27
R ay arrived in the predawn, well-stubbled. He prowled her premises while she hit the bathroom, opening drawers, taking in the view from her deck, analyzing her architecturally. “You have to get some lamps,” he said. “These overheads are disgusting. And the popcorn ceiling has to go.”
“Quit that,” she said as she came out.
Ray, at the moment immersed in studying the contents of her bookshelves, said, “You don’t like me figuring you out.”
“These things aren’t me.”
“You’re the one who told me about how much you can learn from looking at people’s homes. I spy with my little eye your dark side. No porn DVDs for this lady; no, you’ve got a much more embarrassing secret. You’re a reader.” He plucked a book from the shelf. “Hemingway?”
She smiled, caught in her own game. “Okay, Ray. I’ll tell you about that guy and why I have this book of short stories. He stole everything that made him special from Gertrude Stein. You think that deceptively simple little style of his was original?”
“I could get into that with you another time.” He put it back, then took out another. “Woolf?”
“Boring but so beautiful.”
He placed the book back exactly where it had been, then turned to her. “I thought-men and bars.”
“Them, too, sure, sometimes. After all, men’re not all as patronizing as you.”
“Is that what I am? Patronizing?”
Kat smiled. “Earnest and clueless, that’s how you mostly are. But you seem to be trying, I’ll give you that.”
Kat wheeled her small suitcase to the front door while Ray stood at the window, admiring her tiny view of the Pacific. “You sit here at night and see the sun set. Here,” he said, going through the sliding door and finding the spot on the balcony where he could best view the ocean. “You watch the day end.”
“Yep, that’s what I do,” she said. “Now enough with the getting-to-know-Kat number. I’m ready.”
He carried her bag down the stairs. Kat took a quick sip of coffee from her thermos and stifled a laugh, looking at her living room one last time before she went into the hall and locked up, seeing it from a stranger’s point of view. The place wasn’t trendy or enthusiastic or glam. It was stuffed with things, messy, and comfortable.
She fluffed her hair. There was a there there, that was the main thing.
They were almost to the San Bernardino Valley by the time the sun came up over the mountains. Kat stole a glance at Ray in his sunglasses, while she braked and maneuvered through a snake pit of semis, and wondered again what he expected to find. Paranoid scenario: he already knew they would not find Leigh, but his show of cooperation would keep Kat from suspecting him of hurting her.
It all could be a show. But she had been forgetting to keep her guard up, had even started to like him and hope for him as well as for herself. Tighten up, she told herself sternly.
At eight-thirty they found the motel on the edge of the ritzy desert oasis of Palm Springs. Yes, Kat thought, a person on the run might say, I made it, and pull into the first motel with a Vacancy sign.
For here it was, the Blue Sky. The motel sprawled along a busy road, one story, adobe-colored, with Spanish arches and a tile roof, a fountain in front. The water was a nice touch, gurgling, faking an oasis.
Farther east there would be championship golf courses, pools, hotels, restaurants, shopping. Kat remembered the town as a compact, wealthy, sedate Vegas. Tuesday morning, and the only people going to work seemed to be Hispanic. The retirees would still be putting in the laps in their backyard pools.
They drove around the parking lot, looking for Leigh’s minivan. Nothing. Driving past the corner market farther up the road, and up and down a couple of side streets, all they turned up was a guy washing his driveway with a hose-felonious waste of water. “We’ll just have to get the room number somehow,” Ray said as they parked under the portico. The external air temperature was eighty-seven degrees, according to the thermometer Velcroed onto the Echo’s dashboard. The earth-withering heat slapped her down as she climbed out. “Ow.” She flung her hand away from the car.
“Let me go in,” Ray said.
She stood in the shade by the car, imagining a star drifting too close to the earth in a disaster movie and searing the landscape, blinding her through her shades and shriveling her skin. Ray negotiated with the clerk inside behind the barrier of glass, smiling, gesturing like a Napolitano. For somebody who hadn’t communicated very well with his wife, Ray seemed to have a way of persuading people to go his way, so she waited and hoped.
When he came out, she said, “Well, is Leigh staying here or not?”
“He says no. He remembers your phone call. We’re lucky to get rooms at all, he’s so suspicious. Luckily the place isn’t jammed full, it’s a Tuesday in August, not exactly the best weather for a visit. He says it’ll be ninety-nine by noon.”
She examined his face and read nothing. “That’s it? Aren’t you disappointed?”
“We just got here. Keep your shirt on.” He picked up his bag. “Got us communicating rooms at the corner, away from the traffic,” he said, self-satisfied in the way guys were when they killed a deer with a rifle or made money on a stock. He handed her a card key. “Meet me at the coffee shop in ten minutes.”
She walked along the concrete path in front of the third-floor rooms, second-floor rooms, first-floor rooms, cursing the efficient blinds. Now and then she caught a glimpse of motel life, a man sitting on the bed watching TV, loud noises of squabbling kids, a woman on the phone brushing her hair, heedless of the open window.
She wasn’t Leigh, though, and Leigh wasn’t in the standard-issue coffee shop. They showed the waitress her photo and got another look and a shrug.
They ate. Kat had a headache behind her eyes. She thought, another wasted trip, and this thought was very frightening, because the road seemed to end here at the motel. It seemed to Kat that if they didn’t find Leigh here she would have to admit she was dead.
“If she’s not using the coffee shop, I guess it’s not much use to check out the pool,” Ray said. “We can do that, though, and keep a watch on the rooms, and we can keep looking for her van.”
“You think the clerk was lying?”
“I think the clerk was doing his job. Protecting people’s privacy.”
“After this we’ll have to go home,” Kat said.
The waitress gave him the check and he got out his credit card. As he was signing the bill, the door opened and the motel clerk came into the coffee shop. Waving a hand familiarly at the waitress, he zeroed in on their table and slid into the booth next to Kat. He was younger than she had imagined through the window, Latino, with large clear brown eyes, not hostile but not friendly, either.
“Why do you want this lady?” he said.
“Why do you care?” Ray said. “If she hasn’t been here?”
“Curiosity. I keep track of cops traveling through. Do I need to watch out for her?”
“It’s nothing like that,” Ray said. “I’m her husband, just like I said.”
“Who’s she?” he said, motioning with his thumb toward his seatmate.
“I’m her sister,” Kat said.
“Like I told you,” Ray said.
“Still lying,” the clerk said.
“How do you know I’m lying?”
“Because the lady I’m thinkin’ of, she ain’t got a sister.”
Ray’s mouth dropped open. “She’s here?” Kat experienced a peculiar feeling in her chest. Hope, rising eternally. But she felt very fragile, as though she couldn’t bear for this hope to be crushed, too. She and Ray looked at each other. The clerk was watching them.
“I didn’t say that. There’s a similar lady. I gave her a call. She said she had a husband, but no sister.”