Chapter 11
The Cavalcade of Humanity

Sally got up Saturday hoping she might just happen upon Aggie Stark on her morning run. What runner wouldn’t be out on a day like this, one of those perfect mornings that almost had you thinking that spring in Laramie was like spring everywhere else—bright, warm, balmily breezy, alive, full of promise. Before long, the tulips and daffodils just poking their shoots up would burst into nodding bloom. On a day like today, you could almost forget that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the famed spring gales would rip the blossom off any flower foolish enough to show its head, if a hailstorm didn’t hammer it flat first.

She spent forty minutes listening to Neil Young songs, pounding pavement, contemplating mortality and renewal, but didn’t catch sight of Aggie. So once she’d returned, stretched, and made herself a cup of coffee, she got on the phone. Aggie herself answered.

“Didn’t see you out running,” Sally said.

“It was my morning to lift weights and do aqua-jogging in the pool,” said Aggie. “The trainer won’t let us run every day. He says it’s too hard on our joints.”

Hoo boy. If only somebody had given Sally that advice at fourteen, she might not be walking around on knees that crackled like fraternity bonfires on homecoming weekend. “Say,” she began. “I just wanted to know if there’s any chance you’ve heard from Charlie.”

Aggie hesitated.

“I’m worried as heck about her, Aggie,” Sally said. “She could be in really big trouble. She needs to know she’s not all by herself.”

Aggie made a decision. “Yeah. She called yesterday. She wouldn’t tell me where she was, but she wanted to let me know she’s okay,” she said. “She said she missed Beanie.”

“What else did she say?” Sally said.

Another pause. “Well, she said she had a place to stay, and that she’s got a job. She’s already gotten a paycheck. She told me she bought some great shoes.”

Sally thought a minute. “Great shoes? She’s probably not in Wyoming,” she said.

“Duh,” said Aggie.

“Aggie, did Charlie have friends in Colorado? Or anyplace else you can think of? She’s probably crashing with somebody she knows.”

Another pause. “Um, okay. She told me once that Billy Reno’s got a lot of friends in Fort Collins. Once when we went shopping down there, she wanted to go see them, but my mom said we didn’t have time. Charlie was kind of ticked off. She told me she wished she could just move to Fort Collins. She was sure she could get a job somewhere in the mall.”

An opening. Sally probed. “Honey, is it possible that’s where she is now?”

Sally heard Aggie swallow. “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess. She said she’d been down there and hung out with people, and that it was pretty cool.”

Sally wondered what “pretty cool” meant in Billy Reno’s set. From what she’d heard, and from her own misspent youth, she could imagine: a bunch of wasted kids sitting around on thrift shop couches, listening to eardrum-shattering music, getting loaded one way or another. When you started the day stoned, and made every effort to stay that way, each repetition was a little more disappointing than the last. You spent a lot of time in a low-grade daze, with a low-grade headache and a very low level of motivation. Some people got stuck that way.

“So you’re worried about her too,” Sally told Aggie.

“No kidding,” said Aggie.

“Maybe it would be good to go down to Fort Collins, and do a little shopping,” said Sally. “Cruise the mall, maybe have lunch at that Mexican place. You interested?”

“Well, um, as a matter of fact, I’m going down there today with my aunt Maude,” said Aggie.

Maude, going to the mall? This was a woman whose idea of fun was shoveling compost, not cruising the sale racks. “Maybe I could tag along,” Sally said.

“Okay with me, but you’d better ask Aunt Maude,” said Aggie. “We’re supposed to leave in an hour.”

Sally called Maude. “I hear you and Aggie are going shopping. I’m coming with you,” she said.

“How’d you know?” Maude asked.

“I talked to Aggie,” Sally said, without explaining further. “What’s the deal, Maude? You hate shopping.”

“Your kind of shopping, yes. Who in their right mind browses Victoria’s Secret just for fun? I need to get a watch battery at Sears,” said Maude. “That’s my kind of shopping.”

“What’s going on, Maude? What do you know that I don’t?” Sally asked.

It took Maude a minute. “Ordinarily, I’d rather save this conversation for the car. I don’t really like to talk about this stuff on the phone,” she said, “but I don’t want to discuss this in front of Aggie.”

“Okay,” said Sally. “Fire away.”

“As you’re obviously aware, the options for young girls and women who get into trouble are pretty grim here in Wyoming,” said Maude.

“What kind of trouble?” said Sally.

“The kind that’s always referred to as ‘getting into trouble,’ ” said Maude.

“Oh. Like that young lady who was trying to keep the appointment with her doctor, the one you were helping,” said Sally.

“Yes. Poor kid. It’s almost like the dark ages all over again,” said Maude. She wasn’t talking about the medieval era. As Sally knew, Maude had been pregnant and unmarried in Laramie in the 1960s. Meg Dunwoodie had helped her out of the jam, changing her life and earning her love and gratitude forever.

“Only worse, in some ways. Back in your day,” said Sally, “there wouldn’t have been demonstrations and explosions. There just wouldn’t have been any choices.”

“I’d never have thought we’d be back to underground railroads, but we are. Which is how I happened to be passing the time in a certain Fort Collins doctor’s waiting room, a couple of days after that fiasco, and saw a large blond man walk up to the receptionist’s desk and ask if anyone had seen his girlfriend. He said he hadn’t seen her in a few days, and he was down from Laramie, trying to get word to her that her father had been killed.”

“You happened to overhear this in a waiting room?” Sally said.

“I have excellent hearing,” said Maude. “Unlike people who ruined their ears with loud rock ’n’ roll.”

“It helps if you don’t care who knows what a busybody you are,” said Sally.

“On the contrary,” said Maude. “I had to hide behind a plastic ficus tree. I was worried the guy might recognize me—”

“Because,” Sally concluded, “you remembered seeing him at the demonstration. He was praying with Bea Preston and shoving Hawk around.”

“How did you guess?” said Maude.

“Bea told me she had somebody looking for Charlie,” Sally said.

“Since when are you and Bea Preston intimate confidantes?” Maude asked.

“I went to see her after the memorial service,” Sally said. “We need to get down there, Maude. I hate to think this, but the right hand clearly knows what the left hand is doing around here. What if Bea’s guy gets to Charlie before the police do? Bea makes no secret of the fact that she’d like to have the poor kid locked up. I wouldn’t put it past her to take it into her own hands.” She thought a minute more. “You know, I don’t think we should take Aggie with us. What if we manage to find Charlie, and there’s some kind of problem? I don’t want to put her in that kind of situation.”

“Obviously you don’t know my great-niece very well,” said Maude. “Aggie called me yesterday and asked me to take her shopping today. I think she must have heard from Charlie, and they’ve made a plan to meet. She’s damn determined to ride to the rescue.”

Sally thought. “Charlie would have told her not to go to the cops, and Aggie would feel like she had to agree. But why wouldn’t she just ask her mother or father to take her? Why you?”

“My nephew and niece are loving, compassionate, wise, and honest people,” said Maude. “They’d probably feel they had to call the sheriff. On top of which, they object to the notion of carrying concealed. Which, as it happens, I don’t. As Aggie well knows,” Maude finished. “And it seems she also knows about the underground railroad. Kids these days.”

Oh good. Just a typical Saturday of schlepping around the mall, looking for a deeply damaged, possibly psychotic, perhaps homicidal girl-woman, with a hell-bent teenager and a pistol-packing sexagenarian. Potentially shadowed by an evangelical enforcer and God only knew who else, not to mention being one step ahead of or behind peace officers who would not look at all kindly on the interference of private citizens, however well intentioned (or well armed). Couldn’t get much better than that.

Hawk was playing Saturday morning city league basketball. She’d better let him know where she was going. But how much detail? She left him a note: “Gone to the mall in Ft. C. with the girls, for some retail therapy. Call my cell if you need me.”

Just another shopping spree with the gals.

“So tell me,” said Sally to Maude as they hurtled south on Highway 287, Maude’s Chevy Suburban having no trouble hauling the high road at eighty miles per hour, “how did you happen to be in the waiting room of a medical clinic that probably considers patient confidentiality on a par with nuclear secrets?”

Maude glanced over at her. “I’ve done some referrals, some counseling, and, well, some transportation. In cases where there’s been recent violence, and where the patient is a minor, the clinic sometimes likes to keep the counselor of record in the loop.”

“And you’re that counselor for Charlie Preston,” Sally said, drawing the obvious conclusion. “But Charlie’s not a minor.” Sally thought again. “So she’s been there before?”

“Draw your own conclusions,” said Maude, eyes on the road.

“But you didn’t drive her down there this time. She had a car.”

“I know about the clinic too,” Aggie put in, leaning forward from the backseat. “Charlie told me she was going. She was really scared.”

Sally reflected that at the age of fourteen, her biggest life concern had been whether her boyfriend’s braces and hers would get locked if she let him kiss her. “Was that before somebody beat her up?” Sally asked.

“It was the day before she left,” Aggie answered. “We talked on the phone, so I didn’t see her. She didn’t say anything about having been beaten, but she was freaking out.” She looked out the window at a herd of antelope grazing by a snow fence.

“Abortion is a hard choice for anybody to make,” said Sally.

“It’s a lot harder if you’ve got a stepmother who tells you it’s one more reason you’ll burn in hell,” Maude said.

Nobody said much of anything else in the hour it took them to make their way to the mall. The place was jammed. They finally found a parking spot about five million miles from the entrance, and once inside, had to weave their way among phalanxes of teenagers shouting at each other and gabbing on cell phones, oblivious mothers wrestling behemoth baby carriages and herding zigzagging toddlers, and supersize seniors moseying along at half the pace of the crowd. One part of Sally’s brain told her that she should chill out and enjoy the spectacle. This was, after all, the cavalcade of American humanity, the modern-day equivalent of strolling the promenades of Paris in the days of Toulouse-Lautrec. Another part of her brain considered the virtues of neutron bombs.

There were sales everywhere; no wonder the mall was packed. They made slow progress, walking into every store to see if by any chance the bored clerk talking on the phone, or the gum-cracking kid sullenly helping customers, might be Charlie Preston. Jewelry stores and shoe stores, shops selling potpourri and cell phones, beauty products and maternity wear, CDs, DVDs, pianos and eyeglasses. They walked the aisles of the bed and bath emporium, peering around every rack full of overstuffed, overprinted comforters, flimsy tables, and pillows hard and springy enough to bounce a quarter halfway to the moon. No Charlie.

They braved a trendy jeans-and-shirts store, dark, crowded, and deafeningly soundscaped with grating pop music. Aggie obviously knew and loved the place. Sally wondered whether the experts who developed marketing strategies for youth stores had cut their professional teeth in the military, prying Manuel Noriega from his palace by blasting Metallica at brain-splintering volume until the Panamanian dictator came out whimpering. Were the geniuses counting on the fact that parents would simply hand over their credit cards to kids piling up purchases, and then run screaming back into the mall, desperate for an Orange Julius?

No Charlie there either. They stopped for a lifesaving Orange Julius.

They tried Sears. Maude got her watch battery. Sally found a table full of cashmere sweaters at half price. No Charlie.

They hit the upscale department store. Aggie scored a pair of jeans marked down from two hundred to forty dollars. Sally wondered when jeans in the junior section of a department store had started costing more than a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four.

Still no Charlie.

“That’s about all I can take of the mall,” Maude conceded. Maude was possibly the strongest person Sally had ever known, but consumerism had sapped her powers. “Let’s go sit somewhere quiet and have a bite to eat.”

Somewhere quiet? Fort Collins, like every town in the United States, had been taken over by franchise restaurants that specialized in gargantuan portions and acoustics designed to wake the dead. “Let’s get something to eat, anyway,” said Sally, as they headed out into the parking lot.

Two aisles away from Maude’s Suburban, they saw flashing lights and heard raised voices, staticky radio transmissions. The Fort Collins police, it seemed, were making a bust. Sally caught sight of the backs of two officers, cuffing a young man in a backward baseball cap and a tank top revealing arms covered with ink.

“Oh my gosh!” Aggie exclaimed, thrusting her shopping bag at Sally, cutting away from them and heading between cars, toward the action. “That’s Billy Reno!”

“How do you know?” Sally asked, hustling after Aggie.

“I recognize the dragon tattoo!” Aggie said, and shouted, “Billy!”

The suspect glanced over his shoulder. He had bewildered eyes and just about the sweetest smile Sally had ever seen. “Huh?” he said. “Oh. Hi, kid,” he told Aggie.

“Eyes front!” barked one of the cops.

“What’s going on here, Officer?” said Maude, a restraining hand on Aggie’s arm as she addressed the guy checking the handcuffs.

The officer ignored her.

Now a tow truck came down the aisle, lights spinning. The driver hopped out, and the other cop pointed at a Mazda Miata with County 5 Wyoming plates.

“That’s Charlie’s car!” said Aggie.

“See?” Billy Reno told the cops. “I told you! Charlie’s my girlfriend. I’m just here to pick her up at work. I didn’t steal no car, man!”

“Right, son. And I’m the king of England,” said one of the officers, who did, actually, bear a slight resemblance to Prince Charles.

“I’m not shittin’ you, Officer. This really, truly is my girl’s car. I haven’t done nothin’ here.”

The other cop, who looked more like Derek Jeter than the Windsor scion, sneered. “No, of course not. You’re just a sweet young thing. The fact that you’ve got a sheet longer than that tat on your back is all an unfortunate misunderstanding, not to mention that the owner of this here sports car reported it stolen a week ago. Get the fuck in the car,” he finished, shoving Billy’s head down as he forced him into the back of the patrol car.

“Wait!” said Aggie. “He’s telling the truth. This is my friend’s car. She must be in the mall. Just wait a minute!”

The Prince Charles–ish officer let go of Billy Reno and walked toward them, picking up a clipboard from the roof of the patrol car as he approached. “Hold on there, young lady,” he said, “is there some information you’d like to share with us?”

Aggie looked at the tow truck driver, attaching the big hitch to the Miata. Panic and puzzlement showed on her face. “That’s—that’s my friend’s car. Her dad gave it to her. She works—I think she works, like, somewhere in the mall.”

“Let’s slow down a minute here,” said Maude, addressing the officer. “My name is Maude Stark. This girl is my niece, Agatha. And the boy’s girlfriend has disappeared from Laramie. Her name is Charlotte Preston.”

The cop nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He took something off the clipboard, handed it to Aggie. “This wouldn’t be the girl you’re talking about, would it?”

Sally looked. It was a digital copy of a photo of Charlie. Probably her high school graduation photo. Perfect, air-brushed hair, phony smile, no facial jewelry. No bruises. The girl looked as if she’d been embalmed.

Aggie nodded. She looked like she might cry.

“We’ve received a missing person report on this Charlotte Preston. There are officers in the mall right now. We expect to have her very shortly.”