The Baker's Wife (33 page)

“My hands.” Audrey had no care at all for her petty injuries. What were they compared to what her husband and son were suffering right now? “Your blood did this to my hands, Julie. And your husband is killing me.
Killing
me. Tell me why. What happened?”

“I'm so tired,” Julie said, slipping back into her fever. “I'm just so tired.”

Audrey slammed the cup of water onto the floor by the cot, sloshing onto the wood. She demanded God tell her why her family should die while this woman should live, and in the same breath she begged him to forgive her for not understanding a thing.

CHAPTER 31

Diane knew when her weight landed in the driver's seat that something was wrong with her father's old truck, something off-balance and unstable, but she waffled over whether to say this to Miralee—so she said nothing at all. She turned the key in the ignition and heard the engine turn over just as it should, a high protest settling down into a comforting rumble.

After a moment's hesitation, Diane dropped the truck into gear and stepped on the gas. The tires spun, and the truck stayed in place. She looked at Miralee.

“High centered,” she said and jumped out of the car. She peered under the carriage while Miri waited in the passenger seat. “On a big old tree stump. No wonder your mom stopped here.” Leaning into the cab, Diane reached for the key and shut off the engine. “I'm going to have to hike back to get the medicine, if we get it at all.”

“What if you leave the engine running? Like Audrey did down in the lot. Police might see it if they get up here—the weather's clearing out.”

“But it's not as cold as it was. The sun's almost peaked.” Even so, Diane climbed back into the cab and started the engine once more.

“Do you think my dad . . . ?” Miri couldn't bring herself to say the words.

Diane shrugged.

“You're the only one of us who saw him, Diane. Could you tell? Was his mind . . . ? I can't believe it. I don't want to.”

“All of us are capable of doing things we never dreamed of doing, good and bad,” Diane said. “But mostly bad. That's all I know.”

“I always thoughts parents had everything figured out, that it's the kids' job to catch up with them. All I wanted was for them to tell me the truth about life as they know it. But they seemed to think they were supposed to protect me, like if they lied to me about their own misery I'd never have eyes to see it.”

Diane wondered if there was a way for the two of them to rock the truck off the log. But the girl was too small to break a twig off a branch.

“Who wants to catch up with people who can't tell the truth?” Miralee said.

“You're the biggest hypocrite of all, Miri.”

“What?”

“I spent twenty-five years in a prison with women who lie better than you know how to,” Diane said. “Even Audrey sees through you, and she's as pure as they come. Let's figure out this two-way radio.”

Miralee's eyes were wet. Diane turned on the radio, wondering if her childhood knowledge of how to operate it would come back to her.

“You're not being fair,” Miri said.

“You think your mother's a hypocrite because she tried to protect you from her own unhappiness. Think about that.”

“Oh, so she's the perfect mom.”

“She's as imperfect as the next parent. But if you start demanding perfection in the people you love, you're going to end up lonelier than she ever was. You ought to expect as much from yourself as you do from them.”

“I see that's worked out really well for you.”

It was pain talking, and Diane let it have the last word. She had no credentials for pep talks or parenting anyway.

The transceiver emitted a static squeal as Diane searched for a working channel.

“If our cell phones won't work out here, how do you expect that radio to?”

“Cell phones and CBs don't operate on the same frequencies.

We're on a hill—no guarantees I can get anything up here, but it's worth a try. Sometimes CBs work where cell phones won't.”

“But you just said this is a two-way.”

“A CB is a type of two-way.”

Miralee opened the glove box. “Maybe your dad stashed a telegraph away in here too.”

“If you don't have something positive to say, don't say anything at all,” Diane said. Did that line ever work? “Your sarcasm is starting to annoy me.”

She started on channel 19, thinking to pick up traffic on the highways, which even then were possibly out of range of their location. If she was lucky she might find another nearby rural CB operator—one who had access to a telephone. On an even slimmer chance, she might butt into a skip conversation, which would be all but worthless if the parties were out in Montana or Mexico or someplace. Asking them to contact one Captain Wilson in Cornucopia, California, would be like asking them to call the man in the moon.

On channel 5 the voices of another party were audible under a heavy layer of interference. Diane adjusted the squelch to reduce the hissing but couldn't manage enough clarity to break into the conversation. She turned slowly through all forty channels, tinkering with the squelch dial and maximizing the mic gain, but channel 5 was the best she could get. She went back to it.

“I'm sorry,” Miralee said quietly.

Diane tried to hide her surprise by answering swiftly. “Apology accepted.” She brought up the clearest reception she could, which wasn't quite good enough for her to hear a pause in the conversation. She'd have to be rude.

She pressed the transmission button on the mic and said, “Break for emergency.”

If they heard her, she was not acknowledged.

“Break for emergency,” she repeated.

“Mad Cow, you've been walked on, repeat,” one of the parties said.

“That's a good sign,” she said to Miralee.

“What is?”

“They can't hear each other because I'm interrupting their channel. Something's getting through.”

“Break for emergency,” Diane said more loudly. “Ten-seventeen, I think. Please? Ten-seventeen!”

“Go ahead, ten-seventeen.”

“Name's Diane Hall. I need to reach Captain Wilson with Cornucopia PD.”

“You . . . ten-twenty-one.”

“What's ten-twenty-one? I haven't been on here for a while.”

“ . . . use the . . . phone!”

Miralee snatched the mic out of Diane's hands and pressed it to her lips, “Listen, Mad Cow and Dimwit, if we had a phone we'd use it! There's people dying and Wilson's the only one who can help. So do us a favor and call him!”

“We don't even know where these people are,” Diane whispered.

“You know where Cornucopia is?” Miralee shouted into the mic.

“ . . . right . . . Tulare County . . .”

“That's right. You can figure it out. Tell him we found Julie Mansfield. Got that?
Julie Mansfield
.”

“Ten-four, Wildcat. Wilson . . . Cornucopia, Mansfield. What's your twenty?”

My what?
Miralee mouthed to Diane. Diane took the mic back.

“The Old Gauntlet Road, one mile due east of the Silver Gap trail.”

“ . . . closed . . . snow . . .”

“Yes, but that's where we are! Send medics. Do you hear me?”

The man's reply was too garbled to make out. “. . . name?”

Which name? “My name's Diane Hall. But that shouldn't matter. Just tell Captain Wilson
Julie Mansfield
. And Silver Gap trail. Okay?”

Static covered the voices.

“They got it,” Diane said doubtfully to Miralee.

“Is that the truth? I mean, is that what you really believe?”

Diane recognized the real question underneath the girl's hardened image. “It's what I want to believe,” she said.

“I wanted to believe that the Bofingers were terrible people,” Miralee said. She leaned across the seats and grabbed Diane's arm. “I wanted to prove it. I set them up to prove myself right—that I shouldn't envy Ed's Norman Rockwell life, that his lovebird parents were only an illusion. That they didn't have anything I needed.”

“Did they?” Diane asked.

Miralee's eyes filled with sadness. “It isn't fair that some people should get everything they need while the rest of us get nothing.”

“There was a time when I thought that too,” Diane admitted.

There was no sarcasm in Miri's tone this time. “But now?”

True sympathy for this girl filled Diane's heart. “Right now I think your mom needs you, and you should give her whatever you have to offer. Let's go.”

The cat would not stop yowling. Barred from the storeroom and full of Estrella's cream, it started looking for a way out of the sealed building. The tabby cried by the back door for a full minute before Jack stomped his foot and yelled at it.

The startled cat darted through the kitchen, scooched under the bread rack barricade, then leaped over the counter into the dining room. It tried a window ledge, missed, and opened a rip in one of the curtains with its claws. Over the next few minutes the sounds of it pouncing on wobbly chairs and rattling miniblinds and swiping flatware to the floor with its tail reached the storeroom. The only other sound was the ticking of the old clock out in the dining room.

Jack paced, as agitated as the cat.

When all its options were exhausted, the frustrated feline started to mew again.

Jack kicked his bucket stool into the cabinets. The whole room thundered. He'd show that animal a way out.

“What are you doing?” Leslie asked as he passed her. She set her books on the floor.

He checked his magazine and his silencer as he stalked through the kitchen. He rolled aside the bread rack just enough for his body to slip through, then entered the service area. He braced his elbows on top of the glass pastry case, cocked the hammer, and saw the cat's erect tail weaving through the legs of a chair. Jack fired and the wood splintered. The cat became a gray blur. Someone in the storeroom shrieked. Leslie, Jack guessed.

In the slice of light cutting through the torn curtain, a silent shower of fine light cat hairs floated to the ground.

Jack aimed at the trash can where the cat had taken shelter. The pop this time was followed by a thud. The cat squalled and caught about four feet of air as the plastic can fell over. Jack shot again, careful not to hit a window as the cat bounded away over a table and then under the coffee service station. A creamer thermos took the blow this time. It fell off its perch and hit the floor like a failed bomb, spraying white milk in all directions.

He took his fourth shot without pausing, anticipating the cat's direction.
Pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft
, and this time blood instead of dairy spattered across the honey-colored laminate floor.

The cat vanished.

Leslie's shrieking turned to a wail, and Jack saw her yank free of Ed's grip on her at the entrance to the kitchen. She bolted out, behaving as if Jack didn't exist and couldn't put his last bullets right through her heart.

Estrella and Ed were shouting at Leslie to come back.

Jack stopped shooting, as stunned as the cat, which was limping, its body pressed up against the exposed wall. The cat's tail was three times its usual size. The hair on its spine rippled. It was aiming for shelter under a wheeled cart set up for dirty dishes.

Leslie's skinny legs carried her past the end of the counter and straight into the animal, who probably thought she was its fifth bullet, its final hit. She scooped it up and it tried to push off of her, twisting and scratching and hissing and raising a welt on the side of her neck. She was undeterred. When the beast saw that it couldn't escape, it reversed its strategy and clung to her with all its claws, teeth bared and ears laid back flat. The girl held on, her arms a clamp around the cat's wriggling middle. But she directed her fury toward Jack.