A Flower in the Desert by Walter Satterthwait

twenty-third. The twenty-third of August. She was due back the twenty-first. When she didn’t show up, I tried to reach her. When I couldn’t, I … I made a few inquiries. That’s when I learned that she’d gone.”
    â€œYou didn’t know that she’d come back early from El Salvador?”
    â€œNo.” He frowned slightly. That still rankled. Or still hurt.
    â€œDid you try to locate her?” I said.
    â€œI know a local private detective. He’s worked with me from time to time. I asked him to see what he could find.” He made it sound casual, an offhand request to an old friend. Both of us knew that locating someone who doesn’t want to be located is not an offhand kind of job.
    â€œAnd what did he find?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œHave you heard from her since she left?”
    He took a deep breath, the kind you take when you try to fill an emptiness in your chest that has nothing to do with oxygen, and already I knew what his answer would be, and I knew that I believed it. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”
    He looked out the window. The blur of red and yellow was gone now. Except for a faint luminescence in the west, the sky and the sea were a dull seamless sheet of lead.
    I asked him, “Does the phrase ‘ The flower in the desert lives ’ mean anything to you?”
    â€œNo,” he said to the window. He turned to me. “Should it?”
    â€œMaybe not. It’s just a phrase that’s come up. Did Melissa ever talk with you about her involvement in Sanctuary?”
    â€œNothing specific. We talked about it in general terms. She was very serious about helping those people.” He shrugged, and his shoulders seemed to have gotten heavier. “As I said, she’s an extraordinary woman.”
    He looked off to the window again.
    â€œIn your mind,” I said, “there’s no doubt that Roy Alonzo was guilty of sexually abusing Winona?”
    He turned, and his face was flushed. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl aside the table and jump me. I braced myself. Then he sat back. “You haven’t read the trial transcripts,” he said flatly.
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œRead them. There’s no doubt whatever that Roy was guilty.”
    I nodded. “You understand that I had to ask.”
    He stared at me, and finally his face softened and he nodded. He looked out again at the leaden sea.
    I said, “Would you mind if I looked around the house now?”
    He turned to me. He managed a weak, ironic smile. “Do you think the police haven’t looked around? The FBI?”
    â€œAn agent named Stamworth?”
    He nodded. “Some nonsense about Melissa being involved with illegal aliens. He went all over the house. So did the police.”
    And so did you, probably, I thought. I said, “Maybe they weren’t looking for the right things.”
    He nodded lifelessly. His voice without tone, he said, “The psychological approach.”
    â€œYeah. That.”
    â€œGo ahead. The bedrooms are upstairs. I’ll wait here.”

    There were three bedrooms on the second floor. The first might have been Roy Alonzo’s bedroom at one time, if he and Melissa had slept separately. Now it was obviously a guest room, as characterless and as impersonal as a room at the Marriott. A white-enameled dresser, a white-enameled nightstand supporting a brass three-way lamp, a double bed with a chenille bedspread, a fairly good Navajo rug on the hardwood floor, an empty closet. Two framed paintings, both Southwest landscapes, hung on the wall. They were signed Sedgewick , a name that meant nothing to me. A door led into a bathroom smelling of the floral-scented soap, sculpted into hearts and eggs, that filled a small wicker basket on the windowsill.
    I got the feeling that whoever had put the bedroom and the bathroom together—and I assumed it was Melissa—had done so without