Carol O’Connell - Find Me

They stopped for the night. In the hotel restaurant, he asked if she would mind just one more question. “How did Savannah get the letters?” He fell silent as a waitress dropped the menus on their table, and then Mallory told him that the letters had been mailed to Cassandra in Chicago.

“But she never saw them. My mother was working insane hours at the hospital. So her roommate, Savannah, was the only one home when the mail came… when the telephone rang. Peyton called every night. She never knew that, either.”

“When did you discover this?”

“When I found Savannah Sirus.”

Their salad was served and eaten in silence. They were well into the main course when he learned that, after many phone calls from Mallory, Savannah had mailed her one token letter, claiming that she had found it stuffed in an old chair. And thereafter, the woman had ceased to answer the telephone.

“I knew she was lying,” said Mallory. “That first letter promised the whole road. So there had to be more of them.” The telephone assaults had escalated to ringing the woman’s doorbell in Chicago, sometimes for hours with no response. “But I wore her down.” And a compromise had been arrived at. “I told her she could keep the letters. I just wanted to read them.” And Savannah, only wanting the harassment to end, had accepted Mallory’s invitation to New York City. “I sent her airline tickets and theater tickets. I sent her menus for the best restaurants in town. She thought I was planning a nice friendly visit. I wasn’t.”

Charles wondered how far into that visit Mallory’s houseguest had discovered the merits of full confession. He could not get the image out of his mind-Savannah and her interrogator-the story hour from hell.

“Toward the end, Savannah wanted to confess.” Mallory chased the roast beef with long draughts of wine. “After Peyton left on his road trip, my mother told her about the pregnancy… and the wedding plans.”

And then?

Charles waited-and waited. Patience fraying, then lost, and he said, “So… stolen letters, diverted phone calls. Cassandra never heard from Peyton when he was on the road?”

Mallory shook her head. “She was worried. She thought he might’ve wrecked the car. Peyton didn’t have any family, so my mother called some of his old friends along the road. That’s how she knew he was still traveling. And then she had to wonder why he never called or wrote to her. Months went by, but she never did find out. Then she gave up.”

“Cassandra never heard from him again?”

“No. After a long time, she decided that he’d just abandoned us. I always thought so, too… until I found Savannah Sirus’s phone number.”

“You knew this woman when you were a child?”

“I never met her. When I was little, Savannah sent Christmas cards, but I couldn’t remember where they were from. I couldn’t even remember the woman’s name.” Before Mallory had finished her wine, she gave up the story behind the wall of numbers in her New York apartment. “When she was dying, my mother wrote a phone number on my hand. She said, ‘You call that woman, and she’ll come get you.’ ” All but four numerals had been smudged away. A child’s tears would do that. Mallory tossed back the rest of the wine and poured another glass. “It took a long time to find the rest of that number.”

“So your father never went back to Chicago?”

“He had no reason to come back,” said Mallory. “And that was more of Savannah’s work.”

Charles knew this theme of obsessive love; he had heard that tune playing inside his own head several times a day for all the years he had known Mallory. “Well, now I understand why you despised that woman.”

“No, you don’t. Not yet.”

Maddeningly, she left the table, swinging her room key as she walked away.

On the road again the next morning, Charles made his first error of the day by begging an explanation for the initials O.B. Mallory dodged all conversation with sleep until late afternoon, when they were driving into more congested traffic.

In the area of Los Angeles, Californians had apparently not grasped the concept of passing lanes and turn signals, but this was merely harrowing. The last leg of the trip was the most grueling. Only a few miles along Santa Monica Boulevard, traffic was at a bumper-to-bumper standstill. He might have saved them from this ordeal. Six news bulletins had tried to warn him off, but he had been determined to drive this historic route to the end.

Mallory, however, assured him that it was a better fate to be shot in the head than to die of old age on this twelve-mile-long parking lot of detours and road construction. “Pull into that gas station,” she said, nodding toward a nearby escape path. “This is the end of the road.”

“Oh, no,” he said, hardly believing that he was suggesting this, “we have another ten miles to go before we reach Ocean Boulevard. That’s the official finish to Route 66.” And then, at the end of this road, if he still had his wits, he planned to drive the car into the sea so that they could fly back home to New York.

“No,” she said. “Stop the car. This is where my father’s road trip ended.” She kept her silence until he had pulled into the lot and parked the car some distance from the gasoline pumps and a line of customer vehicles.

Charles was somber now, for he believed that he knew what was coming next, and it gave him hope and despair in equal amounts. According to Mallory, the last letter for O.B. had been mailed from Barstow far behind them. This tale could have only one logical end.

Mallory was staring at the gas station. “There used to be a bar on this lot, and there was a phone booth on the corner. He stopped here to call Chicago one last time. Savannah told him that my mother died in a fire.”

“But that’s madness. Savannah must’ve known she’d be found out.”

“It helps if you think like a cop. That was when I knew she’d planned to kill my mother.” Mallory said this with no animosity. It was a simple statement of fact. “It took a long time to break that woman, but I did it. Finally, she told me about starting a fire outside of Mom’s bedroom. My mother could’ve died that night, and I would’ve died inside of her. While Savannah was talking to Peyton on the phone, the apartment was filling up with smoke. If she hadn’t stopped to answer the phone, she could’ve gotten out in time. But she was an amateur arsonist. And she was afraid the ringing would wake up my mother. It did. By then the smoke was every- where, and Savannah couldn’t find the door. She was disoriented, almost unconscious when my mother dragged her out of there.”

“Your mother saved Savannah’s life.”

“And she never knew her best friend tried to burn her to death.”

Mallory left the car and walked toward the corner. She moved slowly, perhaps using the time to rebuild a long-gone telephone booth so that she could watch Peyton Hale make his last call. “He believed my mother was dead when he hung up the phone and walked into the bar.” She turned to face the gas station, where that saloon had once stood. She rose up on the balls of her feet, chin lifting, anticipating, waiting for her father to finally put down his last glass and come back outside.

“I found the old police report. He drained half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s before he got behind the wheel again. He backed up the car to the end of the parking lot, then aimed it at the brick wall.”

She closed her eyes, as if she had just heard the impact of man and machine smashed across a wall that was no longer there. “He went through the windshield, no airbags then, no seat belt. They found most of the blood high up on the bricks where he cracked open his skull.” She raised her eyes the better to see the blood that she had only heard about and read about. “And they found his body on the crushed hood of the car.”