Twenty-Two

That was a load of complete, dried, pelleted, bagged, and tagged bullshit, wasn’t it?” I said to Todd as soon as we were out of the cop shop and scurrying homeward. It was raining. It doesn’t rain much in Cuento. It doesn’t rain enough in Cuento, in fact, given the gallons it takes to grow an almond and the raging wild fires every summer.

“Ssshhhh,” Todd said. “I’m concentrating.” He whipped out his phone and began talking into it very fast. “NSA 042. Phew. I’m crap at remembering numbers. 1960s ranch, U-shaped drive, pepper tree in the front yard, north-facing street. Mint-green paint with black trim and white accents. Grey composite shingle roof. Pool.”

“Good thinking, brain box,” I said. “This is the fourth house with the porch zombie, is it?”

“Which I’m guessing is Joan Lampeter’s, don’t you think?”

“So what do we do? Ring up your pal on the force and get them to run a plate?”

“Mike’s the closest thing I’ve got to a pal on the force,” Todd said. “The license plate is just for confirmation if we find it.”

“How do we find it?”

“We go for an online stroll.”

“A mid-century ranch with a composite roof, a pepper tree out front, and a pool in the back?” I said. “In Cuento? You’ll have to carb up. How did you know there was a pool, by the way?”

“Crystal Clear Pool Service sticker on the gate to the side yard,” Todd said.

“Side yard!” I said. I loved that there was a word for that sliver of dirt between one outsize house on its midget plot and the next. Only people determined to look on the bright side and be delighted with life could have come up with it. It was like giving a French name to a scoop of vanilla ice cream that melted and turned your pie crust soggy, or the way they called everything a holiday even when you didn’t get a day off work. Valentine’s Day! Halloween! 420! Life was a constant party.

“You could let some of these go by, you know,” Todd said. “You don’t have to pick up on every tiny little thing.”

“I was marvelling!” I said. “I was being nice. God almighty, Todd, if you ever went to Dundee you’d never stop whinging. The weather, the food, the drinks, the drunks, the buses, the drunks on the buses … ”

“The no mosquitos, the no black widows, the no brown recluses … ”

“The midges,” I said.

“What are they?” Todd’s shoulders came up round his ears.

“Nothing,” I told him. “Sorry. Forget it. They’re mythological. Like haggis.”

“Haggis isn’t mythological,” Todd said. “They sell it in cans in that deli in Sacramento.”

“Yeah, but hairy wild haggises running round the hills, always in the same direction because they’ve got one leg shorter than the other, aren’t real. And neither are midges. Trust me.”

“What choice do I have?” said Todd. I reached over and squeezed his arm. “So,” he said, “while you go and tell a load more clients to stop whinging and pull their necks up—”

“Socks.”

“—I’ll start scouring the map of Cuento for Joan Lampeter’s house.”

“And when I knock off for the night, if you’re still looking, I’ll call Crystal Clear and find it out that way,” I said.

“They won’t tell you,” Todd said.

“Let’s see.”

“Let’s you, me, and fifty bucks see,” Todd said, by which time we were back at the Last Ditch and going our separate ways.

My two o’clock was the overanxious empty-nester to be. I talked her down from the wire and then up out of the doldrums and sent her on her way. My three o’clock was a thrice-divorced guy who had only just realised that if he didn’t stay married to one of them one of these times, he was going to die alone. His current woe was that the “gals” who were swiping him right these days were only ten years younger than him and he didn’t want them. “Shoulda had a kid or two,” he said. “Like they were always bitching to make me.” I sent up selfless thanks that he hadn’t. Selfless because his kids would be clients by now, and thanks because I had enough daddy issues to deal with on my roster and wasn’t looking for more. My four o’clock was a woman I wish I could have introduced to my three o’clock, but not in a swiping sense. She had multiple sclerosis and she had never met the right guy to bitch at about having children. “Who’ll look after me?” she said. “When it gets bad, I mean.”

I took a long look at her. She had a BMW key ring, so presumably she had the car to match it parked out front. Noleen would love that. A Beemer in the car park would give the Last Ditch a certain cachet. And she was wearing shoes with red soles, I noticed as she recrossed her ankles. I couldn’t remember what brand they were, but I knew it wasn’t Target.

“Are you rich?” I said.

“I’m comfortable,” she answered, bridling. No one ever says they’re rich, I’ve noticed.

“Do you have young relatives of any kind? Not children, but nieces and nephews? Second cousins maybe?”

“I do,” she said.

“Are they rich?”

“They’re living in a shoebox in San Francisco despite being executives in the finance sector,” she said.

“Tah-dah!”

“Are you seriously going to tell me to count my blessings because I’m middle-aged with a degenerative neurological condition instead of young and healthy and strapped for cash?”

Yeah, because I’m a moron, I thought. “No, because that would be silly,” I said. “I was only going to suggest that you could make a difference to your life and theirs if you reconfigured things. Get them out of the rent trap and get yourself some support.”

“You’re asking me to give my nephew and his wife the power of life and death over me?” she said.

“No,” I said again, beginning to see why she had never found the right guy. I wasn’t sure the guy existed who would meet her standards. “I was going to suggest you buy a duplex, half for them and half for you, and tell them they’ll inherit the lot if you die at home. Then, when you need it, get a nurse too.”

“I can’t imagine that working,” she said.

“Read some Agatha Christie,” I told her. “They’re full of rich old relatives who hold the purse strings and young hopefuls dancing attendance.”

“Don’t they usually get bumped off?” she asked, which was a fair point.

“In fiction,” I said. “In real life, there would be a bit of a commute for them and a hell of an incentive to keep you happy if you set the will up in a wily enough way. But let’s not get bogged down in a future that might never happen.” She looked askance. “You might go under a bus tomorrow,” I pointed out. “Or you might walk out of here and meet the love of your life who’ll care for you tenderly forever.”

“Or there’s always Oregon,” she said. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. Because if I mention it to anyone else, they get upset and embarrassed.”

“Oregon?”

“Assisted suicide.”

“We can certainly discuss that,” I said. “It might put your mind at rest to have procedures in place that cover all the unknowns.”

Then followed twenty-five of the most depressing minutes of my life. And I’ve spent my professional life counselling people with lives in the toilet and hearts full of the pain that brings. She had a clipboard with her and she’d made a flowchart. Every arrow led to death no matter what boxes she put in the way.

“But promise me one thing,” I said. “Speak to your nephew before I see you again. Sound him out. You might find your relatives are happy to help if it’ll take some of the squeeze off them.”

“Promise you?” she said. “Aren’t you therapists usually telling us to stop making promises because they always get broken? My last therapist told me the only way to avoid the pain of broken promises was never to make them and never to believe them.”

“I’m not your usual therapist,” I said. “I think the way to avoid broken promises is never to break promises. But who’s going to pay to hear that?”

When I got to Todd’s room, huddled into my waterproof coat with the hood tied round my face, there was a note on the door—bring your sewing fingers to the Skweek—and when I had splashed through the puddles and up the slippery metal steps, I found Kathi and him at the sewing machine engulfed in a sea of foaming white ruffles roughly the size of a VW Beetle. Todd was battening down about half of it with a body slam but Kathi was still in it up to her armpits.

“What’s that?” I said, taking my coat off and grabbing a tissue to dry my face.

“What do you think it is?” Kathi spat. “You’ve got Kleenex confetti all over you, by the way.”

“I honestly have no idea,” I said, rubbing the bits of tissue off in balls and then carefully transferring the balls to the wastepaper basket. Kathi didn’t tolerate the kind of mess some pellets of tissue would make on a pale grey floor.

“It’s a quincañera dress,” said Todd. “And it’s getting away.”

“It’s a dress?” I said, rolling my sleeves up. “What are you trying to do with it?” I waded into it on the other side from Todd, slowing down to a stagger as I hit the wall of net. I put about a double duvet’s worth under each arm and ploughed on another step.

“I’m trying to take it in at the waist,” said Kathi, shaking away a frill that had stuck to her sweaty cheek. “Fucking childhood obesity initiative at the junior high school. It would be a hell of a lot less trouble for the kid to keep downing the donuts until after her party.” She spat out a little spout of net that had foamed its way into her mouth.

“Look, let go,” I said. “This is never going to work. Just let go and we’ll do it methodically.”

Kathi stood back and Todd stood up and I swear to God, that dress bounced out and up until it was the size of a VW camper van. It caught a draught of warm air from the heating vent and waved at us like a sea monster.

“Where’s the waistband?” I said. “Roughly.”

Kathi had retreated to her counter to take a long suck on a can of Coke.

“In the middle there,” she said, pointing to where the sea monster’s mouth parts would be.

I rolled. I started at the hem and rolled and rolled and rolled, working round in a spiral until the skirt of the thing was a giant sausage and the boned corset, sweetheart neckline and net shoulder cowl were revealed.

“How much are you taking off it?” I said, hoping it wasn’t more than a couple of inches. That I could handle by folding the bones one turn over and restitching them. If it was more I’d have to cut the zip out and pull the whole thing round in both directions from the front, so the poor kid’s fifteen year-old boobs would be halfway under her arms.

“From a twelve down to a ten,” Kathi said. “And if her boyfriend breaks up with her and she hits the cookie jar, we’ll be putting it all back on again before her birthday. What do you bet?”

Another good argument for leaving it intact and just tucking it in a bit.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Entertain me while I do it, though.”

Todd entertained me with a blow-by-blow of the streets of Cuento, where mid-century moderns with composite roofs and pools were, as I had prophesied, many and unvaried.

“They’re like … ” he said.

“Shit in a field?” I suggested.

“And when you can’t see the color of the siding there’s nothing to go on. I zoomed in and out from map view to street view to map view so many times I swear I’m motion sick. I actually got motion sick on a virtual journey. A virtual walk!”

“But did you find it?” I said.

“Nope,” said Todd. “And I’ll never find it now, because I’ve studied so many goddam houses I’ve forgotten what the one on Mike’s phone looked like.”

“Hang on,” Kathi said. She was balling sports socks at the folding table and firing them into an open laundry bag on the floor. “Why would Mike have evidence photographs on her phone? You never told me that. That’s illegal. Why would she show you proof that she’s done something illegal?”

“Well, she was pretty keen to convince us about all the crap she was spouting,” Todd said. “She was giving more away than usual, wasn’t she, Lexy?”

“Yeah, but,” Kathi said. “What if they weren’t evidence photos? What if they were showing up on her phone because she was logged into a—”

“Yes!” said Todd. “Oh my God. What an idiot I am.” He was scrolling madly.

“Stop,” said Kathi. “No fair. It was my idea. I should find them.”

“Now now, children,” I said. I had no idea what they were each racing to find or I would have stopped slogging through this chunk of quadrupled satin, lining, and boning that was like trying to sew a steak and joined in.

“We got so sidetracked finding the student council,” said Todd, “we completely forgot about the porches in the Voyager!”

“Found it!” said Kathi. “‘Honourable mentions in the seventh Annual Cuento Halloween Porch Decorating Competition. Witches, Tim Burton, Disney, Silence of the Lambs—ooooh, clever!—witches, ghosts, Mama Cuento—that’s genius!—more witches, ghosts, Freddy
… Here he is! What shall we do with the drunken Scotsman? by Mrs. Joan Lampeter of Lark Circle in north Cuento.’”

“Racists!” I said.

“And there it is,” said Todd, back on his virtual map despite the travel sickness. “Sneaky bastards, putting a keyhole cul de sac under the shade trees where I couldn’t see it. Yep, yep, mint green siding, pepper tree. We’ve got her.”

“Why did we want her again?” I said, which went down like salt on a slug.

“Because she completes the set,” Kathi said. “Tam is dead, Patti is missing, John Worth is unconscious, Mo Heedles is uptight enough to puke at the mention of Tam’s name, Mo Tafoya either tried to sell him a parcel of land or lured him here with a promise of it. Joan could be the key that makes sense of everything.”

“Hm,” I said.

“Come on!” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth leaning on Joanie. I have no idea why Mike has decided to let this drop. Suicide? Bullshit! But she is letting it drop and so the only way it’s going to get solved is if someone else solves it.”

“But if Tam’s the kind of guy who can’t even get the cops to care that he had lye poured down his neck, why should we?” I said. “I mean, say what you like about Mike—and I have—she’s not a bent cop, is she?”

“I tell you why I want to solve it,” Todd said. “Because unravelling what happened at the fiftieth reunion is the only way we’ll ever solve what happened at the graduation. This is the only way we’ll find Patti Ortiz.”

“Find her?” said Kathi. “You think so?”

“Find the answer at least,” said Todd. “Find peace for her mother after all these years. What do you say?”