CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I laced my shoes and tiptoed my way through the dark rooms of the house.

I didn’t have to be so quiet that morning—Mom was doing her laps. She had begun getting up early, expanding her business to include cut flowers, dried ornamentals. She had arranged the flowers for a wedding in Tilden Park, white wicker flower stands anchored with bricks inside, where no one could see. I watched her swim, feeling strangely protective, someone who could pull her from the water if there was an emergency.

I couldn’t help reading one of her memos on the dining room table, her reply to someone’s e-mail, telling him she didn’t want any scrawny Halfmoon-Bay roses, she’d pay air freight from Nipomo.

It was a week after the sentencing. I stretched a little on the dewy lawn, grass clippings sticking to the sides of my shoes. I headed uphill, pushing myself hard.

I maneuvered back over the Warren Freeway and found myself getting a little warm and a little sweaty by the time I was almost all the way to the Beals’ house. I sat at their curb. Mrs. Beal was perfectly nice on the phone, but you could hear her being perfect, a touch of effort in her voice. The family was keeping Rowan busy, taking him to play tennis with a state senator’s daughter, but he called me often, even when he was out of town.

I searched along the curb, up the sidewalk, stooping, discarding. The early sun made so many things sparkle—not all of them were pretty when you took them in your hand.

I put a white pebble inside their mailbox, a fragment of quartz. It was something to mention when I spoke to him on the phone: By the way, did you get my rock?

When I had showered and was in my street outfit, denim pants and a tropical blue cashmere sweater Mom gave me when one of her clients paid her a bonus, I stood at the top of the stairs.

Mom was in the back garden, out by the fishpond, on the phone, from the sound of it. I think I caught the word “azaleas,” Mom planning an order for the winter, months away. Pink azaleas. She never used to bother with shrubs like that. From the top of the stairs, I could see a heap of papers, catalogs, invoices, not far from where Myrna was asleep, her tail and one white leg just within view.

I hesitated.

Quietly, soundlessly, I slipped into Mom’s bedroom. I opened the closet door.

I stood still, listening. She was still outside, a vague voice from so far away she was almost inaudible.

I stooped, nudging the closet door to one side, the shoe organizer stuffed full of custom-made sandals and patent-leather pumps Mom always said she was too tall to wear. The three steel boxes were still there.

But the boxes looked different from the way they had the last time I saw them, months before. They were labeled FIREPROOF, as always. But each one was unlocked, not closed all the way. I opened one of them, hinging back the lid. It was empty.

All three of them were empty.