There was more discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the sky.
The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospital to break the news of T. P.’s abduction to his father. The police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both to protect its occupants and to monitor the kidnappers’ unfolding extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went by with no break in the case, the FBI would soon play the most prominent role. Meanwhile, Crawford and Mireles would keep following up leads here at the nightclub. Elsewhere in Fulton County—as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett—sheriff’s patrols and municipal police forces would set up interlocking dragnets. Interlocking dragnets. That sounded good, but I reminded myself that no one knew what kind of vehicle Craig and Nancy had at their disposal. Surely, Puddicombe had not been able to keep E. L.’s pickup truck for the past year without incurring arrest. On the other hand, maybe he had changed its tag, jacked up its body, pin-striped its hood. I gave Crawford a description of the truck as I remembered it—a brief already on file with the GBI—and he in turn had it radioed around the greater metropolitan area. (Any white-haired young woman gunning through Avondale Estates in a Ram Charger would provoke immediate suspicion.)
Bilker told me where he’d parked my car. When I got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace. A smelly Dempsey Dumpster occupied most of this space. Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two wheels on the terrace and two on the alley’s broken cobbles. No one else had even considered contesting the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips. She broke away.
“Men have all the innate romance of doorstops.”
RuthClaire had said something like that to me back in December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. “Not exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?”
“Paul, please don’t fantasize a friendly fuck later tonight. I’m not ready for it. Even if I had been, this kidnapping would’ve changed that.”
A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there’s an expression RuthClaire would have never used. But hearing it spoken had an effect the reverse of what Caroline intended—it excited me. Maybe I was a bleary-eyed lecher for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac. Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty Anglo-Saxon origin? Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed “bad language” was the province of males only. Me, macho? A bigot, maybe—but not a muscle-flexer. More than likely, I was simply unused to hearing “bad language” on a woman’s lips. The cultural upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman only now getting straight the distinction in nuance between shacking up and living together.
“Look,” Caroline said, “my car is still in front of the Montarazes’. Tomorrow when you and RuthClaire visit Adam, one of you can drive my VW and leave it near the sociology building.” She handed me her keys. “I would like to see you again. It’s just that this isn’t the time, Paul. I can’t believe you think it is.”
“Life’s short, Miss Hanna. This proves it.”
“Ah, another disciple of the carpe diem approach.” Her voice took on a brittle edge: “You think they’ll kill him?”
“They may.” My knuckles whitened as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Puddicombe may, at least. It’s hard for me to believe Nancy’d go along with him on that score. I don’t know what he did to entice her up here, to get her to go punk—but they do share a common pain.”
“The fact that Teavers died.”
“Right. Her husband. His friend. I thought Nancy was free of that taint, though. I thought she’d managed to work through it all unscathed.”
What Caroline answered struck me as a sorrowful rebuke: “People who work through everything unscathed are rare. There may be nobody like that at all, only good pretenders.”
“Maybe so.”
“Could we trust an unscathed person, Paul? He—or she—wouldn’t be human.”
I looked at her sidelong. “The trouble is, you can’t trust a scathed person, either. You can’t trust anybody.”
“No,” Caroline murmured. “You can’t trust anybody.”
We rode for a time. Then I began to speculate on the kidnapping. Puddicombe had been hiding out for a year, eluding the police and plotting revenge. On the night of E. L.’s disappearance into the brick kiln, he had probably lit out for Alabama in his buddy’s truck. There, after ditching the vehicle, he had lain low, probably with the active aid of fellow Klan members. Maybe he had left the Southeast completely, striking out for the Rockies or the California coast. But if he had, he had almost certainly acquired another car. Teavers’s pickup would have been a red flag to every highway patrolman between Opelika and Amarillo. Or maybe he had simply disguised himself—by growing a beard, say—and ridden the bus.
Eventually, though, Puddicombe had returned from his fugitive exile, migrating as if magnetized to Georgia’s capital city. In Atlanta, after all, it would not have been hard for him to find work as a dishwasher or a garage mechanic. The biggest threat to his job would have lain in the likelihood of someone from Beulah Fork catching sight of him, but if his work had kept him, so to speak, backstage, that likelihood would have been a skimpy one. On the street, a beard and sunglasses would have preserved his cover. To trip himself up, he would have had to run a traffic light or neglect paying a bill. And so far, Puddicombe had avoided those kinds of trip wires.
“How would he have involved Nancy?” Caroline said.
Probably a letter, I told her. He would have written only once, and he would have stipulated a meeting somewhere between Atlanta and Beulah Fork. At a roadhouse or a small-town cafe, he would have pressed his case, playing on Nancy’s submerged bitterness and arguing the need to bring about E. L.’s posthumous vindication. Initially, she may have resisted these arguments, but at later rendezvous, each new meeting arranged at the one before, she would have begun to relish the idea of avenging her late husband—maybe not by killing anyone, but by bringing E. L. back to life as a worrisome force in the Montarazes’ undeserved paradise of love and success. Indeed, she and Craig may have fallen in love. Once, after all, E. L. and Craig had been as close as brothers, and somewhere in the Bible it was written that a man ought to wed his brother’s widow to protect her person and champion her causes.
“You know the Bible?” Caroline asked.
“Only by hearsay. The same way Puddicombe would know it. In Beulah Fork, distortions of it contaminate everyone’s thinking, mine included. We have a bountiful legacy of high-minded misquotation.”
“You think they’re lovers?”
“If not lovers, sweethearts. In this day and age, probably lovers.”
“Why so certain?”
“Nancy’s only eighteen. She was widowed at seventeen. Most of her school chums have moved from Beulah Fork, or married, or both. When she told me she was leaving the West Bank, she said it was to ‘seek her fortune.’ Male chauvinist pig that I am, I took that as a code word for husband. She was bored, lonely, and vulnerable. Why wouldn’t she fall in love with Craig?”