Find Me

by Carol O’Connell

  A bit optimistic in Charles’s view.

  The great injury done to Mallory had no single cause, nor was there a cure. In the best foreseeable outcome, her malady could only be survived. And, in the best of all possible worlds, she would have no name for the man she had killed that night on the Seligman loop.

  The packet of old letters fell from the bed. The enclosing ribbon came undone, and the pages scattered across the floor. Mallory continued to fold her clothes, failing to care. She was letting go of the evidence for Peyton’s betrayal of her mother, Cassandra-these love letters written to another woman. He knelt at Mallory’s feet to retrieve them, handling them carefully. And now, for the first time, he saw the puzzling salutation and read it aloud. “ ‘For O.B.’ Well, that’s odd.” All the letters in his hand began in this same way. “Is it some sort of pet name for Savannah Sirus?”

  At the mention of her late houseguest, Mallory looked down at him, only mildly distracted from the packing. “Why would my father write letters to her ?”

  Oh, bloody hell.

  24

  Ray Adler entered the hospital room and ended the conversation. He never noticed the odd expression on the face of Charles Butler, a man left wondering how many times his head could be twisted round before he lost it.

  An hour later, smiling and waving good-bye, the man from Kansas was a reflection in the rearview mirror. The silver convertible’s top was down, and the warmth of the summer sun lulled Mallory to sleep in the passenger seat. Charles, a lapsed Luddite, had worked out the mechanics of her iPod and its connection to the radio, but he found no music to fit well with fear.

  If the letters had not been written to Savannah Sirus, what else might he have gotten wrong?

  He was still pondering his failings as he drove across the state line of Arizona, leaving the grasslands behind. The California terrain was sandy and spotted with clumps of green. No mountain peaks or mesas, only long tedious tracts of desert stretched out before them. Finally, Mallory awakened, and he leaned toward her, prompting her with the puzzle that began each letter from Peyton Hale. “For O.B.?”

  But she closed her eyes again and left him clueless for all the miles to Barstow, California, where they sat in the parking lot of a landmark hotel that had gone to seed. He watched her cross this place off her list of road- side attractions. Other tourists, no doubt following guidebooks, also stopped here for the length of time it took them to turn around and run. Charles put the car in gear and followed suit.

  “On to Los Angeles?” He took her silence for yes and handed her the California map. “Care to play navigator?”

  She unfolded it and stared at the familiar markings, Horace Kayhill’s arcs and lines to define a serial killer’s territory and the crosses that stood for graves. “What are you doing with this?” Unmistakable was her implication that he had stolen it.

  “Riker gave it to me-the whole collection. He thought the California map might come in handy. And I must say it’s superior to the average-”

  Mallory was not listening to him. She was foraging in the back seat, and now she retrieved the small canvas tote bag with the rest of the Route 66 maps. She pulled one out and spread it across the dashboard. “How did Riker get this away from the New Mexico cops?”

  “Well, a state trooper gave it to him. I was there.” And for that matter, Mallory had also been present at the table on the day when it was handed over. Ah, but she had only seen the covering plastic bag. And, as he recalled, Riker had made a cursory inspection, just a glance inside to identify the contents as belongings of the little Pattern Man-poor Horace.

  “Why didn’t he turn the bag over to Kronewald?”

  “Why would he?” asked Charles.

  “And why is Kronewald calling his serial killer a John Doe?”

  Apparently, she had been reading the daily newspapers he had brought to her hospital room. This continuing interest of hers promised upsides and down. “There’s a lack of physical evidence,” he said. “No solid tie to Adrian Egram, and I doubt that he’s used that name since he stole his first car. I suppose we’ll never know what persona he adopted.” Charles had intended this as reassurance, a kind of promise.

  “Riker knows,” she said.

  “Well, he might have a theory.” Was she looking at him now? Did she catch a give-away blush? Could he afford to play a game with her that involved deceit on any level? “There’s certainly no way to prove it-no DNA link, no fingerprints or pictures on file, nothing to-”

  “Riker’s not working a theory,” said Mallory. “He knows.”

  Her eyes closed.

  ***

  Though California’s desert landscape was rather dull, tedious in fact, Charles Butler was in dangerous country within and without. The subject of a serial killer’s identity was off limits to him now. She made that clear. Mallory might be sleeping or feigning it. Either way, she was hiding out, a time-out from her life. And Peyton Hale’s letters were all he had left, the only materials with which to build a bridge to Mallory. However, when she awakened, every word on the matter of Savannah Sirus and the letters was met with cold silence.

  They stopped for the night. In the hotel restaurant, he asked if she would mind just one more question. “How did Savannah get the letters?” He fell silent as a waitress dropped the menus on their table, and then Mallory told him that the letters had been mailed to Cassandra in Chicago.

  “But she never saw them. My mother was working insane hours at the hospital. So her roommate, Savannah, was the only one home when the mail came… when the telephone rang. Peyton called every night. She never knew that, either.”

  “When did you discover this?”

  “When I found Savannah Sirus.”

  Their salad was served and eaten in silence. They were well into the main course when he learned that, after many phone calls from Mallory, Savannah had mailed her one token letter, claiming that she had found it stuffed in an old chair. And thereafter, the woman had ceased to answer the telephone.

  “I knew she was lying,” said Mallory. “That first letter promised the whole road. So there had to be more of them.” The telephone assaults had escalated to ringing the woman’s doorbell in Chicago, sometimes for hours with no response. “But I wore her down.” And a compromise had been arrived at. “I told her she could keep the letters. I just wanted to read them.” And Savannah, only wanting the harassment to end, had accepted Mallory’s invitation to New York City. “I sent her airline tickets and theater tickets. I sent her menus for the best restaurants in town. She thought I was planning a nice friendly visit. I wasn’t.”

  Charles wondered how far into that visit Mallory’s houseguest had discovered the merits of full confession. He could not get the image out of his mind-Savannah and her interrogator-the story hour from hell.

  “Toward the end, Savannah wanted to confess.” Mallory chased the roast beef with long draughts of wine. “After Peyton left on his road trip, my mother told her about the pregnancy… and the wedding plans.”

  And then?

  Charles waited-and waited. Patience fraying, then lost, and he said, “So… stolen letters, diverted phone calls. Cassandra never heard from Peyton when he was on the road?”

  Mallory shook her head. “She was worried. She thought he might’ve wrecked the car. Peyton didn’t have any family, so my mother called some of his old friends along the road. That’s how she knew he was still traveling. And then she had to wonder why he never called or wrote to her. Months went by, but she never did find out. Then she gave up.”

  “Cassandra never heard from him again?”

  “No. After a long time, she decided that he’d just abandoned us. I always thought so, too… until I found Savannah Sirus’s phone number.”

  “You knew this woman when you were a child?”

  “I never met her. When I was little, Savannah sent Christmas cards, but I couldn’t remember where they were from. I couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.” Before Mallory had f
inished her wine, she gave up the story behind the wall of numbers in her New York apartment. “When she was dying, my mother wrote a phone number on my hand. She said, ‘You call that woman, and she’ll come get you.’ ” All but four numerals had been smudged away. A child’s tears would do that. Mallory tossed back the rest of the wine and poured another glass. “It took a long time to find the rest of that number.”

  “So your father never went back to Chicago?”

  “He had no reason to come back,” said Mallory. “And that was more of Savannah’s work.”

  Charles knew this theme of obsessive love; he had heard that tune playing inside his own head several times a day for all the years he had known Mallory. “Well, now I understand why you despised that woman.”

  “No, you don’t. Not yet.”

  Maddeningly, she left the table, swinging her room key as she walked away.

  On the road again the next morning, Charles made his first error of the day by begging an explanation for the initials O.B. Mallory dodged all conversation with sleep until late afternoon, when they were driving into more congested traffic.

  In the area of Los Angeles, Californians had apparently not grasped the concept of passing lanes and turn signals, but this was merely harrowing. The last leg of the trip was the most grueling. Only a few miles along Santa Monica Boulevard, traffic was at a bumper-to-bumper standstill. He might have saved them from this ordeal. Six news bulletins had tried to warn him off, but he had been determined to drive this historic route to the end.

  Mallory, however, assured him that it was a better fate to be shot in the head than to die of old age on this twelve-mile-long parking lot of detours and road construction. “Pull into that gas station,” she said, nodding toward a nearby escape path. “This is the end of the road.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, hardly believing that he was suggesting this, “we have another ten miles to go before we reach Ocean Boulevard. That’s the official finish to Route 66.” And then, at the end of this road, if he still had his wits, he planned to drive the car into the sea so that they could fly back home to New York.

  “No,” she said. “Stop the car. This is where my father’s road trip ended.” She kept her silence until he had pulled into the lot and parked the car some distance from the gasoline pumps and a line of customer vehicles.

  Charles was somber now, for he believed that he knew what was coming next, and it gave him hope and despair in equal amounts. According to Mallory, the last letter for O.B. had been mailed from Barstow far behind them. This tale could have only one logical end.

  Mallory was staring at the gas station. “There used to be a bar on this lot, and there was a phone booth on the corner. He stopped here to call Chicago one last time. Savannah told him that my mother died in a fire.”

  “But that’s madness. Savannah must’ve known she’d be found out.”

  “It helps if you think like a cop. That was when I knew she’d planned to kill my mother.” Mallory said this with no animosity. It was a simple statement of fact. “It took a long time to break that woman, but I did it. Finally, she told me about starting a fire outside of Mom’s bedroom. My mother could’ve died that night, and I would’ve died inside of her. While Savannah was talking to Peyton on the phone, the apartment was filling up with smoke. If she hadn’t stopped to answer the phone, she could’ve gotten out in time. But she was an amateur arsonist. And she was afraid the ringing would wake up my mother. It did. By then the smoke was every- where, and Savannah couldn’t find the door. She was disoriented, almost unconscious when my mother dragged her out of there.”

  “Your mother saved Savannah’s life.”

  “And she never knew her best friend tried to burn her to death.”

  Mallory left the car and walked toward the corner. She moved slowly, perhaps using the time to rebuild a long-gone telephone booth so that she could watch Peyton Hale make his last call. “He believed my mother was dead when he hung up the phone and walked into the bar.” She turned to face the gas station, where that saloon had once stood. She rose up on the balls of her feet, chin lifting, anticipating, waiting for her father to finally put down his last glass and come back outside.

  “I found the old police report. He drained half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s before he got behind the wheel again. He backed up the car to the end of the parking lot, then aimed it at the brick wall.”

  She closed her eyes, as if she had just heard the impact of man and machine smashed across a wall that was no longer there. “He went through the windshield, no airbags then, no seat belt. They found most of the blood high up on the bricks where he cracked open his skull.” She raised her eyes the better to see the blood that she had only heard about and read about. “And they found his body on the crushed hood of the car.”

  When she had returned to the convertible, Charles started up the engine, feeling the imperative to get her away from this place. “We’ll finish it for him, all right? We’ll go to the end of the road.”

  There was no protest on her part, but he knew better than to take this for consent. She simply did not care-about anything. Portrait of a woman on the unwind.

  But one thing was a certainty on this road where paradox was the everyday thing: this sad news was reason for rejoicing: her father had died before she was born, and Mallory had not committed patricide on a dark road in Arizona.

  They rolled on in silence and finally reached the official end of Route 66. Turning left on Ocean Boulevard, he drove on to the famous pier mentioned in every guidebook. It looked rather like a circus in progress. Electing something more tranquil, he chose the beachfront parking lot, then led her across the wide expanse of sand to the water’s edge. “Later,” he said, “after you were born, Cassandra never tried to contact your father?”

  Mallory shook her head. “My mother waited a long time. She was eight months pregnant with me before she gave up on him and went home to Louisiana, where I was born. And after a while, my father just forgot about her-and me.”

  Oh, wait! Back up!

  “After a while ? You mean after you were born? Peyton didn’t die in the crash?”

  An hour had passed before Mallory would speak to him again, and then he learned that Peyton Hale had been badly mangled. One leg had been smashed into twenty-six pieces, and his skull had also been broken, yet he had survived.

  A much calmer Charles Butler was revived by the salt-sea air, and he was experiencing his first corndog on the boardwalk of the Santa Monica Pier. He sat on a bench, listening to the music of a carousel and the rest of the story.

  “Savannah told me he went through years of physical therapy.” Mallory discarded her own corndog in a trashcan. “She was still obsessed with him. She tried to visit him in the hospital, but he wouldn’t see her, and every letter she wrote to him came back unopened.”

  “Understandable,” said Charles. “If Peyton believed that Cassandra was dead, he might not want any confrontation with reminders of her.” And for all these years, Savannah had remained in love with Peyton Hale. Else she would not have kept the stolen letters. “And now,” he said, “if you don’t mind-could we go back to the part where your father just forgot about your mother? Did Savannah tell you that?”

  This time, Mallory’s selective deafness was not a problem. He could answer his own question. She would never believe this from a liar, a monster like her mother’s best friend. “Mallory, you tracked him down, didn’t you? You’ve met Peyton Hale.”

  “We never spoke.”

  And what did that mean? How should he put this so as not to sound too harsh, not too anxious to pressure her? He yelled, “You never spoke ! What the hell does that mean?”

  He sat beside her in the shade of the car, watching the ocean. She told him a tale that jibed with Louis Markowitz’s version of a child’s lost weekend. This was the episode that had driven Louis mad with worry over his foster daughter.

  “I was only fourteen years old,” said Mallory. “The Markowitzes thought I
was at computer camp for those three days. It was a school award for good grades.”

  Charles recalled Louis’s rendition: “Helen was so happy when she signed the school’s permission slip. Finally, Kathy wanted a normal childhood experience. I was less trusting. I put the kid on the bus and stayed until it pulled out of the schoolyard.”

  Mallory’s side of the story filled in a few gaps that Louis had not mentioned, or never knew: In her after-school hours, she had used a police department computer and traced Peyton Hale to a remote town in northern California. She had used the same computer to purchase her airplane tickets, charging them to the NYPD. However, arranging for a limousine to meet her upon arrival had proven too problematic. And so the child had hitchhiked north from the San Francisco airport. Young Kathy had slept on the beach that first night, not expecting to meet her father there, for his home was miles from town. The next morning, she had been surprised to see him coming toward her. “I knew who he was the minute I saw him. His eyes-my eyes.” He was so close to her, almost within touching distance. In passing, he had turned to her with a curt nod, a greeting to a stranger, and then he had passed her by. “He didn’t know me.”

  “That’s it ? You never spoke to him? You just walked away?”

  “What was the point? He didn’t know me.” She splayed her hands to ask why she must repeat herself. And now she laid it all out for him-again, though it annoyed her to do it. “I look just like my mother. I have her face, his green eyes, and he had no idea who I was. He just forgot about her… and me.”

  “He thought you were both dead.”

  Evidently this was not an acceptable excuse in Mallory’s ruthless accounting of what was owed to her. “But I didn’t know that,” she said, as if this might point out a defect in Charles’s logic. When she spoke again, her tone of voice warned him not to side with Peyton Hale. “It was like my mother and I never existed.”

  More accurately, in Charles’s opinion, it was like her father had punched her in the gut-and she would have had no defenses at that young age- only pain. And so Charles thought to change the subject before she could shut down again and lock him out with another prolonged silence. “Did you talk to Louis about this-when you got back home?”