my car, then we went back to her place. We had the letters with us the whole trip, and as I drove us back, Belinda looked through them. When she was finished, she bundled them together again and we carried them into her place.
It was really cool inside, especially after we’d been out in the heat all day, and we put the letters on the coffee table and got something to drink. We sat and drank and didn’t look at the letters. We soon found ourselves in the shower, where it was necessary to use the soap bar on each other so we could get to all those hard-to-reach spots. The water was warm but it wasn’t warm like the outside air. It was pleasant and we spent a long time in there, then rinsed in cold water until we shook.
We toweled off and lay in the bed under the covers. I told Belinda some things about that sex book I had been looking at in the garage, but neither of us was particularly inspired; the heat had sapped us. Without meaning to, we fell asleep.
When I awoke the room was dark. Night had fallen. I got out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Belinda. Still nude, I padded into the living room and sat down on the couch and took the bundle of letters off the coffee table.
I looked through them. Caroline was mentioned in them. A lot. The letters were obviously Mrs. Soledad’s response to letters written by Ronnie. Just being on the receiving end, not having Ronnie’s letters, I wasn’t exactly sure what some of it meant. But I could tell this: Ronnie was worried about Caroline and so was Mrs. Soledad, up to a point. I got the feeling maybe Mrs. Soledad didn’t miss Caroline as much as Ronnie did.
I read through the letters a couple of times. A lot of them weren’t about Caroline and were just hometown things. From the letters I understood that Soledad lived outside of Cleveland, Texas. That was about two hours from where we were.
I turned on Belinda’s computer and looked up Cleveland, and I looked up Mrs. Soledad’s address. It was there, easy as could be to find. There was even an aerial view of her house.
I was looking at the aerial view and thinking about some of the things in the letters when a hand clapped down on my shoulder and I jumped.
Belinda said, “Looking up porn sites.”
I turned. She hadn’t bothered with clothes either. I said, “Hey, I’m living one. Why look it up?”
She smiled at me. “What you got there?” she said.
“An address. Now all I need is a phone number.”
33
It didn’t take much research to find Mrs. Soledad’s phone number. Next morning, I called her and told her I wanted to talk to her about Ronnie, asked if she knew where Ronnie was these days.
“No,” she said. “But I don’t talk about things like that over the telephone.”
I gave her my background, told her I was running down a story about missing women, meaning Ronnie and Caroline, and from some letters I had come across, I knew she knew them well.
Mrs. Soledad was silent for a moment.
“Letters?” she asked.
I explained.
“Those were private,” she said.
“Came across them by accident, and we’re doing an investigation.”
“We?”
“My assistant and I.”
“I don’t know I like you going through letters I’ve written.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Soledad. We just sort of came across them.”
“Did you have permission? Isn’t there a law about that?”
“They had been confiscated by the landlord for back rent. He gave us permission to look through what was left.”
No word from the other end.
“You know that Caroline went missing?” I said.
“Of course. Ronnie told me. We exchanged letters and phone calls. Mostly letters. I don’t do that new thing everyone does.”
“New thing?”
“Mailing off the computer.”
“Oh. E-mail.”
“That’s right. We did it the old-fashioned way. Envelopes and stamps. But, yes, I knew Caroline. I knew her well.”
“Can you tell me about her and Ronnie?”
“You come see me. I see you face-to-face, then maybe I’ll want to talk.”
“All right,” I said.
“You get here, I’ll be the one with a .357 in my lap.”
“Oh.”
“No. I mean it. Come on, but you better have good intentions.”
“I use my powers only for good.”
“Yeah, well, you better.”
She gave me the directions I already had from the Internet. Belinda and I drove over to Cleveland in my junker. When we left, a dark cloud came in from the west and brought thunder and lightning with it. The noonday sky was dark as midnight. We drove with the headlights on. We saw a strand of lightning hit the ground out in a pasture, and when it hit, the world lit up brighter than a floor show in Las Vegas, made my vision go white for an instant. When we were a half hour out from Cleveland, the bottom of the cloud collapsed and down came rain. We had to turn the windshield wipers on high. One of my wiper blades was a wounded soldier. Part of it came loose, slapped frantically at the windshield.
It was still raining when we got into Cleveland. Mrs. Soledad lived in a little white house just off the highway with a covered porch with a swing on it and a couple of cloth foldout chairs. As we drove up in the yard, the wind picked up the chairs and slapped them across the porch and hung them up in the swing.
Belinda and I sat in the car for a moment. The driveway ended some twenty feet from the porch steps, in front of a closed-up garage. I said, “I’m thinking about the .357 she mentioned.”
“She shoots you,” Belinda said, “I’ll go for help.”
“Comforting.”
About that time, a woman, who I surmised was Mrs. Soledad, came out on the porch. I didn’t see the .357 in her hand. She waved us in.
“Here we go,” I said, and I opened my door and slid out, and Belinda slid out behind me. We fought our way through the rain, and the moment we stepped up on the porch steps, the wind picked up again, jerked one of the cloth chairs out of its tangle against the swing, carried it away in a swirl, just missing us. I watched it fly off the porch, hit the yard twice, like a skipping rock, then go sailing into a stand of trees where it got hung up.
I gave a hand to Belinda and helped her onto the porch. I turned and looked at Mrs. Soledad. She was about five feet tall with black hair streaked with gray, and she had a little body and a pleasant face. She looked elderly, but spry, like an android version of a grandma. In spite of this, I kept the .357 she had mentioned in mind.
“Sorry about your chair,” I said. “Rain slacks, I’ll get it for you.”
“Don’t worry about the chairs,” she said. She pushed the screen door wider. “Come on in. It’s gotten chilly out here. Not to mention wet.”
The other chair gave way then, came up and over the swing, banged against one of the chains that supported the swing, then darted off the open end of the porch and sailed out to join its cousin.
Inside it was a little cool, but nothing like outside. The place was dark and smelled of Lysol. After a moment my eyes adjusted, and I could see the place looked like the classic grandma home, with knickknacks here and there, and a big comfy couch with a Chihuahua lying on it like something stuffed. There was a small blackened fireplace and some really thick, comfy chairs nearby. Out a back window I could see a big fenced-in yard being rained
