The Dispatcher Page 2

  Beatrice squirts orange dish soap onto a green scouring sponge, grabs a dirty plate-Maggie’s lunch plate-from a stack of them, holds it under water a moment, and then scrubs at it. Once it’s clean she rinses it and sets it into a rusty dish drainer. She grabs a second plate.

  Her back is to Maggie. Maggie thinks that if she doesn’t get out now she might never get out. The door is unlocked and she’s standing at the threshold. She pulls the door open and simply stands in the doorway a moment. She is waiting to be noticed. Her heart is beating so loud Beatrice almost has to hear it. Except she doesn’t. With her back to Maggie she continues to wash dishes.

  ‘Get back here before she sees you.’

  Maggie jumps and glances over her shoulder.

  Borden stands on a step halfway up the stairs, only his horse’s head in the light, the rest of him hidden in shadows. His eyes are like great pits spooned out with an ice cream scooper. His mouth is covered with a frothy foam.

  Maggie swallows. Then she shakes her head at him. No. I’m not coming back. She turns her back on him. Beatrice is still standing at the sink washing dishes.

  ‘Get back here.’

  No.

  Though she does not know the layout of the house she knows she cannot go left-the sound of the TV is coming from there-so she turns right and walks as carefully as she can, praying-God, please-that the floor does not creak beneath her feet. One step, two step, red step, blue step.

  Beatrice puts another plate into the dish drainer.

  Ahead of her and to her right a door opening onto a hallway. Old-timey pictures hang crooked on the wall on the other side of the door. A yellow light splashes across them from somewhere. The light is rippled with shadow and reminds her of light reflected off water. She hopes the yellow light is coming from the sun. She hopes she is that close to outside, to the daylight world.

  Another glance toward Beatrice. The woman is picking up a dirty saucepan. It has dried pieces of cabbage sticking to it. Beatrice hums as she scrubs at the pan. Maggie recognizes the tune. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong, for we are weak and He is-

  A dog barks. Maggie jumps. A squeal escapes her throat. She slaps her hands-both of them-over her mouth, trying to hold it in, but it is too late. It’s out on the air where Beatrice can hear it.

  She knew there was a dog up here. She has heard its nails clicking on the floor above her head for years. She even knows its name: Buckshot. But until now she has never seen it. It is standing in the doorway toward which she has been walking. It is waist high and the color of tree bark. Its tongue hangs from its mouth and its tail thumps wildly against the doorframe as it wags.

  Beatrice has stopped washing dishes. She now stands looking at Maggie. Her shoulders are slumped and her mouth agape. Her hands hang empty at her sides and drip water onto the dirty green linoleum.

  Buckshot growls and the growl grows slowly into a series of quick barks.

  Maggie jumps again.

  From the basement just other side of the doorway Borden whispers loudly to her: ‘Come back now and you won’t get into trouble.’

  ‘Henry!’ Beatrice says. ‘Henry, she’s got out! Sarah’s got out the basement!’

  Maggie glances behind her but Henry is not there. He will be coming soon. She glances to the doorway where Buckshot stands and blocks her way, his tail thumping and thumping against the wall. He is scruffy and scars line his face and the side of his body, but he is not Henry. She runs toward him. As she runs past he licks her hand and his tail thumps against her hip, but he does not bite, nor does he bark again. She glances right and sees the hallway leading deeper into the house. To her left is a wooden door, the top half filled with yellow pebbled glass which allows the light to come in but does not allow visitors to get a good view of the interior. She grabs the door handle and thumbs down a brass paddle. She pulls.

  A wall of heat greets her and bright sunlight like opening an oven door and finding an entire universe within. Wind blows against her face.

  ‘Sarah, get back here! She’s getting out, Henry!’

  She turns back to the open door. Beatrice’s fingers at the back of her neck. She runs across the porch and leaps, arcing through the air and down onto the gravel driveway. The sharp gray stones dig into the soles of her bare feet. She almost falls, but does not. She looks around, trying to figure out where her best chance lies. To her left, a grazing pasture in which a few cows stand dumbly working their jaws. To her right, woods of hickory and oak and pine. Maybe she can disappear into them. She runs toward the trees.

  Her heart thumps in her chest and her throat feels dry and scratchy, but her skin is hot from the sun, a wonderful feeling, and she is outside outside outside with a hot breeze blowing against her back as she runs, pushing her forward, pushing her toward freedom.

  As she reaches the wall of trees just other side of the driveway she looks back over her shoulder and sees Henry running toward her. Running after her. An old man with his big gut swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, a few strands of gray comb-over hair blowing in the wind, face a grimace, eyes cruel, bulbous red nose bursting forth like an internal hemorrhage about to rupture.

  ‘You better,’ he says angrily between great heaving breaths, ‘you better stop, Sarah!’ Another breath. ‘You fuckin’ stop!’

  She runs into the woods.

  And through them. Blades of sunlight cutting through the canopy overhead and splashing across her face and legs and arms. The sound of birds singing, then taking flight as she nears. Breeze shuffling through the summer leaves. She is outside. She has escaped. She glances back over her shoulder but sees no one. She is outside. No walls surround her.

  She runs until it hurts to breathe, until the stitch in her side is unbearable, jumping over plants she thinks might be poison oak or poison ivy, ducking beneath thick mustang grape vines that are growing between the tree branches and wrapping themselves around tree trunks. She runs until she has to stop, and then she does stop.

  She stands breathing hard, bending over, hands pressed against her knees. Her throat hurts but it feels good too. Clean hot summer air. Lungfuls of it. She tries to slow her breathing so she can listen. She hears nothing. She hears nothing and she sees nothing behind her.

  Maybe he gave up. Maybe she really is free.

  She walks to a white beam of light breaking through the canopy overhead and she stands within it. An outside observer would see a pale, fragile-looking girl seemingly glowing while everything around her was covered in the shade of trees. An outside observer would see an angel. But there are no outside observers. There is only her and the sunlight and the silence of the woods.

  She allows herself a quiet moment, almost allows herself to cry, and then she pulls herself together again, and continues on. She walks at first, but the walk becomes a jog, and soon enough she is running again.

  Despite the pain it feels good to run. She has spent years trapped in a place where running was impossible and it feels good to have this much space open before her.

  In five minutes she comes to a sun-faded road, cracks twisting their way across its surface like rivers on a map.

  She turns left for no reason she can think of and continues on, padding her way along the asphalt. It feels good on the soles of her feet. It is almost too hot, and if she slowed to a walk it would be too hot, so she does not slow to a walk. She keeps running.

  Henry is watching TV and sucking at a beer like it’s mother’s milk when Beatrice calls to him from the kitchen.

  ‘Henry!’ she says. ‘Henry, she’s got out! Sarah’s got out the basement!’

  ‘Ah, fuck,’ he mumbles to himself. Then gets to his feet, finishes the Budweiser in his hand, showing the bottom of the can to the ceiling, and sets the empty on the coffee table. ‘How the hell’d she get out?’ he says.

  ‘Sarah, get back here!’ Bee says from the kitchen. ‘She’s getting out, Henry!’

  ‘I’m
coming.’

  He walks to the kitchen. Beatrice is on the far side of the room facing the open front door. When she hears him she turns around.

  ‘She’s got out.’

  ‘Well, goddamn it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to let her.’

  ‘Goddamn it.’

  ‘I told you she was getting out.’

  He ignores her and hurries to the front door. Sarah is running barefoot across the gravel driveway. She is running to the woods west of the house.

  Henry jumps down the steps and runs after her, feeling sick to his stomach. He’s too old for this kind of activity. When he catches up with Sarah he’s gonna make her sorry she ran like this. He’s gonna make her sorry she made him run like this. She’ll be screaming sorrys, is what she’ll be doing. She’ll keep screaming them for a week.

  As she reaches the line of trees she glances back.

  ‘You better,’ he says angrily between great heaving breaths, ‘you better stop, Sarah!’ Another breath. He feels like he’s gonna have a heart attack. ‘You fuckin’ stop!’

  He knows she is afraid of him. He’d like it better if she didn’t have to be afraid of him. He’d like it better if she accepted the fact that she was now part of this family. She’s had a long enough time to get used to it. It would make everybody’s life easier. Including hers. He’d like that; it just ain’t the way it is. But she is afraid of him and she does what he says. So when he shouts at her to stop he fully expects her to comply.

  But she doesn’t. She turns and disappears into the woods.

  ‘Fuck.’

  He runs to the woods and into them.

  He sees flashes of blue dress between the trunks of trees. He chases after that color. Branches scratch at his face and grab at his clothes. He tries to keep her in sight as he runs, but it’s an impossible task. He must pay attention to what he’s doing or he’s liable to run straight into a tree. He loses sight of her. Then another flash of blue thirty or forty yards ahead. He cuts toward her, but the heel of his boot catches on the root of a tree and he falls face first to the ground, getting a mouthful of composted leaves. He spits and picks himself up. He looks to see if she’s still in sight but she is not. He briefly considers chasing after her anyway, but doesn’t think he’ll catch her on foot. But the woods are surrounded by road, and she’ll have to come out of them eventually.

  He turns back and runs toward the house.

  ‘Bee, I need my keys!’

  A moment later Beatrice arrives at the front door.

  ‘Did you get her?’

  ‘No, goddamn it, I need my keys.’

  ‘Your truck keys?’

  ‘Of course my truck keys. All my keys are on the same fucking key ring. Come on.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Beatrice turns from the doorway and disappears a moment. When she returns his keys are dangling from her hand. She throws them toward him, but they land in the gravel five feet shy of their intended destination. Henry curses under his breath, goddamn it, leans down, and snatches them up. He walks to his pickup, a green ’97 Ford Ranger he bought used a couple years ago from Davis Dodge-it’s got a mushy clutch, but you have to expect that kind of thing when you buy your truck used from Todd Davis, Mr Chief of Police, you just might get pulled over less with a Davis Dodge license-plate frame on your vehicle-and slides into the driver’s seat.

  A few seconds later he’s slamming the thing into first and the tires are kicking up gravel as he takes the driveway north to Crouch Avenue.

  He drives west along the old cratered road, squinting left into his own woods, trying to see white skin or a snatch of blue dress between the trees. On the other side of the road is Pastor Warden’s place, alive with the sound of barking dogs. It sounds to Henry like a schoolyard during recess. Pastor Warden breeds dachshunds and sells them to pet shops in Mencken and other larger towns. Maybe even to some places in Houston. The goddamn dogs never shut up. Henry doesn’t know how Warden can stand it. Then again, after a few weep sessions with troubled parishioners laying their guilt on him, maybe the sound of dogs barking ain’t so bad.

  He makes it to Main Street without seeing Sarah, but that doesn’t really surprise him. She was heading west when she ran into the woods and unless she got disoriented there’d be no reason for her to come out on the north end. He makes a left and drives south, along the western edge of the woods.

  The gray strip of road stretches out before him, empty of life.

  A tight feeling in his chest, like his heart in a vise.

  If Sarah manages to get out of the woods and comes across someone and tells them what happened, that will be the end of his long and peaceful life here in Bulls Mouth. He knows everyone in town and everyone knows him. And mostly they like him. Sure, it’s because they don’t really know him, because he’s always smiling and patting backs and saying give my regards to the missus, Dave, but who really lets the world see their guts? Guts are ugly; that’s why we have skin. Take away the skin and what remains? Nothing you’d want to have a conversation with.

  As he drives south he looks left, hoping to see Sarah emerge from the trees.

  ‘Where are you, you little bitch?’

  And then he sees her. Not in the woods but in the road up ahead, running into the Main Street shopping center. At least he thinks it’s her. From this distance it could be anybody in a blue dress, but he thinks it’s her. He shifts from second to third and gasses it.

  ‘It’s H-’

  But that is all and that is it. That followed by a scream.

  Ian can hear the phone on the other end bang against something as it swings on its cord. It bangs again and again as it swings, the space between each percussive thump longer than the one before until the final thump does not arrive and the space is infinite.

  ‘Maggie?’

  Silence. She is gone.

  ‘Officer Peña, what’s your twenty? You ten-eight?’

  ‘Oak Street and Flatland. Good to go.’

  ‘You at Wal-Mart?’

  ‘Not even in the parking lot yet.’

  ‘Get over to the Main Street shopping center. Forty-one forty. Suspect is a tall white male in his sixties, gray hair, balding on top. Victim is a fourteen-year-old girl, Maggie Hunt, blond hair, green eyes, wearing a blue dress. Code three.’

  ‘Ten-four. I’m on it. Did you say the name of the victim was Maggie Hun-’

  ‘It’s my daughter,’ Ian says.

  Then, before Diego can respond, he pulls the headset off and leans down over a trashcan. His entire body is shaking, vibrating like sound, and he is covered in sweat. He feels as though he may vomit, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out. He spits a mouthful of sour saliva into the can and stares at a wadded-up piece of paper lying inside. The paper has been torn from a yellow legal pad. There is writing on it, and he knows that it is his, but he cannot remember what it says. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is that his daughter is alive. He stares at the paper for a very long time.

  She was kidnapped in the spring. Her older brother Jeffrey was supposed to be looking after her. Jeffrey is Ian’s son from his second marriage, Debbie being his third wife. Now his third ex-wife. Jeffrey’d flown down from Los Angeles to spend spring break here. He was fourteen when Maggie was kidnapped. Now he is twenty-two. He just turned twenty-two last month, in fact, on the twenty-seventh. Ian bought him neither card nor gift. For a few years after Maggie was kidnapped Ian and Jeffrey had some kind of relationship, tense though it often was, but eventually it dissolved till there was nothing left. A chess game they were playing over three years ago still sits unfinished on Ian’s coffee table. Two unsent birthday cards lie at the bottom of his sock drawer. Happy birthday, son. I love you. Ian tried to call Jeffrey just over two years ago, dialed and let the phone ring, but when his son picked up, hello, he could not get any words out. They caught like fishhooks in his throat.

  Maggie was kidnapped in the spring, and, while her kidnapper cannot possibly
know it, Ian lost both his children that night, though it took a few years for the second loss to be finalized. It was a slower vanishing, that’s all.

  But it still began on that spring night. A Saturday with a full moon, bone-white and bloated, floating in the vast dark sea above.

  Ian was behind the wheel of his partially restored 1965 Mustang, a car his father had purchased for him when he was seventeen and they were living in Venice Beach. Dad thought they could rebuild the car together. He said it would be a fun project. They’d even made a couple trips to a junkyard in Downy and found a fender they needed, and a primer-gray trunk-lid, and a taillight. Unfortunately, Dad’s suicide got between them and their plans. Three months after buying the car the old man decided to smoke a shotgun. Ian found him on the floor in his bedroom when he came home from school.

  On this night, this spring night during which Maggie was kidnapped, he and Debbie were in the car with the windows down. The night air was cool and felt good blowing against his face. The radio was on and playing ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ by Richard Hell. Debbie was wearing a summer dress, and her large breasts were spilling out of the top of it. Ian reached over and stroked the inside of her thigh and she separated her knees slightly.

  ‘I’m glad we did this,’ he said as they drove north on Crockett Street, heading from Morton’s Steakhouse, where they’d had dinner, toward home. ‘It’s been a good night.’

  Debbie put her hand over the back of his hand and slid it up the inside of her leg until it was under her dress and pressed against her panties. He could feel her heat and her coarse pubic hair poking through the panties’ fabric and a pleasant sticky humidity.

  He thought of a time when he was eleven or twelve, in Venice Beach, where his dad had a surf shop, when he had headed down to the water to hang out and try to get one of the older guys to let him have a beer and he saw a girl in her twenties whose pubic hair was visible on either side of her bikini bottoms. She was wet and the fabric was molded to her body and he could see the dimpled mound between her legs. It was strange and foreign and exciting. It did things to him that he didn’t understand. He went into the water where no one would see him and he masturbated to the mental image while it was still fresh in his mind, and he shot a load into the water, and somehow that was sexy, too. Even now he is able to get excited thinking of that long-ago girl and that mysterious hint of sex he did not fully understand. He cannot remember the last name of the girl to whom he lost his virginity, Jennifer something, and he cannot picture her face, but he remembers every detail of that day on the beach four or five years earlier.