wasn’t too bad, but she moved slowly, taking in as many loitering places as she could. Autumn had made that call just a few blocks from here.
Spring Mountain Road. Sands Avenue. The streets followed one after another, just as her map had indicated they would. It all had a “Twilight Zone” feel to Francesca, not only unfamiliar but completely outside the bounds of reality. Was this surrealistic place her sister’s stamping ground?
The thought of her beautiful now-seventeen-year-old sister living somewhere on these streets was just too painful to hold on to. Francesca glanced once more at the written directions and highlighted map on the console at her right elbow. The police had said there was nothing they could do with the phone lead. There’d been nothing to trace. Francesca understood that runaways were a dime a dozen in their fine city. And the police had a hell of a lot more to do than Francesca did.
She could sit by that pay phone booth all day every day for the next year if that was what it took to get a lead on her sister’s whereabouts. Sit there holding the camera she’d unpacked that morning and tossed in the back seat just so she’d look as though she had some purpose, something to do.
One more intersection and she had to turn right. And then take an immediate left. She’d been in the city a little more than twelve hours. Long enough to buy the car and get some much-needed sleep—via the help of potent prescription sleeping pills given to her by a sympathetic Italian doctor who’d been unable to ease her pain. He’d offered the escape of powerful drugs instead.
There were nights when Francesca cried out of sheer gratitude to him.
Her first impulse was to ignore the ringing of the cell phone plugged into the car’s power outlet. But there was only one person who’d be calling. And as much as she didn’t want to talk…
“Hi, Mom,” she said, without looking at the caller ID on the phone’s display.
“What did you find?”
She should’ve kept her number private.
“It’s barely past dawn, Mom,” she said, her eyes filling with tears for the sad woman who, living all alone, had aged ten years in the one Francesca had been away. After the death of her first husband, Francesca’s father, Kay Stevens’s life had gone inexorably downhill. The sudden heart-attack death eighteen months before of the bastard who’d been her second husband—Autumn’s father—should’ve made things at least more bearable.
But it hadn’t.
“You don’t sleep a lot,” Kay said softly, but with the barest hint of the steel she’d instilled in her older daughter sometime before her second husband had come on the scene and attempted to beat it out of both of them. “In the three weeks you were home, you never slept more than four hours a night. Something happened in Italy. I know it did. Why won’t you tell me about it?”
A bus stop caught Francesca’s eye—an uncomfortable-looking bench with a couple of panels overhead, to block out rain, maybe. It certainly didn’t offer much shade.
No one was sleeping on it. Had Autumn ever?
“There’s nothing to tell.” The response drained her, but not nearly as much as the truth would have.
As much as she craved her mother’s nurturing hand, she just didn’t have the capacity to talk about the year in Italy that had changed her life forever. Not her brief time in Milan with Antonio. Not the long, slow and frightening birth of her son. And most especially not the moment she’d reached into his crib that last afternoon at Sancia’s, not the autopsy, nor the grandmother she’d left behind.
Nor did she believe her mother any longer had the wherewithal to offer a nurturing hand.
“I think you should at least try to call Antonio,” her mother said again—a suggestion she’d made many times in the month since Francesca’s return. “Let him know you’re back in town.”
“No,” she said, as she had every single time. “I went to Italy because I found out he’d been married the entire two years I dated him. Why on earth would I look him up on my return?” Other than these reminders from her mother, she didn’t think about the man who’d fathered her child. Not anymore. He’d been buried right along with the rest of her heart.
“You said his wife was brain-damaged from that accident….”
“Which doesn’t make him any less obligated. Any less married. And if we’re going to continue to discuss this, I’m hanging up.”
Kay’s sigh was heavy. “Will you call me as soon as you get to the phone booth? Let me know what you find?”
“Unless Autumn left a calling card or some graffiti on the side of the booth, a vacant piece of property owned by Sprint isn’t going to tell us much.”
“I just thought there might be some homeless person around who’d know—” Kay broke off. Into the silence that followed, she muttered, “I know, I’m being presumptuous.” For a brief moment she sounded again like the confident and capable college professor Francesca had known during the first ten years of her life. “This initial phase is your job. Mine comes when we get her home.”
She’d find her sister. Francesca couldn’t think any further than that. If life required more than one step at a time, she’d be paralyzed.
Inching past a red sign with white blinking lights—at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning—proclaiming Welcome to the Candlelight Wedding Chapel, and then, next to it, a big hot-dog placard, Francesca had to wonder if it was an all-in-one deal—nuptials and a wedding supper without leaving the parking lot.
“I’ll hang up now,” her mother said after another pause. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”
“I will, Mom.” I told you I would.
“Anything,” Kay repeated. “Anything at all. I think—”
Francesca’s thumb flipped to the off button just before she dropped the phone back to the console. If asked, she could always say they got disconnected.
Circus Circus was offering free chips and salsa with the purchase of a drink. Francesca made her turn, paying more attention as she got closer to her destination. The phone booth, only a few blocks from the Lucky Seven, could have been reached through backstreets if Francesca had known how to navigate them. With all the construction going on around and behind the Strip—another new casino, road repair, a golf course apparently being shoved in somehow—she hadn’t bothered to try.
Another block, and there was the phone. Right in front of a billboard advertising the Striptease Gentlemen’s Club.
And across the street, a McDonald’s—an old-fashioned rendition of the famous hamburger joint with the ground-to-ground golden arches that were hardly seen anymore. A return to yesteryear? A sign that things were going to be okay again?
Shaking her head, she turned off the engine and settled in, staring at the corner across the street. She knew there was no going back. Ever. Not for her.
And not for Autumn. Her sister had been gone for two years. No matter where she’d been, what she’d been doing, there were bound to be irrevocable changes.
Francesca understood
