“No, no, everybody’s made their feelings perfectly clear. We’ll see what they’ve got to offer, kiddo. If there’s a halfway clean-looking café, we’ll stop. I promise.”
“All right!”
Truth was, Frank was feeling hungry himself. Could be this journeying by motor home wasn’t exactly as the salesman who’d rented it to him had described it.
Near noon, and the sun was high overhead. Nowhere for man or beast to hide. The thermometer flirted with the hundred mark. Thank God it was only May. In a few weeks a hundred would be a cool day out here.
It was hot enough, though, for the sight of a lone figure standing by the side of the road to startle him. He began to slow down, barely realizing he was doing so.
2
IT TOOK A MOMENT for Alicia to react. She made his name into an extended question. “Frank?”
He nodded. “Some fool hitchhiking.”
She leaned forward. The solitary shape was unmistakable now, motionless as a monument. “You aren’t thinking of picking him up?”
“Why not? Everybody’s so bored, maybe some company would add a little excitement. I could do with some conversation.”
His wife didn’t try to conceal her anxiety. “What kind of person would be hitchhiking way out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Someone trying to get to somewhere.” He took a perverse delight in her obvious unease. “That’s something that would be interesting to find out. Besides, I wouldn’t leave a dog on the side of the road on a day like this.” He squinted as he rode down on the brake. “Don’t see any luggage. Maybe he had a breakdown. Good thing we came along.”
“Frank, I don’t know if this is such a good idea.”
Steven had his nose pressed against the window. Conscious that something out of the ordinary was taking place, Wendy had removed her headphones and had actually turned off her Walkman.
If he hadn’t been so fed up with his family, Frank would ordinarily have cruised on past, but he was ready to do anything to shake them out of their lethargy. Now he found himself wondering if maybe Alicia wasn’t right and he was about to do something foolish. Certainly the absence of any luggage was peculiar. He scanned the ground bordering the road, but there was no place for malign accomplices to hide. The skinny bushes concealed nothing. There were no large boulders and the ground was flat.
If his supposition was correct and the hitcher’s vehicle had broken down somewhere close by, their ride-to-be had already disobeyed the first rule of desert survival: namely, to stay with your car. The people who died out here were the ones who naively thought they could walk to safety. No sign of a stalled vehicle, though. An off-road machine, maybe, stuck somewhere out in the sand. He strained but could see only isolated plant growth spotting dirty beige terrain. A couple of beer cans slowly disintegrated in the sun amid a tiara of crumpled plastic packaging.
As he pulled over, the hitchhiker turned to face them. The right hand which had been extended in the classic hitcher’s pose, hand out, thumb up, now fell to the figure’s side. Wendy had come forward to lean between her parents for a better view.
“How old is he?”
Frank’s eyes widened slightly. It was Alicia who replied. “It doesn’t look like a ‘he,’ dear.” She turned to her husband. “I apologize, Frank.”
“What?” His eyes followed the lone figure as it walked slowly toward them.
“It’s probably a good thing you stopped. She’s in trouble or she wouldn’t be out here alone like this. I wonder what happened. I wonder where her car is?”
“Bet she had a fight with her boyfriend,” said Wendy. “Bet he kicked her out and left her here.”
“If so, it wasn’t long ago.” Frank stopped staring. “She’s not even sweating.”
Alicia eyed him curiously. “I didn’t think your eyesight was that good, dear.”
Frank ignored the gentle dig. “Wendy, get the door for the lady.”
His daughter nodded vigorously and moved to do so.
Compared to the air-conditioned interior of the motor home, the air that came flowing through the open door had the force of blast furnace exhaust. Wendy automatically retreated from it. As she stepped back, the hitchhiker climbed in, thoughtfully closing the door behind her.
She was Wendy’s height and slim as a reed. It was impossible to tell if the purple and gold scarf she wore wound around her head was a separate piece of clothing or merely part of her sari-like dress. Wispy folds of multihued silk wrapped round and round her body, tenuous as cirrus clouds. They moved slightly in the blast of air-conditioning, like sleeping snakes. There was just a hint of dark skin beneath, and none of undergarments. Even as he stared, a layer of silk fell into place, leaving Frank to wonder if he’d seen anything at all.
He’d been wrong about something else. The hitchhiker had only looked cool. Beads of sweat hung like flattened pearls from her dark forehead. She used a hand to wipe them away. As she did so she moved some of the silk, revealing thin, brilliantly blond hair. It fell almost to her feet, a golden cascade incongruous against her olivine skin.
“No wonder she’s hot,” Alicia murmured. “Look at all that hair.”
The woman must have overheard because she turned to look at them and smiled. Frank saw she had violet eyes. The only other woman Frank knew of who had violet eyes was Elizabeth Taylor. He’d always suspected it to be a trick of glamour photography. But this young woman’s eyes were a light violet, the color of tanzanite. They were too large for that small, heart-shaped face, like the eyes of those Keene paintings that had been so popular back in the sixties. Big-eyed children and dogs. The mouth was tiny, the nose and chin almost nonexistent. Everything was overwhelmed by those eyes.
Her head and neck appeared almost too thin to support the weight of all that hair, but closer inspection revealed that while extraordinarily long, those gleaming blond tresses were thin and wispy, the ends trailing off to near invisibility.
“It’s not so very uncomfortable,” she said in reply to Alicia’s observation. Her voice was high-pitched, ethereal. Not frail. Just soft and distant.
Quit staring, Frank told himself. She’s just a small-boned little gal. No pointed ears and no tendrils sprouting from her forehead. Not much to her at all. What was it Spencer Tracy had said about Katharine Hepburn? “Not much, but what there is is choice.” He felt himself flush, turned back to face the dash.
“I really like your clothes.” Diplomacy is an alien conception to sixteen-year-olds. “And, oh, wow, check out these nails, Mom!” Wendy’s eyes were wide, admiring.
The woman smiled and held up her right hand. Frank saw that each of her inch-long fingernails was painted a different iridescent hue. She raised her other hand, holding them side by side, the ends of her fingers forming a perfect rainbow from left thumb to right. Placed next to one another like that, the colors appeared to flow into each other. He wondered if her toenails were similarly decorated. Her feet were concealed by slipperlike shoes.
He was still trying to reconcile the Mediterranean coloring with that blond hair. Blondes were inordinately popular among his Hispanic employees. While her coloring it was a possibility, the pale golden hue looked natural to him. Somehow he doubted a woman wanting to dye her hair would take the color to such an extreme. He hunted in vain for buttons, zippers, hooks, saw not even a safety pin, and wondered how the loose assemblage of veils stayed in place.
Wendy hadn’t stopped talking. “Do you do your own makeup?”
“Makeup? Oh, you mean these.” She held out one hand. Light exploded off the glittering, almost transparent polish. “I do most everything myself.”
That’s when Frank took note of the lavender eye shadow and faintly purple lipstick. On this woman it looked right, though he’d never been big on makeup himself. Neither had Alicia, though Wendy was a real bear on the subject. Good thing the woman’s skin wasn’t as fair as her hair, caught out on a desert highway the way she’d been. It struck him that the thin silk would protect its wearer from the sun’s rays while still allowing any breezes to circulate.
She had backed up next to the couch. “May I sit?”
“Sure, sit anywhere,” Frank told her expansively. “Don’t mind the kids. They spend most of their time on the floor anyway.”
The couch was directly behind Alicia’s chair. Alicia swiveled around to face their guest, who extracted a tortoise-shell compact from the folds of her clothing and began to comb her hair.
“Could I do that?” asked Wendy eagerly.
“Thank you, but not now. Perhaps later.” She was working on the ends, untangling them with the comb while the children gaped at her.
It dawned on Frank there was no reason to sit there idling in the middle of the desert with the air conditioner running on high. He checked the sideview mirror, pulled back out into the slow lane.
“Car break down?” The big Winnebago slowly crawled back toward cruising speed.
“No. I have been traveling with the helpful, as you found me, for quite a long time.”
Alicia sounded disapproving. “You shouldn’t be doing that. Especially way out here, and without any luggage.”
“I always like to travel light.” Their guest shook her head. A simple necklace of purple beads flashed light from her throat. Frank struggled to remember his high school geology. Amethyst, most likely. Unfaceted, it would be very inexpensive. She wore a matching ring on the long finger of her right hand. Hardly a target for prospective muggers, he mused.
