Ready or not, here I come, Margaret would holler from the other room. That girl loved hide-and-seek, didn't she? Remember how she would slither under the sheets and pretend she could not be seen till you tickled the bump in the middle of the bed?
Margaret watched him work his jaws, and the effort for pleasure obviously tired him, for he looked like a man living in slow motion. Picking at her salad, she asked about the lady and her baby, but his answer was little more than static. This will kill him. Not losing the girl—he has made his peace and believes that she will find her way back in time. But losing me, she knew, as he helplessly looked on. Snap out of it, go back to him. And it's been what, half a year since she left?
“Four months.”
Setting down his empty fork on the edge of his plate, he scrutinized her face, knowing at once what she meant but mystified as to how and why she voiced her thoughts. “Do you think about her all the time?”
“Not her, so much as her absence. Not think, but feel the hole. The empty chair between us. No sound of a door opening when we two are alone in the house. No sudden good morning. No creak of the floorboards when she settles in for the night. Things that no longer happen.”
“I miss her too.”
She saw Paul now as an old man, his feelings slipping away with his faculties. The circles around his eyes looked like the entrances to a pair of caves. Hair white and thin as a cirrus cloud. Those lines across his brow looked carved by a mason, and she knew that constant tremor in his hands would drive her crazy. Why did he leave me alone, she thought, alone to bear my suffering while withholding his own? Where did he go? Why did he leave too?
The phone rang as she washed the dishes, and she madly dried the suds from her hands to reach the receiver before the caller gave up.
“Mrs. Quinn? This is Special Agent Linnet, sorry to be calling you so late. Is your husband home too? I'm over here at the Rinnick house and since it's so close, I'd like to talk with you in person tonight, if it's not too late. There's been a development in the case.”
29
In Amarillo, she dyed her hair yellow. She had always longed to be someone else.
On the long straight drive through Oklahoma and into the Texas panhandle, Wiley talked about the need to be more careful, to disguise their identities in case the police picked up their trail after the shooting at Garrison's Creek. There could be no more messages home, no more accidents, no more meandering along back roads. A new car would be necessary and more cash and ammunition. “We have to erase ourselves and write a new story. We have to be able to disappear and change, like chalk on a blackboard, one quick swipe and you are gone. Hope the wind obliterates our tracks, and every trace of who we once were is blown away.”
No trees provided shadow on the gray flatlands. The sun beat down on the window glass and the car felt hot even though it was cold outside. Erica fought to keep her comfort balanced by cracking her window and letting in some fresh air. Every few miles she pressed a hand against her belly. She wondered if the man they shot was someone's father. He had a gun, she told herself, a gun, and he shot first, and I thought the man was shooting Wiley. I didn't know what I was doing. Yes, just disappear.
“You should cut your hair short too, like mine, and maybe bleach it. Get some shades, maybe granny glasses, and change the way you dress. A whole new look, whatcha think about that?”
She gathered her brown hair in a ponytail and hid it from his sight.
“We will be strangers to all we have met on the road. Nobody will remember we were there. And we will forget our old friends and family back home. The Angels will know us, and we will be known only as Angels.”
“Don't you think I'll be cute as a blonde?” She patted his leg. “Like having a whole new girl to screw.”
Taking her remark as light-hearted, he laughed and beat a rim shot on the steering wheel. “Tell you what: we'll rob a wig store and take seven heads of hair. You can be a different girl every night of the week.”