I told B last night. He has never shown his emotions but I could tell he was very very upset. I cried and told him how much I loved him and how sorry I was and he held me, so tender and loving the way he was in the beginning. It was all I could have hoped for.
The following week:
I was wrong, he doesnt give a damn about me! He didn’t come to Ds yesterday as he promised, he made me go through it alone. His excuse was an important meeting he couldnt get out of. Important! A fucking meeting! What about me, I said, arent I important? Of course of course, he said, but he didnt mean it. He doesnt care. He never cared. I dont know what Im going to do.
The entries got shorter and shorter after that, with less information about what was going on in the woman’s life. She got up, ate, took naps, watched TV, read, went to bed; B was there, B wasn’t there. Flat, empty words that had to’ve come out of deep depression.
Then this one, five days before her death:
I cant go on alone. I could call C but I cant seem to bring myself to. God help me I still need B. I hate myself for needing him when I know now how he really feels about me and what a fool Ive been but I cant help myself. If I have to Ill go to M, Ill do something drastic to force B to be there for me. I CANT be alone now.
And two days before:
Another ugly fight with B last night. Another terrible headache, so bad I vomited and barely slept. Hes so cold, so unfeeling. He terrifies me when hes like that. His eyes, the way they look through me, it gives me chills. I think, no Im sure now, hes actually capable of doing me physical harm.
The final entry had been made on the day of her death. It was the shortest of any, just the date and time and two words in capital letters: WHY ADHERE?
Tamara had been making notes all along; she made another, with a big question mark after it, then sat back and read through the list of direct quotes and her comments. Not too much there, no real motive for Brandon the asshole to want to off his wife. But there sure were a lot of questions.
What had Nancy done that she couldn’t write about, then confessed to him two days later?
What was it she’d had to go through without him at D’s?
Did “D” stand for Drax the vampire?
Why was she so desperate those last couple of weeks?
Who was M and what was the “something drastic”?
What did that weird final entry mean?
Tamara stared at those last two words. WHY ADHERE? Why adhere to what? Her marriage? Life itself? Couldn’t be a suicide note, could it? No, no way. Woman wanted to off herself, she’d swallow a bottle of pills or slash her wrists in the tub. One thing she’d never do is throw herself down a flight of stairs on the slim chance she’d break her neck.
Well, there was no use speculating without more facts. Bill had pounded that into her head enough times.
He terrifies me when hes like that… I think, no Im sure now, hes actually capable of doing me physical harm.
Yeah. Enough meat here to justify an investigation. The hit she’d gotten from that entry and the others on the last disc was pretty strong. Call it intuition or whatever, something had been wrong, bad wrong, in the woman’s life, and her death sure could’ve been more than just a simple accident.
The laptop clock read 8:50. Not too late to call Bill and fill him in. If he didn’t want to handle the investigation, she’d take it on herself.
9
JAKE RUNYON
The girl’s voice on the phone was shrill, quivery. “He’s gone! Jerry’s gone!”
“Calm down; take a deep breath.” Runyon waited for her to do that. “All right. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I drove out here this morning, like we talked about, and he’s not here. He didn’t leave me a note or anything; he just… he’s gone.”
“He didn’t say anything to you yesterday about going someplace else?”
“No, no. I don’t understand why he’d leave here. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Where are you?”
“At the camp. I’m on my cell.”
“What camp?”
“Oh, right, you don’t know. Old migrant workers’ camp on the Hammond farm. It hasn’t been used for years.”
“How do I get there?”
“It’s about three miles from town. More east than south.” She gave him directions, complicated enough so that he had to write them down.
“Stay there and wait for me. I’ll make it as quick as I can.”
Almost ten by his watch. He’d been up and dressed for three hours, sitting in the motel room for the last hour waiting for Sandra Parnell to call. There was enough of the headache left for him to be aware of it, but none of the aftereffects Dr. Yeng had warned him about. The swelling was down on his ear, and when he put on a new bandage from his first-aid kit the stitched wound on his temple hadn’t shown any signs of infection. His appetite had been good this morning, even if the coffee shop food wasn’t. He was ready to be out and on the move again.
It took him nearly half an hour to find the migrant workers’ camp. Well out in the country, off a hardpan side road, surrounded by orchards and cattle graze, all flatland except for a couple of rocky hillocks in one of the fields, and no farm buildings in sight. Ghost camp. Dozen or so crumbling wood and cinder-block shacks, the single-room type, doorless, the glass long gone from their windows. Two small, rusted Quonset huts, also without doors or windows, and the remains of an ancient Airstream trailer. Built along a narrow stream, summer-dry now, shaded by willows and cottonwoods and overgrown with weeds, dead grass, clumps of manzanita. The sun, already hot in the eastern sky, gave it all the look of a mass of tinder lighted by a match flame.
Sandra Parnell’s Chrysler was drawn in under one of the willows, so that it couldn’t be seen until you came in off the side road; rows of fruit trees hid the camp from the county blacktop beyond. She was waiting beside the car, smoking. She dropped the butt and ground it out quickly under the heel of her flip-flop as he pulled up nearby.
The gathering heat folded around him when he got out. The girl hurried over, bringing the faint smell of marijuana along with her. The joint hadn’t been her first; the glaze on her eyes told him that. Not cheap, just young and stupid. However many she’d smoked, they’d taken the edge off her anxiety. She stood slack shouldered, the way people do when there has been an easing of tension.
“I looked everywhere,” she said. “There’s just no sign of him or his car.”
“Where was he holed up? One of the shacks?”
“No, the trailer.”
The weeds and dry grass were littered with discarded belongings, splintered doors, bent sheet-metal panels, a rusted set of box springs. Runyon picked his way around and through them to the Airstream skeleton. Its door was shut. When he pulled it open, trapped heat heavy with the stink of dust and decay, fast food and marijuana, emptied out at him. He put his head inside, then the rest of his body, breathing through his mouth.
Sunlight slanting in through one of the broken windows showed him a gutted interior, the floor overlain with debris, rodent turds, a dozen or so roach butts smoked down to nubbins. Empty except for an old, worn sleeping bag and the leavings of a recent McDonald’s meal. Both brought by the girl, probably.
He kicked around in there for a minute or so. The only other thing that caught his eye was a torn piece of colored paper, squared off on two sides. He picked it up. Some kind of label, blank and glue-smooth on one side. A caked, sticky blob adhered to the colored side, obscuring a design; all he could make out was what looked like a tree and rubbed and smeared lettering that seemed to be part of a word or name: RipeO. It didn’t look as though it had been there long. Brought in on the bottom of a shoe, maybe, and pulled or scraped off.
He took it outside with him, showed it to Sandra. “This mean anything to you?”
She blinked at it. “No. What is it?”