Chapter 9
October 16, 1999
The bus station smelled of diesel and wet wool, and Diana held Tess's hand so hard she was afraid she would leave a bruise.
They had left the apartment before dawn, Diana carrying the brown leather suitcase and Tess carrying nothing, because Diana had packed for both of them in the dark while Ray slept off the night before. The suitcase held clothes for Tess, the Cannon Beach photograph, the note β Be good. I'm sorry. β and the tin music box, the one thing in the world that mattered more than anything else in that bag, though Tess didn't know that yet. What the music box held, Diana didn't let herself think about. Thinking about it would make her hands shake, and her hands had to be steady.
"Tired, Mama?" Tess said. She was nine, small for it, her hair in the two braids Diana had done by the hallway light. She had not cried when Diana woke her at five and told her they were going on a trip. That was the thing Diana would remember later, on the bus, on every bus for years: Tess had not cried. She had trusted her.
Diana had packed the suitcase the night before, after Ray passed out on the couch, moving through the apartment like a woman defusing something. Clothes for Tess, warm ones. The Cannon Beach photograph, Tess at eight with Haystack Rock behind her, laughing with her mouth full of salt air. The note, written on the back of a grocery receipt because she couldn't find real paper: Be good. I'm sorry. And the music box, wrapped in one of Tess's sweaters so it wouldn't rattle. Diana's hands had shaken when she closed the lid. She had stood in the dark kitchen and wound the key once, just to hear it, and the lullaby had filled the apartment so softly she was sure it wouldn't wake him.
"Not tired," Diana lied. "Sit with the suitcase, baby. Right there on that bench where I can see you."
She bought two tickets to Reno from the man behind the glass. One-way. She paid cash, and her fingers left damp prints on the bills. When she turned back, she saw it through the station's front windows, across the street, parked like a shark: Sal Duffy's Cadillac, cream-colored, impossible to miss. Sal behind the wheel, reading a newspaper he wasn't reading.
Diana's stomach dropped clean through the floor.
Ray knew. He knew she'd been to the police, he knew about the camera, and he'd put Sal on the station. She had thirty seconds to think, and she thought about the drawer where the camera had been, and the look on Ray's face when he found it empty, and she understood that the plan was already broken. If Sal followed them onto that bus, Tess would be handed back to Ray by nightfall, and Diana would be lucky to walk away with her teeth.
So she changed the plan. It was the only decision she ever made that she didn't regret and couldn't forgive herself for, both at once.
She took Tess to the pay phones and dialed Beth's number in Bend from memory, feeding quarters with shaking hands. Beth answered on the fourth ring.
"Beth, it's me. Don't talk, just listen. We're at the Portland Greyhound station. Noon. Main entrance. Don't be late."
"Diana β what's happening, where's Ray β"
"Take Tess at noon. Please. I'll explain everything later. Noon, Beth. Promise me."
"I promise. Diana β"
Diana hung up. She knelt in front of her daughter, there by the pay phones with the diesel smell thick in the air, and she fixed the collar of Tess's jacket, and she memorized the face β the braids, the chapped lip, the small worried line between the eyebrows that Tess got when she was trying to be brave.
"Listen to me, Tessie. Aunt Beth is coming. Noon, at the main entrance. You sit by the suitcase and you don't move and you don't go anywhere with anyone except Aunt Beth. Do you understand?"
Tess nodded, but her eyes were filling. "Where are you going?"
Diana had practiced this lie all night and it still came out cracked. "I have to make sure it's safe. I'll be right back. You stay with the suitcase." She pressed the girl's hand to her mouth and kissed it. "Be good. I'm sorry."
She walked to the side exit β not the main entrance, the side, where the loading dock was β and she pushed through the door into the gray October air, and she made sure she was visible. She crossed toward the corner store at an angle Sal could see, and she kept walking, and behind the newspaper, Sal Duffy folded it in half and started the Cadillac.
It worked. It worked, and that was the worst of it β it worked exactly the way she'd hoped. Sal pulled away from the curb and followed her, slow, three cars back. Diana walked four blocks, ducked into a department store, went out the back, and ran β ran until her lungs burned and her coat was soaked through, and by the time she circled back to the station, breathless, hoping against hope, the bench by the main entrance was empty.
No suitcase. No Tess. No Beth.
Diana stood in the rain outside the Greyhound station and understood, with a clarity that never left her, that something had gone wrong. Beth hadn't come. Or Beth had come and Ray had gotten there first. She had twenty dollars left and a bus ticket to Reno in her pocket, and the Cadillac was gone, and Sal was gone, and the only thing she knew for certain was that she could not stay in Portland β not with the warrant she could feel coming like weather, not with Ray hunting her.
She got on the Reno bus. She sat by the window and watched Portland dissolve in the rain, and she held Tess's unused ticket stub in her fist the whole way south β the second ticket, the one her daughter never used. The driver must have thought she was crying over nothing.