"No."
"I want you to get your baby back," Didi said, "because I'm never going to have a child of my own. And if I can help you find David… that's kind of like he's mine, too, isn't it?"
"Yes," Laura answered. She could feel herself drifting away from the world, on waves of raw pain. It was going to be a long, terrible night. "Kind of."
"It's good enough for me." Didi got Laura a cup of water and gave her two aspirin. The fever sweat glistened on Laura's face again, and she groaned as her hand pulsed with white-hot agony. Didi drew a chair up beside the bed and sat there as Laura fought the pain as best she could. What was going to happen tomorrow, Didi didn't know. It depended on Laura: if she was well enough to travel, they ought to be heading west again as soon as possible. Didi got up after a while, and took the plastic bag out to the ice maker for a refill. While she was there, she found a newspaper vending machine, and used her last change to buy an Iowa City Journal. Back in the warm room, the smells of iodine and sickness thick in the air, Didi got Laura's hand situated on the ice pack and then sat down to read.
She found the story of the crash on I-80 on page three. The body, a male, remained unidentified. "Not much left to work from," the coroner had remarked. Except that the car, a late-model BMW, had a Georgia license plate. Didi realized that by now the tracing of the tag would be done and the FBI would know whose car it was. The police-beat reporters would smell a new scent on an old story, and pretty soon Laura's picture would start showing up in the papers again. And Mary Terror's picture, too. The death of Earl Van Diver might well make Mary and the baby front-page news once more.
Didi looked at Laura, who had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Any picture of the old Laura that appeared in a newspaper wouldn't resemble the woman who lay there, her face pinched with anguish and tough with determination. But if Mary and the baby were back prominently in the news, that meant more of a chance for someone to recognize her. And more of a chance that some Smokey with a macho complex might spot her, do something stupid, and get David killed.
She turned on the TV, keeping the volume low, and she watched the ten o'clock Iowa City newscast. Coverage of the wreck was there as well, and an interview with the milk tanker driver, a fat-cheeked man with a bloody bandage on his forehead and a glazed stare that said he'd had a peek into his own grave. "I seen this van and the other car comin' and the highway patrol right behind 'em," the driver explained in a quavering voice. "Maybe doin' eighty, all three of 'em. The van was flyin' up on my tail and I tried to get over in the right lane and then wham the car hit my tanker and it was all she wrote." The newscaster said the highway patrol and state police were searching for a dark green van with a Georgia license plate.
As Didi listened to the rest of the news, she picked up a notepad with Liberty Motor Lodge and a cracked bell printed across the top. With a motel pencil she wrote Mary Terror. Then Freestone, and three names she had memorized long ago: Nick Hudley, Keith Cavanaugh, Dean Walker. Beneath the third name she drew a circle, put two dots in it for eyes and the arc of a mouth: a Smiley Face, like the button she'd seen on Mary's sweater there at the lumberyard.
The troopers would be on the sniff for Mary's van. They'd be out in droves tomorrow. But they might also be looking for a stolen Oldsmobile Cutlass with a Playboy bunny decal on the rear windshield. It wouldn't hurt to scrape that damned thing off, do away with the hanging dice, and, while she was out in the cold dark, swap license plates with one of the other cars parked outside. How many people looked at their plates, especially on a frigid gray morning? The scissor blades might work to loosen screws as well as the prongs of an engagement ring. If not, then not.
Didi tore off the notepad's page, folded it, and put it into her pocket along with the diamond. She destroyed the next two pages, getting rid of the indentations. She put on her second sweater and her gloves, checked again on Laura's hand – blood coming up through the gauze, but there was nothing more to be done but freeze it with ice – and then Didi went outside to do things that told her she still had the instincts of a Storm Fronter.
6: Sanctuary of Wishes
Pigs were searching for a dark green van with a Georgia license plate?
Good, Mary thought. She was half dozing, her feet up on the Barcalounger and the TV on before her in the cozy little den. By the time the pigs found the van in Rocky Road's barn, she'd be long gone with Drummer.
Her stomach was full. Two ham sandwiches, a big bowl of potato salad, a cup of hot vegetable soup, a can of applesauce, and most of a bag of Oreo cookies. She had fed Drummer his formula – warmed on the stove, which he appreciated – burped him, changed his diaper, and put him to sleep. He'd gone out like a light, in the bed shared by Rocky Road and Cherry Vanilla.
Mary watched the TV through eyelids at half mast. Pigs were searching, the newscaster had said on the ten o'clock news from Iowa City, sixteen miles west of the farmhouse she'd invited herself to visit. Baskin was the name on the mailbox. Mary used to buy ice cream at Baskin-Robbins in Atlanta. Her favorite flavor was Rocky Road. He'd looked like Rocky Road, dark-haired and chunky, enough of a roll of flab around his belly to make him soft and slow and oh-so-easy. His wife was blond and petite, with rosy cheeks. Cherry Vanilla, she was. The fourteen-year-old boy was dark-haired like his father, but more wiry: Fudge Ripple, she figured he'd be if he were a flavor.
There were family pictures on the paneled walls. Smiling faces, all. They no longer smiled. In the garage were two vehicles: a brown pickup truck with a University of Iowa sticker on the rear bumper, and a dark blue Jeep Cherokee. The Cherokee was roomy and had almost a full tank of gas. All she'd have to do is move her suitcases, the baby supplies, and her Doors records from the van, and she'd be ready to roll. An added prize had been finding Rocky Road's gun cabinet. He had three rifles and a Smith Wesson.38 revolver, with plenty of ammunition for all of them. The revolver would join her own Magnum when she packed the Cherokee.
Mary had taken a shower. Had washed her hair and scrubbed her face, and carefully cleaned her wounds with a solution of rubbing alcohol and warm soapy water that had left her gasping with pain on the bathroom floor. Her forearm wound looked the nastiest, with its raw red edges and its glint of bone down in the crusted matter, and her fingers from time to time would convulse as if she were clawing the air. But it was her torn thigh that kept oozing blood and hurting like a barefoot walk on razor blades. Her knee had turned purple and had swollen up, too, and the bruises advanced all the way to her hip. Mary had packed cotton against the wounds, put bandages from the medicine cabinet on top of those, and bound her forearm and thigh with strips of torn sheets. Then she'd put on one of Rocky Road's woolen bathrobes, gotten herself a Bud from the refrigerator, and eased herself into the Barcalounger to wait out the night.
The newscast's weather segment came on. A woman with blond hair sculpted into a spray-frozen helmet stood in front of a map and pointed to a storm system growing up in northwest Canada. Should be hitting the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids area in thirty-six to forty-eight hours, she said. Good news for the ski resorts, she said, and bad news for travelers.
Mary reached over beside her chair and picked up the road atlas she'd found in Fudge Ripple's room, there on his desk next to his geography homework papers. It was opened to the map of the United States, showing the major interstate highways. I-80 would be the most direct route to San Francisco and Freestone, taking her through Iowa, Nebraska, curving up into Wyoming and down again into Utah, through Nevada and finally into northern California. If she kept her speed at sixty-five and the weather wasn't too bad, she could make Freestone in another couple of days. When she left here depended on how she felt in the morning, but she wasn't planning on spending another night in a dead man's house. The telephone had rung five times since she'd herded them into the barn at six o'clock, and that made her nervous. Rocky Road might be the mayor or the preacher around here, or Cherry Vanilla might be the belle of the farm-life social set. You never knew. So it was best to clear out as soon as her bones could take the highway again.