“Good to hear that.”
“You bet. I just don’t want the stress to … Anyway, thanks for trying. The police have really been okay through all this. Don’t worry about Tanya. She’ll go her own way, she always does.”
November got busy, lots of new referrals, my service seemed to be ringing in constantly. I booked myself solid, reserved lunchtime for making calls.
Calls that didn’t get answered. Messages left for Richard, Stacy, Judy Manitow. A try at Joe Safer’s office elicited a written note from the attorney’s secretary:
Dear Dr. Delaware:
Mr. Safer deeply appreciates your time. There are no new developments with regard to your common interests. Should Mr. Safer have anything to report, he’ll definitely call.
I thought a lot about the trip to Lancaster, composed a mental list of reasons not to go, wrote it all down.
I sometimes prescribe that kind of thing for patients, but it rarely works for me. Putting it down on paper made me antsier, less and less capable of putting it to rest. Maybe it’s a brain abnormality—some kind of chemical imbalance, Lord knows everything else gets blamed on that. Or perhaps it’s just what my midwestern mother used to call “pigheadedness to the nth.”
Whatever the diagnosis, I wasn’t sleeping well. Mornings presented me with headaches, and I found myself getting annoyed without good reason, working hard at staying pleasant.
By the twenty-third of November, I’d finished a host of court-assigned assessments—none referred by Judy Mani-tow. Placing the rest in the to-do box, I awoke on a particularly glorious morning and set out for the high desert.
Lancaster is sixty-five miles north of L.A. on three freeways: the 405, the 5, then over to the 14, where four lanes compress to three, then two, cutting through the Antelope Valley and feeding into the Mojave.
Just over an hour’s ride, if you stick to the speed limit, the first half mostly arid foothills sparsely decorated with gas stations, truck stops, billboards, the red-tile roofs of low-cost housing developments. The rest of it’s nothing but dirt and gravel till you hit Palmdale.
Motels in Palmdale, too, but that wouldn’t have mattered for Joanne Doss, it had to be Lancaster.
She’d made the trip late at night, when the view from the car window would have been flat-black.
Nothing to look at, lots of time to think.
I pictured her, bloated, aching, a passenger in her own hearse, as someone else—probably Eric, it was Eric I couldn’t stop thinking about—burned fuel on the empty road.
Riding.
Staring out at the black, knowing the expanse of nothingness would be among her final images.
Had she allowed herself to suffer doubt? Been mindlessly resolute?
Had the two of them talked?
What do you say to your mother when she’s asked you to help her leave you?
Why had she set up her own execution?
I spotted a county sign advertising a regional airport in Palmdale. The strip where Richard’s helicopter had landed on all those trips to oversee his construction projects.
He’d never been able to get Joanne to witness what he’d created. But on her last day on Earth, she’d endured an hour’s trip, made sure she’d end up in the very spot she’d avoided.
Prolonging the agony so she could send him a message.
You condemn me. I spit in your face.
The Happy Trails Motel was easy to find. Just a quick turn onto Avenue J, then a half-mile drive past Tenth Street West. Lots of open space out here, but not due to any ecological wisdom. Vacant lots, whiskered by weeds, alternated with the kind of downscale businesses that doom small-town proprietors to anxiety in the age of mergers and acquisitions.
Bob’s Battery Repair, Desert Clearance Furniture, Cleanrite Janitorial Supply, Yvonne’s Quick ‘n’ Easy Haircutting.
I passed one new-looking strip mall, the usual beige texture coat and phony tile, some of the storefronts still vacant, a FOR LEASE sign prominent at the front of the commodious parking lot. One of Richard’s projects? If I was right about Joanne’s motives, just maybe, because the motel was in clear view across the street, sandwiched between a liquor store and a boarded-up bungalow that bore a faded, hand-painted sign: GOOD-FAITH INSURANCE.