End Time (7 page)

Chen fished in his pocket and opened his own cell phone. Again, the gritty tune filled the car. “Save your battery,” Bhakti told him. But Chen ignored him.

The Ford Interceptor and Jimmy's cop car started to slow—they were reaching their destination.

He had been to this place once or twice before. The desert around Sierra Blanca was just that: white mountains. Sand, dust, scrub. Railroad tracks paralleled the interstate; once upon a time the town served the Texas & Pacific and Southern Pacific. Not much to write home about: a depot museum in a red caboose railroad car, the oldest working adobe courthouse in Texas. And the distinction of once being the largest sewage sludge dump in the nation, on the short end of the stick from places as far away as Detroit or New York City. Municipalities saying,
Here we sit, muscles flexin', giving our crud to another Texan.…
Was Eleanor trying to tell him something? Bhakti wondered. Was this the writing on the wall?

A cluster of streets and houses; an in-between border town, neither totally alive nor totally dead. Population 553. Five a.m.; the stars still shone hard and bright in the night sky like distant witnesses. But the horizon glowed purple in the east; dawn soon. The three cars came to a halt on the apron of an abandoned ruin of a truck stop. Square concrete building, spiky weeds had overtaken the place, paint peeled off the awning over the pumps. The plate-glass windows of the storefront were intact, but split with long cracks, the wind and heat taking their toll.

Deputy Jimmy and the Texas Highway Patrolman were already out of their cars; Bhakti and Chen followed the beams of their flashlights lancing over the ground. The patrolman held some sort of cell phone signal locator, and Deputy Jimmy seemed to skip along behind the man looking over his shoulder; their cowboy boots going
click-clack
on the paved surface, then swishing as they moved through the weeds.

The two policemen paused a moment looking down at the locator, and the spot on which they stood. Then pointed in different directions as if uncertain which way to go. An argument was bubbling between them—the service station? The road, the rail tracks? Deputy Jimmy complaining, “Look it's all over the place, first north then south, then north again.” With the Texas Highway Patrolman arguing, “No it always swings south again.” And the two men weren't getting anywhere.

Bhakti's BlackBerry buzzed in his shirt pocket. Really weird, as if the batt still possessed a drop of juice. The screen ID flashed
ELEANOR
, a Twitter feed:
Here I stand stupidly texting, thinking railroad tracks be Chen's last hope thing.

“Up to the railroad tracks,” Bhakti urged. “Don't ask me why. Eleanor seems to know already.”

Chen gave him a weird, doubtful glance, but didn't challenge him. The fathers picked up speed, past the truck stop and onto a strip of desert. The two lawmen hustled to catch up. The banked gravel bed of the railroad tracks stood out like a low wall. The flashlights danced back and forth. They caught a bit of color and automatically homed in on it. What they found was very, very bad. Two cell phones discarded on the gravel and a pile of girls' clothes strewn on the tracks.

Bhakti had to restrain Chen from scooping them up; the man was in tears, frantic. “Don't touch them, no!” Bhakti hissed, and it took the two lawmen to shake some sense into the father, blocking Chen from the empty shreds of jeans and tops, torn undies.

“We'll get dogs. We'll start tracking first light, just as soon as they get here. Just don't touch a thing, you'll ruin the scent.”

Chen collapsed to his knees. “No, no, God no.…”

How much worse could it get?

They found out soon enough.

The dogs didn't have much luck; they were good dogs, they snuffed around for a bit, but wound up mostly going in circles. Some of the clothes were shredded as if torn apart by a berserk animal.

The cell phones weren't much help either. No strange numbers in the memory, a confusion of sweaty prints. There should have been some kind of registry, cell IP address, a digital fingerprint on the Felix song—but there wasn't. The stupid song seemed to have come out of thin air, untraceable. And by the middle of the day, by the looks of the lawmen, neither believed Bhakti or Chen had actually heard it. DNA would take some extra time. But no footprints, no remains; the girls had simply been plucked naked from the earth, leaving only their rags behind.

The two fathers drove back to Van Horn, neither speaking a word. The gray interstate rolled under them; a gritty roar seeping into every crevice of their brains. A blinding, deadening sound; the yellow sun coming up, a blistering eye.

Bhakti could see his days stretching out before him like a path of broken glass on which he would crawl. There'd be trips down to every border patrol post five hundred miles east and west. A hundred meals in diners, another hundred in Motel 6s. Every other night, wondering how long his strength would last, how long he could keep on searching. Handing out the endless stack of flyers in every border town from New Orleans to San Diego, trying to get on “America's Most Wanted,” and the thousand copies to every cop's office in the United States; there'd be the stapling up of the handmade handbills with Janet's picture on a dozen lampposts on every Main Street, and public notice boards that everyone walked by without looking. He'd walked by handbills like that himself a million times, just walked by with a touch of pity at the faces of children, the milk-carton kidz half covered by ads for landscapers, house painters, and goats for sale.

Then there'd be the telephone calls that rang in the middle of the night, heartbreakers of well-intentioned folk who thought they'd seen Janet, but had mistaken her for someone else—and the dirtiest of all, people who hadn't seen her but worked some scam, preying on the desperate.

Then the calls home to Eleanor, calls he'd never want to make. Reduced at last to what? A hopeless wreck of a man ready to go into any seedy fortune-teller for a séance with one of Janet's stuffed animals she still kept on her bed? At least now that Eleanor could walk, it wouldn't be so hard for her to come along.

But that day wasn't through with them yet. Not with Chen at any rate. Chen stopped the car in his subdivision driveway. Amy, his wife, had turned on the lawn sprinklers and now kneeled on the short clipped grass soaked to the skin, her gleaming black hair in a glistening rope about her neck. As Chen and Bhakti got out of the car the water pressure in the sprinkler faded and died. It sometimes did that. Wait an hour, the water would come back.

“Amy?” Chen ran to his wife. Still staring at the two, Bhakti went to the side of Chen's house and punched off the sprinkler spigot on the control timer. Then walked carefully through the damp grass to where the two both knelt. Chen had put his arm over Amy's shoulders; they were staring at something on the wet lawn. An object, no, not an object—

A body part:
an ear with an earring
.

Bhakti recognized it immediately: one of Lila Chen's hematite earrings, a long pendant, with little polished knobs of tortoiseshell ending in a dangle of shiny gray metal.

He recognized it because his daughter Janet liked them so much and sometimes borrowed them. Eleanor had been talking about getting Janet her own pair of hematite danglers. It seemed fitting; the faintly magnetic iron oxide some thought encouraged healing, intuition, serenity, and balance. Magical iron. They'd even found hematite on Mars, yin-yang on a planetary scale.

Yes, Janet was always borrowing them—
but not this time
. That wasn't Janet's ear. Yes, an ear, but not Janet's ear. You see, Janet had two piercings, this ear only one.
Not Janet. Thank God it wasn't Janet's ear
; that meant she might be alive—and Bhakti felt a twinge of guilt that he could think such a thing with Amy and Chen kneeling before him and so obviously torn in little pieces.

The guilt washed away in a rush of relief, then a clutch of dry-mouth. The fear came back; his little girl still missing. At least alive, but still missing. Amy shivered uncontrollably, inconsolable. Chen had picked up the ear and just stared at it, dumbfounded; the earring tinkled a little as it trembled in his hand.

“Wen, Amy,” Bhakti tried to get through to them. “We have to give that to the police; they have to examine it. Wen!” But Wen and Amy ignored him. Wen pulled his wife from her kneeling position and slowly walked her back to the house, clutching the last bits of his child. The front door opened and closed, and Bhakti found himself alone on their green lawn. At his feet a scrap of paper, somehow forgotten. He picked it up. A handwritten note:
They've been real good. Thanks for everything.

He glanced back at his own house across the street. Eleanor still stood behind the closed window, this time holding the curtain open by the sash. Had she seen who delivered the grisly bits of Lila? After a moment the curtain fell back in place and the figure of Eleanor disappeared from view.

Then Bhakti noticed something even stranger at every house in the subdivision, up one side and down their manicured street. The curtains were open a crack there too, people watching—all the nosy hausfraus? Mrs. Biedermeier in her blue housecoat, Mrs. Stanton in her tennis whites, all the wives standing at their plate-glass windows. He could see their eyes staring at him. One-two-three-four down the subdivision street. Simply staring. After a moment the curtains flicked shut.

Had anyone seen anything? Dammit! Knock on one door, wait, make the demand. What did you see? Who dropped off the things on Wen's lawn? Did you see something—a bicycle, a car, a license plate,
something
?

Mrs. Biedermeier didn't come to the door at all.

Bhakti knocked and hammered, called out hoarsely, “Mrs. Biedermeier!” Nothing. Then soft padding came to the closed door. “Mrs. Biedermeier, I'd just like to ask you—”

But a soft voice came through the blank door. “Go away, just go away.”

“I'm going to have the police come and ask.”

“That's fine, just go away.”

The same thing happened at Mrs. Stanton's, and this time Bhakti nearly kicked the damn door in. But he stopped himself.
Forget 'em—
time for another police call. Oh, God, that's right, the BlackBerry was dead.

In a dumb rage Bhakti stumped heavily back to his own front door. Eleanor stood in the living room.

“I didn't see anything either.”

Of course not—she'd been standing behind a closed curtain the whole day staring at the curtain fabric. Eleanor hadn't moved from her spot. Somehow this took all the wind out of Bhakti's sails. He made the police call from the house phone, and Deputy Jimmy said they'd be out shortly. But something had collapsed inside—an emptiness Bhakti had never felt before.

*   *   *

The fire at the Chen's house started four minutes later, burned hot and quick and couldn't be brought under control for fifteen minutes. Enough time to burn mostly everything. None of the neighbors came to watch, no kids, no nothing—and that was strange too. Fires bring people out: kids on their bikes, fathers watching in their trek shorts and sandals—but not this time.

Fire trucks, ambulances, nearly the whole Van Horn Sheriff's Department, but Bhakti seemed to be Amy and Wen Chen's only witness from the subdivision. He watched the sheriff's men knocking on doors and talking to whoever opened them—Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Biedermeier—but it felt only like show, like they were going through the motions for him alone.

Deputy Jimmy came back with his notepad. “You say there was some sort of evidence, body parts?”

“I told you, Jimmy.…” Harder to say than he thought. “An ear with a dangling earring.”

“What kind of earring again?”

Bhakti went through it once more. Deputy Jimmy nodded, taking it all down. “Yeah, we found some burned”—he paused—“burned stuff. Flesh I mean. Just a lump, really, all mixed in with timber and plastic near one of the bodies. I'll get it processed.”

The firemen rolled their hoses, the EMTs brought two bodies out of the Chen house on stretchers. Amy and Wen. Cause of death? They were pretty scorched up, but it looked like smoke inhalation. Deputy Jimmy halted at the mouth of the ambulance and unzipped the body bags for Bhakti to look. Bhakti made the final nod, heard the final zip of the zipper, and silently bowed his head in a wordless good-bye.

The afternoon passed, the sun went down, and still Bhakti hadn't gone indoors. He sat on his front stone steps staring at the rubble of the Chen house and smelling the rancid smell of burnt oil that comes from a lot of torched plastic. The streetlights came on, casting a nice, familiar glow up and down the subdivision. Televisions glowed in houses; the sounds of people making dinner, the clink of plates and utensils.

American normality.

But nothing came from Bhakti's house. Was Eleanor still standing at the window behind the curtain?

By some unknown impulse Bhakti rose and went across the street to the damp ruins. Char and tar and crunchy wood crumbled under his feet. The open frame of the house, timbers and weight-bearing posts, moved by him like burned wraiths. The floorboards creaked ominously under his feet as though ready to break.

Drawn to Lila Chen's room he looked around.

The beam from his flashlight lanced about the charred walls.

In a corner sat a girl's dresser, white-painted, blistered and scorched. An item stared at him from the dresser top. A single hematite earring, a match for the one in Lila's ear. That happened to girls a lot; they lost earrings. They bought replacements. Could Deputy Jimmy have been that sloppy to miss this one? You'd think he would have bagged it out of thoroughness.

Gingerly he picked the earring off the dresser and for no reason at all put it carefully in his shirt pocket.

Why?