Eleven

Besides, something Mike had said to me was bothering me. And something I hadn’t said to her was bothering me too. And the two bothersome things seemed connected.

Visalia had her theory and she was sticking to it, regardless of how outlandishly wackadoodle it might be. And even though it was too crazy by far to tell the cops, it made perfect sense, psychologically speaking. How much safer to lay the blame on a distant stranger, one of the mythic Poggios, than to wonder about someone closer to home.

How close, was the point. Because Mike hadn’t said stay away from Barb. She hadn’t said stay away from Casa Bombaro, or from the Dolshikovs or from fireworks. No, Detective Mike had said, “Stay away from The Oaks.”

It stopped me like a stun gun. Like a freeze-ray. I stood staring back at my owl-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror of Room 213. Todd had put in peach lightbulbs and the mirror itself was a vintage beauty, foggy and forgiving. Add the smoothing and plumping effects of the toiletries he had chosen for me and I had never looked better. It distracted me for a moment, but the new thought was too compelling to be quashed for long. The police suspected one of Clovis’s neighbours. One of the residents of The Oaks.

As I prepared for bed, slipping silkily in between the thread counts in my brand-new posh nightie and pulling the chilled eye mask I had found in the fridge down over my smoothed, plumped, oxygenated face, I planned a day of advanced sleuthing for the morrow.

I’d definitely visit the closest neighbours under the guise of … something I’d decide later … and I’d find out if Boom Bombaro had an enemy. I’d lean on them like a tired horse. I’d work on them like a Swiss masseuse. And then I’d remember I was Scottish, and can the Raymond Chandler.

I would even, I thought to myself as I turned over trying not to think about the ten dollars’ worth of night cream I was smearing onto my pillow, gas up Todd’s Land Rover, a task I’d never quite got to grips with in my short career as co-owner of an Acura. If I wasn’t trying to fill before paying I was forgetting which side the cap was on, giving myself carpal-tunnel because I couldn’t remember the hands-free notch, rejoining the freeway blinded by bug splat because I kept forgetting the hands-free notch and never got the chance to clean the windscreen. And none of that was even close to the worst thing I’d done.

“Green is unleaded and black is diesel,” I said to myself as I was falling asleep. “Diesel is black and unleaded is green. I am competent and purposeful. I will prevail.”

∞

Hoo, the day went wrong fast. I didn’t even make it to the petrol station. I woke to screams, leapt from my bed, and bolted out onto the balcony into the smoke-grey dawn of a day already warm. Roger was just emerging from the room next door in nothing but silk boxers and his wedding ring. Two sleepy tourists in Mickey Mouse pyjamas and LL Bean yard boots—my guess was they were breaking their journey back to Oregon from Disneyland—stumbled out of the room on the other side, and all up and down the balcony, like munchkins when the witch is dead, people were blundering out yawning and scratching. Some of the more obvious tourists had their phones on ready to film whatever mayhem was in the offing, but the long-term residents looked angry rather than alarmed. Della came out of her room below and called up to Roger.

“You wake Diego, you take him to the playground and push him on the swings.”

From the room at the far left end, Noleen was bearing down, her face blacker than her most cynical t-shirt slogan, her fists clenched, her feet making the walkway shudder as she pounded along.

“Kathi!” she bellowed.

“You push him on the swings, you buy him breakfast at the Red Raccoon … ” said Della.

“Down here, Nolly,” said a thin young man I had passed a time or two in the parking lot. “Room 106.” Noleen wheeled around and made for the stairs to the ground floor.

“Two words,” said one of the tourists as she passed them. “Trip. Advisor.” He withdrew into his room and slammed the door. Roger rubbed his hands over his face and hurried after Noleen. I threw my eye mask through my open doorway and hurried after Roger.

The screaming had started up again. It was a two-note scream, one voice providing a base line of quite lusty yells, lungfuls at a time with short breaks for breathing in, and the other voice adding percussive little squeaks over and over. I wasn’t massively experienced in acute trauma and panic resolution, but it was the squeaker who worried me. The yeller was getting it out of their system and breathing deeply to do so. The squeaker would hyperventilate and keel over if they didn’t calm down soon.

Noleen was picking over a bunch of keys when I got there.

“Kathi!” she barked as she jammed wrong key after wrong key into the lock and wrenched them out again. “Pipe down and open up. This is our business. This is our livelihood. You can’t keep doing this.”

“And you can put a sock in it too, Todd,” Roger added in such a penetrating voice that, doctor or no doctor, I was sure he’d had some dramatic training somewhere along the line.

At last, Noleen found the right key and threw the door open. Inside, right at the back corner, beyond the bed, Todd and Kathi stood clutching each other, melded together, cheek to cheek to chest to hip to toes, and both were trembling.

“What the fuck?” said Noleen. I decided she’d had even less (or at least worse) training in acute trauma counselling than I had, and I put a hand out to stay her.

“Bugs,” said Todd, his voice cracking.

“Filth,” said Kathi, her voice soft and guttural with disgust.

I turned to Roger and Noleen and said, “Leave this to me.” Then I closed the door on them.

“I’ll give you one Tiffany diamond for every bug you show me, Todd,” Roger shouted through the gap as the door was closing.

“Okay,” I said, in a calm, firm voice. “Where are the bugs?”

“And filth,” said Kathi.

“And filth,” I agreed. “Where are they?”

“Bathroom,” said Todd, pointing a wavering finger.

I glanced at the bathroom door, which was just to my left side, then came past it towards them.

“Careful!” said Kathi.

“Stop and check yourself over,” said Todd.

“Let’s all sit down,” I suggested.

Kathi looked at me as if I’d told her to drink from a toilet. “Sit down?” she said. “On the bed? On soft furnishings? In this den of squalor?”

“With lethal insects everywhere?” Todd added.

They didn’t sound like the proprietor of said den and her best customer at all.

There was a little dinette set under the front window; a round table and two hard chairs with wooden seats and backs and so nowhere for beasties to hide. I took both chairs over to the back wall and set them down, then returned to the front and hopped up on the table-top.

“Sit,” I said.

Todd and Kathi inspected the chairs, paying close attention to where my (presumably plague-ridden) hands had grasped the back rails, then slowly and haltingly they broke out of their embrace and perched side-by-side. Kathi held her feet up off the ground, her thigh muscles quaking with the effort, and it melted my heart to see Todd take hold of them and rest them in his lap.

“Now then,” I said. “What happened?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” said Kathi.

“I had to go potty,” said Todd.

“And then what?” I said.

“I come to the clean room when I can’t sleep, so I don’t wake Nolly, cleaning our room.”

“And I can’t go in a dark bathroom,” said Todd. “Obviously. So I come to the clean room where I can put the lights on and then in the morning I tell Kathi it’s not clean anymore and she switches to a new one.” He turned to Kathi. “I would have told you in the morning.”

“I know. I trust you.”

“You’re good friends to each other,” I said. “You take great care of each other. And show great kindness.”

“But?” said Kathi. Todd laughed and squeezed her feet.

“But,” I said, “you need to learn how to take care—”

“Of ourselves!” they said in chorus.

And it was a chorus of three, because of course they were right about what I’d been going to say.

“This ain’t our first rodeo,” said Kathi.

“But that’s for another time,” I went on. “For now, I’m going to open the bathroom door. Todd, you’re going to see that there are no bugs in there and, Kathi, you’re going to see a spotlessly clean bathroom sparkling from all your hard work.”

“No deal,” said Kathi. “You open that door and I will throw you out onto the street with my own two hands.”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” said Todd. “You are going to go to my room and get a roll of extra-wide duct tape. You will bring it back here and seal all four edges of that bathroom door. And then Kathi and I are going to walk out. Kathi, I’m going to go somewhere else for the rest of the night, but you can come with me.”

“We’re not going anywhere!” came Roger’s voice from outside. “There’s nowhere else to go!”

“You can stay here if you like but … ” Todd began. His voice shook and his cheeks had flushed.

“Roger,” I called. “I’m in session here. Eavesdropping is not part of the process.”

That was California-ese for piss off out of it, sunshine and I had delivered it perfectly. I heard Roger’s bare feet slapping on the concrete as he schmopped off.

“You too,” I called and heard the muffled thumps of Noleen’s bunny slippers retreating too.

“What went wrong,” I said, turning back to Todd and Kathi, “was that your expectations were confounded and that tipped you into crisis. Todd, you were expecting an empty room you could light up and check for bugs before using the bathroom and, Kathi, you were expecting a room untouched since you last left it. Am I right? But you met each other and lost your balances?”

“No,” said Kathi. “We met each other and that was a bonus. I said I would check the bathroom and then Todd could use it.”

I smiled at her. “You are a kind woman and a good friend,” I said. “It’s an act of love for you to project all your anxiety onto imagined dirt instead of onto your friend.”

“And as for me, if Kathi hadn’t been here, I might have had a stroke and died. Or a heart attack and died. Or an aneurysm and—”

“You can’t have an aneurysm from shock,” I said. “So you could only have died twice at the most. But you didn’t. What did happen? After you found each other in here?”

“We opened the bathroom door,” said Todd. “Duh.”

“And then?”

“Armageddon.”

“The seventh circle of hell.”

“Catastrophising language doesn’t help you,” I said kindly but firmly. “Now how about this. We’ll talk for just five minutes now, then we’ll all go back to bed and back to sleep and we’ll talk for ten more minutes tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Kathi, but she was watching me closely for clues to the catch.

“What’s the catch?” said Todd.

“First I open the bathroom door and we all look at the pristine, bug-free emptiness.”

Todd dropped Kathi’s feet and they both sprang up to stand pressed against the back wall, once more clutching each other.

“Okay,” I said. “You take any precautions you need to. You’re not screaming now, so that’s an improvement. Well done. Good work, both of you.”

I slid down off the table, gave them a beaming smile, and opened the bathroom door.

My first thought was that the illegal insecticide Kathi got from her cousin in Costa Rica was strangely fragranced, like formic acid, or vinegar maybe. That was it. It smelled like a very old banana in a pickle jar.

I clicked the light on.

Legions upon legions of shiny red-brown insects skittered and scuttled over every surface. The folds of the shower curtain seethed with them. A helpless wriggling heap of them roiled in the bottom of the wash basin and the should-be-white lino was spattered all over with the reeking crumbs of their droppings.

I gulped and snatched at air, clawing for a breath to scream with but stuck like a gargoyle with my eyes bulging out and my voice turned to dust. Until, that was, one of the stinking little shitbags crawled onto my foot and bit me.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, THEY’RE REAL!” I howled, kicking off my attacker and trying to squish him. He didn’t squish. He crunched. I slammed the bathroom door shut, blatted the room door open, grabbed Todd and Kathi, one in each hand, and fell out into the safety of the big bad world.

“There’s an in—” I screamed, but there were still half a dozen guests clustered around the walkway hoping for more action and infestation isn’t a word hotel guests want to hear. “—teresting discussion to be had here,” I finished, quite a lot quieter. “Where can we go to talk?”

Roger and Noleen were loitering over by the chain-link fence around the swimming pool, trying to look as if they just happened to have met and were passing the time of day, silk boxers and granny nightie with the ruffle neck and rosebuds notwithstanding

∞

Funny thing was, Todd and Kathi came down larky and it was Noleen and Roger, after one peek round the bathroom door, who sat pale and shaking in the little private office behind reception, checking the corners and scratching now and then.

“Your face!” said Todd to me for the fourth time. He caught Kathi’s eye and they both snorted.

“Take a deep cleansing breath and feast your eyes on the pristine bug-free emptiness,” said Kathi in a truly terrible Scottish accent.

“Sod off,” I told her. “I’ve never said ‘deep, cleansing breath’ in my life.”

“If you three could stop reliving happy memories,” said Noleen, “what the hell are we going to do?”

“Getting that extra-wide duct tape and sealing round the door would be a good start,” I said. “We wouldn’t want them to swarm.”

“It’s bees that swarm,” said Todd. “Not … ”

“Right?” said Roger. “That’s the thing. What the hell are they?”

“And where in God’s name did they come from?” said Noleen.

“Do you think it’s just that one room?” Kathi said, which sobered everyone.

“We’ll know soon enough,” said Noleen, twisting round in her chair to look at the wall clock. “Six forty-five. People will be getting up.”

“But what in God’s name are they?” I said.

“And,” said Roger, “where the hell did they come from?”

The rest of us ran through these questions a few more times, while he made off to get the duct tape and start sealing, and we concluded we didn’t know and hadn’t a clue.

“Cindy Slagle,” Roger said, returning after a few minutes and scrubbing his hands briskly at the utility sink. He made a proper job of it, what with being a surgeon and all, but still he had to shudder once when he was done. “She’s an entomologist at the university. We had her in once at work to consult on—” He stopped. “I promised Todd I’d never tell him.”

“Why an entomologist was called in to paediatrics?” I said. “I’m with Todd. I don’t want to know.”

“But she won’t be able to tell us how they got in there, will she?” Todd said. “I mean, they didn’t just look in the window and like what they saw.”

“Someone—” said Kathi.

“Don’t say it,” said Noleen.

“Someone—”

“Kathi, don’t say it.”

“Let me speak! Someone put them in there.”

“So we call the cops,” I said.

“No,” came a chorus of four voices.

Noleen and Kathi I could understand. Police call-outs are public record in California. It makes for one of the more entertaining items in the Cuento Voyager each week. Verbal domestic dispute: parties counseled and Failure to stop at a red light: warning issued and the occasional Texting while travelling by skateboard after dark against flow of traffic without lights: kids today. I don’t know which of the Cuento cops wrote up the blotter, but they had a sense of humour.

And Mike struck me as a straight dealer. I didn’t understand why Todd and Roger would be against the notion.

“I’ll text Cindy,” Roger said. He patted his sides as though searching nonexistent pockets for his phone and only then seemed to realize how nearly naked he was. He stood, cleared his throat, and made to leave.

“And I’d better … ” said Noleen, looking down at her nightie for the first time.

Well, none of us had stopped to put on a cocktail dress when we heard screaming, had we? As I had the thought I glanced at my own outfit and was surprised to see spaghetti straps and a groin-high split. I stood, holding the split together to mid-thigh.

“And I’ll just … ” I said, following the others.

“Can you stand to look them up on the internet?” Kathi was saying, as we all trooped away through the front office.

“Could I trawl through pics of bugs?” said Todd. “That’s no’ verrrry kind and prrrotective.” He was doing my voice again.

“What’s the prob with the cops?” I asked Roger, trotting to catch up as he took the stairs three at a time towards our rooms.

He looked at me a while then, just as he opened his mouth to speak, the door of the Disneyland-to-Oregon tourists banged open and the husband one, even more disgruntled than before, skewered me with a glare and jabbed his finger at me.

“Your phone’s ringing off the hook,” he said. “This place is a joke. And we’ve been to India!”

“What did India do to des—” said Roger.

“Answer the goddam phone!” said the tourist and turned his back, stalking off, the glitter-paint of his magic castle winking.