Allie and Bea : A Novel Page 27

  “Fine,” Bea said, her eyes still glued to the road. “Ruby Beach it is.”

  It seemed almost too easy. Allie thought maybe it was a sign that the trip would be easier from here on out.

  When Allie arrived back in the parking lot from her exploratory trip on foot to the beach, Bea was hanging her upper body out the open driver’s side window.

  “There’s a walk involved,” Bea said, “isn’t there?”

  “It’s short. And you have to see it, Bea. It’s the most beautiful beach ever. And there’s no one here. We have the place all to ourselves.”

  “Tell me what’s so different about this beach from every other beach we’ve seen all along the way. Tell me now, before I get down on my tired old legs and my sore old feet and haul all the way out there after that long hike I took at the cape.”

  “I can’t describe it, Bea. You have to see it with your own eyes. Tell you what. If you get out there, and I’m wrong, and it wasn’t worth it, you don’t have to stop at a single lighthouse on the way back.”

  The older woman seemed to digest that offer for a moment. Then she powered up her window and stepped down from the van.

  “That makes me a winner either way, I suppose,” Bea said.

  They stood together at the end of the path, breathing. Surveying their surroundings.

  The air was misty with moisture. Fog-like low clouds blew, parting occasionally to show a steely blue-gray sky marked with higher, more distinct white clouds. The mouth of a creek emptying into the ocean ran through rocks and sand near where they stood. Its water was wide, flat, and shallow. It seemed to hold perfectly still, reflecting the cloudy sky.

  There were sea stacks here too, just off the driftwood-littered beach. One was huge and wide, like a high, sheer-sided island. Others rose ragged and pointy, severe haystacks of rock.

  “What are those stones for?” Bea asked.

  Allie turned her eyes to a log, a massive fallen tree trunk of driftwood. On it, someone—or many someones—had stacked dozens upon dozens of small rock towers, little pyramids of stones. Round, smooth, flat stones, like river rocks—the largest on the bottom of each pile, decreasing in size as they rose. Some only three stones high, some six or seven.

  “They’re like ducks,” Allie said.

  The mood of reverence broke, and Bea regarded her with a comical skepticism.

  “They are nothing like ducks, little one. What about those stacked rocks reminds you of a duck?”

  “That’s not what I meant. Not real ducks. I mean ducks, like cairns. People use them as trail markers. If it’s not clear which way to go, hikers stack rocks to mark the trail. To point the way.”

  Still Bea was staring at her, eyes squinted with doubt. Or maybe that was just the wind.

  “They taught you this in school, too?”

  “No, my dad and I used to hike. Sometimes. On the weekends, or when we were on vacation. But that was a long time ago.”

  Back when we had less money and more fun, Allie thought. But she didn’t say it.

  “Hmm,” Bea said. “So if one of these little stacks means ‘go this way,’ then what do a hundred of them mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe that we’re here? That all roads lead here?”

  “No idea,” Bea said. “But we’ll still need to stop at some lighthouses on the way down. Because this is one stunning beach. Damn it.”

  They had almost reached the parking lot when Allie heard it. A sound that froze her blood and made her heart pound in her ears: the static of a transmission over a police radio.

  She stopped. Bea stopped, but maybe only because Allie had.

  “What’s wrong?” Bea asked.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “No. Hear what?”

  So maybe it was only Allie’s paranoid imagination. Or maybe Bea’s ears weren’t what they had used to be.

  Allie took a handful of cautious steps. Bea followed behind, seeming to catch the fear as if by contagion.

  The van was where they had left it in the parking lot. Parked in front of it and blocking its exit sat a white Washington State Patrol car. Allie’s heart pounded harder, then skipped a beat. She couldn’t see a patrolman, but she could hear him talking on his radio.

  She was eighty percent sure she heard him say, “But no sign of the girl.”

  She reached a hand around and touched Bea’s collarbone, pushing her back into an area mostly obscured by trees.

  “It’s a little late for that,” Bea hissed. “He knows we’re here, now doesn’t he?”

  Allie’s brain scrambled for footing like a spooked wild animal. “He doesn’t know just from looking at the van that I’m still traveling with you.”

  “So what are our options?”

  Allie looked into Bea’s face as she spoke. The old woman looked every bit as scared as Allie felt.

  “We could go back to the beach on foot and find another way out of here.”

  “I can’t walk anymore! It’s too much. And I can’t just leave the van behind. It has everything I own in it. And what about Phyllis?”

  “Oh. Right. Phyllis.” A pause, while Allie tried to organize her thoughts. “Okay. You go back to the van alone. Tell them I was riding with you down in Southern California, but you let me out days ago, and you haven’t seen me since, and you have no idea where I am.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Take off on foot.”

  For a moment, no one spoke. No one moved. Allie wasn’t sure either one of them was breathing.

  “Okay.” Bea took a step toward the lot.

  Allie grabbed her sleeve.

  “No, wait, Bea. Don’t.”

  They stood still together in the middle of the panic. The moment seemed to drag on. To stretch out. All panic and time, and not much more.

  “Don’t lie to them for me,” Allie whispered. “Because if I get caught they’ll know you lied and that could get you in trouble. Lying to an officer. Could be an obstructing justice kind of thing.”

  “So what do we do?” Bea asked, sounding quite desperate.

  In that moment, Allie knew exactly what she should do.

  When had she stopped being Honest Allie? her brain asked within a muddle, a swarm of uninvited thoughts. The Allie people teased and criticized for her unbending ways? And now here she was telling someone to lie for her while she made a desperate dash to evade her own consequences.

  So this is how it happens, she thought. You’re in trouble, so you lie and run because you think you have to. Because you think you don’t have any other choice. But there must always be two choices. At least two. Right?

  “I need to do what I should’ve done all along.”

  She marched through the parking lot and straight up to the uniformed officer, who was now standing by Bea’s driver’s side door. He looked up, his dark brown eyes meeting her own. He seemed surprised to see her.

  “And you would be Alberta Keyes,” he said. “Am I right about that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve got quite a few people sick with worry down in Southern California, young lady.”

  “Yes, sir. I know. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not me you need to apologize to. But anyway, there’s time for that later. Let’s start by getting you back where you belong.”

  As Allie slid into the back of his patrol car, without having to be put there by force or even supervision, she was aware of a painfully familiar feeling. The paralyzing grip of fear had returned.

  It was surprising, if only because Allie hadn’t realized it had been gone.

  They rode in the back of his car together, Allie and Bea. Going where, Allie didn’t know. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask.

  “You really need to leave her out of this,” Allie said to the back of the patrolman’s head. “She had nothing to do with any of it. She didn’t know I wasn’t eighteen. She didn’t know I was a runaway. She just gave me a ride, that’s all, and there’s nothing illegal
about that.”

  “Right,” he said, meeting her eyes for a split second in the rearview mirror. “So you told me the first ten times. And I told you, also ten times, that the police just want to ask her some questions.”

  “And then she can go?”

  “Depends on the answers to the questions.”

  “If you do charge me with something,” Bea said, “what will happen to my van? And my cat?”

  “Oh,” he said. As if just waking up. “The cat is in the van? So that’s what you were trying to tell me.”

  “Yes,” Bea said. “The cat is in the van. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  “If things don’t go your way, ma’am, the vehicle will be impounded. If there’s a live animal inside, it’ll be given over to the department of animal services, who’ll hold the pet until you’re able to reclaim it. But you ladies are getting ahead of yourselves. Alberta, we need to get you back to California. As to your friend here, we just want to ask her some questions.”

  They drove in silence for several minutes. North, Allie guessed by the angle of the sun. The ocean had disappeared from view again. Allie stared out the window and tried to think no thoughts at all.

  “Alberta?” Bea asked after a time. “I always figured Allie was short for Allison.”

  “I wish. My parents named me after my grandfather. Albert.”

  “Oh,” Bea said.

  A few more miles of silence fell.

  Allie reached into the front pocket of her jeans, grasped her quarter-ounce gold coin, and quietly slid it out. She reached over for Bea’s hand, and when Bea opened her hand in surprise, Allie pressed the coin into her palm.

  She wondered if Bea could feel her hand shaking.

  Bea mouthed the words “Thank you,” and Allie nodded.

  Twenty minutes, or an hour, or two hours later—time was a hard entity to pin down in Allie’s brain—they arrived in a coastal town of fairly good size, somewhere along the Puget Sound. A town they had not seen in their travels. It might even have been a small city, but Allie had no map now, and no idea what city it was.

  Bea stirred next to her, and Allie knew they both felt it. That sense of over-ness. Allie thought about the hundred rock cairns on the log at Ruby Beach and wondered if all those “ducks” really did signify the end of the road.

  “Well,” Bea said, “that was a nice adventure while it lasted.”

  “Yeah,” Allie replied. “It really was. While it lasted.”

  For what might have been half an hour, Allie sat alone in an empty room. It was a strangely plain room. Tan walls. A table with one chair on either side. A ceiling fan that made an irritating amount of noise. No windows. No clock.

  Allie wondered if the lack of clock was done on purpose, to make time feel stretched and surreal. To put pressure on whatever unlucky fool had to sit here and wait, not even knowing for what.

  Meanwhile Allie felt nothing, as far as she knew. There was no resistance inside her. That much felt clear. It was bad, what was happening, but Allie’s whole being was in a state of utter surrender. As if her heart and gut had fallen down a very deep hole. No part of her was actively trying to get out, or even prevent more falling. It was just over.

  In time the door opened.

  The woman who walked in wore plain clothes, but her pants and suit jacket were a police-uniform shade of blue. She had long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. Allie thought she might have been forty. There was a calmness about her. In her face, in her movements. It didn’t feel like a satisfied calm. Allie would not have assumed she was a happy woman. But she presented herself as unruffled and low key.

  She sat down on the other side of the table and began to make notes on a clipboard.

  “You’re Alberta Keyes,” she said after a few seconds.

  “Yeah. I think we nailed that.”

  The woman’s eyes flickered up to Allie’s, but she did not otherwise react.

  “Officer McNew,” she said. “I want you to tell me everything you can about what happened.”

  “Why I ran away, you mean?”

  “And what kind of danger you were in after you left the group home.”

  “How did you know I was in danger?”

  “I was just talking to your friend. She’s your biggest fan and supporter; I hope you know that.”

  “It wasn’t her fault at all. Please don’t charge her with anything. Please. She didn’t know I was a runaway. Or that I was underage. She might even say she did, because she thinks she might like jail, because she’s homeless. But I don’t think she’d like it. I don’t think she knows what she’d be getting herself into.”

  The woman leaned back and chewed on the end of her plastic pen. It was the first sign that everything was not placid all the way through her being.

  “You’ve been incarcerated?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then you don’t know what she’d be getting herself into, either.”

  “I feel like I was just starting to know, though. Getting pulled out of my house and stuck in that home with that crazy roommate. And then being kidnapped. I know how it feels when somebody else controls you and there’s nothing you can do about it. And I don’t want that for Bea. She doesn’t deserve that.”

  “Neither did you.”

  In that moment, just that suddenly, Allie’s tears let go. She hadn’t felt them coming. Hadn’t known they were in there, waiting to be cried.

  “Please just put me in juvie and leave her alone,” she sobbed.

  The officer got up from the table and left the room. Allie cried in solitude for a moment, wondering what the sudden exit meant. Then the woman was back, extending four tissues in Allie’s direction.

  “Thank you,” Allie said.

  “I doubt your friend is in any trouble. Lot of people will pick up a runaway or homeless teen. It’s not always for nefarious purposes. Usually they just want the poor kid off the street. We would’ve liked it a lot better if she’d called someone in law enforcement, or brought you back. But she had no bad intent. We’d likely charge her if she’d lied about your whereabouts. You know. To throw us off the track and keep us from finding you.”

  Which I almost had her do, Allie thought. But she said nothing.

  “Or if she contributed to your delinquency in some way.”

  That seemed to hang in the air a moment. The gravity of the soft prod for information felt self-evident.

  “Like what?”

  “Gave you alcohol or something along those lines. But she didn’t, right?”

  Allie sniffled. Then, much to her surprise, she laughed. Just a short bark of a laugh. “I think I might have contributed to her delinquency. But not so much the other way around.”

  Officer McNew smiled a crooked smile. “I thought as much. But I needed to hear it from your own mouth. I’ll go ask somebody to drive her back to her vehicle. You want something to drink?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  “Soda?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want all that sugar.”

  “Diet soda?”

  “Oh, definitely no,” Allie said, shuddering slightly. “That’s just about the only thing that’s worse.”

  “We have coffee, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it. It could moonlight as paint stripper.”

  “Maybe just water,” Allie said.

  The officer walked out, leaving Allie alone again with the noisy ceiling fan. And all that stretchy time.

  When Allie finally had been wrung dry of words, the officer sat back, stretching her writing hand to counteract cramps.

  She read over what she’d written, or at least scanned over it.

  “Think you could find that house in Sherman Oaks again?”

  “I doubt it. I was asleep when he drove me there. It was dark when I got driven out, and I was all in a panic. I don’t even know for a fact it was Sherman Oaks. Just that Jasmine said that’s where Victor lives.”

  “And I suppose license numbers w
ould be asking too much.”

  “Sorry,” Allie said, resisting an urge to knock herself in the head with her own fist. “I feel so stupid. Here I’ve been thinking I want to do something to help other girls who get themselves in that position, and I could’ve helped a lot by just memorizing a license plate, but I didn’t do it.”

  “There are ways you can help,” McNew said. “But that’s for later.”

  “Like what?”

  “Sometimes girls go around and give talks at schools.”

  “Wouldn’t that be better coming from some girl who didn’t get away?”

  “Not necessarily. Let them use their imagination about what would’ve happened to you. That’s scary enough.”

  “Yeah. Well. Not much touring you can do from juvie.”

  “Why do you keep assuming we’re going to incarcerate you?”

  “Jasmine told me when you run away from the system they put you in juvie.”

  “Seems Jasmine told you all kinds of things.”

  “Oh,” Allie said, feeling and sounding even more defeated. “That’s a good point, I guess.”

  She sipped her water in silence.

  “Sounds like Jasmine was a chronic runner. Also that she got involved in criminal activities every time she was out. It’s case by case. If we thought it was the only way to keep you off the streets and safe, yes. We would lock you up. But with extenuating circumstances . . . Well, I should warn you it won’t be my decision. Some judge in California will likely make the call. But based on what you’ve told me, you could get a second chance to stay put.”

  McNew leaned back. Threw her pen on the table. As if things were getting far more serious, and fast.

  “Look. Alberta. I was your age once. Hard to believe, but it’s true. I know it seems like the whole adult world is out to get you. Like nobody cares until you mess up, and then they’re all over your case. But the people in the system are trying to help you. It’s an imperfect system, and everybody knows it, but the idea is to make sure you’re okay. Now . . . having said that, I think you won’t be too surprised if I tell you we have to take you to a juvenile detention facility for tonight.”

  Allie felt her stomach turn slightly, but she said nothing.