Melanie caught her at the door and the two women embraced. Melanie was crying now, but Beth seemed to have control of herself. She knew better than anyone that this was life or death for her, and one world or another for Adam.
Melanie said, “Goddammit, Carver, you better take good care of this lady.”
Carver said, “Things’ll work out.” Though he wasn’t so sure.
“You have my phone number,” Melanie reminded Beth. “You need to put your mind at ease about Adam, call me anytime.”
Beth swallowed hard, tried to speak but merely croaked. She bowed her head and moved out onto the porch.
She walked slowly across the street so that Carver could keep up. He took her suitcase from her, unlocked the Olds’s cavernous trunk, and hoisted it inside. Got his own travel-scarred leather suitcase from the backseat and laid it next to the tweed Gucci. It looked like a worn-out bum who’d sneaked into bed with a countess. There was an airline luggage tag attached to the handle of Beth’s suitcase, with her name and address scrawled on it.
Carver tugged at the tag until the elastic loop attaching it to the suitcase handle snapped. The damn thing whipped around and stung the back of his hand. He crumpled the stiff paper tag and tossed it out of sight in the shadows of the trunk, then slammed the trunk closed.
He opened the passenger-side door for Beth. She seemed to expect it. Sliding her shapely rear backward into the Olds, she pressed her knees tightly together and swung her long legs up and sideways.
Wondering if women practiced getting into cars that way, Carver closed the door. He limped around the Olds and lowered himself in behind the steering wheel, then bent forward and twisted the key in the ignition. The powerful engine ground, caught, and roared. It had barely caught its mechanical breath when he shoved the transmission lever into Drive. The tires
Beth couldn’t help it; she glanced back at the house as the car pulled away.
Carver peeked, too, in the mirror.
Melanie was standing on the porch and waving as if she’d never see her friend again.
And maybe she wouldn’t.
20
He took interstate 95 north, then cut west. The top was up on the Olds, but the air conditioner wasn’t working, so all the windows were cranked down. Air crashed and swirled through the car and ballooned out the canvas top as if it were inflatable. Carver drove fast, eyes fixed on the highway that narrowed in perspective to a thin, pinched break in the flat landcape wavering in the heat.
Almost shouting to be heard over the boom of the wind, Beth said, “Where we going on this date?”
She’d taken a shot at humor even in her predicament; Carver liked that. He continued staring straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel. “Place called Dark Glades.”
She digested the information. “That a town?”
“It thinks so.” While on a case a few years ago, Carver had stayed in the swamp town of Solarville and thought it was backward and isolated. But on the drive back to civilization he’d passed through Dark Glades, and all of a sudden Solarville seemed progressive.
Beth knew they were driving toward the Everglades. “This Dark Glades one of those backwater swamp places?”
Carver said, “It won’t remind you of Miami.”
“Not the kinda surroundings I been used to, Carver.”
“That’s the idea.”
“You think Roberto’s not smart enough to figure I’d try to fool him by running someplace I wouldn’t ordinarily go?”
“Got nothing to do with smart,” Carver told her. “Roberto will assume you think like he does, with the gut instead of the brain.
“You say fish heads?”
“Figure of speech. Anyway, this makes sense. Does Roberto underestimate you because you’re a woman?”
“Sure. It’s built into a guy like that.”
“Uh-huh. That what made you think you could get by with this in the first place?”
“That’s part of it,” she answered immediately, as if she’d given the matter a lot of thought. “The other part was pure desperation.” She flexed her long, dark fingers, as if they’d become stiff and needed the knuckles loosened. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her glance over at him. “You underestimate me because I’m a woman, Carver?”
“Probably.”
Beth was silent for a long time. Then she said, “You’re most likely right with this choice of hideaways, Carver, but I’m not gonna like this.”
“You might change your mind. It’s rustic.”
“Back in Chicago, rustic means old.”
He said, “Old’s what I want us to live to be.”
They reached Dark Glades just before nightfall. Even in the soft dusk, the flat-roofed wooden buildings lining Cypress Avenue, the main street, didn’t seem rustic. They looked ancient and ready to collapse beneath the weight of their years. The swamp humidity had turned whatever colors the wooden buildings had been painted to a dreary, mottled gray. The only brick buildings Carver saw were the combination fire department and police headquarters, a small restaurant, and the office of an auto-repair shop with a couple of gas pumps standing outside it like bored sentries. The Olds was the only vehicle moving on the roughly paved street. Several old cars and pickup trucks were parked on the gravel shoulder or angled in front of some of the small shops. Half a dozen pedestrians, the men rough-looking in cut-off shirts with jeans or denim overalls, stood slouched on the edge of the road and stared at the Olds. A strange car usually meant fishermen from outside town, or maybe some lost motorist. Or trouble.
Beth said, “Pissant place don’t even have a McDonald’s.” Though she spoke better English than Carver did, she’d let herself ease into occasional echoes of street dialect on the hot and exhausting drive. She was more comfortable with him now. Less guarded. Maybe she liked him. He wondered why he thought that. What difference did it make?
“There’s where we can dine out,” he said, motioning with his head toward the restaurant.
“I dunno if I wanna eat at a place called Wiff’s,” Beth said dubiously.
“It’s ‘Whiffy’s,’ ” Carver corrected her. “See, part of the neon sign’s burned out, but it’s lettered there on the window.”
“Yeah, right near the dusty fern.” She pointed at a leaning clapboard building with a sign over its door. “Looka that, there’s moss on City Hall.”
Carver looked. Sure enough, the flimsy structure was the city hall, and sure enough there was a greenish film of moss near the roof on the north side. There was also moss on a statue of what looked like a World War I doughboy standing erect and aiming a rifle. Might even have been moss on the old man slumped on the bench near the statue.
As they neared the edge of town, the buildings became even more rundown, and many of them were up on stilts and in the shade of towering cypress trees.
Beth said, “Must flood a lot around here, people gotta live up in the air.”
“Keeps the alligators out,” Carver told her.
The road outside town became narrower and paved with gravel. It was raised a few feet above the level of the swamp water, flanked by tall saw grass and trees with exposed, gnarled roots that resembled massive, bare vines. Insects droned almost deafeningly and the air was suddenly cooler.
Carver saw a wooden sign up ahead; the Casa Grande Motel was where he’d remembered it. Soon another
