"If Ray wants to make it to Florida, he better not hustle Ernie and Choke," I said.
She snickered, then looked chagrined. "I'm in this stupid mood."
"Did your divorce just come through?"
This time, she pressed both hands over her eyes. "Okay, you're perceptive." She lowered her arms and turned in a complete circle. "I knew that, I really did."
She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her nice lady-lawyer shoes. "The other reason I'm in a funny mood is that I can see my case going down the drain. Now that I'm being indiscreet, you've probably heard of the guy we're after. He's one of Edgerton's leading citizens."
"Probably not," I said. "I left when I was a kid."
"His name is Stewart Hatch. Tons of money. His family sort of runs Edgerton, from what I hear."
"We didn't move in those circles."
"You should be grateful, but I'll never understand why a guy with so much going for him would decide to turn into a crook." She efficiently buttoned herself out of her pin-striped suit.
About a quarter to six in the morning, I jumped out of bed before I was fully awake. Nettie's sixth sense was operating at full strength. The only thought in my head was that whatever was going to happen to my mother was rushing toward her, it wasalready on the way, and I had to get to Edgerton in a hurry. Still foggy, I fumbled around for my clothes and saw a naked woman on the disarranged sheets. One of her legs was drawn up, as if in midstride. Her name came back to me, and I put a hand on her shoulder. "Ashleigh, wake up, it's time to go."
She opened an eye. "Huh?"
"It's almost six. Something's happening, and I have to get to Edgerton, fast."
"Oh, yeah. Edgerton." She opened the other eye. "Goo' morning."
"I'm going to take the world's fastest shower, change clothes, and check out. Should I come back here to get you?"
"Get me?" She smiled.
"You're still willing to give mea ride?"
She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms. "Meet me outside. I'm sorry you had bad news."
A speedy shower and shave; a scramble into clean khakis, a blue button-down shirt, a lightweight blue blazer, loafers. I was going to see all my relatives, and for Star's sake as well as my own, I wanted to look respectable.
Hoping she would not make me wait more than twenty minutes, I carried my duffel and knapsack through the revolving door into the cool morning light and heard a female voice call my name. Across the parking lot, Ashleigh stood beside the open trunk of a blaze-red little car. She was wearing a trim navy blue suit that showed off her legs, and she looked as if she'd had maybe twice the time most people need to look the way she did.
"Slowpoke," she said.
She sailed down the nearly empty highway at a comfortable sixty-five, fiddling with the radio and letting the occasional trucker blast on by. Neither one of us knew quite what to say to each other. She found a university FM station playing a mixture of hard bop and Chicago blues and let the digital counter stay where it was. "Did you call the hospital before you woke me up?"
I said that I had not.
"But you told me something happened to your mother. You didn't get a call in my room, did you? I mean, I don't really care, but. . ."
But if you didn't tell them you were in my room, how did they find you?
"I guess I had a premonition." She shot me a sidelong look. "Maybe it was just anxiety. I don't know. I wish I could explain it better."
She glanced at me again. "I hope she'll be all right."
"I'm just glad you were there."
"Well, I am, too," she said. "I think you should probably go around the country giving hope to depressed women. And you were so tactful, you never made anything seem prearranged."
"Prearranged?"
"Maybe not prearranged, but you know, from Chicago, with my law school friend, Mandy."
A sign announcing the approach of a highway restaurant and gas station floated toward us. I said, "Why don't we pull in there and get something to eat?"
The story emerged over breakfast. In the bar ofa Chicago hotel, Mandy, the law school friend, had sent mea drink. When I left my chair to thank them, Mandy invited me to sit down. The conversation led to our various reasons for being in that hotel lobby on that particular evening, and I had mentioned that I was going to the southern part of the state late the next day and would probably spend the following night in another hotel. To Mandy's chagrin, I had seemed more interested in Ashleigh Ashton than herself. Mandy knew that after working into the evening of the following day, Ashleigh would be driving south. She whisked her off to the bathroom and imparted worldly advice. Not long after, Ashleigh had inserted the Motel Comfort into our conversation, and I had expressed the hope of returning the favor and buying her a drink in whatever passed for a bar in the place if I wound up there, too.
"I told Mandy you'd never show up, but she said, Go to the bar an hour or two after you check in, and he'll find you. I wasn't even sure it was you! In Chicago, you were wearing a suit, and here you had on jeans, but the more I looked at you, itwas you. And you were so tactful, it was like you would have come anyhow, not just to meet me."
"I didn't think you needed any more pressure," I said.
Apparently someone who looked a lot like me, a former Tulane teaching assistant named George Peters or the man for whom the woman in the old Denver airport had mistaken me, had been cruising the lobby of a Chicago hotel. No other rational explanation seemed possible. At the same time, the sheer unlikeliness of the coincidence prickled the hairs at the nape of my neck. If George Peters, or whatever his name was, had succeeded in setting up an assignation with Ashleigh, what had kept him from it?
For the rest of the drive, a caffeine-enhanced Ashleigh maintained a steady sixty-five miles per hour while describing the misdeeds of her scoundrel millionaire. I made accommodating noises and pretended to listen.
The sign at the first of the Edgerton exits readEDGERTON ELLEN-DALE. "Is this it?" she asked.
"The next one," I said.
At the next sign,EDGERTON CENTER, she spun the little car off the highway. For a time we drove past hilly fields on a divided four-lane
road and then, without transition, found ourselves in the wasteland of fast-food outlets, gas stations, motels, and strip malls at the fringes of most American cities. At the moment we passed a billboard welcoming us to EDGERTON, THECITY WITHA HEART OFGOLD, the mild, sunlit air shimmered into a wavering veil like a heat mirage, then cleared again.
"I have time to take you to the hospital, if that's where you want to go," she said.
A stoplight turned red at an intersection bordered by two three-story red brick office buildings, a vacant lot, and a bar called The Nowhere Lounge. Below the street sign, a rectangular green placard pointed the way to St. Ann's Community Hospital. "I think that's the place," I said.
Four blocks later, she pulled up before the hospital entrance. I said, "Ashleigh . . ."
"Don't. You won't have time to see me. I hope your mother gets better. If you were going to ask where I'm staying, it's Merchants Hotel, wherever that is."