Little Girl Gone Read online

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  A Preview of When She Came Home

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  For Nikki

  Acknowledgments

  Family, friends, and colleagues I love and respect: in the end, these are who matter most to me. Without all of you, Little Girl Gone would just be a conversation in my head. I am grateful…

  … for all the people at Grand Central who make it such a good company to work with: Jamie Raab; Emi Battaglia; Beth de Guzman; Jennifer Reese; Siri Silleck; Liz Connor, who takes so much time and care on my covers; and my editor, Karen Kosztolnyik.

  … for my agent, Angela Rinaldi, whose support has made the difference.

  … for the distraction of family dinners, birthday parties, and those insane Charger/Steeler Sundays with Isabelle and Matt and Grayson and Nikki and Addy, cupcakes in the oven, dogs running around the backyard digging up the new lawn, and the general happy chaos of real, not fictional, lives.

  … for Rocky Campbell, my advisor and media sage and go-to guy for all things electronic.

  … for Margaret Ellen, who closed one house and opened another, schlepped and sorted, and stayed happy through the process more or less.

  … for Judy Reeves, San Diego Writers Ink, and the Ladies of the Arrowhead Association, who inspired and entertained and kept me on the straight and narrow. And finally,

  … for Art, the guy in the kilt, the love of my life and still my hero.

  Chapter 1

  Madora Welles was twelve when she learned that some girls are lucky in life, others not so much. On the day her father walked into the desert, she learned that luck can run out in a single day. After that, there’s no more Daddy telling the whole story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” start to finish, in one minute flat. No more laughing Mommy standing by with a stopwatch to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Lucky girls did not have fathers who changed from happy to sad, easy to angry to tears in the space of an hour, locked themselves in the shed and banged on things with a hammer. No lucky girl ever had a father who walked into the desert and put a bullet in his brain.

  Yuma, Arizona: the town is laid out like a grid on the desert flats. Single-story buildings, fast-food joints on every corner, dust and heat and wind, lots of military, and a pretty good baseball team. That’s about it.

  Madora’s mother, Rachel, said Yuma killed her husband, said it was killing her too. To save herself she turned on the television, stepped into other people’s stories, and got lost. For a long time she forgot to care about her daughter. Failing in school, drinking, and wading into the river of drugs that ran through the middle of Yuma, Madora was seventeen when she met Willis Brock.

  Madora’s best friend was Kay-Kay, a girl from a family with slightly better luck than her own. Instead of using a gun, Kay-Kay’s father had been drinking himself to death for a few years when she and Madora latched onto each other like twins separated at birth. Rachel recognized trouble when she saw it come through the door chewing gum and smelling of tobacco, but Madora had stopped listening to her by then. Rachel fell asleep in front of the television, in the old La-Z-Boy lounger that still smelled like Old Spice.

  Madora and Kay-Kay and a boy named Randy who knew someone who knew someone else who had a car drove south of Yuma, into the desert near the border, where they had heard there was a party house and big action. Rachel had told Madora a thousand times to stay away from the border, but in the years after her father’s suicide, Madora’s life was all about escape and rebellion; and the drugs and remote setting excited her. Until the bikers came she was having a good time drinking bourbon from a bottle and smoking grass, taking her social cues from Kay-Kay. Unconsciously, she copied Kay-Kay’s slope-shouldered, world-wary posture, and she was careful not to smile too much or laugh too loudly. Not that there was ever much humor at parties like this; and what passed for conversation was dissing and one-upping, arguments and aimless, convoluted complaints and comparisons of this night to others, this weed to the stuff they smoked the week before.

  At seventeen, Madora’s thinking was neither introspective nor analytical, but she was conscious of being different from Kay-Kay and the slackers around her and of wishing she were not. She wanted to eradicate the part of herself that was like her father: a dreamer, a hoper, a wisher upon first stars. At the party that night in the desert she kept to herself the resilient romantic notions that floated in the back of her mind. Never mind the odds against it: a handsome boy would come through the door, and he would look at her the way her father once had and she would feel as she once did, like the luckiest girl in the world.

  Instead the bikers came. Voices rose and the air snapped; the music got louder and the run-down old house vibrated to the bass beat.

  Kay-Kay put her mouth close to Madora’s ear, her breath an oily whiskey ribbon. “I’m gonna do it.” It was so noisy, she had to say it twice. “Those guys, they brought crank. I’m gonna try it.”

  Madora had been drinking and toking all night. Kay-Kay’s words didn’t really sink in, but what her friend did, she wanted to do as well. “Me too.”

  In a room at the back of the house, they sat on the floor opposite a bearded man with a gold front tooth who said his name was Jammer. Men and girls—long-haired and skinhead, pierced and tattooed and leather jacketed, all strangers to Madora—leaned against each other, stood or squatted with their backs to the wall. Jammer wore a black tank top so tight it cut into the muscles of his overdeveloped arms and shoulders and chest, and his hands were spotted with burn scabs. He held a six-inch pipe with a bulb at the end and played the flame of a lighter under the glass taking care not to touch it with the fire, rolling the pipe as he did.

  Madora watched in fascination as the pale amber cube in the bulb dissolved. Her lip hurt and she realized she was biting down on it. I shouldn’t be here, she thought, and looked at Kay-Kay. One sign that her friend wanted to leave and Madora would have popped to her feet in an instant. But Kay-Kay was mesmerized by the pipe in Jammer’s hand. She leaned forward, watching avidly as he turned and rolled it. A drop of saliva hung suspended from her lower lip.

  The others in the room passed a joint and spoke softly; occasionally Madora heard someone laugh. The door to the rest of the house was shut, but beneath her Madora felt the beat of the music. In the smoky room her eyes watered and blurred. A man crouched behind her, pressing his knees into her back. He held her shoulders and urged her to lean back.

  “Relax, chicky, you’re gonna love this.”

  Jammer held out the pipe to Madora, and Kay-Kay elbowed her gently and grinned encouragement. Madora thought of a birthday party, the expectant moment just before the lighted cake and the singing began.

  The man behind her stroked her arm, running his fingers along her shoulder and up into her hair. He whispered, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll take care of you.”

  She took the pipe between her fingers and put her lips around the tube. She started to inhale, but just as she did, the image of the birthday party came back to her, and she saw her father holding the cake; and she was six again, and no matter what, Daddy would always take care of her. Her throat closed; her hand came up and dashed the pipe onto the floor. Someone yelled and her head explode
d in white light and there was no yelling or talking, no music anywhere, just a burning pain as if her head were an egg and someone had thrown it against the wall.

  She struggled to her feet, fell to her knees, and stood up again. Someone grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. Hands groped at the front of her T-shirt and she flailed and tried to scream but her throat and her lungs had frozen shut. More hands grabbed her arms and dragged her across the floor; her ballerina slippers came off her feet, and her bare heels tore on the broken linoleum. A door opened and she fell forward into a wall of fresh air. Someone shoved her into a chair and she sat down hard, gagging for air.

  A voice growled. “Stay with her.”

  Kay-Kay’s voice came from far away. “Holy shit, are you all right?”

  Madora’s left cheek jerked as her eye blinked crazily.

  “You want me to call your mom? Oh, Jesus, Madora, I can’t get her to come out here.”

  Madora wanted to stop the twitching, but her hand couldn’t find her face.

  “No one’s gonna stop partying to drive you home.”

  Her hands and feet and head were attached by strings. She bobbled like a puppet.

  “Jammer said you only got a whiff. Lucky, huh? Are you listening, Mad? He says like only one in a trillion people react bad like you. It might’ve killed you. I can’t believe how lucky you were.”

  Someone was stirring her brain with a wooden spoon.

  “No one wants to leave yet, and anyway, Jammer says you’ll feel better.”

  Then she was alone on the porch outside the house. A coyote padding across the yard stopped to look at her, moonlight reflected in its yellow eyes. Kay-Kay returned and sat beside her for a few moments, holding her sweating hands, and then she went back in the house.

  The desert temperature dropped, and the air, cold and dry, lay over everything. The sweat dried on Madora’s body and she shivered, and her teeth rattled like bones in a paper bag. She dragged her feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. She rested her face on her knees and tried to close her eyes, but the lids bounced as if on springs. In the house someone had turned up a CD of an old Doors recording. The keyboard riffs scored her senses and the beat got down inside her, deep. Her muscles ached with it.

  Car lights streaked across the cholla and prickly pear. For a moment she was sightless, then bleary-eyed, and the figure coming toward her seemed to emerge out of water like something blessed, a holy vision. Without knowing why, she tried to rise from the chair where she’d been cowering. Her legs wobbled under her and he reached out, helping her to balance.

  “Hey, little girl, you better stay down.”

  She saw two of him, sometimes three, floating like a mirage, but his voice was clear and strong. Under it, the pounding beat and the keyboard riffs grew fainter until they seemed to come from far out in the desert, where she knew there must be a party going on but nothing that concerned her anymore.

  “Don’t be afraid, little girl. Willis won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

  Chapter 2

  Five Years Later

  Madora Welles rose from the living room sectional where she had spent the night and drank a cup of instant coffee, standing in the carport outside the kitchen. The cement was cool and slightly damp, and her bare feet stuck to it in a pleasant way. She ran her fingers through her light brown hair, a color her father had long ago described as mouse. Little Mouse had been one of his pet names for her. Little Mouse, Pug because her nose was pert, Runt because she was short. Sweetheart Girl.

  How odd that her father’s voice, though he had been gone ten years, still came into her mind as if he were sending messages by a circuitry available only to them.

  Before six on an early summer morning, as the moon dropped below the western horizon, the sky over the Laguna Mountains was a wash of pale yellow, and the cool air smelled of sage and pepper and damp sand and stone. Rough chaparral covered the bottom and slopes of Evers Canyon, softened by the cream-colored blossoms of the chamise and the curves and hollows of the tumbled, biscuit-colored boulders. The rocks were ancient, Willis said, maybe two hundred million years old.

  Madora was twenty-two years old, and two hundred million was a number so big she wasn’t even sure how to write it.

  From behind the Lagunas, the sun rose and kissed the head of Evers Canyon that loomed directly behind Madora’s house. In the nearest town, Arroyo, and in San Diego, thirty miles west, people were just waking up, but Madora was alert as she and the dog walked across the yard and the cul-de-sac to where a weathered sign marked a trailhead into Cleveland National Forest, a vast, barren territory of mountains, rocks, and chaparral. A rock one hundred yards up the trail resembled a chair, and she often went there to sit and think and watch the land as she waited for the sun; but this morning Willis wanted her to stay near the house. She leaned back against the trail sign and swallowed the last of her coffee as she waited for the sun line to slip down from the canyon rim and melt the stiffness in her shoulders and neck. Willis said she’d feel better if she lost twenty pounds.

  It was June and the weather had turned the corner, heading into full summer. The balls of sagebrush scattered across the sloping land were already brown. Soon the house would oven up and stay hot day and night until October. Although Madora opened all the windows to lure the slightest breeze, at the dead end of Evers Canyon the trapped air did not move much. Dust settled on every surface and clung to the curtains’ coarse weave. It powdered Madora’s skin, got in her eyes and hair and ears; her nose was so dry it sometimes bled. June meant that July was on its way and right behind it August and September, the hottest months of the year. Fire season.

  The pit bull Madora had found as a puppy pushed against her leg, wanting attention. Though Foo was only a few months old, his personality had begun to organize itself into a mixture of aggression and timidity, curiosity, loyalty, and affection. During the previous night the cries coming from the woman in the trailer behind the house seemed to frighten him. He whimpered until Madora drew him against the curve of her body where she lay on the sectional.

  There had been five cabbage-sized pups in the box at the side of the road, only Foo left alive and him just barely. Brown and white and squint-eyed, he had felt in her hands like a small warm loaf of bread. Coyotes would have gotten him if Madora had not seen the box. Coyotes and hawks. Spiders and snakes. The world was full of danger. In Cleveland National Forest even the plants had spikes and thorns.

  She buried the puppies in the sand along the dry stream at the back of the house and gathered stones for a cairn. She gave Foo water and then evaporated milk from an eyedropper and put a hot water bottle and a scrap of blanket in a box for him to snuggle up to. Willis said they couldn’t afford a dog, but Madora convinced him otherwise, pointing out that a pit bull would be a good watchdog. He needed shots and a tag with his name: Foo. Madora wanted him to have a proper license from the county, but Willis didn’t like signing forms that required his name and address.

  Foo had become part of Madora’s nursery of injured animals and struggling plants. But he was more than that. His companionable presence made the long days less monotonous. She talked to him about the things that mattered to her; and as he listened, his small bright eyes never left her face, as if he believed she had all the answers, if only he could figure out what the questions were.

  Under the carport there were pots and planters and whiskey barrels full of zinnias and cosmos and petunias, flowers that endured the heat as long as they were watered. On a shelf made of bricks and boards, a homemade cage held a rabbit with one ear ripped by a hawk. After six weeks it still cowered at the back of the cage. In another cage, she kept a coyote pup she’d raised from skin and bones, wild and mean. She had found him on the far side of the truck trailer where the girl was.

  As Madora walked back across the road, back to the house, a stranger, a hiker or a boy riding a mountain bike, would have seen a fair-skinned girl made beautiful by innocence, c
andid green eyes, and skin turned to gold by the sun. But almost no one ever came this far up Evers Canyon; there were much easier trails into the Cleveland.

  Madora and Willis had lived in the three-room house at the end of Red Rock Road for almost four years, renting from a man they had never met who kept the rent low as long as they paid on time and asked no favors or improvements. In Madora’s memory the months and seasons blurred; one summer was as hot as another, one winter as dry as the next. Country life suited her, but nature’s ruthlessness was frightening. On a walk with Willis she had stepped into a spider’s net cast between two trees on opposite sides of the trail. As she pulled the sticky webbing from her hair and face, a butterfly came away in her hand, its wings as dull and dry as paper. Madora wanted to destroy the web, but Willis admired the intricacy of the silken weave. He said there was a circle of life and coyotes and spiders as much as girls and butterflies were part of it.

  Madora didn’t believe that life was a circle. Tending her damaged animals, she saw that it was more like a canyon back, where some got trapped and only a few rescued.

  In the truck trailer up on cement blocks, the girl named Linda had screamed through the small hours of the night. Willis worked as a home health care provider and before that he had been a medic in the Marine Corps. He promised that compared to fixing men torn up by IEDs and land mines, delivering a baby was nothing. But still she screamed. Willis had given her pills, but Madora guessed from the cries that they had not been sufficient to ease her labor pains. Anyone walking by could have heard the noise she made, but the house was at the end of the road, almost a mile from its nearest neighbor, and the residents of Evers Canyon kept to their own business.

  In the kitchen Madora followed the directions Willis had made her repeat back to him a half dozen times. She put a clean plastic tub in the sink with an old towel folded on the bottom. Another towel she folded in half and laid out on the counter beside the sink. On the other side she put a clean sponge and a bottle of lemon-colored extra-gentle bath soap and a third towel. The day before she had scoured every surface in the kitchen with Clorox, making her eyes burn and water. On her hands and knees she scrubbed the kitchen floor until she thought she would wear through the old vinyl to the gappy floorboards beneath. Afterwards she wouldn’t let Willis wear his shoes indoors until he pointed out that if Foo could run in and out, he should be able to as well. Madora could not ban Foo. He would be hurt and confused. She gave him a bath and washed the floor again.