As Good As Gone (9781616206000) (20 page)

“I was caught in the rain,” Beverly says. “Mr. Sidey was kind enough to help me with my groceries. How was your expedition? Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Not exactly. Kind of hard to get a feel for things just by looking at sagebrush and a few hills.”

“You got a bank robbery in this book of yours?” Calvin asks.

The question surprises Beverly. Calvin sounds as though he's truly interested in Adam and his project.

“Because I was thinking,” Calvin continues, “you could track down old Horace Hagerman and talk to him. I believe he's still alive. When Horace was a boy, he saw the James gang rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota.”

“Minnesota?” Adam says skeptically.

“Horace's uncle even fired off a few shots at Jesse himself. Missed, of course.”

Before Calvin has finished speaking, Adam is shaking his head. “My novel takes place in Montana.”

“I believe what Mr. Sidey is saying,” Beverly says, “is that you could talk to someone who actually—”

“Never mind,” Calvin says.

Adam shrugs and says to Calvin. “Hey, I'm sorry about that little misunderstanding with your grandson yesterday. I tend to forget that I don't have to turn every dealing with a kid into a lesson.”

“Did you pay the boy?” Calvin asks.

“He walked off before I got around to it.”

“You can pay me. I'll see he gets his money.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

But Adam doesn't reach for his billfold, and the silence and stillness in the kitchen takes on a charge, as if the air itself is first to sense the sudden antagonism between the two men.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Beverly says, grabbing up her purse from the countertop. “Two dollars? Was that the amount?” Without waiting for confirmation, she thrusts the bills in Calvin's direction.

He stuffs them into the front pocket of his jeans. “Looks like the rain's let up,” he says. “I'll head on home.”

Beverly doesn't follow him to the door. She's frozen in place, trying to figure out if by paying Adam's debt she has taken her place with the Lodges or the Sideys.

TWENTY-­FOUR

Will measures off a length of string that will reach from the back of the garage down the alley and into the lilac bushes behind Mrs. Lodge's house. He dips the length of string into the gasoline can in the garage. After pulling out the saturated string, he stretches it along the garage wall, careful to keep it close to the foundation and twining it in and out of the rakes, shovels, strips of lath, paint cans, and snow tires so it looks as though the string belongs there, just more crap lying about until the day comes when Will's father or mother summons the energy to clean out the garage.

Will trails the string out into the alley, snaking through the gravel and dust until he comes to the lilac bushes, its flowers long since fallen and their perfume just a vanished memory. With the string still in hand, Will crawls under the shade of the heart-­shaped leaves. He finds a stone the size and shape of a hamburger bun, and he weights the string down so it'll stay put.

With the string's other end still in the gasoline can, Will has a fuse long enough to allow him to light it from a distance and be out of danger before it goes off, no matter how fast it burns or how powerful the explosion might be.

He has no intention of helping Stuart and Gary spy on Ann, but he also knows there's nothing he can do or say to stop them. So he'll let them go ahead with their scheme. When he's certain they're on top of the garage, he'll circle around the house so he can sneak undetected into the lilac bushes and light the fuse.

The gasoline, he's pretty sure, will explode, maybe blowing out the garage walls and collapsing the roof. But if the gas only wants to burn, Will has prepared for that too. He's taken a couple of old torn-­up towels that his father uses for washing the car, poured a little gasoline on them, and left them, under crumpled balls of the
Gladstone Gazette
, next to the gasoline can.

Will's primary objective is getting Stuart and Gary off the garage roof and keeping them off, but beyond that, he thinks it likely that he can escape blame for the fiery event. First of all, aren't most garages, with their oily rags and containers of various flammable materials, fire traps? And if spontaneous combustion isn't cited as the cause, certainly fingers will be pointed toward the Gitners, the Sideys' neighbors to the north.

Mr. Gitner still burns his family's trash in the alley in his “incinerator,” a fire-­blackened oil drum, and he often leaves his fire unattended. When the sparks and feathery bits of burning papers rise with the smoke and heat, the wind could very likely send them right onto the Sidey property. Worse still, Mr. Gitner doesn't seem to care what he tosses into the barrel, and both Will's father and mother have heard the distinctive
pops
that come from doing something not only foolish but dangerous—tossing aerosol cans into the fire, for example. After the fire department tries to save the Sidey garage, won't they notice the Gitner family incinerator and believe they've found the cause of the blaze?

But again, the important thing is that the garage will be gone, either its walls blown away by an explosion or the building burned to the ground, and once it's gone, Stuart and Gary will be unable to climb onto its roof to spy on Ann Sidey. Will's father will rebuild the garage, of course, but the new one will be closer to the house, exactly where his father wishes the garage were every winter when he has to walk through the cold and the snow to get to his car.

And does Will care about what might happen to his friends when the garage goes up in flames? Not really. As his grandfather said, they're not really his friends, are they?

ANN SIDEY DOESN'T EVEN
like the taste of beer, yet she's already drinking her second cup. She hoped that if she got a little tipsy she'd be able to lift herself into a party mood.

But so far she can't, and she knows the fault is in her. There's nothing wrong or unusual about this party. Beer, whiskey, vodka . . . cigarettes . . . dark bedrooms and basement rec rooms for making out and more. And the Jensens' home is in Western Meadows, the new subdivision where the houses are larger and spaced more widely apart, so that means the music can be louder. Because the night is warm and mild more kids gather out on the patio and in the backyard.

Ann stands alone at the edge of the sloping lawn, right where the grass runs out and a steep ravine begins. The night has taken its time coming on—it's close to ten o'clock and the horizon has only now lost its last blush of light, allowing the darkness that began down in the ravine, among its boulders and its bent and broken trees, to rise and finally overtake the land.

Since the day her parents left town, Ann has been reasonably successful at not worrying about her mother. Both her mother and father assured her that the operation was safe and routine, and Ann took them at their word. Besides, she had other matters to worry about.

But earlier tonight, when she was preparing for tonight's party, Ann looked at herself in the mirror and wondered why her mother seldom wore makeup. She looked so pretty when she did. Two years ago, for example, when her parents went to the Christmas party at the country club, Ann's mother not only put on rouge, eye shadow, and mascara, but she also wore lipstick that seemed to match perfectly the deep red of her dress. And oh, that dress! She had been with her mother when she bought it at Dalton's in Billings, but Ann never saw it on her mother until that December night. A simple wool jersey, it clung to her mother like no other article of clothing she owned. It was low-­cut too, and Ann could tell her mother was self-­conscious about the décolletage because she kept tugging at the shoulders and neckline. But she did it in a good-­humored, almost giggling way, and it occurred to Ann, perhaps for the first time, that her mother might be as excited about going to a party as Ann and her friends could be. But her mother hadn't worn the dress since that night.

Didn't her mother want to be beautiful, Ann wondered, as she put on her lipstick? Her mother was losing her looks already—the sad pouches under her eyes, the deepening lines framing her mouth. Didn't she realize . . .

Ann had a vision of her mother dead, her face painted for eternity by a stranger, her beauty sealed in the grave. Ann's hand began to tremble, and soon she could not follow the outline of her own lips, and in another moment, muddy rivers ran down her cheeks from her freshly applied mascara.

After she stopped crying, Ann washed her face and started over. This time, however, she skipped the eye shadow and mascara, and when Kitty picked Ann up for the party, she asked Ann, “Are you sick or something?” “Just tired,” Ann replied. Although only the two of them were in the car, Kitty leaned across the seat and asked confidentially, “Is Aunt Flo visiting?” At that moment, a false admission seemed easier than any attempt at explanation, and Ann nodded her head.

Kitty must have spread the word about Ann and her mood throughout the party because no one even comes near Ann out here at the edge of the yard. Earlier Cam MacLeod stepped off the patio, and Ann thought he might be coming her way—she had heard that Cam wanted to ask her out—but a few paces onto the grass he ran out of interest or nerve and turned back to the party.

If she stayed home, she could be there if her father or mother call, or Ann might have phoned Aunt Carole's. Just hearing someone's voice, someone who has seen her mom and can testify that she's all right, would be enough to blow away those morbid thoughts that are taking a firmer hold in her mind by the minute. But it's already too late to call, and by the time she gets home, Ann's grandfather will probably be asleep, and it won't do to wake him and ask if there's any word from her parents.

The last time Ann spoke to her father, he had intended to put her mind at ease about her mother, but he had not entirely succeeded. Her father had sounded cheerful and optimistic, but since he believes that a hopeful outlook and a ready smile are always the keys to happiness, Ann placed a little asterisk of qualification beside much of what her father said. If she could hear her mother's voice, Ann would know whether her worries are warranted or not.

While she's thinking of her mother's voice, how she so often keeps it low no matter how circumstance might demand another tone, Ann hears another voice, almost as familiar as her mother's, but this voice sends a chill through her and stops her breath.
Monte
. She's sure, yet her fear talks her into doubt. It can't be. He's in Kalispell. Still holding her breath, she listens, and when she hears that laugh like three grunts—
huh, huh, huh
—she doesn't wait a second longer. She puts her cup of beer down in the tall grass and looks for a direction she can run in.

He returned early. Or perhaps he never left. Maybe he lied and let it be known that he was leaving town in order to lure Ann out into the open. Maybe he was working with someone—Kitty? Would Kitty do such a thing?—who tricked Ann into coming to the party with the promise that he wouldn't be there.

There's only one way for her to go. If she goes back toward the house, even if she tries to circle wide around either side, she runs the risk of him seeing her, or worse, of him believing that she's coming toward him.

So she walks straight ahead, and within a few paces, she no longer feels the Jensens' spongy grass underfoot, but the stony steep slope of the ravine. She descends sideways, trying simultaneously to do contradictory things—hurry, so she can put as much distance between her and him as possible, and slow down, so she doesn't trip on a rock or a clump of sagebrush.

The night is clear but moonless, and the deeper into the ravine she goes the darker it becomes. She makes her way by sense as much as sight, and when the darkness seems to thicken and gain texture, Ann slows and gropes with her hands until she can be sure what—a boulder, a tree, a waist-­high tangle of tumbleweeds—blocks her path.

For the second time this month, Ann is on the run, allowing herself to be chased through what is supposed to be her town, her
world
, the place on the planet that she knows better than any other and where she should feel safer than anywhere else. Yet lately she has been making a point of stopping and looking up and down the street before she pushes open the doors and exits Penney's. Only days ago she ran through the backyards of her own neighborhood.

Years ago, when she was five or six and there were no houses out here, when it was nothing but hills and sloughs and gullies, her family had driven out here, bumping across the prairie—there wasn't even a gravel road—to set off their fireworks a safe distance from town. Maybe they had even arced their bottle rockets out over this very ravine. And now she's feeling her way along in the dark, hoping that the rattlesnakes have slithered under their rocks for the night.

If the branches and trunk of the fallen tree weren't bleached near white, Ann probably would have walked right into it, poking out an eye on one of those twigs that stick out like accusing fingers in every direction. But Ann does see it and feels down the tree's length, toward its roots, trying to find a place low enough and free enough of branches that she can climb over and continue on her way.

She hikes up her skirt and throws one leg over the trunk, a motion that reminds her of climbing on a horse. Is Jensens' house near where those stables used to be? Hadn't they been west of Gladstone? Ann was eight or nine when she and her friends were in love with horses, when they all begged their fathers and mothers to take them horseback riding as often as possible.

If thoughts of horses and her past had not taken Ann's attention, perhaps she might have noticed, even in the darkness, that when the tree fell it dragged down with it a sizable branch from another tree nearby and it's on
this
branch, as thick and round as a man's leg, that Ann lands when she dismounts the trunk.

Her feet slip out from under her, and she topples backward. She gets her hands back under her to break her fall, and she thinks at first that the
snap
comes from a dry twig she lands on, until she registers the sharp pain in her forearm.

The darkness and the fallen tree also conceal the steepness of the slope that increases sharply just on the other side of the trunk, and she begins to slide down the hill. A rock scrapes the side of her head. She doesn't know how to slow or stop her descent. If she sticks out an arm or leg it might snag on a rock or stump, and she knows by now that one arm is already injured, though how badly she can't be sure. Finally, the earth, as if it can feel pity for its inhabitants, comes to Ann's aid. She slides into a depression the size of a car's trunk, created perhaps when a boulder rolled away. In this bowl, Ann first puts her hand to her head. Her fingers do not come away wet with blood, but when she tries to push herself to her knees, the pain in her right arm is so intense she cries out.

Cradling her arm, she scrambles to her feet. The span between her elbow and wrist curves, a shape that might be graceful if a substance other than human bone were involved. But the actuality is grotesque, and Ann has to look away to keep from becoming sick to her stomach at the sight of a part of her own body.

She's close to the bottom of the ravine, but she doesn't hurry. She can't. Not only is she terrified of falling again, but each step sends a jolt of pain directly to her arm.

The cloudburst early in the day brought no more than a quarter of an inch to Gladstone, yet it was enough to form pools of runoff at the bottom of the gully. Ann's foot sinks up to her ankle in the mud. She tries to pull free, but that causes the wet earth to suck harder, and she frees herself by letting the mud keep her tennis shoe.

The slope leading out of the ravine is not as steep or rugged as the path down, and Ann begins to climb a diagonal course up toward the road that leads back to town. Weeds scratch at her ankles and small stones jab at the sole of her bare foot, yet she's grateful for the easier ascent. Her arm feels as though someone is squeezing it, the pain increasing as the grip tightens.