Call the Devil by His Oldest Name (19 page)

Twenty-nine

“HI, GABE. I'VE come
to help!”

Mary looked up from the dinette, stunned. It was past midnight and she'd just finished her ab­solute last sip of wine when someone had tapped lightly on the door. Gabe opened it to reveal Ruth Moon standing there, an odd grin on her face. Though she wore the same clothes as when Mary had last seen her, her demeanor had changed. Where before she'd moved leadenly, as if burdened with sorrow, now Ruth darted about like a sparrow, her eyes bright and feverish.
She's lost it,
Mary thought, her heart aching for the stricken woman.
This has driven her out of her mind.

“You two working hard?” Ruth eyed the empty wine bottle on the table. “Jonathan said I needed to come here and help you out.”

Mary frowned. ‘'Jonathan told you to come here?”

“Yes. He said since he couldn't come help you out, I would have to.”

“Where's Jonathan now?” asked Gabe.

“In jail,” Ruth replied. “Black eye, broken ribs.” She cast a sharp glance at Mary. “Broken heart, for all I know.”

Oooooh, boy,
thought Mary.
This just gets worse and worse.
“Come sit down and tell us about it, Ruth. I bet Gabe will make us a pot of coffee.”

“Oh, I've got tea that works much better than coffee.”

“Let's do coffee first.” Mary looked conspira­torially at Gabe. “Some decaf. Then if we're still thirsty, we'll do tea.”

While Gabe fished the decaffeinated coffee from his cabinet, Mary made room for Ruth at the dinette. In a moment she was telling them everything—that Jonathan had finally arrived in Tremont, but had gotten into same kind of fight with Sheriff Dula and was now in the Nikwase County jail.

“He told me to go and find you,” Ruth said, her hard edge vanishing. “He said you would need my help.”

“What kind of fight did Jonathan have?” Mary knew Jonathan's temper well—slow to boil, but once it did, it could be explosive.

“I was telling him about everything that happened. Then I showed him that first picture of Lily, and he went crazy.” Ruth gave a loud sniff. “He grabbed the sheriff by the neck and lifted him up off the floor.”

Mary closed her eyes, filling in the rest of the blanks. Dula's deputies had no doubt come to their boss's aid, fists clenched, nightsticks drawn. “How badly was Jonathan hurt?” she asked softly.

“Like I said, he's got some broken ribs.” Ruth twisted the hem of her sour, milk-stained T-shirt. “It was horrible.”

While Ruth stirred milk into her coffee, Mary gathered all the photos of Lily they'd re­ceived and spread them out on the table. As Ruth looked at them, the woman who'd just moments ago burst in like a firecracker seemed to grow smaller by the minute, as if the grotesque images on paper were leaching her very life away. Mary pointed to the last picture. “Remember when I last called you and we had such a bad connection?”

Ruth nodded, lifting her coffee cup with shaking hands.

“What I was trying to tell you was that Gabe and I may have found the place where this last photo was sent from.”

“Where?”

“Murfreesboro. A larger town, just up the road.” Mary wondered how she was going to explain this and not set Ruth off on some emotional nosedive again. “Ruth, I think I know who's doing this.”

“Not the porno guy in Atlanta?”

“No. Somebody else. Someone who's using Lily to set a trap for me.”

Ruth almost dropped her coffee. “A trap for you? But why?”

Mary took Ruth's hand. How much should she tell of this to make it plausible? How much should she leave out, so as not to cause Ruth pain? She considered her options, then told much the same story she'd told Gabe, leaving out only the fact that she and Jonathan were making love when this whole horror had begun.

“But why do you think this Logan is after you?” asked Ruth when Mary reached the end of her tale.

“I don't know. But I think it must be about something that happened a long time ago, something between him and my father.”

“Did you tell Sheriff Dula about this?”

“No. I left a detailed message with Chip Clifford, from the FBI.”

“Do you think they'll come in on the case now?”

“All we've got is my conjecture. That's not much to convince them that someone they think is dead might be alive.”

Mesmerized, Ruth stared at the photos of Lily. Finally Gabe spoke.

“Hey, what happened to your cousin? Did she ever get back to Oklahoma?”

“I don't know.” Ruth looked up at him, her eyes regaining their feverish gleam. “She might be in Oklahoma. She might still be in Tennessee.” She gave an evil little chortle. “She might be dead, for all I know.”

“What do you mean, Ruth?” Mary asked, amazed. The woman had just cycled through three totally different personalities in the last twenty minutes.

“On the way over here I finally figured out what was wrong with my life.” Ruth leaned over the table and whispered, as if letting them in on a major secret of the universe. “It's clutter. You know? All the extraneous shit that just gets in your way. I was driving along and I started thinking about all the things and people I could do without and I looked over in the truck and there sat Clarinda, this living, breathing piece of clutter. So I just pulled over to the side of the road and got rid of her.”

Mary flashed another look at Gabe. “What did you do, Ruth?”

“I put her out,” Ruth replied triumphantly. “Threw her and her stupid backpack out of the truck.”

“On the side of the interstate? In the middle of the night?” Mary was appalled.

“Oh, she was just a mile from some town. You should have seen her. She came running after the truck yelling, waving her arms. I just gunned the motor and kept on going.” Ruth started to giggle, then her gaze fell on the photos of Lily. “If it hadn't been for that sorry piece of clutter,” she muttered brokenly, her laughter turning abruptly to tears, “none of this would have happened.”

Mary pulled Ruth close to her. She could feel her trembling beneath her filthy clothes. The last few days had taken a brutal toll on the woman. “Honey, would you like to take a nice hot shower? I can give you a clean T-shirt to put on afterward. It'll make you feel a whole lot better.”

“You think so?”

Mary nodded.

“Okay.” Ruth wiped her eyes, suddenly child-like. “If you say so.”

“Come on, then. Gabe will get you going.” Gabe turned on the tiny shower and gave Ruth soap and a clean towel. As she bathed, he sat down across from Mary, his face pinched with concern.

“Whoa,” he said softly. “Have we just gotten a glimpse of the new, improved Ruth?”

Mary shrugged. “I've seen distraught mothers before, but nothing like this. I don't much blame her for ditching Clarinda, though. Too bad somebody didn't put her out before she ever got to Tennessee.''

“But don't you think we ought to call somebody? The cops or the Highway Patrol?”

Mary thought for a moment. Though her instincts told her Clarinda could probably survive a nuclear blast with nothing worse than a broken nail, Ruth had left her cousin in a potentially dangerous situation. “Of course we should,” she conceded. “I'll call the state troopers and let them know there's a wildcat loose on I-40.”

Just as she reached for her phone, however, she heard the distinctive ring of the “William Tell Overture.” With a sinking heart, she read the screen.

“Get Ruth out of the shower,” she told Gabe. “We've got another e-mail from Lily!”

Forty-five minutes later, they stood back in the Kinko's computer room, waiting for their new photo to come out of the printer. With her hair still damp from the shower, Ruth wore one of Mary's T-shirts and a more rational demeanor. Both her crazed, frantic look and her zombie non-look were gone from her eyes, and she seemed her old herself again—intelligent, capable, and totally focused on finding her child.

“Can you see Lily yet?” she asked Gabe, who was standing closest to the printer.

“Hang on,” said Gabe. “It's coming.”

They waited the last agonizing seconds for the printer to finish. Finally Gabe grabbed the sheet of paper and held it up. This time Lily lay not in front of a gravestone, but at the base of a statue, where a naked youth, cast in what ap­peared to be bronze, held two horses rearing over his shoulders. A tall obelisk rose behind him, with an angel gazing down on the trio from above. Lily lay wrapped in a blanket at the bot­tom of the structure, where someone had propped up a crudely lettered cardboard sign that read “Greetings from Nashville, Tennessee.”

“Oh my God!” wailed Ruth. “My baby!”

Mary turned to Gabe. “Do you recognize this statue?”

“No. But if it's Nashville, he's still on the Trail of Tears.”

“How far is Nashville from here?” asked Mary.

“About forty miles.”

“Come on!” Ruth pulled them frantically toward the door. “Lily might still be there!”

An hour later, they stood at the base of Nashville's memorial to the Civil War. Ruth had followed them in her truck, and they'd stopped only to buy a city map at a local gas station. When they realized that it failed to list any points of interest, Gabe had asked directions from a cabbie working the graveyard shift for the Music City Cab Company.

“That's on Granny White Pike.” The taxi driver pointed at the map.

“Granny White Pike?” Gabe repeated the odd name.

“Yeah,” said the cabbie. “Go to downtown Nashville, get on Broadway. Go south on Twelfth Avenue. It's about three miles down the road, on the right. Spooky as hell at night.”

The cab driver had been right. The statue stood in a small park at the edge of a residential area, soaring up into the night sky, the tall obelisk glowing white in the darkness. The bronze youth and his two horses scowled down upon them, huge and menacing, making Mary dizzy every time she looked up. An eerie silence hovered over the place, as if the Confederate dead still kept watch. The spot where Lily had lain was empty, as were the other three sides of the monument's base.

“Come on,” said Ruth, after they'd made a wide circle of the statue. “Let's go closer.”

Mary grabbed her arm. “Not now, Ruth. We need to wait till the sun comes up.”

“But why? They might have left some clues—”

“Which we could overlook or trample in the dark,” Gabe interrupted, “Mary's right, Ruth. We need to do this when we can see.”

“So now you're now an expert on finding stolen children, huh?” Ruth's voice was caustic.

Gabe gave an edgy laugh. “I'm not an expert on anything, Ruth. I just happen to agree with Mary.”

“I know, I know. Everybody always agrees with Mary.” Ruth walked in a tight little circle.

“Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that. I think I just need something to eat. Or maybe to drink.”

“Come back to the van, honey,” said Mary. “I'll fix you something to eat.”

Ruth hesitated a moment, then agreed. “Let me fix us a pot of sassafras tea. It'll make us all feel better.”

“Okay.” Mary didn't want any tea, but she thought it best to tread lightly, given Ruth's mercurial temperament. “We'll fix sandwiches. You bring us some tea.”

A little while later they sat at the dinette.

Ruth had handed them individual cups of tea, while they had fixed her a grilled cheese sandwich. Mary smiled as the tea took her back to her childhood, when her mother would serve cold sassafras tea in the summertime, with little sprigs of mint in each glass.

“This tastes great, Ruth,” Gabe told her, sipping from the cup she'd poured for him.

“The old Cherokees regarded it as a curative,” she replied, once again her old self. “It does kind of make the world seem a little better.” She gazed out the window toward the statue. “Sometimes, anyway.”

“We'll go out at first light.” Mary glanced at her watch. It was ten past four. “Now, let's at least get a couple of hours of sleep.”

Ruth turned from the window and gave Mary the saddest look she'd ever seen. “Do you really think we'll ever see her again?”

“I don't know, Ruth,” Mary answered honestly. “But I promise you that neither you nor I nor Jonathan will ever stop looking for her, for as long as we live.”

Thirty

SOME THIRTY MILES away,
in an antique­ studded bedroom at the Tender Shepherd Home, Edwina Templeton lay propped against six down pillows, sipping a predawn cup of Earl Grey tea. A laptop computer lay across her thighs, and her fingernails clacked on the keys as she fabricated a completely new biography for her newest client. Though she'd always had a flair for drama and a small talent with words, turning Logan's little misbegotten offspring into a half­ Iranian princess had taken some real creativity. First she'd had difficulty finding an Iranian web­ site written in English, then, when she'd finally navigated to a collection of baby names, she'd had trouble picking one out. “Meshia” was a pretty name that would fit so pretty a child, but it meant “butter made of sheep's milk.” “Fojan,” which meant “loud voice,” suited Logan's baby in a different way, but it sounded like something you'd name a German shepherd. Finally, after hours of searching, she found the perfect name. It was both pleasing to the ear and represented all her hopes for this child. Logan's baby, who had arrived nameless, would hereafter be called “Behbaha,” which meant “best price.”

With the rest of the family history, Edwina was less obsessive. She named the fictional mother “Mahvash Ankasa,” simply because the names were Iranian and she liked the way the syllables flowed together. She made Mahvash a twenty-five-year-old naturalized citizen from Tehran, a bright, progressive young woman who had eschewed the black
chador
in favor of a white nurse's cap.

The father, she decided, should be from Tennessee, mostly because she had a friend up in Nashville who could cover for her if the adopting couple looked at this too closely.
John
, she wrote on the line below
Mahvash
.
John Winston McIntosh
. She put him down as being born in the county of her own birth, Sullivan, and made him twenty-four years old, the same age as her own father when she was born. She stopped typing for a moment as an odd little thrill of power swept through her. She could give this baby any kind of parents she wanted. Ones like her own—an overworked doormat for a mother, and a father who too often fell over drunk on the supper table. Or ones like the parents of the little girls who'd grown up to command the Christmas Tour of Homes—mothers who led Girl Scout troops, fathers who wore silk neckties and drove their children to school in shiny cars.

“I could go either way here,” she said, staring at the computer screen, energized as if she were beginning a novel. For a moment she was tempted, just to spite Duncan, to give his daughter a sordid background of drunkenness and shame. Then she remembered that paying parents preferred children with untroubled histories, babies of nice girls who'd made a single, egregious, nine-month-long error in judgment. And smart.
Very
smart. Above all else, the biological parents had to be smart. Nobody wanted a dull child.

“Let's see, Behbaha,” she muttered, beginning a new paragraph. “Your mother was a nurse, a pretty little thing who drowned, two months af­ter you were born. A Labor Day picnic turned tragic. She got in a canoe with friends to paddle across a lake. The canoe capsized halfway across. She could not swim. Your father tried desper­ately to save her, but the poor thing sank like a stone. He tried to keep things together, but with little money, two more years of medical school, and a tour in the Navy ahead of him, he decided that the best thing would be to find someone who could give you a better home.”

She filled up a whole page, adding the little details that brought poor, bereaved Dr. McIntosh and the doomed Mahvash to life. When she finished, she studied the screen and smiled, pleased and not unmoved by her work. It would surely bring a tear to the driest of eyes, move the coldest of hearts.

“Okay, Behbaha Jane McIntosh,” she said, saving her file. “You've had a tough beginning, but things are beginning to look up. In no time at all, you're going to get new parents, I'm going to get a big fat check, and we're both going to sleep better than we've ever slept before—you in a comfy new crib, me on my new forty-eight thousand-dollar bed.”

Downstairs, in far less opulent quarters, Paz lay on his own bed, listening to the darkness outside the window. Last night, when he stepped back into this room he thought he'd never see again, he felt as if some priest had granted him sanctuary. For the first time in days, he was not speeding down a highway, trying to mollify Ruperta, Gordo, or a screaming infant. When he finally lay down here upon his cool, clean sheets, he'd longed to take Ruperta in his arms and explain why he'd acted like such a
mani
á
tico.
She, however, would have none of it. She'd put Gordo's baby in a little crib in the corner of their room and turned her back to him in bed, without so much as bidding him goodnight. Now, though his eyes burned with exhaustion, he knew Scorpions waited. Soon they would come. Per­haps even now they stood, hiding in the shadows, tossing their little brown bottles up like coins, in wait for his wife.

“Ruperta!” Paz whispered, blowing softly on the back of her neck. He must explain all this to her before Señora awoke. Perhaps together they could work out same kind of plan. All by himself, he was coming up dry. “Ruperta, wake up!” She mumbled two words in Spanish and yanked the sheet up to her ear.

“Ruperta!” he whispered urgently. “I have to tell you something!” He reached over and squeezed her breast, rubbing her nipple until he felt it grow hard. He felt a corresponding ripple of desire deep in the pit of his stomach, but he ignored it. As much as he wanted to thrust him­ self deep inside her, he had to tell her about the Scorpions. “Ruperta!”

“What is it?” She turned all of a sudden, wide awake, her voice angry.

“I need to talk to you—” The words stuck in his throat.

“About what, Paz? It's the middle of the night.”

“We have to make a plan, Ruperta,” he said sternly, trying to sound as if he always pondered life-altering decisions long into the night. “And we have to make it now.''

“A plan for what? More little babies to steal from their mothers? More candy-eating monsters to tour America with?”

He sat up and ran the back of his hand along her face. The soft hair on her cheek felt like down. “I have but one monster, Ruperta,” he whispered. “It does not want candy, but it will eat your eyes.”

“Eat my eyes? What are you talking about?”

He drew a shaky breath, wondering if he dared repeat the Scorpions' threat. As obscene as it felt to give voice to such a thing, not to let Ruperta know would be far worse.

“The Scorpions came last week, Ruperta. They still think I have their money.”

For a moment she said nothing, then she sat up and pulled her knees up under her chin. “How many came?”

“I saw only one. More, of course, were hiding.”

“Did you explain that you never had their money? That Jorge lied?”

“I did. The Scorpion did not believe me.”

“What did he say?”

Paz swallowed. “He said if I did not give them their money in three days, they would put acid in your eyes.''

She looked at him in stunned silence, then, to his horror, she began to cry, hastily covering her mouth lest her sobs wake the baby. Her tears broke his heart. “It's Tuesday morning,” she sobbed. “How could you have kept this from me for so long?”

“I had not wanted to tell you at all,” he said. “I thought Gordo could be our escape! We could slip away from him and go someplace the Scorpions could not find, then all this baby business began.”

“Oh, Pacito!”

She collapsed against him, weeping. He held her, miserable, as her body trembled against his. What a wretched husband he was! Unable to protect his wife from such monsters! He wished they were here now, every one, in this room. He would kill them, one by one, with his bare hands.

“Sshhhh!” He held her tight, burying his face in her hair. Soft and freshly washed, it smelled like flowers in early spring. “Don't cry! I won't let them do it!”

“But how can you stop them? We thought we escaped them in Nogales, then in Atlanta. Al­ ways, they show up.”

“I will stop them, Ruperta,” he vowed, cover­ing her wet face with kisses. “I swear before God I will.” He slipped his hand down the front of her gown, then gently laid her back on the bed and pushed her nightgown up.

He lay on top of her. “You are my wife,” he whispered, his lips against hers. “As long as I live, no Scorpion will harm you.”

“Oh, Paz,” she wept, threading her fingers through his hair, pulling him closer. He kissed her until she squirmed with pleasure, then thrust himself inside.
You will have this many more times to pleasure your wife
, he seemed to hear a voice whisper inside his head.
This many and no more
. As he felt himself dissolve into her he tried to disregard the voice, wishing that he could stay in this little room forever, looking into the dark liquid stars of Ruperta's eyes.

They lay like that for a long time, her breath­ing comforting him like the soft, low
swuush
of the waves at Vera Cruz. Finally she stirred beneath him.

“Paz?”

“S
í
?”

“What are we going to do?”

He rolled off of her, his stomach once again a hard knot of fear. “I don't know.”

She nestled against his chest. “You know what we did is wrong, don't you?”

“Running from the Scorpions?”

“No. What we did with Gordo.”

“You mean taking the baby.”

She nodded. “Do you know what Señora is going to do with her?”

Paz glanced at the little crib in the corner. It and its contents loomed like yet another hurdle to clear before they could escape the Scorpions. “Give her to rich people with no children of their own.”

“She's going to sell her, Paz. Señora does not give anything away. Señora sells. Señora is a
comerciante.”

“That is not our problem, Ruperta. It's between Gordo and Señora.”

For a while Ruperta lightly stroked the scar on his stomach. Then she raised up on one el­ bow. “Paz, we cannot let that happen.”

“What?”

“The baby being sold like a goat or a parrot. She has a mother who loves her. We must return her.”

“Ruperta, are you crazy? We have no car, no money, no way of even finding again the place we took the baby from. Even if we could take her back, the American cops would arrest us for being
secuestradors
! And for what? To return a child to a woman who ran off and left her in the care of a
puta
?”

“Paz, we've committed a great sin. We must make it right.”

“It's a sin to interfere with things that are not your business! You will bring down even worse trouble than the Scorpions! I am your husband! You must do as I say!”

Suddenly they heard a noise. Paz leapt to his feet, at first thinking the Scorpions were at the door, but then he realized it was only the hoarse
clack
Señora's great clock made just before it struck the hour. Still, Ruperta got up in a swirl of sheets and nightgowns and hurried over to the crib. She scooped the baby up before the first whimper left her lips and held her close.

“Put her down, Ruperta,” Paz commanded. “You need to be concerned for us, now. Gordo's baby will have a happy life with rich parents who will buy her everything.”

But Ruperta stood there in her nightgown, her beautiful eyes bright and defiant. “What this child needs is her own life back, Paz. With her own mother. Even a dog deserves that!”