by Donn Taylor
“Sign anything you like, Cupcake,” she chirped. “It goes on your card anyway.”
I signed my name without further comment. Mara made a great study of keeping a straight face. Nor did she comment outside as we fought through a gusty wind back to the car.
Once we had the engine running, though, she mimicked the serious look I’d given the waitress and said, “All right, Cupcake, what do we do now?”
That started us laughing—deep, uncontrollable, satisfying laughter that swept away my saturnine mood. It seemed to affect Mara the same way. I realized we’d never laughed together before, and I rather enjoyed it.
“I had that put-down coming,” I said when I could breathe again. “Some Englishman once said, ‘When a German tries to be graceful, he falls down the stairs.’ The same thing happens when I try to be funny.”
“I don’t know.” She gave me a sardonic blue glance. “I thought you were hilarious. But really, what do we do now?”
I pulled back onto the interstate in the deepening twilight. “We drive into Laila’s bi-county area and tuck in somewhere for the night. Tomorrow morning we find all the information we can and hope we stumble onto something that brings what we already know into focus.”
“We can hope,” she said. “We already have masses of information, but none of it points toward solving the murder. Where will we stay tonight?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “We ought to find a motel somewhere out there.”
“Two motels,” she said. “We’ve started enough rumors already.”
“Okay,” I said. “Two motels.” I should have thought of that first, but I’d been too busy brooding about my poor showing in Insburg.
We drove on into the night, with nothing to see except the highway sliding past in our headlights and nothing to hear except the engine drone and the low whine of tires on pavement. The car seemed an enclosed world, a sealed capsule spinning through space. I felt as if time itself had ceased to exist.
Mara broke the silence. “You told me about your problem with Staggart. I ought to tell you about myself.”
I risked a momentary glance at her face and saw intense emotion written there. The last thing I wanted was an emotional entanglement, so I said, “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“Don’t get noble about it,” she said. “I got you into this mess about Laila, and you have every right to know why I’m . . . the way I am.”
“I’m not getting noble,” I said. “In the Laila business, I’m saving my own skin. And if you’ll pardon my repeating myself, you don’t have to tell me anything.”
Her chin lifted that significant fraction of an inch. “All right, I don’t have to tell you. You’ve helped me do things I couldn’t do for myself, and you haven’t tried to . . . um . . . color outside the lines or anything.” Irritation tinged the emotion in her voice. “For sixteen years I haven’t told this to anyone, and now for some dumb reason I don’t understand I want to tell you. So quit arguing about it and listen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She looked out at the darkness for a few moments, then began. “You’ve read my file, so you know I was born in rural Kentucky and named Alice Thornton. My parents raised me in a very small, very strict country church. We didn’t travel, we didn’t go to movies, and we didn’t watch much TV. The church families formed an insulated fundamentalist community. I grew up thinking all men were surly and all women submissive, and that God intended it that way. Every few weeks, the church pounded Ephesians 5:22 into us: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’”
She paused and searched my face, apparently trying to see my reaction. I studied the road and said nothing.
“I never dated,” she said. “That set me apart in high school. When I was sixteen, an older man—he was twenty-nine—began taking me home from church. I was flattered. He asked me to marry him, and I accepted because I thought that was God’s plan. It thrilled my parents because they believed their daughter was doing what women were supposed to do.”
She spoke as if to herself. “I spent the next three years as that man’s servant. He took me out of school and put me to keeping his house and vegetable garden. He went to work every day—he was a carpenter—but I stayed home and went nowhere except to church with him.”
She paused and I said, “Sounds like the old ‘barefoot and pregnant’ routine.”
She gave a bitter laugh. “He tried that, too, but for some reason it didn’t work. Not for lack of effort on his part. He called it my duty. I came to hate being touched.”
I could find no way to escape her story. I felt like Coleridge’s wedding guest who had to listen to the Ancient Mariner’s tale whether he wanted to or not. And the wedding guest didn’t have a headache.
“That doesn’t sound like much of a life,” I said.
“It was no life at all.” Mara stared out at the highway. “I had time to read the Bible, though. I learned that the same passage in Ephesians speaks to husbands as well as wives, and I found Peter’s instruction that husbands honor their wives as ‘heirs together of the grace of life.’”
She sighed. “I tried to tell my husband that. He told me to shut up and do what I was told. Next day I left him.”
“How old were you then?” I hated that man for the damage he’d done to the concept of manhood.
“I was nineteen, with no high school diploma and no saleable skills. I used grocery money to catch a bus into Louisville and got a job as a waitress. I found a woman lawyer who handled my divorce on credit. It took me three years to clear my debt to her. She also helped me change my name to signify a complete break with the past.”
“You chose ‘Mara’ because it means ‘bitter’?”
That drew a sad smile. “I followed Naomi’s example in the book of Ruth, though our reasons were different. My lawyer also told me about GED tests, so I took one and passed it. That’s the first time I realized I had brains enough to make something out of myself. I used the GED to join the Army because it offered educational benefits.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “That wasn’t an easy way to go. Some of the drill sergeants—”
“Found out I didn’t play their game. That set me apart from the women, too. So I spent my off-duty time earning college credits. I knew my church and parents had lied to me, and somehow I felt a deep drive to find out what was actually true. No matter how ugly the truth turned out to be, I had to know.”
“No relativism?” I asked. Now she had me curious. “You couldn’t just believe something that made you feel comfortable?”
She looked at me like I’d said the Indians could buy Manhattan back for twenty-four post-Carter pennies. “Relativism is wishing, not thinking. The only reason for believing something is that it’s true. How you feel about it doesn’t matter.” She caught her breath and continued. “In college after my discharge I studied all the faiths I could find. All except Christianity. My church had cured me of that.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. “I understand. Seeing bad conduct by Christians can drive people away from Christianity itself.”
She turned to face me. “You’re describing an emotional reaction, not a reasoned process. But by the time I figured that out, I’d settled into Wicca as the closest to truth I could find.”
“How did a Wiccan get accepted in a seminary?”
“You shouldn’t have to ask that.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Diversity is the god of the educational world, and several seminaries wanted to prove how inclusive they were. In spite of my having to work my way through undergraduate study, my grades were good enough to get their attention. Three seminaries offered scholarships. I took the best offer.”
“That sounds like a tough and lonely way to go.” My problems in graduate school looked pretty mild beside her life story.
“I don’t allow myself to get lonely. I don’t need anything except my job and my discipline. That’s why I have to hold on to them. They’re
why I have to get this Laila mess straightened out.”
“We both have to. Unless you’d care to go halves with me on a used-car lot.”
“Go halves? I can’t even pay to have my clunker fixed.” When I looked at her in alarm, she added, “My credit card can cover the motel. It’s a stretch, but I can handle it if I keep my job.”
Lights appeared in the distance. “That’s the town of Bullerton up ahead,” I said. “It’s a county seat and within fifty miles of every place we need to visit. We’re more likely to find motels there than farther on.”
“It’s your decision,” she said. “I haven’t even looked at a map.”
Bullerton had a population of six thousand, but we found no motels on the eastern side of town. I was about to decide I’d been too optimistic, but at the western city limits we found two motels side by side. Both appeared undistinguished, but I parked in front of the better one.
“This one’s for you,” I said. “Use my tag number when you register.”
She came back a few minutes later for her suitcase. “They asked no questions,” she said. She scowled at the other motel and asked, “Are you going to stay in that flea trap?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I slept in worse in Honduras.”
She looked doubtful but carried her bag into her motel. I watched through the glass doors until she disappeared around a bend in the hall. Though I was certain no one had followed us from Overton City, uneasiness crept into my stomach. Mara and I both had cell phones. But still, she was a woman and she was being left alone in a strange town.
My motel proved to be everything one could wish for in a barracks for migrant workers. Most of the rats had already gone to bed and the cockroaches seemed fairly tame. I found no bedbugs under the mattress when I stashed my brown suit there for overnight pressing. The napkin-thin towel convinced me not to investigate the shower until morning. The bedsprings (yes, springs) screeched like a giant cricket fiddling on a blackboard with a hoe file, but I was too tired to worry about it.
For a few minutes I lay still, brooding on the day and the situation. Mara’s story had moved me more than I liked to admit. She’d clawed her way up from nothing to earn a Ph.D. Her determination not to be managed and her determination to find truth had cut her off from other people. But now that she had her degree and believed she’d found truth, what was she going to do with them? I wondered if she’d thought of that.
With an effort, I forced my thoughts back to my own situation. We’d placed a terribly high bet on finding the key to Laila’s murder out here in her home territory.
But what if we found nothing?
At long last, haunted by the sound of Clyde McCoy’s mocking wahwah mute, I dropped into a restless sleep.
CHAPTER 29
Mara and I survived our night in shabby motels as well as breakfast in a restaurant that made Brimstead’s look like Antoine’s. A phone call to Bi-County Consolidated High School got me an early afternoon appointment with Morris Wimberly, the principal who’d written Laila a letter of recommendation. I didn’t lie too badly—just repeated the story that I was a professor researching a posthumous recognition of Laila for the university yearbook. Who knows? Dean-Dean might even make me write one. If I ever got reinstated, that is.
Nine o’clock that morning found Mara and me approaching Laila’s hometown, the tiny farm village of Alfalfa Heights. It lived up to both words of its name. It was built on a mound that towered a full four feet above the surrounding fields. The other land lay flat as a billiard table without pockets, its surface brown rather than green now that the crops had been harvested. A few grain elevators here and there evidenced what the crops had been.
The town consisted of a dozen unpainted buildings straddling a two-lane asphalt county road. Half the buildings stood empty and unrepaired. Two pickup trucks waited by the gas pumps in front of a convenience store. None of the three men inside responded to our inquiry about Laila, but all agreed we ought to talk to Sophie. They seemed to assume I knew who Sophie was.
But I didn’t, so I asked, “Who?”
“Sophie Sloan, her mother. You don’t know much, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “How did you ever guess?”
It didn’t take long to find Sophie’s house in a town with only six occupied buildings. Hers was an unpainted prefab with plywood walls and floors. A drunken beetle could have crossed the living room in seven seconds flat. Sophie herself must have been close to eighty years old. She was small and canary-thin, but with a deep, throaty voice. Her sharp black eyes offered stark contrast to her gray hair and drab complexion.
She seated us on a faded couch and settled herself into the room’s only chair. It stood at a sewing machine buried beneath a pile of men’s shirts.
“You’ve come about Dee Laila,” she said. “When I heard she’d been killed, I knew somebody would come.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mara said before I could speak. “We hoped you could tell us something about her. The more we know about her, the more likely we are to find out who killed her.”
“Who killed her?” Mrs. Sloan said. “That could’ve been anyone she ever knew. She gave us all reason enough.”
Her word us gave me a jolt, but I said nothing. Neither did Mara, who merely leaned forward expectantly.
Mrs. Sloan continued, her face sad but without tears. “Dee Laila was the only child Jed and me had, and we loved her too much. Or maybe not enough. We couldn’t say no when she wanted something. We lived on our own farm then, and money wasn’t too tight. It’s no wonder she grew up thinking nobody else mattered.”
Mara and I said nothing. Mrs. Sloan spoke again, now as if to herself.
“Most people get their selfishness knocked out of them at school, but she was born knowing how to make people do what she wanted. She could talk ’em into using their lunch money to buy her candy. Still, things weren’t too bad till she turned sixteen and Jed bought her a car. When he did, he bought us two years of nightmare. We never knew where she was or what she was into. She always lied when we asked, so we finally quit asking.”
Mara spoke softly. “Did you ever find out?”
“We found out when Sheriff Briarcliff came and arrested her. She’d organized a teenage gang that stole everything in two counties that wasn’t tied down. They was only convicted of one burglary, though. They all got probation, and I hear the younger ones got their records cleared. But Dee Laila was eighteen, so her record stood. We was just grateful she didn’t go to prison.”
“Who were the others?” I asked. This was the first lead to more than we already knew.
Mrs. Sloan frowned. “There was the Wiggins twins, Neila and Sheila. Neila died of pneumonia a few years back, and Sheila moved to St. Louis. Bobby Harkins went off to school somewhere back East and I lost track of him. Lem Peterson was in the group, but he drove his Harley under an eighteen-wheeler a couple of years ago. And there was someone called BJ that I never met. Dee Laila had others in her gang, but I never knew the ones that didn’t get convicted. Except, she once mentioned the Wimberly kid, the one that works over at Bi-County High now.”
Mara spoke in a murmur. “I know that must have been painful for you. . . .”
The black eyes focused on her but still shed no tears. “That wasn’t all. Jed couldn’t take it when they found Dee Laila guilty. He just up and left—said he was going into town for supplies, but he left our pickup in front of the feed store and never came back. I couldn’t keep the farm up, so I sold it and moved in here.”
“And Dee Laila . . .?” Mara let the question hang.
“I lent her money to go to college over in Insburg. That’s the last I heard from her.” Mrs. Sloan’s gaze shifted to me. “I see you looking around and wondering how I manage to get by. I still have a little something left from the farm. And I can sew.”
She pointed to the pile of shirts. “They don’t make shirts now with accurate sleeve lengths. Everything’s 32/33 or 34/35. So some of these w
ell-off farmers around here pay me to alter their sleeves to the right length. I’m the only one in two counties who’ll do it, so they pay pretty well.” She laughed. “I thank the Lord for stingy manufacturers. They’re what keep me eating.”
“Your daughter had quite a bit of expensive equipment,” I said. “You should get a fair amount of money from it.”
She sniffed. “Any money Dee Laila got is dirty money, and I don’t want any of it. Tell them to give it to a church.”
“I’ll tell them,” I said, and stood to leave.
Mara went over and squeezed her hand. “Thank you for sharing. I know it wasn’t easy.”
Mrs. Sloan’s eyes for the first time showed tears. “I wish I’d had a daughter like you.”
“And I wish I’d had a mother like you.” Mara gave her a quick hug and hurried past me to the door, her eyes averted. By the time I reached the car she had her seat belt on.
“Forgive my question,” I said, “but what did happen to your parents?”
“I don’t know.” She stared out through the windshield. “If they or my husband ever tried to trace me, I never heard of it. I think they wrote me off—put me down the memory hole as completely as I did them.”
We drove back toward Bullerton in silence, but her words and those of Mrs. Sloan echoed in my mind. One family was too authoritarian, the other too permissive, and both extremes resulted in total estrangement. Yet the profound mystery of character formation had made the results so different in other ways: Laila so completely pathological, Mara so adamantly ethical.
Our silence continued as we lunched on prefab sandwiches and Cokes at a truck stop and then drove to Bi-County Consolidated High School. It consisted of three connected brick buildings isolated above bare, open fields that seemed as endless as a calm sea.
In spite of the cold wind, we paused outside the car to gaze at the open expanse, and I quoted the line that described my feelings: “‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
