Up in Smoke Read online

  “God damn you, Gayle. Why’d you have to go and get dead for? Shit shit shit!” The river kept rushing away to wherever it rushed away to as though she wasn’t even there. She found a rock and threw it in. It hardly even made a sound with all the rushing and sloshing.

  When she was back on the road, kicking rocks and hiking toward town, she thought of where she could go.

  * * *

  “You ran away from the cops?” Sherry, stomach down on one of the twin beds, bunched the pillow beneath her chest and put her arms around it. “You’re a fugitive! Wow! You’re going to have to keep running and running, like that guy in that old movie. I’ll help!” She tossed the pillow aside and scooted around to sit up, leaning forward eagerly. “They always need somebody they can call, like in emergencies, or to find out what’s going on, or if they have a narrow escape and stuff.”

  Moonbeam lay flat out on her back on the other twin bed, wrist over her forehead, staring at the ceiling. A long dusty spider web hung down in the left corner. Sherry’s mom didn’t worry so much about spider webs. She was kind of loose about things and was always so busy she didn’t pay attention. That was why Moonbeam thought she could come here.

  “Hey, you’re bleeding.”

  Moonbeam twisted around to look at the scrape on her side. “I fell.”

  “Gosh, you want me to get a bandage or something?”

  “Naw. It’s okay. I probably ought to go so you don’t have to lie.”

  “I’ll never turn you in, Arlene, no matter—”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Oh, right, sorry, Moonbeam, but do you think this is a really good idea? I mean, you can stay here and all. Mom has a date tonight and she’s okay, like if I told her I had a friend staying over and all, but, you know, it’ll probably be on the news, about your sister and they’re looking for you and everything.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just wanted a place to get out of the cold.”

  Sherry lay back on the bed. “I’m really sorry about your sister. What happened, do you know?”

  “Somebody whacked her and stuffed her in the car trunk.”

  Sherry gasped. “Why?”

  “Don’t know, but I bet it has something to do with that time, you know, a million years ago in that fire where Vince got hurt and everything.”

  “Why do you think that?” Sherry wriggled down and dangled her legs off the foot of the bed.

  “That Wakely guy, you know, the one that got all crippled and has to be in a wheelchair? He came to the house a bunch of times. They talked, him and Vince, all serious with their heads together and if I came in or anything, they just shut up and didn’t say anything until I left.”

  “You know what they talked about?”

  Moonbeam put the crook of her arm across her eyes. “Not exactly, but it had something to do with Governor Garrett. ’Cause I heard his name a couple times. Gayle and Vince were acting weird. They whispered, you know? I hated it when they whispered.”

  “Oh gosh, I’m really sorry about Gayle. I mean, after your parents died and everything and then Vince and now Gayle.”

  “I didn’t even know my parents really. I was only a baby.” But she knew one thing. Gayle had told her their mom called her my little love-a-doll. For some stupid reason that almost made her cry. She cleared her throat. “And Rosie’s gone.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “How should I know? That cop probably took her to the dog pound.”

  “Oh no, they wouldn’t do that.”

  “Where is she then? She wasn’t there when I got home.”

  Sherry kicked her heels against the legs of the bed. “That guy that got all paralyzed and everything? Wakely? You think he could have done that to Gayle? Maybe he can walk around just like everybody and he’s only pretending.”

  Moonbeam squelched her with a look.

  Sherry flopped over on her back. “Well, it always happens in books.”

  Moonbeam squeezed her eyes shut real tight, opened wide, shut them, and rubbed them.

  “Arlene—I mean, Moonbeam, you might as well go back. I mean, I know it’ll be icky and all that, but what’re you going to do? You can’t just—”

  “Yes, I can,” Moonbeam shouted. “Just shut up a minute so I can think.”

  “There’s that house that’s for sale. You know, the one where the Hudsons lived before they moved.”

  “Sherry, that’s perfect. Can you lend me some clothes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Just a sweatshirt and jeans, and maybe a jacket, if you can. I didn’t have time to get anything and it’s cold out.”

  “Arlene—I mean, Moonbeam, maybe you should think about this. I mean, what are you going to do? You can’t stay by yourself—”

  “I can take care of myself!”

  “I know, but what about food? And clean clothes? And school and stuff? And could you really stay in that empty house? I mean, what if it’s haunted or something?”

  “Don’t be stupid, it’s not haunted.”

  “Well, but—”

  “They’ll put me in a foster home!”

  “Think about it, Ar—Moonbeam. Wouldn’t that be better than all by yourself? Come on, really, we could still be friends and—”

  “We couldn’t be friends if I got shipped off someplace. Like Alaska.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sherry yanked open a drawer, rummaged around and tugged out a sweatshirt which she tossed.

  Moonbeam pulled it on. “There’s such a thing as an emancipated teenager.”

  “Yeah, but that’s for somebody who has a job and can pay for everything, like a place to live and food and stuff.” Sherry handed her a pair of jeans. “They’ll be kinda’ big.”

  “I just need to figure out what to do.” Moonbeam put on the jeans and cinched them tight with the belt Sherry gave her.

  “You’re going to get in trouble,” Sherry said. “I know you will. You always do and now Gayle and, you know, everything—” Sherry threw up her hands. “And you need money, you can’t—”

  “I got Gayle’s ATM card.” Moonbeam didn’t have any such thing, but she figured that would shut Sherry up.

  Sherry took a deep breath. “You stole it?”

  “I did not steal it. She gave it to me.”

  Sherry looked at her weird. “Why?”

  “In case I needed something when I was in Kansas City.”

  “Oh gosh, I forgot all about the music festival. How was it? Are you hungry? Let’s get something to eat.”

  “It was great.” She was going to legally change her name to Moonbeam Melody and be a famous singer. “If you ever tell anybody where I am, Sherry, I swear I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “Moonbeam Harlow, you swear too much.”

  18

  Monday was another glorious fall day with an endless sky blue enough to incite writing poetry. The crisp air smelled tangy and held a hint of coming winter, of the long cold sleep, a preparing for dying. The heavy sense of melancholy that had dogged Susan was with her as she jogged campus paths drenched in autumn sunlight. This golden light of early afternoon was slanted low and hit her in the eyes. The end of daylight saving time yesterday meant the sun would sink earlier and darkness would creep in. There was an ache in her soul that responded to darkness. She was waiting for it.

  Slowing as she came up to Eleventh Street, she took the four blocks to her house in a fast walk. In an hour she was to meet Sean for lunch at the Sunflower. She felt like skipping. Screw it, she wasn’t hungry, she couldn’t afford the time, she had work to do. After a shower, she got so far as picking up the phone to call him, but put it down before she dialed. He’d simply come and drag her out. God only knew why he felt she was in some emotional crisis and he had to get on his white horse and gallop to the rescue.

  To prove him wrong, she made an effort. Blue wool dress the color of her eyes and a little makeup added to cover the dark circles beneath them. What she really wanted to do was put o
n old jeans, an equally old sweatshirt, and listen to Bach. There was nothing like Bach when you were wading through the megrims.

  At the Sunflower, she blinked as she walked into the dimly lighted dining room and ordered a cup of coffee. He was ten minutes late.

  He apologized, kissed her cheek and slid in opposite her. He reached across the table and picked up her hand. “I figured you for a call and cancel.”

  “Would you have let me?”

  “Not a chance.”

  The flickering candle in the glass globe on the table sent shadows across his face and she couldn’t read what was in his eyes, but she’d known him forever and she could tell something was scratching at his surface blandness. “Why are you late?”

  “Fury of a disappointed woman.”

  “You have a woman to infuriate?”

  “Why should that excuse me from pain?”

  “I’m sorry about Lynn.”

  He shook his head. “You were right. I should never have married her.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to, dear heart, you were thinking it so loudly, the words were glowing on your forehead. I just talked with Hannah. She’s hurting. I’m more angry than heartbroken. I knew it was coming right after Hannah was born. Babies are so squally and messy and time-consuming. It just wasn’t Lynn’s thing.”

  When the waiter came, Sean ordered grapefruit juice with ice and asked the waiter to give them a minute. “Could be worse, right? I could be going through life being called Cathal.”

  “Cathal? Who would name a child that?”

  “My father. During the Troubles there was a man—”

  “The Troubles?”

  “Of course, The Troubles. Cathal Brugha, leading honcho in the radical side of the Irish Volunteers. I think his name was originally Charles Burgess, or something. He thought the Irish derivative sounded better, given his line of work. Birthday July eighteen, same as mine. Dad felt it was fitting I have his name.”

  “Why am I not calling you Cathal?”

  “Mom wouldn’t allow it. You’d know all this stuff too, if you weren’t tainted by pale Nordic blood.”

  “Dutch,” she said. The genes of her pale sweet mother.

  When the waiter returned with Sean’s juice, he lifted it and touched it to her coffee cup. “Slainte.”

  “Shouldn’t you be drinking Irish whiskey?”

  He set the glass down, leaned in and picked up her hand again, his was cold from the ice in his glass. “Tell me what’s wrong, kiddo?”

  “What’s wrong.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Well, let’s see. I have a woman killed and stuffed into a trunk and the governor popping in and out of town so I have to deploy resources needed elsewhere and have manpower available for him and I’m a stranger in a strange land. Is that enough?”

  “I’m not talking about that and you know it. Spill it, Susan.”

  Nostalgia stuck its claws in her throat so deep the sweetness turned to pain. Daniel would say that when he wanted to know what was on her mind. Okay, Susan, spill it. “I’ve been dreaming of Daniel lately.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  “Disturbing.” She traced a finger in the circle of wetness left from his glass after he picked it up. “I see him jogging on the beach through the fog, but I can’t catch up with him. I call. He doesn’t hear, or sometimes he turns and sees me and sprints away. Or he’s hidden in fog, the fog thins, and he has no face.”

  “It doesn’t take Jung to figure that. You simply didn’t know him long enough to know him well.”

  “Yeah.” She hurt for all it was and all it wasn’t in a time that faded more and more every year.

  “Widow’s fantasy,” he said. “The perfect man, the perfect love, the perfect marriage.” He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it. “He was a man, Susan, a good man, but a man with virtues and flaws, just like all the rest of us. The thing about Daniel is death came at that wonderful exciting and passionate moment when the world was shiny with perfection.”

  Memories—fragments like running through a kaleidoscope very fast—struck her so keenly she had to fight to keep from bending over and clutching her abdomen.

  “Sometimes in the dreams, he’s just ahead of me and I run to catch up, but I never can. He’s always ahead and he keeps going.”

  Sean tipped his glass and swallowed the last of the juice, then rattled the ice cubes. “You know what your problem is?”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “You’re lonely.”

  “Alone,” she pointed out. “Not lonely. There’s a difference.”

  “Ah, Susan, you slid into being alone and after a time it got to be familiar and safe and then, my love, it got to be comforting.”

  “I can rely on it.”

  “That’s the point, it worked for you. You got used to being alone and you made an acceptable little nest, you settled in and let life go by, but it’s time, kiddo. Get a life.”

  She gave him a sweet smile instead of saying mind your own business. “If you’re anyone to go by, getting a life has more thorns than roses.”

  “Yeah well, you caught me at a bad time.”

  “Want to trade places?”

  “Hell no. You don’t have a sex life.”

  “What if I get one?”

  “We’ll renegotiate.”

  * * *

  Sean stood with the rest of the press pool clustered on the tarmac, waiting for Garrett’s motorcade. Boom mikes and minicams, print reporters and television cookies with their own cameramen. Each day the pool rotated alphabetically by news organization, networks, magazines, radio and newspapers. They were all here to gather the coverage for the entire group. They got file film, bits of news, sound bites from the candidate and passed it around. Ever since the assassination of JFK, they were here to record history. Robert Kennedy shot, George Wallace wounded, attempt on Ronald Reagan.

  They were keeping up the death watch. Who would be the lucky ones to catch history in the making? Up to chance.

  An ambulance waited. Highway patrolman Phil Baker had a choreographed plan all worked out should the governor get shot. One late night in a bar somewhere, Sean had asked him what the drill was. Baker told him the closest cops would shield the Governor’s body, everybody else goddamn stayed right where they were in case of a second assassin. Malcolm X died because his bodyguards got snookered away by a distraction. Capture the shooter, alive if possible. Get the governor in the ambulance and to a hospital. Phil made it his business to know where the nearest hospital was and the fastest way to get there. Ten minutes, at the outside. If the wound wasn’t fatal, there was every chance the governor would survive. Of course, there was always the mortal wound, the one that hit the vital spot. Phil said he had nightmares about these hospital runs.

  A black limo sedately rolled onto the tarmac. Like an amoeba, the press pool surged forward. The governor, surrounded by troopers, headed for the twin engine plane. The cops used the press pool in whatever figuring they did to keep the candidate safe. They recognized faces and moved on. Strange faces stood out. Sean thought, if it became necessary, they wouldn’t hesitate to use any one of the press to save the individual they were protecting.

  The pool shouted questions. Garrett, flanked by Todd Haviland, his campaign manager, shook hands with local cops and answered a few questions. Hadley Cane, press secretary, was listening sharply, ready to deflect, twist, or redirect. Haviland kept the governor moving. Garrett must be late again, he usually was because of his habit of stopping to talk with people.

  With Haviland nudging from the rear, the governor went up the flight of stairs into the little plane. Bernie Quaid was the last to get on before the engines fired, the props whirred and the plane started rolling. It gathered speed and lifted off.

  Sean noticed a middle-aged woman in tan trousers and brown sweater watching until the plane disappeared in the deep blue distance. She looked familiar somehow. Where the hell had he se
en her before?

  19

  Em climbed in her car and leaned her head on the seatback to wait until her heart slowed. All the time now, she felt queasy. And so tired. Sometimes she wondered if she’d have the strength to keep going. She’d be glad when it was all over. Antacids were in her purse somewhere. She rummaged in it until she found them and popped two in her mouth. The chalk taste was bitter and she wished she had some water. With a sigh, she turned on the ignition and drove away.

  For hours that morning, she’d made phone calls, thirty-five of them. Twenty contacts and twelve Garrett supporters. Working so hard to get votes for a man who wouldn’t be alive to benefit from them seemed a twisted irony that somehow stood for the way the world was.

  The young woman working next to her, pretty young woman, blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, soft blue eyes fired with enthusiasm, reminded Em of Alice Ann. Tears came to Em’s eyes. She had a great needy longing to talk with somebody about her daughter, but there was no one. Not even Father Frank. If he knew what was in her heart, he’d first counsel her, tell her what a sin she was contemplating and try to change her mind. Even the thought of it was a sin. When he couldn’t sway her, he’d tell the police.

  Em had gone to church, regularly and full of faith, every Sunday, did everything the church told her. It was the priest who had taught that God loved the weak, the young, the innocent.

  The unborn baby. She clenched one hand into a fist. Where was God when Kirby Vosse bought a gun? Where was God when Kirby murdered Alice Ann and Alice Ann’s baby? Now Em had to put things right. If she went to hell for it, then that’s just the way it would be.

  “Don’t worry, Alice Ann, I’m going to take care of this. I won’t let you down a second time.”

  Em drove and drove without seeing the gun shop. Worry mounting that she might have gotten the address wrong, she pulled over, found the map and spread it out over the steering wheel. Glancing through the windshield, she spotted a street sign for Hollis and found it on her map. At the country club, even though she feared she might have gotten lost, she kept going and just past the golf course she saw Turtle Lake Drive. With a sigh, she followed the road until she thought surely she must have gone too far. No, there it was. Winston’s Gun World.