I am a biographer. I understand people the way secretaries understand file folders and doctors understand femurs. Okay, that’s ludicrous. A file folder is a file folder any way you look at it, and ditto for a femur, but you’d have to be deluded, really gone, to think a person, any person, could ever really understand another. About as likely as turning base metals into gold.
Still, it’s what I do. Given which you’d think I’d have some kind of feel for human nature. Woman’s intuition, at least. It is my birthright. But as I drove away from Theresa Flynn’s house, I had to wonder. Had I been dead wrong? What kind of man was Joseph Albacco, really? Had he been so in love with this Meredith Allan that he’d kill his wife for her?
That name, Meredith Allan. It sounded so familiar. It was an ordinary kind of name. Meredith Allan could’ve been somebody I went to school with back in Jersey, somebody who’d blackballed me from the cheerleading squad. Or a bank manager who’d denied me a loan. There’d been a lot of those. Had that name come up in the transcript? I didn’t think so. Something was nagging at me. And I couldn’t help feeling that someone was playing me for a fool. What about Vincent—Vincent, the soul of kindness? Was it possible I had misjudged him, too?
As I merged onto the 101, I pulled out my phone book and dialed Annie at work, almost plowing into a tour bus in the process. Well, Gardner had been a bad driver, too. Worse than me. He’d smashed a brand-new Model T Ford right through the garage of his first Ventura house. I’d visited the spot on a previous trip. There hadn’t been all that much to see. It’d been turned into a Mexican restaurant. Killer margaritas, though.
Unfortunately, Annie wasn’t at work, though they had expected her that morning and had left dozens of messages because—hello!—they were shooting tomorrow, and the gold facade of the alien ziggurat was hideous, and if I got ahold of her, would I tell her to please, please, call Vanessa? I tried her at Lael’s, but there was no answer. Then I called her at home and got the machine. I waited for the beep.
“Annie, it’s Mom. Vincent stopped by yesterday. I’m trying to mind my own business, but I think we need to talk, sweetie—”
“Mom, don’t hang up!”
“I’m here.”
“Sorry, I was out in the garden, weeding.”
Annie’s garden meant everything to her. It always had. When she was in kindergarten, her class did a unit on plants. Most of the other kids could barely manage to send up a pea shoot. She grew peas galore, plus two twelve-foot sunflowers she decided were husband and wife. We documented them with Polaroids. Annie’s tastes were simpler now. A thriving bean tepee was cause for celebration. A patch of mutant, colorless watermelons, equally thrilling. She got it from me, though I’ve always been more interested in aesthetics than organics. To which end I’ve learned, under Javier’s expert tutelage, to love and respect pesticides. I could never admit this to Annie. Watering, mulching, fertilizing, composting, harvesting, battling pests via alternative means—all were religious sacraments to her.
Before she could get a word in edgewise, I told her I’d be there in an hour with a quart of her favorite veggie chili and hung up. She and Vincent had discovered a rickety stand deep in Topanga Canyon run by an old hippie who claimed that Jim Morrison was one of her customers (still) and that she had invented scented candles. Her chili was delicious, so who was I to argue?
Then I remembered something I’d forgotten to mention to Theresa Flynn. I was on Pacific Coast Highway, waiting for a green light, and ostensibly less of a threat. I dialed the number and she answered with a wan hello. After thanking her again for the tea and cookies, I told her that the secretaries at the insurance company had made me promise to remind her about her sister’s lockbox. Sighing audibly, she told me that on innumerable occasions she had explained to them and their myriad predecessors that she had no key and therefore no use for the thing, not to mention no place to put anything so heavy. But she promised to look into it and apologized for troubling me.
I hit the gas. How odd. Your sister is murdered, all that’s left of her is one lousy lockbox, and you don’t move heaven and earth to get it? You just let it sit around for almost half a century, collecting dust? Maybe Mrs. Flynn didn’t want to know what was inside. Maybe she’d had enough surprises. Suddenly I felt very sorry for her. She’d sounded weak and tired. I planned right then not to get old. Older.
By the time I got to Annie’s, the Kombucha mushroom tea was ready. Lucky me. I called her place Tarzan’s Treehouse because it was smack in the middle of what felt like a jungle, swinging vines and all. We sat outside under a canopy of Chusan palms with yellow flowers that tickled my nose, at least partially distracting me from the poisonous taste of the tea.
“It’s also know as ‘Miracle Fungus,’” Annie said.
“It’s a miracle I’m drinking it,” I said under my breath.
“I heard that. It’s brewed from a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. If you say ‘SCOBY,’ everyone knows what you mean.”
“Rikes, Shaggy! It’s a rhost!”
Annie always ignored my pop-culture references. She had no use for such things.
“Mom, I’ve never seen you look so wrinkled.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say. I thought dappled sunlight was supposed to be flattering.”
“No, I mean your dress.”
“I’ve grown very attached to this dress. It may well become my new uniform. No more fuss. You just pull out the blue halter dress, and you’re set. And on chilly mornings, you accessorize with the duck sweatshirt.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Never mind, sweetie. Have you called back the people at work? They’re frantic. The alien ziggurat looks hideous.”
“Thanks for the update.”
“Annie.”
“I’ll deal with them later.”
“Fine.”
“So Vincent told you everything.”
“Not exactly.”
She picked up her garden shears and started to pace.
“It all started two Saturdays ago. Remember, that day it was so hot? I decided to stay in and organize the filing cabinet. Little Miss Perfect.”
She lopped the heads off two perfectly acceptable daylilies.
“There were tons of papers and old bills and stuff, and I was being ruthless about throwing it all away. I filled up every trash can in the house. And then I came across this letter, tucked way in the back, near the deed to the house and the pink slips for the cars. A letter addressed to Vincent.”
Two more daylilies down.
“I had no idea what it was doing there, so I read it, thinking nothing of it, that it was probably just more junk.”
“And it wasn’t.”
“It was from this woman, Roxana. Vincent had had an affair with her before he met me. I knew all about her—she was an artist, she left town abruptly, a real flake. Never took her responsibilities seriously, that kind of thing. It was no big deal, their romance, or so I had always thought. As it turned out, after they split up, she found out she was pregnant. She had a son.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“She never told Vincent. Not a word. She was already out of his life, they had never been in love, she thought it would be better to raise the boy on her own. She went down to Mexico, tried some different things, and then she changed her mind. She said her son had a right to know his father. She had been wrong to keep something like this to herself. So she tracked Vincent down, wrote him this letter, and asked him to call or write so they could figure out what to do.”
“Well, what happened?”
“That’s the thing, Mom,” Annie said, starting to cry. “I could have handled this. I could have loved Vincent’s son. He could’ve been a part of our family.”
“He still can, Annie.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But why?”
“The letter was dated a year ago. It sat in our house for one entire year, and Vincent never called this woman. He was afraid.”
“Afraid of what? Of being a father? Vincent is great with kids.”
“Afraid of me. Of what I’d say. What kind of monster does he think I am? How could he know me, really know me, and think abandoning his son would be something I’d expect him to do?”
“Did you talk to him about it?”
“I don’t need to. I’m done with him, Mom. There’s no excuse for this. I wish him well, I really do, but he doesn’t know me like I thought he did. And I don’t know him anymore.”
“So you’re auditioning replacements?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, no? It sounds like you gave up on him as much as he gave up on you.”
Ignoring that last comment, she gave me an empty smile and headed back into the house, calling over her shoulder, “Let yourself out, okay?”
I did, realizing only when I was halfway home that I had never even bothered to ask the name of Vincent’s little boy.