3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

T hey drove for a while until Cleo’s stomach gave her away.

The woman in the back sat up. “I cain’t take it anymore. If your stomach growls one more time, I might scream. It’s keepin’ me awake. Pull off at the next exit and let’s feed it.”

Cleo obeyed and almost started crying when she noticed that the restaurant the woman directed her to was next door to a big-box retailer. Never in her life had Cleo bought clothes at a store like this, but needs must.

“Order me a salad, please” she said. “I just need to make a quick run inside here.” She handed Clark a twenty and then raced over to the store and pretended she was on that game show she’d seen once where you have a couple minutes to buy everything you can. She should’ve taken her time to make sure she got the best deals like people did when they lived on a budget. But she didn’t have time.

She bought herself a pair of jeans, sweats, five shirts, underwear, socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, brush, a notebook, a pen, a duffel bag to put it all in, and some makeup. And shoes! Blessedly high-heel-free shoes. She quickly changed in the bathroom and ran a brush through her hair. Ugh, these clothes did nothing for her figure. She was glad her friends would never see her in them. She could only imagine the comments she’d get.

Next Cleo stuffed her wedding dress, veil, and shoes into the bag. The only good thing about the sleek dress was that it didn’t take up much room. She didn’t know why she didn’t just chuck them all, but when she went to do it, she couldn’t bring herself to.

When she returned to the car, Clark was eating a burger in the driver’s seat, and Cleo got relegated to the back. An unappetizing-looking salad waited for her. Cleo put the bags with her things in the seat next to her and buckled in, trying to get excited about her dinner.

“Do you think I could borrow your phone, Clark? There’s someone I should really text before it gets late.” Clark was surprisingly good-natured about sharing it. She figured because of how grumpy he’d been all day that he’d be persnickety about lending a stranger his phone, but he handed it over immediately.

Cleo typed out a quick text to Bea, whose number had fortunately been an easy one to remember. She used nicknames for both of them that only Bea would know, ones that she and Bea had given each other when they were girls.

Cleo: Honey, this is Clydesdale. Long time no talk! I’m good, how are you? Hope all is well! Talk more soon!

Bea’s nickname was short for Honey Bea, and Bea called Cleo Clydesdale since her real name was Claudette. She hoped she’d made the text cryptic enough that if someone else saw it they wouldn’t understand it, but Bea would. Cleo needed to tell her she was safe so at least someone knew. She just hoped her father didn’t ever see it.

Cleo had no idea what lengths her father might go to in order to find her. She knew he had a man on retainer that he used from time to time to find people. One of her father’s employees had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from him, and he had been found and brought to justice by a man Cleo had occasionally seen around their place, going in and out of her father’s study to speak with him. He had slicked-back dark hair and wore a Mexican guayabera. He didn’t look menacing, but Cleo suspected he was very good at his job. Was he on her trail right now? A shiver stole down her back at the thought.

The southern belle sat in the front with Clark and was saying something about how she didn’t mind sharing the armrest one bit, and then squeezed his bicep. Cleo wasn’t sure if the lady noticed how he inched away from her touch, or the wide eyes Cleo could see in the rearview mirror. She would feel sorry for him if she wasn’t enjoying this so much.

Was this what the next several hours held in store for Cleo? Listening to a woman who could be his mother, flirting shamelessly with Clark while he drove? Why hadn’t Cleo bought herself earbuds in the store? Oh yeah, because she had no phone and not enough money to buy one. Drawing in the notebook would have to suffice for entertaining herself.

Cleo handed the phone back to Clark and thanked him for it, then suggested, “How about we listen to the radio?”

“Good idea,” the woman said, turning it on.

She searched stations until she found a song she recognized, though Cleo did not. Before she knew what hit her, the woman began singing along to it, twice as loud as she needed to.

He’d fly through the air with the greatest of ease

A daring young man on the flying Trapeze

His movements were graceful, all girls he could please

And my love he purloined away.

Cleo had nothing against old music; there were actually quite a few older songs she really liked. But this sounded really old, and when a 50-something-year-old insisted on belting the lyrics, it became less appealing. Sort of like this limp salad.

Clark made eye contact with Cleo in the rear view mirror, one eyebrow quirking at her attempt to stifle the giggles that threatened. He turned the radio off when a commercial came on and quickly asked, “You know, I never caught your name.”

“Oh, well, it’s Dottie, darlin’. And yours is Clark? Like the actor Clark Gable?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “My mother named me after him. He was her favorite.”

“But you don’t look much like him, ‘cept for that jawline,” Dottie said as she leaned over and patted his face. She actually touched his face, while he was driving. That would’ve run Cleo right off the road, but Clark was made of sterner stuff, it seemed.

“Is your home in Tennessee, Dottie?” he asked.

“Yep, a little town no one’s ever heard of afore called Beaudell. But the beau is the French kind of way, like ‘beautiful.’” She fluffed her hair in the mirror. “We’re exotic.”

Cleo was pretty sure the ensuing cough was a chuckle Clark covered up. “And you’re driving there because…” he let his question trail off. Cleo huffed, realizing Clark was being a lot less grumpy with Dottie than he’d been with her. Cleo tried not to take it personally, but was at a loss as to how she’d earned his ire. He’d been rude to her almost from the get-go, and Cleo wasn’t used to people treating her that way. She’d been nothing but kind to him, hadn’t she? Or, mostly kind. Dottie, too, was softening. She’d been so prickly, but she’d seemed to mellow the closer they got to Tennessee.

“Well, my sister bought me a ticket to fly back home, but the plane wasn’t workin’ quite right, so they kicked us off of it. And I decided, if the plane wasn’t workin’ right, then I’d keep my feet on solid ground. I canceled my ticket and got myself a car!”

“Your sister lives in Tennessee too?”

“Nah, she’s a city slicker with a big, important New York job and New York life. I was just visitin’ her for awhile, until she heard that they needed me back home again and bought me a ticket for the very next day. Imagine that!” Cleo could, in fact, imagine that, if Dottie’s sister had any sense at all.

“Who needs you back home?” Clark asked conversationally. Cleo didn’t think he really cared much about Dottie’s personal details, but anything was preferable to her singing.

“My girls do.”

“Ah, daughters?”

“No, silly. Chickens.”

“The chickens need you?”

“Yes, apparently they’ve stopped laying. My ladies don’t lay when they’re stressed, and the neighbors I hired to take care of my ranch have surely been stressing them out. They have a passel full of kids who chase ‘em ‘til they’re scared to death. They don’t know how to love on ‘em like I do.”

Dottie kept up a one-sided stream of conversation until late into the evening. Clark only had to ‘oh, really?’ and ‘you don’t say?’ every now and again, and Dottie could carry the rest by herself, like a verbal Paul Bunyan. Doubtless, Clark wasn’t even paying attention to a word she said. Cleo definitely wasn’t. She was lost in thought as car lights flashed past on the other side of the freeway.

What was Cleo’s father doing right now? What did he think of her mad dash out the church? A memory surfaced of Cleo at another church around the age of eight. They’d been attending a funeral of some great aunt Cleo hadn’t even known. Standing on the steps outside the church after, her parents were speaking with relative after relative as Cleo’s black dress grew more and more itchy. She hadn’t wanted to wear it, but her mother forced her to. She just wanted to go home and put on something comfortable and resume the book she’d been reading.

A gray cat slinking by had caught Cleo’s attention. It came close to her and she held out her fingers, but the cat shied away and began to move on. Cleo had snuck a cracker into her pocket before the funeral. Was the cat hungry? Did cats like crackers? She darted a glance at her parents, who were still talking with an older couple. Cleo pulled the cracker free and held it out to the cat, but it was too far away to see her offering. She crept closer, wary of scaring it. Its back was to her now and it couldn’t see what she was trying to share, so she followed it down the steps and around the corner.

“Here, kitty!” she called. “I have some food for you!” The cat crossed the road into the park across from the church. Cleo held the cracker out toward the cat and in her hurry to catch it, she tripped on the curb and fell, the cracker spilling onto the pavement before her. Cleo’s knee stung and she’d torn a gash in her tights that her mother would be angry about. She pushed herself off the ground just as a flock of pigeons converged on the place where the cracker had landed. They tore it to pieces, leaving nothing for the cat. One of the birds swooped over Cleo’s head, scaring a scream out of her. She’d flapped her hands to force it away when her arm was seized and she was yanked off the ground. Her mother yelled, “Claudette, where have you been? Your father and I have been looking for you everywhere!”

Tears welled in her eyes, both from her injury as well as from being reprimanded. She hadn’t thought she was being naughty; she was simply bored. Her mother raised her finger to lecture her further when Cleo was scooped up off the sidewalk and crushed in the loving arms of her father.

“Cleo, Cleo, I’m so glad you’re alright.” He squeezed her to him and held her there for several minutes. The tears fell harder, not because she was sad but because she felt safe again. Her father had always made her feel safe as a little girl. It was only recently when he’d seen her as a means to an end that Cleo had started to feel like a pawn. She missed the way it used to be with him.

Had Bea told anyone what she knew, or at least what she suspected, about where Cleo was headed? Had her father hauled Bea in for interrogation like a mob boss? Cleo knew she couldn’t have brought her phone with her; she wouldn’t have made it two blocks without being picked up if she had. But she hated not being able to use it to find out what had happened after she’d left.

Dottie’s southern drawl brought Cleo back to the present. “And that’s why I told them to just let the critters be. They weren’t doin’ me no harm!”

“So, you didn’t have someone come remove the opossums?” Clark asked Dottie.

“No sirree. Those ‘possum babies are cute as can be. I like knowin’ they’re safe and sound in my shed, not breakfast for some coyote.” The last word was pronounced ‘kiyot,’ without the ‘e’ sound.

“Your ranch sounds fascinating,” Clark said. How did he say that with a straight face?!

“It does, doesn’t it? Y’all should come on by and stay for a spell when you drop me there.” You’d have to pay Cleo to stay at Dottie’s ‘ranch.’ The only ranch Cleo had ever stayed at had been more along the lines of George W. Bush’s ranch. Cleo could only imagine how Dottie’s would compare to that.

“Speakin’ of stayin’ somewhere, shouldn’t we be fixin’ to put up somewhere pretty soon? I’m feelin’ a bit peaked,” Dottie announced.

“I’m good to drive a bit longer,” Clark said. “How are you doing back there, LP?”

“It’s still Cleo, and I’m fine. I can take a turn driving if you want.”

“Well, we cain’t just drive through the night,” Dottie interjected.

Clark and Cleo made eye contact through the mirror. As much as she detested the idea of being on his side of anything, she knew they were on the same page right now.

“I say we push on,” Cleo said.

“Sounds good to me,” Clark agreed.

“Well, then y’all can trade off driving, while I make myself comfortable in the back seat again.”