Читать книгу Girl Gone Missing - Marcie Rendon - Страница 8

Cash pulled herself up and out of her bedroom window. Fear propelled her, running barefoot, across the damp ground, listening to heavy breathing gaining on her. She ran toward the plowed field ahead, heading to town. Her foot sank into the cold dirt of the furrowed field. When she tried to pull her foot up, her front leg sank farther into the dirt. She threw herself forward, clawing with bare hands, her waist length dark brown hair caught in her hurried grasps. She could still hear the heavy, labored breathing of the person chasing her. Fear forced her from her body so she was soon flying above herself. Looking down she saw herself stretched out in the mud below, buried to her knees, arms flailing. Cash circled in the air above like a bird of prey looking down at a mouse in the field. She tried to see who was chasing her but the face was obscured in the darkness. Below, her own body changed to a paler, longer-legged, long-haired blonde. The young woman looked up at Cash and screamed, “Help me!”

Cash sat straight up in bed, then thudded back onto her pillow. Her heart was racing. The same dream, two nights in a row. Damn. She glanced over at the clock sitting on the dresser; the hands read 3:40. Cash reached over and flipped on the lamp sitting on the dresser, swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached around until she found the half-finished bottle of Bud on the floor. She killed it, lay back down without turning off the light, flipped over the pillow and fluffed it up under her head.

She ran the dream back through her mind. She remembered, in foster homes, having that dream as a recurring nightmare.

Always before in the dream, when she flew out of her body and looked back at who was chasing her, it was a foster parent. In those dreams, when she got stuck in the mud of the field and took off, up and out of her body and started flying, she eventually looked down. When she saw herself, she reached down and pulled herself up, out of the field and into the sky. But in this dream, when she looked down she saw another body there instead of hers. It creeped her out. She flipped the pillow again and this time folded it in half with her head stuck inside.

She needed to sleep. She planned to go ask the chair of science about testing out of biology and, if she was lucky, Professor LeRoy from the English Department would let her take that test tomorrow. She started counting backwards from ten. Ten-nine-eight and on to one. Then she started counting forward. She almost always fell back asleep before she reached fifty and tonight was no different.

She woke again at seven when the alarm went off. She brushed her hair, quickly braided it into one braid down the center of her back, washed her face while her coffee was brewing. She rinsed out her Thermos before filling it with hot coffee, made a fried egg sandwich, grabbed her book and notebooks off the kitchen table and headed to school.

The first place she stopped was LeRoy’s office.

“Oh,” he said, leaning back in his chair as she entered. “I looked up your grades. Not bad. You did all right in high school too, I see.”

Cash stood waiting.

“So…you still want to test out?”

“Yes.”

“Alright… if you’re sure. Come back here, not here, but to Room 103 in this building at two. Can you come at two?”

Cash nodded her head yes.

“Alright. Come back at two, Room 103, and we’ll see how you do. Bring a couple of pencils, sharpened, to write with. Most of it is multiple choice, but you’ll also have to write an essay.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is an essay going to be too hard?”

Cash shook her head and turned to leave.

“It’s early enough in the quarter, if you pass, you could register for the next level English,” LeRoy said to her back.

Cash hadn’t thought about that. Wasn’t ready to think about that. “I’ll think about that,” she said as she left. She pulled the heavy door shut behind her.

Maybe she could do this school thing without taking any classes, she thought as she walked through the English building, her footsteps along with the voices of other students echoing off the hardwood floor.

After she sat through what she hoped was her last boring English 101 class, she stepped out into the fall air and fought the urge to keep walking right to her Ranchero, to drive north along the river…or go to the Casbah…or go eat. To do anything but go to science class and take that stupid test. Instead, she walked across the Commons and entered the science building, trudged up the stairs to the second floor.

Sharon was already there, sitting front and center, wearing a different miniskirt than she had worn the day before. This one had fake fringe leather on the hem. Sharon leered at Mr. Danielson’s back as he wrote notes on the blackboard.

Cash took her usual spot at the back of the room. She was done with the test way before most of the other students. Mr. Danielson had said they could leave once they were finished. But, rather than call attention to herself by being the first one up, Cash pretended to keep working while looking around the room at the other students. Her mind drifted to her dream of the blonde screaming for help, the blonde who just a week ago sat at the front of the room where Sharon now sat. Thinking about the dream raised the hair on the back of her neck.

Cash caught Mr. Danielson staring at her. She ducked her head and pretended to write more on the test. Finally two guys got up and turned their tests in. Thank god. A few seconds later, Cash gathered her books and papers from under the desk, dropped her test on Danielson’s desk and walked out of the room, down the stairs into the fresh air. She shivered, and not from the cold. Danielson gave her the creeps.

She remembered she was going to ask Chairman Olsen of the Science Department about testing out too. She went back in the building, found his door and walked through the same conversation she’d had earlier with the chair of the English Department. The Science chair was less verbal. He looked at her through horn-rimmed glasses. He had a pencil stuck behind his left ear. He mumbled, “Sure, come in on Friday at noon.”

Cash nodded and got the heck out of his room. It reeked of formaldehyde.

She was halfway across the Commons on her way to the rec room when Sharon caught up with her. She babbled on for the next hour, over the sound of pool balls dropping, about how groovy Mr. Danielson was. After forty minutes, Cash cleared the table one last time, and told Sharon to “get over it.”

At the end of the hour she went to her psych class. The information in this class was new to her. She found the reading and homework easy, but she didn’t think it would make sense to try to test out of it.

After psych, she went to judo in the school gym. She threw and got thrown for an hour. At the end, she was breathing hard, exhausted. She was going to have to start exercising like she used to in high school. Without working in the fields full time, she could tell she was losing muscle.

Right at two, Cash returned to Room 103 in the English building. The class was in progress, but when LeRoy saw her looking in the door window, he motioned for her to come in. He handed her some standardized test pages and a few pages of lined blank paper. “Your essay should be a comparative essay on Shakespeare and a twentieth-century poet or writer. There’s a desk at the back you can sit at. Just bring it all up here when you’re finished.”

Cash was done with the multiple-choice test a few minutes shy of fifteen. She sat and stared out the classroom window for another ten. There was a maple tree, its leaves brilliant fall red. A small bird, a wren, hopped from branch to branch. Cash thought about the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—“Et tu, Brute?”—and how many times she had been betrayed, or felt betrayed, by families who swore to the social workers’ faces, faces that were either lined with worry or a churchy cheerfulness, that they would care for her. She thought about Langston Hughes’ poem, Dream Variations. Before she gave up hope, she had dreamed of a day when she could whirl and dance in the sun. She was startled out of her reverie by LeRoy blocking out the window.

“You going to be able to finish?”

“Of course,” answered Cash. She grabbed up her pencil. For the next twenty-five minutes, she wrote without stopping. When the bell rang, she put a period on the last sentence and wrote her name at the top of each page. She handed them to LeRoy and walked out of the room, making a beeline for the door. Outside she gulped fresh air and looked to the red maple where the wren continued its hopping.

Mission accomplished.

Cash drove through the town of Moorhead. Lawns were turning brown. Orange and yellow leaves were falling from the trees. It wasn’t winter cold yet, but the fall chill was in the air. She stopped at the red light on Main and lit up a Marlboro waiting for the light to change. Station wagons passed by, driven by farm wives in town for doctor’s appointments or grocery shopping. Ford pickup trucks pulling broken farm equipment dropped chunks of field dirt on the pavement on their way to the implement shop. On the radio, Merle Haggard turned twenty-one in prison while his mama cried. For a fleeting second, Cash wondered about her own mom, but she quickly shut that door in her mind. She took another drag of her cigarette and turned up the volume on the radio.

Back at her apartment, she put the tuna sandwich she had gotten at the Silver Cup in her lunch box with a full Thermos of coffee. She changed into work clothes and headed north along the river.

As she neared Perley, she could see Wheaton’s cruiser sitting in the graveled parking lot of the town’s grain elevators. As she got closer, Wheaton flashed his headlights at her. She pulled in alongside his car, driver window to driver window.

“How’s school?”

“Okay.”

“Passing?”

“Of course.” Smoke from her cigarette filled the air between them.

“Have you heard anything more about the Tweed girl?”

“Nah. Nothing more than last time we talked. Folks just speculating on where she is, who she might have run off with.”

“Her folks are mighty concerned. Say she never would have just run off.”

Wheaton’s big hands twisted nervously around the cruiser’s steering wheel. “I know you’re busy with school and all and driving beet truck, but I was wondering if you’d have a couple minutes to run up to their farm in Shelly with me and see if you can pick up anything that might be useful. Mind you, I wouldn’t want you to say anything to her folks, just go up there with me, get a sense of them.”

He watched a car on the highway speed past. They tapped on the brakes when the driver saw Wheaton’s car. Wheaton flipped on the police flashers. The car on the highway slowed even more. “Maybe they’ll think twice next time.”

Cash flipped her cigarette out onto the gravel. Help me, echoed in her mind from her dream. “Okay,” she answered. “Follow me to Wang’s so I can leave my truck there and ride with you. You can drop me back at startin’ time?”

Wheaton turned on his car. “See you there.”

As he started to roll up his window, a little black dog popped its head up in the back seat.

“What is that?”

“Oh, him,” said Wheaton.

“I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“I didn’t. But I was out driving the other evening by the old Johannsson farm. I was just driving, you know, and I saw this gunny sack moving down the road.”

“Gunny sack?”

“Gunny sack. First I thought the wind was blowing it. But there wasn’t any wind, the sack was moving itself down the road. I pulled over and walked up to it, I could hear this pitiful whining. It was tied shut with twine. I thought maybe it was a bag of kittens that someone was trying to get rid of, but when I untied the bag this little guy was in there. Scrawny, must have been the runt of the litter that someone threw out and left for dead. Now he won’t leave my side.”

Wheaton looked over his shoulder at the puppy. Wheaton was a big guy. He filled the front seat, his build like an ex-football player. He kept his hair cut military short and more often than not his face was stern, the face of a cop who knew he had to mean business. But when he looked at the pup his whole face softened.

“Kinda cute—for a runt. What’d you name him?”

“Gunner.” The little dog perked his ears up. “Gunnysack is too long a name.”

“Now you have a full-time deputy to ride with you,” Cash said, shaking her head in amusement. “I’ll meet you at the farmstead.”

She pulled out, spinning gravel just for the heck of it and took off about twenty mph over the speed limit for five miles before dropping down to the posted limit. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw Wheaton cruising up behind her.

As long as she’d known him, he’d never had a wife or kids or a pet. Once she dared to ask him if he was married. He brushed off the question with a quick no and moved on to another subject.

At the farmstead she hopped out of the Ranchero and got into the cruiser. Gunner jumped over the front seat and sat straight up between Wheaton and her, giving a low throat growl in Cash’s direction.

“Look at him,” she said. “He’s protecting you from me.”

Wheaton scratched the pup behind the ears. “Enough Gunner. She’s okay.” The dog laid its head on Wheaton’s leg.

“Looks like a mix between a black lab and a shepherd, you think?”

“Yeah, that’s kinda what I thought too.”

Wheaton put the cruiser in gear and headed out of the farm and down the county road. Cash caught the pup’s eye. He gave another throat growl.

“You better get used to me, mutt. I knew Wheaton long before you.”

“What’s with you and strays on gravel roads?” she asked Wheaton. “You picked me outta the ditch when I was a kid. Haven’t seen my mom since she rolled the car there, but somehow I have the law on my side. Not complaining, mind you but…” She looked down at the pup. “And now here’s this guy. How could someone just put ’em in a gunny sack and leave ’em for dead?”

“You know, folks do it all the time with cats. They want cats to keep the rats and mice out of the barns and grain bins, but after a few generations you can end up with twenty feral cats. Ain’t nothing to find a bag of them thrown in the river or down at the county dump. But this little guy, someone just threw him out like trash. He must have wanted to live, running down the road inside a gunny sack.” The pup laid its head back down on Wheaton’s lap.

Wheaton turned the car north on the paved highway going toward Shelly, a small town north of the county seat. Like all the other small towns around, the actual town’s population was under two hundred. It had one main street and it was the highway they were driving on. The prairie was so flat Cash could see the water tower seven miles out.

“Where’s their farm?”

“Just a couple miles north of town, then east a quarter of a mile. Told them we’d get there about 4:30.”

Wheaton checked his watch. They rode the last seven miles into town in an easy silence. Cash looked out her window at the fields that had been plowed under for the season. Corn and wheat, alfalfa and barley all harvested and either on trains to the Twin Cities or stored in barns and grain bins throughout the Valley. The only fields where men were still working were the beet fields. Even now, machines were out in the fields picking the beets. And trucks that only a month ago had been following combines around a wheat field were now loaded down and piled high with the grey-colored sugar beets, all headed south to the sugar beet plant.

Beet season took a toll on the county roads that the other crops didn’t. The truckload of beets weighed a lot more than corn or wheat, probably because the beetroots were water dense. They also tended to have field dirt clinging to them even though the newer machines were better at cleaning the large clumps off the roots before they were ever loaded on the trucks. As a result of the weight and the mud and the sheer number of trucks running night and day during beet harvest season, the county roads got torn up bad. And the paved roads developed a sheen of mud. This close to the Red River, the mud was mixed with river clay that was slicker than ice if a rainfall or early frost or, god forbid, an early snow coated the road.

They passed quickly through the small town of Shelly in the same easy silence. Main Street was bare of traffic. One lone pickup truck sat in front of the town bar. Cash felt the itch, wondering if they had a pool table. Not something Wheaton was likely to stop for. A trio of three teenagers walked down a side street. The yellow school bus that had just dropped them off was closing its door and pulling away. In towns this small, everyone knew everyone: those kids knew the Tweed girl. If not her, her brothers and sisters. Maybe they all went to the same church or 4-H club.

Wheaton sped up as they reached the town’s edge. Within minutes he was pulling into a farmyard. The house was an older two-story farmhouse, not one of the ranch-style houses some of the better-to-do farmers were having built. Their wives had grown tired of living in the “old” farmstead house, which had been built when the farms were first homesteaded in this area. Over the years, rooms were added on. Indoor plumbing was installed. Attics were turned into bedrooms as the family had more children.

Cash had lived in a few houses like that during her time in foster care. Once her room was a lean-to porch that was hotter than hell in summer and freezing cold in winter, while the social worker was made to believe she slept upstairs with the oldest daughter. In another home, her room was in a musty basement, the walls of fieldstone always damp to the touch. Cash hadn’t stayed there too long. Just long enough to be nursemaid to the foster mother after she gave birth to her seventh child. An ugly squalling bald lump of flour dough is how Cash had thought of the newborn.

A ginger-colored collie mix ran up to the cruiser. Gunner jumped on Wheaton’s lap growling furiously, the black fur on his neck standing straight up.

“Calm down, Gunner. Calm down. Get in back. Everything’s okay. Stay.”

Wheaton and Cash got out of the car. A man in work overalls and a blue shirt stood holding the door open, waiting for them to reach him. His blond hair hung over his furrowed forehead. His shoulders slumped. He wasn’t that old, probably not even forty, but he’d become an old man in the time since his daughter had disappeared. He didn’t say a word when Wheaton and Cash got to the door, just held it open and gestured with his hand to go on in.

Right inside the doorway, work clothes and jackets hung on farmer nails pounded into the wall. Work boots and shoes sat in a tidy row on a linoleum floor, right off the edge of a braided rag rug.

Mr. Tweed walked them to the round oak table in the kitchen with seven wooden chairs around it. He pulled one out for each of them. Cash looked around the room. Stove and fridge along one side. Kitchen sink underneath a window facing the driveway into the farmyard. Homemade curtains hung from the window. Tweed’s wife placed two ceramic mugs of hot coffee in front of them. Her shaking hands caused some coffee to spill on the table in front of Cash. “Sorry,” she mumbled as she turned and walked back to the kitchen counter.

She was tall and bony, wearing a yellow cotton dress printed with small violet flowers. Cash could see she’d sewn it herself. She recognized the pattern from one she had seen in the Life section of the Fargo Forum a few months before. Each Sunday the paper ran a picture of a sewing pattern women could mail order. When the pattern arrived, wives would go shop for fabric at JCPenney or the larger fabric store in Moorhead.

Mrs. Tweed had clearly taken pride in sewing the dress. The dress was topstitched in all the right places and even had front pockets with buttons sewn on. Judging by the wrinkles and food stains on the sides of the dress, Cash figured she’d been wearing the same dress for a few days. Her home-permed hair was pulled back with a rubber band. Loose strands hung limply around her sorrowful face. She grabbed a dishrag from the sink and another cup of coffee for her husband. She wiped up the small spill in front of Cash and sat down heavily on a wooden chair by her husband, damp dishrag still in her hand. He put his hand on her arm as if to assure her things were fine, though neither of them believed it.