The Most Wanted (37 page)

Our whole personal library of pre- and perinuptial fights suddenly seemed inconsequential. All the way home, I was besieged by images of regret and abandonment. I’d be lost without Stuart. I already was.

Then I thought, I’ll go and see Charley. But immediately thought, how could you, Anne?

It didn’t matter, in any case.

When I got home, Jack Becker was in front of my house with one Carla Merrill, agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It soon became clear that Langtry Mowbray, a white female, aged twenty-one years, had disappeared from her mother’s locked house in Avalon, Texas, leaving behind all her earthly goods, so far as anyone could tell, except a pair of multicolored cowboy boots. A blood-drenched nightgown was found trampled on the ground below the second-story window of the bedroom now hers, once Arley’s. There was blood on the walls of the room and on the open window, but not on the metal extension ladder that lay among the chile pequin bushes. Langtry’s mother, Rita Mowbray, had been at work at Texas Christian Hospital when whatever took place at the house took place. Ms. Mowbray was quite calm. Her greatest anxiety was the ladder, which she was careful to explain was not hers, and to insist that it be removed before it ruined her shrubbery.

“Where is Arley?” I asked Jack, trying to restrain a scream. “Where is Arley right now?”

“She’s in her apartment,” Jack said. “And we have a unit on her, front and back.”

“Would she have a way of knowing?”

“I can’t read her mind, honey,” Jack Becker said. “If she’s watching TV, she knows.”

I grabbed my purse to turn and run right back down the walk.

But the FBI agent broke in: “We need to talk to Missus LeGrande.”

“Not tonight.”

“Miss Singer, this is a homicide investigation—”

“She’s having a baby at six o’clock in the morning! She’s fifteen years old!”

“If she’s been in contact with her husband—”

“She hasn’t been in contact with her husband or anyone but me!” I pleaded with Jack. “You know it’s true, Jack. Her own mother doesn’t even know where she is. . . .”

“That is true,” he agreed.

“I’m not saying you don’t need to talk with her. But this kid has been through so much. A few hours—”

“Can mean a cold trail,” Carla Merrill assured me.

“This is a terrible idea for her physical health, Miss Merrill,” I said then, scrambling for my lawyer gears, settling down. “As you know, a girl this young is at considerable risk.”

They stood there, both of them, staring at the curb. Then Carla Merrill said, “Well . . .”

I knew then that they’d give Arley one last night of peace. Jack agreed to keep in constant phone contact with me—I’d stay at Arley’s apartment. But as I went to gather up my briefcase and my overnight bag from my apartment, Merrill touched my arm and looked me in the eye.

“You know, it’s just possible that this has nothing to do with Dillon LeGrande,” she said. Langtry, she went on, had no shortage of unsavory pals: she was apparently a successful call girl, with a real following among minor-league Hispanic hoodlums.

But there was one thing. Merrill hesitated.

“What? What? Tell me right now.”

It just couldn’t get out to the media; she’d have to rely on me for that.

I wanted to smack her one. But then she finally told me.

There’d been something found at the scene: a cream-colored card with letters cut from magazines to spell out a single line: “What?” I asked. “What line?” She told me: “Wait for me by moonlight.”

Right then I couldn’t have known the significance of that particular bit of poetry. I thought the card found at Rita’s house, with its spooky line, was one of a kind. But of course it was not.

I
F THERE IS A HELL
, I’m going to it, because most of what I remember feeling when I finally found out about Lang was that her disappearing, however it happened, screwed up my first few months with Desi. After all, Langtry had no use for me, and I hadn’t really known her except for a few hours every few months since I was a little girl. I was so sick and frazzled after Desi was born, and then finding out about Lang, that I couldn’t even nurse Desi properly at first. And all the while, Annie kept acting like the Nazis were coming to break into the secret annex. She carried her ugly little gun everywhere and got me shuttled off to the cabin at light speed, even before I was supposed to leave the hospital.

At first I didn’t really think what happened to Lang had anything to do with Dillon. And I certainly didn’t know anything about any card at my mama’s house. Or I would have told. I really would have. About my card with the red ribbons. About the card Dillon sent me. And about the card I found.

It sounds horrible, and ridiculous, but I didn’t really think it was important. Not right then. Not by the time I got into the hospital just the next morning and the birth was starting and all. I thought it could have been a prank. I was pretty sure Dillon never told anyone about the things we did, or the things we said.

But he could have.

He could have told Kevin.

And in my heart I did suspect that Dillon was the one who’d sent our poetry to that TV anchorwoman in San Antonio. He would have liked the attention.

But that morning, the day before Desi was born, I was outside getting my own mail. Mostly, I just got mail that said “Occupant,” but I was looking for a CD I’d ordered through a special offer from the Ameristar Music Library. The guy said it would be there in three days, and here it had been six. I went flipping through the envelopes, looking for something in cardboard, and then I saw it.

It was a shiny black envelope. Like a fancy wedding invitation or one of those You’re-Turning-Thirty birthday cards. No stamp on it.

I opened it. There was a card inside. It didn’t look like the card I got FedEx’d on fiesta night. It was just a plain white file card, and the words on it were cut out of some book. Very tiny. It said: “Then look for me by moonlight.”

It scared me so bad I dropped it right there by the mailboxes and went running back inside. Then I was afraid to go back down and get it. If it was from Dillon, then he knew where I was. But nobody was supposed to know where I was, and Jeanine’s apartments were, like, sealed from the telephone directory and everything. Nobody but the birth parents knew where in the city they were.

And what did it mean? Was I going to see Dillon? My heart felt like it was starting to expand. With the baby, I could barely breathe anyhow. I thought I’d pass out, standing there by the breakfast bar. Where was Dillon? Was he telling me he was coming for me and for our baby? Coming to rush us off to Mexico? I didn’t want to go to Mexico. I didn’t want to have my baby in some old house with some old car sitting out in front of it. I didn’t want to have my baby without Annie. On the other hand, I wanted to be with him, at least for a little while. At least for a night. To look in his eyes. To touch him and make love. To see whether he really hurt that man, or if, as I suspected, it was all Kevin and that Indian, with Dillon craving only his freedom.

How had he found me, I wondered. Someone would have had to see me come over, that first night, to know I was here at all. . . . It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t a ghost, even though I sometimes thought of him that way. He was just a person. He couldn’t be in two places at once. . . . I didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified.

If I’d known about Lang then, I’d have been scared to death.

But not much was making sense to me at that time. I was addled by my body. Even my brain seemed to float.

They say you don’t recall labor—or you wouldn’t ever go through it again willingly. But I remember every instant of Desiree’s birth. It’s before and after I don’t recall. Hardly anything from the month before and not much of the whole month after, my first month at the cabin, when Annie was practically living there and I was asleep half the time. The birth, though, that was beautiful, though Annie would not say the same thing, particularly the shape she’s in right now. At the time, she kept comparing the physical part of it, especially hooking the IV lines up for the induction, to what happened to Stuart’s clients on death row, which was sort of weird. She even thought having to go to the hospital at six A.M. was horrible—like getting guys up at midnight to execute them.

She was a nervous wreck the night before we went to the hospital. I thought it was because she’d dropped Stuart off at the airport and was depressed.

But it was really because she was so afraid.

That’s why she just kept babbling. Talking about death row. It didn’t do much for my frame of mind.

“Think about it, Arley.” She made us some macaroni and picked up the plates to rinse them before I could even finish mine. “Think about dinner dishes from your last meal—now, there’s a concept, huh? Say they’re all cleared away. What are you going to do for the night? Watch old
Mary Tyler Moore
shows? You could never sleep. No hope for that. And no hope for anything else, no room to maneuver, no way to back off and change the course, no reprieve, nothing to do but hang around. Like we’re hanging around tonight. No! God! I didn’t mean it that way at all! I’m just babbling . . . I’m sorry.”

“Annie, chill,” I told her. “Come on! I think you’re more scared than I am.”

“I’m sure I’m more scared than you are.”

By that time, I’d almost forgotten the card by the downstairs mailbox. I guess it was swept up or something. I was so worn out, I slept like a baby that night. But Annie was up, checking the windows, fiddling with the phone. She wouldn’t let me touch the TV. “The sound will drive me nuts,” she grumbled. What I didn’t know then was that she was keeping me away from TV news, especially those little breaks they like to do when something happens in a juicy case like Dillon’s. Since I didn’t know anything about what had gone on at Mama’s house (though I did think that Annie got a strange number of phone calls at my apartment, even for her), I just believed she was all wired up over me going to have the baby and Stuart leaving, coming so close on each other.

Later, Annie told me she’d watched the parkway all night long like it was a movie. Every time she heard a rustle in the live oak outside my window, she’d turn, expecting what she called Dillon’s “green glass” eyes. All night long, police cruisers glided around the apartment house, she said later, surfacing unexpectedly like sharks. She’d wondered, all alone, whether she should have brought me to the hospital that very night, whether Dillon would jump us when she brought me outside in the morning. And she’d kept thinking about what would happen if he did and wanted to take me. Would I go? Would I run right to him, without a backward glance? She had no idea how strong my commitment was to my baby. And neither of us had any idea how strong my commitment was to her, to Annie herself. So, until she heard the dawn birds, she didn’t relax. And she never let me know.

About five in the morning, I woke up when I heard the door of my apartment open and close. I got up and slipped into my clothes, which I’d set out the night before, and looked out the window. Annie was talking to somebody in a police car. I knew it was a police car because Charley had showed me how to spot unmarkeds: four-doors with big tires. The phone rang then. I picked it up, and it was the hospital. They told me that the induction had to be rescheduled and they would call me later in the day with more information.

Dr. Carroll was overbooked. They were sorry.

They didn’t sound sorry.

I started to cry.

Annie unlocked the door and came back in. When she saw me, she dropped her purse with a big
thunk
—it had her gun in it—and yelled, “Where is he?”

I looked up at her and shrank back on my couch. “Who?”

“Dillon! Is he here?”

“Annie,” I said, shocked out of my tears. “There’s no one here but me.” Breath rushed back into my chest, hurting as if I’d run a mile of hurdles.

“What’s the matter, then, honey? Are you scared?”

“No. But the hospital called. They said I can’t have the baby.”

She almost laughed. “It’s a little late for that, I think. What did they really say?”

“They said they were . . . filled. There was no bed for me. So they would just do the induction next week or something.”

“But you know that’s a mistake, honey. I talked with Doctor Carroll yesterday.”

“I know! I told them that! I asked to talk to Doctor Carroll, but they said he was busy. They said to call back later.”

Annie stood there puffing.

She later told me that she was thinking maybe she could fire her gun, after all, take it into the lobby of Texas Christian Hospital and just open up. And then she grabbed up the phone and told me to go in the other room. I heard some of what she was saying, though, even through the door.

“. . . a misunderstanding . . . Arlington LeGrande was to be admitted this morning. . . . In jeopardy, yes, and not just because of problems with the baby. . . . Oh, yes you do. . . . It had better not be because of that. . . . Yes, we will. Oh, no, do not misunderstand me. We will be there in approximately half an hour for this procedure.”

Annie opened the bedroom door. “Get your duffel bag, Arley.” I got my duffel bag. It was all packed. She was still on the telephone.

“Listen, you poor soul,” she said. “I am Anne D. Singer, Arlington LeGrande’s attorney. At a regularly scheduled prenatal appointment last week, I witnessed the decision to induce labor so as not to jeopardize a pregnancy in which a young woman in fragile health is past her due date and in which the fetus has demonstrated some evidence of distress. I confirmed this situation by telephone yesterday with Doctor Carroll. . . . No, it doesn’t matter a goddamn what has happened since yesterday. . . . Sorry, no, here’s the situation: As Arlington LeGrande’s attending physician, who has been responsible for her prenatal care since the eighth week of her pregnancy, only Doctor Carroll can make the decision to postpone this birth—despite the anxiety and emotional damage already caused my client by the nature and timing of the new decision—for reasons that I can only surmise are medically suspect. But you tell him now that if he makes that choice, given that any other physician would be very reluctant to assume Arlington’s care at this stage, and any harm result to Arlington LeGrande or her baby because of what might appear to be a decision motivated by expedience and reasons other than her medical well-being and that of her unborn child, you can certainly expect that he and Texas Christian Hospital will be called to answer for this harm in a legal proceeding of serious proportions.”

She waited. I guess she was on hold. “Turn out the lights, Arley,” she said.

“Why’s there a police car downstairs?”