Unless you’re wearing goggles or a helmet with a face shield, driving without a windshield is not the freeing experience you might expect it to be. All kinds of grit, grime, and insect life came blowing up off the road. I made another stop and searched for my sunglasses.
By then Carrie had shaken the circulation back into her hands, cut the tape from her ankles, and bravely ripped it free from her face.
“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” I asked, handing her the blanket so that she could use it to shield her face and eyes from debris.
“I’ll be okay,” she said, cautiously touching the tips of her fingers to the marks left on her face by the tape. “I’m just kind of scared.”
“Something would be seriously wrong with you if you weren’t. I’m sorry about the rough ride. But I think we’ve lost them, whoever they were.”
“My uncle Giles,” she said angrily.
“What?”
“Uncle Giles,” she said, pulling her feet up onto the edge of the seat and rubbing her ankles. “He runs the school. Fletcher Academy.”
I tried to let that sink in as we turned onto what looked like a promising road.
“On the phone, he was talking to someone named Cleo,” I said. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
“No.”
“A woman. Tall, athletic, short brown hair. Probably in her late twenties. At first I thought she was a man.”
“A woman who looked like a man?” She thought for a while, then said, “I have a lot of cousins, and I haven’t met all of them, but I can’t think of anyone who looks like that.”
If you asked me to retrace the route I took from there, it would require hypnosis to pull the memories out. I really didn’t have a clear idea of where the hell I was at any given moment, or where I was going. An aerial view of my progress would have made me look like the mouse voted least likely to find the cheese.
Eventually I ended up on Pearblossom Highway. We attracted a certain amount of attention, which I hoped would lead to some cell phone calls to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, but I kept driving until I found a minimart gas station that was fairly busy.
We were both dirty and dehydrated, and I suppose our hair made it look as if we had tunneled out of a fright-wig factory. I found my wallet and went inside with Carrie. She took hold of my hand, which was fine with me-I wasn’t exactly feeling all that steady myself. I asked the clerk to please call the sheriff’s department, because someone had shot at us and blown out our windshield. He peered out at the van, then made the call. He was solicitous after that, allowing us to use the restroom to wash up a bit, not charging us for the bottled water we wanted to buy, and even letting me use the phone. A cynic might say that it was only about five bucks’ worth of kindness, but to us, after about three hours of terror, it seemed as if we had found the most generous soul on earth.
Frank, as it turned out, had been looking for me by the time I called.
“We were supposed to have lunch, remember? Then Lydia said you had hurried out, and I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone…”
“Sorry, but a dead man’s got it now. I was abducted. With Blake Ives’s daughter. We’re okay now, though. I think.”
I should have broken it to him differently, but I wasn’t thinking all that clearly by then. Now that I was out of the way of immediate harm, reaction was setting in.
I interrupted his own quite understandable reaction and said, “I’m borrowing someone’s phone, so I can’t talk long. Can you come out to the sheriff’s station in Palmdale-maybe see if you can get Zeke Brennan to come along with you? I’m not in as much trouble as I was in an hour ago, but I think I’ll need an attorney. And I…” I took a deep breath, struggled to stay calm. I tried to give him a condensed version of my day so far. He interrupted, asked for the phone number I was calling from, and wanted me to tell him exactly where I was and to give him the name of the store. So I handed him over to the clerk, who provided all of that information, then handed the phone back to me. He was looking at Carrie and me in wonder.
“Are you okay?” Frank asked.
“Getting there.” I asked him to call Blake Ives, and to try to reach Roy Fletcher, who might still be at Graydon Fletcher’s place. “And if he’s got a girl named Genie with him, I think that might be Caleb’s sister-Oh, here’s the sheriff’s department,” I said, seeing a cruiser pull up. “Oh, and the Express.”
“The Express is there?” he asked with some heat.
“No, but will you call them?”
“Maybe. That may cause some difficulties. Let me talk to the deputy.”
Apologizing to the clerk, I waited for the deputies to come inside, then handed the phone to one of them saying, “It’s for you.”
Before he took it, he asked his partner to wait outside with us.
Carrie, who had stayed huddled next to me, was trembling as we walked out. I put an arm around her shoulders, and her tears began to fall. Part of it was undoubtedly just the scare setting in, as it was for me as well, but it occurred to me that she had probably never been this far from home or around so many strangers at one time.
“You okay?” I asked. “Sure you aren’t hurt?”
“What will they do to me?” she whispered.
“Do to you? What do you mean?”
“I mean, who will I live with?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it for a moment. “Maybe your father, Mr. Ives. Or they may find someone for you to stay with while they sort things out. They’ll probably try to contact your…your dad, and I know they’ll try to find out where your mom is.”
She looked away from me, then started crying hard. She curled back into my shoulder. I tried to think of words that might soothe her, and decided just to let her cry. I don’t think she had any more real hope that her mom was alive than I did.
After a time, she quieted.
“Do you have kids?” she asked in a small voice.
“No, I don’t.”
“Don’t you like them?”
“Oh no, I like them a lot. Why do you ask?”
She turned red. “Maybe they’d let me stay with you.”
I hugged her shoulders. “I would love to have you stay with us, but I don’t get to decide that. Besides, you might not like it-I have a husband, a friend, three dogs, and the fattest cat you ever saw living at my house. Here, I’ll show you.” I opened my wallet and flipped to the photos of Frank, Deke and Dunk, and Cody. “I don’t have pictures of our friend Ethan or of Altair yet. They’re just visiting.”
She asked questions about the animals and Frank. We only spent a few minutes doing this, but somehow it had a calming effect on both of us.
OVER the next several hours, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Huntington Beach Police Department, and the Las Piernas Police Department all wanted to talk to us. So did a tremendous number of members of the media, although they didn’t get much more than footage of us leaving the LASD Palmdale Station. They made up for that by talking to neighbors in Huntington Beach (“very quiet,” “kept to themselves”) and getting aerial shots of an abandoned BMW and the removal of remains from the desert.
The bodies of Giles Fletcher and Bonnie Creci/Victoria Fletcher had been found half a mile from the border of the Angelus National Forest, a half-mile that kept the Park Service and the FBI off the list of our questioners.
Frank arrived with three passengers. I had expected Blake Ives and my attorney, Zeke Brennan, but I was amazed to also see Graydon Fletcher, who was hanging back a bit.
As he hugged me, Frank whispered, “You okay?”
I nodded.
“Don’t worry about Graydon.”
