11

‘I’m racking my brain,’ Amanda said in the car. ‘I don’t know a soul up in that part of the state.’ She lit a cigarette and inhaled smoke a little too quickly. Frantic was the word Morgan had used. I must speak to Amanda, Yours truly, Frantic, Tuba City. Hispanic accent. She didn’t want to think.

A shadow rolled through her head, the same smoke signal she’d expelled from her mind when she’d been discussing Galindez with Willie Drumm, the same little shiver of concern she’d felt in Bascombe’s office. She shut her eyes. Tuba City, the back-end of beyond. She thought of an endless arid landscape and a voice travelling through telephone wires and the way Galindez had been ferried downstream by the river.

‘Why would somebody phone you at your father’s number anyway?’ Rhees asked.

‘Maybe she tried our home number first, then when she got no response she looked up Morgan in the book. I don’t know.’

Rhees was driving towards Scottsdale from Phoenix. All that remained of the sun were a few spectacular streaks the colour of blood. Downtown Scottsdale was a sequence of traffic lights, all seemingly red. Rhees took a left turn off the main street. He drove until he reached the cul-de-sac where the house he shared with Amanda was located. He parked in the driveway and Amanda strolled ahead of him, unlocked the front door and turned on the lights.

Inside the air was stuffy. They’d been gone a little less than four weeks and yet she felt like an intruder. She went into the living-room, Rhees followed her. More lights. She looked round the room. Their possessions – books, TV, furniture – had that alien quality you sometimes experience when you come back after a vacation. The geometry of the house was all wrong, ceilings too high, windows too large.

Rhees said, ‘Weird.’

‘You feel it?’

‘Yeah, I feel it.’

‘It’s like somebody else’s house,’ Amanda said. ‘I expect if we go into the backyard we’ll find duplicates of ourselves emerging from giant pods.’

She walked to the answering machine, then remembered she’d disconnected it before they’d left for the cabin, an act of deliberate severance. Kill the machine. I don’t need and I don’t want messages.

‘You think this mystery woman will call?’ Rhees asked.

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘I need a drink. Want one?’

‘Please.’

Rhees went inside the kitchen. Amanda could hear him rummaging for ice. She sat on the sofa, glanced at the Adams prints on the walls, chilly black and white rock formations. Objects formerly charged with easy familiarity were shorn of meaning. Even the framed newspaper and magazine clippings that concerned some of her legal cases were related to a person other than herself. It was as if somebody had come here when the house was empty and stripped away the veneer of recognition.

Rhees returned with drinks. ‘We forgot to empty the refrigerator. Something disgusting is growing in there.’

‘Sit beside me.’ She patted the sofa. He sat down and touched her wrist. She sipped her drink. She was conscious of the silent black telephone located on the table at her back. She was suddenly uptight, jangled. She wanted the gin to relax her, numb her head a little.

In the distance the shrill whine of a cop car was audible. Night in the city. Deaths and accidents. Casual, drive-by shootings. She yearned for the forest.

‘We should be heading back soon,’ Rhees said.

Amanda didn’t move.

Rhees got up. ‘Maybe I’ll just defuzz the fridge to pass some time while you finish your drink and wait to see if the phone rings.’

He went back inside the kitchen. She listened to the sound of things being clattered around. Jars and bottles, glass knocked on glass impatiently. He didn’t want to be here any more than she did. She heard him say, ‘Sweet Jesus, was this sodden mass once a bag of carrots?’

Fifteen minutes dragged past before the telephone rang, and when it did Amanda reached for the receiver at once and spoke her name.

The woman said, ‘Manda, I been trying to phone for days, I can’t get you, Manda.’

For a second Amanda couldn’t speak. Electricity spiked through her. She was only dimly aware of Rhees materializing in the kitchen doorway with what looked like green compost in his rubber-gloved hand. She leaned forward on the sofa and tried to keep alarm out of her voice. ‘Where are you? Where the hell are you?’

‘It’s gone wrong, Manda, the whole goddam thing. This isn’t the way you planned it. I’m inside this nightmare where I don’t belong.’ The woman was crying and her words ran into one another in breathless little utterances.

‘Just tell me where you are,’ Amanda said.

‘God, where am I? Jesus, I don’t know.’

‘Calm down, calm down.’

‘They’re coming after me, Manda.’

‘Who?’

‘These two guys, they’re coming after me.’

Amanda’s fingers were rigid on the handset. ‘I’ll help, just tell me where you are.’

‘OK, where I am, this is,’ and her voice faded. Amanda heard the clank of a telephone being set down, then a creaking noise. ‘Where I am. OK, this is a place called, wait a minute, I’m looking at the sign, the Canyon Motel, off the interstate. It’s got a big blue light outside.’

‘Which interstate?’

‘What’s the one? Seventeen. I-Seventeen.’

‘Seventeen? You’re here in Arizona?’

‘Manda, help me. Come help me.’

‘You’re at a pay phone there.’

‘A pay phone, right. Say you’ll come.’

‘Stay where you are. Don’t move.’ Rhees was looking at her with curiosity.

‘How long it gonna take you?’

‘I don’t know. Fast as I can get there.’

‘Hurry, Jesus Christ hurry, please.’

‘I’ll be there.’ Amanda hung up. Rhees was thumbing quickly through the Yellow Pages.

‘The Canyon,’ he said, reading from the directory. ‘It’s near Black Canyon City.’

Amanda could hear the motion of her blood. ‘Even if I go like a bat out of hell, that’s still twenty-five, thirty minutes. Do me a favour. Call Willie Drumm, tell him to meet me there.’

She rushed towards the door before Rhees – who looked puzzled and anxious – had time to say anything. She was all haste, her brain locked in that space where thoughts don’t cohere and your head’s filled with a strident choir of panic. She blew a quick kiss back at Rhees and said, ‘Tell him it’s Isabel Sanchez.’