Scot on the Rocks

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ I said. ‘We need to solve this case. And I need to go on a hilariously awful first date and come back and tell you about it, to make you sorry you pushed me.’

  The boat rocked gently and I put my head out of the kitchen door just as Kathi arrived at the top of the front steps. She came through the living room and along the passageway towards us. ‘You see the news?’ she said. ‘Someone’s been shot.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Who? Brandeee? Where? Here? Cuento?’

  ‘South Dakota,’ Kathi said. ‘There’s a statue. Huge great big beautiful statue of a native woman. I mean huge!’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ said Todd. ‘How the hell did someone steal that? It must be fifty feet tall.’

  ‘No one stole it. But everyone got scared someone was going to. So some folks got a posse together and went to guard it. It’s on public land. But it didn’t go down too well with some other folks. And … you know how it is. He’s OK, the guy that got shot. But he got shot.’

  ‘Maybe …’ I said. ‘Don’t jump down my throat, but maybe it’s a good thing. It’ll raise the profile of the case. Won’t it? And if Bran did make it up about Brandeee’s acrylic he might get cold feet and come clean. At least people will be paying attention now.’

  ‘Because some guy shot some other guy at a roadside rest stop in South Dakota?’ said Kathi. ‘Ya think that’ll hit the front page of the New York Times?’

  ‘The vigilantism might,’ I said. ‘And the three statues that have gone missing. Come on! A Latina town mother in California. A pregnant Asian in’ – I dug deep – ‘Idaho. Yay me!’

  ‘Utah,’ said Todd. ‘There weren’t any internment camps in Idaho.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right. And a Black girl in Oregon? The point is don’t tell me that’s not a story.’

  ‘Unless Alice in Wonderland in Central Park gets her hairband twanged, nobody’s going to care,’ Kathi said. ‘Except us. What the hell’s going on? That was some freaky stuff about Blaike’s fake dad, wasn’t it? And that school! Where do we even start with any of this?’

  ‘I’m going to start with Brandee’s co-workers,’ Todd said. ‘Just like Bran suggested. How’s she been? How’s her mood been? Who is she close to? All that. Get some sense of why she might have run. Or if she had any reason to fear her partner.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ I said, ‘I think I’ll try to track down Burt.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Burt?’ said Kathi.

  ‘You know how you introduced yourself on the phone to White Pines as Brandeee Kowalski-Lancer?’ I said. ‘She’s really Brandeee née Rumsfeld, fake Kowalski, Lancer one, Towser, Lancer two. Burt Towser took a spin between bouts of Bran.’

  ‘Does he live in Cuento?’

  ‘I don’t know. But how many Burt Towsers can there be? Poor guy. What are you going to do, Kathi?’

  ‘Bowling team uniforms,’ she said. ‘Life goes on. But while they’re rinsing and spinning, I’ll be on the phone trying to find witnesses who might have seen who stole the other two statues. It must be the same crew, right? Must be.’

  I woke at four o’clock, to the sound of rain pattering on the wooden roof of the houseboat. Me – a Scot – woken by rain! If I stayed in this country for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t know myself at all by the end. I’d be embalmed, in an open coffin, all my pals taking selfies.

  As I turned over, I thought about how glad I was that we’d found Blaike and got him out of the tree house before the weather broke. Because it really had broken. It wasn’t pattering now; it was hammering, drilling down like stair rods on to my roof. I made a mental inventory of windows – all shut tight – and I tried to remember if I’d left any cushions or books out on the porch. (California weather lulls you into complacency that way.) I couldn’t think of anything, but there was a faint meep coming from the front door and I slid out of bed and went along to let one of Diego’s cats in out of the rain. He had two of them, both as white as snow and distressingly fond of rolling about at the creek’s edge. I hoped the other one was tucked in under one of Diego’s skinny little arms and not about to get swept up in the water as it rose.

  And it would, if this carried on. I used to think the storm drains were only there to freak out cowards who’d read too many horror novels – I jumped past them, always half-expecting an arm to come whipping out and grab my ankle. But when I saw my first real downpour I understood why they’d never get away with a polite little grille in the gutter, like we had back home. Storms here were like leaving the taps on and the plug in. A jaw-dropping surge of water, more like a tide than a shower of rain. And, living in a houseboat, it was even harder to ignore. I felt the floor beneath me start to shift and creak; we were on the rise already. I scooped the kitten up and went back to bed, telling myself there were lots of shelters in the parks for the homeless to get under; they were meant to be sunshades for summer barbecues but they worked for rainy nights too.

  But I still couldn’t stop thinking about Brandeee. I could barely imagine her on a patio, or a beach, or even a street. I certainly couldn’t imagine her huddled in a doorway or lying in a row of other unfortunates, under the corrugated iron roof of the farmers’ market. We should check, though. Someone should ask around. I tutted and resettled myself, earning a grumpy little miaow from the cat. We should have asked the tree people if a skinny woman with blinding blue-white teeth had been there the night before Valentine’s Day.

  Surely not.

  But if she hadn’t taken her car and she hadn’t used her cards, where was she? Unless she had a different set of cards and she was using them. She must have some kind of talent for invention to have conjured a whole husband out of thin air, photos and all, and then killed him off again. Leonard Kowalski. He’d have been even easier to find than Burt Towser.

  Next time I woke, heart hammering, I could hear someone moving – nay, blundering – around on the other side of the boat. Not Todd bringing coffee! I sat up, flipping the little cat, who’d been pinning my legs down. It yowled and jumped on to the floor, then trotted out of the door, which was ajar.

  ‘Hey, kittycat!’

  Blaike. I finally remembered.

  ‘Morning!’ I called out.

  He put his head round the door. ‘Hey.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about your dad,’ I said. ‘Lenny Kowalski? Didn’t he have any other family? A granny and grandad for you? Aunts and uncles?’

  ‘Huh,’ Blaike said. ‘Nope. How dumb was I, never to ask?’

  ‘Not dumb at all,’ I said. ‘A kid. Did she tell you how he died?’ It made no difference; only if she’d claimed he was a war hero or something I was ready to despise her even more than I did already.

  ‘Elk hunt,’ he said. He was looking more and more uncomfortable and obviously working up to saying something. I gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Is it OK to use that dinky little bathroom, or should I go to the motel?’

  ‘Um …’ I said. How do you ask a seventeen-year-old boy you barely know if it’s a number one or a number two? Because I tried not to overload my ‘dinky’ little bathroom, but I didn’t want to start a discussion.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me I need to stand on the deck and pee in the slough?’

  Ah, number one. ‘No, no, go for it. Bathroom’s all yours. Have a shower, if you like. Use my purple shampoo. It works wonders on your highlights.’

  ‘I might just do that,’ Blaike said. ‘I think I got cooties from that hammock last night.’

  He was gone before I realized I had just talked my way out of an early morning pee of my own. Now I’d have to go over to the motel.

  But such is the power of the cootie card. I’d never heard of them before I got here but, because chiggers sounded made up and weren’t, and no-see-ums sounded completely impossible and weren’t, it took me a while to twig that cooties weren’t real. People even spoke about ‘cootie shots’. They weren’t real either, as I realized when Diego gave me one.
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  Of course, it was still raining. I put a cape on at the back door and stepped gingerly along the side of the boat, on the strip of deck that runs round it. The rain plotched down from the branches overhead and chuckled in little rivulets, slowly feeding the slough, where the water was starting to swirl with brown blooms of mud from the banks and would soon be like oxtail soup till the sun came out again.

  And of course, I didn’t make it into the office without Todd seeing me. ‘Breakfast date?’ he called down from the upstairs walkway, where he was lounging in the open door of his room in his shortie pyjamas, having just waved Roger off to work. ‘You really going like that?’

  ‘Blaike’s in the bathroom and I need a wee,’ I called up. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Au contraire,’ said Todd, stepping back and beckoning me. ‘Come up and use ours and I’ll tell you exactly where you’re going.’

  It was a tough choice. On the one hand, Todd was offering a vacant toilet – and at breakfast time in the office it was far from guaranteed that there wouldn’t be a paying tourist guest shedding some of the free coffee supplied along with that microwave porridge – but on the other hand it was going to come with a side serving of intrusive bossiness about something or other.

  My bladder overruled my brain and I went up the metal stairs, two at a time, and along the walkway. The rain really was shitting down. Those dead-flat roads would soon be flooded and the silty mud of the fallow tomato fields would be turning to gumbo.

  ‘Don’t you own any waterproof footwear?’ Todd said as I kicked off my sodden Converse at the door to his room and scampered loo-ward. Todd and Roger’s bathroom was a treasure chest wrapped in a cliché. More cosmetic preparations than two faces could possibly soak up in the course of a night and a day stood ranged in all their overpriced glory on the shelves. I gave them a good look, used a bar of white soap to wash my hands and rejoined Todd out in the bedroom. The bedroom was a treasure chest too, but wrapped in less of a cliché. In fact, it was somewhat surprising. The motel furniture had been moved out and replaced by sleek, modern design, expensive art and top-of-the-range brushed-steel appliances. Apart from the fact that it was a room, not the five-bed house with pool that they owned, it was OK. It was a lot swankier than my boat.

  ‘So where am I going?’ I said, sitting down on the grey moleskin sofa and accepting a tiny cup of bitter espresso.

  ‘Date,’ he told me, in the tone of voice that usually says, Duh. He necked his own espresso and shrugged out of his pyjama shorts into the sweats he wears to go to the Swiss Sisters and buy the real coffee.

  I hardly blinked. There was nothing suggestive, much less aggressive, in his stripping. Todd believes his body to be a wondrous part of God’s creation – he’s not wrong – and thinks sharing it is like bestowing favours on the rest of humanity.

  ‘Date. Right,’ I said. ‘The architect uncle. Does it have to be today?’

  ‘Yes, it has to be today,’ Todd said, putting on a scarf and then another one and then, after a look in the mirror, a third. His morning coffee-run style is very Bolshoi practice studio. ‘But it’s not the architect. I was puzzled about him being single and so I did a little digging. And what I learned … Well, I pulled you. Put it that way.’

  ‘Do I want to know?’

  ‘Only if the words “Margaret Mitchell slash fiction” don’t worry you. But I managed to get you in with the manager at the port-a-potty rental company, since you seemed so taken with that career arena.’

  ‘How …?’

  ‘Connections,’ Todd said. ‘His name is Doug. He’s very artistic and you’re having lunch with him.’

  ‘We’re kind of busy, Todd,’ I said. ‘In case you didn’t notice.’

  ‘And here comes Kathi now,’ Todd said. ‘To split the day’s tasks. Someone has to interview Brandee’s colleagues and other friends, someone has to find and talk to Burt Towser, and someone has to try to get some kind of a bead on this statue insanity.’

  ‘I said I’d do statues,’ Kathi said, as she let herself in. ‘It’s online and I need to stick close to the laundromat. Then later I’ve got a whole house diagnosis for a prospective new Trinity client. I could tack some interviews on to that …’

  She would too. She would make herself traipse round filthy dentists’ surgeries and other people’s revolting houses, pulling her weight like a trouper.

  ‘I’m slammed,’ Todd said. ‘Back to back until after three o’clock, except for one slot. And I thought I might hang out with Blaike and get the full story of the belly button. But, if you need me to sweet-talk information out of anyone, I can work late and do it then. I do have the knack of getting people talking.’

  In direct contradiction to this claim, I found myself counting to ten before I spoke. I was a therapist, for God’s sake. Getting people talking was 80 per cent of my job. Plus 10 per cent providing tissues and 10 per cent providing answers. Roughly.

  ‘So like I said, I’ll find Burt and interview as many of Brandeee’s associates as I can get round, and go on a lunch date,’ I said. ‘After a nine o’clock counselling session. Todd, is it OK if I send Blaike up here, to get him out of the way?’

  ‘Lunch date?’ said Kathi. ‘The architect?’

  Oh good. Todd wasn’t just interfering; he was oversharing too.

  ‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘This one works at a port-a-loo rental company.’

  Kathi reared back and I could have kicked myself.

  ‘As the manager! I’m sure he doesn’t touch them. And I won’t be touching him. No kisses on first dates.’

  She was still rearing. And actually, who could blame her? Whenever I found myself behind a trailer-load of port-a-loos on the freeway, I did tend to drop back a bit, in case of sloshing.

  I hurried on: ‘After my nine o’clock, I’ll go to Bran and Brandeee’s office and start the interviews. What was the name of the receptionist he mentioned? Elsie, was it?’

  ‘Ha HA ha ha ha ha!’ said Todd. ‘Elise, but I dare you to call her that.’

  Blaike was more than happy to go and hang out with Todd at nine o’clock, telling me he thought Todd was ‘cool’ and had ‘way cool’ games. In other words, he thought I meant Devin. I tried not to think about how ‘uncool’ Todd would appear to a seventeen-year-old straight boy. He went skipping off – well, slouching off but in quite a chipper fashion for a teenager – and I prepared for my nine o’clock client: a third-time woman in her forties, who was edging very slowly towards the reason she wanted to see me. Maybe this would be the breakthrough session, I told myself, as I put on the ocean sounds and set my indoor water-feature to trickle.

  And was it ever! I don’t think I opened my mouth to say a single word after ‘How have you been?’ and before ‘Will we make another appointment?’ She let rip: on the topic of loneliness, middle age and early mistakes mostly.

  ‘I didn’t want to settle,’ she said. ‘I dated and I even got serious once or twice, but there was always something wrong. He was too work oriented or he wasn’t ambitious enough. He was too unstable or too boring – too boring! Can you believe it? Who cares if someone’s boring? You can read or watch TV or stream a podcast. You can go out with your girlfriends for fun, or have a little affair on the side even. Boring! The guy I dumped because he was boring is married with three kids and a cabin at Tahoe. His wife’s a Facebook friend. She doesn’t look bored. She looks happy.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Sometimes I even stepped back from some guy because of his looks! His looks! I track them all, now. The ones that looked good back then are like bowls of pudding. Some of the ugly ones grew into themselves or they got better hair and teeth. And some of my gal pals are happy with Jabba the Hutt because he’s funny and good with the kids.’

  She sighed again and made some kind of strange scooping gesture that had to be yoga related.

  ‘So here I am at forty-eight, all wised up. But the forty-eight-year-olds who would have had me when we were both twenty-five are still looking at
twenty-five-year-olds. And the men looking at forty-eight-year-olds are seniors! White hair and pigeon chests, retired to the golf course. I’m not ready for that! Then I hear myself say so and I think I’m doing it again. And in ten years, when the only ones who want me are in electric carts, with oxygen tanks, I’ll look back to now and kick myself all over again.’

  For a solid hour, this went on. She left me reeling, ears ringing, brain scrambled, and with only one coherent thought: she was right, and what was I going to wear to lunch with this artistic toilet boy?

  FOURTEEN

  Burt Towser wasn’t hard to find, although there were more of them across the land than I’d expected. I took a punt that the orthodontal surgeon based in Madding was the one I was after, and set off up there at ten o’clock.

  It was still pelting rain, which usually cheers me up – bringing, as it does, memories of childhood and Scotland; of jumping in puddles, and cocoa by the fire afterwards; of life without drought and wildfires. Today though, I had been hoping to keep my hair within the normal range of acceptable styles for toilet boy but, as I drove up the state route between Cuento and Madding, I began to see the edges of it in the rear-view mirror as it grew and frizzed and grew again, like a home chemistry trick with baking soda. When I took a look at it, after parking, I thought of those bolls of killer tumbleweed that cause pile-ups in the desert, and of those fridge cakes you make by rolling cornflakes in melted toffee, except I looked like one great big one dragged across a barber’s floor before it was set all the way.

  Towser’s office was, as so many offices in these parts are, in a big block of suites set round an atrium, with more parking than they needed (surely) and a handy little strip mall across the way, offering a Daivz coffee, a Korean barbecue, a nail salon and a juice bar. I think it’s a local zoning law that these four establishments appear in every five-unit strip mall in the state. The wild card this time was a doughnut shop, all the better to make more customers for orthodontal surgeons across the way.