14

I’M REALIZING THAT MEMORY runs at different speeds. Sometimes, like a 24-frame-a-second film, it appears to mimic life. Sometimes it lapses into slow-mo. And sometimes it’s a Keystone Cops movie: careering cars; hair’s-breadth misses; a man, arms pistoning, frantically cramming more into a suitcase than it seems it could possibly hold.

This is a Keystone Cops moment. Everything happened so quickly that it all feels jumbled up. Some careful unpacking is required, to recover the right order.

Episode one, I suppose, is my return to the hotel. I locked the door behind me and retrieved my phone. When I switched it on, a deluge of relief broke over me. There was a text from Ruth. I opened it. It appeared to consist of one word: Sorry.

I scrolled down. No: nothing else. She must have pressed Send before she’d finished it. But odd that she hadn’t noticed her mistake and tried again.

I rang her number, telepathically pleading with her to answer. It didn’t work. And there was still no voicemail, so I couldn’t leave a message. I quickly composed a text:

Glad to know you’re still alive, at least. But am desperate to talk to you. PLEASE call, any time. I’ll leave the phone on. Love R

I lay on my bed, trying to fill the void with television. It was as useless as plugging a raw tooth socket with gauze. I ordered a hamburger from room service but could only eat half of it. At eleven, I rang her again. Same result as before.

Sorry. Sorry for what? Not being able to speak to me? But if that was it, why didn’t she say so?

I wrote another text:

I don’t want to be a nag, but this is getting annoying. There’s a lot I need to tell you. I finally feel I’m making some headway, but we have to discuss the next step. At the moment, I’m planning to stay at least two more days and see where that takes me. Let me know what you think.

I took a shower. When I came out, there was still no response. Ditto when I checked in the middle of the night. Ditto when I got up.

Episode two: after breakfast that morning. When I went to the hotel reception, it was obvious something was wrong. The normally cheery woman there looked awkward and unhappy, as if she’d just arrived at a funeral and was afraid to meet anyone’s eye.

“Checking out?” she said, barely moving her lips.

“No, actually I was wondering if I could take the room for another couple of nights?”

She pulled a glum face.

“See, I like the place so much, you can’t get rid of me.”

Yesterday, that would have got a laugh. Now it got nothing at all.

“There’s no availability,” she said.

“I don’t mind changing rooms.”

“We’re booked out.”

Not even an apology.

I packed my bags and carried them out to the Sable, clutching the peach tree in the crook of my arm. A large sign at the entrance to the car park said, Vacancy.

Episode three: Milward Library, half an hour later. Some far-flung bit of my mind was still alert enough to my surroundings to notice that it was a charming, brick-built, early twentieth century building, with the serene demeanor of an Egyptian temple. Inside, it was tall-ceilinged and airy, with light filtering down from large windows set high in the walls. The back half was still a warren of shelves, but the front had been opened up and turned into a book-free zone, with rows of computers arranged side by side on long tables.

A young woman sat at the enquiry desk, staring at a screen through thick-rimmed glasses. As I approached, she looked up and said,

“May I help you?”

“Is Eric here?”

“Eric?”

“The IT guy. I don’t know his surname.”

“Oh, Eric. No, he just had to step out for a minute.”

Her smile was cold and slithery, like a half-melted lump of ice in a glass. The meaning couldn’t have been clearer: I have no interest in you. Can you please leave me alone now, so I can get on?

I went over and stationed myself at the endmost computer. Even without Eric’s advice, I figured, it shouldn’t be too difficult to work out how to set up a new email account. In the event, it took me less than ten minutes. I found Ruth’s Whitrow site, clicked on Send a message to Professor Halassian, and wrote:

I realize we said no emails, but the phone doesn’t seem to be working. Can you just let me know the best way of reaching you?

I pressed Send. Almost instantly, a reply appeared in my inbox:

Sorry, we were unable to deliver your message to this address.

Up until that moment I had seen the two problems—my difficulty in reaching Ruth and the attitude of the woman in the hotel—as separate phenomena. Now a tidal surge of paranoia joined them up. Something was very wrong.

I googled Ruth Halassian. Immediately, the shit-storm hit. The screen filled with emotive words: Hate; Phobia; Toxic; Bigotry; Shame. I scanned the first few stories, looking for a phrase that made sense. The first one I found was:

Embattled professor resigns.

I clicked on it. A report in The Whitrow Recorder, posted late the previous evening. At the top was a picture of a tearful-looking Ruth. She was speaking into a microphone thrust into her face by an amputated hand. The text underneath said,

Controversial Whit Professor Ruth Halassian finally called it quits Thursday. After battling dismissal threats since an incident with a student last fall, she resigned her philosophy department post to, as she put it, “avoid causing further embarrassment to the college and my colleagues.” Whitrow Against Hate, which led the campaign against Professor Halassian, claimed victory, saying her decision sent “a clear signal that this college will no longer tolerate hate and bigotry in any form.”

My mouth was dry. I quickly calculated: it was only four days since I’d last seen her. At that point, even though she’d been—understandably—sad and anxious, she’d seemed absolutely determined to fight on. What could have changed her mind in such a short time?

I trawled through the Google results, looking for the answer. The early stages were easy enough to follow. First came: Good News for the Cat: Halassian Heads Home. But Where Has She Been?, followed by: Professor hits out: Whatever anyone thinks of me, my mother is not a legitimate target. In less than an hour, Whitrow Against Hate had posted a response: Here we go again, folks. More evidence that Professor Halassian just doesn’t get it. Of course we don’t condone the threats against her mom. But the professor needs to understand that she hurt a lot of people, made them feel unsafe. And that has consequences.

And then, apparently out of the blue, there was this, from The Whitrow Record: Halassian Apologizes, Pleads to Keep her Job.

I opened it. It read like a Moscow show trial recantation. Professor Halassian acknowledged grave mistakes and errors of judgement. She sincerely regretted the pain and distress she had caused. She would engage positively with students demanding a change to the curriculum. With great humility, she would ask the college to reinstate her, and to refer her, as a matter of urgency, for a course in awareness training.

I couldn’t believe the last diatribe against her had been enough to make her back down like this. Then, on the Whitrow Against Hate site, I found: Professor Halassian: The Unanswered Questions.

I clicked on it. A forest of words appeared on the screen. Two immediately leapt out at me: Robert Lovelace. I scanned down: there they were again. They weren’t incidental. The whole thing was about me. I was the biggest unanswered question.

We can now reveal who the guy is that Professor Halassian took off with. He’s a Brit “travel writer” called Robert Lovelace. He gets to fly around the world, reporting on “exotic” places and people. Or at least he did, until Evan Bone bought the paper he worked on, and the new editor decided they didn’t need a patronizing straight white man to explain The Other to their readers. Hey, you never know: one of these days they might even give The Other a chance to speak for themselves.

But here’s the big headline about Robert Lovelace: he was a friend of Anne Grainger. Remember her? Yeah, that’s right: the English alt-right bigot who killed herself after being called out over homophobic emails. Surprise, surprise: it turns out she was fired from the same paper. No prizes for guessing why. But of course, far as she was concerned, it was nothing to do with her hateful views: it was all the fault of Evan Bone, trying to silence free speech. Result? Lovelace is now on a secret revenge mission, hoping to take Bone down. Last we heard he was in Milward, California, pretending to be researching a book about the commune where Evan Bone grew up. What he’s really doing is sniffing around, looking for some dirt he can use.

So far, so off-the-shelf white male pissed at losing power. But what Professor Halassian needs to explain is: why did she go with him?

The world was folding in on itself, turning into a Dali landscape of drooping lines and ambiguous forms that might be either rocks or skulls. How had they found out so much about me? Just through assembling snippets of data—a phone message here; a hotel reservation there—and feeding them to some hungry algorithm that could somehow reconstruct my inner world with uncanny accuracy? Or had somebody along the way deliberately betrayed me?

I returned to the screen:

Professor Halassian: Update. Here’s a first: the professor has accepted our invitation to reply. This is what she has to say:

I accompanied Robert Lovelace because I believed in good faith what he told me: that he was searching for my roommate from Stanford, who disappeared years ago, and thought I might be able to help him. I now realize I was wrong. During the few days we were together, it became clear that his real motivation was an irrational hatred for Evan Bone. When—troubled by his increasingly bizarre outbursts—I questioned him about it, he finally said that he had seen an apparition of his friend Anne Grainger at the moment of her death, which had convinced him to try to avenge her. In case you don’t believe me, I took the precaution of recording his account of what happened on my phone.

For me, this was the final straw. I was clearly dealing with someone who suffers from a severe paranoid personality disorder. Looking back, the signs were there from the moment I met him. All I can say in my own defense is that I love my job, and the thought I might lose it had probably made me slightly crazy. But this was a wake-up call. I immediately packed my bags and returned to Whitrow.

I sensed someone watching me. I looked up: Eric, standing just inside the door. When he saw I’d noticed him, he shambled over, red-faced, not meeting my gaze.

“You need to leave,” he said.

“Why?”

“Instructions.”

“From whom?”

He shook his head, flexed a big hand in front of my face. “Come on. Out.”

I stood up and left. I half-expected to find the Sable had disappeared, or melted into a giant poached egg, but it was still where I’d left it, solid and prosaic, impervious to the Dali-ization of the world around it. I got in, locking the door behind me. The tinted windows, at least, were a godsend. They meant I should be able to sit there in peace for a few minutes and think.

To begin with, all I could do was let a storm of anger and self-pity batter its way through me. I didn’t cry or howl or thump the wheel with my fists: I just waited, while it ran its course, goading me to actions that some beleaguered island of reason knew I wouldn’t take: killing myself; killing Ruth; hiring a hit-man to murder Evan Bone. As the chaos started to recede, I found myself face to face with a single clear thought: somebody was seriously rattled. To put Ruth under that kind of pressure, to go to that much effort not only to expose her, but to discredit me, in such a way that anything I said could be dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic, suggested that I was—from their point of view—getting dangerously close to some uncomfortable truth. But how could I pursue it, when they seemed to have managed to turn the whole community against me?

I rewound the last couple of weeks in my head. Surely, there must be someone I’d met since my arrival at Global Village who could help me? Ruth was so clearly the obvious candidate that her name kept elbowing its way into the list, and there was always a nanosecond’s delay before I remembered what she’d done and elbowed it out again. I briefly considered Leonard Drew, then realized that his closeness to Birch Ogren ruled him out. There was always Stewart Crothers, of course: he might be sympathetic. But equally, he might not—and, anyway, there was no untraceable way to contact him. And Ginny Voss was a non-starter. I’d just end up making her more miserable than she was already.

I was aware of a faint, tangy, unfamiliar scent from the back of the car. I turned: the peach tree. Gerald Chess. Corinne Ramirez.

I burrowed in my satchel. It took me a while to find the leaflet she’d given me, crumpled up at the bottom in a drift of old receipts. I smoothed it open and dialed her number. It rang a few times, then switched to voicemail. A jaunty woman who sounded as if she was trying to sell me an unrivalled investment opportunity invited me to leave a message. I rang off and drove the quarter of a mile or so to Wreck City.

Gerald Chess was in the workshop, peering into the open mouth of a weather-beaten van. I parked the Sable on the road and walked over to him, clutching the tree.

“This is for you,” I said. “A small thank you. For rescuing me the other day.”

He looked up. “What is it?”

“A peach tree.”

He took it without a word, sauntered to an old, bronze-colored Chevy in the car park, and stowed it on the rear seat. I traipsed after him. As he slammed the door and turned, I said,

“I’ve been trying to reach Corinne Ramirez.”

He started back towards the van, saying nothing.

“Didn’t I see you with her? At the protest about the fire?”

He shrugged. “Could be.”

“I need to talk to her. She told me what happened to her father. Asked me to write something about it. I said I’d look into it, do some research. And I think I’m getting somewhere. But people are making it hard for me. I need help.”

“What number you got?”

“For Corinne?”

He nodded. I read it off my phone.

“What’s your name?”

“Robert Lovelace.”

He walked outside again, taking a mobile from his pocket. He thumbed in a number and hovered by the bronze Chevy, waiting. Someone must have answered, because after a few seconds I could hear him talking, though he was too far away for me to make out what he was saying.

“Oh, you’re back, are you?” bellowed a voice behind me, so loud that it made me jump.

I spun round. The blond man from the office was grimacing at me, like a furious cartoon baddie.

“I was hoping to get a pizza,” I said.

It didn’t connect. The force-field of rage was too strong.

“I thought maybe you’d be too scared to show your face,” he said. “Where’s my car?”

I pointed to the Sable.

“Well, get it in here. Now.”

“I’d actually like to keep it for a couple more days, if that’s OK.”

“It isn’t OK. The agreement’s terminated.”

“Why?”

He sighed, exasperated at my obtuseness. “You must think we’re just a bunch of dumb hicks. But when someone shows up in town and starts making trouble, stirring stuff up, we know what to do.”

“Who told you I was making trouble?”

“Everyone. People been emailing me all morning.” He jabbed a finger at the ground. “Now.”

I retrieved the Sable. He directed me to a parking space. When I opened the door, he leaned over me and said,

“Get your stuff out.”

“Where am I going to put it?”

“That’s not my problem.”

I removed my bags and lined them up on the concrete. He held his hand out for the keys. When I gave them to him, he locked the car, then pointed at the office. I followed him inside. He completed the paperwork without a word and slid it gingerly across the counter, as if he didn’t want to run the risk of touching me. To leave without saying anything seemed so unnatural that I couldn’t help muttering Goodbye. He didn’t reply.

When I emerged, I saw that Gerald Chess had finished his call and was walking back towards me. We met halfway, close to the Sable. He eyed the little clutter of exiled luggage.

“That yours?”

I nodded. He picked up the largest bags and carried them to his car. I followed him with my satchel. He put everything in the boot.

“They’ll be OK in there,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He closed the lid. “You know where the bookshop’s at?”

“Yes.”

“She’ll meet you there. Thirty minutes.”

“Does it have to be there?”

He shrugged. “That’s where she’ll be.”

She wasn’t: not in thirty minutes, not in forty-five, not in an hour. I paced the same stretch of street again and again, trying to look as if I had some business being there, always keeping at least a hundred yards between me and Milward Books. My plan, when the moment came, was to attract her attention and try to draw her away from the shop before she went inside. But as my watch prolonged the agony—dragging its feet, so that every time I checked, it was earlier than I thought—I started to wonder whether Gerald Chess and Corinne Ramirez were actually part of the Milward-wide conspiracy against me. Perhaps she wouldn’t come—and when I finally got back to Wreck City, I’d find that Gerald Chess had decamped with my possessions, leaving me totally destitute.

I tried ringing her again. The same woman invited me to leave a message.

“This is Robert Lovelace,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure I was in the right place. I’m on Main Street, not far from Milward Books. If you want to meet somewhere else, please let me know.”

I rang off. Nobody phoned me back. After another fifteen minutes, I decided to call it a day. But I’d gone no more than a few steps when a huge pick-up appeared at the end of the street. It was so dirty that it was impossible to tell what color it was meant to be. But as it passed me I saw, scrawled on the side, just visible through the dust, Fight the Fire.

A moment later it turned abruptly and stopped in front of Milward Books. After a few seconds Corinne Ramirez got out. She was wearing jeans and a black tee-shirt with a stylized image of a red bird printed on it. She checked the cab unhurriedly to make sure she had everything she needed, then shut the door and locked up. As she started towards the shop, I waved my arms and shouted, “Hey!”

She stopped and looked at me. I got as close as I dared and called,

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to go in there. Is there somewhere else we can talk?”

I’d expected her to be puzzled, even suspicious. But she simply pointed across the street at The Magic Coffee Shop.

“OK,” I said.

As she stepped off into the road I heard the ting of the bookshop bell. Red-faced Breeze rocketed on to the sidewalk.

“Excuse me!”

Corinne Ramirez looked back. Breeze nodded at the pick-up. “That’s three spaces you’ve taken up there. I’m not like Amazon. If people can’t park, they won’t come in my store. You’re killing my business. And these guys’—”

She swiveled towards Angela’s Dream and saw me.

“Are you with him?” she asked Corinne.

Corinne didn’t reply.

“Do you know who he is?” fumed Breeze. “What he’s doing here?”

Corinne glanced at me, then unlocked the pick-up again. “Get in.”

We both clambered into the cab. It had the stuffy old-vehicle smell of oil and metal and warm plastic. A pile of Indian People for the Earth leaflets lay on the seat between us. An uncut stone threaded on a leather thong hung from the rear-view mirror.

Corinne switched on, making the whole cab throb like the inside of a tank. She reversed into the street and drove slowly back the way she had come. She said nothing: not even the obvious What a bitch, to vent her fury and make common cause with me against the enemy. But perhaps she didn’t want to make common cause with me: perhaps for her—as for everyone else, apparently—the real enemy was me.

Just beyond Milward, she pulled into a small out-of-town shopping center and parked in front of a clothing store with Sale! Everything Must Go! plastered in every window.

“We’ll be OK here,” said Corinne. “No one’s going to bother us while they still think we might get out and spend some money.”

I sat quiet, waiting for her to go on—aware, now that the air conditioning had been turned off, of the thud of the sun through the window, and wondering how long it would be before it became unbearable.

“Gerald says you got something,” she said. “About Evan Bone.”

I hesitated. I had no idea what her relationship with the Chess family was, how much she knew about Joe, whether she’d even heard of Beth McGregor. But if she sensed I was being evasive, she would assume I didn’t trust her.

“I think there’s a strong chance he murdered someone,” I said. “Or two someones.”

I braced myself for the inevitable Who?

Instead—could she really be that incurious, or had she somehow picked up my reserve?—after a moment she said, “Is that why they’re being so mean to you?”

“Yes. They obviously want to make sure that no one believes me. And they reckon the best way to do that is to tell everyone I’m mad.”

“This friend of yours killed herself. Is that what happened? What they said? You saw her, like her ghost, when she did it?”

My throat ached. “How do you know about that?”

“I looked online. Read all the stuff they’re saying about you.”

Ruth had the recording. She might make it public at any moment.

“I have to admit,” I said, “that bit’s true.”

She turned and looked at me inquiringly “Did your friend say anything? When you saw her?”

I shook my head. “She was only there for a few seconds. When I was in the parking lot at Global Village. Then she ran off, and I went after her. And that was when I met you.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. Nothing to suggest a sudden eureka moment, as she finally put two and two together.

“But afterwards,” I said, “I discovered she’d written a note before she’d died. Telling me to look into your father’s story.”

She raised her eyebrows, very slightly. “Why?”

“She didn’t say. But I’m guessing it’s because they were both hounded to death by Evan Bone.”

“And she figured that was how to get you on the case, huh? Show up at Global Village?” She paused. “I known people had that kind of thing happened to them. But you’re the first white person.”

“Has it happened to you?”

“Not a ghost.” She studied me closely. “Maybe you got some Indian in you.” She opened her door and got out, reaching for her mobile. She dialed and moved a few paces away to speak. After a couple of minutes she re-pocketed the phone and climbed back into the cab.

“OK.” She started the engine and edged back on to the road. In the distance we could see the smoke from the fire, hanging in a lowering, black-bellied cloud over the hills.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Some place they can’t get you.”

After the last couple of weeks, I could only imagine one place that would qualify.

Maybe she wants you dead?

Why?

Because you’re a white supremacist.

She knows I’m not. She said herself they were being unfair to me.

Mean. That’s the word she used. They could be mean, and still be telling the truth.

I waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, squeezing the anxiety from my voice, I said, “And where’s that?”

“Gerald’s auntie’s. He’ll bring your stuff out later.”

I hesitated. “Is that Marianne Chess?”

She nodded.

“Joe Chess’s mother?”

“Yeah. But she don’t like to talk about him. She’s not much of a talker.”

“Are you related?”

She shook her head. “There’s hundreds of tribes in California. She’s Shoma. I’m Ohlone.” She paused. “But see, she’s traditional. A lot of Indian people now, they forgotten who they are. She remembers. That’s why I came here the first time, so’s she’d help me remember.” She turned to me and smiled. I’d never seen her smile before. I got the startling impression that she was actually teasing me. “Maybe she’ll help you to remember the Indian in you, too.”