The Last Blue Plate Special (38 page)

I didn’t know what to make of Kara Eldridge. Had she known what her husband was? Had she even suspected that the man beside
her in bed had changed from whatever he’d been when she married him and become monstrous? When did he change? And why? And
if Kara knew, when did she learn? And if she knew, why didn’t she tell somebody?

“Because nobody would have believed her,” I said aloud in the warm, dry gloom of an October evening in Southern California.
The farthest edge of the continent. From where there’s no place left to run.

Nobody believed me, either.

From Carlsbad it was easy to take a connecting county road to I-15 and head up into the mountains that way. It was dark by
the time I reached the village of Julian and the Rainer/Nugent house on the side of a hill. No lights were on, and the tattered
structure looked forbidding in the gathering shadows. Remembering the Boston terrier, Elsa, I left Brontë in the truck as
I approached the door. When something hit me in the chest with a painful sting, I thought it was a bat, although bats’ radar
prevents their running into anything and I knew it. My knit blouse was wet where the thing hit me.

“Don’t take another step!” Chris Nugent’s voice boomed from the porch.

“Chris, it’s Blue McCarron,” I yelled. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, Dr. McCarron, I’m sorry,” a woman’s voice answered as the porch light was turned on and I could see Chris and Megan standing
there, Megan holding what looked like an assault rifle in firing position. The damn paint gun. The fluid soaking my blouse
was red.

“I don’t believe this,” I said. “Where are the sheriff’s deputies and the FBI?”

“They were here, but he showed up and they went after him,” Megan said. “Except I was afraid he’d doubled back. I mean, I
thought you—”

“Turn that light off,” I said. “Who showed up? What happened?”

“It was Pond,” Chris Nugent said.

“I shot him,” Megan Rainer added. “Or at least I think I did. The deputy said it will help them identify him if he’s gone
into Julian and he’s covered with red paint.”

“You shot Jeffrey Pond with a paint gun?” I said, incredulous. “Did you see him? Are you sure it was Pond?”

“No, but everybody said it was,” Nugent answered. “We were watching from a window upstairs, saw somebody come out of the woods
on the side of the house. Too shadowy to see him clearly. Megan had brought the paint gun upstairs and was ready,” he said
proudly, wrapping a big arm over his wife’s shoulders.

“I don’t believe this,” I said again. “Where are the children?”

“They’re inside,” Megan answered. “We were about to leave, take the kids and stay in a hotel down the hill, when this happened.”

I felt momentarily useful as I ran back to the truck and got the Smith and Wesson.

“This is a real gun,” I told them when I’d joined them on the porch. “I want you to tape a large note to the door telling
the authorities that you’ve taken the children to a safe place and will contact Wes Rathbone with the location and phone number
of that place when you get there. Do it now. I’ll cover you as you get the children into your car. Everyone but the driver
should lie on the floor until you’re out of this area. I don’t believe you shot a serial killer with a paint gun!”

“Mom was really cool,” Joshua Nugent yelled from behind the screen door. “Can we take Elsa? We
have
to take Elsa.”

“Absolutely,” I answered.

The family of four and a Boston terrier dashed to their car as I ran beside them, aiming the little .38 at every shadow moving
at the edge of the woods surrounding the house.

“Did the man you shot have a gun?” I yelled as Chris gunned the engine.

“I think so,” he answered. “He was carrying something that could have been a rifle.”

“It was T. J. Eldridge,” I said, but they were too far away to hear me. And the shadows were suddenly too dense. Time to go.
But go where?

I couldn’t go home. The place was crawling with armed people waiting to capture or kill another armed person. I would only
be in the way. Roxie’s place was out of the question. I wasn’t really wanted there, and so even though Rox would welcome me
if she knew what was going on, I’d freeze to death standing on a drifting ice floe before I’d go anywhere near her, not that
there are a lot of drifting ice floes in the mountains above San Diego. The First Law of the Heartland involves a cast iron
and often disastrous pride. Probably handed down from Scots-Irish ancestors, it’s ludicrous, but if it’s in your head you
have to obey it. And it’s definitely in my head. I’d go to a motel, then, I decided. A big one off the freeway where I could
sneak Brontë in a side door after I’d registered. But first I had to do one more thing. I had to prove I wasn’t a fool, if
only to myself.

It was dark by the time I slowed to drive through Anza’s little main drag. Colored pools of neon light spilled across the
pavement from the diner, the gas station, and the convenience store. A few people were about, but Anza was as peaceful and
quiet as its chamber of commerce promised. Nothing much ever happened in Anza, I thought, unless you knew where to look.

There was a late-model car parked a quarter of a mile up the road, but the old line shack seemed deserted when I stopped the
truck outside and let Brontë run for a while in moon shadows. The air had the musky smell of the desert verbena growing in
patches on the ground around the shack, and I assumed Brontë was responsible. She’d bruised the leaves with her paws while
dashing around, causing the release of scent. A lot of people don’t like the resinous odor of desert verbena, which is like
a mixture of sweet milk and tobacco, claiming something about the scent makes them nervous. The verbena seemed to be making
Brontë nervous, because she kept sniffing the ground and running in circles, her growl a soft murmur. Maybe a rabbit had just
scuttled past, I thought. Or her favorite lizard, the reclusive chuckwalla that blows up one side of its body in order to
flatten the other side into a crevice. My last guess, as it turned out, was close enough.

“Come on, girl,” I called after she’d run around for ten minutes or so. “Up in the truck. There’s broken glass on the floor
in there and I don’t want you stepping on it. You wait here. Brontë,
stay.
”

The .38 was lying on my sweatshirt on the floor of the truck cab, and I stuffed it in the waist of my jeans before pulling
the sweatshirt and tennis shoes on. Then I grabbed the penlight I keep in the glove compartment. It would provide enough light
to see what I wanted to see.

The corrugated steel panel left smears of rust on my hands as I moved it away from the door, stepped inside, and clicked on
the penlight. The torn magazine pages were still there, taped to the walls like pictures in a gallery. In the stillness I
walked to my left, aiming the narrow beam of light on the images one by one. The two owls I’d seen before, torn from a child’s
nature magazine called
Ranger Rick.
A pen-and-ink drawing of a dragon with the log line from a Goth magazine popular with teenagers who wear black. Pictures
of corpses stacked in a woods outside Dachau in 1943. A stunning illustration from an edition of
Sleeping Beauty
depicting a murderous wall of thorns in which were imprisoned the skeletons of the princes who’d tried to rescue the sleeping
princess and failed. A unicorn from a medieval tapestry, more owls, a heron, the raven illustration from a book of Poe. A
photograph of a steaming, sulfurous creek from a travel promo for New Zealand, the water inked in black. Another dragon. I
knew what I was looking at. I was looking at a vanished biblical nation called Edom.

“‘And it shall be an habitation for dragons …’” I whispered, quoting from my old King James Bible.

“‘… And a court for owls,’” another voice answered as frost raced in sudden sheets down my neck and arms and back.

Oh, shit!

Instinct wrapped my right hand around the grip of the snub-nose at my waist and I felt my thumb push the safety off as I turned
toward the voice, gun in firing position. He was hunched behind the old counter at the far end of the structure. In the gloom
I could see concave half circles behind his head where round rocks had fallen from a fireplace chimney. I could also see that
he held a bolt-action rifle in both hands, braced on the counter and aimed at me. The counter protected most of his body.
Nothing protected mine.

“Drop the gun,” he said evenly. “I don’t want to kill you.”

“If that rifle is your father’s, it’s so old it may not fire,” I answered, fighting to keep the panic out of my voice. “I’ll
take my chances.”

My right hand was hot and sweating around the gun’s grip, but it wasn’t shaking.

“My father’s rifle was taken as evidence by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department at the time of his death over a quarter
century ago and was never returned,” Thomas Eldridge told me, a note of approval in his voice. “The weapon in my hands is
similar but new. Drop your pistol or you’ll force me to kill you.”

The logic was unassailable. And nobody would hear the shots. I dropped the .38, which clattered on the cement floor.

“Now what?” I said.

“I’ll tie you up, then ease your truck over the lip of Nance Canyon back there. Nobody will find it until tomorrow, and I’ll
be gone by then. I’ll be in San Diego at a pep rally for a woman who thinks she’s a man. I’ve already told them. There’s no
secret about where I’ll be tomorrow. I’m going to kill her.”

He wasn’t raving, wasn’t wild-eyed, or even agitated. If anything, he seemed tired. A sense of exhaustion was audible in his
voice, the set of his shoulders. Coming out from behind the counter, he kept the rifle trained on me until he reached my gun,
then leaned over and picked it up without taking his eyes from me.

“Do you understand why I’ve had to do this?” he asked, holding me in the sights of my own gun now and stashing the rifle under
the counter. He was wearing jeans, a green polo shirt, and a dark nylon windbreaker, which he was carefully removing. And
he was splattered with red from head to toe. I could see the glint of moonlight on the military watch at his wrist. We might
have been chatting somewhere. Casual acquaintances at a chance meeting just before which one of us happened to have lost a
companion to a grisly accident involving a land mine. The red paint made him look like a ghoul.

“No,” I answered as he walked behind me and pushed me toward the counter, the snub of my gun at the base of my neck. “And
right now I don’t care. My dog, Brontë, is in my truck. I hope you’ll release her before you push the truck into the canyon.
If you don’t, she’ll be injured or killed. You once,” I said, turning to look him in the eyes as he shoved me against the
counter, “took care of injured animals, nursed them. I’m asking you not to injure an animal. That’s all.”

“I will free your dog,” he agreed, slamming my head down on the dusty, cracked Formica as he bent to tie one of my ankles
to the counter’s rust-pocked chrome footrail with the nylon jacket. The knots were so tight I knew they could never be untied,
but I could find a way to rip the fabric between my leg and the rail if I had a chance, I thought.

There was nothing on the counter I could hit him with, no point in trying to fight in the few seconds it took him to secure
my leg to the rail. If I did, he’d kill me.

“Thank you for promising not to kill my dog,” I said.

“You’re like my mother,” he mentioned seconds later. “That’s why I liked you. She took care of animals and things. You’re
like her, living out here all alone. I guess you have your reasons, just like she did.”

“I have my reasons,” I said inscrutably, trying to get a fix on what he was saying. It was fine with me if he thought I lived
in the desert because I’d attempted to murder a husband. Just fine. As long as it kept me alive.

“He beat her,” T. J. Eldridge said, again behind the counter as he unzipped a backpack he’d pulled from the floor. “My father
beat my mother so hard her ears bled and once her eye popped out and hung down her face on its cord. He raped her, too. He
did it in front of me once when I was six. He said in the Bible six is the age of reason and I was old enough to learn what
women are for. He beat her unconscious and then propped her on her stomach over a chair. I hated him. I was glad when my mother
stabbed him. We thought he was dead when we left. But then my mother saw in the newspapers that he didn’t die. She read it
to me. She said he’d try to find us and so I had to wear dresses and pretend to be a girl so he couldn’t.”

His voice was flat, emotionless. The sentences clear but simple, like a child’s. I couldn’t see his eyes.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” I said as if I were standing near a casket at a funeral parlor back in Illinois.
She looks so nice,
is the next line in the heartland script for these occasions, but it wouldn’t do here.

“You should be sorry about my father, too,” he replied. “Another woman killed him. He was going to rape her so she’d be ready
to be my wife, but I untied her hands and she shot him.”

He was looking at my hands on the counter as he spoke. We both wore laced athletic shoes. He could have tied my hands with
shoelaces the way his father had tied the girl’s, but he didn’t.

“T.J., why did you kill those women that way?” I asked. “Why did you hide little MAOI time bombs in their surgical incisions
so days or weeks later they’d eat some salami or a handful of fava beans and die?”

“Because I could,” he answered in that flat, tired voice as he took a plate and a large plastic Baggie from the backpack.
“I took the pills from Isadora’s purse a long time ago, when I found out what Kara had done. Somebody has to do something,
and yet nobody does. My father was a cruel and stupid man, but that doesn’t make the Bible wrong, Dr. McCarron. My father
taught me the Bible. It’s all in there. It says the man must rule over the woman and the woman must be subservient to the
man. It says any woman who refuses to be subservient, any woman who tries to have power like a man, is an abomination to the
Lord. Women have forgotten their place and that’s what’s destroying this country. You do agree with that, don’t you, Dr. McCarron?”