The Last Blue Plate Special (36 page)

The line shack, she told me, had been built on Bureau of Land Management land by a special permit granted to the utilities
company. When the line crew finished its work and left, the structure’s complicated legal status prevented its being sold,
so it just sat there empty for years. Her husband, Bill, and others had used it from time to time to store feed, but it was
inconveniently far from the herds and eventually they all built ramadas for that purpose closer to the grazing areas. After
that, transients wandering through camped out in the place, a practice frowned upon by Anza’s residents. It was decided that
a committee of townspeople would voluntarily manage the property until either the BLM or the utilities company decided what
to do with it, which they never would, Reed explained, because it was too remotely situated for either agency to care about.

So the town fixed it up a bit and rented it out for Cattle-men’s Association meetings and the like, school campouts and picnics,
eventually a concession from October through June as more and more hikers found their way through Coyote Canyon after the
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park was created.

“Of course, the wives had to do all the work,” she went on, smiling. “Wives of the Cattlemen’s Association, wives of the Sheepmen,
wives of the Anza Development Commission. Somebody had to sit up there selling lemonade and cold sandwiches from a cooler
all day as the locals and hikers and school groups came in and out. This was over thirty years ago and we all had families,
you understand. I was raising a set of grandchildren at the time after one of my sons got into trouble with drugs, got divorced,
what a mess. Anyway, after a while nobody wanted to do it. Nobody had time to sit up there all day.”

“So what about this Lorene and Tommi?” I asked, watching as Brontë left the man with the red sandbags on his chest and went
to be petted by a heavyset woman in tights and a leotard who was doing something with a CD player.

“It’s almost time for wheelchair aerobics,” Reed explained. “And I’m about to tell you about Lorene and her daughter.”

Around that time, she said, a woman and a girl of eight or nine had turned up in Anza. The woman, Lorene Smith, said her husband
had gotten a job as a ranch hand somewhere south of there and sent for her and the girl to come out from Kansas. Except the
husband got killed in a brawl while the wife and daughter were making the long bus trip, and now they were stranded and didn’t
have any money. Somebody had told Lorene there was a family up in Anza looking for a housekeeper and cook, so she got some
bus money from Travelers Aid down in Los Angeles and came to apply for the job.

“Now,
nobody,
” Reed said, “ever had a housekeeper in Anza or ever said they wanted one. Not only that, there wasn’t any bus through Anza
that morning Lorene said she and the girl had got there on the bus. What I’m saying is, it looked like they’d
walked
there from someplace. Both of ’em like skinned rabbits, pale as ghosts. It was Waddy Babbick’s wife, Dot, took ’em home for
a meal, let ’em stay for a while. See, in those days, even into the 1970s, little places like Anza were still sort of the
Wild West. People didn’t ask too many questions, just lent a helping hand if they could.”

A lot of elderly people in wheelchairs were rolling themselves or being pushed by attendants into the gym. The woman in tights
had made the musical selection for the aerobics class. Kenny Rogers. Loud. Most of the class was robustly singing along with
“Reuben James” as they began their warm-up exercises.

“We’re going to have to get out of here,” Reed noted, unfolding an aluminum walker as she stood. “They tend to get rowdy.
Let’s grab a latte at the coffee bar and then sit out by the pool. I think you’re going to be very interested in what I have
to tell you next.”

I
was beginning to question my impulsive decision to visit Reed McCallister by the time we were settled at poolside with our
lattes. She was definitely a character and loved to talk, but then, I thought, don’t older folks always love to talk about
the past? Her detailed history of the shack in my photograph was taking forever and would lead nowhere. And I had no idea
where I expected it to lead in the first place.

“I’m afraid I’ll have to go shortly,” I told her. “You’re very kind to talk with me, but—”

“But you’re starting to wonder if I’m a crazy old coot who’ll never shut up,” she finished the thought. The caramel eyes watched
me with amusement from behind three different lenses. “You young people are always in a hurry. Remember, this story has waited
almost your entire lifetime to be told.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I follow these wild goose chases nobody sees but me while everybody else does the real
things, the important things. My partner says I’m irrational.”

“Of course you are, dear,” she replied, smiling. “What has being rational ever gotten you?”

“But this is serious,” I argued. “It’s not about me. Four prominent women are dead, a suspect has attempted suicide, the
FBI
is involved, for crying out loud, and I’m chasing a story about a shack.”

“You’ve come to the right place, then,” she said. “Now, what happened was that Dot Babbick came up with the idea that Lorene
and Tommi could live up there in the old line shack, and Lorene could run the concession. Lorene was grateful for the roof
over their heads and agreed to do it. She got to keep twenty percent of the concession proceeds to save up for their bus fare
back to Kansas. Only thing is, they never did go back. They stayed for two years.”

The mother and daughter settled in, Reed explained, like they were born to the place. Lorene sold lemonade and cold sandwiches
as usual, but then she ordered a big coffeepot through mail order, a couple of electric grills for hot sandwiches, and some
dishes. Bill McCallister found an old restaurant counter somebody had dumped in a wash, and the men hauled it out with a couple
of pickup trucks, painted it and put on a new Formica top, and installed it in the line shack for Lorene. The place became
a local hangout, and the little girl, Tommi, made a sign she hung over the door.

“Dessert Diner, she called it,” Reed went on, spelling out the words. “Blue letters on white. Real pretty sign even though
she spelled ‘desert’ wrong. See, Lorene kept Tommi at home, didn’t let her go to school with the Babbick kids and mine and
the others, so she didn’t spell too well. Tommi just ran wild, roaming the canyons when she wasn’t helping her mother. She’d
been a timid, sickly little thing when they got there, but after a while everybody could see the child was thriving. That’s
why nobody pushed Lorene about putting Tommi in school. Sometimes it’s best to let people manage their own affairs even though
we all knew the girl was in danger, running around in the desert all alone.”

The other mothers had tried to protect the girl, Reed explained, by sewing jackets and dresses for her out of bright fabrics
so she’d be easy to see if she got lost or something happened to her and there was a search.

“Probably would’ve saved Bill, he’d been wearing a bright red shirt or something when the rattler got him,” she noted. “But
Waddy and the others out looking went right past him within thirty yards and didn’t even see him. By the time somebody brought
dogs, it was too late. Anyway, Tommi spent all her time out in the canyons, kept bringing injured birds and lizards and what
have you back to the diner, where she’d nurse them and Lorene would help her. Tommi never said much, but she had a big smile
for anybody and we all tried to look after her. The kid was happy. Of course, she eventually got in trouble out there by herself.
We all knew it had to happen.”

Dot Babbick had taken Lorene down to San Diego for a doctor’s appointment, Reed said, and Tommi was supposed to manage the
diner while her mother was gone. Except when the first rancher showed up that morning for his coffee, there was nobody there.

“Coffee all brewed and ready, but the place was empty.” After an hour a small search party was organized and the girl was
quickly found, her bright orange jacket a beacon among the dun-colored rocks. She’d turned an ankle, fallen, and apparently
hit her head while hurrying back toward the diner from a little cave she’d fixed up, where she’d taped pictures from magazines
all over the walls.

“Pictures of pretty houses,” Reed said thoughtfully, “pictures of food, ads for appliances like where a woman’s standing in
a kitchen smiling at a toaster oven, pictures of dishes and pots and pans. Bill was there. He said it was the strangest thing
he ever saw, all those magazine pictures taped to the rocks and rustling in the wind. Said it was like a kind of shrine.”

Tommi was brought to the McCallister place so Reed could care for her until Lorene and Dot Babbick got back from San Diego,
Reed concluded, slurping the last of her latte. She’d wrapped the sprained ankle and kept the girl awake long enough to make
sure she didn’t have a concussion, then given her an aspirin and let her sleep.

“Washed that orange jacket and red dress she had on, too,” Reed said as if this information had great significance. “Just
told her to give me her dirty clothes and go lie on our bed in her panties. I put a nice warm afghan over her, but she kept
kicking it off in her sleep. You know how fidgety kids are when they’re hurt.”

“Um, no, I don’t have any children,” I said with a growing desperation to escape. Reed McCallister wanted to tell me the story
of her kindness to a hurt child thirty years ago, I thought. It was very nice, but it didn’t have a damn thing to do with
anything. I felt like a fool for getting myself into the bind I was in.

“Well, after that all hell broke loose,” Reed went on, picking up the pace as if she knew I was going to leave the second
I could get a word in. “About a week later some folks saw the sheriff’s car drive through town and go up to the diner. Two
deputies in it and a man in the backseat.”

Her eyes narrowed and she watched me closely as she continued.

“Next thing we knew, Lorene’s in the back of the sheriff’s car. They came and took her away. To prison. She died there a year
later. Nobody ever saw Lorene again after that day.”

“Why? What happened?” I asked in spite of myself.

“The man was Tommi’s father, Lorene’s husband. Seems Lorene had tried to kill him over in Riverside, tried to stab him in
his sleep two years back, a couple of months before she showed up in Anza. She was on the run, you see. She and the little
girl. Guess they’d been all over Southern California before they showed up there. Guess they were just about at the end of
their rope. And then I guess Lorene was too tired to move on when she had the chance. Or else she was just waiting for the
day they’d come for her.”

“What happened to the little girl, to Tommi?” I asked.

“Well, like I said, in those days people minded their own business. Now, Bill said for sure he saw that man walk back toward
town with Tommi wearing that same red dress I’d washed, and somebody told Dot Babbick later that they must have hitched a
ride out because they sure didn’t stay in town. But it wasn’t two months later Waddy was running one of his herds up in a
mountain about thirty miles from Anza, and said he saw the man, Lorene’s husband, up there hunting with an old bolt-action
rifle. Said he was sure it was the same man, and Waddy always had a good eye from searching out all that Indian stuff he collected.
Didn’t see the girl, though, just the man.”

“So you don’t know what happened to Tommi?” I said as the phone in my purse rang. “Excuse me.”

“Blue, where are you?” Wes Rathbone asked urgently.

“I’m in Carlsbad.”

“You’re still at Eldridge’s? Okay. We’ve got a mess here. Grecchi’s out of surgery but still in post-op. Nobody’s allowed
in with her except Rainer. He says she’s not coherent, but she is talking. What she’s saying, according to Rainer, is stuff
about Megan. Like, ‘He’ll get Megan next. He’ll kill Megan.’”

“He?” I said.

“Who knows? Rainer may be making this up as a cover for Grecchi, but he also may not be. There’s more bad news.”

“Oh, God. What?”

“The FBI put the thumbscrews on Jeffrey Pond’s ex-wife, Gwen, and her friend Jeri. You know, the one who claimed he raped
her? Well guess what? Both women admitted under heavy questioning from the FBI that Pond had paid them to drop the rape charges.
Jeri’s saying now he did rape her. Gwen, the ex-wife, says she doesn’t believe it was rape because she knew her husband was
having an affair with Jeri for at least six months before their divorce. She’d hired a snoop, had pictures to prove it. So
when Jeri cried rape, Gwen knew Jeri’s husband must have caught on and this was Jeri’s way of covering up. But Gwen had the
pictures, right?

“So what the FBI thinks happened,” he went on, “is that Gwen saw Jeffrey going to jail on this trumped-up rape charge, and
there goes the alimony and child support. Pond’s in prison, she gets nothing. So Gwen goes to Jeri with the pictures, tells
her to drop the rape charges or she’ll show them to Jeri’s husband. But Jeri’s no fool, sees the dollar signs in Gwen’s eyes,
and decides to grab something for herself. Her marriage is in the toilet, anyway, and she’s going to need money. In the end,
both women go to Pond and tell him the rape charges will be dropped
and
the evidence of adultery not introduced into the divorce proceedings if he pays them a little blackmail. It’s possible he’s
still paying and will be for a long time. It’s possible this guy has learned to
really
hate women.”

There was a certain sleazy justice in the story I’d just heard, but I didn’t mention it.

“But Pond was at the hospital all night last night,” I said instead.

“His mother says he was,” Rathbone went on, “which isn’t very reliable, and even if he was, he could have sent those e-mails
by picking up a phone and calling his own computer if he’d programmed it that way. What’s even more troubling is that Pond
left the hospital shortly after his mother did this morning. That gives him plenty of time to get to Grecchi’s, cut her phone
cord and her wrist, set it up to look like a suicide, and then, if Grecchi’s story is credible, drive up to Julian and take
out Megan Rainer before he does himself in. We’ve just talked to Rox. She says it makes some sense. I always knew this perp
was a man, Blue. It’s always a man.”