Three

I love Creek House. Truly, I do. It’s the first house I’ve ever loved, the first place I’ve ever lived that I’ve given two hoots about, but still. Stretching out on the Cali-King bed in Room 112 in the Last Ditch was bliss. I rolled over and then over again and then a third time, just because I could. I slid off the end onto the floor instead of getting out on one side or the other, just because I could. And I danced around in the shower doing the Funky Chicken, just to luxuriate in not bashing my elbows on both bathroom walls or accidentally flushing the toilet with my knee.

Only Della pounding on the connecting wall and telling me to stop jumping around in case I woke Diego made me simmer down and end my space salutation. I washed the fake blood out of my hair and scrubbed the slough water off my feet and tried not to think about the dead guy wrapped round my beer rope, or who might have killed him, or why, or what the Jimmy wig was supposed to signal.

Todd was lying propped up on my bed when I came out of the bathroom. Of course he was. But I was used to it and I was swathed in a bath sheet.

“You stopped praying then,” I said. He was back in diamonds and linen again, cashmere at the throat. “How have you got that scarf tied?” I added, taking a closer look. “Every time I think I’ve learned all there is!”

“Are you changing your mind?” Todd said. “It’s about time.” I started to protest, but he shushed me and kept talking. “What did the good detective tell you when she had you on your own? Because the uniforms wouldn’t tell the rest of us anything.”

“Not much,” I said. “He had no ID on him. He’s been dead for four days. GSW to the stoma—”

Todd was cackling. “‘Gee Ess Double-Ewe’ has two syllables more than ‘gunshot wound,’ Lexy, and it makes you sound like a dork.”

“—to the stomach,” I carried on, “and the Jimmy wig was stapled to his head post-mortem.”

“Why?” Todd said.

“Dunno. Mike didn’t share her theories.”

“Don’t say Mike,” said Todd. “So she doesn’t believe in pooling resources to build a whole greater than the sum of its parts? Can you believe it? Some people have no vision.”

I rolled my eyes, refusing to open the tomb of the forbidden subject. We had agreed to have the Halloween weekend off bickering. “I don’t say it to her face,” I said. "Did she ask you about the ring?”

“What ring?”

“He had a ring on. Dead Guy. On the hand that was waving as he came up, he had a great big ugly lump of a ring. But it fell off as they were getting him out.”

“I didn’t see it,” Todd said. “I saw his head and the start of his sweatshirt but no ring. What kind?”

I shrugged. “A bog-awful big barnacle of a hideous ring. Looked like it came free with coupons, or maybe had a cyanide compartment in it. Did Roger see it? Get him in here and let’s ask him.”

Todd plucked his phone out of his back pocket and speed-dialled Roger.

“Better get dressed,” he said once he had hung up again. He waved a languid hand at my bath sheet, which had unravelled to the Renaissance nymph stage, leaving a lot of thigh and shoulder on show. “Roger’s not numb to it all, the way I am.”

“You’re not exactly convincing me to let you loose on clients at vulnerable stages of recovery.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about it till Monday?” Todd said. He really was the most infuriating individual I had ever dealt with. And I’ve dealt with undiagnosed sociopaths and my mother.

Roger let himself in and grinned at me. He was also back in the slouchy linen shirt and trousers Todd and he favoured for evenings at home, the pale pink shirt open over his perfect mahogany chest and the pale lemon trousers rolled up above his perfect mahogany ankles. He was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen. Well, Todd was beautiful too, but Roger was much less annoying.

“Blotchy neck, clenched jaw, beady eyes,” Roger said, looking me over. “What’s Todd done to drive you to the edge of reason now, Lexy?”

“Oh, nothing out of the ordinary,” I said. “One of the daily specials from his weekly menu. I’m okay. Listen, never mind that now. The guy in the slough—did you see the ring he was wearing when we were hauling him up? It dropped off and it’ll be tomorrow before they can get a diver down to retrieve it.”

“And?” Roger said.

“They couldn’t ID him,” I said. “And this thing was quite distinctive. The size of a quail’s egg and butt-ugly.”

“Don’t say butt,” Todd told me. “You sound dumb.”

“Okay, plug-ugly. I was just thinking we could …”

“Interfere in a police investigation and risk prosecution?” said Roger. “Again?”

“Was it metal?” said Todd. “It wasn’t jade or onyx or anything?”

“Mike told me specifically not to go fishing with a magnet on a bit of string,” I said.

“Shame,” said Todd. “Although gold, silver, and copper aren’t magnetic anyway. Who wears an iron ring, when you think about it?”

“Nazis?” said Roger. “No, that’s an iron cross.”

“And it wasn’t a spiky design,” I said. “The impression I got, through the water, was of … bubbles.”

“Duh,” said Todd.

“No, not water bubbles. The design itself was … bulbous.”

“Could you draw it?” said Todd.

“Why?” said Roger. “To what end? They’ll dredge it up in the morning. What’s the point of trying to get ahead of the cops on this?”

“Well,” I said, “there’s the fact that Mike reckons he was dumped in the slough by my boat in a Jimmy wig as a message to me.” Their faces were gratifyingly horror-struck. “Or a warning maybe.” Tears gathered in Todd’s eyes and Roger’s mouth dropped open. Bless them. “So there’s that.”

“Dead four days?” Todd said, leaping to his feet and cracking his knuckles. “He must have been reported missing, don’t you think? It’ll be on the police blotter at the Voyager.”

“And I can lean on all my contacts at the Senior Center.” Roger was on his feet too, squeezing his hands into fists until his muscles popped all the way up to his shoulders.

“Senior Center?” I said.

“You know,” Roger said. “The Gimme A Grandma Initiative.” It was the joint brainchild of Roger at the hospital, the nursing manager of the attached children’s convalescent home, the head teacher of the kindergarten wing of the Beteo County Foster Home network, and the Residents’ Activities Manager at the biggest of the three old folks’ homes. There wasn’t a single white-haired little old lady or baldy old codger in Cuento without at least one adopted grandkid now, and there wasn’t a single at-risk little scrap of lisping humanity anywhere in the county system without someone to read stories, comb and remake neglected cornrows, and shake a tripod walking stick at their care-workers if their assigned moppet heard so much as a cross word.

“Of course,” I said. “How could I forget?” Todd was campaigning like a member of the Academy at Oscar time to get Roger nominated as Cuento’s man of the year. “But I mean, why the Senior Center?”

“Because even if he doesn’t live there, someone who does live there is going to know him from silver-top yoga or chair-cercize, or even bingo.”

“But he’s not old, is he?” I said. “He didn’t look old to me. I’d have put him in his forties.”

Roger gave an uneasy little smile.

“Ew,” said Todd.

“What?” I said.

“Bloating,” said Roger. “His face wrinkles were puffed out from post-mortem bloat. It’s been mild. And it was four days, like you said. I’d put him in his seventies. So if he’s local, the seniors in town will know him.”

“It shouldn’t be worse,” I said, “for someone to kill an old man. It totally bloody is though. A sweet old man who should have died in his bed with his family around him.”

“Huh?” said Todd. “Maybe he was a complete dick. Maybe he was handsy old slimewad who made everyone’s life hell for miles around.”

“No way,” I said. “Not with that adorable gap between his two front teeth.”

“Another reason we know he’s old,” Roger said. “No one young would have a mouth like that.”

“Adorable?” said Todd. “Wait, you think British teeth are attractive? I knew you could tolerate them, but I had no idea you actually looked at all those rows of condemned tenements and thought they were pretty! Huh.”

“It’s like dog lovers,” I said. “I always wondered how they could stand the smell. Then I found out they like it. They actually like the stink of dog.”

“Or cats,” said Roger, who loved dogs.

“Cats don’t smell,” I said. I loved cats.

“Cats stink!” said Roger. “Why do you think Della and Diego have that Rube Goldberg contraption to let the kittens out of their room to go potty in the bushes?”

“Because cat litter is expensive and Della thinks it’s a waste of money.”

“No, because the smell of the litter box was making everyone in the whole motel—”

“The smell of cat shit in a box of gravel doesn’t mean cats smell,” I said. “If you shit in a box of gravel in the corner of the room, I wouldn’t be dabbing it behind my ears. It’s not cats’ fault.”

“Aren’t you paying the kittens’ expenses anyway?” Todd said.

“Yes, and cat litter is a drop in the ocean.”

“Oh, I know,” Todd said. He couldn’t have looked more thrilled if he’d been Mike telling me about a gunshot wound in an old man’s belly. “How are you getting on with a solution?”

“Fine,” I lied.

“Because Trinity—”

“Out!” I said. “Out you go. Go and Google missing persons. Go and bug the seniors. You’ve crossed the line now, Todd. So go on with yourself and just go.”

Trinity. I seethed every time I thought about it. When my client list exploded, Todd was there by my side, like an unpaid intern, taking all sorts of things off my hands and not making a peep of complaint about it. He registered my domain name, set up a website, took out adverts in the Voyager, and made me a thousand business cards. And I was so slammed, I’d handed out about twenty-five of the things before I read one.

“Trinity?” I had said, leaning in the doorway to Todd’s room. He was patrolling a free-standing rack of large women’s dresses with a clipboard in his hand. “Kind of God-sy, isn’t it? Won’t people be expecting Bible stuff? Faith-based?”

I was bending over backwards so far I could have hired myself out as a hula hoop. Because what I wanted to say to him was What the frilly hat gave you the right to decide my practice name, Téodor? My business is called Lexy Campbell, Caring and Confidential Counselling. Where the limited-edition, embossed and authenticated fuckity-fuck did Trinity come from?

“We didn’t think so,” Todd said. “We thought it just said ‘three’ with a dash of Matrix.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” I said.

He pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and gave me a look of incredulity. “Kathi and me,” he said. “The other two of the three.”

“What?”

“Have you even looked at our website?” Todd said. “I worked hard on it.”

“Our website?” I echoed, reaching for my phone and scrolling. “‘Trinity Life Solutions,’” I read aloud. “‘Our team of experts offer counseling for relationships and family upsets, wardrobe and grooming makeovers for personal positivity, and decluttering and deep-cleansing for healing and a happy home.’

“You have got to be joking,” I said.

“We even put you first.”

“Upsets?” I said. “Upsets? You provide personal positivity, Kathi does healing and happiness, and I fix UPSETS?”

“You’re the one that always said there was too much psychologizing everything.”

I pointed at the rack of clothes. “Do those belong to one of my clients?” My finger was shaking. So was my voice.

“One of our clients,” Todd said. “You betcha. Oline? With the credit card debt and the bossy sister? I’ve sent her to a spa in Calistoga while I write up a diet sheet and torch these muumuus.”

“Yeah, she had her second session scheduled tomorrow,” I said, nodding, “but she cancelled. She said she was sick.”

“All those toxins coming out in the mud bath,” Todd said. “She probably is. But nothing to worry about. She’s posted on Instag—”

Oblivious as he usually is, he stopped talking when he saw the look on my face and left his phone in his back pocket. We agreed to leave it until after Halloween because the buffet food was already ordered, then I turned on my heel and swept away.

So when Della told me, the day before my party, that Flynn and Florian needed to be groomed, I couldn’t turn the problem over to Todd and his contact list, or to Kathi and her can-do attitude. I needed to deal with it myself.

Why? Because I’d bought Diego the kittens. And the rabbit. And the seahorse. When I was supposed to be buying him a goldfish to make up for persuading him to put his tadpoles back in the slough. Noleen and Kathi bent their NO PETS policy for the menagerie, and their NO STRUCTURAL MODIFICATIONS policy for the tunnel leading out of the back window into the bushes now designated as Pussycat Pottyland. They also had a NO HYDROPONICS policy, which was nothing to do with the illegality of pot, it turned out, and everything to do with how it hiked their electricity bill if everyone was growing under heat lamps. They dropped that for Diego too, even though the heat and lamps and oxygenation pump for a seahorse and a modest shoal of clown and angel fish was enough to make Noleen drop her duct tape in the middle of her monthly maintenance initiative.

If it was anyone but Diego—mop-haired, dimpled, piping-voiced angel that he was, with eyes bigger than his cheeks and cheeks as round as his chubby knees and those chubby little knees with more dimples than his sweet face—the whole zoo would have been in the pound quicker than Noleen could say, “Who cares if it’s a kill shelter?” But Diego hugged her round her sturdy calves and told her he loved her every day on his way to preschool. So I had two Persian kittens with knots in all eight armpits to try to find an emergency groomer for.

At least it would take my mind off murder.

I had tried to do it myself the morning of Halloween, thinking if I could just cut the lumps of matted hair off them and then start a daily brushing habit to stop them building up again, all would be well. But even the smallest nail scissors looked like chainsaws when they got close to the fondant-pink skin and feather-white fluff on the underside of those two kittens, and I couldn’t bring myself to make the first snip. The kitten between my knees was crying like an orphan in Dickens and the other one was matching it peal for peal as well as hiding in terror down the side of the chair, where I could feel it trembling. And Diego was watching out of his window doing that Disney-tear-brim-thing that he could take on the road.

I opened my knees, let the trapped kitten go, fished the squashed kitten out from beside the seat cushion, and watched them scamper off back to Diego, moving like some film student’s first try at animation, because the knots in their pits stopped their legs from working.

But the morning after Halloween, when I went out on an early coffee run as an excuse to stop at the cop shop and ask if they’d made any progress overnight (which they hadn’t, or at least if they had, the night shift dispatcher wasn’t willing to tell me), the solution was right there staring me in the face at the Swiss Sisters drive-through queue. The car in front belonged to a cat groomer! There was a decal in the back window: a white line drawing of a sleek cat washing its paw, a verse of badly scanning guff about velvet coats and satin paws and the stroke of serenity and peace. Which, if a Facebook friend of mine had posted it over a photo of a sunset, meadow or—I suppose—cat, would have made me unfollow at least, if not unfriend, if not block, if not anonymously harass online for crimes against poetry. And a phone number.

Of sorts.

Far be it from me to complain about any aspect of America that’s been serving Americans perfectly well for generations and only strikes me as a tiny bit awkward because it’s so unfamiliar. Well, not that far. If I’m honest, I bitch and whine about everything from the colour of the mailboxes—because dusty blue merges into the shadows and is functionally invisible and mailboxes should be red, so you can see them—to the way no one ever tells you how much anything is going to cost, but instead says a random price stripped of all mention of tax, like it’s a secret, and then whacks you with the truth at the register, which is as off-pissing to me as if a waiter brought me a plate of big juicy prawns, put it down on the table, said, “Bon Appetit,” and then ate one. And speaking of waiters, why—if you agree to another drink—do they whisk away the one you’re drinking that’s still got two good mouthfuls left in it? Even if the last two mouthfuls are kind of watery because of the truly insane mountains of ice in absolutely everything, scamming everyone out of stuff they’ve paid for in a way that hasn’t been seen in civilised circles since Georgian reformers stopped traders putting brick dust in sacks of flour at the London corn market.

And then there’s the phone numbers. Which are not numbers at all! Oh, they’re numbers at the start, but then they’re slogans that are supposed to help you remember the number. 1-800-GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, SUCKER. Because by the time you’ve located the G number and the O number, you’ve completely forgotten whether the end of the aide-memoire was doofus, sweet-cheeks, sucker, or ma’am.

The car groomer decal was a case in point: six digits, randomly broken up with dashes to make them harder to use, and then TABI instead of 8224, which is tons easier to remember.

I keyed in the number anyway, using every scrap of my pre-
caffeine mental capacity, and listened to it ringing, only thinking about the fact that the groomer was currently juggling coffee and payment for coffee through her car window when it went to voicemail.

“Speak!” said the message.

I stared at my phone. That was a bit basic for an outgoing phone message on a business line, wasn’t it? “Hi,” I said, anyway. “Sorry to bother you when you’re on the road. I’m actually right behind you right now. I’d honk but you might spill and burn yourself. Anyway, I’ll get back to you soon. It’s a cutting job I need. Too much for me to tackle. Cheers, then. Bye.”

The car in front was moving away. I gave a bit of a bibb in the end, since I thought the coffee was safely stowed, and I waved like a loon at the tinted back window. Then I pulled up to the window and started reciting my morning prayer.