Strangers Read Free

stopping to eat would have amounted to more stalling, and I didn’t do it. She’d be waiting, watching the clock, alone with the anxiety eating at her; the sooner I put in an appearance at her home, the better for both of us.
    The directions she’d given me were easy enough to follow without technological assistance. Yucca Avenue was a block behind me; I’d noted it on the way in. Out Yucca past the rodeo grounds and across the Union Pacific tracks to the last street, Northwest 10th, before Yucca continued on into the desert; left turn past the Oasis Mobile Home Park, fourth house on the east side of the next block, big prickly pear cactus in front. Easy. You couldn’t miss it.
    And I didn’t. Getting there took less than five minutes.

 
    2
    It was a small, boxy house in an older tract of small, boxy houses on the last street at the edge of open desert. No lawns and not much greenery in the yards; despite the nearby river, water was at something of a premium in this country. The big prickly pear cactus in Cheryl’s yard must have been seven or eight feet tall; its jutting arms and flattened leaves had a grotesque appearance in the star-flecked darkness. The porch light was off. Drapes were drawn across the facing window, light leaking out around the edges.
    A dust-streaked Ford Ranger was parked in front, two other vehicles in heavy shadow under a side portico. I pulled up behind the Ranger, sat there for ten or fifteen seconds—still stalling a little—and then went up onto the narrow front porch. The reason the light there was off was because the metal fixture was broken; it hung at a twisted off-angle, the jagged remains of the bulb visible inside, as if somebody had thrown or swung something at it. If there was a bell button, I couldn’t find it in the darkness. So I thumped on the door panel, not too sharply.
    It didn’t take her long to open the door. The light that spilled into the foyer from the room behind her was not bright enough to give me a clear look at her face. Pale smile in a thin, pale oval, her eyes shadowed. Slender when I knew her, still slender now, but she seemed too thin, shorter somehow than I remembered her, as if the weight of her son’s plight combined with the weight of years had bent and compressed her body.
    She put out her hand—it felt dry and rough in mine—and said my name and “Please come in” and “I’m so glad you’re here” in a voice that showed the strain she was under. When she stepped back and I was inside, I had a better look at her—and my stomach clenched up.
    Her age was forty-five or so now, but she looked older. And so thin in a dark-brown sweater and light-brown skirt. Age lines slightly marred the elfin attractiveness of her face; the reddish-gold hair, worn short now, was shot through with gray. But her eyes … my God. Twenty years ago they’d had an almost mesmeric effect on me—large, very green, very bright; now they were squinty, the color dulled, the animation gone. The only thing about them that was the same was their pleading quality, back then like a child afraid of being hurt, now like an adult who’d been hurt too much.
    I tried to keep my expression neutral, but some of what I was thinking must have shown through. She said, “You look well. I wish I could say the same about myself.”
    â€œYou’re under a lot of stress.”
    â€œYes. I—”
    A man’s voice said, “So this is the big-city detective. Lot older than you let on, Cheryl.”
    I hadn’t known he was there because I’d been looking at her, only at her. And I’d expected her to be alone. He was standing off to one side of a living room plainly furnished except for a wall display of Native American craftwork, a bottle of beer in one meaty hand. Late forties, short, compact, with a heavy beard-stubbled face burnt dark by the desert sun and patchy tufts of