A Flower in the Desert (22 page)

By the time I reached Hartley, a small mountain town of frame houses huddled among the oaks and elms, a storm was about to hit. The homes were lit up within, promising a warmth and security that, in my business anyway, is more often remembered than experienced. Overhead, huge black clouds were piled one atop the other, their swollen bellies streaked a sickly gray. Now and then, lightning flashed, bright jagged bolts snapping across the sky. A few seconds later, thunder slammed against the earth, sudden earsplitting booms that tapered off, rattling, into long low resentful growls. Any moment now, the rain would start.

Deirdre Polk had given me directions. I turned left past the general store, followed a tree-lined dirt road down the hill and over a narrow concrete bridge, then down a tunnel formed by arching black branches. The road twisted among the trees. Windblown leaves flapped through the headlight beams like flocks of pale startled bats. I passed a small shivering meadow, its tall gray grasses flailing as gusts ripped across them. I passed a few houses to the right, a few to the left, each separated from the next by black thickets of shuddering brush or by black clusters of trees drunkenly swaying.

Her house was the last one on the road, a small shingled structure set back among the trembling oaks, with a roofed wooden porch that ran along its front. The porch light was on. I parked the Subaru in the dirt driveway, behind an old Volvo station wagon. When I stepped out of the car, the wind clawed at me. Trees hissed and moaned. Hunching my shoulders against the cold, I jogged up the wooden steps to the front door. No doorbell. I was about to knock when the door suddenly opened.

“Mr. Croft?” she said. “I heard your car. Come in.”

I stepped in and she closed the door behind me, muffling the wail of the wind.

She was tall, close to six feet tall. Her shining black hair was cut short, nearly as short as a man's, lying lightly over her ears and parted on the left. Somehow it suited her strong cheekbones, her aquiline nose, her large brown eyes, her wide mouth. She wore a pale blue cotton turtleneck sweater, a pair of faded jeans, a pair of brown lizardskin cowboy boots. Her shoulders were square, her breasts were large and firm. Big-boned and well proportioned, she held herself upright, unashamed of her height, her size, and she moved easily, gracefully—a woman comfortable with herself, her body, her life. She was handsome rather than beautiful, but she was very handsome.

She smiled. “It'll be pouring out there in a minute. Have a seat.” Her voice was low, musical, and sounded of Eastern universities.

I turned, and something growled.

To the left, sitting on its haunches on the hardwood floor, was an extremely large male German shepherd. His head lowered, his ears flat against his big skull, he eyed me as though I were a pork chop with pretensions.

“
Friend
,” said Deirdre Polk, and abruptly the dog's ears relaxed. He stood up, panting happily, and lumbered over to me, claws clicking at the floor. I offered him my hand to lick. Or to eat. Whatever he wanted. He licked it and I squatted down in front of him, scratched at his ears. A rough wet tongue the size of a bath towel reached out and thwacked my face.

“Enough, Marcel,” she said, and the dog looked at her, trying to determine whether she was absolutely certain about this.

“Enough,” she said.

The dog sighed and turned and padded over into the corner, lay down beside a black potbellied wood stove, looked up at me from beneath a furrowed brow.

I grinned and stood up. “Marcel?”

“Duchamp,” she smiled.

I grinned again. “Of course.”

“Please. Have a seat.”

After the wind and the cold and the darkness of outside, the modest living room seemed almost impossibly cozy. Like the floor, the walls were wood, hung here and there with small, carefully wrought paintings like the ones I'd seen in Melissa Alonzo's house. Below two of them, on the wall to my left, stood a low oak bookcase filled with oversized hardcover books. The curtains on the windows were a festive red. The furniture was Early American, an oak sofa frame supporting embroidered white cushions, and, facing this across a brightly patterned red Navajo rug, a pair of matching oak rocking chairs, also cushioned. There were two brass Aladdin kerosene lamps, one on the end table beside the sofa, the other on the antique cherrywood table that separated the rockers. Through their ivory-colored shades, both gave off a clear, white, gentle light. The air was warm and it smelled of piñon logs burning and of apples and cinnamon.

I sat down on the sofa. Deirdre Polk, standing there with her hands in her back pockets, said to me, “I've got some mulled cider on the stove. And there's some Calvados. I like to put a shot of it in the cider. Would that be all right?”

She was being much more pleasant than she had sounded on the telephone. “That,” I said, “would be perfect.”

She smiled and left. I looked at Marcel. As soon as Deirdre Polk disappeared around the corner, he clambered to his feet, clicked across the floor, sat down beside my foot, and put his head on my knee. It weighed about the same as a bowling ball. I scratched his hears. He looked up at me with shiny tragic eyes. We communed.

Deirdre Polk returned to the room carrying two white ceramic mugs. “He's such a baby. If he's bothering you, just tell him to lie down.” She handed me one of the mugs. Outside, suddenly, thunder crashed.

The dog looked at me as though he expected me to do something about all this noise. “He's okay,” I said.

She crossed the Navajo rug, sat down in one of the rockers, crossed her long right leg over her left. Before I could speak, she said, “I want to apologize for the way I must've sounded on the phone. People have been pestering me about Mel now for months. After I talked to you, I called some people I know in Santa Fe. Bonita DeMarco knows you. She's a friend of mine.”

Bonita DeMarco owned a gallery on Canyon Road. I'd helped her out with something once, a small something, and I'd been receiving invitations to openings at her gallery ever since. She was a fat, Falstaffian woman with a ribald sense of humor and a loud infectious laugh. She was also a lesbian. Deirdre Polk's friendship with her didn't necessarily mean that Deirdre was a lesbian herself, but it was suggestive. I felt a small flicker of regret.

Typical male chauvinist response. The implication being that if Deirdre Polk were straight, she'd have gone belly up in my stunning presence.

“I like Bonita,” I said.

She smiled. “She's very fond of you. She says that you don't lie.”

I smiled. “I've been known to exaggerate.”

“Are you working for Roy Alonzo?”

“No. I'm working for his uncle.” Once again, I explained my arrangement with Norman Montoya.

“And he really means it?” she said. “He's really only concerned about Melissa and Winona's safety?”

“I think so, yeah.”

Her dark eyebrows moved toward each other. “You're not sure?”

“I'm as sure as I can be. But I could be wrong.” I shrugged. “I'm not a mind reader. Unfortunately.”

She frowned, sipped at her drink.

I sipped at mine. It was good. Apples and spices and the mellowness of the Calvados. It went down warm and it stayed warm when it reached bottom. I said the same thing I'd said to Melissa's mother: “Melissa's been in contact with you, hasn't she?”

She lowered the mug to her lap, lifted her head slightly. “Yes.”

“A postcard?”

She shook her head. “She was here. Last month.”

Deirdre Polk told me that on September 23 she had returned from Taos, where she'd been shopping. She had parked the car, carried her bags into the house. Fifteen minutes later, someone had knocked at the door. It had been Melissa. For an instant, Deirdre hadn't recognized her: Melissa was wearing dark glasses and her long blond hair had been cut, permed into curls, and dyed brown.

“How did she look otherwise?” I asked. I was feeling a certain sense of unreality. Despite my determination to find Melissa Alonzo, I realized now that I'd begun to think of her as a will-o'-the-wisp, a figure forever on the distant horizon, forever unattainable. Probably because I had talked to so many people who hadn't seen her for so long. Here was someone who had actually seen her, spoken with her, a few weeks ago.

“Tired,” Deirdre Polk said. “She looked tired. She'd lost some weight. But she was happy, or she seemed to be. We laughed a lot. I made fun of her hair.” She smiled. “It was so strange to see her with hair like that. She'd always kept it long. Long, straight blond hair. I used to call her Alice. Alice in Wonderland.” She smiled again, looking off, remembering, then turned to me. “It was wonderful to see her again. Really wonderful. I hadn't heard anything from her since the beginning of August.”

“Was Winona with her?”

“No. Winona was back in Santa Fe, at the house of the people they were staying with. A young couple. She wouldn't tell me their names. They were part of a group that helps out women and children like Melissa and Winona.”

“The Underground Railroad.”

She nodded. “She said they were really very special people. They had a daughter of their own, Winona's age, and the two girls had become friends. But she said there were problems. These people had decided they couldn't keep harboring Mel. Their daughter had just started school for the first time, kindergarten, and they felt it wasn't fair to her, all the secrecy, all the precautions everyone had to take. They were miserable about it, Mel said. About asking her to leave. They felt guilty. But guilt was something that Mel understood. She probably felt more guilty about the situation than they did. She'd made arrangements to take Winona somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“She wouldn't say. She wouldn't tell me. But it was somewhere nearby. Here in New Mexico. She told me she'd be getting in touch with me soon.”

“Has she?”

“No. That's why I'm telling you all this. I thought about it for hours, after I spoke to Bonita. She says I can trust you. So I'm trusting you, Mr. Croft. I don't really have a choice. I'm worried. I'm really very worried. It's not like Mel. If she says she's going to do something, she does it. She would've contacted me somehow, unless …” She frowned as the possibilities presented themselves, and then she chose to bury them beneath a generality. “Unless something were wrong.”

Outside, with nice timing, the rain began to fall, rattling against the leaves, clattering against the rooftop.

“The place she was going to,” I said. “You're certain that it was somewhere in New Mexico?”

She nodded. “She told me that much. And she said it'd be good for Winona. That there were a lot of children there. Boys and girls Winona's age. It's been hard on Winona, she said. The hiding, the moving from place to place. She felt terrible about that. I don't think she realized, when she started all this, how hard it would be on Winona. She realized it intellectually, of course, but that's always different from actually
seeing
it.”

“Did she mention any of the places she'd stayed?”

“No. She wouldn't tell me anything about the Railroad at all.”

Once again, thunder crashed and rumbled outside. The big German shepherd raised his head from my knee and looked at me, disappointed. I scratched his ear. He laid his head back down and closed his eyes.

I said, “You said that people have been pestering you about Mel for months. Who did you mean?”

“Back in August, toward the end of the month, two men came here from the FBI. They wanted to know if I'd seen her or heard from her.”

“And you hadn't.”

She shook her head. “She called me before she went down to El Salvador. And that was the last I heard until she showed up at my door.”

“Who else asked?”

“There was another FBI man. He was here twice, once in September, and then again last week. He said he was following up on the earlier investigation.”