In Vegas Jess and Vince rented a tan four-door Plymouth Fury, which the man at the lot said was the fastest car he had. They crossed back into California, reaching Twentynine Palms just after midnight. A handful of bars were open along the main street. They checked each of them, coming up short until the bartender at a country-and-western joint told them Martha worked there but had taken some time off. He asked how they knew her, and Jess said Martha was an old friend. The bartender nodded to a side door. Martha lived down that back road about a mile, he said, the trailer at the very end.
It was an overcast night. Ragged scraps of cloud covered the moon and soon they were out of reach of the streetlights. Jess drove slowly, high beams on, braking when little roadrunners dashed across their path. They passed a couple of trailers and then nothing for a while but open land, broken occasionally by dry puffs of chaparral in the headlights. The silence was almost as complete as the darkness; the gravel crunching under their tires sounded like shouting. They weren’t trying to surprise Martha, but this noise was too much, an alarm announcing their arrival. Jess slowed the car further but that only seemed to make it worse, louder and more distinct.
After about a mile, the road gave out. Jess thought that they had gone too far, but then Vince tapped the windshield and Jess saw a lone single-wide at the edges of the high beams. The trailer’s windows were dark. Jess pulled into the driveway beside an orange hatchback. They got out of the car and Jess told Vince to stay put. She walked down to the trailer and knocked on the screen door. Her knuckles on the metal made a tinny racket. Vince paced impatiently in front of the Fury’s square headlights, agitating the dusty beams.
Jess went to knock again, then stopped herself. She felt a presence on the other side of the door.
“Martha,” Jess said, keeping her voice low. Then, hopeful, “Isabella?”
The inner door opened, slowly, the headlights revealing a woman behind the screen. She had cut and darkened her hair, maybe recovered some lost weight, but Jess still recognized Martha from the TV news.
Vince stopped pacing. Martha dropped her hand from the door. Her arms hung at her sides. Her whole body hung, as if something essential had been removed. She looked at Jess and then Vince. She didn’t seem surprised by the strangers at her door. They weren’t strangers; somehow Martha knew who they were.
“She’s gone,” Martha said. “He took her.”
Jess and Vince sat at the kitchen table while Martha spooned mounds of Taster’s Choice into mugs. The overhead light was on, too bright for this time of night, but the rest of the trailer remained dark, just the hint of other rooms stretching back in a straight, narrow line.
Martha tucked her hair behind her ears. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a while; gray puffs like little thunderclouds hung under her eyes. Meeting Martha didn’t feel as strange as Jess had thought it would. She was younger than Jess but older than Isabella, and watching her make coffee Jess couldn’t help thinking of Martha as a long-lost middle sister. Maybe it wasn’t as ridiculous as it seemed. For two years, Jess had seen herself and Isabella as opposing poles, but she had been wrong. There were three of them who had been transformed by Zero Zone.
Martha poured steaming water into each mug. When she turned, Jess noticed dark bruises on either side of her neck.
“I don’t know if Izzy wanted to leave with them,” Martha said, “or if she was trying to protect me.”
“Where are they going?” Vince said.
Martha set mugs down in front of Vince and Jess, then leaned back against the counter. “Back to the room.”
Jess felt her stomach tumble. “What do they think will happen there?”
“They think they’re going to pass through.”
“Through to where?”
“Another place. A better place. I know it sounds crazy. But Tanner has a way of making you believe.”
Laura Lehrer had told Jess the same thing. But while Laura spoke about Tanner with pure terror, Martha’s fear seemed threaded with something stronger, a hard braid of anger.
“What does that mean?” Vince said. “How will they ‘pass through’?”
“I don’t know,” Martha said. “Nothing makes sense until you’re in there with him.”
Vince turned to Jess. “It’s time to call the police.”
“No,” Martha said. “We know what the police will do.”
“Then we have to go. We have to get her out.”
Martha stared off into the dark trailer. To Jess it seemed as if she was listening, then receiving confirmation of some kind, the answer to a difficult question. After a moment she met Jess’s eyes.
“You made that place,” she said. “Tanner would feel you had authority there. And Izzy talked about you a lot—how sorry she was for what she did. If we go, there’s a chance they’ll listen to you.”
At first light they drove back through town, stopping at a gas station on the eastern outskirts. There was no line of waiting cars this early, just a handwritten sign in the station’s window: Due To Gas Shortage Pay 2X What Pump Reads. Vince got out of the Fury’s back seat and went inside to pay and grab some water and food for the drive while Jess filled the tank. Martha stayed in the passenger seat, a black leather purse in her lap, tapping an unlit cigarette against her bottom teeth.
Jess listened to the pump tick up with each gallon and watched Vince through the windows of the station. He moved down the short aisles, deliberate and determined, a kid entrusted with an important task. He was a kid. She couldn’t imagine taking him into Zero Zone, the kind of threat he would pose to those men if he came along. There would be no chance of ending this without more violence, of everyone walking away whole.
She finished pumping and got back in the driver’s seat, letting the open door’s warning chime ding in steady procession. Martha pushed the dashboard lighter in with her thumb.
“Izzy misses Vince,” Martha said.
“Then I have to make sure he’s still around when we get her out.”
Martha looked at Jess, her head tilted in surprise.
“Won’t he follow us?”
“He’ll find his way back to your place,” Jess said. “He’ll get your car running and drive straight through. But he’ll be a few hours behind. Hopefully that’s enough.”
Jess shut her door, silencing the chime. She looked out to the gas station, where Vince stood at the counter, uncrumpling bills from the pocket of his jeans. Then she started the car and pulled out of the lot, heading for the highway.
Martha had bought the purse back in Vegas just after Misty died, during one of those dead-end days where she sleepwalked through her shifts and then wandered the city, drifting in and out of different stores and restaurants, any place that would change her surroundings, this interminable movie’s backdrop, even for a moment.
She saw the purse at Driscoll’s, hung over the shoulder of a faceless mannequin, black leather with a long strap and a two-inch fringe along the flap. It was a little flashy, more Misty’s style than her own. She bought it anyway. The purchase felt obligatory, like she couldn’t leave something Misty might have once wanted sitting alone in a store. When she and Izzy drove down to the desert trail Martha brought it along to carry her wallet and sunglasses and when they left her car by the entrance she took what she needed and locked the empty purse inside. Later, after everything, a police officer drove her from the hospital back to her car. She popped the hatchback and stared at the purse, which seemed so strange sitting there, a relic from a past life.
The purse sat in her lap now, as they barreled east in Jess’s rental. Martha ran her fingers along the soft leather, the places where thin strips had pulled away, leaving gaps in the fringe. She had told Jess that they could talk to Tanner. This was true. Tanner could talk forever. He would talk until his voice was in their heads, until Martha felt his words in her mouth. They could talk, but Martha knew how that ended.
Jess rolled down her window to light a cigarette and Martha moved her purse to the floor, feeling the weight inside shift and then settle, the gun hard against her foot.