“In your dreams,” she sniffed. “I suppose this means my car isn’t safe any longer.”
“Amanda, your car was never safe.”
She rolled her eyes at him, exasperated. “I mean, the state troopers will be seriously on the lookout for it now.”
“Well, we’re stuck with it,” he said. “We can’t rent one—we’d have to show a credit card, not to mention a driver’s license. And I’m no car thief. A spree killer, yes, but not a car thief.”
“Damn, damn, damn.” Amanda considered the matter in grim silence a moment. Then she raised her eyebrows as if considering something, went to the window, and peeked out through the curtains. “Do you still carry that little pocketknife of yours?”
“What about it?”
“Hand it over.”
He pulled the tiny Swiss Army Knife out of his pocket and gave it to her. She stepped into her shoes, opened the door, and stood there in the doorway wrapped in her towel. “If I’m not back in two minutes, send for the cavalry.”
“Amanda, where the hell are you going?”
It was no use. She had already gone out into the humid night. Carl tore over to the window and looked out into the parking lot. He saw nothing. He heard nothing. He paced the room until she returned a couple of minutes later, out of breath. “Here,” she panted, handing his knife back to him. “I had to break the point off. Sorry.”
“Amanda, what did you—”
“I unscrewed our license plates and switched them with one of the other cars in the lot. It’ll be hard for them to ID us with Alabama plates.” She smiled triumphantly—and a little smugly.
“Don’t you think the guy from Alabama is going to notice?”
“Not a chance. People never look at their own license plates. I’ll bet you seventy-five percent of the drivers in America don’t even know what their license plate number is.”
He stared at her for a moment, admiringly. “You would have made a great criminal, you know that?”
“Carl, I
am
a criminal,” she said. “You did say there was good news, too, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“So what is it?”
“The editor of your paper is very concerned about you. He said you’re like family.”
“How touching. I wonder if he hits on all his other relatives after he’s had one glass of cabernet sauvignon.”
“That’s not all. He said you have a history of getting trapped in one-sided, self-destructive relationships.”
“Well, he had to say that.” She shrugged. “Anytime you turn a guy down, he decides you must have a problem with men. That’s the only way his ego can handle it.”
“He also said you had a way of getting too involved in your work. That it leads you to make irresponsible, sometimes dangerous decisions.”
She let out a long, pained sigh. “It’s amazing,” she said angrily. “They can turn everything you’ve ever done in your whole life—good, bad, or meaningless—against you when they want to. They can take something and turn it into something completely different. And no one has a clue. I’ve spent my whole career in the news business and I never really understood that before. Not really. No one can. Not until it’s
you
. I’m going to make you a promise, Carl. I swear to you that when we come out of this crazy thing, when our lives return to normal. I am going to be a changed journalist.”
Staring straight ahead, all he said was, “Amanda …”
She didn’t say anything in return. Just shook her head slightly, as if she knew what he was going to say but didn’t want him to say it aloud. But he felt that he had to say it.
“We’re never going to come out of this thing, Amanda. Our lives are never going to return to normal.”
She bit her lip and one hand rested on his shoulder, squeezing harder than she intended. “I know that,” she said quietly. “But I have to keep talking or I’ll start crying again. And I don’t think I can handle crying twice in one day.” She let out a strangled moan that fell somewhere between a sob and a laugh. And he could not help noticing the way her chest rose and fell under the towel. He watched her, feeling helpless, remembering other times he had watched her. Remembering when, after the watching, the towel had come off. Remembering it all …
“If I asked you to do me a small favor,” she said quietly, “would you do it?”
“Under the circumstances, I don’t see how I can refuse.”
Slowly, tentatively, she went over to the bed and stretched herself out on it. “Would you hold me? Just … hold me?”
His mouth was suddenly dry. “I can do that.”
He lay down beside her. She came into his arms and snuggled against him, warm and moist and smelling of Dial soap. Carl felt an overwhelming rush of animal responses as he lay there, cradling her in his arms: sensory memories awakening, bells going off, lights flashing, engines racing.
“I’ve missed you,” She said drowsily. “I’ve missed being with you.”
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“Missed talking to you …”
She was fading now. Drifting.
“I’m here now,” he said. “I’m here.”
“No more complications,” she murmured softly. “Just hold me. Don’t need complications.”
“No complications,” he echoed.
“Just want to be held. Just need to be held …”
He watched her eyes close. Felt her breaths even out, saw her slide toward a gentle slumber.
“Me too,” Carl whispered. “Just need to be held.”
They fell asleep that way, joined together, with the lights on and the air conditioner cycling noisily on and off and the occasional car swooshing by on the dark road not far beyond their window.
They woke at dawn, still wrapped in each other’s arms. No words were said. No words were needed. They cleared out within minutes, back to Amanda’s car, heading toward Corinth.
They spent the morning combing the town. There were tree-lined streets of lovingly preserved antebellum homes, some of them now converted to bed-and-breakfast stops for tourists. There was a massive old courthouse, thriving central business district on Fillmore Street. A banner suspended over the street read “Next Week: Annual Slugburger Festival. Come One, Come All and Eat Our Slugburgers.”
Amanda would not even speculate on what a slugburger could possibly be. And she refused to let Carl ask anyone.
The sun was blinding, the heat was blistering, the air heavy and still and scented with honeysuckle. They pulled in at the Borroum Drug Store, the oldest drugstore in continuous operation in the state, and bought a couple of frosty cold Dr Peppers, which they drank down so quickly it made their throats ache. Carl also bought a Corinth Seed Company cap and a pair of dark shades. With his stubble, his rumpled jeans and T-shirt, and his new short, dark hair, he felt relatively safe. He looked no different from anyone else drifting along in this little town. He did not, he hoped, look like a deranged killer on the run from the police, the FBI, and the news divisions of every major network and cable operation.
A group of old-timers sat in the back of the store, passing the morning in a cloud of cigarette smoke. While Carl was trying on shades, Amanda bummed a Winston from one of the elderly ladies and struck up a conversation, steering it quickly to the subject of local factories. There was a big new Caterpillar diesel engine factory right on the outskirts of town, she learned. The most notable
old
factory was the Corinth Machinery Company, which had originally been built way back in 1869 as a cotton factory. In the early 1900s boilers and sawmill equipment had been produced there. During the 1950s it became the Alcorn Woolen Factory and did a thriving business. Presently it was set up for the fabrication of plywood.
They rushed back out to the car, eager to take a look. What had been the Corinth Machinery Company was on Highway 72, right across from Dildy’s Garage, which did full auto repairs and, Carl was willing to bet, sold more bottles of Coca-Cola than any other station in America. He bought three bottles and downed them immediately. Amanda had learned her lesson with the Dr Pepper and sipped her bottle slowly and delicately. Standing in front of Dildy’s gas pump, they stared across the street at the old brick factory.
“Well, does it strike a chord?” Amanda asked, feeling the sweat trickle down her neck.
Carl shook his head. “It’s a factory. Like every other factory.”
“That’s it?”
“They lived about a mile away from it, I remember that.”
She nodded, each nod sending another trickle of sweat down her long neck. They got back in the car and circled the area, two miles in each direction, looking for anything that would jog Carl’s memory. But nothing did.
Corinth was picturesque. It was prosperous. It was not Simms.
So they headed on out, hitting the one-stoplight towns that surrounded it, Amanda behind the wheel, Carl working the map and trying to fight back the waves of frustration and desperation that kept washing over him with each fruitless stop: Jacinto, Kossuth, Glen, each and ever one of them strictly a farming town. No help—although in Rienzi they did learn that General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s beloved horse was named for this very town. Kendrick did have a big Kimberly-Clark plant, but it was brand-new, just like the Caterpillar plant had been.
So it was back to Highway 45 and south to Tupelo, where Elvis Presley was born and where they would pick up Route 6, which would take them west across Mississippi toward the delta. Old Mr. LaRue had been right, Carl reflected gloomily, peering out the window at the lush green countryside shimmering in the heat. They were investing in casino gambling big time down here. One giant roadside billboard after another promised unimaginable riches and glamor and fun in Helena Bridge, Tunica, Casino Center, Vicksburg, Philadelphia, Biloxi … The bright colors and load boasts were a sharp and angry contrast to the country stillness.
“I’ve been thinking,” Carl said, glancing over at Amanda. Her eyes were on the road, her chin raised with grim determination. “And I think we’ve got to narrow in on the factory. LaRue was probably wrong about it being a poultry works.”
“Why is that?”
“We want a place that smelled
nasty
.”
“Have you ever been near a slaughterhouse?” she asked challengingly. “They smell plenty nasty.”
They passed by a sign for yet another casino. This one said: “Best Sports Book Outside of Vegas. Be the First to Pick Next Year’s Super Bowl Winner. Great Odds.”
Carl was silent a moment. Something was coming back to him, snaking into his brain, but in an instant it was gone. What was it? A detail he’d overlooked, something he’d forgotten. No, he couldn’t dredge it up.
Damn
. There was something, some detail in Rayette’s diary about the town he’d named Simms …
“They compost the manure for fertilizer, you know,” Amanda went on. “It’s very effective. And even smellier.”
“But would it make people sick to live near it?”
“Maybe it was a paper mill,” she offered. “There used to be a lot of those down here, I believe. Notorious chemical polluters, one and all. A garment factory is another possibility. I covered the State Department of Environmental Protection for a while when I worked in Albany. The state was trying to get the feds to declare this abandoned hat factory outside of Rochester a Superfund site. Would you believe they used to use
mercury
to make dye? My God, this one old-timer told me you could tell the color of the hats they were making that day by the color of the river was. They ended up contaminating not only the river but the soil on both sides of it. Absolutely nothing could be built there, and it was a total, toxic eyesore, so they—”
“I think you’re on to something here,” Carl broke in excitedly. “Your friend Shaneesa could do a computer search of the EPA’s files to see if there are any Superfund sites around her. If we’re talking about a big polluter, they’d be on record, right?”
“Well, no. You didn’t let me finish the story. There’s a sad part.”
Carl groaned inwardly. “Okay, tell me the sad part.”
“Superfund cleanups are so expensive it’s mind-boggling. They literally have to take away freight-car loads of the riverbank soil to someplace like Nevada. It’s prohibitively expensive. And there are thousands and thousands of sites that need to be cleaned up. Too many. So unless the site is near a heavily populated area, and that population happens to be white and affluent—and if you’re keeping score at home, the place we’re looking for flunks miserably on all three counts—then the feds can’t be bothered.”
“So what happens to the site?”
“Not a damn thing. Everyone just tiptoes around it and lets it fall into ruin and neglect. They call them brown fields, because nothing will ever grow there. It that’s what we’re dealing with, then the EPA would have no record of it whatsoever. The state of Mississippi
might
have something on it, but frankly I doubt it.”
“Well, shit,” he growled.
“My sentiments exactly.”
They were nearing the town of Abbeville now, halfway between Holly Springs and Oxford, and they followed a sign that said “Business District.” Abbeville’s business district turned out to be one abandoned gas station, a savings and loan that looked as though it would be abandoned before long, a working gas station, and a general store called Frankie and Johnnie’s, which had a sign boasting “Home Cooking.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked him.
“Starved,” he replied, gazing at the place through the car window.
“You think we can risk a take-out order?”
“No, I think we should sit down and eat like normal folks. If by some chance someone does recognize us, they’ll figure it can’t be us because we’re sitting there eating like ordinary people. It’s like when two people are cheating on their spouses. If they meet in some dark, out-of-the-way little restaurant, it’s incriminating. Whereas if they meet out in the open, no one suspects a thing.”
She shot a look at him. “Jesus, Carl, when it comes to thinking like a criminal, you’re not too shabby yourself.”
“Don’t sound so horrified. It’s a handy trait right now.”
“I’m not horrified, just surprised. I thought I knew you.”
“I thought I knew me, too,” he reflected, his words hanging in the air between them. “Maybe I didn’t. Maybe you never really know yourself at all until something like this happens to you.” He glanced at her. “What do you say?”