The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  Around that time, she said, a woman and a girl of eight or nine had turned up in Anza. The woman, Lorene Smith, said her husband had gotten a job as a ranch hand somewhere south of there and sent for her and the girl to come out from Kansas. Except the husband got killed in a brawl while the wife and daughter were making the long bus trip, and now they were stranded and didn’t have any money. Somebody had told Lorene there was a family up in Anza looking for a housekeeper and cook, so she got some bus money from Travelers Aid down in Los Angeles and came to apply for the job.

  “Now, nobody,” Reed said, “ever had a housekeeper in Anza or ever said they wanted one. Not only that, there wasn’t any bus through Anza that morning Lorene said she and the girl had got there on the bus. What I’m saying is, it looked like they’d walked there from someplace. Both of ’em like skinned rabbits, pale as ghosts. It was Waddy Babbick’s wife, Dot, took ’em home for a meal, let ’em stay for a while. See, in those days, even into the 1970s, little places like Anza were still sort of the Wild West. People didn’t ask too many questions, just lent a helping hand if they could.”

  A lot of elderly people in wheelchairs were rolling themselves or being pushed by attendants into the gym. The woman in tights had made the musical selection for the aerobics class. Kenny Rogers. Loud. Most of the class was robustly singing along with “Reuben James” as they began their warm-up exercises.

  “We’re going to have to get out of here,” Reed noted, unfolding an aluminum walker as she stood. “They tend to get rowdy. Let’s grab a latte at the coffee bar and then sit out by the pool. I think you’re going to be very interested in what I have to tell you next.”

  25

  The Dessert (sic) Diner

  I was beginning to question my impulsive decision to visit Reed McCallister by the time we were settled at poolside with our lattes. She was definitely a character and loved to talk, but then, I thought, don’t older folks always love to talk about the past? Her detailed history of the shack in my photograph was taking forever and would lead nowhere. And I had no idea where I expected it to lead in the first place.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to go shortly,” I told her. “You’re very kind to talk with me, but—”

  “But you’re starting to wonder if I’m a crazy old coot who’ll never shut up,” she finished the thought. The caramel eyes watched me with amusement from behind three different lenses. “You young people are always in a hurry. Remember, this story has waited almost your entire lifetime to be told.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I follow these wild goose chases nobody sees but me while everybody else does the real things, the important things. My partner says I’m irrational.”

  “Of course you are, dear,” she replied, smiling. “What has being rational ever gotten you?”

  “But this is serious,” I argued. “It’s not about me. Four prominent women are dead, a suspect has attempted suicide, the FBIis involved, for crying out loud, and I’m chasing a story about a shack.”

  “You’ve come to the right place, then,” she said. “Now, what happened was that Dot Babbick came up with the idea that Lorene and Tommi could live up there in the old line shack, and Lorene could run the concession. Lorene was grateful for the roof over their heads and agreed to do it. She got to keep twenty percent of the concession proceeds to save up for their bus fare back to Kansas. Only thing is, they never did go back. They stayed for two years.”

  The mother and daughter settled in, Reed explained, like they were born to the place. Lorene sold lemonade and cold sandwiches as usual, but then she ordered a big coffeepot through mail order, a couple of electric grills for hot sandwiches, and some dishes. Bill McCallister found an old restaurant counter somebody had dumped in a wash, and the men hauled it out with a couple of pickup trucks, painted it and put on a new Formica top, and installed it in the line shack for Lorene. The place became a local hangout, and the little girl, Tommi, made a sign she hung over the door.

  “Dessert Diner, she called it,” Reed went on, spelling out the words. “Blue letters on white. Real pretty sign even though she spelled ‘desert’ wrong. See, Lorene kept Tommi at home, didn’t let her go to school with the Babbick kids and mine and the others, so she didn’t spell too well. Tommi just ran wild, roaming the canyons when she wasn’t helping her mother. She’d been a timid, sickly little thing when they got there, but after a while everybody could see the child was thriving. That’s why nobody pushed Lorene about putting Tommi in school. Sometimes it’s best to let people manage their own affairs even though we all knew the girl was in danger, running around in the desert all alone.”

  The other mothers had tried to protect the girl, Reed explained, by sewing jackets and dresses for her out of bright fabrics so she’d be easy to see if she got lost or something happened to her and there was a search.

  “Probably would’ve saved Bill, he’d been wearing a bright red shirt or something when the rattler got him,” she noted. “But Waddy and the others out looking went right past him within thirty yards and didn’t even see him. By the time somebody brought dogs, it was too late. Anyway, Tommi spent all her time out in the canyons, kept bringing injured birds and lizards and what have you back to the diner, where she’d nurse them and Lorene would help her. Tommi never said much, but she had a big smile for anybody and we all tried to look after her. The kid was happy. Of course, she eventually got in trouble out there by herself. We all knew it had to happen.”

  Dot Babbick had taken Lorene down to San Diego for a doctor’s appointment, Reed said, and Tommi was supposed to manage the diner while her mother was gone. Except when the first rancher showed up that morning for his coffee, there was nobody there.

  “Coffee all brewed and ready, but the place was empty.” After an hour a small search party was organized and the girl was quickly found, her bright orange jacket a beacon among the dun-colored rocks. She’d turned an ankle, fallen, and apparently hit her head while hurrying back toward the diner from a little cave she’d fixed up, where she’d taped pictures from magazines all over the walls.

  “Pictures of pretty houses,” Reed said thoughtfully, “pictures of food, ads for appliances like where a woman’s standing in a kitchen smiling at a toaster oven, pictures of dishes and pots and pans. Bill was there. He said it was the strangest thing he ever saw, all those magazine pictures taped to the rocks and rustling in the wind. Said it was like a kind of shrine.”

  Tommi was brought to the McCallister place so Reed could care for her until Lorene and Dot Babbick got back from San Diego, Reed concluded, slurping the last of her latte. She’d wrapped the sprained ankle and kept the girl awake long enough to make sure she didn’t have a concussion, then given her an aspirin and let her sleep.

  “Washed that orange jacket and red dress she had on, too,” Reed said as if this information had great significance. “Just told her to give me her dirty clothes and go lie on our bed in her panties. I put a nice warm afghan over her, but she kept kicking it off in her sleep. You know how fidgety kids are when they’re hurt.”

  “Um, no, I don’t have any children,” I said with a growing desperation to escape. Reed McCallister wanted to tell me the story of her kindness to a hurt child thirty years ago, I thought. It was very nice, but it didn’t have a damn thing to do with anything. I felt like a fool for getting myself into the bind I was in.

  “Well, after that all hell broke loose,” Reed went on, picking up the pace as if she knew I was going to leave the second I could get a word in. “About a week later some folks saw the sheriff’s car drive through town and go up to the diner. Two deputies in it and a man in the backseat.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she watched me closely as she continued.

  “Next thing we knew, Lorene’s in the back of the sheriff’s car. They came and took her away. To prison. She died there a year later. Nobody ever saw Lorene again after that day.”

  “Why? What happened?” I asked in spite of myself.

&nb
sp; “The man was Tommi’s father, Lorene’s husband. Seems Lorene had tried to kill him over in Riverside, tried to stab him in his sleep two years back, a couple of months before she showed up in Anza. She was on the run, you see. She and the little girl. Guess they’d been all over Southern California before they showed up there. Guess they were just about at the end of their rope. And then I guess Lorene was too tired to move on when she had the chance. Or else she was just waiting for the day they’d come for her.”

  “What happened to the little girl, to Tommi?” I asked.

  “Well, like I said, in those days people minded their own business. Now, Bill said for sure he saw that man walk back toward town with Tommi wearing that same red dress I’d washed, and somebody told Dot Babbick later that they must have hitched a ride out because they sure didn’t stay in town. But it wasn’t two months later Waddy was running one of his herds up in a mountain about thirty miles from Anza, and said he saw the man, Lorene’s husband, up there hunting with an old bolt-action rifle. Said he was sure it was the same man, and Waddy always had a good eye from searching out all that Indian stuff he collected. Didn’t see the girl, though, just the man.”

  “So you don’t know what happened to Tommi?” I said as the phone in my purse rang. “Excuse me.”

  “Blue, where are you?” Wes Rathbone asked urgently.

  “I’m in Carlsbad.”

  “You’re still at Eldridge’s? Okay. We’ve got a mess here. Grecchi’s out of surgery but still in post-op. Nobody’s allowed in with her except Rainer. He says she’s not coherent, but she is talking. What she’s saying, according to Rainer, is stuff about Megan. Like, ‘He’ll get Megan next. He’ll kill Megan.’”

  “He?” I said.

  “Who knows? Rainer may be making this up as a cover for Grecchi, but he also may not be. There’s more bad news.”

  “Oh, God. What?”

  “The FBI put the thumbscrews on Jeffrey Pond’s ex-wife, Gwen, and her friend Jeri. You know, the one who claimed he raped her? Well guess what? Both women admitted under heavy questioning from the FBI that Pond had paid them to drop the rape charges. Jeri’s saying now he did rape her. Gwen, the ex-wife, says she doesn’t believe it was rape because she knew her husband was having an affair with Jeri for at least six months before their divorce. She’d hired a snoop, had pictures to prove it. So when Jeri cried rape, Gwen knew Jeri’s husband must have caught on and this was Jeri’s way of covering up. But Gwen had the pictures, right?

  “So what the FBI thinks happened,” he went on, “is that Gwen saw Jeffrey going to jail on this trumped-up rape charge, and there goes the alimony and child support. Pond’s in prison, she gets nothing. So Gwen goes to Jeri with the pictures, tells her to drop the rape charges or she’ll show them to Jeri’s husband. But Jeri’s no fool, sees the dollar signs in Gwen’s eyes, and decides to grab something for herself. Her marriage is in the toilet, anyway, and she’s going to need money. In the end, both women go to Pond and tell him the rape charges will be dropped and the evidence of adultery not introduced into the divorce proceedings if he pays them a little blackmail. It’s possible he’s still paying and will be for a long time. It’s possible this guy has learned to really hate women.”

  There was a certain sleazy justice in the story I’d just heard, but I didn’t mention it.

  “But Pond was at the hospital all night last night,” I said instead.

  “His mother says he was,” Rathbone went on, “which isn’t very reliable, and even if he was, he could have sent those e-mails by picking up a phone and calling his own computer if he’d programmed it that way. What’s even more troubling is that Pond left the hospital shortly after his mother did this morning. That gives him plenty of time to get to Grecchi’s, cut her phone cord and her wrist, set it up to look like a suicide, and then, if Grecchi’s story is credible, drive up to Julian and take out Megan Rainer before he does himself in. We’ve just talked to Rox. She says it makes some sense. I always knew this perp was a man, Blue. It’s always a man.”

  “But what about the blue willow plates? And why would Jeffrey Pond be hanging around my place leaving them for me?”

  “Who knows? Right now we’ve got San Diego County sheriff’s deputies and FBI all over Megan Rainer up in Julian and at your place. If Pond shows up, he’s hamburger. I’m just calling to tell you to stay away from Julian and don’t go home. Go to Roxie’s. Don’t go home until this is over.”

  “Yeah,” I said as he hung up.

  “What’s happening, dear?” Reed McCallister asked, looking strangely like Jennings Rainer’s schnauzer with her wiry hair and bright eyes. A schnauzer in trifocals.

  “I have to go,” I told her. “Something’s come up. Thank you so much for talking to me. You’ve been very helpful.”

  I’d go by the Eldridge place, inform Kara of the developments, I thought. I might be able to catch her if I hurried.

  “I haven’t been helpful yet,” Reed said, grabbing her walker and following me. “I haven’t told you the really interesting part.”

  I am incapable of turning my back and walking away from an elderly woman in a walker who is trying to keep up with me. Reed McCallister knew it and played it masterfully, stumbling a little, wincing in pain. Brontë trotted beside her and gave me recriminating looks.

  “There really is something I must do,” I tried, and was ignored.

  “Over the years Bill and Waddy and the others saw Lorene’s husband up in the mountains, usually with a teenage boy after that first time. See, they were living wild up there, living off the land. Never said much to the herders, just a tip of the hat. And then they kidnapped that young woman.”

  “What young woman?” I had to ask, stopping in the hall outside the casino.

  “She was a student with a college group doing field research. They had a base camp and were searching for Indian artifacts. Should’ve asked Waddy, saved themselves a lot of time. Anyway, the girl was scouting in a canyon alone when Lorene’s husband showed up out of nowhere aiming that old bolt-action rifle at her. He told her his son was old enough for a wife, and she was going to be it!”

  “What?” I said.

  “Yep. It was in all the papers back then, all over the country. He forced her at gunpoint back to their camp hidden way up inside a wash where nobody would ever see it. He told her he was ‘bringing’ her for his son. When they got to the camp he tied her hands and feet, and then he and the boy just waited for her to calm down and accept her fate. She told the authorities later that the old man read aloud to her from the Bible constantly. She said he actually believed that women were placed on earth to serve the needs of men, particularly the sexual needs which the teenage boy was experiencing. Said it was in the Bible and any woman who refused was ‘an abomination to the Lord.’ The old man told her he assumed she was a ‘virgin’ and so he would ‘break her in’ for the boy. When he tried to rape her, she shot him with his own gun. Right through the heart. Dropped him like a bird.”

  “But you said she was tied up,” I pointed out.

  Reed McCallister sighed with satisfaction.

  “The boy had untied her hands,” she said. “And the boy had left the gun where she could reach it.”

  I was almost to the door of the Sagebrush Resort.

  “Wow, that’s quite a story,” I said, looking at my watch. “But what happened to the boy? And I still don’t know what happened to the old guy’s daughter, Tommi.”

  “The boy was barely fourteen and was placed in foster care in Riverside,” she said, watching me closely. “After that I have no idea.”

  “And the little girl?”

  Her caramel-colored eyes sparkled as she shook her head.

  “Haven’t figured that out yet, huh?”

  “Figured what out?”

  “The little girl sleeping on my bed in her panties was no little girl,” Reed told me. “I was a married woman with a daughter, two sons, three grandsons, and four granddaughters by then, but it doesn’
t take that much experience to tell the difference between boys and girls when you see ’em in their underwear. Lorene Smith’s little girl, Tommi, was really her little boy, Tommy. She’d been dressing the kid as a girl so the old man couldn’t find ’em.”

  I felt as though I were swimming up through dark water, just about to break the surface.

  “Reed, what was the old man’s name?” I asked. “Do you remember his name?”

  “Think it began with an E,” she answered, nodding thoughtfully. “Etheridge? Something like that. I’ve still got the newspaper clippings, but like I said, they’re in a trunk at my son’s house. I can have him bring them over sometime if you’d like to see them.”

  “Was it Eldridge?” I said. “Try to think back.”

  “It could be. It sounded like that. It could be Eldridge.”

  It was all falling into place. Everything. “Is there a Bible handy anyplace?” I asked.

  Reed led me into a parlor adjacent to the casino.

  “Honey,” she said, “we’ve got more Bibles here than sense. Every church group in San Diego is convinced the elderly wear out at least ten Bibles a week, preparing for the inevitable, so they bring us more.”

  She opened a rough-hewn cabinet, revealing shelves of Bibles.

  “You want the Douay, King James, Jerusalem, Good News, Revised Standard, or one of these new ones written in street slang? We also have large type, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Tagalog editions and a set of twenty of the Torah in both English and Hebrew. Now, down here are some unusual translations and a nice one with illustrations by the Old Masters, as well as—”

  “Anything in English,” I said, laughing. “I just want to check something in Isaiah before I go.”

  Owls, dragons, bitterns, mountains of rotting corpses, streams of hot tar, and a mythological woman called Lilith. It was all there. I grabbed the cell phone again.

  “Do you remember the plates that Lorene got to use in the diner?” I asked Reed. “Remember? You said Lorene got a coffeepot and fry grills and dishes from a mail-order catalogue.”