“What about me?” she screamed at him.
“You have to leave.”
“Leave? But-”
“This house. Rose. So people think somebody took you.”
“What?” She looked at him as if he were insane.
“Laurie, we have to get you out of here. It has to look as if somebody broke in here and raped and kidnapped you and killed Hugh-Jay when he tried to protect you.”
“I can’t do that!” She looked stunned, confused. “Where would I go?”
“We’ll figure that out. I’ll take you somewhere tonight, and then we’ll figure out the rest of it.”
“Come with me!”
“What?”
“Meryl, come with me. We’ll go away together! It will be all right.”
“No, it won’t, it will never be all right if we do that. I have to stay here. I have to go back to my office and get up in the morning and act as if I was there all night after I left Belle. You have to be gone, where nobody can find you, and then when they do, you have to pretend you were taken.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Yes, you can. You have to. Get dressed. Don’t bring anything. Not your purse. Nothing.”
“I don’t want to, Meryl!”
“Would you rather be charged with his murder?”
“What? But we didn’t-”
“Can you prove that? They’ll want us to prove that, and we can’t.”
“Maybe he killed himself, we could say he-”
“Because he found us in bed? No, I don’t think we want that, either.”
“Meryl, I can’t do what you say I should do. I can’t-”
“Go put on some clothes. Whatever you need later, I’ll get it for you.”
When she wouldn’t budge, he ran into her bedroom and took the first thing he saw: her yellow sundress. He came back and put it over her head, pulling it down over her body. Then he picked her up and carried her outside before he remembered he didn’t have his truck. “Shut up,” he told her, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear her during moments when the storm died down. Fearful of being witnessed now, she acquiesced to his plan, even telling him to use Billy Crosby’s truck, which was behind the garage.
They rolled it silently down to the street.
With the storm still boiling all around them, Meryl drove her out to Testament Rocks over dirt and gravel roads that made the going slippery and treacherous and threatened to dump them into ditches. They drove through low places where the water came halfway up the tires, and once the truck got stuck and he had to rock it from drive to park and back again several times in order to rock it into moving again.
“Why here?” Laurie screamed at him when he stopped the truck. The windshield wipers revealed glimpses of the huge rock formations that loomed over the dark, desolate landscape.
“Because nobody else in the world will be here during this storm.”
“What if you get stuck on your way back into town, or on your way back to pick me up?”
“I won’t get stuck. You saw how I got out of that already.”
“You can’t leave me here alone like this!”
“I have to go back and take care of things at your house before the storm stops,” he yelled back at her. He knew he couldn’t think straight about how to cover their tracks if he also had to cope with her hysteria. “You can get under that shelf of rock over there. You’ll be okay. Wait for me-”
“Like I have a choice!”
“I’ll come back for you when I finish cleaning everything up and we’ll figure this out.”
When she wouldn’t budge from the truck, Meryl came around to her side, flung open her door and forced her out. She was sobbing and screaming about rain and Hugh-Jay and Jody, and she beat on Meryl as he picked her up again and carried her to where he wanted her to be.
“Laurie, our lives depend on this. I swear I’ll come back for you!”
She clung and he forced her to let go and pushed her away. She tried to run after him but he was faster. He left Laurie standing in the middle of nowhere with only the furious storm and the huge rocks for company.
When he drove away, leaving her in rain, thunder, lightning, and isolation, she was so terrified and furious that she half climbed, half ran up one of the huge rock formations to watch his headlights abandon her.
She was forty feet up when her shoes slipped and she fell, landing not only on chalky ground but on rock as hard as centuries could build it.
41
BLEEDING AND BROKEN, Laurie lay on the chalky, rocky earth in a daze of shock and pain. Her consciousness faded in and out as her five senses surged in to startle her awake and then disappear again: smell of her own urine soaking her sundress; tastes of dirt, of beer and catsup; sounds of the wind that whipped her dark hair stingingly into her open eyes and moaned and sang around the rocks; sight of enormous clouds rushing east; painful stab of rocks beneath her shattered back.
It all blinked on and off as she woke up, faded out, woke up.
At first she felt terrified of lying helpless on her back, because she feared drowning with her face to the sky. Thunder rumbled the ground beneath her, making her shudder involuntarily, making her broken bones rattle agonizingly inside of her like seeds in a gourd. Flashes of lightning illuminated the landscape in nightmarish relief, turning rocks to gargoyles looming over her.
But then the first storm passed, and she found herself staring up into a sky so clear and deep blue-black that it hurt her heart to see it. In a moment that changed her, Laurie felt grateful to have been flung onto her back, her poor ruined back, so that she might see this astonishing beauty.
She had not known the world could be so lovely.
She’d always thought of the landscape of Rose, Kansas, as boring, had never understood when other people raved about its supposed glories, its famous soaring rock monuments and its sunsets, its flat horizons and dramatic cloud banks. Now she understood: it was wonderful! It looked transformed and magical in the shifting, changing light of the moon, stars, and clouds. Light rolled over the Rocks like waves, changing their colors from soft orange to gold to white to silver to black and back to gold again.
It appeared strange, enchanted, like the landscape of a fairy tale with a tragic ending. She had thought herself a princess, too special, too beautiful for her own hometown. Hugh-Jay had played her wealthy prince, and the big house in Rose had been their castle where they were going to live happily ever after inside its thick stone walls that were supposed to keep the three of them safe.
The Rocks above her looked now as if they had been washed in delicate pastels she would have stolen for a dress.
She had literally never noticed such beauty in the world before.
If her arms could have moved, she would have reached up to touch the amber moon and the winking stars that appeared from under the clouds as they scudded west to east. A memory from high school surprised her, because she couldn’t remember ever having paid much attention: From Missouri to the Colorado border, Kansas climbs nearly half a mile in altitude. Which teacher had said that? She couldn’t recall, and wouldn’t previously have cared, except that now the memory felt like someone kind had come to keep her company in her loneliness.
Thank you, she sent to the unremembered teacher.
Thank you, she repeated, to taste its novelty in her mouth.
But then that memory of the slant of Kansas gave her a sudden dizzying feeling of lying on a bed with her head lower than her feet.
Oh, God!
The world tilted back into flatness again, and she stopped worrying about dying by choking on her own seasick vomit.
