‘He’s capable of sending a kid to boarding school,’ Todd pointed out. ‘And those were grievous sins against taste going on in there too.’
SEVEN
Funny old world, I thought, as I walked up the path of the next-door neighbour. I’d decided that there was no time like the present and had got back out of the car again, leaving Todd and Kathi to go downtown without me.
I’d never knocked on this door when I lived at the Beige Barn and so I had no idea who was going to answer it, my Cuento expertise not being well honed enough yet to hazard a guess based on planting and window treatments. Prayer flags and flag flags I knew, and I was starting to get a bead on cactuses versus geraniums – put it this way: you’d be surprised to find a Trump lawn sign snagged on a prickly pear – but this garden had lots of rocks and a couple of Japanese maple trees, with a swing on the porch … Hard to call. I rang the doorbell and waited, composing an opener that didn’t sound too mad to deliver.
‘About time.’ A man answered the door, practically pulling it off its hinges. ‘Are your shoes clean?’
‘Uhhh,’ I said.
‘Let’s go round.’ He came out on to the porch beside me, bustled past and headed off towards the back of the house before I could think of a thing to say. I scampered after him.
It was quite a big garden for these parts, with enough space for him to have disappeared by the time I got round there.
‘Hello?’ I called. ‘Are you …?’ On strong medication? In the middle of an episode? Mistaking me for someone else?
‘Are you coming?’ his voice was rising up from somewhere inside a covered walkway made out of white-painted wood. Like a … bower, I suppose. A gravel path led into it. But it would take more than a gravel path to lead me into it.
‘Sir?’ I said. ‘Can you come back out here and tell me what’s going on, please? I came to ask you about your neighbour—’
‘Ohhhhh,’ he said, appearing at the mouth of the … pergola – is that the word? ‘You think it’s my neighbour? Which one?’
‘Think what’s your neighbour?’ I said, feeling a slight chill that was more than the pathetic California attempt at winter.
‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘She’s right there, as dead as a dodo.’
I stared at him. He didn’t look mad or ill or dangerous. He looked like an upright citizen of Cuento: Jason Momoa hair and Roy Cropper fashion sense. He turned to look behind him. And I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to see if it was true. I told myself I could scream bloody murder if it was and bring Mike and the uniform flying to my side. And I’d be able to comfort Bran by telling him she looked peaceful, whether she did or not.
I stepped off the grass on to the gravel and followed the path as it wound in under the white painted … trellis? It didn’t take long. A big garden for Cuento is still not a very big garden, and this wasn’t the Hampton Court Palace maze, by any means. Another ten paces brought me alongside the guy again. He was standing, looking down at … nothing.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘You told me someone was dead.’
‘She is,’ he said, pointing at absolutely nothing. ‘Barbra Streisand – dead as disco.’
I took a couple of breaths, wondering how to play this. ‘Do you have someone who can come and be with you?’ I asked, taking a leaf out of Mike’s book. This guy had some serious problems and – although he didn’t look all that distraught at imaginary-invisible Streisand’s demise, here in his backyard – at the very least, he shouldn’t be driving.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Are you mocking me?’
Uh-oh, I thought.
‘My mother said you were the right people to call,’ he added.
‘Who is it you think I am?’ I said, reckoning the answer could be absolutely anything.
‘The Beteo County Master Gardeners’ on-call troubleshooter,’ he said, which proved me right. ‘Aren’t you?’
It took me a couple of beats, nodding and smiling, before I made sense of it. ‘A gardener?’ I said at last. ‘I thought you thought I was the police.’
‘Oh my God!’ he said. He wiped a hand over his forehead. ‘She called the police? I’m sorry, officer. Please don’t punish her for wasting your time. She’s not as young as she was and she has bad days.’
‘I’m not the police though,’ I said. ‘I’m the ex-wife of your neighbour across the way, whose current wife appears to have been kidnapped. And a counsellor.’
It took him a couple of beats this time, nodding and smiling, while he wondered how to cope with being trapped in a … gazebo? … with a complete nutter.
‘Your neighbour across the road?’ I said. ‘Lancer? His wife’s gone missing and she might have been kidnapped. So I came to ask if you had seen anything. And you said, “She’s dead,” and I thought—’
‘Oh my God!’ he said, again stuck between gasping and laughter. ‘No, not a neighbour!’
I relaxed a bit and laughed with him.
‘Barbra Streisand’s dead,’ he said.
I might well have stopped laughing again.
‘Look!’ Once more, he pointed down at nothing. ‘My mother said so yesterday and I thought she was having a senior moment, but there’s no hiding it today.’
‘Sir,’ I said. ‘Barbra Streisand isn’t here. Barbra Streisand is probably at home in Santa Barbara, alive and well.’
He stared at me a moment, but he didn’t use the nod and smile this time. Then light broke over him. ‘Rosa “Barbra Streisand”,’ he said, pointing for the third time at nothing, or rather at some brown twigs poking up out of the ground. ‘Someone has killed my mother’s favourite hybrid tea.’
‘A rose?’ I said.
‘Dead,’ he said, reaching down and breaking off a piece of twig with a snap like a cracker.
‘But don’t roses die every winter?’ I said. ‘I’m really not a county garden master, see?’ I added, as he gave me a withering look.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re the counsellor for the ex-wife of the guy who’s missing from across the street.’ Some people have no mind for detail. ‘Tell me, do you really think roses die and come back to life? Do you think all plants do that? Any animals?’ I supposed when he put it like that it did sound a bit unlikely.
‘Ha,’ I said. ‘I might have used the wrong word.’
‘You know how the leaves fall off the trees and then the trees grow new ones?’ he said, stepping way over the sarcasm line. ‘The trees are still alive. Look.’ He reached out and pulled a low-hanging bare twig towards him, then bent it double like a hairpin and scratched the bark, showing me a bright lime-green underneath layer. To be fair, it was very different from the biscuit snap of the dead rose.
‘What a shame for your mum,’ I said. ‘She’ll have to plant a new one.’
‘If it’s a horrible disease she might not be able to,’ he said. ‘That’s why I was trying to get a diagnosis.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Well, I hope the garden trouble master guy can help you, when he gets here. Meantime, did you see anything funny going on over the way? The night before last?’
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I don’t live here. What, you thought I lived with my mother?’
‘Ah,’ I said. It wasn’t the worst insult I could have dreamed up. Those would all have involved his dress sense.
‘I don’t live with my mother,’ he said. He was protesting a bit too much, to my mind.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Me neither. Yay us. So could I speak to your mother, maybe? She might have noticed something.’
Reluctantly, it seemed, he agreed to let me in the house and question the old lady. He made me take my shoes off at the door, like a mother-living old fussbudget, then took me through a maze of big, heavy walnut furniture towards the back of the open-plan layout, where an incredibly spindly old woman sat in a glassed-in neuk, looking out over her garden. Here was where her son had got his knack for snazzy dressing. She was wearing a mustard-coloured velour lounge suit, looking like something from The Sopranos.
‘She�
��s dead, isn’t she?’ was the greeting I got, as she turned a blank gaze my way. I couldn’t see her eyes behind the shine on her bottle-bottom glasses but her lip was wobbling and she held a hanky in one fist.
‘I’m not the gardener,’ I said. ‘But your rose didn’t look too good, if I’m honest. I’m sorry.’ There was a short pause. I expected her to ask who I was, giving me a good opener. But she was lost in horticultural grief or something and the silence stretched. ‘I’m actually here on another matter,’ I said, when it had stretched to twanging. ‘You know your neighbours across the way? The Lancers?’
‘Cautious drivers, smell like mouthwash,’ she said.
It was an odd description, but not untrue. ‘That’s the ones,’ I agreed. ‘She’s gone missing.’
‘Again?’ said the old lady. I was beginning to like her. ‘He doesn’t have much luck with wives. This is the third one, I think.’
‘I mean, she’s disappeared and it might have been kidnap. I was just wondering if you saw anything the night before last.’
‘Do all the other pencils in the box make fun of you?’ she said. ‘For not being as sharp as them?’
‘Um,’ I said.
She leaned forward and this time I did see what lay behind her thick lenses. ‘I’m blind,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen anything for seven years.’
I suppose it explained the lounge suit, if not the heavy glasses. Maybe they were wishful thinking.
‘Do you sleep at the front of the house?’ I said. ‘Maybe you heard something?’
‘Because my other senses have developed to make up the difference?’ she said. ‘I’m eighty years old. I can’t hear what I used to, my knees are shot, I’m a prune-juice junkie and even at that it’s a red-letter day if I’m out of the bathroom in under an hour. And my heart sounds like modern jazz.’
I sat down, thinking that I liked this woman more and more and wanted to hang out. Also, how would she know?
‘Take a seat, why don’t you?’ she asked me.
‘There’s nothing wrong with your hearing at all, is there?’ I said. ‘But I’m sorry I annoyed you.’
‘I was being honest. I don’t hear as well as I did ten years ago. But I can hear traffic on the street. Two nights back, you say? Two nights back. Last night, I read late – audiobook, you understand – and it must have been midnight when I put my light out – just an expression. The night before … Now, then, what was I doing the night before …? No, I can’t say I recall much. They came home about eight, parked on the drive instead of in the garage. He took the garbage out at ten and put the car away then. She opened the powder-room window around eleven, just after flushing her toilet – strange time of day to need to air out a bathroom; I was always trained to go in the morning. But that’s the modern way – the twenty-four/seven lifestyle.’
‘Did someone close it again?’ I asked. I was thinking to myself that if I ever had a blind neighbour I’d make sure and have a loud fountain too. She’d practically been on a stake-out.
‘I fell asleep,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t say. But I will say this: I’d be surprised if the wife just up and left him. They seemed very happy, if you get my drift.’
‘No noisy arguments?’ I said, guessing.
‘Not that so much as they never closed their bedroom window. And they seemed very happy at least three times a week.’
‘Ah,’ I said. I was glad she couldn’t see me blushing.
‘Don’t be embarrassed,’ she said. ‘My son’s single,’ she added. ‘Are you?’
‘Ahhhhhhh,’ I said, standing up and going into a fast reverse. ‘I think I heard someone outside. That might be your garden guru.’
‘Oh calm down,’ she said. ‘There’s no harm in mentioning it.’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s just that I want grandchildren before I’m too decrepit to pick them up.’
My mouth literally dropped open of its own accord. ‘Aaaaanyway,’ I said, to shut her up before she asked me about my religion or menstrual cycle. ‘Sorry about your rose bush.’
‘My favourite of all roses.’
‘It’s an odd choice for a blind person, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘They’re not exactly tactile, what with the thorns. And it’s not as if—’
‘I can see them? That’s no loss. I think Barbra Streisand is a very cold purple-ish blue, like blackberry ice cream. But her scent! She smells like the Arabian Nights. Her perfume is enough to make you drunk with delight.’
‘Would it interest you to know,’ her son said, having come back into the room silently in his stockinged feet, ‘that roses don’t have thorns?’
‘Oh yes?’ I said, wondering how long he’d been standing there and how much he’d heard, wondering if this was his idea of a chat-up line.
‘Those things are prickles.’
‘Oh. Well, in that case no.’
‘A thorn is a pointed section of stem. A prickle is an outgrowth of bark.’
‘How is that helpful when there’s blood running down your arm?’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’d better be off. I need to tell the police to take a close look at that bathroom window for footprints in case she climbed out that way. That was a good tip. Thank you.’
I jammed my feet into my shoes and shuffled off at double speed, in case he came after me to tell me that a tomato didn’t have seeds or a lily wasn’t a flower.
The person I passed halfway down the path looked a lot more like a gardener than me. She had a lot of pockets on the outside of her clothing and boots you could wear up a mountain.
‘Watch out for the son,’ I said, as we passed. ‘And the mother. Unless your clock’s ticking.’
I didn’t stop to see what effect my words would have on her, because across the road Mike and the uniform were coming down Bran’s path as if to leave.
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Have you looked for signs of entry around the window of the downstairs loo?’
‘What?’ said Mike. ‘It’s all downstairs, Lexy. It’s a single-storey house.’
‘Half bath,’ I said through gritted teeth. I couldn’t bring myself to speak the words ‘powder room’.
‘Did your ex-husband tell you to say that?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘No. I’ve been over there.’ I pointed. ‘The neighbour heard suspicious noises on the night Brandeee disappeared and she happened to know there was a window left open.’
‘Was that where he was heading when he came out to howl up at the heavens and you found him?’ said Mike. ‘The neighbour’s house?’
‘What?’ I said. ‘You’ve lost me. Look, never mind. Have you checked for prints around that window?’
‘Specialized work. We’ll send forensics,’ said Mike, but in that dry way of hers that means she’s being sarcastic. Bran was standing in the doorway, white faced and damp around the eyes. I let Mike go and rushed up to try him instead.
‘Do you still shut all your windows at night, except the room you’re sleeping in, like a paranoid little old lady?’ I asked him. It had been a bone of contention during our short marriage. Bran liked to seal the house against the few California elements and manage the temperature by means of the air-conditioning unit. I preferred my air with a few mosquitoes and a bit of barbecue smoke in it and I hated trying to sleep through the racket of the air-conditioning fan rumbling away outside the window. Bran suggested a white-noise machine to mask it. I suggested more noise wasn’t the answer to noise. Bran asked me why I thought white-noise machines were on the market if they weren’t useful. I directed his attention towards patented melon slicers and we left it there.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Because your neighbour across the road thinks there was a window left open the night Brandeee disappeared.’ I veered away from him into the shrubs that hugged the front of the house. The one nearest the downstairs-loo window was a … well, who knows what it was, but it had a single thick stem and left a good lot of soft bare earth between it and the wall, perfect for footprints if someone had scra
mbled into the house this way. I peered at the ground but couldn’t see so much as a dent.
And inside, when we got there, the windowsill showed not a scrape nor a smudge.
‘Of course I didn’t leave this window open!’ Bran said. ‘Cuento isn’t the place it used to be.’
‘When Cuento was the place it used to be, this was all fields,’ I said. ‘What did Mike say? What are they going to do? Do you still need us to chip in or do you think they’ve got it taped?’
Bran sat down on the closed toilet lid and put his head in his hands.
‘That detective thinks Brandee left me,’ he said. ‘She thinks the note’s a fake.’
‘What?’ I said. I said it quite loud and it rang out uncomfortably in the little loo. The echo made me realize that, only two days after Brandeee had left (or been taken), the number of decorative guest towels was down to nil. A bit of me wanted to go and count the decorative pillows on the master bed. But instead I patted Bran awkwardly on the shoulder nearest to me. ‘She probably didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘The wording is the same as the note left at Mama Cuento corner. She does realize that, doesn’t she?’
‘She does,’ said Bran. ‘That’s the whole point. She thinks I copied the wording to make them take it seriously.’
‘But you didn’t know,’ I said. ‘Did you? You didn’t seem to know about Mama Cuento being missing, when we turned up.’
‘I was kind of busy with my wife disappearing,’ Bran said. ‘I haven’t been following human-interest stories on the local news, no.’
‘I suppose it could be worse,’ I said. He gave me a look as if to say, Could it? ‘At least they think Brandeee left and you faked the note to make them investigate. They don’t think you got rid of her and faked the note to throw the suspicion off of you on to a kidnapper. That would be really bad.’
Bran went so pale and so clammy-looking, I was glad he was near a toilet. But he didn’t puke. He stood up and took hold of me with both hands. ‘If she doesn’t escape, though,’ he said, ‘if no one finds her, eventually those dumb cops will have to agree there’s something wrong, won’t they?’
Scot on the Rocks Page 7