Scot on the Rocks

by Catriona McPherson

‘If she doesn’t turn up, or use her cards or get in touch with Blaike,’ I said, ‘eventually, yes.’

  ‘Blaike!’ said Bran, close to wailing. ‘But you think, when they finally accept she’s missing, they’re going to come after me?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘For thoroughness, they’ve got to. Like they looked through the house in case you had her tied up and gagged somewhere. It’s just a process of elimination.’

  That got him going. He was up on his feet, trying to pace in this titchy little toilet with someone standing in his way. After two tight turns, he gave up and went out into the hallway. ‘So, yes, I still need you,’ he said. ‘I need you to find Brandee and … I really need you to go to Idaho and break the news to Blaike.’

  ‘I can’t …’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better coming from you?’ I was trotting after him as he paced now, up to the opening at the main room, back to the master-bedroom door, back to the main room again. He still hadn’t hit on the prime pacing location in the house, in my opinion. A circuit round the living area would have been a lot more satisfying.

  ‘Blaike hates me,’ he said.

  ‘Palming off something like this isn’t going to help,’ I pointed out. ‘And I’ve got a practice, Bran. A job, just like you.’ He had always thought his work was more important than my work when we were married. Just because he earned four times more than me in my best month and didn’t run his business from a suite that rented out offices by the day.

  ‘This is your job,’ he said. ‘I’m paying Trinity Solutions to take care of this.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. I had forgotten. ‘But still, I can’t go flying all over the country to take care of your personal family business.’

  ‘I’ll pay for your flights, obviously. And hotel.’

  ‘First class?’

  ‘Extra legroom.’

  ‘And priority boarding. OK, I’ll discuss it with my partners. And now I better go. Did you give Todd and Kathi—?’

  ‘Everything I could think of – friends, appointments, usual haunts, all the paper, notes, forms, bills … I have to get her back, Lexy. After everything we’ve been through, I couldn’t bear to lose her now.’

  EIGHT

  After everything we’ve been through, I repeated to myself as I embarked on the long walk down from the posh suburbs to central Cuento, the railroad tracks and the Last Ditch. It was hardly flattering, since a lot of what Bran had been through was me. But his devotion to Brandeee was just as puzzling on its own merits. She didn’t strike me as the sort of person to spark major passion. She was … I mean, I wished her no harm but she was …

  Actually, I had no idea what she was, beyond committed to grooming and fond of a lot of little towels and cushions. I was actually looking forward to interviewing her friends and colleagues to finally get a handle on this woman who was responsible – in a roundabout way – for upending my life. There must be more to her than I had ever seen, because I was far from sure anyone would come reeling out of the house to – what was it Mike said? – howl at the heavens, if I’d been stolen away.

  Without meaning to, I found myself walking slower and slower, as if my batteries were running out. That was a very strange thing for Mike to have said, actually. And it was a very strange thing for Bran to have done. He didn’t call the cops when he found the note. He didn’t even call me to see how close we were. He came outside and happened to find us just arriving. And the only reason he’d found the note was that he’d come outside minutes beforehand to look for us once already.

  That, as Mike had seen and I had not, wasn’t like Branston Lancer. He was an app-downloader extraordinaire, an online booker, an other-end-of-the-sofa texter. I couldn’t remember him ever having to ask a barista for his drink; he would sit in the car park and order it, then wait till he could see it before he opened Starbucks’ door. So there was no way on God’s earth Bran would react to bad news by rushing out into the street to look for an actual human being to help him. He would be googling ransom notes and FBI stats with one hand while he sent a message via speech-to-text and uploaded a scan of the nail to a subreddit with the other.

  And was it possible he hadn’t known about Mama Cuento? Wouldn’t he have been glued to the local news if he thought his wife had gone missing by foul means?

  I still hadn’t puzzled it out when I arrived at the corner of First Street and Main Street, where the floral tributes had now spread across the whole corner, banked up against La Cucaracha’s wall and filling the pavement to the kerbside. A couple of students from UCC were reading messages and taking pictures of them.

  ‘It’s very sad, isn’t it?’ I said.

  One of them looked up and frowned. ‘It depends on the issue,’ he said. ‘If it’s a protest against colonization, then the selection of Valentine’s Day to stage it was a great moment in the march to freedom.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, in place of the Huh I felt. ‘Was it? A protest.’

  ‘It had to be,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Why else would you steal a symbol?’

  ‘Have there been any more notes from the kidnappers?’ I asked him.

  ‘Nope,’ said the female student, shaking off a determined bunch of lilies that she’d got tangled up in. ‘We’d know. We’re recording and transcribing the emerging text.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, in place of a snort. ‘Aren’t there police doing it too, though? I mean, isn’t this still a crime scene?’

  ‘Isn’t everywhere?’ said the boy.

  ‘Right,’ I said a third time, instead of a raspberry. California still regularly made me feel like a retired colonel from Agatha Christie.

  I dragged my feet past the police station, in case Mike looked out, saw me and decided she wanted to chew over the case and give me lots of useful information by the by. But she must have been on the other side of the building.

  Back at the Last Ditch, I checked my watch and decided I had just enough time for a brief catch-up with Noleen. I don’t need meditation, spa days or alcohol, as long as I check in with Noleen every now and then. She’s like a salt rub with a shamanic loofah, in her own quiet way. She sorts me out even as she flays me.

  Or maybe I’m more in tune with my deeper self than someone from Dundee has any right to be. Certainly, I didn’t know what I wanted to find out when I pushed open the office door. I was just going where my instinct took me. And I was right.

  Nolly was in the middle of one of her periodic reorganizing drives. Usually the motel office was in marked contrast to the Skweeky Kleen, being rather more filled with discarded clothes, half-done crosswords, burst lamps, accidentally printed-out room bills that still had one blank side and would be useful for scrap paper if we ever got locked in the office for a month and needed to write out our wills and a three-volume novel before we pegged it. But every so often a tower of paper would fall, or Noleen would find her favourite baseball cap just after she’d ordered a replacement one, or a potential guest would put a head round the door, curl their lip and go away without booking, and then Noleen would blitz the place, throwing out everything that wasn’t her own coffee mug or a new inkjet cartridge, until there was no junk left at all and the office was revealed in all its tatty lack of splendour.

  She was facing away from me, wearing a sweatshirt I hadn’t seen before – it read, Nobody asked you – and upending the stationery drawer over a black bin bag. Elastic bands, bulldog clips and pens cascaded down. I think I saw some postage stamps go in there.

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Are you going paperless?’

  ‘I’m starting over,’ she said, turning. The front of the sweatshirt said, Shut up. Blunt, even for Noleen. ‘I’m going to OfficePro, after Della gets here to tag me, and buying just what I need and nothing else. None of this …’ She stirred the very dregs of the drawer contents, then tipped it higher to shoot the lot into the bin bag.

  ‘Is that foreign currency?’ I said. ‘Because it looks like quarters. Nolly, you’re binning money.’

  ‘I’m letting g
o,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to start locking this drawer so no one can put hairbands and thumb tacks in it when I’m not looking.’

  ‘No one …’ I began. ‘OK. But you know what I think?’

  ‘Don’t want to,’ she said. ‘Don’t want your opinions stinking up my head any more than I want random strangers’ Canadian change stinking up my drawer.’

  ‘I’ll tell you anyway. I think that drawer is like a coral reef, or maybe a compost heap. It’s a functioning ecosystem that will keep finding its own equilibrium, no matter what.’

  ‘All this time, I thought you had to study psychology to be a therapist,’ Noleen said. ‘Now, I find out you’ve got a master’s degree in bullshit.’

  There she was! There was the Noleen I knew and loved, the insults as much a part of her as her tidy-up blitzes. That thought sparked another one and I let it run as I stood there watching her tie the binbag and then set about the empty drawer with a Clorox wipe. She’d caught that habit from Kathi. Kathi adored a Clorox wipe. It was neck and neck whether the floating island of plastic she alone was responsible for building in the ocean was more wipes or gloves; she had to have one or the other over her hand before she’d touch most things.

  ‘What?’ Noleen said, when she’d had enough of being watched.

  ‘People don’t change,’ I said. ‘Or they change slowly, for reasons. Kathi’s rubbing off on you and you’re probably rubbing off on her. But people don’t do things they don’t do.’

  ‘You aced that Bullshit MA.’

  ‘Bran would have called someone, or texted someone,’ I said. ‘He’d never have run out into the street to look for succour.’

  Noleen put down the drawer and regarded me through narrowed eyes. ‘They told me,’ she said, ‘he was looking out for you and he found it on the doormat. Then he went outside again to see if you were on your way.’

  ‘Yeah, but we hadn’t texted or anything,’ I said. ‘We’d only said we’d be there today. It doesn’t ring true. Much as it pains me to say it, I think Mike might be right. He staged it. He was acting. He knows more about it than he wants us to think he does.’

  ‘He was real upset when he came here looking for you this morning,’ Noleen said.

  ‘He sounded “real upset” when he wailed “Oh, Brandee, baby!” too,’ I said. ‘But he didn’t hang around in the car park, waiting and watching, did he? Oh!’ A light bulb had just gone on in my head. ‘Where did you say I was, Nolly? Where did he think I was when he went to wait on the boat for me to come back?’

  ‘I said you were up at First and Main, where Mama Cuento had gotten stole away. Why, where were you?’

  ‘Bingo!’ I said. ‘We’ve got him. He said he hadn’t heard the news about Mama Cuento. But he had. Bugger it, Mike is right. He really did fake a copycat ransom note.’

  Noleen whistled. ‘He’s chopped her up and fed her to the hogs?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘Not very flattering that he employed me to investigate in that case, is it? Or maybe he just wanted to make the cops pay attention to her disappearance. I wonder why he doesn’t want to tell Blaike face to face, or even phone the school and get a sympathetic teacher to break the news.’

  ‘Maybe he’s hoping she’ll come back before the kid needs to hear,’ Noleen said. ‘If he hasn’t chopped her up. Or, if he has, he wants people to think he’s hoping she’ll come back.’

  ‘No, he wants Blaike to know,’ I said. ‘But he wants me to go and tell him. He’s willing to pay for me to fly to … somewhere … Is Idaho a place?’

  ‘Maybe Blaike can tell when he’s lying,’ said Noleen. ‘If he’s chopped her up. Or maybe – if he hasn’t chopped her up – he doesn’t want to be away from home. Or he doesn’t want to take the blame for her disappearing. This is if he hasn’t ch— You know what? We need a shorthand. “Chop” and “no chop”. OK?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake. I don’t think it’s anything so dramatic, anyway. Whether we’re looking at—’

  ‘Chop,’ said Noleen.

  ‘Or no chop. It’s just that Blaike hates him and Bran hates the poor kid right back. He’s hopeless with kids. And dogs.’

  ‘I gotta ask,’ Noleen said. ‘What were you thinking?’

  And I couldn’t wheel out the dungarees-in-the-eighties riposte again, because I’d seen all Noleen’s photographs from all her sixty years by now, and she had dressed exactly the same, with the same hairdo, since she left school and burned her little kilt and white knee socks.

  ‘The question is, should I go flying all over the country to break it gently or is that Bran trying to get me out of the way? Or does he think so little of me he doesn’t realize what a risk he’s taking, letting me talk to his arch-enemy?’

  ‘Wow,’ Noleen said. ‘You want some incidental music to punch this scene up a little? Arch-enemy? All over the country? Where do you think Idaho is, Lex?’

  ‘Uhhhhh, the middle? Chicago.’

  ‘That’s Illinois.’

  ‘Cleveland then.’

  ‘That’s Ohio.’

  ‘That’s the same damn word. That’s barely even an anagram.’

  ‘Keep guessing,’ Noleen said, as the door opened to admit Todd and Kathi. ‘Cool new game, guys! Lexy don’t know shit about these our United States. Ask her where Iowa is. Funniest thing you ever heard.’

  ‘It’s happened again,’ Kathi said. ‘Another delivery and a new note.’

  I hadn’t noticed how sombre they both looked, but a second glance made my blood drain.

  ‘A new toe? Or just a nail?’ I said. ‘And whose?’

  ‘A new body part,’ said Kathi. ‘It’s a belly button.’

  ‘That’s …’ I said, before I had to sit down suddenly on one of the uncomfortable little café chairs where unsuspecting motel guests sometimes ate the microwave porridge on their first morning. ‘How would you even …? That’s a big step up from an acrylic nail.’

  ‘It’s not Brandee’s,’ said Todd. ‘It’s not anyone’s. It was cut off a fibreglass statue of a pregnant Asian woman at a memorial in Utah, away in the armpit of nowhere, and sent to some kid in a boot camp in the asshole of nowhere. But he put it online and it’s the same words in the note.’

  ‘Nine more where this came from?’ I said. ‘But that must be a copycat! No one’s got ten belly buttons.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what’s on the wire,’ Todd said. I was sure he meant Twitter but he has a definite flair for the dramatic. ‘Another stolen statue – she’s called Hope – another delivery and an identical note. God knows what it’s got to do with our stuff. If anything.’

  ‘A statue of a pregnant woman though,’ I said. ‘And a minority too? It’s not random.’

  ‘Another day, another hate crime,’ said Kathi. ‘Is Brandee some kind of radical feminist, Lex? Is that the connection?’

  I tried hard not to laugh. After all, the woman had either been kidnapped or killed, or had fled her home. ‘A radical feminist dentist?’ I said. ‘Who married Bran? Twice?’ I added when I saw Noleen open her mouth to point out the obvious glassiness of my house.

  ‘Is she involved in … public art projects in any way?’ Todd said, which was a pretty decent suggestion, actually.

  ‘Eh, no,’ I said. ‘She’s a hairdo. She’s a monthly manicure. She would flatten the whole of downtown for more parking, if she could get the votes. And anyway Noleen and I just worked out that Bran knew about Mama Cuento and we think he faked the nail and note on the doormat to get the police to take him seriously.’

  ‘Unless he chopped her up,’ said Noleen.

  ‘And fed her to the hogs,’ added Kathi. They had been married for a very long time.

  ‘Making it a double bluff,’ said Todd. ‘And an insult to the collective intelligence of Trinity Solutions’ investigation wing.’

  ‘That’s what I said!’ I said. ‘Only … he really did look upset when he was down here and when we were up there. Didn’t he?’

&n
bsp; Todd was no fan of my ex-husband. He was a good friend that way: never neutral when what you needed was bias in your favour. And Kathi was no fan of the entire category of straight white guys with perfect teeth, so a Cuento dentist would have to be something pretty special to get a fair shake from her too. But both of them nodded.

  ‘He gave us everything,’ Kathi said. ‘Wait – make that, he gave us a whole lot and there didn’t seem to be anything missing. We’ve got her passwords for her bank, doctor, email, social media …’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘He knew them?’ He’d never known mine.

  ‘He told us pretty straight out what her relationships were with everyone at the business,’ Todd said. ‘She got a little lit at the holiday party and went behind the X-ray screen with a receptionist. Told us that loud and clear, didn’t he?’

  Kathi nodded. ‘So we think she really went missing and he really cares, but maybe the note is a red herring? So, maybe we can forget that and concentrate on the job we’re getting paid for?’

  ‘The case of the missing manicure,’ said Todd. ‘Is that mean?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ I said. ‘But, yes, we can. Let the California cops find Mama Cuento.’

  ‘And the Utah cops find Hope,’ said Noleen.

  ‘And the Idaho cops interview the kid,’ Todd said.

  Noleen and I flashed a look between us. ‘Spooky coinc—’ I started to say.

  But Noleen knew more than me about life in these her United States, as she had just been so keen to point out. To me ‘boarding school’ spoke of money and power, toddlers in top hats and a short downhill path to the top tiers of government. Noleen understood, however, that a boarding school and a correctional boot camp were probably the same thing.

  ‘The belly button got sent to a kid at school in Idaho?’ she said. ‘Did you get a name?’

  ‘Uhhhhhhh,’ said Todd. ‘Blaize? Blaine? Blair?’

  ‘Blaike,’ I said. ‘Blaike Kowalski. He’s Brandeee’s son.’

  We all stood there in silence for a moment, letting our thoughts shift and resettle to accommodate this minor thunderbolt. It made me feel proud. In my own quiet way, I had managed to pass on a fair few healthy mental habits to my friends. I might not have cured Todd and Kathi’s specific problems, nor got Noleen to admit she had any, but I’d made all three of them stronger, more resilient, more reflective individuals.