She left Charlie Jeffords there on the couch. She hurried down the hall and let herself out the back way.
There’d be time enough later to think back on it. She’d have a lifetime to wonder if she’d acted like a frightened fool.
Now all she wanted was to put some distance between herself and the woman in the truck.
She stood on the back porch, flat against the wall, listening for some hint of how and when to make her break.
She heard the woman yell.
“Charlie!”
Then, when he didn’t answer, a shriek.
“
She heard the thumping sounds of someone racing up the front steps. At the same time she soft-toed down the back and doubled around the house.
She stopped at the corner and looked out into the yard. For reasons she only half understood, she was now thoroughly spooked.
There was no time to dwell on it. The truck sat empty beside her rental car: the woman had jumped out without closing the door or killing the engine.
Go, she thought.
Run, don’t walk.
She sprinted across the yard, jumped in her car, and drove away fast.
43
She looked at me across the table and said, “It seems silly now, and yes, before you ask, I do feel like a fool. I’ve never done anything remotely like that. To break and run just isn’t my nature. I can’t explain it.”
“You don’t have to. I’ve done a few things that I can’t explain either.”
“Charlie Jeffords never shot at anybody, and I don’t think the Rigby girl did either. Where does that leave us? All I can tell you is, the thought of being there when that woman came home was…I don’t know. The only thing I can liken it to is having to walk past a graveyard at night when I was a kid.”
“It’s like me walking through the blood at Pruitt’s house, and every dumb thing I’ve done since then. Sometimes you do things.”
“I don’t know, I had this feeling of absolute dread. My blood dropped to zero in half the time it takes to tell about it, and I was just…gone, you know?“
“So what did you think about it later, when you had time to think about it?”
“I kept thinking that one of the people who’s missing in this story is a woman, this Nola Jean Ryder. She’s always been the missing link.”
“You didn’t have much about her in your book.”
“I didn’t know much about her. She was just a girl Richard met and brought home. I couldn’t find out where she came from and nobody knows where she went. It’s like she dropped off the earth when the Graysons died.”
“How much work did you actually do on her, trying to track her down?”
“Quite a bit. Probably not enough. By then it was obvious even to me that I wasn’t going to get it in the book. I was still making more changes on the galleys than the publisher wanted to live with, and we were up against a horrendous deadline. The book was already scheduled and promoted as a March title and publishers want everything done yesterday.”
She shrugged and poured herself more coffee. “I had to let her go. Then, after the book came out, I tried to keep up with it, but I had a living to make. I wasn’t exactly Robert Ludlum, flush with royalties. It made me some money, but not enough to stop being a working gal.”
I reached for the coffeepot. “So what do you think about it now? Are you thinking this missing woman is hiding out down there in Taos?”
“When I saw the truck pull up, I didn’t think at all, I just wanted to get out of there. Halfway back to town I realized that, yeah, I had been thinking of them as one. In my head, Ryder had become Jeffords.”
“Which is at least possible, I guess.”
We looked at each other.
I said, “If you had to make book on it now, what do you think happened twenty years ago?”
