As Good As Gone (9781616206000) Read online

  After she stopped crying, Ann washed her face and started over. This time, however, she skipped the eye shadow and mascara, and when Kitty picked Ann up for the party, she asked Ann, “Are you sick or something?” “Just tired,” Ann replied. Although only the two of them were in the car, Kitty leaned across the seat and asked confidentially, “Is Aunt Flo visiting?” At that moment, a false admission seemed easier than any attempt at explanation, and Ann nodded her head.

  Kitty must have spread the word about Ann and her mood throughout the party because no one even comes near Ann out here at the edge of the yard. Earlier Cam MacLeod stepped off the patio, and Ann thought he might be coming her way—she had heard that Cam wanted to ask her out—but a few paces onto the grass he ran out of interest or nerve and turned back to the party.

  If she stayed home, she could be there if her father or mother call, or Ann might have phoned Aunt Carole’s. Just hearing someone’s voice, someone who has seen her mom and can testify that she’s all right, would be enough to blow away those morbid thoughts that are taking a firmer hold in her mind by the minute. But it’s already too late to call, and by the time she gets home, Ann’s grandfather will probably be asleep, and it won’t do to wake him and ask if there’s any word from her parents.

  The last time Ann spoke to her father, he had intended to put her mind at ease about her mother, but he had not entirely succeeded. Her father had sounded cheerful and optimistic, but since he believes that a hopeful outlook and a ready smile are always the keys to happiness, Ann placed a little asterisk of qualification beside much of what her father said. If she could hear her mother’s voice, Ann would know whether her worries are warranted or not.

  While she’s thinking of her mother’s voice, how she so often keeps it low no matter how circumstance might demand another tone, Ann hears another voice, almost as familiar as her mother’s, but this voice sends a chill through her and stops her breath. Monte. She’s sure, yet her fear talks her into doubt. It can’t be. He’s in Kalispell. Still holding her breath, she listens, and when she hears that laugh like three grunts—huh, huh, huh—she doesn’t wait a second longer. She puts her cup of beer down in the tall grass and looks for a direction she can run in.

  He returned early. Or perhaps he never left. Maybe he lied and let it be known that he was leaving town in order to lure Ann out into the open. Maybe he was working with someone—Kitty? Would Kitty do such a thing?—who tricked Ann into coming to the party with the promise that he wouldn’t be there.

  There’s only one way for her to go. If she goes back toward the house, even if she tries to circle wide around either side, she runs the risk of him seeing her, or worse, of him believing that she’s coming toward him.

  So she walks straight ahead, and within a few paces, she no longer feels the Jensens’ spongy grass underfoot, but the stony steep slope of the ravine. She descends sideways, trying simultaneously to do contradictory things—hurry, so she can put as much distance between her and him as possible, and slow down, so she doesn’t trip on a rock or a clump of sagebrush.

  The night is clear but moonless, and the deeper into the ravine she goes the darker it becomes. She makes her way by sense as much as sight, and when the darkness seems to thicken and gain texture, Ann slows and gropes with her hands until she can be sure what—a boulder, a tree, a waist-­high tangle of tumbleweeds—blocks her path.

  For the second time this month, Ann is on the run, allowing herself to be chased through what is supposed to be her town, her world, the place on the planet that she knows better than any other and where she should feel safer than anywhere else. Yet lately she has been making a point of stopping and looking up and down the street before she pushes open the doors and exits Penney’s. Only days ago she ran through the backyards of her own neighborhood.

  Years ago, when she was five or six and there were no houses out here, when it was nothing but hills and sloughs and gullies, her family had driven out here, bumping across the prairie—there wasn’t even a gravel road—to set off their fireworks a safe distance from town. Maybe they had even arced their bottle rockets out over this very ravine. And now she’s feeling her way along in the dark, hoping that the rattlesnakes have slithered under their rocks for the night.

  If the branches and trunk of the fallen tree weren’t bleached near white, Ann probably would have walked right into it, poking out an eye on one of those twigs that stick out like accusing fingers in every direction. But Ann does see it and feels down the tree’s length, toward its roots, trying to find a place low enough and free enough of branches that she can climb over and continue on her way.

  She hikes up her skirt and throws one leg over the trunk, a motion that reminds her of climbing on a horse. Is Jensens’ house near where those stables used to be? Hadn’t they been west of Gladstone? Ann was eight or nine when she and her friends were in love with horses, when they all begged their fathers and mothers to take them horseback riding as often as possible.

  If thoughts of horses and her past had not taken Ann’s attention, perhaps she might have noticed, even in the darkness, that when the tree fell it dragged down with it a sizable branch from another tree nearby and it’s on this branch, as thick and round as a man’s leg, that Ann lands when she dismounts the trunk.

  Her feet slip out from under her, and she topples backward. She gets her hands back under her to break her fall, and she thinks at first that the snap comes from a dry twig she lands on, until she registers the sharp pain in her forearm.

  The darkness and the fallen tree also conceal the steepness of the slope that increases sharply just on the other side of the trunk, and she begins to slide down the hill. A rock scrapes the side of her head. She doesn’t know how to slow or stop her descent. If she sticks out an arm or leg it might snag on a rock or stump, and she knows by now that one arm is already injured, though how badly she can’t be sure. Finally, the earth, as if it can feel pity for its inhabitants, comes to Ann’s aid. She slides into a depression the size of a car’s trunk, created perhaps when a boulder rolled away. In this bowl, Ann first puts her hand to her head. Her fingers do not come away wet with blood, but when she tries to push herself to her knees, the pain in her right arm is so intense she cries out.

  Cradling her arm, she scrambles to her feet. The span between her elbow and wrist curves, a shape that might be graceful if a substance other than human bone were involved. But the actuality is grotesque, and Ann has to look away to keep from becoming sick to her stomach at the sight of a part of her own body.

  She’s close to the bottom of the ravine, but she doesn’t hurry. She can’t. Not only is she terrified of falling again, but each step sends a jolt of pain directly to her arm.

  The cloudburst early in the day brought no more than a quarter of an inch to Gladstone, yet it was enough to form pools of runoff at the bottom of the gully. Ann’s foot sinks up to her ankle in the mud. She tries to pull free, but that causes the wet earth to suck harder, and she frees herself by letting the mud keep her tennis shoe.

  The slope leading out of the ravine is not as steep or rugged as the path down, and Ann begins to climb a diagonal course up toward the road that leads back to town. Weeds scratch at her ankles and small stones jab at the sole of her bare foot, yet she’s grateful for the easier ascent. Her arm feels as though someone is squeezing it, the pain increasing as the grip tightens.

  When Ann finally reaches the road, her relief is so great she stops for a moment to catch her breath. But with her first hard sigh, she suddenly feels lightheaded, and she bends over, just as her father taught her when Ann felt faint during the rehearsals for her seventh grade Christmas program. Lowering her head, however, is not enough. Her vision dims as if the darkness at the bottom of the ravine has followed her up the hill and is now wrapping itself around her. She sits down on the shoulder of the road, the gravel rough but warm under her.

  In another moment, she sees the headlights of a car in the distance, and though she knows she shou
ld get back on her feet and flee back down the ravine—or at least to go far enough so she isn’t visible from the road—she can’t make herself stand up. She hears the steady roar of the car’s engine grow louder and then feels its vibration through the heel of her bare foot where it touches the asphalt, but she stays put. The rumble of the car’s muffler—that could be the sound of Monte’s Ford—but still Ann stays where she is. The driver obviously sees her, slows, then stops right in the road alongside Ann. The passenger door opens, but Ann does not alter her position, seated cross-­legged in the dirt and cradling her bent arm like one of the dolls she stopped playing with half a decade ago.

  TWENTY-­FIVE

  Beverly is in bed reading, only two chapters left in her Erle Stanley Gardner mystery, when the doorbell rings again and again. Her first thought is of Adam—he’s gone out for the evening and forgotten his keys. Which only shows how absorbed she is in the novel. Adam is home. Of course. She doesn’t even have to listen very carefully before she hears the sporadic clacking of his typewriter in the basement, a sound that even after all these weeks that her son has been home still reminds her of the furnace and its ductwork clicking and ticking with heat.

  She puts her book down, grabs her robe, and runs toward the front door.

  She flips on the porch light, and when it illuminates Calvin Sidey’s form, she sighs with relief, believing that the same need she struggled with earlier has finally gotten the better of him too.

  But he does not pull open the screen door and try to get under her nightgown’s thin cotton. Instead, he speaks, and with the same urgency with which he has been leaning on her doorbell.

  “My granddaughter’s in the hospital, and I’ve got to get over there right away. Can you come over so if Will wakes up it won’t be to an empty house?”

  “Ann? Ann’s in the hospital? My God, Cal, what happened?” She steps back and Calvin follows her into the house.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve got this second or third hand. Apparently she fell somewhere. She was being chased . . . ? I don’t know.”

  “How bad?”

  He rubs his jaw with the backs of his fingers the way men do to check if they need to shave. Beverly recognizes the gesture for what it truly is—the action of a man trying to hold down his panic.

  “They told me her life’s not in danger, but she’s banged up.”

  She hears the urgency in his voice. “I’ll throw on some clothes and be right with you.”

  Back in the bedroom she tosses her robe on the bed, pulls her nightgown over her head and lets it fall to the floor, and from the closet grabs the sundress she took off only an hour or so earlier. She’s buttoning herself up and hurrying back to the living room when Calvin’s words catch up to her. Chasing her—someone was chasing Ann?

  Calvin is standing at the door, staring out at the night and eager to be on his way. Beverly puts a restraining hand on his shoulder and leans tenderly against him.

  “I should go with you,” she says. “If someone’s after Ann, that’s something she might feel more comfortable talking to a woman about.”

  “Will—”

  She cuts off his concern. “Adam’s here. I’ll ask him to stay with your grandson.”

  “Fine. Maybe we can take your car then. My truck’s low on gas.”

  “I’ll get Adam.”

  She hasn’t been able to shake free of the image of Calvin striding across the street toward Brenda Cady’s house with a tire iron in his hand. If he armed himself for a confrontation with a man who only made a threat, what is Calvin likely to do to someone who has actually brought harm to a member of his family? And what if the years-­old gossip is true—that Calvin once caved in a man’s skull for a rumored insult to his wife? No, Beverly better stay close to Calvin. If for no other reason than to try to prevent him from doing something that will land him in Deer Lodge State Prison for the rest of his days.

  BILL AND MARJORIE HONEYMOONED down at the Chico Hot Springs Resort, and when they returned to Gladstone, Bill did not carry her across the threshold of his—their—house on Fourth Street. He held the door open for her, bowed low, and said, “Enter, Mrs. Sidey.” It was, of course, not the first time she had been in the house; Bill had lived there all his life, except for his years in the service, and during the time they dated, Bill and Marjorie were more likely to spend an evening at his home rather than at her tiny apartment above Woolworth’s. But she had never been inside as “Mrs. Sidey,” and that slight difference was enough to discomfort her and to trouble her sleep for nights to come.

  She was, first of all, not entirely certain how she felt about being a Sidey. In Gladstone it had always been a name to be reckoned with, tied up as it was with the town’s history, its prosperity and property. But not long after Bill’s mother’s death—the previous Mrs. Sidey—the family’s reputation changed. When grief and drink and a possible murder drove Calvin Sidey out of his mind and out of his home, suddenly the Sidey name was one people whispered about and muttered over, a name associated with tragedy, scandal, and strangeness. Marjorie knew Gladstone had been talking behind her back ever since she began keeping company with Tully Heckaman, but she could live with that. To be a Sidey, however, was another matter.

  Marjorie also worried that she wouldn’t be able to adjust to her new name, that something in her would so resist being a Sidey that she would fail to acknowledge any “Mrs. Sidey” directed at her. And she certainly didn’t want Bill to believe she was ashamed of taking his name. So she practiced. She wrote the name over and over, filling sheets of paper with “Mrs. Bill Sidey,” and “Marjorie Sidey.” All the while she did this, she could not shake the worry that somewhere was a notebook that might turn up also filled with her handwriting, but with the name Heckaman rather than Sidey. She had whiled away many classroom hours practicing that name as well.

  Yet in spite of the rehearsals, the Sidey name seldom seemed a part of who she was. And there were times when she didn’t want to answer to the name, when, for example, men with whom she’d had some history called her “Mrs. Sidey,” and they used a tone—how did they manage it, those men who were usually so inexpressive and inarticulate?—that had a leer tucked inside it. Perhaps worst of all were the nightmares: She would be someplace where she was in danger, but the danger was invisible to her. She might be in a building, for example, that was on fire, but she was in a room where the flames had not yet reached. People outside tried to warn her by calling her name, Mrs. Sidey, Mrs. Sidey, Mrs. Sidey, but inside her dream Marjorie could not comprehend that they were calling her.

  Or as in this dream. She is in a hospital, and a name is being called, Mrs. Sidey! Mrs. Sidey! Gradually, it dawns on her that the hospital authorities are looking for someone to come forward because there’s a baby in the nursery whom no parent has claimed. Mrs. Sidey! Can that possibly be Marjorie? She’s a mother, she knows that, even if she’s uncertain about any of her other roles. No, she can’t take a chance, not if a child is in distress. She struggles toward waking, a destination that suddenly recedes exactly at the instant that Marjorie decides to make for it. Mrs. Sidey! Mrs. Sidey!

  But make it she does, and she opens her eyes to a lantern-­jawed elderly nun who smiles down at Marjorie as if she’s the child who has been missing a mother.

  BEVERLY CLOSES HER EYES, leans back in her chair, and rests her head on the waiting room’s cinder-­block wall. She hasn’t seen Ann yet, and the only injury for certain is a broken arm. She hopes it’s not a compound fracture. Beverly shudders at the thought not only because of the pain it would cause Ann but also because of the grotesque image of bone tearing through skin, through that lovely skin. Beverly opens her eyes to banish that picture.

  Adam, bless him, for once did not disappoint her. When she went down to the basement to tell him what happened to Ann and to ask him if he would go over to the Sidey home, Adam immediately picked up his typewriter and a stack of paper and hurried up the stairs.

  Beverly’s fond thoughts of he
r son are interrupted by the sound of a woman clearing her throat. When Beverly looks up, she sees Mrs. Teed cautiously approaching. It was Mrs. Teed who brought Ann to the hospital.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Teed says, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No, no, not at all. But I thought you went home.”

  “I couldn’t. Not until I know I how she’s doing.”

  Beverly shrugs helplessly, and at that Mrs. Teed sits down in the green chair next to Beverly. The vinyl squeaks and the cushion sighs under Mrs. Teed’s weight. She’s a stout woman, but attractive nonetheless. She has a quick, bright smile, high cheekbones, and long-­lashed dark eyes that any woman would envy. Like Beverly, Mrs. Teed is a widow, and to much of Gladstone that means the women should automatically be as close as sisters, but Beverly can’t remember an occasion when they’ve done anything more than exchange a word or two about the weather. Beverly is also aware that Gloria Teed has a reputation as a gossip, and this knowledge makes Beverly wary.

  “To tell you the truth,” Mrs. Teed says, “I wondered if I made a mistake, just bringing her to the hospital.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I wondered if I should have called the police or the sheriff. I mean, if someone was after her, my God, I can’t believe that could happen here. Not in Gladstone.”

  “If he thinks the authorities should be notified, I’m sure Mr. Sidey will take care of that.”

  “So that’s her grandfather? Calvin Sidey is her grandfather?”

  Beverly nods.

  Mrs. Teed makes a low hissing sound as she draws air past her teeth. “I heard he was dead.”

  “No, alive and well.”

  “I used to hear Jim and my folks talk about him. But I guess I never put it all together—Bill and Marjorie, their kids. So that’s Calvin Sidey . . . my goodness!”