I’d almost forgotten I had a leaping creature made of marshmallow fluff waiting for me back at the motel. I thought the Pomeranian might nip my nose clean off it was so excited to see me. The Cracker Jacks were untouched, and the dog hadn’t made a spot of mess in the bathroom.
“Good dog,” I said, but didn’t pet it. “Let’s get you some real dog food and find your owner.”
I grabbed my purse, opened the door, and then stopped abruptly. There was Officer Shelley, fist raised, about to knock.
“Hello again,” he said. “Thought I’d check in.”
My mouth stopped working. Pan-Cake started to growl.
“Your ma make it back?” Shelley asked, peering over my shoulder.
I hoped my shadow was blocking the nail polish stain.
“She’s just out picking up a couple TV dinners and Coca-Colas,” I said, my lips too tense to smile. “Should be back in a jiffy.”
Shelley leaned against the doorframe. “In that case I’ll wait.”
My mind sent fishhooks out the door, trying to snag something that would rescue me. A storm welled on the horizon, bruising the sky with storm light. In the parking lot, the motel manager sprayed out the gutters with a hose, but he only smiled and waved, figuring I was safe with the man with a badge.
“Strange for a mother to leave her child alone so long and so often,” Officer Shelley said. “I have half a mind to drag you back to my house and make a proper lady out of you.” He laid his hand on my shoulder just like he had at the station, thumb resting on my clavicle. “My wife’s with her sister for the weekend.”
Just then one of my fishhooks snagged something. “I appreciate the invitation, but I’m actually on my way out.” I ducked the officer’s hand and pushed past him. “I’ve been invited to join the, um, Girl Scouts.”
“That so?” Shelley said.
He didn’t look too happy about letting me go, but the dog was snarling between us.
“Yep, imagine that,” I said, backing down the stairs. “Little old me in Girl Scouts. Toodle-oo.”
I took off down Main Street, Pan-Cake trotting by my side.
• • •
Clouds swept overhead, blanketing the sky in layered grays and obscuring Daddy’s face. I was headed toward the church because I didn’t dare get caught by Officer Shelley anywhere else, when a voice called out to me.
“Phoebe! Oh, Phoebe!”
My shoes stuttered to a stop. There was Rhoda standing in the open doorway of one of the Levitt ranches, flapping her hand at me.
“Come to me, will you?” she called. “All I have is socks.”
I walked up the perfectly straight sidewalk that cut through the perfectly mowed lawn.
“My shoes are at the cobbler’s getting new cleats put on,” she said. “Apparently, I walk harder than anyone else and wear my soles right down to the leather. Isn’t that funny?”
“Funny,” I said, imagining Rhoda stomping the heads of baby birds. I was in no mood for smiling. I’d spent my entire TV personality at school that morning.
“Why, who is this darling girl?” Rhoda said, crouching down and opening her arms.
Pan-Cake ran up and placed its front paws on Rhoda’s knees while Rhoda combed her fingers through its fur. I guess the dog couldn’t sense evil after all.
Beyond Rhoda I could see into a living room with flowered wallpaper and plastic-covered furniture and a coffee table with a little glass dish filled with candy. I didn’t get many chances to see inside normal houses.
“I just love little dogs like this,” Rhoda said in a syrupy voice. “But Dad won’t let me have one.” She squished Pan-Cake’s face, rubbing her nose against its wet black one. “I’ll bet if he came home and saw something as beautiful as you, he’d just have to let me keep you, wouldn’t he?”
Was Rhoda trying to take this dog right out from under me? I needed it to find Ma.
“I’m afraid I’ve grown attached,” I said, kneeling myself and touching its soft hair.
Rhoda rubbed the dog’s velvety ears. “If she was mine, I’d shampoo her hair every day, and then I’d tie it up into little bows. Why, I might even paint her nails. What’s her name?”
“Um, Pan-Cake.”
Rhoda scowled. “You mean like something you eat?”
I shrugged. “Or a makeup base.”
“Well.” Rhoda became prim and proper. “I’d name her Queenie.”
I stood and patted my leg. “Come on, Pan-Cake.”
I could feel Rhoda’s glare as we headed down the sidewalk. The clouds woke with flashes of light, and scattered raindrops tapped my hair. I was starting to like the name Pan-Cake.
• • •
By the time I reached St. Maria’s, the clouds were releasing a torrent. As I ran to the front entrance, trying to keep my head covered, the church’s clock tower bonged three times.
I was half an hour early.
The church’s double doors were locked, so I knocked while Pan-Cake shook herself dry beneath the eaves. One of the doors creaked open and the smell of dust and Pine-Sol mixed with the rain. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses glowed in the darkness. The reverend was small with thin black hair and clammy-looking skin, like he’d been dipped in wax.
“Yes?” he said in a pinched voice.
“Can I come in?” I said, wringing out my hem. The knit-cotton dress was soaked through and clinging to my body.
The reverend’s eyes scanned the street. “It would not be becoming to invite a young girl into the church alone.” He began to close the door. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must iron my bookmarks.”
“Wait!” I said.
The door stopped at a crack.
“I’m part of the Girl Scouts,” I said. “They’re meeting here in thirty minutes. I just need to stay dry till then.”
“You are the . . . actress’s daughter,” the reverend said through the narrow opening.
“Yeah?” I said, hugging myself and shivering.
“I fear your mother’s wantonness will bring death upon us all,” he said. “Good day.”
I scoffed and looked at Pan-Cake, like, Can you believe he just did that to us?
Ma may have been a lightning rod for monsters, but it didn’t have anything to do with her looks, I didn’t think. Besides, she was “as chaste as a nun’s knickers” up until the day she married Brad, the pilot who saved her from the Chrysler Building. That’s what she claimed anyway.
The church’s door creaked back open and then shut again. An umbrella fell by my feet. I opened it over my head and watched the rain clean the dust off the Lincoln sitting in the parking lot. When Beth arrived, her smile just about banished the storm.
• • •
The rain pelted the windshield while the squeaking wipers did a miserable job of keeping up. There were four of us in the station wagon, plus Pan-Cake, who sat on Beth’s lap and watched the desert plants whiz past the window.
“We’re simply tickled that you could join us this afternoon, Phoebe!” Beth’s adoptive aunt Gladys said in the driver’s seat.
“Tickled!” Susannah said from the passenger’s.
They seemed like the kind of women who would be tickled by a trash compactor. Their skin was pale as milk and their beehive hairdos brushed the car ceiling. I thought I might drown in their lavender perfume.
I didn’t want to participate in community service. I wanted to look for Ma. But my search was rained out anyway, and joining the Girl Scouts sure beat being ogled by Officer Shelley in the motel room of gloom.
“So!” Susannah awkwardly rotated in the passenger seat so she could address me. “Loretta Lane’s daughter. How exciting. Where’s your father in the picture?”
“He was part of the expedition to Alaska in fifty-one,” I said, thinking fast. “He was one of the first to dig up the saucer.”
Gladys sucked through her teeth. “He wasn’t one of the ones who . . . burned alive, was he?”
“She probably doesn’t want to talk about it, Auntie,” Beth said.
“Where are my manners?” Gladys said. “Phoebe, today we’re going to the Nava-Joe reservation.”
I had flashes of the boy I’d met when I was twelve. The one with his arm in the sling. If my heart got one more pinch that day, I swore it would pop.
“Not many girls are interested in going to Gray Rock, unfortunately,” Beth said. “That’s why we’re only four today.”
Susannah flipped on the radio. “—individuals in Switzerland have been mysteriously decapitated, losing their heads to what people are describing as a strange mist which has crawled its way—”
“Blech,” Susannah said. “Always bad news.”
She tuned it to “Twilight Time” by the Platters.
Out here in the desert, the horizon so distant, I could see all the way down past the black box in Daddy’s hand to his towering shins, covered in flannel pajama pants. It was an unfortunate angle because it was obvious where I inherited my legs, which didn’t pinch off at the knee, but continued in wide columns right down to the ankles.
“Now, Phoebe,” Gladys said, adjusting the rearview so she could meet my eyes. “I want you to listen to me very carefully. These people we’re about to visit aren’t in what we’d call an ideal position.” She spoke in a low voice as if the Navajo people might hear her across the long desert miles. “That’s why it’s our job as good Christians to save this, um, tribe from their untamed selves. Is that what we’re calling it now? Tribe?”
“Yes, tribe,” Susannah said.
Beth mumbled something that sounded like “Nation.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Gladys said. “Those Nava-Joe code talkers were very helpful in the second war, but after the fighting was over those people didn’t behave themselves, now did they? Doing peyote and performing those ceremonies and . . . well, goodness knows what else. If they aren’t careful, they’ll invite God’s wrath and drop a disaster the size of Ook on all of us. Oops, excuse me.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“The only part that’s okay,” Beth mumbled.
“Besides,” Gladys said more quietly, “we need to keep up relations to make sure their tribe keeps digging up that uranium.”
I looked out my window through the rain at Daddy, whose eyes never seemed to fall on an Indian reservation. I wondered how Gladys would explain that.
We rode in silence for a while. Pan-Cake tried to crawl from Beth’s lap into mine, but I pushed her off.
“Oh!” Susannah burst out and started ruffling around in a paper bag between her legs. “I almost forgot! I figured since it was our first time visiting the Nava-Joes, we could try to blend in.” She sat up, wearing a feathered headdress. “How, Chief!” she said, raising her hand with a mock Indian accent.
“Oh, you’re too much,” Gladys said.
They laughed in pitches so high, I worried my eardrums might break.
“May I see that?” Beth asked with a strained smile.
Susannah handed her the headdress. I turned away for a split second when Beth said, “Whoops!”
When I looked again, the headdress was gone, and Beth’s window was open. I followed her eyes through the rain-streaked rear window to see the headdress rolling along the highway like a struck bird.
“Oh, shoot,” Susannah said, craning her neck around. “That cost me three dollars.”
Beth shrugged. “The wind stole it right off my head.”
I had this funny feeling like Beth had tossed it out the window on purpose. But why, I had no earthly idea.
“Ah, well,” Gladys said. “We still have the Bibles.”
• • •
After a half hour of driving, the rain calmed to a drizzle. The highway spat us out onto a muddy road, which wound its way to a wide valley lined with mesas and plateaus that looked like sandy birthday cakes. We passed a military base with a banner that showed a picture of a winking cadet and read SO LONG, MOM! I’M OFF TO DROP THE BOMB!
Beth yawned awake beside me and petted Pan-Cake. “Are we there?”
“We sure are!” Gladys said. She pointed a sparkly fingernail at several eight-sided wooden houses with mud roofs scattered around the base of a small hill. “Phoebe, your and Beth’s job will be to read stories to the little ones.”
I grimaced. I never saw the point in children. How could anyone in good conscience bring kids into this world when they might just get gobbled up by a Shiver?
As we pulled up, a man exited one of the houses to greet us. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt and his hair was tied in a bun with white yarn. A woman in a black dress and a suede jacket watched from the doorway. I was suddenly glad Beth had ditched the headdress.
“Wait here while I work my magic, girls,” Gladys said.
She got out of the car and smiled brightly. “Why, good afternoon! Looks like we dried up all the rain!”
The man looked at the sky and scratched above his eyebrow like he didn’t necessarily consider this good news. Still, he extended his hand. “My name is Eugene,” he said. “I’m the chairman here at Gray Rock.” He gestured to the woman. “This is Darcy.”
“Oh!” Gladys said. “Why, what nice names.”
“Could be worse,” Eugene said, chuckling. “What can we do for you?”
“Well,” Gladys said, laying a hand on her chest. “My name is Gladys, and I am the head of the Girl Scouts of Pennybrooke. In the car is Susannah, Beth, and Phoebe. Oh, and Pan-Cake. Wait till you hear what we’ve brought you today! It’s Bibles. And they are an absolute steal.”
“We already have Bibles,” Darcy said from the doorway.
“Not like these, you don’t,” Gladys said, shaking her finger.
While she tried to sell the Navajo people on Bibles they didn’t need, something about the woman caught my eye. My heart lit up. She was wearing Ma’s jacket. It had the hole in the elbow and everything.
I popped open the car door.
“Phoebe?” Susannah said. “Maybe you should wait until—” I slammed the door on her.
“Tell you what,” Eugene was saying. “We’ll be happy to purchase some Bibles if you consider buying some of our blankets. Darcy’s weaving provides warmth to the body and the soul.”
“Oh!” Gladys said, wringing her hands and laughing nervously. “Well. Um—”
“Where did you get that jacket?” I said to Darcy, running up to her.
She clasped it around her chest and pointed toward the highway. “I found it. In the road.”
In the car, Pan-Cake was yapping her little lungs out, leaping and scratching at the window.
“Phoebe?” Gladys said. “I think your dog needs to go tinkle. Perhaps you should—”
The moment Beth opened the car door, Pan-Cake leapt out and took off running across the highway right in front of a speeding truck.
Beth covered her eyes. “I can’t look!”
The truck swerved, nearly making a pan-cake of Pan-Cake, but she made it safely across the road and continued into the open desert, barking.
It was like she was onto a scent. Like she remembered something.
I took off running after her, across the highway and into the desert, my pumps kicking up mud.
“Phoebe?” Gladys called after me. “Phoebe! You’ll ruin your dress!”