation,” I said.

“Cal begged her not to take Roy to court. The scandal. The press. It had been bad enough when Melissa and Roy divorced. People calling us night and day, newspaper reporters, television reporters. He told her he'd handle it himself. But Melissa was determined. It was the only way, she said, to make sure that Roy never came near Winona again.”

“Mrs. Bigelow,” I said, “do you know why Melissa made the accusation? Do you know about any particular incident that might've caused it?”

She lowered her head, and for a few long moments I thought I'd lost her. Not to reticence or shame; to alcohol. But apparently she was deciding whether to tell me. I don't know why she decided what she did. The alcohol, maybe. Or the loneliness. Maybe both.

She raised her head and said, “Melissa called me one night. She was … she wasn't hysterical, really, but she was extremely upset. She told me she'd been putting Winona to bed that night, dressing her in her pajamas. This was a Monday night, after Winona had stayed the weekend with Roy.” She sipped at her drink.

I waited.

“She said—she was dressing her, did I mention that?—she said that Winona looked up at her and told her that she'd had sex with Daddy.” She took another sip from her drink, made a girlish grimace once again, and she looked away.

I waited.

She turned back to me. “Melissa said she didn't know what to think. At first, of course, she thought that Winona was confused, that she didn't know what the word meant. Children can say things sometimes without really understanding them. But then, when Melissa kissed Winona good night, Winona … Winona stuck her tongue in Melissa's mouth … And then she smiled at her. And Melissa said that the smile was absolutely diabolical. Absolutely
evil.
” Again she made that face, with more real pain in it this time, and again she looked away.

Suddenly I didn't want to be here, in this close confining room with its smell of scotch and fading flowers, its grotesque clutter of gaping animals. Didn't want to be sitting across from this wounded, painted woman, a fading flower herself; didn't want to be hearing what I was hearing. I didn't want to turn over this particular rock.

But turning over rocks was what I was paid to do.

Mrs. Bigelow said, “I told Cal when he came home. He was angry, of course, he was furious, and he left and drove over to Melissa's. When he came back, he was even more furious. Because Melissa wouldn't listen to reason. She refused to see, Cal said, that Winona was probably making it up. Winona's always been an imaginative child, like Melissa when
she
was a little girl. Cal was convinced that she'd seen something on television, or possibly heard somewhere, someone talking, and that she'd invented this.”

I said, “What did you think, Mrs. Bigelow?”

“I … I honestly didn't know. I didn't know what to think. I still don't know. I liked Roy, I really did. It seemed impossible that he could do something like that. That
anyone
could do something like that. But you read the papers, you know, and you see that it happens all the time. But
Roy?
”

She drank some more scotch. “And then the doctors. At the trial. One said this, the other said that. Contradicting each other.” She stared down into her glass for a moment, then looked up at me. “How can that happen, Mr. Croft? How
could
someone do something like that?”

How do you explain evil? It was a fundamental question, of religion, psychology, even politics; perhaps it was
the
fundamental question. Maybe it had an answer, but I didn't know what it was, and I told her so.

She shook her head, looked down at her glass again.

I said, “Mrs. Bigelow, Melissa has been in contact with you, hasn't she?”

Without looking up, she nodded.

“By mail?” I asked her. “Over the phone?”

“By mail,” she said, still staring down at her lap. “A postcard.” She looked up. “From New Mexico. The same postcard she sent … the same one she sent to Cathryn. The message, I mean. ‘
The flower in the desert lives.'”

“When did you receive it?”

“September. The end of September.”

“When was it postmarked?”

She shook her head. “I don't remember.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No. No, I … I disposed of it. If Cal had found it, he would've only gotten upset.”

“Have you heard from her since?”

She shook her head, looked down, gently twirled the ice in her glass. She looked up at me. Beneath the mask of cosmetics, her vulnerability seemed real now. “Do you think she's all right, Mr. Croft?”

“I don't know,” I said. I wasn't going to tell her what I'd been telling everybody else, that her daughter Cathryn's death might possibly be linked to Melissa's disappearance. “I hope so. But I think it'd be better for her and Winona if I found them. Mr. Montoya will be able to help them a lot more than whoever's helping them now.”

“Who
is
helping them now?”

“I'm not sure. Did she ever talk to you about the Underground Railroad? A network of people who help women in Melissa's position?”