Nat dropped me off, waiting to make sure I’d opened my front door and closed it behind me before making a merry little toot on his horn and heading toward home.
Lucy would usually waddle out to greet me and see if I’d been out buying Milk-Bones, but when I opened the door and switched on the hall light, she didn’t appear. I checked her basket in the living room, but she wasn’t there, either. Again, unusual. I checked to be sure the door to the back stairs was closed, then walked down the hall to my bedroom and pushed open the door. The light from the hall fell on her. She was curled up on my bed, fast asleep, tight against a man-sized lump in the duvet.
“Ben,” I whispered. The duvet shifted, and he hauled himself up against the headboard and blinked at me. “Hey,” he said, and then grunted when I landed on him. Lucy growled and jumped off the bed, which was good, because there wasn’t room for three of us, and I wasn’t leaving.
“You never call; you never write,” I said, kissing him between every word.
He answered the thought rather than the words in between kisses.
“I flew stand-by at the last minute, and grabbed a cab as soon as we hit the ground at SFO. I sent you a text. God, it’s good to be home. I missed you.” His arms closed around me, strong and warm. He felt wonderful.
“How long have you been home? Did you get something to eat? There’s some stuff in the fridge; I could make you a sandwich, or do you want coffee or a beer or—” I burst into tears.
“Hey, hey, is it that bad?”
“You don’t know!” I sobbed. “Katrina’s dead, Nat found fingers in his microwave, Sabina and I found a dead priest, and Davie and Grandfather have been arrested.”
He pulled the duvet around us both while I grizzled and sniffed. Then he said quietly, with a sort of wonder, “Have I been gone longer than six weeks?”
An hour later he had calmed me down a little, and I was pulling a meal together—a recipe Sabina and I worked on after I told her about my pathetically limited range of menu items—when Ben dropped his own devastating piece of news.
“There’s a lot going on, but after tonight there might not be time to talk so—I’ve decided to take the bar exam here.”
I stopped sawing the bread into lopsided doorstops—slicing bread isn’t as easy as YouTube makes it look—and glanced over at him in surprise. Ben wasn’t looking at me, he was rummaging in a drawer for spoons as if he hadn’t just walked into a minefield of atom bomb proportions.
“You are?”
He frowned. “What do you think we’re doing here, Theo? I’m not just passing time; I’m all in.” He sounded exasperated.
He’d been looking dissatisfied before he left this time, and I’d started to think he meant to break up with me. I’d even been trying to get used to the idea and deciding I wouldn’t like it. I’d be the first to admit I was difficult to get close to, and I was sure he’d tired of the effort. I was equally sure admitting how much of our life together was built on lies would be the tipping point, and he would leave me anyway.
I swallowed. “No, of course, I know that. I just—I mean, you haven’t mentioned the bar exam before, and you took me by surprise, that’s all. Um—when is it? Do you have to study?” Was that the right thing to say? Did I sound pleased and interested instead of terrified? I served up two bowls of cassoulet, forgetting that I’d already eaten two pounds of meat on my pizza.
He looked slightly mollified, although he was watching me carefully. “It’s held twice a year; the next time is March.”
“March, right,” I said and hoped I didn’t sound as relieved as I felt. March was months away; surely by then I’d have thought of a way to tell him who I was. I put the hot bowls on the forest green place mats Nat gave me to match some cooking pots he’d made me buy, and put out the basket of inexpertly cut bread. Ben poured olive oil into a shallow terra-cotta dish I didn’t remember ever seeing before. It didn’t seem like the right time to ask him where it came from.
“California doesn’t have reciprocity with other states, so I have to take the exam here. I’ll need to get up to speed on California law—”
I stopped staring at the terra-cotta dish. “Is the bar exam here difficult?” I stirred the cassoulet in my bowl and took a cautious mouthful.
“Yeah, it is. Maybe the toughest in the country.” He tasted the cassoulet, too. “This is good, Theo.”
I grinned at him. “Don’t sound so surprised. So, um, do you think you can pass it? I mean, I’m sure you’ll pass it,” I said more robustly. “You’ve already passed it, right?”
“I’ve already passed two.”
“Two?”
“New York and DC, and in case you were wondering, New York’s was tough.” Ben could be very dry.
“It’s all one country; why don’t they all have the same exam?” I found America puzzling in so many ways, and the culture shocks kept on coming. We might have shared a language, more or less, but things like this exposed the traps set for the unwary person trying to fit in.
“Maybe it has something to do with the piecemeal way we became a country.”
“How do you mean?”
“It took, what—nearly two hundred years for us to get to fifty states?”
I hoped that was a rhetorical question, because I had no idea. English schools spend about half an hour on the American Revolution and no time at all on the American Civil War. I’d spent a lot of time memorizing the names and reigns of kings and queens. We have two thousand years of our own history to get through, and if there’s any time left over to spend on foreign wars, we opt for those we fought against the French. I assume that’s because they’d been entangled in our own history since the days of Alfred the Great and because, in spite of the grudging respect accorded Napoleon, we felt better about ourselves when we beat him.
He went on. “A lot of states joined up after they already had established legal systems.” He looked thoughtfully at the bread before taking a chunk. “Louisiana’s is based on Spanish and French law instead of English common law.”
I didn’t know what Louisiana had to do with anything, but there was apparently a link with France I’d missed somehow. I was already lost, but I nodded as if I knew what that meant. Being a university dropout had its downsides when it came to conversations about cultural mores, and when the culture was transatlantic, it was even harder to keep up.
After we cleared away our dinner things, I took Lucy downstairs for her late-night outing and followed her around as usual, while Ben built a fire upstairs. It was late, but he said he wasn’t tired, and I was too wired to sleep. When I came back upstairs, he had the file from Katrina’s office in front of him on the coffee table. My eyes went straight to it as I walked into the room.
He leaned toward me over the back of the couch. “Found it,” he said, “under the pillows.”
“Oh God—did you read it?”
“I glanced at it. Why do you have a dossier on our neighbors that looks like part of a law firm’s filing system?”
I stared at him, horrified and embarrassed. Why, oh why, hadn’t I burned the damn file, or handed it over to Nat, or not taken the blasted thing in the first place?
“I stole it from Katrina’s office, but you can’t ask me why.” I was taking too many shallow breaths and talking too fast. I went over to sit on the coffee table before my legs gave out and snatched up the file.
Ben was silent for what felt like two hours. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Can I ask what you’re planning to do with it?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Am I allowed to ask if you’ve read it?”
I shook my head so fast it made me dizzy. “No. I mean, yes, I’ve read it, but I felt guilty invading people’s privacy.”
He started to say something else, then closed his mouth and made a sort of huffing noise. He started to stand but then he bent forward, his shoulders shaking, and I realized he was trying not to laugh and losing the battle.
“It’s not funny!” I hissed at him, and he looked up at me, straightening his face and clearing his throat.
“No, I can see that,” he said and sat back on the couch. “So you have ethical concerns about privacy, but not about stealing. Good to know.”
I blushed. “Katrina was gathering information about people as if—I don’t know, as if she planned to blackmail them or something.”
“And you knew about the file and so—what?—after she was killed you decided to steal it to save everyone some embarrassment?”
“No, I didn’t know—” I faltered.
“So you didn’t know about the file, but you broke into Katrina’s office—I assume you broke in, yes?”
I nodded miserably.
“And you saw the file and decided to take it. Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Well, not okay, really. You’ve just admitted to a crime. Give me a dollar.”
“What? I—”
He put his hand out, palm up, and wiggled his fingers in a “gimme” motion. I dug into my jeans and pulled out a few dollar bills and some change. I picked out a dollar bill and gave it to him, and he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. “Now I’m your attorney and our communications are privileged, and I don’t have to turn you in to the cops. We’ll ignore for the moment that I’m not licensed to practice in California. I knew taking the bar exam here was a good idea.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No. Well, yeah, but only a little. Now, since our communications are privileged, you can tell me why you broke into Katrina’s office in the first place.”
Neatly trapped, I nevertheless shook my head. “I can’t.”
He was silent for a minute, then nodded, “Fair enough. So what do you want to do with this file?”
I looked over at the fire. “I suppose I should burn it. Except—”
“Except since you went to the trouble of stealing it in the first place it seems like a waste, and suppose there’s something in there that sheds light on how Katrina was killed.”
“Something like that.”
“Privilege includes written communications.”
“Other people’s written communications?”
“It’s a gray area. Do you want me to look it over? We can share a jail cell.” I shook my head. “So what do you want to do with it?”
“I think it should go into the fire. I feel guilty knowing about these things.”
“You’re sure?”
I nodded ruefully and crumpled up the papers and fed them into the flames, thus ending my short, inglorious career as a cat burglar. As I watched them burn, I realized I hadn’t told Ben about the intruder who’d shot at me, and I groaned.
“What?”
I pressed my hands against my forehead and into my hair, holding it flat against my head. “All right, look,” I said. “There was more to the story.”
“Imagine my surprise,” Ben said.
“When I was in Katrina’s office, someone else broke in, and when they saw me they chased me and shot at me.”
“They shot at you. With a gun.”
He looked grim, so I knew not to make a joke. Instead, I nodded. “It was a man, but I was too busy running away to get a look at his face.”
“Could he tell who you were? Did you have your hair covered?” He gave my red hair a flickering glance.
“I had on a green wig and a baseball cap.”
“Don’t—” He hesitated and then went on, “Please don’t do anything else that puts you in the path of a homicidal maniac.”
“Do you really think he’s a maniac?”
“And of course that’s your takeaway. Unless you think we have more than one killer in the neighborhood, someone has killed twice for reasons we can’t fathom and who has a habit of chopping pieces off his victims.”
“When you put it that way—”
“There’s another way to put it?”
“No. You’re right. Of course you’re right. No more breaking and entering. Promise.”
“That promise has an odd specificity. How about promising not to get involved any deeper in trying to find out who the neighborhood killer is?”
I shook my head. “I can’t not try to help Grandfather and Davie.”
“No,” he said unhappily, “I can see that.”
Neither of us was tired, and for the next hour, Ben worked on his laptop while I put together an order for Aromas and caught up on e-mails, but truthfully my attention was half-hearted at best. Mostly I worried about the bar exam and the level of commitment it implied on Ben’s part, and whether I wanted him to move to California. We were never short of conversation, but maybe we weren’t really communicating, because I’d had no idea he was considering it. How oblivious was I, anyway? I honestly hadn’t seen it coming.
Ben flew out here from Washington, DC, twice a month. He stayed for several days, made at least one brief trip to LA or Las Vegas, and otherwise worked remotely for a national group of nonprofits serving mostly homeless and abused women.
I watched him as he concentrated on whatever he was working on. He wasn’t handsome exactly, his profile was a little too rough for that, but he was funny, intelligent, decisive, and loyal. He had a sort of rugged, blue-collar charm in jeans and a leather jacket; in a suit he more closely resembled the lawyer he was. Both were good looks on him. His hair was almost black, with an occasional thread of silver. He was, in short, an attractive man in his early thirties, five or six years older than me. He looked up from his laptop, saw me staring at him, and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking. Um—what time is it?”
He smiled and snapped his laptop closed. He had a great smile. “Time for bed,” he said firmly and stood. Well, that was one area where we had no communication problems. At all.