The Last Blue Plate Special (37 page)

“But what about the blue willow plates? And why would Jeffrey Pond be hanging around my place leaving them for me?”

“Who knows? Right now we’ve got San Diego County sheriff’s deputies and FBI all over Megan Rainer up in Julian and at your
place. If Pond shows up, he’s hamburger. I’m just calling to tell you to stay away from Julian and don’t go home. Go to Roxie’s.
Don’t go home until this is over.”

“Yeah,” I said as he hung up.

“What’s happening, dear?” Reed McCallister asked, looking strangely like Jennings Rainer’s schnauzer with her wiry hair and
bright eyes. A schnauzer in trifocals.

“I have to go,” I told her. “Something’s come up. Thank you so much for talking to me. You’ve been very helpful.”

I’d go by the Eldridge place, inform Kara of the developments, I thought. I might be able to catch her if I hurried.

“I haven’t been helpful yet,” Reed said, grabbing her walker and following me. “I haven’t told you the really interesting
part.”

I am incapable of turning my back and walking away from an elderly woman in a walker who is trying to keep up with me. Reed
McCallister knew it and played it masterfully, stumbling a little, wincing in pain. Brontë trotted beside her and gave me
recriminating looks.

“There really is something I must do,” I tried, and was ignored.

“Over the years Bill and Waddy and the others saw Lorene’s husband up in the mountains, usually with a teenage boy after that
first time. See, they were living wild up there, living off the land. Never said much to the herders, just a tip of the hat.
And then they kidnapped that young woman.”

“What young woman?” I had to ask, stopping in the hall outside the casino.

“She was a student with a college group doing field research. They had a base camp and were searching for Indian artifacts.
Should’ve asked Waddy, saved themselves a lot of time. Anyway, the girl was scouting in a canyon alone when Lorene’s husband
showed up out of nowhere aiming that old bolt-action rifle at her. He told her his son was old enough for a wife, and she
was going to be it!”

“What?” I said.

“Yep. It was in all the papers back then, all over the country. He forced her at gunpoint back to their camp hidden way up
inside a wash where nobody would ever see it. He told her he was ‘bringing’ her for his son. When they got to the camp he
tied her hands and feet, and then he and the boy just waited for her to calm down and accept her fate. She told the authorities
later that the old man read aloud to her from the Bible constantly. She said he actually believed that women were placed on
earth to serve the needs of men, particularly the sexual needs which the teenage boy was experiencing. Said it was in the
Bible and any woman who refused was ‘an abomination to the Lord.’ The old man told her he assumed she was a ‘virgin’ and so
he would ‘break her in’ for the boy. When he tried to rape her, she shot him with his own gun. Right through the heart. Dropped
him like a bird.”

“But you said she was tied up,” I pointed out.

Reed McCallister sighed with satisfaction.

“The boy had untied her hands,” she said. “And the boy had left the gun where she could reach it.”

I was almost to the door of the Sagebrush Resort.

“Wow, that’s quite a story,” I said, looking at my watch. “But what happened to the boy? And I still don’t know what happened
to the old guy’s daughter, Tommi.”

“The boy was barely fourteen and was placed in foster care in Riverside,” she said, watching me closely. “After that I have
no idea.”

“And the little girl?”

Her caramel-colored eyes sparkled as she shook her head.

“Haven’t figured that out yet, huh?”

“Figured what out?”

“The little girl sleeping on my bed in her panties was no little girl,” Reed told me. “I was a married woman with a daughter,
two sons, three grandsons, and four granddaughters by then, but it doesn’t take that much experience to tell the difference
between boys and girls when you see ’em in their underwear. Lorene Smith’s little girl, Tommi, was really her little boy,
Tommy. She’d been dressing the kid as a girl so the old man couldn’t find ’em.”

I felt as though I were swimming up through dark water, just about to break the surface.

“Reed, what was the old man’s name?” I asked. “Do you remember his name?”

“Think it began with an E,” she answered, nodding thoughtfully. “Etheridge? Something like that. I’ve still got the newspaper
clippings, but like I said, they’re in a trunk at my son’s house. I can have him bring them over sometime if you’d like to
see them.”

“Was it Eldridge?” I said. “Try to think back.”

“It could be. It sounded like that. It could be Eldridge.”

It was all falling into place. Everything. “Is there a Bible handy anyplace?” I asked.

Reed led me into a parlor adjacent to the casino.

“Honey,” she said, “we’ve got more Bibles here than sense. Every church group in San Diego is convinced the elderly wear out
at least ten Bibles a week, preparing for the inevitable, so they bring us more.”

She opened a rough-hewn cabinet, revealing shelves of Bibles.

“You want the Douay, King James, Jerusalem, Good News, Revised Standard, or one of these new ones written in street slang?
We also have large type, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Tagalog editions and a set
of twenty of the Torah in both English and Hebrew. Now, down here are some unusual translations and a nice one with illustrations
by the Old Masters, as well as—”

“Anything in English,” I said, laughing. “I just want to check something in Isaiah before I go.”

Owls, dragons, bitterns, mountains of rotting corpses, streams of hot tar, and a mythological woman called Lilith. It was
all there. I grabbed the cell phone again.

“Do you remember the plates that Lorene got to use in the diner?” I asked Reed. “Remember? You said Lorene got a coffeepot
and fry grills and dishes from a mail-order catalogue.”

“Oh, yes,” she said brightly. “They were those old blue willow plates the diners all used to have. Weren’t too popular by
then, though. Most places had started using that pale green Melmac. Lorene probably got those plates for a song.”

“She probably did,” I agreed, giving her hand a squeeze before I headed out the door. “Reed, I think you’ve just saved the
life of a woman vice presidential candidate. Have your grandson bring those clippings to you and get ready for a lot of company.
You’re going to be famous.”

“Then I’d probably better do something with my hair,” she said, grinning as Brontë and I dashed out.

In the parking lot I called Rathbone at the hospital.

“It’s Eldridge!” I yelled. “Tell the FBI to forget Jeffrey Pond and find Thomas Joseph Eldridge. I don’t know where he is,
but his wife said—”

The phone was making a crackling noise.

“Hello?” Wes Rathbone said again. “I can’t hear you.”

The battery, I realized, was dead.

I
found a pay phone next to Ralph’s Grocery in the shopping center across the street from the Sagebrush Resort.

“Wes, my cell phone is dead,” I said after phoning the hospital, depositing ninety cents, and waiting for the hospital switchboard
to contact the nurses’ station on Grecchi’s floor and then for somebody to go get Rathbone from the surgical waiting area.
In a half a day I’d learned exactly why people love cell phones.

“You have to recharge the battery,” he mentioned before telling me the latest. “Listen. Pond’s flown the coop. He never showed
up at Megan’s place in Julian. We think he’s—”

“Wes, it’s not Pond, it’s Eldridge!” I broke in. “Let me tell you what I just found out. See, Eldridge lived up in Anza for
about two years when he was a kid around nine or ten. He was with his mother, Lorene, who called herself Smith but her real
surname was Eldridge. She’d tried to kill her husband in Riverside and was on the run. She dressed T.J. as a girl, Wes, so
if the husband or the police came around asking about a woman and a little boy, everybody would say they hadn’t seen a woman
and a boy. But then the police and the husband caught up with them, and Lorene died in prison. T.J. went with the father,
who was some kind of Bible-thumping survivalist, lived in the wild up there for years until—”

“Blue, we’re sure it’s Pond,” Rathbone interrupted. “He fits the profile better than anyone else, he worked as a technician
in a psychiatric hospital during a time when MAOIs were still widely in use, so he had experience with the drug and knew what
it could do. He has motivation, and he ducked out of his father’s hospital room the minute his mother left and just vanished.
The FBI went through his place and found several small containers of an unusual pink plastic substance they think may be symbolic
trophies for his kills. The stuff is like a soft, stretchy glob. The theory is these things represent wombs to him. They’re
all covered with his fingerprints. Looks like he sits around squashing them in his hands. Sick, huh?”

I felt as if I were in Sri Lanka trying to define “Missouri” in English to a peasant. That certainty that you’re not going
to be heard.

“That stuff is
Silly Putty
!” I told Rathbone. “He’s into bodybuilding and he squeezes wads of it to build the muscles in his forearms. Wes, the killer
is
not
Jeffrey Pond. It’s T. J. Eldridge. He was a medical corpsman in the service. He could have learned about MAOIs there or from
Grecchi. But get this—he and his mother ran a diner up in Anza. Just a little place, mostly hikers and locals coming through,
and they used blue willow plates!”

“Blue, every diner in the country used blue willow plates at one time. And Pond’s mother has a kitchen clock made out of a
blue willow plate. She told the FBI her husband made it for her years ago from the last of a set that had belonged to
her
mother. Those damn plates are everywhere. Hell, I think Annie has a blue willow cup and saucer her sister got her in Singapore.”

“Wes, Thomas Eldridge’s father was some kind of religious fanatic who raised him alone up in the mountains after Lorene was
arrested. The father
kidnapped
a female student from a college anthropology campout to be used by T.J. as a ‘wife.’ The father was going to rape the girl
to ‘break her in’ for a fourteen-year-old boy, but T.J. had untied her hands and left the father’s old bolt-action rifle near
her. She shot and killed T.J.’s father. Apparently the story was in papers all over the country thirty years ago. The woman
who told me still has clippings. I mean, this can be
proved.
”

“Okay,” he said, “if Pond turns up clean, then it’s Eldridge. I’ll put the word out, put this story out about Eldridge. Blue,
are you sure this really happened, the father kidnapping the girl and the shooting? Who’s your informant? Where’d you hear
this?”

“A woman from Anza named Reed McCallister. She lives in a retirement center in Carlsbad now. The Sagebrush Resort.”

“And how old is this McCallister?”

“I don’t know, Wes, late eighties. But she was
there.
”

“Late eighties. Great,” he said. “Blue, go to Roxie’s. I’ll call you there as soon as we get a statement from Grecchi. If
she didn’t cut her own wrist, if Pond or Eldridge did it, she’ll tell us. There really isn’t anything else to do right now.
Just relax.”

The phone felt hot and slick in my hand as I hung it up. I was sweating, I realized. Because nobody was listening to me. I
hate it when people don’t listen, when they don’t hear. It reminds me of the twelve thousand times I tried to tell my twin
brother crime doesn’t pay. Probably he hears that in prison now, too.

Next I called Roxie, who didn’t want to talk.

“Blue, the authorities are handling things now,” she said. “Our part is over. And I meant it when I said I need some time
alone to think.”

So I didn’t tell her about Reed McCallister and the story of Thomas Eldridge. I just hung up and noticed darkness falling
indifferently around me. The feeling was strange. I imagined it was like what the first tiny sliver of consciousness must
have been for the first protohuman who experienced it. Long-armed and heavy-browed, she would have thought,
I am,
for only a split second and then, seeing no answering spark in the black, simian eyes of her companions, known that she was
alone.

In the phone booth I curled my fingers, apelike, over the palm of my hand and thumped my breastbone. This was what it would
be like, then, I realized. This was what it would be like not telling my life to Roxie Bouchie. A primordial loneliness so
intense it rocked me back on my heels for a second, made me gasp. But it didn’t really change anything. I still knew. And
I had things to do.

I went in the grocery and got some chocolate milk and enough tuna-vegetable medley from the salad bar for both me and Brontë.
After we’d eaten in the truck I drove by the Eldridge house, which was dark and silent at five-thirty as neighbors came home
from work, their automatic garage doors whirring in the dusk. I let the truck idle in the driveway for a few minutes, then
killed the engine, got out, and knocked on the door. There was no one there and no sense that anyone would ever be there again.
The posing couple BB and I had seen on these steps was gone. They wouldn’t be back, ever.

Through partially open picture window blinds I could see the pink and green couch, the pale rectangles of paint where photographs
of Kara Eldridge had once hung over a fireplace. Photographs of Kara cooking, caring for children, wearing a corsage. Behaviors
acceptable for a woman. Except the little boy Zeke had said daddy threw a sandwich and broke one of the pictures. What had
happened? I wondered. What had shattered that glass and a statue’s oblivion, and released the woman imprisoned within? And
where was Kara now, and where was Thomas, who had spent two happy years as a girl thirty years in the past and now was killing
women in the name of his father? The Sword of Heaven.