through and she watched as he worked his way to his feet using the walls of narrow hallway.
She closed and locked the door. Scotty would get the cuffs off, but it would take him a while. It would keep him away from her.
Suddenly too tired to stand, she sat back down on the bottom bunk. At her feet was the plastic-wrapped bundle Scotty had come across land and water to leave in Tinker’s way.
A growing dread would not allow her to open it slowly, scientifically. Grabbing two corners, Anna yanked the bag and shook it. The body of a baby tumbled out and she screamed.
But it wasn’t a baby. It was a plastic baby doll and it had been painted blue from head to foot.
TWENTY
Anna clicked through the rest of the pictures in Tinker’s Instamatic. She took two of the doll and two of the torn screen. When the film was used up, she rewound it and dropped the roll into her pocket. Tinker could not be trusted to be sufficiently hard-hearted. Anna could.
She wrapped the blue baby in its plastic shroud, then glanced at the clock: a rhinestone Sylvester, tail and eyes twitching off the seconds. After ten p.m. and she was marooned in Rock Harbor with no food, no wine, no dry clothes, no change of underwear, and no place to sleep.
Patience would just be closing the restaurant at the lodge. All Anna needed to do was look moderately pitiful and she would provide everything but the underwear. Anna bundled herself and the baby out the window, replaced the screen, and set off through the fog at a trot.
The lights of the lodge glowed a warm welcome. Coming out of the darkness of the trees, Anna felt as if she’d been lost in the wilderness for a month. “I once was lost, but now am found.” Whistling the old hymn, she felt her spirits rise.
Two parties, one of six and one of eight, still lingered in the dining room. Though they were subject to the glares of a waitress and two busboys, Anna was grateful to them. They had forced the kitchen to stay open. And the bar. She ordered pasta Alfredo and a glass of Chianti. The pasta was gooey and the bread reheated but, glad to be in a warm well-lit place where nice people brought food, she was not inclined to be picky.
Patience, looking tired but well groomed, had drifted over to Anna’s table and been wheedled out of an invitation to sleep on her sofa. By the time a pretty young waiter, angling for a tip, brought over a second glass of Chianti, Anna had begun to feel downright expansive. Even the snufflings of Carrie Ann, trying to chip the crockery at the sideboard, seemed more homey than sullen.
Near eleven the larger party called for their check and Patience felt she could go home. Carrie Ann in tow, she came by Anna’s table. Scarcely into her teens, Carrie was already taller and bigger than her mother.
“We are practicing togetherness.” Patience explained Carrie’s late hours as Anna pushed up out of her chair, then finished the last swallow of Chianti. “Surveillance in the guise of Motherly Love has taken the place of trust and ‘do your own thing.’ Certain persons of the childish persuasion seemed to think three a.m. was a good hour to retire.”
Anna found herself wishing Patience would address her insults/parables/whatevers to her daughter instead of banking them like an expert billiard player off Anna. No such thing as a free lunch, she reminded herself. She was to be had for a meal and a bed.
“More star-crossed disappearances?” Anna said to say something.
“In spades,” Patience replied.
“Oh God!” Carrie Ann rolled her oversized brown eyes. “What speech now? AIDS or ‘when I was your age’?”
“Shut up!” her mother snapped. To Anna she said: “Get your tubes tied.”
Anna began to wonder if partaking in this dispute was going to be too much to pay for a dry bed.
Shortly after they reached the Bittners’ apartment, Carrie disappeared into her room.
“Gad!” Patience threw herself onto the vinyl of an institutional rendition of an overstuffed chair. “I need a drink. Need, not want: the point when connoisseur becomes addict. Can I pour you something?”
“Whatever,” Anna replied. She wanted the hot shower, the flannel gown, the sofa Patience had lent her in the past, but, ever mindful of her beggar-not-chooser status, she schooled herself to listen to anything from confession to kvetching.
“Wine! Lord, what would we do without it?” Patience asked rhetorically. “Wine is about the only thing you can count on. Too bad you can’t choose vintage children. Can’t say, ‘Ah, yes, ’78, that was an excellent year for children. Sweet, a little precocious, but not impertinent.‘ Do you remember Prohibition?”
“Not firsthand,” Anna replied. “I’ve seen the movies. Loved Sean Connery in
“It almost killed the California wine industry. A crippling blow.” Patience brought two glasses of red wine over to the couch where Anna huddled dreaming of dry flannel gowns. “Some kept going in secret-like the Catholics in Communist Russia or the secular artists during the Inquisition-artists smuggling their art out of a repressive country.”
“Mmm.” Anna drank of the red. It slid down rich, uncompromising. “California?” she guessed.
“No!” Patience laughed. “Hungarian. Who cares?” she said with a sudden change of attitude. “Wine’s wine. It’ll get you there.”
“ ‘There’s’ not where it used to be,” Anna said wearily and, with the words, realized she’d probably consumed enough alcohol for one night.
“You sound like a woman who’s had a long day,” Patience observed.
“Long day,” Anna agreed. She found she didn’t want to talk about it, about Jo, Stanton and his pointed questions, about Scotty or blackmail or blue plastic baby dolls. What she wanted, she realized, was to watch TV. Preferably something familiar, something without too much violence.
“Isn’t
TWENTY ONE
A good night’s sleep had cleared Anna’s head. Sitting on Patience’s couch, warm in a tangle of bedclothes, she turned the doll between her hands. It was fairly realistic: the legs bowed, the arms were pudgy, the glassy blue eyes closed when the little body was placed on the horizontal. There were no marks of violence, no tiny broken legs, no doll-sized knife in its back. Nothing that Anna could see to indicate a threat. The blue was the only abnormality.
Blue to indicate death by suffocation or drowning, immersion in the icy waters of Superior; a death, or a burial like Denny Castle’s? Then why the “Hopkins” in the blackmail note?
Anna put the toy back in its garbage bag. “Patience, can I use your phone?” she hollered. From behind the bathroom door came a muffled affirmative.
A private phone: Anna felt the luxury of it as she lifted the receiver. Dutifully she recited her credit card number to a user-friendly AT amp;T operator and was channeled through long-distance information to the Hopkins Public Library. An efficient-sounding woman answered on the first ring. Anna introduced herself. “I’m doing a background check on a Theresa Coggins,” she told the librarian. “She lived in Hopkins from 1974 to 1980. Is there any way you could check the local paper for any reference to her during those years?”
Normally, no, but it wasn’t a busy morning and the librarian had always wanted to be a park ranger, so yes, this once. She would call back.
Patience emerged from the bath in a cloud of commercial scent. Her slender frame was draped with tasteful elegance in dove-gray linen with shoes to match. “How do you do it?” Anna asked.
“Perhaps I didn’t marry well,” Patience said with a wink, “but I divorced brilliantly. Carrie Ann!”
Looking dull as an ox beside her mother, Carrie trudged up the hall and was taken off to the lodge in maternal
