On the other hand, his unexpected appearance seemed to have lifted Wendy’s spirits, if only temporarily. Arriaga was grateful for that. They could help support one another.
Soon both were standing with him on the porch and he found himself shaking the old man’s hand. He looks tired, Arriaga thought. Only natural, considering his age and the length of the journey. Arriaga was a little surprised at the absence of any luggage, but then, old people often traveled light.
“Hello, Jake. Been a while.”
"Como ’sta, Arri? Qué pasa?”
Arriaga forced himself to smile. “Quite a lot, I’m sorry to say.” The smile didn’t last long. “Come inside. I’m afraid we have some bad news to share with you.”
It was on Jake’s lips to say, “It’s about Amanda, I know,” but he kept silent. He and his grandniece had spent too much time preserving their little secret for him to give it away now. So despite his anxiety he waited for them to explain. They wouldn’t have believed him anyhow.
Once inside, Wendy sat him down on the couch in the living room and busied herself in the kitchen, fussing with lemonade and plans for dinner. It was left to Arriaga to break the bad news to her uncle. The fisherman sat in the chair opposite the couch, his hands working nervously against each other.
“… so we can’t be sure yet, but the police think Amanda may have been kidnapped,” he concluded. Arriaga waited for the old man’s reaction, was surprised when none was forthcoming.
You had to hand it to the old boy, he thought when he’d finished. He was taking it well. It was a difficult thing to accept, but old folks can be good at keeping their emotions hidden. According to Wendy’s stories, Pickett was a tough old bird. Would’ve made a good fisherman.
He said lamely into the silence that followed his disclosure, “What about you, Jake? How are you doing these days?”
“Doesn’t seem to matter much now, does it? I had a feeling something was wrong.”
“You did?”
“Yes. I could see it in Wendy’s face when she ran up to greet me. Amanda kidnapped?” He shook his head slowly, sadly. “It doesn’t make sense. And the police have no idea who did it or why?” Jake pretty well knew the answers to his own question, but he was curious to see what the authorities were making of the situation.
“Nobody really knows anything.” Unable to sit still, Arriaga rose and resumed his pacing. “Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. We went into her room in the morning and she just wasn’t there anymore. She’d vanished straight from her bed.” He went on to explain the FBI agent’s theory and relate the incident involving the vandalism of their van.
Jake listened with half an ear, remembering a couple of recent nights when he’d nearly vanished from his own bed. But why would the people who wanted him resort to kidnapping his grandniece? Surely they couldn’t have discovered her own ability. He thought of all the television detective shows he’d seen. It was a crude education in criminology, but one at least partly valid. It didn’t take him long to figure out that they’d kidnapped her in order to get to him.
“No one’s contacted you about a ransom or anything like that?”
“No,” said Arriaga. “That’s almost funny, someone sending us a ransom note. If that man from Houston is right and they’re the same bastards who tried to rip off our van and they took Amanda for revenge, there shouldn’t be any ransom note. So far he’s been right.”
“No one’s contacted you at all about her, then?" Arriaga shook his head once, angrily. Jake could feel the man’s rage, could share his pain, and like him felt utterly helpless. No, he wasn’t completely helpless. His mind lit up with memories of exploding cars and fleeing gunmen. The remembrance was unreal, another TV show unspooling in his brain. Something else had caused those cars to explode, something else had induced the old bridge to collapse. Not him, it hadn’t been him. Not poor old, tired Jake Pickett. At least in his mind he tried to run away from the truth, but the truth kept catching up with him.
The memories wouldn’t go away. There was the terrified face on the boy steering the pickup down the road, Jake’s foot jammed against the accelerator. There was the roadblock ahead, transformed into flaming metal boxes. There was himself in the middle of it all, the pain at the back of his head as things all around him slipt.
What good did that do him now? If only his precious, dear Amanda could get in touch with him. Never mind keeping their secret anymore. Nothing else mattered to him. Just tell me where they’ve taken you, Mandy, he thought furiously. Give me a hint that you’re still alive, a clue to your location, and I’ll come for you and I won’t let anyone hurt you; your Uncle Jake won’t let anyone hurt you.
And despite his silent entreaties there was nothing, only the same maddening, taunting silence inside his head, a silence he felt far more strongly than Arriaga or Wendy ever could. He studied the face of Wendy’s father, and the expression only multiplied his own sorrow. These people were all the family he had. Though Amanda was by far the most important to him, he also loved Wendy and this soft-spoken bull of a husband of hers.
He could hear his niece in the kitchen, trying to hold back the flow of tears and failing, could see the brawny Arriaga fighting to keep from falling to the floor to bawl like a child. Only he, alone among those in the little house, felt no need to cry, perhaps because he’d stopped feeling that deeply when his sister Catherine had died.
Or maybe it was something else. Maybe he was too angry to feel real sorrow, because unlike Amanda’s parents he knew where the blame for this agony lay and had a good idea who was behind it. Arriaga had nothing, only empty fears and his own imagination and the suppositions of the FBI agent, which were insufficient to focus on.
“Don’t worry, Arri,” he told the father consolingly. “She’ll be alright. She has to be. She’ll turn up, you’ll see.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” the fisherman told him. “Everyone’s trying to be so positive about it; you, the sheriff, the agent. Everybody’s so positive, but nobody knows a damn thing.” He punched an unseen opponent, the fist ending up in his other palm. Beneath the anger and the fear lay the beginnings of hysteria, only just held under control.
Jake meant what he’d said. They would find Amanda. But the police had no inkling of what had really happened to her. Only he knew that. So it was up to him to locate her. And when he found her, he decided, justice would be done. Never before in his life had he thought of doing harm to another human being, not even during the second world war when the enemy was known and real. His draft-exempt job in the shipyards had spared him the necessity of finding out if he could have done such a thing.
All he’d ever wanted was to be left alone to live out his life in the house on the ridge, and to make other people feel good. Like the neighborhood kids he did tricks for. Now, near the end of his life, all that was changing. It was a change he hated, a change that was being forced on him by others.
There was no reason for such evil, no reason to put nice folks like Arriaga and Wendy through this kind of hell. There was no reason for the things those people had been trying to do to him during his hurried flight across the Southwest.
Now they’d gone so far as to kidnap a sweet, totally innocent young girl. Yes, Jake was discovering that it was possible for him to feel real anger. The anger was still small, still contained. Nothing like Arriaga’s barely repressed fury, but anger nevertheless. As he sat there and wondered what to do next and watched the anguish fill Arriaga’s face, the anger continued to grow within him.
Somerset turned off the tape recorder. The gown she was wearing was yellow with orange trim. It plunged in front at a sharp angle, creating what Huddy liked to refer to as “the view from Toroweep Point, Grand Canyon.” It was open to a point not far below her navel. Only a thin orange ribbon held it together at waist level.
Huddy lay on the bed in his underwear, considering both the contents of the tape and the nightgown.
“That’s the latest,” she told him.
“We should have picked him up in Abilene,” Huddy murmured. “Or in Benson. Or outside Phoenix. Everything’s getting so complicated. It all seemed so simple, so easy at first. Just pick him up and deliver him to Navis for testing.” He laughed hollowly.
She sat down on the bed next to him. “You’re making a career out of worrying, Benjy. Everything’s under control. You heard. The cops don’t have the slightest idea what’s happened to her.”
“Yeah, but now FBI….”
“Cops in suits and ties,” she said soothingly, caressing him. “Let Mama Somerset handle things.” She was a little miffed at his preoccupation with Pickett, especially since they hadn’t seen each other in days.
“What if they find the bugs we’ve put in the Ramirez house?”
“Now why on earth should they start looking for telephone taps?” she said irritably. “You heard what the agent’s theory was. They’re all looking for out-of-town car thieves.”
“Pickett must have some idea that we’re behind it all.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You told me yourself the old man’s not too bright. Not that it matters.” She put her arms around his neck. “Tomorrow morning we’ll find some way to isolate Pickett from the rest of the girl’s family. Then we’ll get in touch with him. All you have to do is mention the grandniece and he’ll do whatever we want him to. Don’t you see, it’s over? Finished. I admit it’s been more trouble than we anticipated, but none of that matters in the end so long as we’re successful. And we have been successful.
