A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [30]
Later, they unloaded that hitchhiker and picked up another—a homeless boy who regaled Byers with stories about male prostitution and other survival strategies for young people in the city. They rolled into the Bay Area and found their way to the home of Raleigh Roark’s half sister, who had left Seattle and was living not far from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Byers, Stanley Ann, and the young hitchhiker arrived and settled in.
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, Hunt had barely gone to bed that night—or perhaps woken up in the morning—before the telephone rang. Byers’s parents were calling. “My story was, ‘Gee, I don’t know. I dropped them off at Bill’s. I thought Bill was going to take her home,’” he told me. Back in Kansas, too, the telephone rang in the home of Leona and R. C. Payne, Charles Payne remembered. Thinking Stanley Ann and Byers might have headed for Kansas, Madelyn was calling her mother. The two teenagers were reported missing. Hunt, who was not in the habit of lying to his parents about things that mattered, received a visit from a member of the county sheriff’s office. Gradually, fragments of the story spilled out. They had all talked about going off on a lark, driving someplace. They had said, “Wouldn’t it be fun to drive to San Francisco?” Perhaps Byers’s parents remembered Byers having talked about Roark’s half sister in the San Francisco Bay Area. Someone called the police in the Berkeley area and in the surrounding county. Officers turned up at the house. The young hitchhiker tried, unsuccessfully, to bolt through an open window. The three runaways were taken into custody and put briefly in juvenile detention, segregated by gender. Stanley Dunham arrived by plane from Seattle and somehow managed to retrieve the car, which had been impounded. Then he drove Byers and Stanley Ann home. As Bill described it, Stanley Dunham seemed to suspect, wrongly, that Bill and Stanley Ann had eloped. Byers told me, “I remember him going off on this strange monologue, saying, ‘Sex isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know?’”
There is a temptation to see in the midnight road trip a foreshadowing of events yet to come in Stanley Ann’s life. It certainly suggests a willingness to take a risk, an aptitude that flows, like a leitmotif, through the history of the Dunhams and the Paynes. Madelyn, as a teenager, had defied her parents and married in secret. Stanley, at a young age, had struck out for the coast. They may have appeared conventional from the outside, but there was a restlessness about them—the restlessness that had propelled Americans westward and that would eventually take the Dunhams as far west as they could go. Perhaps it is a leap to connect that impulse to a late-night lark in the young life of one high school senior. But the truth is, Stanley Ann would keep traveling for the rest of her life.
When she resurfaced in school, she did not want to talk about what had happened, Hunt remembered. People would not understand, he said, and she could not explain. Such an escapade was unheard of.