“Hi, Jenny,” she said, sounding as tired as she looked.
I felt at a loss as to what to say next to her. But—as the extraordinary sensitive she was—Cleo noticed my confusion. Her face changed, sagged somehow, and everything I had looked for, but hadn’t seen in her before—the terrible sadness, the pain—was all there, visible at last.
“You know?” she asked me.
I stepped toward her. “Yes. Cleo—”
“Don’t say it.”
She looked away, squinting at the setting sun. It was late, getting on toward twilight. Then she pointed, but I didn’t understand what she was pointing at, at first. “In an impact,” Cleo said, “between a car and a human body, imprints can be left in some fabrics. Like leather. Or vinyl. An entire license plate can be imprinted into the clothes the person is wearing.”
Now I understood: she was pointing at a license plate on a car.
“It had been raining,” she said. “Elena had on her favorite raincoat. It was a yellow vinyl slicker. When it stopped raining, she didn’t want to take it off.
“So when he hit her, the license plate number was pressed into Elena’s slicker.”
I said, “Cleo, there is no license plate number in the police report.”
“No.” Cleo looked carefully at the backs of cars as they drove past us. “I took her slicker off her, before anybody got there. Because I couldn’t hold her properly while she had it on. I wanted to feel her close to me.
“I still had it with me—the slicker—when they took me back to my car. We had driven in that day, just to bike the trail together. We thought it would be fun in the rain, God knows why. It was harder to do, for her, than I realized it would be. I had thought it was a paved trail, but of course it’s dirt, which made it harder for her to pedal.
“I think that’s why she rode out on the highway without stopping. She’d finally gotten up a good speed, and she was too excited to stop. Or, maybe she didn’t even see the road. I didn’t see it, myself, in time to stop her.
“So then, afterwards, I was back in my car, and my daughter’s body was in a mortuary in a town I’d never been to before, and it was so strange. There she’d been with me in the other seat of our car that morning, just a few hours before, and now I was alone in the car, and my daughter was dead.
“And there was this slicker on my lap. When I turned it over, 1 saw the number imprinted. I knew, right then, I knew I’d never give it to the police. I knew it was my task to search for him, and then it would be my responsibility to decide what to do about him.
“I never went back home at all, Jenny. I never did. I called.” She laughed, an odd, strangled sound. “And I told my parents what had happened, and I said, I can’t drive back without her. I just can’t. And they were unbelievably understanding, and they didn’t ask me to do what I couldn’t do. They said, we’ll take care of everything. Elena and I lived with them. They said, we’ll come to you. They said, stay there, we’re coming down there to be with both of you.
“So they did, my wonderful mom and dad, and other friends have also come to see me, but nobody can convince me to go back without her.”
After a moment, when I was sure she was finished talking, I said, “You got the job as delivery woman—”
“Yes, so I could have a good reason to drive everywhere looking for that license plate. I got a private investigator to look it up in the motor vehicle registry, and I know his name, Jenny, and lots of others things about him.”
“Tell me?”
“His name is Johnny Vaught, and he’s forty-nine years old. He’s an alcoholic, and he’s got a criminal record for a whole bunch of stuff. He’s not married, never has been married, no children of his own. At the time he killed Elena, he didn’t have a job, and he was on probation.”
“If you know who he is—”
“And I know his address.”
“Then why—”
She looked over at me, with an unreadable expression. “Why haven’t I confronted him? Or turned him in? Because nobody has seen him since the accident Nobody’s heard from John Vaught since the day he killed my daughter.”
That surprised me so much that for a moment I couldn’t even think. But then I said, “Cleo, doesn’t that probably mean he just kept on driving, that he left this town, and probably even left this part of the country?”
She shook her head. “My private investigator is good at finding people. My parents helped me get enough money together to hire the best one we could find—we saw him profiled on television, he’s so famous. He’s good, and he swears Vaught has never surfaced anywhere.”
“Then he could be dead, couldn’t he?”
“Where’s his body? Where’s the car? Why doesn’t anybody who knows him know that he’s dead? Our investigator believes he’s still alive. I think he hid the car. If I keep searching, eventually I’ll find it.”
With those words, I was suddenly not only distressed, but also frightened for her. This was an impossible, possibly insane obsession. The investigator should have discouraged her. Her parents should have stopped her. But then, I realized: Who could? There’d been a terrible time in my own life after my mother died, when I had been similarly obsessed with finding “truth.” And, I had to admit, I had found it, against all odds. Maybe Cleo could, too.
I didn’t know anything to say, except, “Can I help you?”
She smiled that wise, compassionate smile that belonged on the face of a much older woman, not on one who was still so young. “Actually, you have, all of you. You’ve treated me like a normal person. You’ve let me think I could have a life with friends in it someday. Just …” Her smile faded. “Not yet.”
“I didn’t have any idea,” I admitted.
“Don’t feel bad, nobody ever does. I work really hard at accepting it all, and you’d be surprised how often I actually feel a little peace. First, it was only maybe one second out of an entire week, but now it’s sometimes several minutes at a time, maybe even half an hour, usually on a day when I’ve been really busy and people have been really sweet. This is a nice town, you know? People are really nice. Without even knowing the truth about me, you’re all so patient and friendly to me.”
“But that’s you, Cleo. You’re kind of a remarkable person.”
“Oh, no, I’m not.”
There wasn’t any point in arguing that, but I was right: If people were unusually sweet to her, it was because she inspired that kind of response.
“Sometimes lately, I feel comforted,” she said, “as if Elena is still here, somehow. And sometimes—quite a lot of the time—I just feel, well, this is the way my life is, and I have to accept that. But that’s only sometimes. Most of the time, I miss her so much, and it just about killed my parents, and it’s so awful—”
She stopped talking and just looked at passing cars.
“But one thing I can’t surrender,” she finally said, “is my need to find him. It’s my job. I have to do that, and I’m not even sure exactly why anymore, because it’s not as if it would bring her back to me.”
Dimly, I’d been hearing the loudspeaker from the festival. Now it sunk in that it was saying my name.
Cleo and I both heard it at the same time.
“Jenny Cain! Come to the front gate immediately! Jenny Cain, please come to—”
We weren’t very far away from from the gate.
I was surprised when Cleo kept me company as I turned and walked that way. I was glad she did, though, because that meant I didn’t have to abandon her when what I really wanted to do was to take her hands and hold them. I stepped in close to her and put my arm around her shoulders as we strode together toward the “witches.”
“Jenny!” It was an elderly “witch,” one of the volunteer ticket takers, who ran up to us. I took my arm away from Cleo, but she stayed close to me. “The most awful thing just happened. My ticket bag fell off my belt someplace between here and the portable toilets, and I’ve looked and looked, but I can’t find it!�
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What she was referring to was a big black cotton drawstring pouch that was issued to every ticket-dispensing witch at the entrance gate. Inside each pouch was a precounted roll of entrance tickets—they were orange and looked just like old movie theater tickets—that the witches threaded out one at a time through the opening in the pouch. It had been a clever idea cooked up by our volunteers, who’d also sewn that bags and stuffed them.
If a pouch went missing, it meant we’d be vulnerable to scalpers who might sell the tickets—at six bucks per adult—to tourists who wouldn’t know the tickets were worthless unless they were punched at the time of sale. Tourists also might not know that children were supposed to get in free. It wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, but it wasn’t great, either.
“Did you notify security?” I asked her.
“We thought we should tell you first, Jenny.”
Too bad, I thought, since Geof’s security guards might already have spotted the pouch, if they’d only been told to look for it.
“I’m so sorry!” She seemed upset out of all proportion to the problem.
“Don’t worry,” I tried to reassure her. “Obviously, our foolproof system of tying the bags to your belts wasn’t really foolproof. It’s not your fault.”
“But Jenny!” Tears came to her eyes. “I put my belongings in there. My billfold, with some cash, and my driver’s license and my credit cards are all there—”
I began to comprehend her dismay.
“And my wedding rings,” she said, topping off the bad news. And then she burst into tears. “They were snagging on my costume, so I took them off. I never dreamed—oh, Jenny, I have to have them back! They were my late husband’s grandmother’s rings, and they mean everything to me.” Through her tears, she added, “I’d better tell you that they’re worth a lot of money. There’s forty-thousand-dollars’ worth of diamond rings in that bag!”
I could have happily hung that witch, right there on the common.
Instead, I asked her to jot down for me a rough estimate of the number of tickets she’d already torn off, and to go around and warn the other witches to double-check the security of their ticket pouches. Then I asked her to walk me along the path she’d taken when it disappeared. Cleo came along with us, and I alerted every security guard I saw to be on the watch for somebody carrying it.
“Maybe,” Cleo suggested, “it just got buried over with leaves.”
It wasn’t going to be easy to see, if it was still on the ground, especially with evening coming on. After we three had carefully shuffled and kicked our way back to the toilets, I picked my way around back of them, because the lightweight bag could have gotten kicked back there by a succession of unwary feet. With my head bent to the task, I wouldn’t even have noticed the boys, if one of them hadn’t made the mistake of yelling, “Oh, geez, it’s her!”
I looked up.
There was the little band of ten-year-olds, all masked, now surrounding a boy on a bicycle. I heard one of them yell, “Go! Go! Before she catches you! Go, Chappie!” The little gang broke apart, and there was the lone bike rider—Chappie, in a silver half-mask—and I saw something black and weighted hanging from his handlebars. He took off pedaling as if demons were chasing him.
“Wait!” I shouted, as I started running. “Chappie, wait! It’s okay, just … wait!” When I reached the other kids, they were already scattering away from me, but one of them didn’t move fast enough. I nabbed him by the back of his T-shirt.
“Whoa, big fella. What’s the deal?”
He looked more defiant than scared.
“You messed things up for Chappie’s grandpa!” he said, glaring at me in spite of his fear. “Chappie says his grandpa says you’ll be the ruin of this town. Chappie says his grandpa says everything you do costs him money, and causes trouble, and somebody ought to stop you! So we grabbed that lady’s tickets when they fell off, and Chappie says he’s going to throw them away, so it’ll hurt this festival, ’cause you hurt his grandpa!”
“What’s he planning to do with the bag?”
“He’s going to throw it in the river!”
“River? There wasn’t any real river around here, but then I thought: Crowley Creek.
I released the boy, who ran after his friends.
Cleo, who’d come trotting up and heard the whole thing, said, “Jenny, the kid’s on God’s Highway. I’m going to stop him.”
The other boys had abandoned their bikes, which were more or less propped against the back of the reconstructed church. Cleo grabbed one of them and hopped onto it. It was only after she rode off that I realized something she didn’t seem to know: Chappie wouldn’t be aware that she was chasing him to try to help him; he’d think she was coming to get him—to arrest him, no doubt, to his kid’s mind—so he’d only pedal faster and faster to try to get away from her.
“Cleo!” I shouted futilely at her back.
I faced the inevitable: I, who had not mounted a bicycle since I was thirteen years old, was going to have to get on one, and a stolen one at that I plucked a green one out of the pile and swung a leg over. I wobbled a lot at first, but then it was fairly easy to ride. Since the bike was a little too small for me, I felt more in control of it than I would have on a full-sized adult bike. When I had last ridden a bike, it had one gear and foot brakes; this thing had sprockets galore and slender silver handbrakes, and I could only hope I wouldn’t end up going ass over handlebars.
28
GOD’S HIGHWAY WAS NOT, AS CLEO HERSELF HAD EARLIER POINTED out, paved. It was hard, packed, somewhat rocky earth. It was regularly used as a bike path, however, so it wasn’t all that difficult to navigate—except that bikers usually didn’t have to pedal at top speed, didn’t have to dodge festival patrons, and also had probably actually been on a bike sometime in their previous twenty-five years of life.
There was actually no speeding for me until I got the full hang of it and I ran out of crowds. By the time that happened, I was on my way out of town, with no sight of either of the bikers ahead of me. No Cleo, no Chappie.
Dammit, Pete, I thought, why’d you have to do that? Why couldn’t you keep your mouth shut around the child?
The trail took me through gentle glide slopes and around wide turns—nothing challenging to somebody accustomed to it. But my breath was already coming hard, and my legs were sending up notice that they weren’t going to be good for twenty miles of this.
Crowley Creek wound along near the old railroad bed for much of its route in Port Frederick, but there were only a few places where there was easy hiking access from the trail to the water. All but one of those places lay behind us, in the direction the boy had not taken. The only other good spot to stop, bike down to a bridge, and toss something into the water, was at the trail crossing near Nellie’s house.
At that precise moment, with that realization, an irrational fear—at least, I hoped it was irrational—began to seize me. The farther I pedaled—my lungs and my legs protesting more and more—the greater became the fear, until I felt nearly sick from it.
No. Nothing bad was going to happen. I said that and other reassurances to myself in time to the wheels.
“Oh, Chappie,” I cried to the wind, “Please, please stop.”
He didn’t stop.
But he must have tired and slowed, because about a mile from the trail crossing—when the only thing keeping my legs moving was dread—I could see the back of Cleo’s T-shirt.
Somehow, I pedaled faster. And then I saw the back of Chappie’s shirt. He was bent over his handlebars, pumping like mad, his ten-year-old legs probably used to soccer and basketball and baseball and probably not even tired.
The crossing was a half mile away. Or less.
“Cleo!” The shout wouldn’t leave my lungs. “Cleo!” It was only a faint cry. “Stop! Don’t force him into the crossing!”
She never heard me.
There was a child ahead of her, and she was going to “save” him.
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br /> I started praying, even as I pedaled. “Please, please, don’t let him get hurt. Nobody hit him! Oh, please.” I thought of the sweet face looking hesitantly up at me from inside his grandfather’s car … of how he had made a funny face when I said there would be arts and crafts at the fair … of how he laughed when I joked that we’d have to get in lots more food to feed him and his friends … of how scared and upset he was when Pete had knocked me over.
The three of us came flying around the last bend before the crossing, flying through the warm and dark gold and purple light cast through the leaves by the setting sun. The shadows were long now, and it was hard to see the bumps and rocks in our path. I prayed for a rock to spring up in Chappie’s path, for his bike tires to bend askew and send him sprawling. A broken arm, even a bump on his head, was preferable to—
“Stop!” Faintly, Cleo’s cry floated back to me. I heard desperation in it. She’d finally recognized the real danger. By trying to catch him and to save him from getting into big trouble, she could—we could—drive him pell-mell, heedless, into the highway, into the path of anything that was coming down the hill from Nellie’s house.
Cleo screamed and screamed.
The boy rode on.
Toward the opening in the trees, he flew. And then, when he was almost on top of it, he seemed to see or to sense danger, because his bike suddenly began a sideways slip. Sliding, sliding, he was going down, down toward the highway pavement.
And then I saw that Chappie hadn’t braked because of the highway. He was trying to stop because there was a person lying across the trail, right at the highway’s edge.
Chappie’s bike struck a person lying there.
I saw the boy fly off his bike and land on top of the person, whose body lay in the way. He—a small, raggedly dressed, filthy-looking man—put up his arms to shield his face from the boy and the bike, but they hit him hard.
Chappie tumbled off, then quickly picked himself up and started to run.
“My God! Stop!” I screamed it.
Twilight Page 30
