Evidence of Life

Chapter 12



The lobby of the Riverbend Lodge was empty, but the office door was open and a light was on. Abby peeped inside and saw an old man slumped in a chair asleep in front of a flickering television screen with the sound turned low. She was reluctant to wake him and tried first by clearing her throat. No response. She tapped the desk bell, cringing at the tinny sound, but almost at once that brought a loud snort. Pretty soon the man came shuffling through the door, scouring his face, blinking at her.

Abby apologized and said she hadn’t planned to stop here, that she was on her way to a friend’s house and had gotten tired. All of which was untrue. This was most certainly her intended destination. Why else had she carried a book of matches from this place around with her since last August? She asked about a room. “I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying. Will that be a problem?”

The old man looked curiously at her, obviously trying to make sense of the discrepancies in her story. “No,” he said after a moment. “I guess not.” In between taking down Abby’s information and swiping her debit card, he said he was sorry Abby had caught him napping. “I’m covering for my son. He owns the motel, him and his wife do, but she’s in the hospital. Emergency surgery.” He patted his midsection. “Female trouble. Come on her real sudden-like this afternoon.”

Abby took the key he handed her and said she hoped everything would be okay. Do you know anyone named Sondra? She might have been a guest. She might have been with someone named Nick. The questions hovered in Abby’s mind. The answers to them were all she wanted to know. The old man waited, fingers balanced on the desk. Abby noticed their tremor; she noticed his frailty, that his skin was chalky, his face lined with worry and fatigue.

They talked about the flood, and he told Abby the motel had had a foot of water. “It was a mess,” he said, “but I’m not complaining. Some folks lost everything. Next to that, it’d be a sin for me to whine about a little water.”

They said good-night, and she went around back to the room he’d given her and sat on the bed with her navy canvas tote beside her—the tote she’d packed that morning at her mother’s, her going-home bag. The edge of the mattress was brick hard under her and sank toward the middle like a half-done cake. It smelled sanitized, she thought, wrinkling her nose; it reminded her of the color green. Latrine green, with shades of mold and air-conditioned-damp underneath.

The room’s furnishings and décor were styled to resemble someone’s idea of the Old West, very 1950s, very Hollywood with all the real hardship and deprivation worn slick off it. Sets from episodes of the Lone Ranger or maybe Gunsmoke came to mind. Only in Bandera, Abby thought. Cowboy Capital of the World. She pulled up her hands, pointed her index fingers at the floral curtained window and said, “Reach for the sky,” then lay back. The ceiling overhead had a large yellow stain to the left of center. Dark shadows encroached on it from the corners, making a pattern like a herd of horses or a range of mountains with clefts formed by deep gorges. Abby shoved the tote onto the floor and lay down, pulling her knees up against the weight of dread that had settled in her stomach.

Sometime later, through the fuzzy walls of an uneasy doze, she thought she heard footsteps outside her door, and when they persisted, she went to look, parting the curtain slightly, but there was only a paper cup from McDonald’s skittering across the parking lot at the whim of an errant breeze. The taillights of a car nearing the exit caught her eye. Dark blue, she thought, although it was hard to tell in the wash of light that pooled beneath the motel’s vacancy sign. When the car turned, Abby saw the driver was a woman. Maybe she was related to the old man at the desk; maybe she’d brought news of the daughter-in-law. Abby hoped it wasn’t bad.

* * *

When she woke again, the glare of morning sunlight edged the curtains. She could feel it needling her eyelids and crooked an elbow over her face. Her head ached, and she felt heavy, hangover heavy. From driving half the night, she thought. From the stress of not having a clue about what she was doing and doing it anyway.

Abby sat up slowly. What did she think she was going to wear while she was here? She looked down her front at her rumpled sweater and Nick’s sweatshirt that she wore underneath it. She prodded the canvas tote with her toe. What was in it? A couple of T-shirts. Maybe another sweater, a pullover, some underwear. She couldn’t recall exactly what she’d tossed into it yesterday, but she was pretty sure she was wearing the only pair of socks, the only jeans. She would need more than that if she intended to stay. Did she? What was her plan? Would she grill the old man at the front desk, demand to see the guest register, ask all over town if anyone knew a woman named Sondra?

She took a shower, and once she was dressed, she walked to the motel lobby. She was glad when the girl working at the reception desk told her that the old man had gone home to rest and that his daughter-in-law was going to be fine. Abby had breakfast, and afterward she drove the short length of Main Street hunting a shop to buy a jacket, clean socks and underwear. She didn’t know what to think of herself. As if it was rational to believe her family had survived the flood and were now—what? Wandering like vagabonds? Or maybe they’d found housing atop some remote cliff and were living off the land.

At Gruenwald’s General Store, Abby bought a fleece-lined jacket, bright red, a happy color, two pairs of thick socks and two pairs of underwear, another bra, Playtex, in the box. When she pulled her wallet from her purse, the book of matches came with it. She handed the clerk her credit card and tucked the matches back inside, thinking: Sondra. Thinking: Well, who knew? Could be anybody. A client. Somebody’s secretary.

While Abby waited, she thought how little she knew of the people in Nick’s professional life. But was that so unusual? Was it any different than other marriages? Families? She had her role to play, Nick had his. Of necessity, their daily routines were separate, involved different places, different people.

The clerk pushed the sales slip across the counter toward her.

Abby signed it and pushed it back. “I’m trying to locate someone,” she said.

The clerk waited.

Abby’s cheeks warmed. “Never mind. Can you cut these?” She indicated the tags on the jacket, slipping it on once they were removed. Leaving the store, she stowed her shopping bag in the car and walked down Main Street toward the river. Bandera had been settled in one bent elbow of the Medina River in 1856. Now more than one hundred fifty years later, the river still wasn’t much of a hike from the center of town.

She crested the hill where Main crossed Maple and dipped toward the junction with Highway 16. Last time she was here, the Medina had been raging over the intersection. Now as she threaded her way around twiggy clumps of possumhaw, buttonbush and gnarled mesquite, her steps raised powdery dust. Dry blades of yellow switchgrass brushed the sides of her boots. Nearer the water, where a thick layer of cypress needles mixed with oak and sweetgum leaves cushioned the ground, she paused to look at the water flowing east.

After the storm, when she’d come here with Kate, she had watched for her Jeep, certain that she would see it with Nick and Lindsey inside. She had imagined diving in. Somehow she would swim against her fear of water, swim against the furious current and save them. A miraculous rescue. Today the water level was normal, the flow sedate. Still, Abby hunted the river’s edges for a sign. The sun’s glitter off the car’s roof, a tire partly concealed in the gnarled fist of a tree’s roots. But there was nothing like that. The water passed her, placid, heedless of what it had done, what it had taken. Did she intend to walk its length? If she spoke to it, prayed to it, would it give up its secret? Tell her where it had left her husband and daughter? Would it deny it had ever taken them?

“Abby?”

She wheeled. “Oh, Katie.” Abby walked into Kate’s embrace. “Who called, Mama or Jake?”

“Your mama, early this morning. She thought you’d be at my house or that you would have at least called me by now.”

“I was going to.”

“I saw the BMW outside Gruenwald’s, and when I didn’t find you inside, I figured you were here.”

“Your nutty friend.”

“Insanity,” Kate smiled, “the tie that binds.”

“I can’t seem to give up.” Abby surveyed the river.

“Where did you stay last night?”

“Riverbend.”

“Oh, Lord, how depressing. Come on.” She linked Abby’s arm with hers. “Let’s get your stuff. George can bring one of the men later for the car.”

* * *

The road leading out of town was edged by a thick limestone shelf, and the view shot into the blue, vacant nowhere, down the wall of a canyon that would end in a boulder-filled crevice. Looking out the window, Abby wondered, Was the Jeep there? In this one? That one? The one fifty feet on?

Stop! The word shouted in her mind. She bit both lips to keep it inside. They could go from dawn until dark and never see into all the canyons and gorges. The land was like a rumpled sheet. If only she could, Abby would pick it up and shake it out flat.

Kate said, “I think I saw Nadine Betts in town.”

“The reporter? Say you didn’t. Say she doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Umm, not sure. I was coming down the street toward Gruenwald’s. Looked like she, or somebody who looked an awful lot like her, was checking out your car. She was gone by the time I found a parking place.”

Abby thought of the blue sedan she’d spotted leaving the motel parking lot late last night, too late for it to have been there for any good reason. “What does she drive? Do you know?”

“Ford. Taurus, I think.”

“What color?”

“Dark blue. Why?”

Abby explained and then groaned. “How does that woman know I’m here when I didn’t even know myself that I was coming?”

“Hah!” Kate said. “You’re forgetting where you are.”

* * *

Long ago, according to legend, in the midst of a terrible drought, a Comanche chief came to the highest bluff near his village in the Hill Country to survey the brown wasteland that lay in every direction. Nothing moved; there was no sign of anything left alive. All the game that had fed his people—the deer and the buffalo, the jackrabbits, even the lizards—had died off or escaped, and now, without adequate food and water, the chief’s people were dying. He fell to his knees then and there, and in a last act of desperation, he petitioned the Great Spirit for relief. The answer came swiftly. In exchange for rain, the chief was told, the Great Spirit would accept his most precious possession, his beloved daughter. The chief was devastated. Never was a child so dear to a father. He begged to give his own life instead, but the Great Spirit refused, and the chief went away with a heavy heart.

It was while he was in consultation with his tribal council that his small daughter approached. In her hands she carried her most prized possession, a small doll made for her by her grandmother from cornhusks before the old woman died. In the ancient voice of the wise grandmother, the chief’s daughter announced that she had come at the request of the Great Spirit. The girl told how Spirit was so moved by the chief’s love of his child, and his sorrow over her impending loss, that He had changed His mind. He would not take her. Rather, the chief must dress the doll in a bonnet made from blue jay feathers and lay it atop the bluff in offering, and rain would come. This was done, and the promised rain fell like a gentle blessing throughout the night.

But the true miracle wasn’t found until the next morning when the chief and his people emerged from their tepees to find the hills surrounding their village awash in a sea of flowers. Tipped in white, the tall spires were the same clear, beautiful shade of blue as the jay’s feathers. They were called bluebonnets from that day, and the people honored them as they honored their chief, whose unwavering love for his daughter had inspired the selfless gift that had saved them and their land.

Abby had first heard the legend from her mother, and she had repeated it to her children many times when they’d asked. One very hot, dry summer day when they’d been camped near the Guadalupe River at a site not far from Camp Many Waters—sadly, no longer in existence—Lindsey had offered to sacrifice her Barbie doll to bring the rain. Abby had turned away to hide her smile, somehow not able to picture it, Lindsey’s full-busted, pencil-waisted Barbie dressed in blue jay feathers. Standing at the window now overlooking Kate’s deck, Abby thought if only it did work that way. If only she could leave a doll in offering, and the Great Spirit would return Lindsey to her.

George came up beside her and handed her a glass of wine. “Big difference since you were here last. In the weather, I mean.”

Abby looked at the sky, unblemished now at evening except for the moon, a frosted sickle, that hung in one far corner. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you? For coming, for thinking I can find out what happened.”

George slipped his arm around her shoulders. “I just hope you won’t be hurt any more, Abby, that’s all.”

She thought of saying it wasn’t possible to hurt any more than she already did; she thought of asking him point-blank what he knew. Because she sensed there was something. But didn’t she sense that with everyone? Was she wrong? Could she even stand knowing?

She sipped her wine. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

George tightened his grip. “I hope so, honey. I truly do.”