Stealing Faces - Michael Prescott [16]
It seemed a heavy burden for such frail shoulders.
He would be glad to lift it from her, to give her peace.
He expected her to get on Interstate 10, but instead she passed beneath it, then pulled into a motel on the frontage road.
She was not even a local resident. And the motel, a ramshackle one-story building amid miles of desolation, looked as seedy as the car she drove. Whoever she was, she had no money.
She was nobody. Nobody at all. A stranger from out of town, alone, engaged in a secret quest. Who would miss her when she disappeared?
Cray parked on the frontage road, then retracted his side window and stared at the motel parking lot across a waste of weeds and flat, parched land. Trucks howled past on I-10, shaking the world.
He watched as Elizabeth Palmer got out of the car and headed toward the motel. Halfway there, she stopped, lifting her head to look around sharply.
“Do you know I’m here, Elizabeth?” Cray asked in a whisper. “Do you feel my gaze?”
With a dismissive shake of her head, she resumed walking. At the side of the building she fumbled in her purse for her keys, then unlocked the door of her room.
The door shut behind her, and a light came on behind closed drapes. There was a pause, and suddenly her shadow passed over the drapes, sweeping like a pendulum. Again. Again.
She was pacing. Upset.
“You’re tired, child,” Cray said. “You need your rest.”
She would fall asleep eventually. Cray could wait.
Another bevy of trucks roared past, and then in a stretch of sudden stillness, Cray heard the distant wail of a coyote somewhere on the flats, another predator like himself.
7
The room was quiet, at least. Elizabeth was grateful for that. She had spent much of the afternoon trying to block out the pornographic sounds from the adjacent units.
The motel, if she could judge by the scarcity of cars in the parking lot, was largely empty now. Apparently it did most of its business during the day.
Many times in the past twelve years she had been holed up in a place like this. Sometimes it was a motel just off the interstate, and sometimes an apartment house that rented single rooms by the week, with a common bathroom down the hall.
There had been a nice cottage in Santa Fe, which she’d rented for nearly a year while doing clerical work at an accounting firm. Trellises of climbing roses had garlanded the patio; she would sit outside in the soft springtime air.
That had been one of the good times. Colorado Springs had been good also. She’d spent six months there, in a two-bedroom apartment with modern appliances and quiet, respectable neighbors. She had been tempted to buy a cat and settle in, but then things had gone wrong and she’d had to clear out fast, loading up her Chevette in the night.
So much running, twelve years of it, crossing state lines, moving from the desert to the mountains, from cities to small towns.
A month ago—had it been only a month?—she’d been living at the edge of a Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area, where the sculpted buttes took great jagged bites out of the turquoise sky. She had been a waitress in a truck-stop diner, a job that always seemed strangely glamorous in the movies. Her feet were sore every night, and in her sleep she would dream of balancing stacks of dishes.
She’d run and run, and now here she was in southern Arizona, not fifty miles from where her zigzag trek had started.
Elizabeth kicked off her shoes, tossed her jacket on the armchair by the standing lamp. It was a nylon jacket, red with silver and white trim, bearing the insignia of the University of New Mexico Lobos. She’d bought it in Albuquerque, on an excursion from Santa Fe—just one of many things she’d picked up in her wanderings.
Barefoot, she paced the floor. A window air conditioner rattled and hummed, stirring a lukewarm breeze. The spotty beige drapes shivered in the current of air.
She ought to sleep, but worry had her in its clutch and wouldn’t let go.
Worry ... and guilt.
“Shouldn’t feel guilty,” she murmured. “Not your fault.”
She’d done