A Flower in the Desert by Walter Satterthwait Page B

You’re making me feel upper-upper-middle aged.”
    She smiled that smile again. “Joshua.”
    Maybe I should invite her up to my room. We could discuss all this in private. I could explain some of the finer points of investigative work.
    â€œWhat’s the nothing definite? ” I asked.
    â€œOld stories. Secondhand, thirdhand. Stories that Roy and Melissa Alonzo would show up once in a while.”
    â€œAs participants?”
    â€œFrom what I gather, one is more or less compelled to participate. If you’re a participant, you’re not likely to go telling stories about everyone else.”
    â€œEveryone else could tell the same stories about you.”
    She nodded. “But as I said, this is all second- and thirdhand information.”
    â€œDo we know what sort of roles Roy and Melissa favored?”
    â€œRoy, according to the stories, was the dominant, Melissa the submissive.”
    â€œThose are the technical terms?”
    â€œThose are the terms these people use. Sadist and masochist are passé.”
    I nodded. “Okay. Tell me about the Underground Railroad.”
    What she told me was that the people responsible for its organization were careful and smart. A woman and a child in need of help—occasionally a man and a child—first contacted them through an intermediary. Who, in Melissa Alonzo’s case, might well have been Elizabeth Drewer. They, whoever they were, would request convincing proof that sexual abuse had been committed. If they determined to their satisfaction that it had, and that the woman had attempted every legal means to protect the child, and had failed, they would provide her with instructions. How to vanish, leaving behind no trail. Where to go. How to get there: often by bus, sometimes in a private car with a driver, a “conductor,” who was part of the network.
    From what Bonnie had been able to learn, there were four loosely structured but interlocking networks, one in the Northwest, one in the Northeast, and two in the South.
    As she talked, I regarded Bonnie Nostromo’s face, her blue eyes, her mobile, intelligent features. I wondered if she’d ever considered vanishing from Los Angeles. Ever considered, for example, relocating to a small, quaint Southwestern town …
    â€œSometimes,” she said, “they can zigzag, the mother and child, up and down the country, moving from one safe house to another. Go to Boise, Idaho, and then Las Vegas, and then Rockford, Illinois, and then New Orleans, or wherever, before they finally settle down.”
    â€œWhy zigzag?”
    â€œThere are some states where the network hasn’t organized any safe house.”
    â€œThese people, the Railroad, they provide papers? ID?”
    â€œUsually. Birth certificates, some of them forged. Some obtained from public records.”
    â€œThey visit cemeteries, find names whose birth dates match.”
    She nodded. “And with the birth certificates, they can get drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards.”
    It was the classic method for obtaining false papers. “So who are they? The organizers?”
    She sipped at her soda. “No one seems to know,” she said. “There are supposed to be four or five of them. Elizabeth Drewer might be one.”
    â€œWho runs the safe houses?”
    She shrugged. “They call themselves ‘keymasters.’ Some of them, apparently, are old sixties radicals. Some of them are children’s rights advocates. Some are just sympathetic families—sometimes the wife, sometimes the father, has a history of having been sexually abused.”
    â€œWhere are we getting all this information?”
    â€œOff the databases. Magazine articles.”
    â€œ People? ”
    She smiled. “Among others.”
    I’d put the check in the mail tomorrow.
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Elizabeth Drewer?”
    â€œShe’s one of the most vocal supporters of