Five

Just as well Mike and the divers were finished at the slough because I had completely forgotten to cancel my clients. My eleven o’clock was waiting on the porch when I picked my way round the side of the motel at ten past the hour and hopped over the bank.

“Sorry!” I said.

She beamed at me. “Don’t be. I think it’s a great idea and it wouldn’t work if you told me in advance.” Hoping to snag a clue, I cast my mind over our first two sessions, during which she had complained relentlessly about her hard-working sweetheart of a husband and her two high-achieving drug-free teenagers. My mind slid off without catching anything. Luckily she kept talking. “Dr. Kroger said increasing in five minute increments was fast enough, but I’m delighted you stretched it to ten. I need to be ready by next September.”

I threw my mind at it even harder but, once again, nothing.

“September,” I said. “You’ve set a clear goal then? That’s wonderful.”

She gave me a puzzled look as I ushered her into the corridor and followed her to the consultation room.

“When Buster goes to Purdue,” she said, mystifyingly.

I gestured her into a seat, settled myself in the chair opposite, and motioned for her to go on.

“I did what Kathi suggested in the garage too,” she said.

“Great!” It came out one notch too hearty, and she leaned forward to look at me like I was a specimen of something. “I mean, good,” I said, thinking it was nice for Kathi to have made a useful suggestion at the end of her life. Because I was going to kill her. “We … haven’t had a case meeting since your last session with me,” I said, “because I didn’t get you to sign the consents. So maybe you could just catch me up. With the increments. And the garage.”

“Oh,” she said, rootling in the backpack at her feet. “I signed the consents with Dr. Kroger. Should I give them back to him or can I leave them with you to pass on?”

I swiftly replanned Kathi’s funeral, edging her coffin to one side of the altar to make room for Todd’s too. “I’ll take them,” I said, managing not to snatch the sheaf of papers out of her hand, shred them into confetti, and stamp on them. “Now then … ?”

“I do want to work on the causes of my abandonment issues with you, as we planned,” she said. Abandonment issues? News to me. I hadn’t got any further than suggesting that she couldn’t keep asking her husband to pack in his good job and move to Indiana for no reason. “But clearing out the garage so the car fits in has made a surprising difference.”

I agreed. Surprising was exactly the word for it.

“Our street is long,” she said. “So when I turn in at the east end, I don’t know whether or not Marty’s home. And I’ve put up hanging bike racks for Buster and Tooty too.” Buster was her kid! Finally my brain was working. Purdue, I was almost sure, was a university, probably in Indiana, and this woman wanted the family to move there when her son started college next September! Because of her abandonment issues … as diagnosed either by an anesthetist or a dry cleaner. I wasn’t quite ready to cancel the funerals yet.

“But I just walk and breathe,” she was saying. “And sure enough, by the time I put my key in the door, the panic has passed. It’s true what the doc says about panic. You can’t sustain it for long. It fades.”

Especially if you’re under a general anesthetic, I thought, which was “the doc’s” speciality.

“It’s really working,” she said. “Waiting here for you for ten minutes would have sent me into a spin if I hadn’t been practicing every day walking home.”

“I’m very glad,” I said, although it just about choked me. If I had sprung an unannounced ten-minute wait on her as a test of her recovery, I’d lose my licence to practise counselling and probably have to get a job in Target to pay the fines. “So what else has been happening?”

She was the worst. Todd and Kathi hadn’t managed to plant quite as many flags all over the three clients that came after her, but two of them had different hairdos and were in suspiciously new-looking work-out gear. The other one was a recent widower in his late seventies who’d been hounded into counselling by his kids, but who didn’t need anything except permission to grieve.

“They want me to take up ballroom dancing,” he said. “Wednesdays at the Oddfellows’ Hall.” He mopped his tears with a hanky the size of a picnic tablecloth. “I haven’t danced with anyone except Maddy since VK day. I can’t go weeping over nice little old ladies every Wednesday.”

“Of course not,” I said. “Ignore the kids. You just go home and curl up on your recliner with your photograph albums and remember the happy days. If they want someone in the family to dance, they can go dancing themselves. Tell them that from me, and if they give you any crap you just send them my way.”

“You’re a good girl, Lexy,” he said. “You remind me of Maddy when I first met her. Did I tell you that? If you backcombed your hair and put stockings on, you’d be Maddy to a tee.”

“Tell me how you proposed,” I said. “I bet you’ve got a story about that, haven’t you?”

Todd and Kathi were waiting in the motel’s front office when I got there at sundown.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I’d hate you to kick up any abandonment issues in me.”

They looked back at me with faces as innocent and eyes as round as a pair of kittens when Fancy Feast tins are being opened.

“Della’s just dropping off Diego at his little friend’s house,” Noleen said, coming in from the back office. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said You’re welcome to try. Vague but somehow no less aggressive for all that. “When she gets back here we’ll have a good two hours and then we’ll pick him up on the way home. Home from what, is the question. What is it that’s stuck in your grille this time, Lex?”

“Humour me,” I said. “Todd, did you find Kimberly Voorheft?”

“Yep,” he said. “She wasn’t hard to track down. She’s meeting us at the stables in the morning to see if she can ID Tam.”

“ID him from what?” I said. “Have you made a sketch?”

Todd’s eyes couldn’t get any rounder, but he dimpled his lips in a little smile that upped the innocent look from Shirley Temple to Bambi. My radar started humming.

“No!” I said. Bambi got bumped for the pink butterfly that lands on Bambi’s nose and makes him sneeze. “When did you take a photo of him, for God’s sake?”

“One while Roger had him near the surface,” Todd said. “And one with zoom once the cops hauled him on deck.”

“But you can’t show the kid that!” I said. “She’ll be scarred for life.”

“I’ve Photoshopped it,” said Todd. Of course he had. “She’ll be fine.”

I shook my head. “How did Roger get on with missing persons?” I said. “Anything?”

“He delegated that to me,” Kathi said. “And there was nothing in Beteo County. Not in the last week anyway.”

“And nothing doing at the Senior Center either,” Noleen said. “Except the good news that it’s a hotbed of hookups. Roger didn’t tell them the guy was dead and five old broads want his number.”

“How is that good news?” I asked.

“Because some of them are in shared rooms,” said Todd. “Awkward! So Noleen was thinking about discounting motel rooms on hourly rates.”

“Plus a shuttle,” Noleen said.

On the whole, I’d rather think about corpses. “Hey, Todd,” I said, “does the photo from when he was still in the slough have his hand
in it?”

“No, Gollum, it doesn’t,” Todd said.

“Hey!”

“Frodo, then.”

“Better.”

“But we’ve had an idea about the ring, actually.”

“Great,” I said.

“You’re not going to like it,” he added.

“Which would … what? You’re saying that would stop you? If I’m not happy about something, you’ll take it into account?”

“Quit bitching,” Noleen said. “Della’s here.”

As we were leaving, Della rapped on the window of Todd’s Jeep and held out her closed fist to me.

“Here,” she said. “For you.” She let something small and soft drop onto my open palm.

I squinted in the low light. “What is it?” I said. “A talisman? Good luck charm? Is it a rabbit’s foot.” I squeezed it, but it didn’t feel solid enough to be a foot.

“It’s a hairball,” Della said. “Florian coughed it up and I kept it for you. Get. A. Groomer.”

I dropped the hairball at my feet but Kathi whimpered and pulled her feet up so her knees were round her ears, so I scrabbled it into my hand again and pinged it out the window.

“I’ll pick it up and dispose of it when we get back,” I said, to reassure her. I spoiled it by reaching out to pat her knee though.

“Don’t touch me!” she said. “Todd! Hand sanitizer! Now!”

“Groomer!” Della shouted through the window as we peeled away.

“I’m trying!” I shouted back to her. Then Kathi started squirting me from a gallon bottle of industrial strength chemicals and I had to shut my mouth in case I choked.

We were all out of our gourds on the stuff by the time Noleen pulled off the county road ten minutes later.

“Anyone want to sniff my Sharpie for a chaser?” I offered.

“Leave the windows down,” Kathi told Noleen. “There’s no one to steal a car here anyway.”

That was true. We were only just out of town, but Cuento’s a town that shuts with a bang. Once you’re across the southerly drainage canal that connects to the Last Ditch slough, there’s nothing but flat dusty fields, empty this late in the year with the last of the tomatoes gone and the first lettuce not due till after Christmas. Live oaks, half dead from drought and irony, stuck up here and there at worrying angles, like drunks without lampposts, and above it all the sky soared like the backdrop of a dream sequence, gold bruising to purple as the first stars came shyly winking.

“Where is it?” I said, turning round on the spot. I was looking for a stone wall with a lychgate and rows of headstones, stupidly.

“Just there,” said Noleen, pointing to one of the saddest sights you’ll ever see in California, a sight that never makes it onto a postcard or a tourist board trailer. Well, to be fair, nothing from Beteo County gets onto the postcards and tourist trailers. Beteo County isn’t that bit of California. I tried to explain that to Alison, my old pal from home, when she announced she was saving up for a holiday. “It’s not Hollywood,” I told her. “It’s not even San Francisco. Have you ever seen that film Erin Brockovich? Well, that was California too, remember. What? Yes, the beaches are lovely but the sea’s bloody freezing.”

The sad sight Noleen was pointing at wouldn’t even make it into a Chamber of Commerce montage playing on a loop at the bank. Fifty yards to our left, just visible as the gold gave up and the purple darkened, was a withered orange tree, a withered grapefruit tree, a couple of spindly oleanders just about surviving, and a prickly pear cactus going from strength to strength, except that it had missed a fair few essential prunings to keep the weight balanced and several big lumps of it had dropped off to lie rotting around its base.

The house was long gone, lost to termites and storms, and the paths were long gone, submerged somewhere under the star thistle and stinkweed, but this was undeniably an abandoned homestead, chewed up by the agricultural behemoth that had finished delivering tomatoes to the Campbell’s factory for the year and would be cutting its first three-packs of Romaine hearts come Valentine’s Day.

The rest of them had started walking. I hop-skipped to catch up with them.

“I remember this place from when the family lived here,” Noleen said. “We used to help with the harvest. Mrs. Armour made pink lemonade.”

“Where’s the burial ground?” said Todd.

“The Armour place was built on top of it,” Noleen said. “It was … oh sometime in the late thirties it was discovered. They were replacing their furnace and Mr. Armour dug up an artefact. It’s in the museum in Sacramento now. Anyway, they got some archeologists to come from the university. It was Christmas morning for the ancient archeology department. It pretty much put UCC Archeology on the map. And it turned out that what Mrs. Armour had always thought was a decorative hill that someone had scraped up to give the yard some character was actually a burial mound.”

She stopped walking and pointed. Just ahead of us, part hidden by the collapsing prickly pear cactus, was a sort of half-hemispherical hillock sticking up out of the star thistle. In Dundee I’d have thought it was an air-raid shelter, still submerged, with its door on the far side. The gardens round where my granny lived were littered with them. This was much more glamorous. I stood and stared, with Noleen on one side and Todd on the other. Kathi clicked on her headlamp and then swung her head back and forth like a cow to light the hill up for us all.

“But how can it just be sitting here abandoned?” I said. “Shouldn’t the local native council—whatever they’re called—have jurisdiction over it? Isn’t it sacred or at least protected or something? And how come the artefact’s in the museum? Shouldn’t it belong to the descendants of the people who’re buried here? Oh my God, are they still buried here? I don’t know what’s worse. Them still being here, neglected, or them being dug up and moved. What are you doing?”

This last was because I had heard a crackle and seen a folded note pass from Todd to Noleen.

“I told him you’d been here too long to just swallow an Indian Burial Ground story,” Noleen said. “He wouldn’t listen.” She stretched the fifty-dollar note and flicked it, making a noise like a snare drum.

“So it’s not real?” I said. “You’re winding me up?”

“Kinda,” Noleen said. “It was a tale Mrs. Armour told. They’d moved out by then, into a nice little ranch in the new subdivision. But every Halloween she’d light a fire and we’d gather round and she’d tell us the story of the lost princess and her trusty attendants and how they walked above ground once a year.”

“They walked at Halloween?” I said. “Would they? The … who would this be?”

“Patwin people,” said Noleen. “Nope. But we didn’t know that fifty years ago. Hell, we were still playing cowboys and Indians fifty years ago, feathers in our hair and everything.”

I winced.

“We were kids,” Noleen said. “And the Armours meant no harm either. She was a princess, the one Mrs. Armour told the tales about. Not a savage. No one got scalped.”

“Jesus,” said Kathi. “Nolly, we’ve talked about this before. If you wouldn’t say it in front of a native person, you shouldn’t say it at all.”

“Standing right here,” said Todd. “Hello! Native American standing right beside you!”

“What?” said Noleen. “You’re Mexican.”

“Mexico was in North America last time I looked and, no matter what Lexy thought when she first met me, this—”

“Not again!” I said.

“—this is not a tan.”

“I wish you would stop dredging that up,” I said. “I said I was sorry. I am sorry. So maybe this could be my last punishment? I’ve proved myself too assimilated to swallow this lot.”

“’Kay,” Todd said.

“And now you’ve had your fun,” I said, “can we go? Della shouldn’t be stuck in the office for two hours after a double shift just so you can mess with me.”

Kathi had climbed the little hill while I was talking. Standing on top with her headlamp shining down she looked vaguely First Encounter-ish.

“Wrong again, Lexy,” she called back. “We’re not wasting your time and we can’t go till the cops secure the scene. There’s a cutty sark here, unless I’m seeing things.”

Todd gasped and surged forward. I gasped and surged forward. Noleen came trotting after us. “A what?” she said. “A cut what?”

“A mini dress,” said Kathi. That’s not usually how it’s translated from Burns’s eighteenth-century Scots, but that’s what it means. I clambered up the mound and took hold of Kathi’s arm for balance. The beam of her headlamp shone down on where the gossamer light little shirt lay carefully draped over the stinkweed, so that it floated like ground mist on a winter’s morning.

Todd reached out towards it, but I laid a hand on his arm.

“Best not,” I said. “Look. Kathi, can you shine your light on the collar there?”

Kathi bent over to train the beam more directly and we all got a better look at what I was sure I had seen. There was a dark red mark on the back of the neckline, seeping a little way into the white linen and turning it rusty.

“Some girl’s been hurt here, hasn’t she?” Noleen’s voice was shaking with suppressed emotion. “Some sick fuck’s done something bad, hasn’t he?”

I didn’t always agree with Noleen about the rights and wrongs of this world. I didn’t believe that all women were gentle angels and all men were monstrous devils. Well, neither did she, really. She knew it was muddier than that. And we’d both agreed it was sick that someone killed a man and stapled a novelty wig to his dead head. This little smear of blood didn’t strike me as in that league, not nearly.

But there was something about it. The way it floated there, six inches above the ground. And the way it had been placed there and left there, as if it was waiting for us to find it. Above us the sky was full dark now, ink black, the stars piercing and cold, but the cutty sark only seemed to grow more luminous as night fell and thickened. Even when Kathi switched off her headlamp, it still glowed as it lay there.