Rosie understood “your father” because Amanda had always found something arch about “your daddy”—but at once, in order to remind her that there was no safe harbor, she said fearfully, Daddy all go—”
“Because he’ll be worried,” said Amanda, rushing to cover that and feeling obscurely that as long as she was talking she had some measure of control over her situation, “and so will your mother.”
“Daddy all gone, huh?” observed Dickens alertly, and then they were out in the windy cold.
It was still snowing. Amanda glanced automatically at her own earlier footprints, now shallow depressions visible only to someone looking for them. If she had had ten minutes more? But they would still have looked inside the church, knowing what it held, and even if she had had the courage and the strength to return Ellie Peale to concealment they would have followed the traces of moisture from her wet shoes and tracked her down like an animal.
Without a word, she was shepherded—Dickens in front, Ellie Peale’s still-unseen killer behind—toward a green pickup. It was like a stone in her chest to remember Maria Lopez, glowing in her cream pantsuit and blue eye makeup, handing over her fragile child and saying, “I can’t thank you enough. Merry Christmas. . . .”
At least, thought Amanda numbly as Dickens opened the door with an imperative gesture, it was not the murder van.
The van had been stolen, as confidently expected by Sweet, half an hour after he had abandoned it near Contessa Park two nights earlier.
Leaving a vehicle untended in this area, even without the keys in the ignition, was tantamount to leaving a roast of beef accessible in a house which contained a dog. Contessa Park, handy to a number of bars which tailed into the local skid row, was a magnet for petty criminals, vagrants, groups of malcontents, troublemakers of every variety. It was not unusual for a band of youths to while away a summer afternoon attacking any innocents who strayed into the park to shoot baskets on a cracked cement apron, and passing cars occasionally had their windshields shattered. Unless specifically summoned, the police inclined to give the place a wide berth.
A number of people came to New Mexico for reasons of health. So, indirectly, had Sal Arcudi, for whom there were eight warrants out in his native California. He had annexed to himself en route a stray named Shirley, a fact which mystified all who saw her: At nineteen she had a figure which seemed heavily and unsuccessfully corseted, and a countenance so forbidding that it suggested knitting and a scaffold.
Sal was down to his last twenty dollars, and Shirley to her last seven and her mother’s watch, when they came upon the van, keys in place. It could not have been called a jewel—its seats were splitting and only bright slivers remained of its rearview mirror—but there was half a tank of gas and Sal knew of a thicket along the river where they could pull in and, for a time, subsist. They were off in a twinkling.
Not surprisingly, because the police bulletin had been late in its issuance and there was no year, make, or even exact color to go by, they reached their destination unmolested. Both Sal and Shirley slept late in the morning, bundled into the sleeping bags they had traveled with, and when Shirley finally trudged up to the road and found a store where she could buy sweet rolls and a can of fruit juice, the morning papers had long since been sold out.
The van’s radio did not work until Sal, bored, skilled with his fingers, brought it to life by early afternoon. They listened to the news, in search of the weather forecast because they were contemplating El Paso, and stared at each other in wild surmise. There was no blood in the van, as far as they could see, but they might very well be stopped routinely on a highway. In addition to being wanted in California, Sal was five feet eleven and dark haired, and his fingerprints were now all over the van.
They wiped the surfaces with thoroughness, only realizing when they had finished that if this were the vehicle used in the abduction—and here they remembered those inviting keys—they might have erased the prints that mattered and inadvertently left one of Sal’s somewhere.
It was imperative to put distance between themselves and the van. The autumn winds had brought down a lot of small debris, and they piled it over the roof and hood, cementing it with matted cottonwood leaves; Shirley, growing tired and mulish, nevertheless made a number of trips up to the road to report on the effect. Then they took measuring stock of each other.
Shirley’s face was square; she wore her dark-blonde hair in grimly coroneted braids; even at a glance she weighed a good thirty pounds more than the missing girl described on the radio. Sal had begun to sprout a Fu Manchu moustache, but it Was still wispy enough to go unnoticed at a distance and in spite of the need for haste he took time to darken it generously with Shirley’s eyebrow pencil. Together, sleeping bags rolled and lashed to their backs, they would pass easily as a pair of sociology majors getting a late start home for the Christmas holidays.
Speed notwithstanding, they had done well. When they gained the road and glanced back and down, the van was invisible to any but
