Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [10]
As she sifted through the pile, she thought of Jeffrey. It was her dream last night that had brought him into her thoughts. He was so intimately connected in her mind to the murder of her mother. She realized it had been five weeks since they last spoke and she desperately wanted to hear his voice. She missed him like she missed the smell of the ocean, barely noticing until she caught the scent once again, and then it could bring tears to her eyes. She looked at the phone and knew he was thinking of her—waiting every day, in the back of his mind, for her to call, only really thinking of her when he was alone in his office late at night or in bed. But some kind of discipline kept her from calling, some need to see how long she could go without hearing his voice. She despised dependence in herself.
One of her shrinks had confronted her about her relationship with Jeffrey, commenting on how complicated it seemed to be and asking what he meant to her. It was an insightful question, but she was not about to share her personal feelings with some stupid doctor, in spite of the fact this was probably the point of therapy. It was complicated; she loved him, she needed him in her life. Maybe it was because she had met him when she was so young, or that he had played a rescuer/protector role for her initially, but for a long time she had almost hero-worshiped him. He was everything a man should be: strong, brave, honest, honorable, reliable—everything she aspired to be. She considered him to be an omnipresent, omnipotent force in her life, more than friend, more than brother, just everything. But when he had been shot, about a year earlier, something about the way she felt had shifted within her. The thought of him being gone from her life was unbearable and the fact that he had suddenly been proved as human, that he was fragile and mortal like she was, like her mother, had forced her to recognize that she was and probably always had been in love with him. So, of course, she was compelled to get as far away from him as possible without actually putting him out of her life. Love like that was not safe for anyone.
She turned her attention to the clippings. In the pile, she found an article about a trend of people abandoning cars in the desert. One old Cadillac was found with its lights still on, a dirty baby doll in the backseat with its head pulled off. The possibilities intrigued Lydia. Another article concerned itself with the high incidence of methamphetamine addiction among local teens. A housewife had died by hanging herself but the article stated that she’d been found wearing “leather accessories” and intimated that rather than suicide, her death may have been “accidental.” I guess “autoerotic asphyxia” and “suburban housewife” don’t go well together in the same sentence, thought Lydia. It was amazing what you could find going on in small towns if you knew what to look for. Lydia was sure there were no idyllic small American towns and probably never had been. Behind the quaint and charming facades of Everytown, U.S.A., there was some ugly rot, some unimaginably twisted lives.
The articles that attracted Lydia today were notable not just for their strangeness, but by their potential connections to each other and the larger force that might be at work behind them.
(AUGUST 10)
BREAK-IN AT SURGICAL-SUPPLY WAREHOUSE:
Various Instruments in Small Quantities Are Missing
(AUGUST 15)
ABANDONED BARN BURNED, ARSON SUSPECTED
(AUGUST 16)
TEENAGER MISSING FROM THE CARE OF FOSTER FAMILY
(AUGUST 21)
DRUG-ADDICTED COUPLE DISAPPEAR:
A Long-suffering Victim of Domestic Abuse and Her Husband Missing
And there was one more story that made the back of her neck tingle.
Since she’d arrived in Santa Fe, she had been following a story about a little boy with leukemia, the son of a congresswoman, who had lost his German shepherd, Lucky. The dog had run away from the boy’s father during an evening walk near their home in Angel Fire. As the kid lay dying in his hospital bed, he wanted nothing