A Flower in the Desert (31 page)

“When was she supposed to show up here?”

“On the thirtieth. Of September.”

“How long was she supposed to stay?”

“A week. And then she was gonna move on to the next place. And I can't tell you where that is, man. I'm sorry, but I can't. I don't even
know
where it is. But she hasn't been there. The people in California told me to tell you that. She hasn't been there.”

“I still don't understand why you never let them know that she didn't arrive here.”

“Okay, man, I fucked up. No question. But, shit, you got to realize that I got other things on my mind. Right now, here, this is the first time since sunup I'm able to sit down and shoot the shit. I got the plumbing to worry about, and work crews for the Hall, and food supplies, and we got someone sick over at the hospital in Taos. If it's not one thing, man, it's another. Twenty-five people here, man.”

“I'll explain all that to Melissa Alonzo, when I find her.”

“Hey, man, come on. I didn't tell her not to come here. That was her decision.”

“I hope so.”

He frowned again. “What's that mean?”

“It means I don't know that it was her decision. I won't know anything until I find her.”

“Shit, man, it hasn't even been two weeks. She'll show up. She's probably, like, taking a little vacation. Maybe it got too much for her, hiding out and all.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I hope you're right. Bilbo's carrying a gun, isn't he?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I thought you glommed on to that. It's empty, man. I got the bullets. He only carries it ‘cause like I say he's not housebroken yet. It's like a pacifier for him, man. Guy's gone through some rough times. I could tell you stories, make your hair stand on end. But basically he's good people. Wouldn't hurt a fly.”

I nodded. I got out one of my business cards, handed it to him. “If Melissa Alonzo does contact you, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.”

“You got it. Anything I can do, man.”

I was angry as I drove off down the track from the weathered old house. If Sam had made a single telephone call, back when Melissa had failed to appear at the commune, then perhaps someone in the Underground Railroad would've set in motion a search for her.

Maybe they didn't have the resources to check up on missing women. But maybe, when I spoke with Elizabeth Drewer earlier in the week, she might've told me the truth, and today I would be that much closer to Melissa.

I was still angry when I reached the main road. I drove back to the small general store and used the pay phone to call Norman Montoya. Once again, he answered the telephone himself.

“Ah, Mr. Croft. It is good that you call.” His voice was light, relaxed.

“How's that?” I said.

“The telephone line is clear?”

An isolated pay phone in an isolated northern New Mexico town? Probably, but I didn't know, and I told him so.

“Ah,” he said. “Well. The package you were asking about. It has arrived.”

Twenty-Four

S
HE
IS
IN THE GUEST HOUSE,”
Norman Montoya told me. “She arrived less than two hours ago.

“Is she all right?”

He nodded. “Yes, but she is quite tired. She has been under considerable strain.”

He and I were in his living room, me sitting on one end of a long white sectional couch, he sitting upright, spine straight, in a white padded armchair. To my right, the wall of glass looked out over a spectacular vista of steep river valley and snow-wrapped pines, all of it drifting down into shadow now as the last of the sunlight drained from the sky.

Montoya was wearing brogues again—maybe he always wore brogues—and also a pair of neatly pressed black wool slacks and a white dress shirt. The shirt was opened at the neck but the sleeves were buttoned. He was not an informal man.

I said, “She's awake, though.”

“Oh yes. She is anxious to speak with you.”

“Have you talked to her yourself?”

“Only in the most general way. To ascertain that she was all right, and to assure her that she is quite safe here.”

He wasn't exaggerating about her safety. Coming up the forest road above Las Mujeras, I had seen two cars backed into side trails in the woods. In both, the drivers had watched me pass while they spoke into telephones. No one had tried to stop me. I had told Montoya, when I spoke to him from Palo Verde, what time I would be arriving and what kind of vehicle I would be driving.

Montoya said, “From what she tells me, she does not know where Melissa and Winona are.”

I nodded. “We'll see.”

Another guard, a short stocky man wearing black boots, black slacks, a black leather coat, and a black cowboy hat, stood outside the guest house door. As I approached, he said something into a small walkie-talkie, then slipped the device into his coat pocket and nodded to me, unsmiling.

I knocked at the guest house door. After a moment, Juanita Carrera opened it. She took a quick drag from her cigarette and, blowing smoke, she said, “You are Croft?”

“Yes.”

“Come in.”

Inside, the guest house was one large, spacious room. Behind a counter at one corner, to my left, was a small kitchenette. The living area, on this side of the counter, held a white leather chair, a small white leather sofa, a glass coffee table that supported some glossy magazines and a portable television. To my right was a king-size bed in an oak frame; beside that, an oak dresser. Farther to the right, a door led off into a bathroom. The curtains were drawn at the windows and the light in the room came from behind a white cornice that ran along the top of the white walls.

For a moment, the two of us stood there staring at each other.

Up until then, ever since I drove up the mountain road from Las Mujeras, I had been feeling a dull, almost dreamlike sense of unreality, similar to what I'd felt at Deirdre Polk's house. I had been feeling somewhat unreal, in fact, since all this began; and everything I had learned as I stumbled along, everything I had confronted, had seemed only to intensify the feeling. Roy Alonzo's glib sincerity in my office, the glitter and humbug of Los Angeles, the petty but brutal bigotry of Bill Arnstead and Rebecca Carlson. The endless veils of secrecy behind which Melissa Alonzo appeared to live and move and hide. Salvadoran assassins, two innocent woman brutally murdered, inconclusive shoot-outs in the wide white wilderness. Aging hippies so laid back they couldn't make a simple phone call. Burly guards murmuring into car phones and walkie-talkies. And, at last, a melodramatic meeting with a frightened woman who might be able to lead me to Melissa Alonzo.

Juanita Carrera
was
frightened, desperately frightened, and the sense of unreality dropped away like cobwebs falling from my shoulders.

She wore black pumps, a black skirt, a wrinkled white rayon blouse, and she was hugging herself as she looked at me, shoulders hunched, one arm beneath her breasts, the other upraised to hold her cigarette. The cigarette was trembling slightly, as if she were chilled. Her entire body was rigid, poised for flight.

She was also, despite the stiffness of her body and the tension showing at the corners of her mouth, despite the smudges of exhaustion below her eyes and the gauntness of her checks, a remarkably beautiful woman. Her hair was thick and long and black, her face perfectly proportioned, her features perfectly shaped the rich red mouth, the thin and aristocratic nose, the large dark eyes hooded by delicate and slightly slanted, almost Oriental lids.

I said, “May I sit down?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” She sucked on the cigarette. “Please,” she said, and waved her cigarette at the sofa. The
please
was an afterthought, a politeness remembered because it had been automatic in better times.

I sat. Moving swiftly, jerkily, she sat to my left in the chair, and then she leaned forward, feet together, knees together. I noticed that there was a long run in her sheer nylon stocking.

She reached to the coffee table, picked up a pack of Kools, held them out to me. “You smoke?”

“No. Thanks.”

She tossed the pack to the table. “Five years,” she said. “No cigarettes for five years. And now, again, I smoke three packs a day.” She looked at the cigarette in her hand, leaned forward, and stabbed it out in a circular glass ashtray already nearly filled with half-smoked butts.

It was as though by putting out the cigarette, she had also extinguished, at least temporarily, the smoldering nerve ends on which she had been surviving. With a small tired sigh, she laid her arms along her thighs, wrist atop wrist, hands limp, and lowered her head, her thick black hair sweeping forward, off her thin shoulders.

I said nothing.

At last, slowly, she raised her head and looked at me over her crossed wrists. Her beautiful face was utterly blank. “Perhaps,” she said, “as this Mr. Montoya insists, it is safe to speak with you. Perhaps it is not. I do not know. But I think I no longer care.” She sat back against the chair.

“You're safe here,” I told her. “No one can get to you here.”

She shrugged. It wasn't a shrug of resignation. Whatever she felt, it was something that existed out in the cold bleak empty reaches far beyond resignation, and light-years beyond hope. “For now, perhaps,” she said.

“Mr. Montoya will see to it that you're protected. He can do that. He's a powerful man.”

“He is a gangster,” she said, her voice flat, affectless. “The people I was staying with were much impressed that he wished to help me. They are Salvadorans, and of course they have much respect for power.”

“He told you that I'm trying to find Melissa and her daughter?”

She nodded.

“Something happened down in El Salvador,” I said. “While Melissa was there. What was it?”

She reached forward, picked up the pack of Kools, tapped a cigarette out, put it between her lips, lit it with a Bic lighter. She sat back, once again folding her left arm beneath her breasts, her left hand clutching at the upper part of her right arm. She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and, pursing her lips, exhaled downward. “My sister and the priest she worked with were killed. Melissa was there. She saw them being taken away, my sister and the priest. She saw who was responsible.”

Although Rita had proposed the idea several days ago, and although I had grown more and more inclined to believe it myself, I was still surprised to hear it turned, and turned so flatly, so clinically, into fact. I said, “Your sister was Maria …” I couldn't remember the woman's last name, and I felt a small sad stab of guilt.

Juanita Carrera didn't seem to care. “Vasquez. My maiden name. She was staying with the priest, Father Cisneros, helping him.”

“Why was Melissa there? At the home of Father Cisneros.”

“She had an airplane ticket for Maria. And papers. False papers, you understand? A United States passport with a departure stamp from this country. She had obtained it from people she knew in Los Angeles, people who help women and their children.”

“People involved with the Underground Railroad.”

“This, yes. Someone in customs, a friend of Maria's, had stamped it with a Salvadoran entry visa while Melissa was in the capital. Also, he had put Maria's false name on the list of visitors to the country. When she left, no questions would be asked.”

“Melissa told you what happened?”

“Yes.” She sucked on the cigarette, exhaled.

“Can you talk about it?”

She made again that empty shrug. “It is only one more small piece of violence, one more small horror. After a time, the heart grows numb.” Another drag from the cigarette. “But if you wish to hear of it.”

“Please.”

She told me.

Melissa had arrived at the village of Cureiro on the evening of August 16, after dark. As she had been instructed, she had come alone; and, as instructed, she had hidden her rental car behind a grove of palm trees outside the tiny hamlet. Careful not to be seen, she had walked to the priest's house, where Father Cisneros and Maria were waiting.