We set out for the border. Over the Oak Street Bridge and down the long strip of highway that led past the airport, past Surrey, to the curved hilly lanes that fed into the Peace Arch Crossing. The dollar was still weak, and traffic was minimal.
Sonia drove. I played disk jockey. Once we were through Bellingham, I asked her if she wanted to hear the song she’d be playing at my funeral. I scrolled to Bobbie Gentry, “He Made a Woman Out of Me.”
“You don’t have ‘Beast of Burden’ on there?” she asked.
What struck me driving down through the Pacific Northwest was the lack of grandeur of so many of the towns. To put up a Vancouver or Seattle seemed understandable. But to carve deep into the endless green and blue, to clear-cut forests and redirect waterways, all to erect a dirty brick train station, a plastic coffee hut and yet another outlet mall with a drive-through bank and family restaurant, seemed the choice of an insane creature that would rather stare at its own feces than a perfection it had no hand in shaping.
And yet I loved it. When we gassed up in Everett I walked through the aisles of the convenience mart, admiring the English-only labels and the strange brands that never seemed to catch on up north: Skoal, Payday, Whatchamacallit. As we drove, the fast food billboards we passed seemed to cycle and recycle in indecipherable patterns, like the colored symbols on a slot machine wheel.
We crossed the Puyallup River on I5 and continued into Tacoma, the highway bifurcating a sprawl of gas stations, car lots, and casinos.
It was eleven forty. We pulled off and had brunch at a Denny’s. We split plates of bacon and eggs, pancakes, hash browns, biscuits, and toast.
“White or brown?” the waiter asked Sonia.
“Excuse me?”
“Your gravy.”
Sonia looked at me. “Who has gravy for breakfast?” I shrugged. She looked back at the waiter and smiled. “Little of both on the side.”
At noon we both watched my phone stay perfectly silent. I took a sip of tea, which had been served as a cup of water, a tea bag, and a plastic thimble of cream.
“Could be a late riser,” I said.
“You would know.”
Her attention drifted away. I asked what was wrong.
“I don’t want to search for her,” Sonia said. “She’s not worth it.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Hand this over to the Pierce County Sheriff’s and go home.”
“Leave Essex out there with Crowhurst.”
“She chose him. They deserve each other.”
She broke off pieces of biscuit to sample the gravies.
“I have no problem helping someone who wants to be helped, especially someone who’s risking her life to do right.” She found the brown passable, the white made her pause. “But if she’s planning something, I want no part of it, and if she’s lost her nerve, well, that’s not our problem.”
“Or he got to her already,” I said. “I’ll phone some hotels. If I get nothing, we go to the sheriff and head home.”
“Fine.” She pointed her fork at the two gravies, together on the saucer. “The white is basically mushroom soup.”
“We’ll probably serve it at our wedding. Maybe have the service here.”
“Planning our wedding now?”
“Just speaking words. Why, you have other designs?”
“Why no,” she said, batting her eyelashes. “It’s every girl’s dream to get married at a diner in Tacoma.”
“You’re a haughty cosmopolitan.”
“That’s me. One gravy’s just not enough.”
The phone jumped. I opened it and read a text message from an unknown number. ARE YOU HERE?
I showed it to Sonia. We thought it over. I punched in, WHERE IS HERE?
IN TOWN came the almost instant reply. Then: TACOMA and finally, THIS IS DANA.
YES, I hit back, IN TOWN.
YOU SHOULD LEAVE. STAY AWAY AND BE SAFE.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Nothing for seven minutes. The check came and I laid down cash. The waiter asked Sonia what she thought of the gravies. She replied with tact if not sincerity. In the parking lot the phone buzzed again.
HES BACK IN TOWN, was the message.
L H C
YES
HE CALLED YOU
YES
FOR WHAT?
A minute’s hesitation. We were back in the car now. I dialed up a question mark to emphasize my last point, HOW DO YOU KNOW?, but before I could send it Essex beat me to it.
HE PHONED. HE TOLD ME HES GOING TO KILL YOU.
A minute ticked by, and then the last text she sent.
BOTH OF YOU.