Thirteen

SHE TURNED BACK TO ME. SHE spoke without any hesitation now—whether because of the alcohol or because of a simple need to talk. “Well, you understand that we weren’t sure about it, of course. When you’ve lived in this town as long as we have, you tend to be a bit … wary of movie people, you know. Actors, especially. You hear so many terrible things. Drugs, infidelity. And worse. But Melissa was so terribly happy.”

She sipped at her drink. “Even Cal had to admit she was happy. We thought, the two of us did, that Melissa had finally settled down. Finally found herself. And then when Winona came, such a beautiful little girl, it seemed that everything was perfect. A happy marriage, that beautiful, beautiful child. And then we started hearing those terrible stories …” With another quick birdlike motion, she shook her head, as though denying the truth of the stories, or that such stories could exist.

“What stories?” I asked her.

“Horrible,” she said, making a little girl’s face of horror. “Absolutely disgusting.” She took another drink. “I really couldn’t repeat them, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to hear them. They were complete fabrications, of course. I knew that. But they disturbed Cal, and he confronted Melissa with them. Well, Melissa lost her temper—it’s possible that Cal was a bit too brusque, he can be that way sometimes. He doesn’t mean to be, it’s just the way he is. One thing led to another and the two of them had a terrible row. And both of them are so stubborn. Melissa is a lot like Cal that way.”

She drank from her glass. “They didn’t speak to each other for a year or so, until she and Roy divorced. I tried to mediate between her and Cal, tried to bring the two of them back together—we were a family, after all—but …” She shrugged an elaborate shrug of hopelessness: What’s a woman to do?

“They spoke again after the divorce?”

“They reconciled, yes. I was so pleased. And then …” She looked down again, sadly, and without the girlish affectation.

The whiskey was beginning to affect her careful pronunciation: words slightly slurred, s’s turning into sh’s.

I prompted her, “And then Melissa accused Roy of abusing Winona.”

“It was horrible,” she said. She looked away and quickly shook her head again. “Horrible.”

“Your husband wasn’t pleased about Melissa’s accusation,” I said.

“Cal begged her not to take Roy to court. The scandal. The press. It had been bad enough when Melissa and Roy divorced. People calling us night and day, newspaper reporters, television reporters. He told her he’d handle it himself. But Melissa was determined. It was the only way, she said, to make sure that Roy never came near Winona again.”

“Mrs. Bigelow,” I said, “do you know why Melissa made the accusation? Do you know about any particular incident that might’ve caused it?”

She lowered her head, and for a few long moments I thought I’d lost her. Not to reticence or shame; to alcohol. But apparently she was deciding whether to tell me. I don’t know why she decided what she did. The alcohol, maybe. Or the loneliness. Maybe both.

She raised her head and said, “Melissa called me one night. She was … she wasn’t hysterical, really, but she was extremely upset. She told me she’d been putting Winona to bed that night, dressing her in her pajamas. This was a Monday night, after Winona had stayed the weekend with Roy.” She sipped at her drink.

I waited.

“She said—she was dressing her, did I mention that?—she said that Winona looked up at her and told her that she’d had sex with Daddy.” She took another sip from her drink, made a girlish grimace once again, and she looked away.

I waited.

She turned back to me. “Melissa said she didn’t know what to think. At first, of course, she thought that Winona was confused, that she didn’t know what the word meant. Children can say things sometimes without really understanding them. But then, when Melissa kissed Winona good night, Winona … Winona stuck her tongue in Melissa’s mouth … And then she smiled at her. And Melissa said that the smile was absolutely diabolical. Absolutely evil.” Again she made that face, with more real pain in it this time, and again she looked away.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be here, in this close confining room with its smell of scotch and fading flowers, its grotesque clutter of gaping animals. Didn’t want to be sitting across from this wounded, painted woman, a fading flower herself; didn’t want to be hearing what I was hearing. I didn’t want to turn over this particular rock.

But turning over rocks was what I was paid to do.

Mrs. Bigelow said, “I told Cal when he came home. He was angry, of course, he was furious, and he left and drove over to Melissa’s. When he came back, he was even more furious. Because Melissa wouldn’t listen to reason. She refused to see, Cal said, that Winona was probably making it up. Winona’s always been an imaginative child, like Melissa when she was a little girl. Cal was convinced that she’d seen something on television, or possibly heard somewhere, someone talking, and that she’d invented this.”

I said, “What did you think, Mrs. Bigelow?”

“I … I honestly didn’t know. I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t know. I liked Roy, I really did. It seemed impossible that he could do something like that. That anyone could do something like that. But you read the papers, you know, and you see that it happens all the time. But Roy?”

She drank some more scotch. “And then the doctors. At the trial. One said this, the other said that. Contradicting each other.” She stared down into her glass for a moment, then looked up at me. “How can that happen, Mr. Croft? How could someone do something like that?”

How do you explain evil? It was a fundamental question, of religion, psychology, even politics; perhaps it was the fundamental question. Maybe it had an answer, but I didn’t know what it was, and I told her so.

She shook her head, looked down at her glass again.

I said, “Mrs. Bigelow, Melissa has been in contact with you, hasn’t she?”

Without looking up, she nodded.

“By mail?” I asked her. “Over the phone?”

“By mail,” she said, still staring down at her lap. “A postcard.” She looked up. “From New Mexico. The same postcard she sent … the same one she sent to Cathryn. The message, I mean. ‘The flower in the desert lives.’”

“When did you receive it?”

“September. The end of September.”

“When was it postmarked?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember.”

“Do you still have it?”

“No. No, I … I disposed of it. If Cal had found it, he would’ve only gotten upset.”

“Have you heard from her since?”

She shook her head, looked down, gently twirled the ice in her glass. She looked up at me. Beneath the mask of cosmetics, her vulnerability seemed real now. “Do you think she’s all right, Mr. Croft?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell her what I’d been telling everybody else, that her daughter Cathryn’s death might possibly be linked to Melissa’s disappearance. “I hope so. But I think it’d be better for her and Winona if I found them. Mr. Montoya will be able to help them a lot more than whoever’s helping them now.”

“Who is helping them now?”

“I’m not sure. Did she ever talk to you about the Underground Railroad? A network of people who help women in Melissa’s position?”

She shook her head, gently twirled her ice again. “We haven’t talked much. We weren’t talking much, I mean, before she left. Just a phone call now and then.” She set the glass on the end table, reached out for a small beige box encircled by a platoon of adorable baby animals, and pressed a button in its center.

I asked her, “The message on the postcard. Do you know what it means?”

“I assumed …”—she waved her hand vaguely—“I assumed it was a sort of reassurance, a way to tell me she was all right.”

“Did Melissa ever mention anyone in Santa Fe she might’ve gone to, a close friend?”

She looked off to the window that faced the front lawn, her eyes focused on some place far beyond the grass, then she looked back at me. “There was a woman. An artist, a painter. Deirdre, I think … Deirdre Polk. But she didn’t live in Santa Fe.” She frowned, trying to remember.

Deirdre. I took out my notebook and pen. I wrote the name down. “Where does she live, Mrs. Bigelow?”

Her face was pinched in concentration. Finally, she said, with a mock desperation that threatened to become real, “Isn’t that awful? I can’t remember. I—” Abruptly she put on a bright, vacant smile as the Hispanic woman returned. “Thank you, Annabella.” She set her empty glass on the tray, took the full one waiting for her, cocked her head, and turned the bright smile in my direction. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything?”

“I’m sure. Thanks.”

The Hispanic woman padded away.

“Hartley,” Mrs. Bigelow said suddenly. “That was the name. The name of the town.”

North of Santa Fe, closer to Taos, it was a small town, locally famous for its artists’ colony. I wrote the name down.

“Anyone else?” I asked her.

She shook her head, took a sip from the fresh drink. Her face was slack now, as though the effort of remembering had drained it of life. Her voice was toneless. “We never really talked, Melissa and I, about the people she knew in Santa Fe.”

“Did she ever mention a woman named Juanita?”

Mrs. Bigelow canted her head to the side, thoughtful. At last she said, “We had a housekeeper named Juanita once. But she’s dead now, I believe. Yes, I’m sure she is. We sent flowers.”

“No other Juanita?’

“Not that I can recall.”

I said, “Did she ever tell you how she met Deirdre Polk?”

She waved a hand vaguely. “Some opening or other.”

“In Santa Fe?”

“I believe so.”

I said, “What about the people involved in the group she worked with. Sanctuary.”

“That,” she said, looking displeased. She shifted slightly in her seat.

I asked her, “Did she ever mention the names of anyone in the group?”

“It was something we didn’t really discuss. She knew that Cal and I didn’t approve of her involvement with those people.” It seemed that there were a lot of things that Melissa and her mother never discussed.

“Why is that?” I asked.

She sat upright, gathering herself together. “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure that many of them are very well intentioned. Like Melissa is. And I suppose they see themselves as romantic figures, flouting authority, aiding the downtrodden. But it seems to me that they’re no better than common criminals, some of them. They’re helping illegal aliens, you know. They’re breaking the law of the land. I know that Melissa would never be involved with that part of it. But we felt that it was dangerous, her being a member of a group like that. The law is the law, after all. If we didn’t have laws, we’d be no better than animals.” This she said as though it were something else she had learned many years ago, and had often repeated since then. Repetition had emptied it of any conviction it might once have had, genuine or hoped for.

“How much of her time did Melissa spend in Santa Fe? While she was married to Roy?”

She thought for a moment. She blinked. “Well, she and Roy used to go out there for the summers, when Roy wasn’t making that television series. And then later, toward the end of the marriage, she spent more of her time out there, she and Winona. A week here and there.”

“Did she go there after the divorce?”

“Yes. Occasionally.”

“Does Sanctuary have an office in Santa Fe?”

“I really couldn’t say. As I said, we didn’t discuss those people.”

“Did Melissa speak to you after she returned from El Salvador? Before she disappeared?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t even know she had disappeared until Roy called me and asked if I’d heard from her.”

She looked down again.

I said, “Is there anyone else you can think of, Mrs. Bigelow? Any other friend she might’ve gotten in contact with?”

She shook her head slowly. Then she looked up and stared out the window once more. I saw that quietly, politely, discreetly, she was crying. Tears dark with mascara rolled down her taut cheeks. Without looking at me, she said, “Lately, you know, we haven’t talked that much.”

It occurred to me then that if she had been the figure I’d glimpsed at the window, she might have been looking out across that broad sweep of lawn for Melissa. Standing there, drink in hand, waiting for her daughter to return. Since last week, the only daughter she had left.

It was not a happy thought.

I told her, “I’ll find Melissa, Mrs. Bigelow.” There was nothing else to say.

“Please,” she said softly, still staring out the window. Then she closed her eyes and she sat there, holding her drink in her lap with both hands, as the tears made small slick trails down the mask that was her face.