mom. Elizabeth didn’t understand until she stopped at a fountain and caught her reflection in the water.
She was a mess. She’d lost her straw hat somewhere on the trail, and her hair was windblown and tangled and studded with broken bits of leaves, and her face was inflamed with a wild-eyed, panicky stare that almost scared her.
She looked like a street person or a drug addict — or perhaps just a girl who’d had a good roll in the hay.
The thought coaxed a smile from her. She relaxed a little, then stiffened again, superstitiously afraid that by lowering her guard she had invited an attack.
But there was nothing.
“Stop it,” she whispered to herself. “You’re driving yourself crazy.”
These were not the right words to use. She regretted them as soon as they were spoken. They touched a part of her that was still tender, still too easily liable to be hurt.
She sat on the rim of the fountain and combed out her hair, allowing herself to be soothed by the simple, repetitive chore.
Then she set off once more, searching the hotel grounds.
Cray was here. Somewhere.
She would find him.
4
But she didn’t.
She wandered up and down the network of paths for more than two hours, the purse clutched tight, the little Colt within instant reach. She found the tennis courts, lit up but deserted. She climbed the stairs to an observation deck and found it empty as well.
Cray was not loitering near any of the three swimming pools, he was not in the restaurant or in the bar, and the gift shop and the wellness center were closed.
She even dared to try the fitness trail again, venturing along its entire length. Cray was not there either.
At the trail’s dead end, where she had panicked before, she forced herself to probe the brush. With a pocket flashlight she swept a cone of amber light over cholla cactus and wild purple sage. She found no shoe prints, no sign of human passage.
It was as if Cray had vanished into air. As if he had never existed at all.
She didn’t like that thought.
Briskly she doubled back along the trail. She wasn’t sure quite where she was headed until she found herself approaching the lobby.
Then she knew that she meant to check out the parking lot.
She wanted to see Cray’s SUV, the fancy Lexus he drove, because the vehicle was something real and tangible, and it would prove that Cray was real also.
The Lexus was black, of course, like Cray’s ensemble. Somehow he kept it spotless even in the desert, where dust and rainstorms competed to dull any automobile’s finish. From the first time she’d seen it, she had thought the vehicle suited him. It suggested both civilized refinement and a dangerous addiction to thrills, and it seemed at home in the night.
And now it was gone.
A red Fiat was parked in the space the Lexus had formerly occupied.
Elizabeth looked at the Fiat, turned away, then looked again. A shiver ran through her, and for a dizzy moment she was sure she was losing her mind.
Cray wasn’t here.
He’d never been here.
She had been pursuing a phantom all night long. A delusion, something conjured by her brain, not part of external reality at all, and suddenly she felt it again — the disorienting awareness of a gap between her mind and her environment, between consciousness and reality, and as she stood unmoving, the gap widened and became a chasm, and into it she was falling, falling….
Head lowered, eyes squeezed shut, she forgot everything except the need for calm.
Time was suspended. She was not herself. She was only a stretch of blankness with no body, no mind.
Then finally the panic was gone, and she was all right, not crazy, and the world had not strayed from its orbit.
There was still no Lexus, only the red Fiat, but that was fine. Because, of course, there was an explanation. A very sensible explanation.
Cray had left.
That was all. So simple.
He had been here, she really had seen him and followed him, and he really had disappeared somehow in the dark, but there was nothing supernatural about it, nothing to upset the balance of her mind.
He had simply returned to the parking lot and driven away. He could be anywhere now. She would not find him again tonight.
And although she knew she ought to be sorry she had lost him, she was too tired to feel any regret. She wanted only to go back to her sordid little motel room and lie on the sagging bed and stare at the busted TV until sleep came.
Tomorrow night she would follow Cray again, from his home. Tomorrow, when she had the strength.
Nodding in assent to this plan, Elizabeth crossed the parking lot to the far corner, where she had left her car, a 1981 Chevrolet Chevette with 92,000 miles on an odometer that doubtless had passed the 100,000 mark at least twice. The four-cylinder engine was held together with spit and paper clips. Every part of the car rattled. The seat belts were broken and the ventilation ducts were clogged.
The hatchback had cost $350 when she bought it two years ago in a liquidation sale at a car lot in Flagstaff. The salesman had seemed ashamed to sell it to her, but she could afford nothing better. Remarkably, the Chevette had proven reliable enough.
She unlocked the door on the driver’s side and sank behind the wheel, then jerked upright with the sudden certainty that Cray was in the car with her, in the backseat, waiting to take her by surprise—
He was not in the backseat. He was nowhere.
“Oh, quit it,” she snapped, tired of herself. “Just cut it the hell out.”
She keyed the ignition, and instantly the car began to shake like a washing machine on the spin cycle. With an unsteady hand Elizabeth rolled down the window to get some air.
Pulling out of the lot, she cast another look at the red Fiat, which was still a Fiat, not a Lexus SUV.
Cray really was gone.
She’d done her best, but he had slipped away. There was nothing more she could do. Nothing.
Except, of course, there was.
