Cyn-thia glanced back at him, nodded, then put the doll down in one of the captain’s chairs. She fanned her tank-top at her neck. “Hot,” she said. “I mean boogery.”
She walked into the RV’s cabin. Steve went the other way, into the driver’s area, ducking his head so as not to bump it. On the dashboard in front of the passenger seat were three packs of baseball cards, neatly sorted into teams—Cleveland Indians, Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates. He thumbed through them and saw that about half were signed, and maybe half of the signed ones were personalized. Across the bottom of Albert Belle’s card was this: “To David—Keep sluggin’! Albert Belle.” And another, from thePittsburgh pile: “See the ball before you swing, Dave—Your friend, Andy Van Slyke.”
“There was a boy, too,” Cynthia called. “Unless the girl was into G.I. Joe and Judge Dredd and the MotoKops as well as dollies in blue dresses. One of the side-carriers back here is full of comic books.”
“Yeah, there’s a boy,” Steve said, putting Albert Belle and Andy Van Slyke back into their respective decks. He just brought the ones that were really important to him, he thought, smiling a little. The ones he absolutely could not bear to leave home. “His name is David.”
Startled: “How in the hell do you know that?”
“Learned it all watching X-Files.” He picked up a gas credit-card receipt from the wad of papers
jammed into the dashboard map-receptacle, and smoothed it out. The name on it was Ralph Carver, the address somewhere inOhio . The carbon had blurred across the town name, but it might have been Wentworth.
“I don’t suppose you know anything else about him, do you?” she asked. “Last name? Where he came from?”
“David Carver,” he said, the smile widening into a grin.
“Dad’s Ralph Carver. They hail fromWentworth,Ohio . Nice town. Next door toColumbus . I was inColumbus with South-side Johnny in ‘86.”
She came forward, the doll curled against one mosquito-bump breast. Outside the wind gusted again, throwing sand against the RV. It sounded like hard rain “You’re making that up!”
“No’m,” he said, and held out the gas receipt. “Here s the Carver part. David I got from the kid’s baseball cards He’s got some high-priced ink, tell you that.”
She picked the cards up, looked at them, then put them back and turned slowly all the way around, her face solemn and shiny with sweat. He was sweating himself, and plenty. He could feel it running down his body like a light, sticky oil. “Where did they go?”
“Nearest town, to get help,” he said. “Probably some one gave them a lift. Do you remember from your map what’s around here?”
“No. There is a town, I think, but I don’t recall the name. But if that’s what they did, why didn’t they lock up their place when they left? I mean, all their shit is here She waved one hand toward the cabin.
“Know what s back there by the studio couch?”
“Nope.”
“The wife’s jewelry caddy. A ceramic frog. You put your rings and earrings in the frog’s mouth.”
“That sounds tasteful.” He wanted to get out of here and not just because it was so nastyhot or because he had to track down the boss. He wanted to get out because the RV was like the fucking Mary Celeste.
It was too easy to imagine vampires hidden away in the closets, vampires in Bermuda shorts and tee-shirts saying things like I SURVIVED HIGHWAY 50, THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY IN
AMERICA!
“It’s actually cute,” she said, “but that’s not the point There’s two sets of earrings and a finger-ring in it.
Not real expensive, but not junk, either. The ring’s a tourma line, I think.
So why didn’t they—”
She saw something in the map-holder, something that bad been revealed when he stirred the crammed-in papers and plucked out a dollar-sign moneyclip that looked like real silver. There were bills folded into it. She fanned them quickly with the tip of a finger, then tossed the moneyclip back into the map-holder as if it were hot.
“How much?” he asked.
“Forty or so,” she said. “The clip itself s probably worth three or four times that much.
Tell you what, pilgrim—this smells bad.”
Another gust of wind splashed sand against the northern side of the RV, this one hard enough to rock it a little on its flat tires. The two of them looked at each other out of their sweat-shiny faces. Steve met the doll’s blank blue gaze. What happened, here, honey?
What did you see2
He turned for the door.
“Time for the cops?” Cynthia asked.
“Soon. First I want to walk a mile of backtrail, see if I can spot any sign of my boss.”
“In this wind? Man, that’s really dumb!”
He looked at her for a moment, not saying anything, then pushed past her and went down the steps.
She caught up with him at the foot of them. “Hey, let’s call it even, okay? You made fun of my grammar, I made fun of your whatever.”
“Intuition.”
“Intuition, is that what you call it? Well, fine. Call it even? Say yeah. Please. I’m too spooked to want to piss in the catbox.”
He smiled at her, a little touched by the anxiety on her face. “Okay, yeah,” he said. “Even as even can be.”
“You want me to drive the truck back? I can do a mile by the odometer, give you a finishing line to shoot for.”
“Can you turn it around without—” A semi with KLEENEX SOFTENS THE BLOW written on the side blasted past at seventy, headed east. Cynthia flinched back from it, shielding her eyes from flying sand with one Kate Moss arm. Steve put his own arm around her scant shoulders, steadying her for a moment or two. “—without get-ting stuck?” he finished.
She gave him an annoyed look and stepped out from under his arm. “Course.”
“Well … mile and a half, okay? Just to be on the safe side.”
“Okay.” She started toward the Ryder truck, then turned back to him. “I just remembered the name of the little town that’s close to here,” she said, and pointed east. “It’s up that way, south of the highway.
Cute name. You’re gonna love it,Lubbock .”
“What?”
“Desperation.” She grinned and climbed up into the cab of the truck.
He walked slowly east along the shoulder of the westbound lane, raising his hand in a wave but not looking up as the Ryder truck, with Cynthia behind the wheel, rumbled slowly past. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re looking for!” she called down to him.
She was gone before he had any chance to reply, which was just as well; he didn’t have any idea, either.
Tracks? A ridiculous idea, given the wind. Blood? Bits of chrome or taillight glass? He supposed that was actually the most likely. He only knew two things for sure: that his instincts had not just asked him to do this but demanded it, and that he couldn’t get the doll’s glazey blue stare out of his mind. Some little girl’s favorite doll. . . only the little girl had leftAlice Blue Gown lying face-down in the dirt by the side of the road. Mom had left her jewelry, Dad had left his moneyclip, and son David had left his auto-graphed baseball cards.
Why?
Up ahead, Cynthia swung wide, then turned the bright yellow truck so it was facing back west again.
She did this with an economy Steve wasn’t sure he could have matched himself, needing to back and fill just a single time. She got out, started walking toward him at a good clip, hardly looking down at all, and he had time, even then, to be moderately pissed that she should have found what his instinct had sent him out here to look for. “Hey!” she said. She bent over, picked something up, and shook sand off it.
He jogged to where she was standing. “What? What is it?”
“Little notebook,” she said, and held it out. “I guess he was here, all right. J. Marinville, printed right on the front. See?”
He took the small wirebound notepad with the bent cover and paged through it quickly.
Directions, maps Steve had drawn himself, and jotted notes in the boss’s top heavy scrawl, most of them about the scheduled receptions. Under the headingSt. Louis , Marinville had scribbled, Patricia Franklin. Redhead, big boobs. Don’t CALL HER PAT OR PATTY! Name of org. is FRIENDS OF
OPEN LIBES. Bill sez P.F. also active in animal-rights stuff Veggie.” On the last page which had been used, a single word had been scrawled in an even more flamboyant version of the boss’s handwriting: That was all. As if he had started to write an autograph for someone and then never finished.
He looked up at Cynthia and saw her cross her arms beneath her scant bosom and begin rubbing the points of her elbows. “Bruh,” she said. “It’s impossible to be cold out here, but I am just the same. This keeps getting spookier and spookier.