“Where’s yours?” She wore a nametag, I had to squint to make it out. Norma.
“Somewhere in the bottom of this bag.”
“You’re too young to smoke. And you’re too young to be here.”
“I’m older than I look.”
She snorted. “Bullshit.”
We stood apart for a few moments until it was clear I wouldn’t leave. Finally she reached into the pocket of her uniform and produced the lighter. I leaned in to the flame. The back of Norma’s hand was dotted with sunspots.
“What kind of mess are you?” she asked, dropping her cigarette butt to the ground. She squashed it with an orthopedic loafer.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine. She disappeared from this casino weeks ago. It’s the last place she was seen.”
“That Mexican girl?” Norma looked skeptical. I offered her my pack. She kept her expression but picked out another cigarette with her nails, lighting up again.
“You know about it? Her name’s Penny.”
“The police were here a few days ago.” She gestured with her coffee cup hand. “But where’s her family? You’re not in any shape.”
“But I’m the one who came.”
“Well, I don’t know anything that can help you. She looked like a nice girl. Real pretty.” Norma blew smoke over her shoulder.
“You actually saw her?”
“I’ve been here nineteen years. I see everything.”
“How did she look? I mean, was she upset?”
“I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t know. She didn’t play roulette. I told the police the same thing.”
“What about the man she was with?”
“No man, not that I saw. They asked me that, too. Showed me a picture. But I’ve got to be honest with you, the older I get the less attention I pay to men altogether. Your friend I remember. She was hanging around the blackjack table. If she came with anyone, I didn’t see.”
“She could have met him here.” I remembered I was holding a cigarette and forced myself to take a drag. “They think something terrible happened to her.”
“Do they? Well, they have a habit of thinking the worst.”
“But no one saw her leave,” I said. “It’s not on the cameras, her leaving.”
“You know what people do sometimes? There’s a continental breakfast in the morning, in the restaurant. People go by for coffee before they leave and butter up one of those muffins. You should try them if you get a chance. A woman from Sparks drives all the way out here with them. Then people leave out the restaurant way and forget to check out. Pisses the manager right off.”
“Aren’t there cameras in the restaurant?”
Norma shrugged. “If they work.”
“Wouldn’t they check all the cameras?”
“You don’t know much about our boys in blue, do you? Lazy unless it comes to writing you a ticket.” Norma threw the cigarette on the ground and let it smoke. She slipped a tube of lipstick from her pocket and applied it expertly to her thin lips, recapping it with one hand.
“Do the cops know about the restaurant exit?” I asked. I was sure Fischer would have checked all the cameras. But Fischer hadn’t come to the Leaspoke, only the local cops had.
Norma tilted her head, considering. She smoothed down her uniform, tucking her lipstick back into her pocket. Break was over; our conversation was, too.
“I don’t think they asked,” she said.
54
There were two numbers listed on Fischer’s card. The first I recognized as the station’s; the second had the same local prefix. I dialed the latter and held the phone gingerly, prepared to hang up if confronted by an answering machine, or Dale. On the third ring someone answered, fumbling the receiver. A phone dropped and retrieved.
“What?” Fischer’s groggy voice over the line.
“It’s Cale Lambert.”
“What time is it?” I heard something else tumble from a desk or table, a muffled curse. “It’s one in the morning. Is everything all right?”
“I meant to come by the station earlier, but things took longer than I thought.”
Fischer didn’t answer for a long time. He was still trying to wake up, or else he’d already fallen back asleep.
“Hello?” I asked.
“What things?”
“I’m heading out of town tomorrow. I need to talk to you.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. I could come by the station.”
“I’m already at home.”
“Maybe I could just drop by.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Cale. You can’t come to my house. What’s so important you had to wake me up?”
“It is important.”
“Did you remember someone else Penny was afraid of?”
His scorn was grating. I was meant to feel the weight of my own desire for a friend’s return, to feel guilty for it. I was not owed back a friend. We were owed nothing.
“You’re upset,” I said. “I’m sorry I woke you. Still, I’d like to talk.”
“I want to be clear. I’m not in the mood for dramatics.”
“Tell me all the ways I can’t comprehend seriousness.”
“Cale. If you have something to say, just say it now.”
There was another long silence on the line. I considered hanging up. But I had already walked the dogs over to Jackson’s and handed him their leashes, hugged their necks, kissed their handsome, furred faces. I had gone home and packed a duffel and set it behind the truck’s bench seat, my fingers brushing against Lamb’s heavy gloves and the cold, solid weight of the tire iron. I hauled out the tool and balanced it in my hands, as if the object itself might indicate next steps, a direction in which to proceed. Of course we should have just thrown it away. We should have wrapped it in the newspaper we didn’t have and tucked it in the dumpster behind the gas station. But wasn’t concealment, in itself, an admission of guilt? Examining the bowed handle, I couldn’t make out a single drop of blood, but the people who fingerprinted Penny’s house had other ways of seeing, black lights and solutions, tiny fiber-grabbing brushes. Penny had washed the car, the tires, our shoes—yet she never suggested throwing the tire iron away. Neither one of us, ready to admit our crime.
“You’re the only one I can tell,” I said.
Fischer coughed, his voice returning to the line. “Five minutes. Okay? That’s it. I’m over by the water tower. You have a pen?”
* * *
—
I didn’t need to write down Fischer’s address. I knew Pomoc well enough for that. I only needed to remember the number, 416, a small single-story on a gravel plot, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Fischer answered the door in dark jeans and a white collared shirt as if he had just come from the station, but his button-down was wrinkled, his hair mussed. Stepping into the light of the porch in his white shirt, he appeared an arbiter, someone capable of granting mercy. His bare feet on the unvarnished wood were tapered, nimble; his bearing agile. In all animal lives preceding this one, he had been predator, never prey.
He led me inside, down a short hall papered with yellow chrysanthemums, a feminine remnant from previous owners that stood in contrast to the rest of the austere, masculine decor: a worn leather couch, a dark coffee table covered in red and fluorescent yellow files, two empty bottles of beer. Fischer scooped up his shield and service holster from the arm of the couch, tucking the gun in his waistband. It wasn’t difficult to infer the shape of this evening or a hundred others like it, Fischer reading files on the couch until exhaustion surpassed nobler intentions. He ran a hand through his hair, looking sheepish.
“There’s a reason I never let anyone over,” he said.
“But you let me.”
The edges of his mouth tightened. His e
yes traveled over my features, searching for clues. For someone who spent an entire career studying faces, he must have found mine wanting. I should have explained. The girl he was looking for was gone.
“Let me guess,” I said. “No news?”
“Cale. The investigation—”
“—is ongoing,” I finished for him, glancing over the coffee table and the yellow files. One or more of them had to be Penny’s. I took a seat on the couch. He sat, too, leaving a respectable amount of space between us.
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Does it matter?”
He shrugged. “It seemed important on the phone.”
But now that I was here, he didn’t sound all that surprised. He expected very little of me, and I was happy to comply. I slid across the couch, moving laterally like only the craftiest of animals: crabs, sidewinders, children, murderers. Fischer, mistaking my intention, raised an arm to offer comfort, shelter—as if he had any to give. I brushed it aside, and before he could stop me I was straddling his lap. He brought both hands up in surprise, to ward me off, to push me. In the hesitation that followed, his character was revealed. Here was a man unused to pushing girls. Until that moment, I hadn’t been sure.
“Hi,” I said.
The corner of his left eye twitched.
“Right before she left, Penny and I had an accident.”
“Cale.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
“I want you to know, he tried to kill us first.”
“What?”
I pushed down the pointy collar of his shirt with a single finger and leaned in, taking a deep breath. Cedarwood and soap. I pressed my lips against the base of his neck and felt his pulse jump. When I pulled away, his eyes were darkening with real anger and something else, too, something wet and tarry that stuck to the whorls of my fingertips when I spread them across his jaw.
What did I think the truth could do? No matter how much I wanted to believe these choices were mine to make, our futures had already been devised. This is your heart line. This is your fate. Fischer clenched his jaw under my hand. I leaned back as if to backbend over the coffee table. If I fell, I already knew he wouldn’t catch me. I pulled myself back up by degrees and pressed my face into his cheek. He said my name again, the word lost in my hair. I turned my face to hunt it and found his mouth, warm and willing. How you learn to kiss a man without ever being taught. Fischer touched his tongue to mine, tightening his hands on my hips, lifting me with him as he stood. He made it one step, two, before stopping with a noise deep in his throat, dropping me as if I had become a fire that burned through his hands. I landed hard, half on the couch, half on the floor, gasping at impact. Fischer stood over me, furious.
“Get out,” he said.
I sucked air into my lungs, propping myself up on an elbow, still dazed. Fischer adjusted his collar, looking away. As if I had flattened myself on his couch without any help from him, snuck in through the window, distilled into form from ether. As if he didn’t know the entire spine-rubbing time that this was what we were working toward. His mouth looked soft and recently kissed, but the longer I stared at it the angrier he became. He grabbed my wrist and hauled me up.
“Ow!”
“Get out.”
“You’re hurting me!”
He tightened his grip, shaking my arm hard enough to rattle my bones. With his other hand he raised a finger and pointed it between my eyes. An image of Ava sprang to mind. How many times had she been on the other end of this pointed finger, the forthright tone she probably couldn’t take seriously, even now.
“You need to leave,” he said.
I yanked back my wrist. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
We stared at each other for a moment, daring the other to make a move. Finally he pointed down the hall. “Down there. Take my bedroom and lock the door. Go to sleep. When you wake up in the morning, we’re going to drive down to the station and you’re going to tell me, very carefully, very clearly, whatever the hell you’re trying to say now. You’re going to write it down in a sworn statement. Because if I find out one single thing you’re saying isn’t true—”
“I can’t—”
He raised a hand between us, strangling the air. It seemed to take all the effort he had to keep himself from doing it to me. “None of this is up for discussion. Pick up your bag.”
I turned away, my legs shaky. Fischer was right; my duffel bag had appeared at the foot of the couch, though I had no memory of bringing it inside. Ever since I’d left the hospital, Lambless, my mind had taken to skipping large chunks of time, whole sections of day sucked into thin air. I came across the evidence when I brought a water glass to the sink and discovered a bouquet of violet penstemon on the countertop, its hairlike roots still muddy with soil; or carried my pajamas to the hamper, old photo albums weighing down the dirty clothes; or woke up in the middle of the night to find my fingers clenched around the handle of a kitchen knife I couldn’t remember placing underneath the pillow. I picked up the duffel bag and made my way down Fischer’s unlit hall. The first door opened to a white-tiled bath, the porcelain sink a ghostly protrusion in the dark. I backed out and made my way to the next door. When I looked over my shoulder Fischer was still standing at the end of the hall, his hands balled into fists. The distance between us was not so great that he couldn’t cross. When I blinked, Fischer was gone.
60
On the twelfth floor of the Leaspoke, the elevator doors opened on to a long, carpeted hallway, eerily silent after the crash of coins and voices downstairs. At the end of the hall I inserted a card to unlock a single room furnished with a small television and a polished desk, a twin bed with a printed coverlet I was certain had never been washed. I checked the closet and dropped to my knees to peek under the bed. I turned on the light in the bathroom, waiting for it to flicker and hum before pulling back the shower curtain. The paint at the bottom of the tub was nicked.
I stretched out on the bed beside the duffel bag and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the room was cold, the windows dark. I was frightened by how deeply I had slept, how time had been eaten up. It felt like another blackout, another distressing lapse in memory. It was cold in the room; they had turned up the air-conditioning, which meant things must be getting warm downstairs. I opened my mouth wide, trying to pop my ears. An image flashed across my mind of Alvaro’s rattlesnake preparing to swallow his limp mouse. I closed my mouth again very carefully.
In the bathroom I stripped off my shorts and Fischer’s T-shirt and ran the shower, the water only available in two temperatures, freezing or scalding. I chose the latter and climbed into the spray. The pinpricks of water brought up flushed red constellations on my chest and belly. I had been a child in casino hotel rooms like this one; I had been allowed to order cheeseburgers from room service, take shampoo bubble baths, watch television for hours while waiting out Lamb downstairs. One evening, flipping the channels in search of cartoons, I found a popular, frosty-haired talk show host meandering thoughtfully up the aisles of his studio audience, turning to ask questions of several elegantly dressed women onstage. Under the studio lights, the women sat on high stools. They wore long skirts and pumps and guileless expressions. The host squinted in their direction, his wretchedly pale eyes peering out from behind large, bifocal lenses. I’m not a psychiatrist, he said, but what are you punishing yourself for?
One of these women had thrown herself off a bridge, only to land in a safety net installed to deter suicides. Another woman, her deep chestnut hair swept up in a sleek, high bun, outsized clip-on earrings like jade discs at her throat, admitted to regularly carving notches in her forearm, as if her flesh were a post she could use to mark off time. The third, a redhead with skin the color of cream, looked coolly into the audience, her features drained of all expression. The host listed her attempts: overdose, hanging, bungled wrist slitting, overdos
e. The host paused in his litany, stalking the carpeted steps of the studio, pushing the rim of his glasses up with a single finger. What are you punishing yourself for? Not one of the women spoke up, but even then I knew they harbored secret replies.
I uncapped a miniature bottle of shampoo and worked the suds through my hair, releasing the smell of oranges into the steam. If the police were right—if the cameras caught Penny entering this casino in a yellow sundress, and in all this time she had never left—then Penny was dead. In my nightmares, I imagined Penny strangled on a bed, stabbed on the floor, her body stuffed in a mechanical closet or crawlspace, stashed under a bed. But what if the man with the pixelated eyes had only used Penny in the spirit she desired to be used? What if Penny, after all that happened in the desert, felt the need to punish herself, too? What if, once the man excused himself to refill a bucket of ice or play a round of craps downstairs, he returned to the room to find Penny, having ingested a potent prescription cocktail, lying unresponsive on the bed; Penny, floating lifeless in the bathtub? What if then, and only then, did he dispose of her body?
What if the person who needed to punish herself was me?
I rinsed my hair, the suds skimming over the sharp planes of my hips, the elongated curve of my thighs. The water at the bottom of the tub rose a degree, lapping at my toes. The drain was clogged from an accumulation of skin cells shed from a thousand different bodies, all the women who had stood underneath the spray to wash their hair and hearts and limbs. On my waist was a small bruise in the shape of a thumb.
The water rose at the bottom of the tub, sloshing around my ankles. I soaped my hands and ran them over my face and neck. I allowed them to follow the path Fischer’s had taken, rubbing the wound between my legs, inserting a finger where he had first introduced himself. I rest my forehead against the steamed tiles of the shower stall, desperate to reach deep enough inside to touch the center of all things, to tear out the new, thorny part of me that had taken me away from Pomoc, but kept me barreling toward some unknown culmination of grief, a shimmering, formless mirage.
A Prayer for Travelers Page 21
