Wanted! Page 4

  Alice shut her mind down like a bank at night, refusing to think of where and what Dad might be.

  So far, she thought, the only thing I’ve done wrong is to drive my own father’s car without a license. I can get into trouble for that, but I don’t think a whole lot of trouble. Do I want to add car theft? Do I want that woman, who’s angry anyway over her package, to come back and there’s no van here?

  In the creepy way of headlights in the dark, the lights of a car not yet visible made jumping rectangular patterns around the rough cement walls of the parking garage.

  Alice thought: It’s the police car.

  She’d been hanging out as if she had all the time in the world. Things to analyze, strategies to plan, anger to feel. But if those headlights belonged to the cop, she had no time at all.

  She thought of hiding in the van, hunching down—

  —but that was childish and ridiculous, like hiding in your own closet if you heard noises.

  The police would be all over the Corvette in seconds, and she would be trapped inches away.

  That is stupid, thought Alice. I am stupid. This is what you are supposed to learn from all these years of watching television. Cooperate with the police. Tell the truth. Be a good girl.

  Alice had definitely watched her share of television. She and Dad were partial to real-life cop shows and always hoped that for once, instead of filming in Atlanta or Los Angeles or Miami, they’d come here and film streets Dad and Alice would recognize.

  But a girl whose very own mother believes she is capable of murder…police who have a confession…

  Alice reminded herself that forensics was a very advanced science. The pathologist would establish that Dad had not been killed in the condo. Couldn’t have been.

  Alice’s face twitched, as if she had tasted something awful, and could flinch off the disgusting flavor with muscle spasms.

  It was imperative to get away, take the disks and read them, find out what was on them, do something more sensible than steal a van. Maybe—maybe—maybe what? There were too many choices and no choices.

  The lights of the approaching car cast quickly changing shadows across her face.

  It occurred to her that maybe Dad had not been killed someplace else.

  Maybe the man had brought a living Dad into his own bedroom and killed him there. Maybe that was the inhuman groan she had heard.

  Alice’s own inhuman moan whimpered out of her mouth. She stifled it, and panted tiny shallow breaths, like a desperate dog.

  Alice decided to do what any girl would do in a similar situation.

  Shop.

  Chapter 4

  ALICE RAN BETWEEN THE rows of cars, following the direction the fat woman had taken. The underground mall entrance was small and dark, without the gleaming two-story pillars of the main entrances.

  Should I look back? Alice wondered. Letting her eyes move in the Corvette’s direction would show her face to the policeman, like a deer caught in the headlights. But she had to know.

  The door rotated automatically, letting one person enter at a time, so Alice could not linger on the threshold, considering things. Yanking her long hair out of her eyes, Alice looked fast over one shoulder, and there, partially visible among cement pillars, was a police car.

  Alice stepped into the mall. Instantly she was part of a swirling crowd of anonymous people. Wednesday must be a big shopping day. Nobody looked at her, because nobody cared. They cared about themselves and their purchases.

  The door had led Alice into the downstairs area of a low-end department store, among appliances and hardware. It amazed her to see couples stroking washing machines, women opening vegetable drawers in refrigerators, men examining the gears on yard tractors. It was so normal. She wanted to explain to these people that nothing was normal now.

  A scream was sitting inside her, waiting to leave. If she let go of her control for a single second, the scream would barrel out with as much force as the Corvette. Alice fastened her jaws together hard enough to break fillings.

  She found the escalator with the ease of a practiced mall-woman and went to Clothing on the second floor. She moved swiftly among the racks, getting a pair of generic jeans, a pale pink T-shirt size L, the cheapest sneakers in the world, which would probably fall apart in an hour, and from a bin of generic baseball-style caps, grabbed the one on top. There was a vertical rack of sunglasses, and old-people reading glasses, the kind where you didn’t go to the eye doctor first, and Alice chose a pair with nerd rims, wide and black.

  She didn’t try anything on.

  She didn’t insist on brand names.

  She didn’t even read the logo on the cap.

  There was a line at the cash register, and this time Alice did not let herself look around, nor think of police, but stayed close to a woman her mother’s age, as if they were together. Her charge card startled her. When she signed the sales slip, she thought: This is a paper trail. I am leaving a trail.

  The mall was a vast T, with soaring ceilings, and anchor stores at the ends of the cross. There were ledges and seats and perches, three-story strips of hanging ivy, odd little wagons for crystal earrings or photos printed on T-shirts. There were families and strollers and canes, there were sweats and high heels and flapping sandals.

  A jutting balcony, as large as a gym, was filled with tiny food shops: chocolate, french fries, Orange Julius, tacos. A semicircle of public telephones stood at one side, each phone fastened to a high gleaming steel pillar.

  I have no idea what I am doing, thought Alice. Why am I buying clothes? I have two walk-in closets full of clothes at home!

  She moved toward the phones, thinking: My mother loves me. She’s a sensible woman and I’m a sensible daughter. One phone call, and we’ll clear this up.

  All six phones were being used.

  Alice listened to each conversation, trying to figure out who was likely to stop first. At a time when Alice so urgently needed to speak to her mother, the conversations these strangers were having were stupid and worthless.

  Two security guards, each talking into his hand phone, came jogging down the hall.

  Me, thought Alice. Those men are after me. The police alerted mall security.

  It had been terrible to see the car that had chased her, but to see the actual men…see their faces, and hands, and weapons (weapons!) and know that they were taller and stronger…that their actual job, their actual assignment, was to catch Alice…

  All the security staff need do was close the mall exits. So it was necessary to leave before that happened. Forget changing clothing.

  In fact, now that Alice thought about it, how could they know what she was wearing? It was the car that had been described, not her clothes. She had wasted precious time getting an outfit that would blend in. She had forgotten the important thing—she had to get away.

  Alice slipped around knots of shoppers and walked swiftly into the department store from which the security men had come. She went through Perfume, its glass counters sparkling with bottles, and through Handbags, leather and cloth and designer—and there was an exit. Two automatic doors, flanked by two push doors.

  A security guard was standing there, facing into the store. He was not lounging. He stood solidly, legs spread, arms folded. His eyes shot around, little scouts in the wilderness, hunting for her.

  Alice took a handbag from the display and tore off the price tags as she walked through Lingerie over to Swimsuits. She pushed through the cash register line, annoying shoppers, and held up the purse to the overworked, exhausted clerk. “Someone left her purse in the ladies’ room,” she said. “Would you please call Security to come and get it?”

  The clerk beamed. “Oh, how nice of you!” The women in line softened. Today’s young people were not so worthless after all.

  Alice smiled back. This was too bad. The clerk and customers were going to be able to describe her and her clothes. Alice set the handbag on the counter, hoping nobody would go through it just ye
t, since the only contents were smushed store paper to keep the bag from sagging.

  The clerk picked up her phone.

  Alice walked back, taking a route behind racks full of clothes, and sure enough, frowning, the security guard headed toward Swimsuits. He walked sideways, keeping an eye on the door.

  Alice crouched between tightly packed nightgowns and shimmering satin robes. Stooped over, she got as close to the exit as she could, straightened up, shoved the door open, and ran.

  Flew, actually.

  Her skirt and hair lifted behind her, and her shopping bag and purse whapped into cars as she raced past them.

  She had visualized the parking lot as an easy place to hide, a thousand cars behind which she could duck, but she was taller than the cars. She was completely visible.

  And there was no place to go. At the far side of the immense lot was the six-lane road she’d driven off of. Not the sort of road you easily crossed on foot. There was nothing on the other side but more stores, more parking lots, more exposed places where pedestrians did not hang out.

  Halfway across the lot Alice knew she was ruined. Running away was one thing, but you had to have somewhere to end up.

  I have nowhere to end up, thought Alice.

  She heard a yell from the mall. “Hey! You!” It was a big, chesty, masculine yell. An authority yell.

  A truck backed out almost on top of her. Alice had to brake as if she were a car.

  It was a Ford pickup, not the cute little suburban kind, but a big solid V-8 work truck. It was not new, and the back was filled with stuff. A tarp, a barrel, some tools, a ladder, several cement blocks, empty white buckets. The tailgate was gone.

  The driver could not see behind him. His interior rearview mirror was blocked and he was backing in that slow way of people who are hoping immovable objects will move out of the way.

  Alice threw her purse and shopping bag behind the cement blocks, put her two hands on the bed of the truck, and jumped in. Turning on her fanny, she pulled up her feet and skirt, crawled up against the junk and yanked the tarp over herself.

  The truck changed gears painfully and slowly. Then even more slowly, it drove forward. Had the driver seen her get in his truck? Had the security guard seen? Was any of this really happening, or had her imagination split like an atom, causing a bomb of made-up nightmares?

  The tarp was brilliant blue plastic, very thin. She felt outlined. The truck bed was filthy with spilled oil, paint, gunk, and food wrappers.

  The truck turned, and turned again. Were they heading out of the mall or toward the guard?

  The truck lurched and then leaped out into traffic, the driver ramming through gears as if he were hours late for the most important event of the year. Alice braced herself on the corrugated floor of the truck. They drove for a minute and stopped dead. Alice and the junk tipped, and then fell back in place. They must have hit a red light.

  When this had happened twice more, Alice took the tarp off. Her truck was in the third, interior lane, completely surrounded by cars and vans and other trucks. A very curious driver in a Mazda was watching Alice.

  She twinkled her fingers at him and he grinned, surprised and interested, and waved back.

  The light changed, and this time Alice’s truck drove straight for perhaps a mile. Buildings emerged from the wrong direction, because she was sitting backward. She saw every fast food chain in America—Dunkin’ Donuts and Taco Bell and Ruby Tuesday’s and Burger King. It made her hungry even while the thought of food also made her sick.

  At each red light, Alice told herself to get off.

  But it was dangerous. Right here in the midst of vehicles and idling engines and turning trucks? Just slide off hoping nobody would run her over? Dart through several lanes of traffic?

  Alice was not a danger-seeking kind of person. She used seat belts. She put waterproofing on her winter boots. When she did homework on the computer, she always made a backup.

  It was too late, anyhow. Abruptly, they left the city behind and were among large yards and houses set way back off the road.

  Alice tried to think through the geography of this. Westtown Mall was about five miles from Mom’s house, and about five miles the other direction from the city itself. She wasn’t familiar with this road, so were they heading back out to the country? Or was this a diagonal, and merely another way through the suburbs that ringed the city?

  Now there was nobody behind them, and Alice had time to be afraid of the driver of her truck. The driver she had not seen; did not know the gender or age of. What would he/she do about Alice when the drive was over? Where would they be? What would Alice do?

  Her brain was capable of questions, but not answers.

  When the truck stopped again, Alice hung onto her plastic shopping bag and her purse, scooted to the edge of the truck, and slid off. She walked away, trying to look like a person who had been on the edge of the road all along.

  The light changed. The Ford moved on.

  She could not stop herself from checking. She turned and looked, and incredibly, the driver’s hand was sticking out of the window, waving at her.

  She could not wave back. It was too casual.

  Had it been a teenager, delighted to have a sudden hitchhiker? A mason or a housepainter, amused by some weird girl’s antics? A shoplifter, willing to bail out a fellow criminal?

  The truck disappeared around a curve, and Alice was alone.

  Ordinary houses looked like fortresses.

  Garage doors looked like traps and small dogs like Dobermans.

  Alice tried to walk as if she belonged here and knew where she was going. Anxiety turned to crippling fear, and now her ankles hurt, and her knees, and hip joints, and spine, and she wanted to lie down on something soft, and curl up, and pull a blanket over her face, and then have Dad kiss her awake from her nap and her nightmare.

  What am I doing? she thought. What do I do next? I need help.

  The only person who could explain this horror was Mom.

  What if explaining was not enough? What if, after Mom finished explaining to the police, they still thought Alice had killed her very own father?

  Every house she walked by must have a telephone, or two or three or four. She actually thought of breaking into a house just to use their phone; explaining to whoever was sitting there, This is an emergency.

  A yellow sign warned oncoming cars to be careful of children crossing the street. Alice crossed in the crosswalk, to establish how law-abiding she was. How filthy the back of her dress must be. The dress was cream with scattered tiny red and black flowers, a vaguely Persian pattern. She felt extremely visible.

  Around the corner was an elementary school, named for a person, probably a local heroine. Margaret P. Trask School, it said.

  Alice’s school had a day off. A professional day, during which teachers were supposed to be learning a ton of useful stuff and you got to stay home, learning how to use nail polish. But this school must be in another district, because it was open. Playing fields stretched on three sides of the school, and kids were struggling with various forms of baseball and T-ball. School must be almost over; empty yellow buses had begun to line up.

  Alice was not wearing a watch. Was it two in the afternoon? Three? When had Dad phoned? Eleven? It seemed to Alice that she had a commitment this afternoon. What was it?

  This did not seem the time to worry about whether she had a dentist appointment or had promised to call Kelsey.

  If Alice had ever needed a best friend, it was now. But Mom would have phoned Kelsey to see if Alice had gone there. The police would be asking Kelsey to guess where Alice was.

  What guess would Kelsey make? Would Kelsey tell the police anything? Would she believe for a single instant that Alice—who had spent the night with Kelsey a million times, and shared pizza, and rented movies, and popped popcorn, and most of all discussed boys, boys, and still more boys—was a killer? Whose side would Kelsey be on?

  My own mother is not on my
side, thought Alice.

  A class bolted out a side door of Margaret P. Trask, scattering over the grass. Their teacher clapped her hands. Her students were like little magnet filings, coming back to her. “Hi, how are you?” Alice said to the teacher. Alice smiled at the class, and went in where they had come out. It felt very schoolish in here, with light tan tiles, and art papers on the walls, and the sounds of chatter and chalk coming out the doors.

  She was walking toward the front of the building, toward the principal’s office, where phones would be, when she remembered that in elementary school, you had to ask to use a phone. Phones were behind the secretary’s desk. Or in the nurse’s room. They were not lined up, mall-style, in the hallways. How could she use a phone here, considering the conversation she expected to have?

  She walked past two closed doors, two open classroom doors, and came to a Girls’ Room.

  Inside, the toilets were tiny, and the sinks very low.

  She stepped in a stall and changed into her new jeans and T-shirt. She had no way to cut the tags and had to rip them off. It tore a hole in the shirt. Alice had plenty of T-shirts with holes, but this hole seemed too much and once again she had to battle tears. She took off her sandals and yanked on the new sneakers. They, too, had to be torn to separate them. She made a ponytail of her long hair, threaded it through the hole in the back of the baseball cap, and tugged the visor low on her forehead.

  Her face puckered like a lemon, and then, horribly, her stomach, too. Alice whirled, bent, and threw up very neatly into the tiny toilet. She stayed clutching the white porcelain sides while her stomach and her face settled back into position, and then it was over.

  You can fool your mind, she thought, but not your gut.

  The awful quick animal panting returned for a minute and then Alice forced herself to the sink, washed her face and mouth and teeth with her hands, shoved her old clothes back into the shopping bag, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed out the way she had come.

  One class had left book bags outside their door.

  There were movie character book bags: Pocahontas and 101 Dalmatians. There were teddy bear book bags and L.L. Bean book bags, tiny second-grade-sized book bags, and huge Dad-goes-camping backpacks.