The brittle ring of the phone interrupted.
I couldn’t think of anyone on earth I felt like talking to. Reluctantly, I picked up the receiver on the bedside table. Something was screwy with our caller ID because of the old telephone lines in the house, but Mike insisted I answer the landline no matter what. He didn’t like when he couldn’t reach me, which he declared was half the time lately. The pregnant me forgot to charge my cell phone, left it in the car console or buried in the chair cushions, turned off the sound.
“Hello.”
Nothing.
“Hello? Who is this?”
I felt a presence on the other end, waiting me out. The thick silence spun me back to a phone call in college, months before I even knew Pierce Martin’s name. The caller had paused his rapid breathing long enough to whisper that he was watching me through the bare window of my basement apartment. The cops who showed up ten minutes later assured me that the caller was some gutless wonder lying in his own bed, jerking off. But, I always wondered, how did he know I had no curtains?
Anger at Mike surged, for leaving me alone and not letting me finish. I sat there in my nightgown, slick with sweat and tears, gripping the phone and willing the intruder in my bedroom to hang up first.
I won.
I woke up, sitting ramrod straight, staring at the face of a frightened, wild-eyed woman.
It took a moment to realize that the woman terrifying me was me.
My eyes were locked on a murky reflection in the mirror leaning against the wall on top of the dresser. The white moon of Mike’s head rose beside me in the glass before his arms pulled me down into a warm embrace. He had slipped back into bed around 1 a.m.
“The dream again?” he asked, half-awake. “The little girl?” And then he promptly started snoring.
“Yes. The dream.” I snuggled tighter into his arms even though my body was steaming, soaked with perspiration.
“The little girl,” I said.
The little girl in my dream stands on top of a steep hill. Her expression is solemn. An ancient stone church looms behind her with dozens of pointy turrets rising like thick, sharpened pencils against the clouds. I can see every detail of her face and every microscopic blade of grass on that hill in high definition, a magic trick of dreamland. After the third miscarriage, Mike had made me bring her up in one of our marriage counseling sessions with a woman whose name wasn’t Marguerite.
Yes, the little girl in the dream looks like me, I told the therapist, who gave off a polite, bored vibe in our sessions, as if I wasn’t interesting enough to be a good anecdote in the unfinished self-help book glowing on her computer screen. If only she knew.
The therapist persisted.
Did I know that the little girl probably represented my vulnerability? My fears?
It wasn’t a deep thought worth 150 bucks for a forty-five-minute hour.
Yes, I’d heard that.
But, of course, I knew something different.
11
The uneasiness began with the moms, like I guess it usually does. A tiny flame of gossip, texted and tweeted and Facebooked, all of it leaked from Mike’s office. The blood on the pillow. The damning Bible verse. No family stepping forward.
It was a churning, collective small-town kind of worrying unfamiliar to me, an ex-New Yorker who knew exactly seven people by name in my last apartment building. In New York City, there were 99,000 calls to 911 a day. People disappeared into the ether all the time. No one bonded about it.
Three PTA officers had hounded Mike’s office yesterday until he agreed to place an extra cop at the elementary school during recess and for end-of-the-day pickup. Their concerns weren’t specifically about Caroline Warwick but about the idea that this could happen here, to someone rich and ensconced behind a fortress wall.
“ ‘Paranoia is knowing all the facts.’ ” I said this nonsensically to Mike, on the third morning that Caroline was missing. “Woody Allen.” I was making myself a breakfast of cut-up bananas with sugar and milk, one of my mom’s old tricks.
“Not helping,” Mike said. “Facts aren’t even part of the equation yet. One of those PTA moms bordered on maniacal. She mentioned the Lindbergh baby. First Baptist wants to hold a vigil. I want to hold off hysteria.” He grimly dumped his coffee in the sink and kissed the top of my head. “What you are eating is disgusting.”
As soon as he closed the door, my smile receded. In seconds, I was punching Maria Valdez into a White Pages search on my laptop, which returned 113 listings for either M. Valdez or Maria Valdez within a sixty-mile radius. I took a guess and focused on the M. Valdez who lived closest, in the nearby town of Boon Hill, which was mostly Hispanic. A random decision on my part, because odds were that Maria Valdez was living in a house under a first name that belonged to a father or husband or boyfriend with one of twenty-five initials other than M. But this was the plan I’d made last night.
Mike had brought up Boon Hill in a recent conversation because he was amazed that it was mostly minority and poor with almost nonexistent crime stats. About four hundred people, mostly low-income Hispanics, some illegal, some not. Primarily good people, working hard. Scrubbing toilets, pounding nails in roofs that reflected 200-degree heat, making sub-par wages. No one seemed to mind, Mike said. The Clairmont elite cast their gaze the other way, to the far, far left, when it came to immigration papers for people who snuggled with their children and made their lives immeasurably better. For people they loved. The Hispanics hunkered down, hoping that they wouldn’t get booted back, that Washington and Texas politicians would remain hopelessly mired. It seemed a very good bet for Boon Hill residents.
Clear directions to Boon Hill did not exist in Google or on the Texas map in the glove compartment, which meant I couldn’t plug in the most accurate coordinates for Hugh. I snapped him off after he directed me to drive straight into a barbwire fence and rolled into British freak mode when I ignored him. Bloody hell! You’ve missed it! Mum, turn around!
“Bugger off, Hugh,” I responded, in my best Cockney.
I bumped along on the two-lane country road, feeling lost even though I was traveling in a perfectly straight line. The leafy trees on either side formed a drooping canopy over the road. Eerily isolating. Maybe this drive wasn’t such a good idea. There hadn’t been a single living thing in the last ten minutes except for the crow with nice aim who dropped a splotchy white present onto my windshield.
For the next five miles, I felt increasingly unsettled. The sun was shining but something was off. Every few minutes or so, I checked my rearview mirror. I had answered two hang-up calls this morning after Mike left for work. I was trying to convince myself that they were a glitch between a telemarketing company’s computer dialing and our house’s frayed wiring.
I woke up this morning with Maria on my mind. I figured Maria would have a pretty good handle on whether it was Caroline Warwick’s habit to send out obscure threats to prospective club members. Maybe Maria herself had delivered this special present to my door as part of her duties. I hoped, prayed, that Caroline was at the root of this, because the alternative-that it was all somehow connected to Pierce Martin-was far scarier. I could handle a depressed rich old lady with an overly obsessive interest in my life. Maybe Caroline had voluntarily booked herself into a comfy psych ward for a couple of weeks. Maybe Gretchen had put her there and just wasn’t saying.
I almost missed the sign. Weeds were growing halfway up the pole: BOON HILL, POP. 212, obviously a few years behind the census. No hill in sight.