There wasn’t much to Travis’s story, but the big strange man, who was Mr. Cornell Jasperson, asked him to repeat some details again and again, as if they might change a little each time until, after a while, the whole story would be different and Gavin and Jessie would have come back hours ago and there would be nothing to worry about after all.
When Mr. Jasperson finally stopped asking to hear this and that bit yet again, he stood in silence, his hands over his face, but now looking at Travis between the spread fingers. After a silence, he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t know, either,” Travis said. “Except I better tell my mother.”
That was when he realized he hadn’t brought the disposable phone with him, to which the number of his mother’s disposable cell was taped. “I have to go back to the house.”
25
The driveway to the little blue house is unpaved and bristling with weeds. The yard immediately around the house is pea gravel. Behind the house stands an unpainted barn with each wall askew the other, a shaky assemblage of dry rot and rust and tar paper, likely to collapse if a cow farts.
“Reminds me of home in West Virginia,” Dubose says.
Carter can’t help tweaking him. “You lived in a barn?”
“We had a house maybe a little nicer than this one. But our barn was worse.”
“How could it be worse?” Jergen marveled.
“It took some effort, but it looked like such a ratty place you’d dare go in only if you wanted your family to collect on your life insurance. Nobody official ever did go in when my granddad and my daddy distilled whiskey and packaged it there, and not later when my brother Carney put in all the lamps and planted a crop of weed.”
“Your grandfather and father were bootleggers?”
“That isn’t a word they would have used.”
“And your brother is a pot dealer?”
“He farms it a little, but he’s too much of a user to be a seller. Anyway, Carney is a world-class asshole. He’s dead to me.”
Jergen considered that last sentence. “When you say ‘dead to me,’ do you mean…?”
“No, I didn’t kill him. Though there’s times when I wish I had. Anyway, even with Carney, life was good back then.”
“Well,” Jergen commiserates, “we all feel that way about one relative or another.”
His nostalgic reverie drawing to an end, Dubose takes his foot off the brake and the VelociRaptor drifts forward. “They left the boy somewhere in the valley when they went to the market. He’s still here. His mother will know where, and she’ll sooner or later come for him.”
26
“Don’t leave me alone with these big, scary dogs,” Mr. Jasperson said, “please and thank you.”
“They won’t hurt you,” Travis promised. “I’ll just run over to the house and get the phone and be right back.”
“Oh, my. Oh, goodness.”
“You’ll be okay.”
Duke and Queenie were lying against each other, a puddle of dog fur, about as threatening as a rug.
“I’ll be fast,” Travis promised.
He went into the vestibule, and the door closed behind him, and he opened the outer door.
Out on the road, a monster pickup truck was moving slowly past, rolling on six big tires, glossy black and as cool as anything from a Star Wars movie.
27
“…Still here. His mother will know where, and she’ll sooner or later come for him,” Dubose says, and he accelerates.
“We’ll set a hundred traps for her,” Jergen says.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t bet serious money that she can’t walk right through the hundred. While we’re waiting for her, we have to be finding the boy.”
“You think she’ll surrender if she knows we have him? I mean, she’s got to figure we’ll inject her and him if we don’t just kill them both.”
“After a lot of serious contemplation regarding the mother-child bond,” Dubose says, as though he is a heavy-thinking backwoods philosopher, “the way I see it, if she doesn’t surrender within six hours after she knows we have the kid, then we just kill the little bastard. Because that’ll as good as kill the bitch herself. She’ll be done after that. She won’t have any game in her anymore. She might even kill herself and save us the trouble.”
As night descends, they cruise a few miles in mutual silence, during which Jergen contemplates the unmitigated ruthlessness of his partner, which he cannot help but admire. “I think you’re right about the kid. But I wouldn’t give her six hours. Maybe two.”
28
In the days of the gold rush, Placerville, which lay on the eastern flank of the Mother Lode, went by the name Old Dry Diggins. It was a place of such lawlessness that to keep order, authorities started hanging lawbreakers two at a time, after which the settlement became known as Hangtown. Placerville was less colorful these days, and quiet.
Jane had driven out of the storm twenty miles back and had the tire chains removed when she refueled. Now she found a generic motel, paid cash for one night, and moved all her luggage into the room. The titanium-alloy attaché case, which contained $210,000 that had once belonged to Simon Yegg, could not be seen when she slid it under a dresser that stood on four short legs.
She walked to a nearby supermarket, went to the deli counter, and ordered two roast beef sandwiches with provolone cheese and mustard.
The heavyset woman who built and wrapped the sandwiches was sensitive to the moods of others. “Been a long day, dear?”
“I’ve had better.”
“I’m sure it’s not man trouble.”
“Not anymore.”
“Girl as pretty as you should give them some trouble.”
“It’s been known to happen.”
In the liquor department, she located the Belvedere vodka and added a pint bottle to her purchases.
Back at the motel, she filled an ice bucket from the ice maker in the vending-machine alcove and bought two cans of Diet Coke.
In her room, she took off her Elizabeth Bennet wig. She had lost the clip-on nose ring somewhere. It didn’t matter. Anabel had seen her in this look, probably even captured an image of her, which meant she couldn’t be Liz anymore.
She stripped and examined the wound in her left side. Not bad. A thin crust of blood. She had pulled one of the stitches. It was healing well enough, and she still had plenty of antibiotics.
She took a hot shower and dressed in underpants and a T-shirt. She mixed vodka and Coke and sat on the bed to eat the sandwiches, one of them entirely, only the meat and cheese from the second.
There was a TV, but she didn’t want it.
Bolted to the nightstand to keep it from being stolen, a clock radio offered an alternative. She found a station doing a Mariah Carey retrospective. That sensational voice. “I Don’t Wanna Cry” and “Emotions.” And then “Always Be My Baby” and “Love Takes Time” and “Hero” and more.
Music could lift you up so high, and music could destroy you, and sometimes it could do both in the same song.
When she finished eating and felt fully calm, she intended to call the disposable phone that she’d left with Gavin and Jessie.
She was finishing her second vodka when her own burner rang. She switched off the radio and plucked the phone from the nightstand and took the call. She heard Travis say, “Mommy?”
Whatever had happened, it was all there in that one word, because since she’d gone on the run with him from their home in Virginia, months earlier, he had called her only Mom, as if he had understood that it had fallen to him to grow up fast. Besides, she knew him so well that she could read him in two syllables. She swung her legs off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”
“Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie went for groceries, and they never came back.”
29
Jane in Placerville, which seemed like a suburb of Hell when Travis was all the way down there in Borrego Valley, the motel room now a cage in which she moved restlessly, without purpose, a pain in her chest as if the dread that cinched her heart was a thorny vine, a demon of anguish feeding on her mind…
She knew the whole story of Gavin’s cousin Cornell Jasperson, brilliant and highly eccentric, a kind of end-times prepper, but not crazy. She had approved his place as a bolt-hole. But she had not allowed herself to believe such a moment as this would ever come.