The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,140

stopped glaring at him.

“Phew! I can see why Alan Yardley repented of his evil ways and went off to have visions in the desert.”

I had no idea what his cryptic comment meant, but the important news was that he knew something about Yardley. “Did you see him?”

“Yup. You were on the money about him. He’s okay.”

“What did he say about Barbara?”

“As you suspected, she went to Yardley after you caught her with the boyfriend. Seems she felt safe with him. Good instincts, like you. They did, as he so delicately put it, another modeling session; she wanted the money. Then he and his wife put her up that night at their house. Maybe I’m getting all schoolgirlish and gullible, but I think he was on the level, no hanky-panky.”

I nodded. “I’ve met his wife.”

“Next day, he drove her to her bank downtown and then to the train station in Riverside.”

“Why all the way out there?” Riverside was a good fifty miles from Los Angeles. If she was going to get on a train anyway, why not catch it in the city?

“Apparently she was worried that your family might show her picture around the train stations. She didn’t want anyone coming after her.”

Even though I’d accepted by now that Barbara had been planning her escape, it stunned me to understand how thoroughly she’d anticipated our moves and preemptively foiled them. Had she been that desperate to get away?

“Eat your steak,” Philip said. “It’s good for you.”

I’d barely noticed that a steaming T-bone had been placed in front of me. I dutifully ate a couple of bites.

“I suppose Yardley lied about helping her leave because he’d promised her?” I said.

He nodded. “Can’t say I hold his former profession in high regard, but I’d say he was a man of his word.”

“Then why did he tell you now?”

“Funny thing,” he said with a wolfish grin. “I’m told I’m the kind of fellow people can’t stop themselves from confiding in. And by this time, who at the Riverside train station is going to remember her?”

“Did your persuasive powers extend to getting him to divulge where she went?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know or wouldn’t say?”

He chuckled. “I should have brought you with me. You got him to quit taking dirty pictures and dedicate his life to art. Maybe you could have—”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was that visit from you that made him decide to get out of the smut business.” He raised an amused eyebrow, and my volatile, touchy mood returned.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“I wouldn’t do that. According to Yardley, meeting you changed his life. Taking a hard look at what he did through your eyes. In fact, he asked me to give you this. To thank you.”

He handed me the parcel he’d brought into the restaurant. I unwrapped it. It was one of Yardley’s desert photographs: sand, scrub, and sky exquisitely etched in black and white.

“Does he think that makes what he did all right? I don’t want it,” I said, even as I imagined how beautiful the photograph would be on my wall, and something in me felt glad that Yardley was living in the desert he loved. But I was wretched that night, on the verge of either tears or rage, and I chose rage.

“Well, it doesn’t really go with my décor,” Philip said. “Keep it, anyway. It might be worth something one day. So Yardley’s story was, your sister told him she was going to stick a pin in a train schedule and decide that way.”

“How could he let her do that? She was only eighteen.”

“He figured she had enough money—and enough moxie—to take care of herself.”

“If we got the schedule of trains that left Riverside that afternoon—”

“Elaine.” He regarded me with what looked infuriatingly like pity. I wanted to slap him. “You figured it out for yourself. She’d been planning her getaway for a long time. She did work that she may have found demeaning so she could save up the money to leave. She went to the trouble of catching a train in another city so she couldn’t be followed. Sweetheart, look, for some people, it’s not enough to leave the family nest. Some people—for reasons they probably can’t explain themselves—feel like they’re running for their lives.”

“People in my family did run for their lives!” I said. “My grandfather was being chased by men who wanted to kill him. My mother, if she hadn’t gotten out of Romania … do you know what’s happening there