When She Was Bad: A Thriller (23 page)

Fano’s mule, she thought—crap oh crap oh crap, how could I
possibly
have forgotten!

5

Irene swam upward from a deep dreamless sleep, saw Pender’s face floating above her like one of those giant balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade. It took her eyes forever to bring him into focus. He looked so
concerned,
hovering there. “S’matter, Pen?” she mumbled.

“Are you all right? Where are they? Did they hurt you? Do they have your car?”

“Too many questions. Just lemme…a couple more minutes, lemme sleep a couple more minutes.” She rolled over onto her side, facing the back of the couch, and drew her legs up.

“Irene! Wake up, Irene, I need you to wake up now.”

His hand was on her shoulder, shaking her. How rude, she thought, covering her ears with her palms and resuming the fetal position. But it was no use—her head was starting to throb, her back and knees ached, and her neck felt like she’d spent twenty minutes in the ring with Hulk Hogan.

“Did they drug you?” Pender was saying. “Slip you a mickey, something like that? Should I call an ambulance?”

“No!” For some reason, the suggestion alarmed her. “No ambulance.” She rolled over onto her back, swung her legs off the couch, and tried to sit up. The blood rushed from her head; the room swam.

“Take it easy, I’ve got you.” Pender helped her lie back down, positioned a throw pillow under her head. “How about a doctor—is there a doctor I can call?”

“I
am
a doctor,” said Irene, almost pouting.

“Okay,
doctor.”
Pender pulled the side chair over to the couch to sit on. “Would you
please
tell me what the hell happened here?”

Irene sat up again—slowly, this time—and was surprised to find she was still wearing Frank’s pajamas. “They must have slipped something into my orange juice,” she told Pender. Nor would finding that something have been very difficult. They’d only have had to go as far as the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom—in the last six years, Irene had self-prescribed, with varying degrees of success, every sleeping medication known to God, man, and GlaxoSmithKline. “I thought it tasted kind of bitter.”

“When was that? Do you know when they left here?”

“One quesh’n at a time,” said Irene, slurring like a ham actor playing a drunk.

“Sorry. How long ago did they leave?”

“What time is it now?”

“A little after eight.”

Leaning forward, massaging her pounding temples with her fingertips: “
A
.
M
. or
P
.
M
.?”

“
P
.
M
.”

Come back to me, little brain, thought Irene, working at the math. “Eight, ten hours?”

“In your car?”

“If it’s gone.”

“Do you know your license plate number?” asked Pender, taking his cell phone out of his pocket.

“I think so. Who are you calling?”

“The police,” Pender explained gently. “So they can update the BOLO.”

“That won’t be…necessary.” Irene was proud of having come up with the word—for a few seconds there it had been touch and go.

“Why not?”

“Because…” Blank. Blank mind. Because what? What was the question? Oh, right. Yes, of course: “Because there’s only one place they could have gone.”

“Where’s that?” asked Pender—but Irene appeared to have nodded off again. “I’d better go make you some coffee,” he said.

“Good idea,” Irene mumbled. “Make some for me, too.”

6

Lily dressed hurriedly. On her way out of the cabin she saw Lyssy’s snubnosed revolver lying atop his 501s, at the foot of the bed. She snatched it up almost as an afterthought and stuffed it into the waistband of her Guess?’s, then tiptoed barefoot across the clean-swept boards, opened the door, and closed it ever so quietly behind her.

The
pocketapocketapocketa
grew louder; Lily waved from the covered porch as the open-sided, open-roofed contraption her grandfather had always referred to as the mule came chugging up the dirt road leading in from the highway. A skeletal vehicle with small rubber tires lined up four on each side, a frame of welded pipes supporting a bench seat up front and a railed wooden flatbed mounted over a noisy, sputtering gasoline engine in back, the mule was one of the few motorized vehicles capable of traversing the steep-sided canyons and narrow, deeply rutted trails of La Guarida.

“Hola, Tío Fano!”

“Mija!”
The driver, a small brown man with a bowl haircut, parked the mule a few yards in from the edge of the fan-shaped clearing, next to the beige Infiniti. Wearing a denim shirt, once-white trousers, and open-toed sandals, he hopped down from the cab and approached Lily with both arms outstretched and his leathery features contorted into a mask of tragedy.

She hurried down the steps and across the clearing. The ground was bare save for a sparse, limp growth of thin-bladed grass. She held out her hand; he took it in his weathered, work-callused hands and squeezed gently, as if he were giving her a blessing.
“Pobrecita.
I’m so sorry—my heart is…” His vocabulary failed him (Spanish was his second language, English his third); he let go her hand and pressed his fist against his sternum.

“Mine, too,” said Lily, her mind racing. Fano, an ageless, undocumented Guatamalan Indian who lived in a shack on the far side of the northern rim of the canyon, had been the caretaker here for as long as Lily could remember. Somehow she had forgotten all about him when she suggested using La Guarida as a temporary refuge.

And now he held her and Lyssy’s future in his hand. Although there was nothing in Fano’s greeting or demeanor to indicate that he knew she was a fugitive, Lily couldn’t discount the possibility entirely. But if he did know, would she have the courage, the wherewithal, to do what Lilith had once done? Could she kill someone in cold blood? Someone who’d never done her a lick of harm—someone she
liked
?

The answer was no, of course not. But the fact that she was even able to
consider
the possibility told Lily how much she had changed since this morning. It wasn’t just that she’d finally made love—no one knew better than Lily DeVries that there was nothing illuminative or magically transformative about the sex act in and of itself; if there had been, she’d have been enlightened by the age of four.

But overcoming such a monumental blockage after a lifetime of suffering flashbacks, panic attacks, and alter switches at the mere thought of sex—now
that
was empowering, as Dr. Irene might have said. And never mind that she’d only been able to accomplish it by pretending to be Lilith—after all she’d been through, Lily was finally beginning, if not to accept completely, then at least to consider, what Dr. Irene had been telling her for years, and had reiterated only that morning: that the alters were
not
others. That Sunny Lemontina’s anger was
her
anger, the unnamed little girl’s flight into autism was
her
flight, Lilah’s sexual desires were
her
desires, and most important, that Lilith’s capabilities were her capabilities as well.

“The place is looking pretty good,” she heard herself saying—one of her grandfather’s stock greetings for Fano.

“Gracias.
Señor Rollie came down last week, he told me whatever…how you say,
acuerdo?”

“Agreement, arrangement.”

“Sí,
agrangement—whatever agrangement I have with your
abuelo,
now I got with him.” He started to tell her something else, then caught himself.

Lily thought she had a reasonably good idea what it was. “Did—did my uncle happen to mention anything about me?”

“About
you
?”

Lily couldn’t remember ever having felt so
present
as she did at the moment. She was intently aware of her surroundings: the sunset stillness in the clearing; the pale green, failing light through the towering redwoods, their feathery tops disappearing into the gloaming like so many Jack’s beanstalks; the feel of the dirt beneath her bare feet and the cold metal of the revolver pressing against her bare belly; the sound of the creek off to her right; and the sweet, loamy smell of the surrounding forest.

But even with her senses fully engaged, Lily’s mind was running as clear and cold as the creek, focused in laser sharp on Fano, noting the sideways shift of his eyes, the uneasy shuffle of sandals in the dirt. “Please, Fano, what did he tell you?”

“Just you ran away from home, and if you show up down here, I suppose to call him.”

Okay, could have been worse, thought Lily. “Is that really all he said, Fano? He didn’t mention I’d had a nervous breakdown or anything?”

“Que?”

“Loco
—that I was
loco en la cabeza?”
She twirled a forefinger at her temple.

Fano was shuffling his sandals again, looking like the man in the TV commercial whose wife had just asked him,
Does this make me look fat?
“He just say you very…disturb?…about what happen, and everybody very worry about you.”

“What if I asked you not to tell him I was down here?”

“Por que?”

“If I tell you, you have to
promise
you won’t tell Uncle Rollie.”

The shoulders of Fano’s denim workshirt rose in what might have been either a shrug of agreement, or a
let’s hear what you have to say first.

Lily took a deep breath. “Okay, here’s the thing—I didn’t come down here alone. I’m here with my boyfriend. Uncle Rollie doesn’t like him—he’ll do anything to keep us apart. And if he finds out we’re here, there’s no telling what he might do. He might have him arrested, or put me away in a mental hospital, or both.”

She leaned closer, locked eyes with him. “Please, Tío Fano—haven’t
you
ever been in love?”

The clearing was nearly dark by now, the redwoods outlined black against the greenish glow of the sky.
“Sí,”
he said softly. “Very much.”

“Tell me.”

He was staring directly at Lily, but no longer seeing her. “One day they came to our village,” he said, his voice steady, a distant look in his eyes. “Men with guns, men with big…” He shoved the air with both hands palm forward, bent upward at the wrist. “How you say,
empujatierra
?”

“Earth movers—bulldozers.”

“
Sí,
bulldozers. To knock down our village. I say you cannot do this. Their head man, he say who are you, the
jefe,
the big chief? I say I am
alcalde
of this village.
Bueno,
he say, an’ strike me”—he mimed a diagonal blow with a rifle butt—“here.” He pushed his hair back from his temple to show Lily the scar. “I wake up under a pile of dead bodies with the smell of
gasolina
in my nose. Lucky for me, after they light the fire, they leave for the next village. Only I am left alive. I crawl from under the pile, but there is no water to put out the fire, because when they knock down a village, they also destroy the village wells, so nobody can build a village there again.

“So I start to pull the bodies off the pile. Then I find
mi esposa,
my wife. She was very much
embarazada—
” Lily was confused for a second; then he traced the curve of a swollen belly in front of his own flat stomach, and she remembered that in Spanish, they used the same word for embarrassed and pregnant. “I said my last prayer that day—that
mi querida,
she was already dead when those men, they cut the baby out from her stomach and throw it on the pile.”

Darkness had crept over the canyon. High in the redwoods, an owl hooted, deep-toned and trembly; a throaty roar in the distance reminded Lily that there were still plenty of mountain lions left in the barranca. She didn’t realize she was crying until Fano reached out and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Señor Rollie, he coming down Monday to meet with the man from PG&E to see how much money it cost to run the
electricidad
in from the highway. So a gift of two days, three nights, that is all that is in my power to give to you and your
querido.
Accept it with my love,
por favor.”
Fano bowed formally from the waist, then turned and started back across the clearing to the waiting mule.

“Gracias,”
called Lily.

“De nada, mija,”
he said over his shoulder, and at that instant, four things happened in such quick succession that afterward Lily would remember them as occurring simultaneously:

She heard a loud popping sound behind her; something invisible
zzzz’d
past, disturbing the air; a cloud of birds rose up startled from the trees; Fano threw up his arms as though overcome by a sudden urge to shout hallelujah.

Then, as Lily screamed and the cloud of birds wheeled off angrily into the dusk, Fano dropped to his knees, swayed there for a moment, and pitched face forward onto the bare ground.

7

“Irene, I’m
not
taking you with me,” said Pender. The two were seated across from each other at the round maple-topped kitchen table, under the rose-pink glow of a stained-glass chandelier shaped like a tulip. “It’s much too dangerous.”