usual. It was Mary Ellen who had slowly begun to introduce the element of chance. Three years ago for Father’s Day, she had bought John a metal detector. They had begun by taking it on a vacation to Florida, and while Mary Ellen had sat on the beach getting sunburned, John had found fourteen dollars in change and a pretty good wristwatch. They had taken it to parks, and even walked along the Mississippi with it now and then. They had never found anything quite as good after that, but Paducah wasn’t Miami, either.
Over the past couple of years, a lot of their little adventures had to do with found money. They were adequately provided for, with John’s pension from the plant and Social Security. The money itself wasn’t the attraction. One time, when the Illinois Lottery had been up to forty million, they had driven over into Illinois and bought tickets. They hadn’t won, but they had started driving over for tickets about once a month after that.
That was how they happened to see the flyers saying “Find This Girl” and “Woman Missing.” They had driven up from Paducah one day, and when they had stopped for lottery tickets, John had picked up the flyers off the counter. They had decided to keep driving deeper into Illinois, looking hard at the faces of all the women they had seen. They had driven up to Marion, where the prison was. Then they had decided that if the women were somewhere around the prison, the only major routes they had not covered on the way up from Paducah lay to the north. They had ended up here in Terre Haute, Indiana. It had been like a dream. They had come into this hotel to eat dinner, and there was “Find This Girl” sitting at a table overlooking the garden all by herself.
“Did you get through to them?” she asked quietly.
He nodded happily. “I did. They said they’d check it out right away.”
“And they took your name and address and everything?”
“You bet,” he whispered. “All they’ve got to do is come and see for themselves that it’s the same one, and we’re going to get the money.”
“If it’s the right one,” she reminded him.
“Of course it is,” he said. “Look for yourself.”
Mary Ellen tried to keep the excitement at a low level, the sort of feeling she could manage without getting a fluttery heart or something. She ventured another glance, and she felt her heart quicken a little. There was absolutely no question it was “Find This Girl.” Now she let herself hope that “Woman Missing” showed up before the investigators did. That would be twice the money.
As Mary Ellen ate her dinner, she felt a little bit guilty about her good fortune. The flyers had implied that “Find This Girl” was some sort of runaway child. Sometimes what that meant was that there was some terrible story involving abuse. Either that was the reason why they left home, or what everybody feared had happened to them since. It would be a shame to get rich and then find out that her windfall and John’s had been based on something like that. She tried to reassure herself with thoughts about “Woman Missing.” She looked quite a bit older, and what was said about her implied that she was a criminal, not a victim. Maybe Mary Ellen would be the one who saved the girl and put the criminal in jail.
Mary Ellen was all the way through her dessert—an apple cobbler with vanilla ice cream—and she still could see no sign of policemen or detectives. Maybe John had given them directions that were too vague, or completely wrong. Maybe they had heard his voice and thought he was a nut.
The waiter brought the girl her check in a leather folder. She signed it, got up, and left. Mary Ellen looked at her husband in horror. “She’s leaving.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“But if they don’t get here, she’ll be gone, and we won’t get the reward.”
“Sure we will,” he said. “Didn’t you see the way she signed the bill?”
Mary Ellen was sure her husband had lost his mind. “What was I supposed to see?”
“She didn’t give him a credit card. She just signed it, and wrote a room number. She’s not leaving. She’s staying at the hotel.”
35
Jane reached Terre Haute at eleven-thirty at night. She felt a kind of exhaustion that was strangely pleasant. At some point, a week or a month from now, she would think back on all of the driving and the tension and the endless watchfulness, and it would probably be difficult to reconstruct how it had all happened. Right now, she knew that the pleasure of a long, hot bath and a soft bed would be enough.
She drove past the car rental agency, and she could see that it would be possible to leave the car now and drop the key in a lockbox, but she drifted past the entrance and sped up again. It didn’t look as though there was anyone on duty to give her a ride to the hotel. She drove toward the hotel, but resisted the temptation to simply park in the lot and step into the lobby. The money was gone, but she, Rita, and Bernie weren’t finished yet. Having a car that nobody knew about was not a small advantage if something had gone wrong while she was away. She drove up the street one block west of the hotel and parked.
Jane walked to the end of the block and turned toward the hotel. It was a warm, humid summer night, and even in this commercial part of town, she could hear crickets. She supposed the lawns and gardens of the hotel were part of the reason, but she could hear the sounds coming from a row of low rosebushes along the facade of an insurance agency to her right, then from a patch of azaleas in front of a women’s clothing store.
Jane reached the street where the hotel entrance was, but she didn’t cross at the intersection. Instead, she turned and walked up the sidewalk across from the hotel. When she had achieved the proper angle, she could see the reflection of the chandelier on the shiny floor of the brightly lit lobby. When she had gone thirty paces farther, she knew that she would be able to see the parking lot.
She knew that it was unlikely that she would see that Rita and Bernie had taken the Explorer and run, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth checking. The Explorer was still there, exactly where she had parked it when they’d arrived. She half-turned to go back to the intersection and cross the street, but something made her stop.
There was a van in the guest parking area. It was nearly midnight, a bit late for deliveries, and this wasn’t a van that somebody used as a car, because the back door had printing that said, “How am I driving? Call (800) 555- 1100.” She kept walking on, trying to achieve the proper angle to read the name of the company on the side. When she had reached the right spot, she could see the name: Mayfair Products. She knew she might be letting weeks of extreme caution overrule her sense of proportion, but she decided to satisfy herself.
Jane kept walking until she found a pay telephone on the front of a discount drugstore a block away. She pulled from her purse the little folder the clerk had handed her at check-in to hold the key cards, read the telephone number, and dialed. When the operator answered, she said, “Room 224, please.”
The telephone rang three times before she heard a click and the sound of breathing. She didn’t wait for Bernie to speak. “Bernie? It’s me.”
His voice was hoarse from sleep. “What? Where are you?”
“I’m across the street and down one block at a pay telephone. I was on my way in, but I saw something that worried me. Has anything gone wrong since I left?”
“I haven’t seen anything. We haven’t left the place. The only time either of us has been out of the room was when Rita went down to eat dinner. She said there was nobody but old codgers. What did you see?”
“There’s a delivery van in the parking lot. It might be fine, but it’s parked in kind of an odd place—not near a loading zone, but close to the side door where the first-floor rooms are. It says ‘Mayfair Products’ on it. I remembered Trafalgar Flowers, and—”
“Trafalgar Square Flowers, Parliament Park grocery stores, Belgravia Broadcasting.”
“Then it is Delfina?”
“I don’t keep track of everything the bastard owns, but do you want to bet it’s just some schmuck who misses London?”
“No,” said Jane. “Wake Rita up. If they know we’re here, then they know the Explorer’s ours. I’ve got the rental car parked on a street parallel to the front of the hotel, one block over. Do you remember what it looks like?”
“Remembering things isn’t my problem. White Chevy, license number—”
“Enough,” she interrupted. “I’ll leave the keys on the ground behind the right front tire. You and Rita come down the stairwell, then out the door by the swimming pool. Go through the garden by the restaurant, and out to the street on that side. Go one block up before you cut over to the street where the car is.”
