A Flower in the Desert by Walter Satterthwait Page A

much enthusiasm. They were moderately comfortable, but they were perfunctory and prosaic, as though she hadn’t really expected guests, or particularly wanted them.
    I broke the bedroom into quadrants and searched each of them. Found nothing useful. Did the same in the bathroom, and found the same.
    The master bedroom smelled very faintly of Jean Naté. It had a beamed ceiling and, like the porch downstairs, a glass wall that faced the sea. Pale yellow satin drapes, pulled shut now. A king-size bed lounging in a sleek brass frame and covered with a white satin bedspread. Two white Flokati rugs on the floor. A long oak dresser. Atop that, facing the bed, a twenty-one-inch color television, a VCR, a large jewelry box, a single photograph in a silver frame. Obviously taken by a professional photographer, this showed a young baby, presumably Winona, gurgling merrily at the camera. There were no photographs of anyone else. No Roy Alonzo, no grinning friends, no beaming grandparents.
    On the wall above the bed was another Southwest landscape, also signed Sedgewick , this one a Cinemascope view of Monument Valley. A bit gaudy, I thought, but technically well done. John Wayne would’ve liked it. There were two other paintings in the room, to the left of the television. These were much smaller, both about six inches by twelve, and each was a view from a doorway into the interior of a room, one of them a parlor, the other a kitchen. The light in each had a Vermeerish quality, glinting off polished surfaces of tile and wood, and the paintings themselves, precisely detailed, had a quiet elegance and a slightly haunting quality, as though the rooms were inhabited by smiling ghosts, just out of sight. They were signed D. Polk.
    The paintings and the yellow drapes were the only touch of color in the room. Everything else was white or off-white, monotoned, making the place seem stark, almost sterile. As though Melissa had been reluctant to reveal herself by committing to blues or reds or browns, plaids or checks or stripes.
    I searched the room, and then the dressing room and then the bathroom, which held a sunken hot tub large enough to bathe a Buick. At the bottom of one of the dresser drawers, I found a pair of handcuffs. A nice toy. I wondered what the earlier searchers had made of those. I wondered what I made of those.
    There was none of the other grim paraphernalia of bondage: no riding crops, no choke collars, no clamps or clips or shiny leather straps. Maybe there had been, and the cops had removed it. But wouldn’t they have taken the cuffs as well?
    In the jewelry box, which held mostly costume stuff, rolled gold and paste, I discovered that a few of the slots in the velvet, slots which still bore the impression of jewelry, were empty now: some earrings and some rings were missing. Melissa might have taken them, possibly pawned them; or possibly they’d been lifted by someone else. The cops. Stamworth. Chuck Arthur, for all I knew.
    All I knew was approximately nothing.
    I found nothing to indicate that a man, any man, had ever once set foot in the room. I found no note from Melissa Alonzo that described her current location.
    The final bedroom was a surprising contrast to the rest of the house, a giddy explosion of color. The walls were pink, banded toward the ceiling with lavender, covered all over with appliqués of laughing cartoon characters, teddy bears and rabbits and Smurfs and the entire Disney contingent. The curtains were red, patterned with large black dots, like the wings of a ladybug. Braided, multicolored throw rugs were scattered around the floor. And stuffed animals were everywhere: along the walls, along the bright yellow bedspread, sitting and lying and slouching in the blue plastic bookshelves.
    I looked around and, once again, I found nothing. I sat down on the bed, picked up a brown rabbit. It seemed old, older than the toy of a six-year-old, its plush worn down to the thread in spots, its