Sisters of the Road (3 page)

I didn’t drive my car—I’d be glad never to get into it again after last night. Now it had blood—Rosalie’s blood, smear-dried all over the back seat. No wonder Trish hadn’t wanted to stay in the Volvo. But my bag! And the deposit!

The Monday morning scene up on Broadway was less than peaceful. The street had been plowed and sprinkled with sand, and shivering crowds stood waiting for the slow trolleys. We weren’t too used to snow in Seattle. Those who skied were well-turned out in bright jackets and caps; everyone else looked like they’d thrown on whatever they could find to keep them warm. Still, the spirit was lively and strangers traded excited complaints and stories: “I could barely get out my door this morning.” “
My
street is one of those that
never
gets plowed—and then it just turns to
ice
.” “Did your pipes freeze too?” “Remember the winter of ’79? This is really nothing compared to that. I bet this is gone by tomorrow.” “Well, the kids love it anyway.”

We packed ourselves into the trolley like frozen string beans and began to expand and cook in the heat. The trolley lurched down the hill and through the city center. “It’s going to be a hard day,” department store clerks complained. “Those girls in Bothell will say they were snowed in.” But others looked forward to an easier rhythm. Things would go on as usual, just more slowly.

June was at the print shop before me and said that Carole had called to say she’d just gotten back into town after a weekend away and had found her pipes frozen. She’d be in late.

“You could have expected it,” said June, and I agreed. In her very unreliability, Carole was predictable. Giddy, endearing and exasperating, Carole bounced from one complication to the next, chronically late and astonishingly absent-minded. Every day she lost the keys to her car; every day the thing she most needed disappeared in some mysterious way.

She’d been working with Best Printing for six months, and kept us all in a state of confusion, as we tried to help her find things and occasionally burst out in frustration, “Carole, what are you
doing
?”

In spite of thinking she was completely hopeless, I had been attracted to her on more than one occasion. I’d never let her know. Life was complicated enough already.

“You didn’t drive, did you?” asked June. “I thought about it, but the streets are a mess.”

I thought about the Volvo’s back seat again and the whole story came pouring out. It sounded unreal and bizarre on this cold white morning. “And then I waited and waited and then they said Rosalie was dead.”

“Rosalie, Rosalie. I used to know a Rosalie. I mean, she was a kid who went to our church. Skinny and braids? Probably not any more. I should call my cousin, my cousin knows everybody. What about that other girl, what was her name—Trish? What the fuck was her trip, taking off like that?”

The muscles in June’s cocoa face tightened, like machinery parts that have gone too fast and seized up, and her brown eyes blazed. “Stupid little bitches, seventeen years old and they think they know everything and can protect themselves. They’ve undercut the whole prostitution racket and they don’t think they can learn anything from women who’ve been working the street for years. You see many women over twenty-five getting knocked off by the Green River killer? No, because they know how to protect themselves.”

June had jumped up and taken hold of a chair as if ready to bring it down over someone’s head. I didn’t dare bring up the problem of the missing deposit right now. “And you think that goddamn Green River Task Force is out there telling the girls to be careful, telling them what they know about this guy, his little perversions and all? Thirty girls’ bodies found and maybe there’s fifty more. Yeah, if they were from Bellevue or Broadmoor or someplace you can bet they’d have found the guy and sent him up for life plus two thousand years. Little Rosalie No-Name. Poor little Black Rosalie No-Name! I’m going to call my cousin right now.”

I went to the window and stared out. There were about two inches of snow; probably it wouldn’t stay long. One elderly guy in a long taupe coat was picking his way slowly down the street. I remembered the packed waiting room at Harborview; the homeless were everywhere these days.

“Yeah, ask her to call me back,” June was saying. Her anger had vanished and she just sounded efficient. She and Penny were two of a kind, organized, model hard workers. “Gotta start running that poster job,” she said, out of her chair before she hung up the receiver.

But the phone rang again. “It’s for you,” June said, and in a stage whisper, “One of your old girlfriends.”

Old was a misnomer for this one, Devlin, who still considered herself very much in the running.

“Hello, Pam! Isn’t the snow fantastic! I thought maybe you’d like to come on up to my house after work and we could take a walk and then have dinner and I could make a fire.”

I remembered those little fireside chats that had quickly grown so personal. Devlin had had an interesting life of travel and adventure; unfortunately she was definitely into recounting it at length. After episode four (Nepal, the summer of ‘74), I’d had enough.

“I don’t think so, Devlin.” I wasn’t unsympathetic to people nursing hopeless crushes; my own undying feelings for Hadley fell into pretty much the same category, but at least I had the dignity to shut up about it. “I’m fairly busy today…I…I have to wash my car.”

There was a silence as frosty as the air outside. “Well, I must say you’ve chosen an excellent day for it,” she snarled and hung up.

“You’re so popular, Pam,” June said.

“Yeah, now I have four new enemies that I didn’t have before.”

“Well, everybody has to sow their wild oats sometime.”

“I feel a little old for this though.”

“It’s only because you came out so late,” she said wisely, as if she were my ancient dyke great-aunt and not a practicing heterosexual five years younger. “You have to make up for lost time. You’ll settle down some day.”

The phone rang again and this time it was her cousin Joyce. She knew everyone in the world, but she didn’t think she knew a Rosalie. She’d tell the parents of the missing girls, though—maybe Rosalie was a fake name. Because Darla’s Beverly was gone and so was Cheryl Brown, you know, that cute girl who used to sing so good in choir. She kind of hoped it wasn’t her, hoped it was nobody they knew….

June got worked up again and said that the so-called Green River Task Force was probably getting paid by the killer to set the girls up. Probably the killer was even on the fucking task force! Somebody’s idea of cleaning up the streets!

I looked out the frosted window again and saw another figure picking its way through the snow. It too wore a beige coat, but this one was fashionable and swung open, unbuttoned, and I had seen that hat before. The figure was also carrying something very familiar. It stopped and looked at the building numbers, and by the time it reached our shop I had the door open. I was surprised at how relieved I was to see her. “Come in, come in,” I said. “June, this is Trish.”

T
HE YOUNG WOMAN WHO
came through the door looked far different than she had last night in my car. That small, pathetic girl with the pale, terrified face under the black hat was actually taller than me, and the stiletto heels of her short soft leather boots made her even taller. Under her fake fur-lined coat she was wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt with a dash of black calligraphy across the front. Her figure was good, in a kind of unnatural Barbie Doll way: broad shoulders, spindly arms, large breasts, narrow hips and legs with almost no thigh. Today she was wearing no jewelry other than a silver heart on a chain around her neck, and very little makeup. Under her hat her small features were sharp and pointed; only the widely spaced eyes were outlined; the tiny rosebud mouth was pale and chapped. Strands of frosted ash-blond hair curled over her shoulders. June and I were in overalls and hiking boots, and I still wore my tattered blue scarf around my neck.

“Have a seat,” I said, and gestured to the couch. June said good-bye to her cousin, pulled up a chair and straddled it. I perched on the couch’s armrest.

“I didn’t take any checks or money or anything,” Trish began, holding out my bag. Her voice was high and a little nasal; she consciously lowered it and started again. “I just wanted your address.”

June looked severely at me and then at the bag, a dirty white canvas pouch with a leather strap. “Was the deposit in there? Give me that.”

While I might have felt constrained from counting the money, June certainly didn’t. She plunged her hand in and took out the deposit envelope, then tossed the bag over to me.

I said, “You know that Rosalie is….”

“I know. I called the hospital.”

“Was Rosalie her real name?” asked June. “What was her last name? Her parents ought to know.”

“I don’t think she has parents,” said Trish. “She came from California. I didn’t know her long, but…” she ducked her frosted head and opened up her purse, expensive soft leather like her boots. “She was my best friend.”

I thought for a second she was crying, but when she raised her head again her eyes were dry and their expression distant. She took out a Marlboro and lit it with a cheap lighter. Her hands were small and skinny, child’s hands, with artificial purplish fingernails attached to them like mussel shells.

She smoked badly, as if she had learned the art for an amateur play.

“I want to do something,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to the police.”

“Why not?” asked June.

“They’d tell my parents where I am. I don’t want them to know. They live in Broadmoor—they’d just put me back in that awful girls’ school I ran away from. In six months I’ll be eighteen. I don’t want them to know where I am until then.”

“You hooking?” June asked.

“Not really.”

“What do you mean, not really?”

“I have a friend,” said Trish. She attempted to smile, and choked a little on her cigarette smoke.

“Then what were you doing down around Sea-Tac?” June shot back.

Trish didn’t answer; she took a long, uncomfortable drag from her cigarette and looked at me.

“How can we help you?” I asked.

Her sudden look of panic went straight through me.

“I’m afraid,” she whispered.

“Afraid? Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. Her cigarette was burning close to her purple fingernails but she didn’t seem to notice. “It was so dark and snowy. It took me a long time to get there and I was late—I feel like it’s all my fault.”

“Did you see the man? Would you recognize him again?” I leaned towards her from my perch on the armrest. “Is that who you’re afraid of?”

“No,” she said, with a thin, quavering vehemence, and stubbed out her cigarette on the floor. “I didn’t see him. But I have this feeling—it makes me so afraid—that he saw me.”

June and I conferred in the press room while Trish continued to smoke cigarettes out front. June had pointedly provided her with a saucer and told her to pick up the butt from the floor.

“Don’t get involved in this, Pam. It’s too weird. And you’ll get dragged into it, I know how you are, and you won’t pay attention to your work, and then it will be you
and
Carole flaking off.”

“Just because Penny’s gone you don’t need to start acting like her. Christ, she was born two minutes before me and my whole life she’s acted like my older sister. If you want to know something, her leaving was a relief and I don’t need you telling me what to do.”

“You think this girl is telling the truth? She is
not
. All that stuff about her parents and that guy supporting her? She’s just a regular street hooker like the rest of them downtown. Before she goes you better take a good look in your wallet and see if all your credit cards are still there.”

“She’s not going to get far on a Sears card already charged up to its limit. Besides, I think Nordstrom’s is more her style.”

“Those clothes are all ripped off. Ripped off, I’m telling you. The girl is a con artist if I’ve ever seen one. Broadmoor, fancy girls’ school, that’s a load of shit. She’s got something in mind you don’t know the slightest bit about. I know these types of girls. I knew them in high school, hey, some are even my relatives.”

There was nothing I could say to that. June had street smarts and I did not. But I trusted my instincts about Trish somehow. And I wasn’t going to send her away without finding out more about her.

June finally accepted it. She turned to the press and started to load the paper and said, “I’m only promising you one thing—that I won’t say I told you so when you get disappointed.”

“Promise me one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That you won’t say ‘I told Pam so,’ to Penny when she gets back.”

And with a pitying smile June promised me that too.

I
TOOK TRISH FOR
an early lunch at the cafe downstairs from the Elliott Bay Book Company. The sun had appeared like a pale granite stone in the white-gray sky, and Occidental Square looked its old-fashioned, slightly touristy self; bare trees and grill-work, surrounded by solid masonry. Trish walked carefully in her high-heeled boots by my side and was noticed by passersby in ways I’d long forgotten. In my parka and overalls, yellow-striped cap pulled down over my ears, I felt like a woodsman escorting a fairy princess who had gone astray in the forest outside the castle.

The bookstore was crowded and so was the cafe. “This is like a library down here,” Trish whispered. The cafe was lined with books, not for sale but for show—tired old bestsellers like
Forever Amber
and
Marjorie Morningstar
and old reference works and encyclopedias: “A-Pocket Veto”; “Pockmark-Zymurgy.” I had always wondered what zymurgy meant.

“Do you like to read?” I asked her as we got into line.

“Oh, I love to!” Her sharp features lit up with genuine pleasure. “I love to read books that are really long and have good stories that keep you guessing. Did you ever read
Shōgun
?”

I shook my head.

“That was a really great book! It was, like, in Japan, only early Japan. You really learned a lot from it. Like history, but it was fun.”