She blinked. Couldn’t be. The man had made a U-turn.
Maybe he was sick of diner food. Maybe she had scared him with her plaid robe! Why was her first emotion disappointment?
“I’ll be damned,” she said. “Pete, I feel abandoned! Isn’t that weird? Empty nest all over again.”
Pete chuckled. “Not so fast,” he said. “Didn’t you listen to the man’s job?”
“Yes. Starving,” she muttered and took a spoonful of the borscht. “Mmm, wow. Wow. So what?”
“He’s a trained hunter. Maybe at last you’ve met your match. A real James Bond.”
“Humph.”
“If he is that good, he knew you put the tracker on him. He’s surely trained to sweep his vehicle every day, as you said. Remember the Piss on Hippies guy?”
“Of course.”
“Wasn’t that the last place we saw young William?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Didn’t the driller’s truck say Jackson Hole on the door?”
Celine stared at her husband. Incredible! Pete seemed all fusty and distracted and he didn’t miss a single beat, did he? Tanner might have simply moved the GPS on its magnet to the redneck’s truck. Damn. Still, it was just a guess.
“Maybe,” Pete said, “he is done jogging out in the open, trying to intimidate us. Maybe he is going dark. Trying to.”
She blew on another spoonful and swallowed it. Pete said, “Maybe he is hunting us now.”
Celine dipped a piece of store-bought roll into the soup. Pete said, “Why don’t we check the second one, the one his surrogate mother put in the coffee grinder. Let’s see how good he really is.”
Celine twisted her lips and ladled up more borscht. “This soup is really delicious,” she said. “You should eat something.” Pete grinned. His wife, he could see, was delaying the moment of truth. “Okay, okay,” she said. She patted her lips with her napkin and typed in the code for the second tracker. The map vanished and reformed and there was the blip in the middle of it, pulsing away like a headache. “He’s at the bar next door!” Celine said, triumphant. “Either that or he’s making coffee on his tailgate a block away.”
“Did you want to invite him over for dinner?” Pete said dryly.
“He kept my present!” she said. “Oh, Pete, you’re getting jealous!”
Pete didn’t deign to respond. But he did say, “He may simply have known where we were going. Where else would we go? But maybe in the morning we should do our own sweep.”
Celine pushed her salad bowl an inch closer to Pete’s side of the table. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, sure, to see if something’s there. But if we are lit up, it may have a use later.”
“Hmm,” Pete said. And she knew by the timbre that she wouldn’t have to explain.
“But how do we know,” he continued, “when he has begun to really hunt us? When the fun and games is over with?”
“We don’t,” she said.
SEVENTEEN
It was too late to call anybody. Celine wanted to talk to Sheriff Travers first, but that would have to wait until morning. Before they could order, Nastasia brought out two plates of hamburger steak fried flat and smothered in sauerkraut, two small dishes of creamed spinach, and a bowl of mashed potatoes.
“Is this included in the meal, too?” Celine said. They hadn’t had time to order.
“Actually, yes.” The waitress leveled her world-weary violet eyes at Celine. “Actually, it is the meal. There is one meal.” Her eyes were neutral, waiting for the challenge.
“Great.”
“Okay. Well.” Nastasia relaxed just a little and picked up the salad bowls. “By the way, I noticed that you were walking here. Be careful back to the motel. There is Problem Bear.”
She must have been sitting in the window waiting for a customer. Cooke City suddenly seemed even sadder.
“What is Problem Bear?”
“He is big griz. He is eating garbage and he charged Sitka on the street, since three nights.” There was only one street.
They walked back slowly. They held hands and walked down the middle of the dark county road that served as Main Street. There were no streetlights, only the neon in the bar and the lights from the motel sign and the windows of the two restaurants, a few houses. The rain had stopped but there were no stars, and the thick clouds were keeping the air from freezing. It smelled of woodsmoke. They could see the pale plumes rising from stovepipes into the stillness. Winter was coming fast and people were stoking their stoves, the air was thick with it. Celine wheezed a little as she walked, the thin reedy note on the inhale that almost sounded like a cat. Everything seemed sad. They heard a garbage can clatter somewhere behind them, but they were not scared of the bear because Celine was packing, though she knew that a nine millimeter round would more likely piss off a grizzly than stop it.
It occurred to her as they walked that they were looking for a father who had disappeared more than two decades ago, but that he had truly left his child’s life long before that, that the young woman had grown up for all intents and purposes fatherless. As she did. That finding him now might resolve something in the woman’s heart but would not change the essential sadness. And that was the business she was in. She had had to accept it long ago: that her job was enabling just such reunions. That though they could not change someone’s childhood, still—there was a great raw need in her clients to know their parents and to meet them again. There was something in that resolution that was very important. To the child, and often to the parent. She certainly knew about that. And sometimes they—the parent and the child—started again. Rarely did it work, but sometimes it did. And then a child would have a mother and a mother a daughter.
The saddest part was that parents would keep disappearing, and children would cry themselves to sleep night after night, for months, for years. And that mothers would have their babies taken from them before they had a chance to smell the tuft of soft hair, their ears, before they had a chance to say, “Oh how I love you! Forever and ever.” That the baby was taken before she had a chance to kiss her and wrap her properly in her arms.
Pete guided her around a deep pothole partly filled with gravel and she gripped his hand more tightly. In the wan light from the motel sign she could see their truck, the only vehicle in the drive. The only guests. At the end of the street she could see the dark bulk of the Barronette rising against the night sky. Yes, sad. How it felt. She thought that one might not make a dent in the Great Sadness, but one could help make another person whole.
That night in the overheated motel room Celine dreamed of Las Armas, the villa on the hill. She was returning after a long sojourn, she was not a little girl anymore but she was not a grown woman either. She was running down the shell drive and she was looking for Bobby and Mimi. She had something important to tell them and she wanted badly to run with them down to the little beach, to tell them away from Baboo. She wanted to tread water beneath Grayson’s dock and tell them.
She got to the house and pushed open the door and there was a woman in the front hall picking the heavy receiver up from a black phone. The woman turned, startled. She was blond, handsome, her wrist glinted with a gold bracelet, she had the air of having everything she wanted in the world, but Celine didn’t recognize her. She wanted to call out for Gaga, but she was afraid of upsetting the woman who clearly lived in the house, and she was afraid Gaga would not answer. Celine looked past the woman to the main parlor and saw scaffolding and sheets and lumber. Broken plaster.