Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [42]
Relieved, she passed Eddie to his sister. “Sit here and hold him,” she said. “I need to finish packing.”
Before Manny’s attack, Ellie had been carefully folding and sorting clothing prior to packing it. Now she threw in everything that would fit and then sat on the bulging cases to force the lids shut. Once they were closed she hurried outside with two of the suitcases, only to discover Manny’s pickup was nowhere to be found. Rather than bring it home, Manny had evidently hidden it. It was one more way of making sure his wife didn’t leave.
Had Ellie gone searching, she probably could have found the truck. It was most likely at Manny’s parents’ house or else at his brother’s, but there wasn’t time to play hide-and-seek. Praying Manny wouldn’t awaken before she returned, Ellie took the kids and trudged as far as the pay phone outside the trading post, where she placed a call to Sister Justine in Topawa.
Sister Justine came at once in the convent’s nine-passenger station wagon. She looked at Ellie’s bloodied face and shook her head. “You should go to the hospital,” she said.
Ellie shook her head. “No hospital,” she said. “He’ll know to look for me there. I have to get away.”
“All right, then,” Sister Justine said. “Let’s go.”
And they did.
Arriving at Topawa in the early-afternoon heat, Delia Ortiz found only a few dusty pickups scattered here and there in the dirt parking lot outside the small adobe-covered church. She parked her Saab as unobtrusively as possible among the other vehicles and went inside. It was early enough in the day that the gloomy sanctuary, like the parking lot outside, was still relatively deserted. She didn’t have to wait long before making her way into the confessional.
“Forgive me, Father,” she said as she closed the door behind her. “Forgive me, for I have sinned.”
Ten
It was just after noon when Larry Stryker came home from a charity golf tournament at Tucson National. Luckily his foursome had drawn an early tee time. They’d finished up before the worst heat of the day, but he’d been too beat to stay on for the afternoon’s festivities and the awarding of trophies. He told Al Parker he had things to attend to at home, and he did. He might be too tired to spend much time in the basement that afternoon, but he still needed to take food there. He owed the girl that much.
The spacious and solitary ranch house was coolly welcoming when he unlocked the front door and let himself inside. He had moved to The Flying C after Gayle’s mother died while Gayle stayed on in their El Encanto home. It was an arrangement that suited them, allowing both to maintain a public facade as a happily married couple while leaving them free to follow their individual pursuits.
Larry pulled a beer from the refrigerator under the wet bar and then settled into his recliner—a well-worn Stickley Morris chair—in the living room. He wondered sometimes what would happen when—not if—he was no longer able to live here on his own and look after things. Considering what lay beyond the locked basement door, his having household help—live-in or otherwise—was entirely out of the question. He maintained the parts of the house he used—the kitchen and living room as well as his bedroom and bath and the basement—in reasonably good order. As for the rest of the house? He shut the doors and left it alone.
In public Dr. Lawrence Stryker was often described as a man of action. Here, in the privacy of his own home—alone except for the presence of whatever girl awaited his attentions in the basement—he sometimes allowed himself to wallow in the past and to wonder what would