Daniel made her breakfast, like he’d promised. Huevos rancheros and Bloody Marys. They sat out on his balcony and ate.
‘Really good,’ she said, because it was.
When he finished his, he pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. Stirred his Bloody Mary with a celery stick.
‘So what do you think?’
She was still eating. She put down her fork. ‘About what?’
He shrugged. ‘Are you going to be sticking around for a while?’
Funny, she thought. Was he really that interested? She wasn’t sure. He wasn’t smiling the way he usually did. He looked, if anything, thoughtful. Maybe a little sad.
He’d enjoyed himself last night, she was pretty sure. She had, in spite of everything.
She’d managed to forget, for a while.
They were quiet together. Tender, almost. And she’d fallen asleep, which she hadn’t really expected to be able to do, and she’d slept well.
She’d woken up to an empty bed, a clatter of pans, and the faint smell of coffee. He’d put a folded robe on the pillow where he’d been, which was a nice gesture, she thought.
Now she stared at the sliver of ocean visible from the balcony.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I do have to get back at some point. Maybe in a week or so. After that I really don’t know.’
‘My week’s looking kind of crazy,’ he said. ‘But I hope we can get together again, before you go.’
They were refinancing, Tom had told her.
When she thought about it now, that was when she should have demanded an explanation. When she should have stopped trusting him. Even if he hadn’t been lying to her, she shouldn’t have let it go.
She’d gone online to their bank’s bill-pay center to schedule the month’s payments, and the mortgage account had vanished. The line where the payee should have been, gone.
‘We can get a better rate,’ Tom had said. ‘The accountant’s dealing with the refinancing. He’s taken the payments out of the household account, so you don’t have to worry about it.’
‘And you didn’t think we should talk about it first?’
It had really grated on her the last few years, the paternal attitude, that he could just do these things and not even bother to discuss them with her. Of course, it was his money, he was the wage earner, but weren’t they supposed to be in this together?
‘Honey, this kind of thing is my business,’ he’d said. ‘It’s what I do. It would be like … like me telling you what photos to hang on the wall.’
‘But I still ask you,’ she’d said. ‘I ask you what you think.’
The truth was, she hadn’t asked enough.
She’d known that the business hadn’t been going well. But he’d told her it was nothing dire, nothing to worry about, just normal ups and downs – a fund that was underperforming. Financing that had fallen through. She could tell that he was more stressed out than usual, working longer hours, keeping a greater distance from her. She’d let him.
That was what bothered her the most now. That she hadn’t confronted him. That she’d let him handle things, even when she’d suspected that things weren’t right.
Maybe he’d wanted to talk. To confess. If only she’d pushed him a bit, maybe he would have told her. Instead she’d gritted her teeth and nodded. Because she hadn’t really wanted to know.
She’d liked the distance between them.
When she got back to Hacienda Carmen in the early afternoon, she changed into her bathing suit and a blouse and sarong and went down to the beach. She had her choice of chairs at the beach club; hardly any were taken.
She got out her iPhone and stared at it a moment before calling Ted Banks.
‘Hey there, Michelle. Nice night?’
It was all she could do not to hurl her phone into the sand. Instead she swallowed hard. Took a deep, calming breath.
‘Hi, Ted. Yeah.’
Maybe he didn’t know. She was calling him; presumably she had something to report.
Or he had someone watching Hacienda Carmen, who’d reported that she hadn’t come home that night.
Either way he could read between the lines.
She didn’t know what to say. She kept silent, her chest and throat tight with frustration.
‘So are you gonna tell me about it?’
‘Look …’
The parasail guys finally had a customer. She watched for a moment as the chute advertising a local real estate agent lifted up and soared out over the surf.
‘How much longer do you expect me to do this?’
‘For now I think we need to play that by ear.’
‘Gary …’ Her heart was pounding. Deep breath. One more. ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this. I … it’s too hard.’
Gary snickered. ‘Awww, don’t tell me you’re falling for him.’
‘Fuck you,’ she said before she could stop herself.
‘You are, aren’t you? Sweetie, I could tell you some things about Danny that would curl your hair.’
‘Then tell me,’ she snapped. ‘Go ahead, tell me! You’re always insinuating all this shit – why don’t you prove it to me?’
For a moment there was silence.
‘Oh, I get it,’ Gary said. ‘You think you can get a better deal with him, don’t you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What’s he been promising you, Michelle? You think he’s gonna give you a cut? Well, let me tell you, you’re in for a world of hurt if you believe that.’
Michelle stared at the phone in disbelief.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want a deal, I don’t want a cut, I just want to go home.’
‘Well then, we both want the same thing,’ Gary said. ‘So you need to keep your cool and do what I tell you, okay?’
The parasail was landing now. A young guy, bearded and shirtless, laughing as he stumbled onto the beach.
‘How long, Gary?’ she repeated.
‘Not too long. I promise. Just tell me about last night.’
Oh, God, she thought. What was she supposed to tell him? About the sex? About what they’d done? Was that what he wanted to hear?
‘Ned came by El Tiburón,’ she said. ‘He’s an American who owns a restaurant.’
‘I know who he is.’
‘He was looking for Danny. He seemed really anxious about it. Said it was … it was time-sensitive.’
‘Oh, yeah? So what did Danny say?’
‘I …’ Michelle squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I used the watch. I’ll send it to you.’
‘I knew you could do it,’ Gary said, and the satisfaction in his voice made her cringe. ‘Good job, Michelle! Lookin’ forward to it.’
A pause. ‘Anything else?’
Just a bunch of shit I never should’ve gotten involved with.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, nothing else.’
Fuck the passport, she thought. I’ll just get on a plane, and when I get to L.A., I’ll say I lost it. They could lock her up in Immigration, whatever. It didn’t matter.
Except … didn’t she need a passport number to book a flight? Did she know her passport number?
You were supposed to make a copy of your passport when you traveled – how many times had she read that? – but she hadn’t done it. Hadn’t even thought about it.
Would they even let her on the plane without one?
A bus, then. A bus to Guadalajara, then a bus to Tijuana. Just get to the border.
But Gary knows where I live, she thought. He knows who my family is. He knows my credit cards, my bank accounts . …
Stop, she told herself. Just stop.
She lay back in the beach chair and closed her eyes.
She could call Daniel. Tell him what was going on. Maybe everything Gary had been telling her about Daniel was bullshit. Lies.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
Sunday morning she got up and did yoga, but after that she was still restless. The courtyard of Hacienda Carmen felt like a trap, a place contaminated by Gary – he’d chosen it for her, after all.
I’ll go have coffee someplace else, she thought. One of those cute breakfast places up on Basilio Badillo, maybe. Buy yesterday’s New York Times and try to relax.
One of the little markets on Olas Altas carried English-language papers, she recalled. Maybe they even had magazines. New Yorker, something like that.
The inside of the store smelled like mildew and heated sunscreen: coconut mixed with chemicals. She perused the rack. Mexican tabloids and papers dominated, but here were the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Mexican papers printed some really gruesome images, she thought. This one, on the front page, a body scorched and melted by flame in the middle of a burned-out room.
MATARON A NORTEAMERICANO, she read.
Mataron. Did that mean ‘killed’?
Her heart started pounding before she could even think why.
There was a hand-lettered sign taped to the rack that said NO READING! in English. She picked up the paper anyway and looked below the fold. ‘Incendio,’ she saw. ‘Restaurante.’
And a name. Ned Gardner.
She bought the paper, shoved it in her totebag, and went outside, blinking in the glaring light.
Don’t think about it. Not yet. Find someplace to sit down.
She walked blindly down Olas Altas, sweat dripping into her eyes.
Here were some restaurants. Where to sit? Inside, where no one could see her? She thought of fire.
By the window, closer to the exit. Where she could get away.
‘Coffee, por favor,’ she said automatically when the waiter came by. She sat and stared out the window. The newspaper in her bag felt poisonous, something she feared to touch.
Not yet. She’d wait for her coffee.
‘¿Y para comer? For breakfast?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
She sipped the bitter coffee and finally pulled out the paper.
Not that she could understand much of what it said, just a few words here and there. But the photo she understood: That charred and melted thing, that was Ned. A man she’d met. She’d talked to him. He’d had to talk to Daniel. And she’d told Gary about it.
She found a twenty-peso note, threw it on the table, and pushed back the chair, acid burning her throat, stumbling a little as she stood.
At the Internet café, she searched for the article and found it easily enough, then ran it through Babelfish to see if she could figure out what had happened.
‘The official of Firemen information emphasized: in the 2:45 hours, it reported that Ned Gardner, who was a person of North American, apparently dead by the flame erupted it in a restaurant denominated the Lonely Bull, in the flank of the street Insurgentes in the Emiliano colony Zapata, already by the firemen extinguished . …’
Okay, Michelle thought. Firemen reported that they’d found him dead at 2:45 A.M. – this morning – in the restaurant. There’d been a fire.
‘The agents of the municipal police they went to the place, later the judicial and personal authority arrived from the Instituto Jalisciense de Ciencias Forenses. It extended that there were no violence tracks and the body did not present/display blows or wounds, but that had a splice of cord or rope in the wrist, reason why thinks that he can be assassinated.’
Cord or rope in the wrist. Tied.
‘The authorities expect to the use an accelerator, as liquid lighter or gasoline.’
The online version had additional photos, and they were clearer than the one in the newspaper.
You could still see his sneaker in one shot, a Nike. It hadn’t burned all the way. Why was that? she wondered. And bits of fabric from his pants. Were they Dockers?
A giggle rose in her throat. She swallowed it.
You can’t lose it now, she told herself. Get a grip.
She forced herself to look at the photo again. The head and torso had burned more than the lower legs.
Now, if this were one of those stupid CSI programs, they’d do some fancy graphics with slow motion and reconstruct the murder, with a few shots of the screaming victim thrown in for shock value, she supposed. She’d always hated those shows.
But she could guess what had happened, from what she could read and what she could see. Tied. An accelerant. Burning from the top down. She could picture it. Bound in a chair maybe. Gas or fluid poured on his head. The match or lighter lit.
She shuddered and closed the browser.