I don’t know where I am. I hop off the bus after twenty minutes and request an AutoCab pickup. It’s a different cab from the one I’d had before so I have to decline the chorus of offers as I ride. Apartments and strip malls, gas stations and traffic. I ask the cab to pull over across the street from my hotel and approach around back—no police cars, nothing unusual. I keep the lights off in my room, calling Albion while I pack, rolling up my Steelers hoodie and sweats, changing into my Adidas. I pack up my new books and Albion’s artwork.
She calls.
“Dominic? Where are you?”
“At my hotel. Are you all right? I’ve been calling you—”
“Look for a green Prius. It’s light green, almost silver—”
I find her in the lot, idling near the entrance. The backseat and rear hatch of the Prius are filled with suitcases and garbage bags stuffed full. She must have been packing when I tried to call, taking whatever she could gather in just a couple of trips, leaving everything else behind. She rolls down the window and says, “Get in—”
Awkward, my suitcase between my legs, my knees splayed out so I have to cringe to the side in order for Albion to shift gears—she drives fast, rolling through stop signs and pushing intersections, rarely stopping. Her posture’s prim, her hands kept at 10 and 2—she leans forward, scanning the traffic for spaces to slip through, aggressive. I hold my hand to the dash and see my fingers still shaking—I can’t quite calm down.
“I tried to kill one of them,” I tell her. “I pushed him—he was hit by a car. I can’t believe, I, almost I—”
“Who was it?” she asks. “What did he look like?”
“A young guy,” I tell her, flashing the image I captured. “He looked like a stoat. Pale—”
“Rory,” she says. “Did you kill him? Is he dead?”
“No, I don’t think so—”
Albion cries as we cross the Golden Gate Bridge—a self-controlled sobbing that amounts to little more than tears in rivulets down her otherwise stoic face. Hallucinatory women float like angels in the Adware, singing daily deals and half off admission to tourist traps. Auto-Toll with Adware registration but Albion waits in line to pay with cash, paranoid our connection might have been hacked. I stare out over the bay, at the white flecks of sailboats and gulls against the expanse of impossibly blue water, the phantom weight of the man’s body against my palms as if I’m still pushing him—He’s not dead, I tell myself, it’s all right, he’s not dead. I haven’t killed anybody.
“We wasted too much time,” says Albion, panic edging her voice. “We should have left hours ago. We should have left the moment you found me—”
She has a checklist for disappearance—her first few steps scripted years in advance. Up 101, distant folds of mountains and grass verges and overpasses, medians lined with skinny pines. She pulls over at a McDonald’s in Novato, one she’d picked out because the parking lot’s hidden from view of the road, transferring her checking and savings into a floating account. She stops again just outside of Santa Rosa at a place called Good Stuff Auto and trades her Prius for a used Outback and five thousand in cash—she’s bilked on the deal, but adamant that the Outback is featureless, no GPS, no OnStar, Adware hookups only to the stereo, no other account access. She signs her papers using a Washington state ID that lists her name as Rose Callahan. The salesman knows the ID’s bullshit, but he’s happy to deal—even helping us repack our luggage in the new car before counting out a hundred crisp fifty-dollar bills. We grab burritos from a roadside grill before backtracking south down 101.
“Now tell me who you are,” she says. “I need to know why you’re here, how you found me—”
“I told you last night—”
“Do better than what you told me—”
“Are you taking me back to San Francisco?” I ask her. “We’re heading south—”
“We’ll pick up I-80 toward Nevada. There’s a town called Elko,” she says. “We’ll figure out what our next steps are from there, but I need to know more about you before I decide what to do—”
By four o’clock, the afternoon’s turning syrupy, hours of driving already behind us. She pulls over at a rest stop so we can stretch our legs, use the restrooms. Pepsi and cheddar cheese Combos from the vending machine.
“I’ve been keeping a journal,” I tell her when she’s back at the car. “It’s the best I can offer to tell you about myself, why I found you, how I’m involved in all this—I’ll let you read it. It will tell you everything—”
“Go ahead and start,” she says. “Read it while I drive—”
I read from the beginning, “‘Her body’s down in Nine Mile Run, half buried in river mud,’” but Albion stops me after only a few pages, once I’ve read about my session with Simka, when I told him the name of the body I’d found.
“I knew her,” she says. “I remember Hannah—”
Albion’s connection to Hannah, or their potential connection, never occurred to me until now—beyond their separate relationships to Timothy, to Waverly. Albion always sliding away from me toward her disappearance, Hannah Massey always emerging, someone I’m excavating. Thinking of them together unsettles me.
“Did you know her well?”
“Not very well,” she says, speaking to the miles of highway in front of us more than she’s speaking to me. “Waverly was interested in her. He was a lecturer from time to time—he said it kept his mind elastic to be around so many intelligent young people, that it helped keep his work fresh for his company, Focal Networks. I remember when he told us about Hannah—there were about eight of us eating together that night. We’d just said prayers when Waverly said something about finding a flower growing in a barren field. Anyway, he was enthusiastic about a student in one of his classes, and asked me to get to know her, me and Peyton—”
“Is that how it worked? Did you recruit women to live at the house?”
“Recruit might not be the right word,” she says, “and Hannah never lived with us. We introduced ourselves, spent time with her. She was an actress and was interested in modeling, so there was a natural connection with me and Peyton. She was impressed by Waverly, impressed by us. She came to the house for prayer group, sometimes, but never lived there—”
“Do you know how she died?” I ask, but the question closes her off. I know I’ve bungled something, though I’m not exactly sure what—maybe the bluntness of the question, maybe scratching at a wound she thought had healed years ago. After a few minutes, I say, “Albion, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t pry. I didn’t mean to sound so callous or direct about someone you knew. I don’t mean any disrespect to her—”
“It’s all right,” she says, but turns on the radio and eventually the oldies ease us.
We arrive in Elko late and check into the Shilo Inn, a stretch of white motel with the feeling of an emptied swimming pool. Once we drop our bags, she takes me to a sports bar called Matties and tells me to bring my journal. After midnight. We sit in a corner booth far from the windows, scanning the front door whenever someone new drifts in. Terrified and anxious about the faces we might recognize. She asks me to start my journal again from the beginning. She listens carefully, stopping me every so often to clarify something I’d written or to ask me to fill in details about my life. I read until two, when Matties is closing and we retreat to our rooms at the Shilo.
A few days in Elko. We spend most of it at Matties or wandering slow laps around the Elko Junction Shopping Center, lost in conversation or sitting for hours in the food court while I read my journal to her, only retreating to our hotel rooms once everything’s closed and the streetlights blink yellow. I read to her about Theresa, and Albion supposes she may have known her—that she once took a class on container gardening at Phipps. “The teacher was kind of quirky,” she says. “Longish hair, blonde? I liked her. I remember she liked to tell jokes—”