Carol O’Connell: Find Me

“-a very strange, enchanted boy-”

The car tracker in Illinois assured Riker that the Volkswagen had not moved. Evidently, Mallory had pulled off the road to catch some sleep. Bonus. Breathing room.

He was near the edge of Pennsylvania with only two more states to cross before he entered Illinois. Easing up on the gas pedal, he lit a cigarette. Riker did his best thinking while smoking and coughing; it relaxed him.

The detective returned to the problem of the gunshot victim back in New York City. He was dead certain that Savannah Sirus had decided to take her life after meeting his young partner. One dark picture in his mind was of Mallory teaching her houseguest how to use the gun-so the woman would not bungle the job of self-murder. This bothered him for the next forty miles. Finally, he made peace with the possibility that a violently ruptured heart was Savannah’s o w n idea-maybe a metaphor. Perhaps the note left behind was true and the lady had died of love. Riker had suffered the same ailment once or twice, and this was something he could believe in-if only the note had been signed. Maybe Savannah had been too tired to write anymore, so tired of her life. She was always Savannah to him now. He was on a first-name basis with Mallory’s d e ad houseguest.

The victim’s personal effects were in the trunk of the car, and he had hopes of gleaning more from what had been left behind. But his primary mission was to get to Mallory before she cracked up in her mind or in her car.

Deep in reverie and losing track of time, Riker had driven across the Pennsylvania border and into Ohio before his cell phone beeped with another message from the Illinois tracker: Mallory’s c ar was on the move again.

The detective drove faster, pushing the speedometer’s needle toward the outside limit, and a sleeping bug beneath the gas pedal died horribly.

A packet of letters, tied with ribbon, slipped from the passenger seat to the floor mat. Mallory stopped the car to retrieve them, handling them gently, for they had been worn to torn creases during all the years when Savannah Sirus had owned them and read them every day. Mallory knew so many lines by heart and now recalled the description of “-awesome heaven and a constellation of stars that hung like notes to a road song.” She lifted her face to the sky for the last time that night and saw only a few pinpoints of light arranged with a lack of symmetry. There were no more instructions to follow until sunrise.

She had older guidelines than these, directions handed down by another man, her foster father. Louis Markowitz had given her rules for a life in Copland: Thou shalt protect the sheep; thou shalt not spend a bullet unwisely and get them killed in the process.

Nothing about stars.

However, the old man had loved rock ’n’ roll, and these letters shared his taste for songs by the Rolling Stones and The Who. She played them for miles and miles. Sometimes an old tune would coincide with favorites from Lou Markowitz’s collection of albums that dated back to the days of vinyl records. And when this happened, that old man rode with her for a stretch of highway the length of a song.

She needed food and sleep.

Tomorrow she would try again to grasp the new rules that Peyton Hale had laid down in his letters. The author, once a California boy, had grown to manhood. Homeward bound, he had retraced his old route, laying down tracks with an odd sense of direction. She had failed in her attempt to follow the illogical instruction for how to look at the road ahead by stopping to look up at the sky.

Click.

The undeveloped photograph came out of the mouth of the camera. The image was slow to emerge inside the square Polaroid format. Now a woman could be seen inside the brightly lit restaurant. Her hair was black, her clothes were red. Still as death, she sat there-in the photograph.

The actual woman was in constant motion, head turning, as if she could have heard the camera clicking out here in the parking lot. Framed once more in the viewfinder, she appeared to be posing for the next shot, frozen in a startled moment. But then she moved again, looking at the other customers, no doubt wondering if one of them was the source of her fears tonight.

Wrong.

And now she must sense that the danger was in the parking lot-good girl-for she picked up her red handbag and moved to another table far from the window.

The photographer started up his vehicle and drove out of the lot to park on a dark side street.

Mallory steered into the bright lights of Dixie Tr uckers Home. Tw o large commercial rigs, big as houses, were topping off their gas tanks at the diesel pumps. She counted ten trucks in the lot. There was only one car, a red sedan with out-of-state plates, though it was four o’clock in the morning and well past the tourist hours. With her knapsack slung over one shoulder, Mallory entered the restaurant and ordered coffee from the man behind the cash register. Then she moved on to the self-service islands with wells of food under warming lights.

A tray in hand, she shoveled robotically, hardly noticing what was heaping on the plate, yet she knew every detail of the room and its occupants seated in islands of ones and twos. The patrons were outnumbered by empty tables-ten men to match the big rigs in the lot and one fidgeting woman, feet tapping, eyes traveling everywhere, probably jazzed on too much coffee. This tourist could only belong to the small red car. Everything about the woman was a different shade of red: the semi-new shoes, baggy pants and a faded sweatshirt that draped her lumpy body like a tent. However, her hair was the black shade of a drugstore dye job and obviously styled in a bathroom mirror.

Mallory carried her tray to the most remote table, aware that all the truck drivers were smiling her way. Their conversations had stopped, and now they stripped her naked with their eyes. They were so fearless in their sense of entitlement-as if they were ticket holders to a strolling peep show. Oh, if eyes could only whoop and holler. She set her knapsack on the table, then removed her denim jacket and draped it over the back of a chair.

“Oh, Lord, ” said a passing waitress.

Sans jacket, Mallory displayed a shoulder holster and a.357 Smith & Wesson revolver. With the tight unison of chorus girls, the men turned their faces downward, as if finding their plates infinitely more fascinating.

Problem solved.

Only the waitress seemed to take the gun in stride, shaking her head, as if the lethal weapon might be some minor violation of a dress-code rule. The tourist in red was smiling broadly, raising her fist high in some yesterday symbol of solidarity and sisterhood.

Yeah, right.

Mallory pulled a small notebook from her back pocket and opened it to the page of landmarks. She checked off the green lions of Chicago and drew a line through the missing Cicero statue called Tall Paul. Another line was drawn through the lost ballfield. She checked off a second giant called the Gemini Man, a statue in a space suit, and made one more check for Funks Grove. The list of sights for Illinois was almost done. Only one roadside attraction remained unchecked and that was the Queen of the Road.

“Hi, my name is April.” The tourist in red was hovering over the table and waiting out that polite interval where Mallory would offer her own name in exchange, but seconds dragged by and the woman’s e x istence had yet to be acknowledged. More timid now, she said, “April Waylon from Oklahoma. May I join you?”

Mallory looked up with a frosty glare that said no, April should not even think of sitting at this table.