A Flower in the Desert (28 page)

At the bottom of the hill, we crossed a snow-filled arroyo, and then he turned onto a thin white ribbon of driveway that ran between the trees for a hundred feet. The house we reached was a large square adobe, gingerbread brown. At the right side, a coyote fence enclosed a small courtyard. The shades were drawn at the two broad windows that flanked the front door. Below the window on the left was a long stack of firewood, half a cord or so, covered with a black plastic tarp that dripped meltwater. In front of the stack was a gray Dodge pickup, five or six years old. The house was invisible from the road.

We got out of the Ford and I followed Cooper around the Dodge and up the front steps. More meltwater fell in a thin shiny trickle from a canali on the roof and spattered onto a patch of brown mud in the snow.

The door was unlocked and he opened it and signaled me to enter.

As I did, a woman stood up from a sofa opposite me. Short and pretty, she wore dark brown boots and a long stonewashed denim dress. The color of the dress matched her pale blue eyes. Her long hair was blond and pulled back into a ponytail.

“Sarah,” said Cooper, taking off his down jacket, “this is Mr. Croft. Mr. Croft, my wife, Sarah.”

She crossed the room and offered me her hand. I shook it. Her grip was firm but her eyes were uncertain. She hadn't spoken since I'd arrived. She was a few years younger than her husband and she looked worried.

“Take your coat?” Cooper asked me.

“Thanks.” I slipped the jacket off my shoulders. He accepted it and hung it beside his coat on a tall wooden rack.

“Have a seat, Mr. Croft,” he said, and nodded to a heavily padded fabric chair.

I sat down. The two of them sat on the sofa.

It was an airy space, high ceilinged, divided by a wooden counter into a roomy kitchen and the big living area in which we sat. Large framed black and white photographs of stark desert scenes decorated the walls. Some children's toys—a doll, a red plastic wagon—decorated the floor. The furniture had been lived in, but didn't resent it much. Heat radiated softly from a gray rectangular wood-burning stove along the east wall, beside a doorway that led to the rest of the house. Classical music, one of the Brandenburg Concertos, floated from the stereo to my left.

Sarah Cooper had been watching me. Now, finally, she spoke. “Are you recording this conversation, Mr. Croft?”

Her husband looked at her and frowned slightly. It seemed to me that her caution, and his own, made him uncomfortable. He would rather have assumed that the world was filled with decent, upright people who always played fair. She clearly assumed otherwise. She would be right, of course, more often than he was.

“Nope,” I told her.

She said, “If you deny you're recording this, and you're lying, and we admit to violating the law, wouldn't that be entrapment on your part?”

“It only works that way for law enforcement officers,” I told her. “So far as the law is concerned, I'm not much different from a private citizen. And a private citizen can't be charged with entrapment.”

She frowned.

“But I'm not recording this,” I told her. “Later on, if there is a later on, it'll be your word against mine. Two against one. You're the couple that Melissa and Winona stayed with, aren't you?” No great intuitive leap here. A phone call from Elizabeth Drewer, a young couple and their mutual paranoia.

Sarah Cooper glanced at her husband. He said to me, “We read this morning about that woman up in Hartley. Deirdre Polk. She was a friend of Melissa's.”

It wasn't really a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yes, she was. And if you think that her death is connected in some way to Melissa, you're most likely right.”

He looked at his wife, who sat there watching me.

“Listen,” I said. “You're worried. I'm worried, too. We wouldn't all be here if we weren't worried. What did Elizabeth Drewer tell you about me?”

“That you were a private investigator,” Larry said. “Looking for Melissa. She said she'd made some phone calls to some people here in town. You're supposed to be honest.”

“I'm supposed to be, but I don't always pull it off.”

He smiled slightly. “She also said you were kind of a wiseass.”

I smiled. “That, I can usually pull off.”

His wife spoke. “Did Melissa's ex-husband have anything to do with that woman's death?”

The idea had never occurred to me, and I took a look at it for a moment. Roy Alonzo hires me to track down Melissa, or he tries to, because he wants to kill her. He's the one who slips the transponder into my car. He follows me to Deirdre Polk's house, tortures her for information, strangles her.

But why would he want to kill Melissa? Revenge? To pay her back for ruining his career?

Maybe, but how would Roy come by a sophisticated tracking device like the transponder?

And Deirdre Polk had probably been killed by the same person who killed Cathryn Bigelow. And Roy had been in New York when Cathryn was killed.

According to him.

I reminded myself to ask Roy where he'd been last night.

Finally I said, “It's possible, but I doubt it.”

She told me, “From what Melissa said, he was a monster.”

“He may be. But there are all kinds of monsters. I don't think he's that kind.” Not the kind who strangled women in cold blood. It would be bad for his image.

She frowned. “Who did kill her, then?”

“I'm not sure. But I think that whoever he was, he wants to find Melissa. I want to find her first. You wanted to talk to someone about this. I'd like to hear what you have to say. I'm not going to go to the police with anything you tell me, unless I believe the information might keep Melissa and her daughter out of jeopardy. And I won't give them your names.”

Larry Cooper glanced at his wife and then he said to me, “We've been worried about Melissa since she left us, worried about her and Winona.”

“Why?” I asked him.

“After she left here, she never got to where she was going.”

His wife spoke again. “We didn't know that, not for sure. But she was supposed to call us. She was going to call person to person, collect, and ask for Linda. And we'd say she had the wrong number and then hang up. We'd know she was all right.” She crossed her arms. “But she never called.” She shrugged sadly.

I said, “Why don't we start at the beginning. You're part of the Underground Railroad.”

He said, “Yes.” She nodded.

“I don't really know how all this works,” I told them. “Would that be standard procedure, for her to call and let you know she was all right?”

“No,” said Larry Cooper. “Once people leave here, they're not supposed to contact us at all. It's safer that way, or it's supposed to be.”

“It was my fault,” said Sarah. “I asked her to. I'd gotten really fond of her and Winona. The times before, when people stayed here, I never really got close to them. But with Melissa, it was different.”

Her husband said, “We've been on and off the phone for hours, ever since we read about Deirdre Polk. We talked to … someone in California, and then Elizabeth Drewer called us. We've been going back and forth with this all morning.”

I asked them, “When did Melissa arrive here?”

“Last month,” Larry Cooper said. “On the twentieth.”

“And how long did she stay?”

Sarah said, “She was going to stay until the first of October. But we had a situation with Julia, our daughter. She just started school this year. She's a really intelligent little girl, really open and friendly, and we were afraid she'd say something to someone without meaning to. We tried to explain to her that Melissa and Winona were a secret, that she wasn't supposed to tell anyone. But secrets are difficult for children. And really, they shouldn't have to worry about them. It's not fair.”

Her husband said, “They were going to be the last people we helped. Melissa and Winona. We would've liked to keep on with it, the helping. These people deserve all the help they can get. Not just Melissa and Winona, all of them. But it's been rough. It was rough even before Julia started school.”

“It's been nerve-racking,” Sarah Cooper said. “Keeping it hidden from the neighbors, jumping when the telephone rang. And Julia. Once when she and I were in Kaune's, shopping, I ran into a friend of mine, and Julia, without ever really intending to, she mentioned something about the people who were staying here at the time. I had to cover it up, say it was my cousin visiting. And then afterward I had to explain to Julia why I lied.” She frowned. “That was the worst part.” She looked at Larry, looked back at me. “It's my fault. I was the one who got both of us into this.”

“That's not true, babe,” Larry said. “We both agreed.”

“It was my idea,” she said with mournful resignation.

I asked them, “How
did
you get into this?”

Larry ran his fingers back though his hair, pushing it away from his forehead. “Do you really need to know that?”

“No,” I said. “I'm just nosy. Sorry.”

Sarah still wanted to accept the blame. She said, “Someone from my incest survivor group mentioned the Underground Railroad. I'd read about it, and I thought they were doing good work, important work, and I said so. In group, in front of all the others. Afterward, she came up to me and asked if I'd really like to help. When I said I would, she told me to talk it over with Larry and get back to her. We talked it over and we agreed we wanted to do something.”

“We both agreed,” he told her.

She smiled sadly at him, then turned back to me. “I was sexually abused when I was a child. By my adoptive father. I used to think it happened because I was an orphan, because I was damaged goods. That it was my fault. That it wouldn't have happened if I'd been with my natural parents.” She shrugged. “I found out, from group, that none of that was true. It can happen to anyone.”

Larry put his arm protectively around her shoulder. She leaned slightly toward him and reached out to lay her hand on his thigh.

I liked them and I admired their closeness, maybe even envied it, but I needed to know about Melissa. “You said that Melissa visited Deirdre Polk while she was here. Did she visit anyone else?”

“A woman named Juanita,” she said. “Melissa didn't want to talk about it—she acted very mysterious whenever I tried to ask her. I only asked because it might've been dangerous, being seen in town. Someone might've recognized her. She told me that no one could possibly do that. She
did
look different from pictures I'd seen of her, in magazines, during the trial, but I still didn't think it was safe. But Melissa was determined to see her. She could be so damn stubborn sometimes.”

“When did she see her?” I asked.

“The twenty-third of September,” she said. “The same day she saw Deirdre. I remember because it was the first day of fall and it was such a beautiful day, like a day in the middle of June.”

The twenty-third was also the day Melissa had posted the card to her sister, Cathryn. And perhaps posted the card to her mother. “How long was she gone?”

“For most of the day. She left at nine in the morning and she came back around six. She seemed less tense when she came back, less worried.”

“She'd seemed worried before?”

She frowned. “Not worried, exactly. More like she was carrying a terrible burden. Something really painful, oppressive. Something that had nothing to do with her own position, I mean. And God knows, that was burden enough. But when she came back from meeting Juanita, she seemed much better.”

“Did she ever mention El Salvador?” I asked her.

She shook her head, turned to her husband. “No,” he told me. “But I really didn't spend much time with her. I've been busy for the past few months.”

“Larry's a photographer,” Sarah told me.

“I had an assignment and I spent most of September in the darkroom,” he said. “I didn't have much of a chance to talk to her.”

I indicated the photographs on the wall. “Yours?”

“Yes.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “
The flower in the desert lives.
' Does that mean anything to either of you?”

They looked at each other. She shrugged. He told me, “No.”

I asked them, “Did Melissa make any phone calls while she was here?”

“No,” Sarah said. “The only person she called was Juanita and she drove her car into town, to a phone booth, to make the call.”

“She had a car?”

“She bought one when she got here. That was something else I didn't think was a very good idea. But Melissa said she was sick and tired of buses. She said she wanted a car, even if she only had it for a little while, a few weeks. I drove her out there to get it. It was a little Honda. She paid cash for it. Nine hundred dollars.”

“What color was the car? What year?”

“White. It was a little two-door. I don't know the year.” She turned to Larry. “Eighty-two?”

He shrugged. “Eighty-two, eighty-three,” he told me. “Something like that.”

I could find out from the dealer. “Where'd she buy it?”

She gave me the name of a used-car place on Cerrillos.

I said, “She needed a driver's license to get the car.”

Sarah said, “She had a California license made out to another name. It was her photograph, though.”

“What was the name?”

She looked at her husband. He nodded.

“Linda Lattimore,” she said. “That was why we were going to use
Linda
when she called to let us know she was all right.”

“Did she register the car? Get plates for it?”

“No. It had temporary plates, good for thirty days, and she said she wouldn't be using it any longer than that.” For the first time, she smiled. Faintly, sadly. “She called it her ‘disposable dream.' It was part of her last fling, she said. I remember, she laughed out loud when she got into the front seat. Like a little girl. She was really incredibly happy.”