The Long and Faraway Gone (20 page)

The resemblance was only superficial: the age, the hair, the clothes. This girl had a round face with small eyes, close together, light not dark, and she wore a pair of tacky dyed-­feather earrings that Genevieve would never have worn. And the way this girl hugged herself against the chill, the way she slouched—­Genevieve took great pride in her posture. She could set a book flat on her head and walk casually down the basement stairs. She could pivot at the bottom without missing a beat and walk casually back up again.

And when Julianna looked closer, she saw that the slouchy, round-­faced girl in the photo was not wearing a
BORN IN THE USA
shirt—­it was just a shirt with an American flag on it.

Mary Hilger Hall had left her table and crept closer. She hovered by a display of instant coffees, watching Julianna. Julianna ignored her and focused again on the photo of the illuminated fountains. She studied the rest of the crowd. Nothing. No Genevieve, no mysterious man in a cowboy hat. The faces were blurred and indistinct.

The next photo was the last photo in the stack, the one from Food Alley that Mary Hilger Hall had posted online.

Julianna stuffed the photos back into the envelope. She felt fine. Disappointed. A week ago this outcome might have destroyed her. Now, though, waiting for Crowley to contact her, she had more pressing devastations to worry about.

Mary Hilger Hall pounced. Eyes wide, hopeful, hungry. “Did you find anything?” she said.

Julianna handed back the photos. She pressed a hand to her heart and closed her eyes and took a deep, shaky breath.

“I did,” she said, and then left.

HOW COULD YOU
do that, Genni? How could you walk away and leave me there and never come back? All I had was you. All I've ever had was you.

Julianna spent the afternoon failing to nap. What had really happened between Genevieve and Crowley? What did she say when he asked her where she was going?

Would Crowley tell Julianna the truth? What would that cost her?

When she got to the hospital for her shift, she checked in with the supervising nurse. Julianna had worked in the ER for three years before transferring to recovery, but she knew this woman only vaguely. A tyrant, a Ben with ovaries.

The supervising nurse eyed Julianna suspiciously. “So. You're our floater?”

“I'm being punished,” Julianna said.

“I assume your credentials are up to date?”

The supervising nurse knew they were. She was exactly like Ben.

Julianna's first patient was a homeless man with an upper-­respiratory infection and severe dehydration. The aide worried that the man would be a difficult stick—­he was in his seventies, with tiny, spidery veins—­but Julianna had always been good at inserting an IV, ever since nursing school. She warmed the man's arm and eased in the catheter. No problem.

The ER was slow for a weekend night. But then again it was still early, only a little after one. The bars were still open. Julianna kept her phone with her, in the pocket of her scrubs, against regulations. If it vibrated, if Crowley called, she planned to answer it. She didn't care what, or who, she was in the middle of.

The photo bothered her. The girl by the illuminated fountains looked almost nothing like Genevieve, but only at second glance. At first glance the girl looked enough like Genevieve that even Julianna—­Genevieve's own sister—­had felt her heart stop for an instant.

The illuminated fountains and the Made in Oklahoma Building were very close to the north end of Food Alley. It was conceivable, Julianna recognized, that after the photo was taken, the girl who looked a little like Genevieve had walked over to Food Alley. It was conceivable
she
was the girl the rancher's wife from Okeene had seen, not Genevieve.

But no. Abigail Goad was the one absolutely reliable eyewitness. She'd examined a dozen family photos and been absolutely certain it was Genevieve she saw that night. She specifically identified the
BORN IN THE USA
T-­shirt that Genevieve had been wearing.

Julianna's next patient was a man who had been mugged: bruised ribs, bruised knee, a laceration on his palm, a possible concussion, various facial abrasions. A police officer was taking his statement when Julianna entered the room.

The man looked up at her and smiled. “Wait till you see the other guy,” he said.

Julianna smiled back and examined the laceration as the police officer finished taking the man's statement. The laceration was straight and not too deep, but it would need stitches. The police officer left. Julianna buffered lidocaine with sodium bicarbonate and prepped a ten-­milliliter syringe. The man watched her.

“Will I feel a sting?” he said. “No. A slight pinch. What's the current euphemism?”

He was nice-­looking, even in his damaged state. A nice smile. Julianna found his eyes interesting. They were in some agreement with the smile, but only some.

“You'll survive,” she said. She injected the anesthetic slowly, starting inside the cut margin of the wound.

“What's your name? My name's Wyatt.”

“Julianna.”

She cleaned the wound with saline and examined it again. She realigned the skin and began to suture.

“Julianna,” the man said, “have I ever told you that you have a gentle but knowing touch?”

She smiled again. She couldn't tell if he wanted to have sex with her or not. That was an uncertainty most men never thought to cultivate.

“Not recently,” she said. “No.”

“When I was a kid, seven or eight years old, I was trying to climb a fence at school. A chain-­link fence that went around the playground. Do you remember—­ I don't know if this is still the case, but chain-­link fences back in the day had these really sharp points all along the top. Where the wires sort of twisted together?”

Julianna remembered. The grade school she and Genevieve attended had just such a fence.

“Before lawsuits,” she said.

“Exactly. Anyway, I think someone kicked a kickball over the fence or something, and I was racing to get it, and I got my palm caught on one of those twisty things and fell off. Twelve stitches. You always remember your first time.”

She tied off the last suture. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Maybe it had been stolen when he was mugged.

“We're done,” she said, and reached for the antibiotic ointment.

Her shift ended at eight. Crowley still hadn't called. Julianna had to cut across one of the visitor lots on her way to the employee garage. The wind had turned around during the night and blew now from the north, knifing through her. Oklahoma. Just when you though the Indian summer would never end, it did.

“Hi!” A woman getting out of her car called to Julianna and waved. Julianna didn't know why. She waved back and kept walking. “Julianna!”

Julianna turned. The woman hurried over, beaming. A girl in her early twenties, blond hair and big sunglasses, a sundress and three-­inch cork wedges. She looked like she was headed to a spring-­break pool party in Padre.

“Don't tell me you don't remember me
again,
” the girl said. She laughed happily. “You slut!”

She took off her sunglasses. Julianna recognized the French nails, the bright eyes—­the girl who worked in HR at the Indian casino, who had given her Crowley's address.

“Oh,” Julianna said. “Hi.”

“Ariel,” the girl said. “You know how you can remember it from now on? Picture one of those old planes with the double wings doing a loop-­the-­loop. That's what my dad used to always say. Aerial tricks. Ariel.”

Julianna took her car keys out of her purse. She displayed them as proof of her impending departure. “I'm just leaving.”

“I'm just arriving. I'm going to find some cute dude nurse and let him stick it to me.”

Julianna blinked, and the girl, Ariel, laughed.

Chemo.
Julianna remembered now. The D&C that had landed the girl in Julianna's recovery hadn't been used to clean up a miscarriage. It had been used to diagnose uterine cancer.

“No, it's fine,” Ariel said. “I'm totally okay. It's just like a precaution. And I didn't even lose my hair! They're using some groovy new drug, apparently.”

She put her sunglasses back on. Too quickly, Julianna noticed. She looked over at Ariel's car. There was no one else in it: no father or mother, no sister, best friend, or boyfriend.

“I'm sorry about what happened to your sister,” Ariel said. “I never told you that.”

“You're here alone?” Julianna said.

“No! I mean, today. Today I am. I have a minute before I start, if you want to get, like, coffee or whatever.”

The girl was only twenty-­one or twenty-­two years old. And she seemed, shivering there in the gusting north wind, even younger. Julianna felt an ache of something deep inside her—­pity, perhaps. It took her by surprise.

“I have to go,” she said. She started to move away. The girl moved with her.

“I wish I had some perfume. I didn't have time for a shower this morning, and I probably smell like a tweaker.”

“I don't have any perfume with me.”

“Give me your phone.”

Julianna stopped. “My phone?”

“Your phone. Just for a sec. Gimme, gimme.”

Julianna found herself, without really knowing why, handing her phone to the girl. The girl started punching keys.

“I'm putting my info in your phone,” Ariel said. “And now I'm calling my phone with your phone. That way I'll have your number and you'll have mine. It's what we call a win-­win situation.”

A frantic, tinny hip-­hop ringtone came from somewhere deep inside Ariel's bag. She gave Julianna her phone back.

“Bye!” she said.

Julianna watched her cross the lot, unsteady on the high cork wedges, and enter the building. A few seconds later, Julianna's phone rang. The pushy girl again.

“Listen,” Julianna said, not bothering to glance at the caller ID. “Stop it. Leave me alone.”

Silence, and then a rough, hoarse laugh.

“If you say so,” Crowley said, and hung up on her.

 

W
yatt drove himself to the emergency room. Every time he turned the steering wheel more than an inch or two, he felt like he was being impaled by one of his own ribs. His right knee hurt so much he had to work the gas and brake pedals with his left foot. And his hand—­during the attack, Wyatt hadn't even registered that he'd sliced open his own palm with the shard of broken beer bottle. Gavin would love that.

In the emergency room, a cop took his statement and frowned when Wyatt provided his best description of the assailant. Male. White, probably. Around six feet tall, give or take. Medium to heavy build.

“That narrows it down, doesn't it?” Wyatt said.

The cop said they'd tried to pull prints off the board he'd been attacked with, but both the cop and Wyatt knew that the attacker had probably worn gloves. Wyatt told the cop about the case he was working for Candace, and how someone had broken into the Land Run two nights ago, and how Wyatt had discovered the boards in the stockade fence that had been pried loose for easy access.

“Huh,” the cop said. “Same board used on you?”

“Presumably.”

“Sounds like someone is telling you to drop it and go home.”

Wyatt nodded. He'd come to the same conclusion.

The attacker hadn't been trying to kill Wyatt—­he'd gone after Wyatt's back, ribs, knee—­and the weapon had been chosen, and left behind, to send a message. Wyatt wondered how long his attacker had been on him—­since his first visit with Candace, maybe. He hadn't noticed a tail, but then again he hadn't been looking. Probably he'd been tailed from the Land Run after he stopped by to see Candace. The dark, deserted playground was a good place to make a point.

All that was easy. The tough question was
who.
Jeff Eddy or one of his football buddies? Maybe Jeff Eddy was smarter than Wyatt gave him credit for and had realized at the football game that his attempt to buy Wyatt off was a bust. Maybe
he
was the one playing along with Wyatt, not the other way around.

Lyle Finn was the other most likely possibility. Lyle Finn or one of
his
buddies, one of the hippie groupies hanging out at the warehouse when Wyatt came to visit. Weren't hippies supposed to believe in the principle of nonviolence? Peace and love? Finn's manager, Dixon, didn't look like the kind of guy who would go after you with a board, but Wyatt knew that meant exactly nothing.

Maybe there was a wild card on the table that Wyatt hadn't even turned over yet. Was he getting close to finding out who was harassing Candace? If so, it was news to him.

The cop promised that a patrol unit from the Will Rogers Division would keep an eye on the Land Run, driving by at staggered intervals over the next several days and nights.

Wyatt thanked him. The painkillers a doctor had given him were starting to lose their kick. And now that the adrenaline had ebbed, the shakes rolled in. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been in a fight. Third grade?

“No fun, is it?” the cop said when he was about to leave.

“Not even a little,” Wyatt said.

The nurse who took care of the slash on the palm of his right hand had skin with a faint olive tint and long, graceful fingers. Her name was Julianna. Wyatt had to work to get a real smile out of her, and even then he couldn't be sure if it was real.

“Julianna,” he said as she stitched him up, “have I ever told you that you have a gentle but knowing touch?”

“Not recently. No.”

He needed more painkillers. His knee ached, his ribs. His head hurt, too, now. What didn't hurt? Wyatt didn't want to think about the pain, so he told the nurse about the time he split his other palm open on the top of chain-­link fence.

“Twelve stitches,” he said. “You always remember your first time.”

The nurse's smile came and went, like breath fogging a window.

There had been a time in Wyatt's life when every girl he met who looked vaguely like Theresa looked just like Theresa. Not now, though. And this nurse looked only vaguely, vaguely like Theresa. But she had the same dense weave to her—­layers and layers. He suspected she was the kind of woman you stayed away from if you knew what was good for you.

Around five in the morning, Wyatt was finally discharged. His knee wasn't broken, only badly bruised, as were his ribs. The doctor told him that if the attacker had used the edge of the board instead of the flat side, he would have ended up in traction. A CT scan of Wyatt's head revealed no excessive bleeding or damage. The doctor wrote him a prescription for painkillers and advised him to avoid alcohol until the headache faded, as well as any activity that required a great deal of concentration.

Yeah, right. There was someone out there, after all, who'd just beaten him silly. Wyatt needed to figure out who, preferably before the guy took another crack at it.

Now, though, he was so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. He pulled in to the parking lot of the Marriott and shut off his engine. A tap on his window made him jump. A woman peered in, looking concerned. One of the breakfast waitresses at the hotel. Wyatt tried to remember her name.

“Mr. Rivers?” she said.

Wyatt opened his door and got out of the car. “I'm fine, Marisol,” he said.

“You were just sitting there and like staring off into space.”

“I was?”

She saw the bandage on his hand, the scrapes on his cheek. “Mr. Rivers! What happened?”

“You should see him,” Wyatt said.

“Who?”

Wyatt calculated he had approximately sixty seconds to make it to the hotel lobby, up to his room, and into bed or he'd fall asleep where he stood. He started walking.

“The other guy,” he called back to her.

H
E SLEPT HARD,
without dreaming. He woke only because his bladder was about to blow—­he'd been too tired to take a leak before he went down the night before. No, not the night before, just earlier this morning. Was it still morning? Was it still today? He left the bathroom and pulled open the curtains of his room. Sunlight blasted him. His phone told him it was a little before nine on Friday morning. He'd been asleep for a grand total of about five hours.

He felt surprisingly all right, though, everything considered. He could flex his knee, a little, and his ribs were more sore than excruciating. Wyatt was afraid that if he went back to sleep, there was a good chance he'd wake up feeling worse than he did now, so he took a shower—­tricky when you have to keep the bandage on your right hand dry—­and got dressed. He tried calling Candace, but she didn't answer, so he went down to the hotel restaurant and drank more coffee than was probably wise.

A rush-­hour fender bender had backed up the Northwest Expressway, so Wyatt looped around on May. He looked for the pizza place, Shotgun Sam's, where he and O'Malley had often swapped free movie passes for pizza. Shotgun Sam's appeared to be gone, unless Wyatt had his memories mixed up and it had been south of Thirty-­sixth, not north.

The movie passes could be used at any Monarch theater in the chain. They came in books of twenty, and Mr. Bingham guarded them with his life. He counted them, he recounted them, he kept them locked in a drawer in his locked office. But O'Malley had his ways. He had a dozen ways. Once or twice a month, for example, he'd knock on Mr. Bingham's door and report that an unhappy customer in the lobby had a complaint. The complaint was always specific and plausible—­how the butter-­flavored topping on the popcorn tasted weird, for example. Mr. Bingham, who dreaded confrontation with anyone but his teenage employees, would unlock his drawer and hand O'Malley two passes to give the fictitious customer.

“For the widows and orphans,” O'Malley would say to Wyatt when he tucked the passes into the inside pocket of O'Malley's orange blazer.

Among the crew the passes were community property—­to each according to his or her need. One pass was good for a new-­release cassette at Rainbow Records, a large pepperoni pizza from Shotgun Sam's, or a ­couple of Sonic burgers with Tater Tots. Three or four passes could usually be traded for a ticket to a concert at the Myriad or the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman.

At the mall, directly above the movie theater, was a small, dark bar where local jazz bands sometimes played. Ten Monarch passes got you a bottle of bottom-­shelf vodka or bourbon, if one of the bartenders was in the mood to cut a deal with O'Malley.

One time O'Malley negotiated a deal with Donald, Mr. Bingham's friend who worked at the pet store upstairs: twenty movie passes for a giant iguana. The deal fell through when Pet Shop Boy couldn't deliver the iguana. No shock, since he had zero credibility to start with. He was always coming up with the dumbest moneymaking ideas possible, like a stagecoach taxi ser­vice for downtown.

Melody told O'Malley he should be grateful about the lost iguana. Her cousin, she said, had been bitten while on a mission trip to Belize, and a doctor had removed part of his foot.

“That's no lie,” she said, nodding so emphatically that the beads attached to her cornrows rattled.

Wyatt drove up Sixty-­third. He kept one eye on his rearview mirror. A dark blue sedan had stayed with him when he turned off Portland, but now it peeled away and pulled in to the PetSmart on the corner. Wyatt relaxed—­a little.

He parked next to the playground and then walked the escape route he'd seen his attacker take. Through the park, across the street, into the lot behind the Burlington Coat Factory. The lot looked more or less the way Wyatt remembered it from his days at the movie theater. A little smaller, maybe. The asphalt had been recently resurfaced, and a new Dumpster—­green, not blue, with a sleeker design and a lid that was curved, futuristic, plastic—­had replaced the original monster.

Wyatt had hated that Dumpster. The lid was solid, heavy, rusted metal, like something salvaged from a torpedoed Japanese freighter. Every edge and corner was bent and sharp. And the permanent sludge in the bottom stank like you wouldn't believe, sour and poisonous, a smell that followed you around the rest of the night. You just hoped to find enough dropped change in the auditorium trash sweep to make the trip to the Dumpster at the end of the night worth it.

The rocks that doormen used to prop open the exit doors, Wyatt remembered, were actually chunks of concrete—­all that was left of a broken parking block, yellow paint flaking, from the mall's front lot.

The new Dumpster was in a new location, at the far end of the lot, beneath what would have been, in 1986, the pet store. Wyatt flipped open the plastic lid and peered inside. He'd hoped his attacker might have tossed gloves, hoodie, or sunglasses as he was fleeing, but no such luck—­the Dumpster was empty. He worked his way back across the lot, back and forth across an imaginary grid, one square yard at a time. Nothing. Wyatt supposed he wasn't surprised. His attacker was someone who'd meticulously turned every object in the Land Run upside down, who'd managed to tail Wyatt without getting made. If the gloves and hoodie and sunglasses had been ditched, they were probably somewhere he would never know to look.

He walked over to one of the auditorium exit doors that had been plastered over, the one closest to the street. The four concrete steps. The imitation wrought-­iron handrail, with a round knuckled claw at the end of it—­the last remaining evidence of the building's original French Quarter theme.

It was strange to be back here, this parking lot, after so long. Wyatt remembered standing on these steps with everyone else that afternoon in August. The old bat in the Cadillac had bashed the Dumpster with the force of an explosion—­the crew heard the boom and crunch all the way in the lobby and came running. Mr. Bingham, when he got there, ordered everyone back inside the theater, but no way—­this was too good to miss. Wyatt remembered Mr. Bingham, slouched and sweaty, standing at the old bat's window and melting down. He kept taking off his glasses and wiping them with his tie.

O'Malley had said something that made everyone laugh. What? Wyatt couldn't remember. Theresa, in front of Wyatt on the steps, had leaned her head back and rested it on his chest. Karlene had gathered her riot of frosted blond hair together and lifted it up, to cool her neck. Grubb had asked Melody for a piece of gum.

And here, now, a lifetime later, Wyatt still stood, all the others gone.

He drove to the Land Run and parked in the employee lot behind the building, empty at two o'clock in the afternoon. He walked over and confirmed—­the telltale gap at the far end of the stockade fence, a plank missing—­that the attack last night had definitely been a message.

He looked around. The street to his right, the boarded-­up body shop to his left. On the other side of the fence, the windows of Lyle Finn's warehouse mirrored back a flawless blue sky. Yesterday morning someone, lurking somewhere close by, had watched Wyatt examine the fence and find the loose boards. Who?

Wyatt squeezed through the hole in the fence and followed the alley to the warehouse. A ­couple of Lyle Finn's groupies were on the loading dock—­a girl wearing a leopard-­fur fedora and a bearded dude in a pink inflatable-­pig costume. The bearded dude was watching the girl wobble around the loading dock on a pair of short aluminum stilts, about two feet high, the kind that construction workers used when they drywalled a ceiling. She stopped when she saw Wyatt.

“Hi,” Wyatt said. “Is Lyle around?”

The two groupies stared sullenly at Wyatt. The girl was having a hard time keeping her balance. The bearded pig reached out to steady her.

“Hello?” Wyatt tried again. “Lyle Finn? Oink once if you understand.”

Dixon, the band's manager, came around the corner of the warehouse. He gave Wyatt a wave and walked over.

“Was it something I said?” Wyatt asked him. The girl began to wobble around again on the stilts. The bearded pig turned away to watch her. “They refuse to acknowledge my existence.”