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  Willing Hostage

  Marlys Millhiser

  For my parents

  Doris and Harold Enabnit

  … virtue is an individual, not a group, attribute.

  —ROBERT N. KHARASCH

  The Institutional Imperative:

  How to Understand the United States Government

  and Other Bulky Objects

  Chapter One

  The sign of the heron cast a distended shadow across double strips of pavement. The shadow, distorted and jetty, inked through sunlight to the ditch beyond, through barbed wire and a cow grazing alone.

  Leah turned the yellow Volkswagen into the drive and stopped beside the gas pumps. The Volks was as dry as she was and Enveco was her only living credit card. The signs of the heron had been ominously few since she’d left Chicago.

  She fell against the steering wheel and closed her eyes.

  Fatigue exploded sunspots behind her eyelids, sent shudders through flattened muscles. Heat fingers searched along the dampness of her back where she’d pulled away from the seat.

  … The whisper of leaves, the rubbery splat of tires on hot pavement as a car passed, the whining of dogs …

  … A splatter of red across a soap bar … the smear of it across tile … the contrast against the white tub … the red stain oozing toward the drain.…

  Relaxing muscles jerked. The acid of her stomach rose to her tongue. Leah pushed at the door as if the car were in flames and forced aching legs to stand on the concrete outside.

  The whining turned to barking. Four medium-sized dogs with very large teeth fought the wire of their individual cages in the back of a pickup.

  Leah glanced up at the familiar sign of the heron for reassurance. The neon bird stood on one leg, blue-gray, serene and supreme.

  The dogs snarled as a door slapped its frame and they turned stiffened tails toward Leah, then whimpered into silence as a man came around the pickup and growled at them. Tearing great hunks from a hamburger with his teeth, he climbed into the truck and drove off.

  “Fill it?”

  “What?” She swung around to find a cowboy leaning against the pumps.

  “Your car. You want gas?” He didn’t look like a friendly cowboy.

  “Oh … yes. But don’t fill it.” She reached into the car for her shoulder bag. “How much would two dollars get me?”

  “Not much.”

  “How about four?”

  “Twice as much as not much.”

  “I’ll take four dollars’ worth.” She had a credit card, but when and how would she pay Enveco? “Can you tell me how far it is to Ted’s Place?”

  “You’re here.”

  “Here” was a building, gas pumps, and the cow still gazing across the double highway. The map had shown it as the first entrance to the mountains on the route she’d followed from Chicago. A place to stay overnight, rest, and gain courage before starting a new life.

  “But on the map it showed a town.”

  “I don’t make the maps.”

  The sun was too bright through her sunglasses. She felt like an alien on an enemy planet—a hungry alien.

  The building didn’t look like a gas station. It looked something like an Americanized version of a Swiss chalet. Interspersed with the dormer windows of the second story were the letters T … E … D … S.

  “How far is the next town?”

  The tree behind Ted’s whispered its leaves in answer. It seemed to be the only tree for miles.

  “Depends on which way you’re going.”

  “That way.” Leah pointed toward the dark shapes waiting on the skyline behind Ted’s Place.

  “The next town’d be Walden, over the pass. About ninety miles. Check the oil?”

  “No.” What were ninety more miles after today?

  “Best thing this late in the day”—he smeared at the windshield with a rag—“go to Fort Collins. Spend the night. Start off in the morning.”

  Spend the night. Spend. “I just came through there.” She found her Enveco card and handed it to him.

  “Best thing,” he repeated as she followed him toward the building. A dark-gold car parked beside it. Under the striped awnings the windows were full of signs—LUNCH; GROCERIES; SPORTING GOODS; COORS BEER; LIGHT OLYMPIA BEER; BUD; COLORADO HUNTING, FISHING LICENSES.

  Three steps led down to the door where another sign declared NO PACKS, NO PETS!

  But it was the smell that made her swallow and grab the doorframe. Hamburgers. Lovely, meaty, juicy, rich-smelling hamburgers.

  Leah ignored the three men staring at her from a booth and the smiling dude behind the lunch counter under the Dr. Pepper clock. She walked around postcard racks and piled bundles of firewood to the sign at the back that read REST ROOMS.

  Once in the ladies’, she gulped water from the spigot, wetting her face and some of her hair. When it seemed that her stomach would accept the needed moisture, she brought the bottle of Maalox from her purse and drank from it.

  A sign on the wall told her exactly how to dispose of soiled sanitary napkins. Another instructed her on how to release paper towels from the dispenser. She hated signs, but always read them.

  The fire in her middle had subsided a little. Hadn’t it?

  The image of the three men in the booth slid before her own in the mirror above the sink. So there were three men in a booth.

  But all of them had crowded into one side. And they were too large to sit comfortably that way. The one on the outside had grinned at her … expectantly? The dark one sitting so stiffly in the middle.…

  Leah shrugged them off. She mustn’t think of them. They’d been eating hamburgers.

  The three were lined up at the cash register as she emerged from the hall. They didn’t see her and she slid behind the grinner as the cowboy handed her the Enveco card, a ballpoint pen, and a clipboard with the gauzy layers of paper and carbons that would make her pay up. Environmental Energy Corporation was printed across the top.

  “If you hadn’t blown this,” the grinner said to the dark man, still in the middle, “you could’a had a nice cushy job on the farm, showing off bag jobs or something.”

  She signed Leah Harper to the bill, but not before the dark man turned a look of murder on the jocular man so close behind him. It seemed to include Leah and she stepped away quickly.

  If ever she came face to face with a murderer, she told herself, that’s how he would look.

  Hunger. It makes people fanciful. She selected a carton of milk from a glass-fronted cooler and a loaf of sliced cheese. On a rack not far away, she found bread. When she turned to the cash register, the three men were walking out the door.

  As she left Ted’s with her purchases, they were standing beside the dark-gold car. “… Illinois license plate?”

  “Well what do you expect? It is a blonde in a yellow Volks.”

  Leah hurried to the Volks. This was one blonde who was interested only in food. But as the car and her stomach growled in unison, a face intruded through the open window.

  “Are you Sheila?” His eyes seemed to be hidden because his grin pulled at their corners so hard that it pressed the upper eyelids down.

  “No, I’m not Sheila.” She stared into the eye slits that the grin left and experienced an odd sense of danger. No reason for that sudden feeling … but it was strong enough to add an unpleasant tingle to a queasy stomach.

  “Charlie!” The cry came from behind them and she turned to see the two remaining men wrestle each other to the ground.

  Charlie backed away and L
eah jammed the Volkswagen into gear, roared out of Ted’s drive, turned right and then right again where the side road heading west met the highway under the sign of the heron.

  Charlie had joined the scuffle by the time she passed the side of Ted’s Place.

  A sign read WALDEN 92, CAMERON PASS—OPEN.

  She should make Walden in under two hours. And she’d better. Two hours were about all she had left in her.

  Leah steped hard on the gas pedal, anxious to put miles between herself and the strange trio back at Ted’s. She didn’t envy Sheila, whoever she was. What was a bag job done on a farm?

  Fighting the bread wrapper with one hand until she’d extracted a slice of pasty tasteless bread, munching it as slowly as she could endure, Leah Harper faced the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

  Chapter Two

  Her sisters’ eyes had accused Leah over the lid of the coffin. Annette, her elegant clothes washing out her face. Suzie, adding the weight of another pregnancy. Two pairs of eyes, the same color blue. “This takes care of one of your problems,” they seemed to say. “Where do you go from here, sister?”

  That was the moment Leah had decided to go. Anywhere.

  After the funeral, Ralph, Annette’s doctor-husband, asked, “What will you do now that your mother is gone, Leah? Go back to New York?”

  “No, I think I’ll go west.” She couldn’t go back anywhere.

  “West? What’s west of Chicago?”

  What was west of Chicago? She had been east and had seen oceans.… “I’m going to … to the mountains.” The decision had been made that quickly.

  Leah couldn’t admit to her family that she was running from another failure and hadn’t thought clearly about what she was running to. And so she’d said, “To the mountains.”

  And here they were. The mountains. Drawing closer. Hovering. Enormous, dark, ragged under a lowering sun.

  Leah ate another piece of bread, poked her fingernails through the plastic cover of the Velveeta and peeled a slice off the loaf.

  “But what will you do there, Leah? After the funeral expenses there won’t be much left for travel.”

  “I’ll have to get a job, won’t I?” she’d answered flippantly and changed the subject.

  The narrow asphalt led straight to the mountains, peaceful pastures on either side. A river flowed languidly to her left … a hint of pine soap in the air … the bell-like trill of a meadowlark.

  Then the road rose, curved, twisted, and the river roared ahead of her. CACHE LA POUDRE, the sign next to the bridge told her. The river raced now, dangerously close to the road. Canyon walls swallowed up the Volkswagen. Leah wished she could get to the milk but needed both hands on the wheel.

  A man stood on a rock in the river, a fishing pole in his hand, intent and as serene as the blue heron on its pole at Ted’s Place.

  There was no serenity for Leah. Monster mountains crushed in on either side of the cleft while the river roiled and crashed against rocks and rock-cliff banks. The sun would sink to the bottom of the canyon at one point and then she’d round a curve to gloomy shadow. She hoped it wasn’t like this all the way to Walden.

  The Volkswagen crawled as the grade steepened even though she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Danger signals from her mind kept shooting warnings at her senses. This canyon was so different from the canyons of the city.

  At the outward edge of the next curve, the canyon widened to include a small treed area with picnic tables and trash cans and sunlight. She pulled over to eat and drink and calm tired nerves.

  The sun felt cooler here than at Ted’s Place. She sat at a picnic table and drank awkwardly from the tri-cornered fold-out of the milk carton … and pondered why it was that going back seemed such a sign of failure to her. Perhaps because she failed so often. Or because she’d had to return to her mother’s house after her one real fling with freedom?

  A car passed going downhill and soon another with a camping trailer going up. Leah felt less alone.

  She’d even failed at being a daughter and fled guilt this time, guilt at not realizing how desperate her mother had become … guilt at her own relief at being free of the poor woman at last. How else would she have come to be in this deserted little park next to a roaring maniacal river?

  Leah looked over her shoulder. There were probably few muggers in the mountains. But what about bears? She looked over her other shoulder.

  A scrubby bush to the right of the picnic table moved, rustled.

  The sun went down behind the mountain. It lit the tops of the cliff walls on either side of her, but Leah sat in shadow below.

  The bush moved again.

  Something fawn-colored uncoiled at its base. Leah stood and backed away as brakes screamed behind her. A car skidded around the curve, its rear tire biting gravel at the road’s edge. And then it was gone.

  A dark-gold car. Whoever sat at the wheel was alone. The sound of its engine had died suddenly. Had it stopped up ahead? Or was its sound drowned in the river’s roar?

  She turned again to the bush but the fawn-colored thing sat on the picnic table now, next to the food.

  Leah shrugged. Just a cat. Wasn’t it?

  It had the color and markings of a Siamese but she’d never seen one that big. She’d never seen any cat that big.

  “You aren’t a cross between a house cat and a … a bobcat, are you?”

  The cat answered her with a yowl instead of a meow.

  “You sound like a Siamese.” She reached for the food and the animal rubbed its neck against her arm, purring like a muffled machine gun.

  “Hungry? Well, run on home and get your dinner. Be glad, you’ve got a home.” Leah started for the car.

  The cat gave a pleading and extended yowl. But the luminous blue eyes were cold, impersonal. There hadn’t been a house for miles. “You do have a home? You weren’t dumped?”

  No answer. The cold eyes didn’t waver. They reminded her of her sisters’ eyes. Cats usually didn’t look people eye to eye. Her mother’s cats never had.

  “I’ve got my own problems but”—Leah found a fairly clean plastic margarine bowl in the trash can—“you can have some milk.”

  The cat rubbed against her as she poured it. “I didn’t like the looks of that last car, for one thing. Good heavens, you are hungry.”

  She broke up some bread and added it and more milk to the bowl. “Any cat who’ll eat bread and milk is starving but you certainly don’t look it.” Her mother’s cats ate nothing but liver or fish.

  “You would have loved my mother, kitty. Too bad no one else did. Well, it’s been nice,” she said to the hypnotic eyes.

  Leah put the food in the car and stood for a moment at the open door, looking up the lonely road and then down. Which way?

  Was the gold car parked somewhere ahead? Waiting for Leah Harper? She was getting neurotic … the last few days had been too much … her mother, the funeral, the endless driving.…

  Leah had been alone before and liked it. She was just tired. And the sun wasn’t getting any higher. Walden lay ahead and she refused to go back … anywhere.

  She slid behind the wheel and the Volks worked hard just to get her up the incline to the road. Her stomach felt better and she was not going to worry about that gold car. It, like the giant Siamese, was not her problem. It had nothing to do with her.

  But her conscience pricked her enough to look as she passed. The picnic table was empty except for the little margarine bowl. The cat’s home probably lay somewhere ahead. Cats wander.

  Leah set a course for Walden, hoping the anemic Volkswagen could make it. She forgot the hungry cat … but not the dark-gold car with one passenger.

  Chapter Three

  “But you’ll be gone for your birthday, Leah,” Suzie said with a knowing glance at Annette. “After all this sadness, we’ll need something to celebrate. Won’t we Ed?” She leaned against her husband in that proprietary way.

  “Yeah. Remember last year, Leah?” Ed’s leer i
ndicated that even a death in the family hadn’t stopped the open season on spinster sisters-in-law.

  Their mother had been alive then and had brought her liquor and her cats.

  The air moving through the car window was cold now. And strangely fresh.

  But her mother never got drunk, just sadder, emptier.

  Leah had romped with Suzie’s little boys and sidled away from their father’s hands. Ralph and Annette had quarreled in their married way.

  Suzie whispered to Leah, “It’s just that they don’t have any children. That’s what makes Annette so pinched and old. Children keep you young.”

  And later Leah had overheard Suzie tell Annette, “Leah’s twenty-nine and no husband in sight. I’m worried for her. That’s what makes her so nervous, the ulcer and everything.” At one time Leah had wanted a husband, a home. Now she wanted freedom. From what she wasn’t sure.

  The canyon opened into a wide valley. Twilight illumined the side of jagged trees, rumpled mountains, of water spilling over rocks.

  Well, she wasn’t twenty-nine anymore. This very day she’d turned thirty!

  Tents, trailers, and campfires along the river, children chasing each other, mothers pulling things from boxes on picnic tables, fathers carrying firewood. That would have been a cheap way to travel, but Leah, the city girl, wouldn’t have known how to handle it … alone.

  “You’ve been independent long enough, Leah,” Ralph, the doctor, had said one year ago today. “The time will come when you’ll wish you had a man to take care of you.” Old Ralph didn’t grab for her like Ed. “You’ve still got your looks and figure, the grace you had as a model. It’s your damned independence that turns men off.”

  Ralph wasn’t the first man to mistake Leah’s flippancy for independence. If only she were as independent as people thought her. Now that Iris Harper was dead, Leah had a real chance to prove that she could be. Not like the last time she’d fled the family and gone to New York, only to be called back two years later to help care for her mother. But the New York experience hadn’t been a success either. All she had to show for that was a scrapbook.