Twenty-nine
“HI, GABE. I’VE come to help!”
Mary looked up from the dinette, stunned. It was past midnight and she’d just finished her absolute last sip of wine when someone had tapped lightly on the door. Gabe opened it to reveal Ruth Moon standing there, an odd grin on her face. Though she wore the same clothes as when Mary had last seen her, her demeanor had changed. Where before she’d moved leadenly, as if burdened with sorrow, now Ruth darted about like a sparrow, her eyes bright and feverish. She’s lost it, Mary thought, her heart aching for the stricken woman. This has driven her out of her mind.
“You two working hard?” Ruth eyed the empty wine bottle on the table. “Jonathan said I needed to come here and help you out.”
Mary frowned. ‘’Jonathan told you to come here?”
“Yes. He said since he couldn’t come help you out, I would have to.”
“Where’s Jonathan now?” asked Gabe.
“In jail,” Ruth replied. “Black eye, broken ribs.” She cast a sharp glance at Mary. “Broken heart, for all I know.”
Oooooh, boy, thought Mary. This just gets worse and worse. “Come sit down and tell us about it, Ruth. I bet Gabe will make us a pot of coffee.”
“Oh, I’ve got tea that works much better than coffee.”
“Let’s do coffee first.” Mary looked conspiratorially at Gabe. “Some decaf. Then if we’re still thirsty, we’ll do tea.”
While Gabe fished the decaffeinated coffee from his cabinet, Mary made room for Ruth at the dinette. In a moment she was telling them everything—that Jonathan had finally arrived in Tremont, but had gotten into same kind of fight with Sheriff Dula and was now in the Nikwase County jail.
“He told me to go and find you,” Ruth said, her hard edge vanishing. “He said you would need my help.”
“What kind of fight did Jonathan have?” Mary knew Jonathan’s temper well—slow to boil, but once it did, it could be explosive.
“I was telling him about everything that happened. Then I showed him that first picture of Lily, and he went crazy.” Ruth gave a loud sniff. “He grabbed the sheriff by the neck and lifted him up off the floor.”
Mary closed her eyes, filling in the rest of the blanks. Dula’s deputies had no doubt come to their boss’s aid, fists clenched, nightsticks drawn. “How badly was Jonathan hurt?” she asked softly.
“Like I said, he’s got some broken ribs.” Ruth twisted the hem of her sour, milk-stained T-shirt. “It was horrible.”
While Ruth stirred milk into her coffee, Mary gathered all the photos of Lily they’d received and spread them out on the table. As Ruth looked at them, the woman who’d just moments ago burst in like a firecracker seemed to grow smaller by the minute, as if the grotesque images on paper were leaching her very life away. Mary pointed to the last picture. “Remember when I last called you and we had such a bad connection?”
Ruth nodded, lifting her coffee cup with shaking hands.
“What I was trying to tell you was that Gabe and I may have found the place where this last photo was sent from.”
“Where?”
“Murfreesboro. A larger town, just up the road.” Mary wondered how she was going to explain this and not set Ruth off on some emotional nosedive again. “Ruth, I think I know who’s doing this.”
“Not the porno guy in Atlanta?”
“No. Somebody else. Someone who’s using Lily to set a trap for me.”
Ruth almost dropped her coffee. “A trap for you? But why?”
Mary took Ruth’s hand. How much should she tell of this to make it plausible? How much should she leave out, so as not to cause Ruth pain? She considered her options, then told much the same story she’d told Gabe, leaving out only the fact that she and Jonathan were making love when this whole horror had begun.
“But why do you think this Logan is after you?” asked Ruth when Mary reached the end of her tale.
“I don’t know. But I think it must be about something that happened a long time ago, something between him and my father.”
“Did you tell Sheriff Dula about this?”
“No. I left a detailed message with Chip Clifford, from the FBI.”
“Do you think they’ll come in on the case now?”
“All we’ve got is my conjecture. That’s not much to convince them that someone they think is dead might be alive.”
Mesmerized, Ruth stared at the photos of Lily. Finally Gabe spoke.
“Hey, what happened to your cousin? Did she ever get back to Oklahoma?”
“I don’t know.” Ruth looked up at him, her eyes regaining their feverish gleam. “She might be in Oklahoma. She might still be in Tennessee.” She gave an evil little chortle. “She might be dead, for all I know.”
“What do you mean, Ruth?” Mary asked, amazed. The woman had just cycled through three totally different personalities in the last twenty minutes.
“On the way over here I finally figured out what was wrong with my life.” Ruth leaned over the table and whispered, as if letting them in on a major secret of the universe. “It’s clutter. You know? All the extraneous shit that just gets in your way. I was driving along and I started thinking about all the things and people I could do without and I looked over in the truck and there sat Clarinda, this living, breathing piece of clutter. So I just pulled over to the side of the road and got rid of her.”
Mary flashed another look at Gabe. “What did you do, Ruth?”
“I put her out,” Ruth replied triumphantly. “Threw her and her stupid backpack out of the truck.”
“On the side of the interstate? In the middle of the night?” Mary was appalled.
“Oh, she was just a mile from some town. You should have seen her. She came running after the truck yelling, waving her arms. I just gunned the motor and kept on going.” Ruth started to giggle, then her gaze fell on the photos of Lily. “If it hadn’t been for that sorry piece of clutter,” she muttered brokenly, her laughter turning abruptly to tears, “none of this would have happened.”
Mary pulled Ruth close to her. She could feel her trembling beneath her filthy clothes. The last few days had taken a brutal toll on the woman. “Honey, would you like to take a nice hot shower? I can give you a clean T-shirt to put on afterward. It’ll make you feel a whole lot better.”
“You think so?”
Mary nodded.
“Okay.” Ruth wiped her eyes, suddenly child-like. “If you say so.”
“Come on, then. Gabe will get you going.” Gabe turned on the tiny shower and gave Ruth soap and a clean towel. As she bathed, he sat down across from Mary, his face pinched with concern.
“Whoa,” he said softly. “Have we just gotten a glimpse of the new, improved Ruth?”
Mary shrugged. “I’ve seen distraught mothers before, but nothing like this. I don’t much blame her for ditching Clarinda, though. Too bad somebody didn’t put her out before she ever got to Tennessee.’’
“But don’t you think we ought to call somebody? The cops or the Highway Patrol?”
Mary thought for a moment. Though her instincts told her Clarinda could probably survive a nuclear blast with nothing worse than a broken nail, Ruth had left her cousin in a potentially dangerous situation. “Of course we should,” she conceded. “I’ll call the state troopers and let them know there’s a wildcat loose on I-40.”
Just as she reached for her phone, however, she heard the distinctive ring of the “William Tell Overture.” With a sinking heart, she read the screen.
“Get Ruth out of the shower,” she told Gabe. “We’ve got another e-mail from Lily!”
Forty-five minutes later, they stood back in the Kinko’s computer room, waiting for their new photo to come out of the printer. With her hair still damp from the shower, Ruth wore one of Mary’s T-shirts and a more rational demeanor. Both her crazed, frantic look and her zombie non-look were gone from her eyes, and she seemed her old herself again—intelligent, capable, and totally focused on finding her child.
“Can you see Lily yet?” she asked Gabe, who was standing closest to the printer.
“Hang on,” said Gabe. “It’s coming.”
They waited the last agonizing seconds for the printer to finish. Finally Gabe grabbed the sheet of paper and held it up. This time Lily lay not in front of a gravestone, but at the base of a statue, where a naked youth, cast in what appeared to be bronze, held two horses rearing over his shoulders. A tall obelisk rose behind him, with an angel gazing down on the trio from above. Lily lay wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of the structure, where someone had propped up a crudely lettered cardboard sign that read “Greetings from Nashville, Tennessee.”
“Oh my God!” wailed Ruth. “My baby!”
Mary turned to Gabe. “Do you recognize this statue?”
“No. But if it’s Nashville, he’s still on the Trail of Tears.”
“How far is Nashville from here?” asked Mary.
“About forty miles.”
“Come on!” Ruth pulled them frantically toward the door. “Lily might still be there!”
An hour later, they stood at the base of Nashville’s memorial to the Civil War. Ruth had followed them in her truck, and they’d stopped only to buy a city map at a local gas station. When they realized that it failed to list any points of interest, Gabe had asked directions from a cabbie working the graveyard shift for the Music City Cab Company.
“That’s on Granny White Pike.” The taxi driver pointed at the map.
“Granny White Pike?” Gabe repeated the odd name.
“Yeah,” said the cabbie. “Go to downtown Nashville, get on Broadway. Go south on Twelfth Avenue. It’s about three miles down the road, on the right. Spooky as hell at night.”
The cab driver had been right. The statue stood in a small park at the edge of a residential area, soaring up into the night sky, the tall obelisk glowing white in the darkness. The bronze youth and his two horses scowled down upon them, huge and menacing, making Mary dizzy every time she looked up. An eerie silence hovered over the place, as if the Confederate dead still kept watch. The spot where Lily had lain was empty, as were the other three sides of the monument’s base.
“Come on,” said Ruth, after they’d made a wide circle of the statue. “Let’s go closer.”
Mary grabbed her arm. “Not now, Ruth. We need to wait till the sun comes up.”
“But why? They might have left some clues—”
“Which we could overlook or trample in the dark,” Gabe interrupted, “Mary’s right, Ruth. We need to do this when we can see.”
“So now you’re now an expert on finding stolen children, huh?” Ruth’s voice was caustic.
Gabe gave an edgy laugh. “I’m not an expert on anything, Ruth. I just happen to agree with Mary.”
“I know, I know. Everybody always agrees with Mary.” Ruth walked in a tight little circle.
“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. I think I just need something to eat. Or maybe to drink.”
“Come back to the van, honey,” said Mary. “I’ll fix you something to eat.”
Ruth hesitated a moment, then agreed. “Let me fix us a pot of sassafras tea. It’ll make us all feel better.”
“Okay.” Mary didn’t want any tea, but she thought it best to tread lightly, given Ruth’s mercurial temperament. “We’ll fix sandwiches. You bring us some tea.”
A little while later they sat at the dinette.
Ruth had handed them individual cups of tea, while they had fixed her a grilled cheese sandwich. Mary smiled as the tea took her back to her childhood, when her mother would serve cold sassafras tea in the summertime, with little sprigs of mint in each glass.
“This tastes great, Ruth,” Gabe told her, sipping from the cup she’d poured for him.
“The old Cherokees regarded it as a curative,” she replied, once again her old self. “It does kind of make the world seem a little better.” She gazed out the window toward the statue. “Sometimes, anyway.”
“We’ll go out at first light.” Mary glanced at her watch. It was ten past four. “Now, let’s at least get a couple of hours of sleep.”
Ruth turned from the window and gave Mary the saddest look she’d ever seen. “Do you really think we’ll ever see her again?”
“I don’t know, Ruth,” Mary answered honestly. “But I promise you that neither you nor I nor Jonathan will ever stop looking for her, for as long as we live.”