Lucy (27 page)

43

AMANDA WAS GOING
to interview for a job and then to have lunch with her mother. She wanted to try to mend some fences. School had started. She had decided not to go to college yet. She wanted to keep her options open until they learned what had happened to Lucy. She and Jenny had agreed that it wasn’t good for her to sit around the house worrying. Amanda had to get out and live her life. She had to be with people her own age and reenter society. Jenny needed something to distract her as well, so she had returned to volunteer at the shelter. Nina, the administrator, had welcomed her back with the comment, “Now I know you’re ready. I think I have just the thing to take your mind off of your own troubles.” And she had introduced Jenny to a sixteen-year-old girl whose father had kept her locked in a basement for two years.

Jenny had just made coffee. She could hear Amanda upstairs in the girls’ room, dressing for her job interview. Jenny went outside to bring in the newspaper. It was the sort of autumn day that made her glad that she lived in an area that had actual seasons. High thin clouds hurried across the sky toward the lake. The sun made colors jump out of the background, and the wind bumped her with sudden gusts that made her widen her gait.

In the kitchen she glanced through the headlines. How much more did she want to know about the Mideast? How much violence could she stomach this morning? She wondered why she even subscribed to a newspaper. She knew: Because her mother had done so all her life.

Amanda came down looking smart in a gray pantsuit and a black cashmere sweater.

“Breakfast?” Jenny asked. “I’ll cook.”

“I’ll just grab some cereal.”

“Fruity Cheerios?”

“Yum.”

They exchanged a look, then Jenny turned to the national news page, where she found short summaries of incidents from various states. Double murder at a Taco Bell in Texas. A chemical plant explosion in New Jersey. A man fell from a construction site in midtown Manhattan and landed on a car, killing himself and the driver. A veterinarian had been killed by a chimpanzee at a primate facility in New Mexico. The story struck Jenny as odd the moment she saw it. But newspaper stories were often odd, raising more questions than they answered, so she paid no attention to it at first.

She and Amanda ate cereal with bananas. “What time is your interview?”

“Eleven.”

“What is it?”

“Internal marketing. I thought I’d do a little shopping since I’ll be downtown. Want to get some retail therapy?”

“Thanks. I have to go to the shelter. They took in a new girl. Terrible story. You don’t want to know.”

“No, I don’t.”

As they were cleaning up the breakfast dishes, something that had been nagging at the back of Jenny’s mind rose to the level of consciousness. She dried her hands and crossed to the table. She turned the pages of the newspaper and found the story. Amanda was loading the dishwasher as Jenny reread it. A veterinarian. A chimpanzee. The story said that a thirty-nine-year-old chimpanzee named Buddy had escaped from its cage when a member of the staff happened to enter the area. Robert Walton, 41, was found dead of a broken neck when the morning shift arrived, according to the county coroner. To herself, Jenny said, “What?”

“More nonsense about Lucy?”

There had been more huffing and puffing from Congress after Lucy went missing. But then Senate Bill 5251 had passed, and it seemed to cast a pall over those who might have wanted to protect Lucy. Ruth Randall had offered a reward for Lucy’s safe return. The lawsuit that Sy Joseph had filed was grinding its way through an endless maze.

“Come here and look at this,” Jenny said.

Amanda dried her hands and read the short item. “Yeah, that’s too bad. Gives apes a bad name. You think the guy screwed up?”

“Well, it doesn’t say much. You have to be awfully cautious with a middle-aged male chimpanzee. But what’s even stranger is this cause of death: His neck was snapped.”

“Yeah, well, chimps are really strong, so …”

“Yes, they’re plenty strong enough. But they don’t fight that way. They have very characteristic ways of killing. They draw their victim near and bite ferociously. They always go for the scrotum and the butt. They’ll bite off the fingers and then attack the face with those huge incisors. When a chimp kills another chimp—or a man—there are really dramatic wounds. Lots of blood and gore. Horrible. But no broken neck.”

“Have chimps killed people before?”

“Definitely. There was one in 2006 at a chimp sanctuary in Sierra Leone. A chimp named Bruno, who was twenty years old, led a mass escape. These guys are really smart. A driver had brought some people in to see the chimps, and Bruno smashed the windshield and dragged the driver out. He bit off the guy’s fingers and killed him with a horrific bite to the face. Then there was that lady in Connecticut. Same kind of wounds. Her face was gone, but she lived. Anyway, after millions of years of killing in this one particular way, a chimp isn’t just going to stop and dream up a new strategy. Bonobos, though. They’re different. They’ve been known to bite fingers off, but they fight with their feet when they mean to kill. They kick. A kick in the head from a powerful bonobo can snap your neck.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means this guy wasn’t killed by a chimp.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny stared at the story as if she might somehow drag more information out if it. “I know this place. Alamogordo. It’s a primate research lab at Holloman Air Force Base. Jane Goodall tried to get the chimpanzees released from there. It’s been going for decades, and no one’s ever been killed. There’s just a lot more to this story. And this guy wasn’t killed by a chimp.”

“So if it’s on this air base and all, why did they even release a story?”

“Well, someone was killed on the job. He was a doctor, a vet. Presumably he had a family at home wondering what happened. They had to say something. They couldn’t say what really happened, so they blamed it on some obstreperous old chimp they wanted to get rid of.”

“Oh, my God, Lucy said she might have to kill somebody. What should we do?”

“I don’t know. But if Lucy was there and if this is how she escaped, then we’d better find her before they do.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“I don’t know.”

44

THE TERRAIN AROUND
the primate facility was rocky and exposed. To the west Lucy could see an airfield blasted in the glare of floodlights, so she fled in the opposite direction, stumbling over rocks and dodging low piñon trees. She reached a small pond and lay panting under a moonless sky. Now at least she had water. That was always primary: Get to water and you’ll be all right. That’s what her father had said. Papa, Papa, Lucy thought. Do I love you or hate you? Lucy could see now that he had prepared her for this. He had known what might come. But why, why? And then she asked herself, Would I rather not exist? No, she knew it more completely than ever before: She wanted to live. Cruel as it was, this world was just too sweet to give up.

She felt the blood trickling down her neck. She touched the wound on top of her skull. The piece of bone had seated itself. But she would need her head covered. All she had to wear was the hospital gown. She had to find clothes. She had to blend in. She had to get to Donna, and she no longer had the luxury of time.

She washed the blood off of her head with the brackish pond water. Then she sat and smelled the air. The wind was light and variable. The air was warm. Here on the thirty-something parallel, autumn wouldn’t come for a while. The breeze shifted, and then Lucy caught the aroma of pine sap. She leapt to her feet and headed into the faint draft that carried the scent. Going as fast as she could over the rocky ground, she found an arroyo about thirty minutes later. She descended into the trees and down to a small stream. She drank again and moved on, following the watercourse. She knew that they’d be out with the helicopters and infrared as soon as they found the body.

She stopped to listen. Coyotes were yipping in the distance. She followed them, and they led her to a place where they had dug a small tunnel beneath the perimeter fence. Lucy squeezed through and continued on.

When the cover of trees petered out in a dry wash, she climbed a butte to see where she was. Another stretch of woods continued toward the east. She made her way to it and then navigated through scrub forest. Stars were hived in branches overhead.

She walked on, picking her way by starlight. The image of that man lying dead on the floor kept leaping into her head. After a time, she saw a break in the woods and moved cautiously toward it. At the edge of the forest a tennis court lay in darkness. She moved closer. It was part of an estate. A large adobe house in the distance lay in a wash of security lights. Lucy stepped onto the cold concrete surface and made her way across. A tall judge’s chair stood beside the court. She saw a small building in the trees. She moved toward it.

It was made of adobe and had high louvered windows. She found the door unlocked and went inside. She could smell chlorine. It was a shower room. She felt her way along the wall in the darkness. She touched lockers, cupboards, hooks on the tile walls. She began opening the lockers one by one, and halfway down the row she found a pair of jeans. She dropped her gown and put them on. They were large but would have to do. She cinched the leather belt tight. Searching through the rest of the lockers, she found a T-shirt and then tennis shoes. They were too big but she wore them anyway. Her feet had grown soft during her time away from the jungle, and she could feel her blood sticking to the shoes.

Moving back toward the door, she ran her hand along the hooks until she found a baseball cap. She adjusted the strap and put it on. She picked up the gown and slipped across the tennis court and back into the trees.

She went as deep into the woods as she could go. Adrenaline had kept her going, but now she had to sleep. She checked the canopy overhead. The trees were not sturdy enough to support a nest. As she lay down on the forest floor, she felt the adrenaline begin to subside at last. Things had been moving so fast that she hadn’t had time to think clearly. And now, as she tried to let her muscles relax, this thought came into her mind: I killed a man. I killed a human being.

All her life she had been taught not to kill, and now she’d done it. The worst thing in the world. She felt revulsion spread through her as the image of the dead man came to her once again. His blood. His pleading eyes. She thought of her father and felt grief and anger. All his preaching and effort had come to this. She wanted to scream, Why did you do this to me? But she also thought, Who, if I cried out, would hear me? She hated what she had become. She couldn’t even remember who she’d been before they sank their hooks into her. The hawk. The hawk had gotten her. But she’d managed to escape. She desperately wanted to find a way back now. But back to where? She wondered if she would ever reach a place of safety where she might begin to heal.

Lucy buried the hospital gown and fell asleep. When she woke, she sat quietly and waited for sunrise. She knew it was coming when the birds began. She went into The Stream and waited. She could tell by what the birds and animals said that no one was near. She found a piñon tree and ate some of the nuts. Then the whole forest lit up with a beauty that was almost painful after her time in captivity. The trunks of the trees stood, twisted and dark, and the glittering green leaves seemed to hold the light and vibrate with an electric aura. Aromas rose around her.

But she had no time to enjoy it: They would be finding the body now, sending out the alarm. She wished that she could see what she looked like before going out, to know what sort of impression she would make. She had to pass for an American teenager. At least the ghastly wound in her head was covered.

She could hear a road in the distance. She forged her way through the woods toward it. A scattering of cars and trucks passed on a divided four-lane highway. She began to walk along the shoulder, where a crow picked at some roadkill. As Lucy approached, he cocked a dark and gleaming eye at her and shouted, “I know you! I know you! I know you!”

“Go away!” The crow lifted off and cackled back at her, his heavy black wings cutting the air.

Lucy stuck her thumb out. She had read about it in
The Grapes of Wrath
and
On the Road
, and now she wondered if hitchhiking still worked. She walked on with the sun at her back, casting a long shadow across the land like a great spider.

45

AMANDA WAS DIPPING FRITOS
into a small container of bean dip and drinking a Diet Coke as the old Toyota crossed through the great irrigated fields of wheat and cotton on a deserted road in Oklahoma. Staying clear of the interstate, they had driven all day and all night, taking turns sleeping.

Jenny had called Ruth Randall, the only person she knew in New Mexico. She had gone to Harry’s to make the call. She told Ruth only that they were accepting her invitation to the ranch.

“Do you want Luke to send the plane?” Ruth had asked. “It’s no bother.”

“No, we’re driving.”

“I always liked the open road. I can’t get Luke to do it anymore, though. He’s in too much of a hurry.”

“We should reach your place tomorrow.”

“I’ll be waiting.” Jenny thought she detected by a change in her voice that Ruth understood the subtext of their conversation. “It will be nice to see you.”

Jenny had hung up and turned to look at Amanda, who had been standing beside her in Harry’s kitchen.

“We’re going to find her,” Amanda said.

“I hope you’re right.”

“We’re going to find her.”

Harry had packed sandwiches for the trip. Jenny had not told him where they were going, only that she’d call when she could. Harry, as always, understood.

Now, after a long night on the road, Amanda slid a disk into the CD player. “American Girl” began. Celestial choruses of voices soared over wild guitar riffs. She smiled at Jenny. She held out a Frito with bean dip on it. Jenny opened her mouth and Amanda put it in. Jenny closed her eyes for a moment as she chewed.

“Why is that so good? It’s junk food.”

“The American sacrament,” Amanda said.

“When you have children, you want to give them everything. I’ve never had children of my own, but now I think I understand that. You want to give them just everything. But you have to keep on living, too. And then you somehow feel guilty when you’re enjoying what they can’t have. It’s a terrible thing.”

“We’re going to find her,” Amanda said. It had become her mantra.

Tom Petty sang, “After all, it was a great big world with lots of places to run to …”