Murder in Pastel

by Josh Lanyon

  Brett gave up on me, and darted ahead, plunging into the waves. The others were right behind him in various stages of undress.

  I stood, tugged my sweatshirt over my head. Put my hands on my belt buckle. With sudden clarity I wondered what I was trying to prove. I’d just eaten. It was cold. My bare skin was breaking out in goose bumps as the wind off the water hit it. The blue-black water was rough, sweeping in on the incoming tide. Who was I trying to impress? And how impressive would it look keeling over in cardiac arrest?

  Reaching down, I shook the sand out of my sweatshirt and pulled it back on. Adam still sat on the log drinking beer.

  “You’re not going in?” I asked, dropping down beside him.

  “No.” Curt.

  Was Adam always the designated driver?

  Silently, we sat watching the others scream and frolic in the inky waves, their bodies alabaster in the moonlight, reminding me of those stark black-and-white woodblocks Gauguin did in Tahiti.

  Adam smelled like almond soap and sunscreen. He smelled warm and familiar, although at the edge of my vision his outline—lean, hard, smooth-shaven and close-cropped—was suddenly alien.

  His shoulder brushed mine as he leaned forward toward the tub of ice. “Want another beer?” he asked.

  “No. Thanks.”

  For the first time in my life I had nothing to say to him. It was weird and a little sad.

  “Everything okay, Kyle?” Adam’s abrupt voice cut into my thoughts.

  “Yeah, why?”

  I flicked a look his way. He was staring into the fire, half his face in shadow. “You seem…distant. Have I done something to offend you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Hesitation. Then he said colorlessly, “Has Brett done something?”

  “Huh? No.” I heard the nervousness in my voice. Adam stared at me. I said, “I just—I’m preoccupied, that’s all. The book I’m working on.”

  “Because if I’ve done anything or said anything that…hurt you…”

  “No.” I jumped up, pacing. “No, Adam. I said no. Let it go.”

  Kyle, Ace of Spies.

  “Okay,” Adam said evenly, after a pause.

  After that there really was nothing to say. I walked out a way from the fire, my shadow exaggeratedly long and sinister across the bleached sand. Adam continued to drink, gazing out at the ocean.

  “Do you see Brett?” he questioned suddenly.

  I scanned the waves. “No.”

  He rose, striding toward the water’s edge. At the same time there was a yell for help, half-strangled.

  The swimmers closest in, Micky and Vince, turned. A wave knocked Micky to her knees and Vince splashed back to drag her up.

  I couldn’t see who was further out, only pale bobbing shapes cresting the rolling black peaks.

  “Adam, help!” That ghostly cry was Brett, his voice choked off as he went under a second time. By then Adam had kicked his shoes off and was running for the water.

  I ran after, stopping only to remove my own shoes. The others were calling out “What’s happening? Who is it? Is it Brett?”

  Adam plunged into the water and disappeared.

  Wading out to my waist, I stood beside Vince who said grimly, “I told him not to swim so far out.”

  “Where are they? Can you see them?” Micky demanded from the other side of Vince. “It’s as black as pitch out there.”

  “Where the hell’s Jenny?” Vince questioned suddenly. He waded out hollering for Jenny.

  She answered distantly. I saw her white face materialize a few yards down.

  “Do you see them?” Micky asked me, moving in. Her teeth were chattering.

  “No.” My eyes strained to see. The surf was deafening, the moonlight deceptive. A piece of wood looked like a body tumbling over and over in the surf.

  “There!” Micky grabbed my arm.

  “No, look!” I pointed the other direction.

  “Oh, thank God. Is it both of them?”

  “I can’t tell.” I could discern Adam. It looked like he had his arm locked around Brett’s shoulders as he struck out toward the shore. “Yes, he’s got him.”

  Lunging through the water to meet Adam halfway, I draped Brett’s other arm over my shoulders. Between us we half dragged, half carried him up to the beach and dropped him in the sand.

  Adam rolled Brett onto his side and proceeded to empty water out of him like an old-fashioned pump. I knelt at Brett’s feet as the others grouped round, hushed. I was conscious of my soaked, stiff Levi’s and the wind biting through my clammy T-shirt. My hair dripped down my nose, an annoying distraction to the drama before me.

  Brett started to come around, choking and coughing even before Adam eased him onto his back. His eyes flew open and he gazed up at the circle around him.

  “Brett, are you okay?” Adam urged.

  Brett stared blankly and suddenly jack-knifed up, clutching Adam who locked his arms around him.

  I didn’t hear what he said, distracted by the pain of watching them, but I felt the shock wave that rippled through the ring around us.

  “What?” Adam demanded.

  Brett pushed back in his arms. “I said, someone tried to kill me! Someone grabbed my feet and pulled me under. Someone tried to drown me!”

  There were assorted gasps and gurgles before Micky said harshly, “He’s in shock. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

  “You must have caught your foot in some rocks,” Adam said.

  Brett scrubbed his wet face. “There aren’t any rocks that far out. You think I don’t know the difference between rocks and hands!”

  “What’s going on?” Joel inquired, coming up behind us.

  “Brett swam out too far,” Jen said. “Now he claims someone tried to kill him.”

  Everyone began to talk at once. Brett clutched at Adam and spoke tensely, his profile pale and saint-like in the moonlight. I couldn’t hear what he said, but Adam was frowning.

  “Okay, lover, calm down,” he said finally. “Let’s get you home and warm.”

  He helped Brett stand. Hastily everyone gathered their belongings. Joel dumped the ice from the metal tub into the fire and kicked sand over it. There was a strange hush as we packed up. I think we all tried not to watch the lumbering two-headed figure of Adam guiding Brett up the cliff.

  “He’s lying,” Jen said finally.

  No one replied.

  When I got back to my cottage, I followed a scalding shower with a cup of chamomile tea, and wrapped myself in the heavy terry robe I usually saved for cold winter mornings.

  The light on my answering machine was blinking. I pressed Play. Brett’s hoarse voice filled the room.

  “You and Adam screwed up your big chance to be together.” Raspy laughter. “Meet me tomorrow for breakfast. I’ve got something to show you.”

  * * * * *

  That morning I could hear the music clear across the meadow as I started over to meet Brett: Sonny Stitt playing “Bebop in Pastel.”

  He was kicked back on the verandah, wearing side-split denim short-shorts and a pink polo. The guy didn’t have an ugly bone in his body: elbows, knees, ankles—every inch of him was brown and smooth and polished.

  “Adam drove into town, so we won’t be interrupted.” He poured juice out of a jug and shoved a basket of croissants my way.

  I took a sip of juice and felt my eyebrows shoot up. “What is this?”

  “Mimosa.” He rolled his eyes at my ignorance. “Orange juice and champagne.”

  “Three parts champagne. I have to work today.”

  “Oh, lighten up. You sound like Adam. Look.” He set one bare brown foot on the tabletop, clattering the gleaming porcelain dishes.

  There were ugly purple bruises around his ankle.

  “Someone did try to drown you last night.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. Did you think I was making it up? I’m not talking about the damn bruises. Notice anything else?”

  He was wearing a
n anklet, gold links intertwined with pink-gold grape leaves. It was pretty and unusual, but hardly worth getting together over breakfast. “The ankle bracelet?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Recognize it?”

  “Should I?”

  Brett stared at me with eyes as hard and green as jade. He seemed intent on my reaction.

  “Sure you don’t recognize it?”

  I shrugged. “No. Did Adam give it to you?”

  “Adam?” He snickered. “You think Adam’s an ankle bracelet kind of guy?” He swung his leg off the table and leaned back in his chair. He lit a cigarette. “So…since you don’t want to get it on with me, how about a three-way? You, me and Adam? Adam digs that.”

  I tore open a croissant, and slathered it with the butter melting in the sun. “No, thanks.”

  “‘No thanks!’” Brett mocked. “Talk about Virgin in Pastel. No wonder you never got anywhere with Adam. I was thirteen my first time. One of my dear old foster dads obliged.” He laughed at my face. “Sorry. Ancient history.”

  I made an effort and swallowed the wad of dough and butter.

  He propped his chin on his hand and said slyly, “I bet you would have offered your ass up without a murmur if it had been Adam last night. Wouldn’t you?”

  “You’ve got a one-track mind.”

  “You’re only kidding yourself, Kyle.” He poured me more spiked OJ, ignoring my feeble protests.

  “Sit tight. I want to show you something else.”

  Oh goody.

  He was back in a moment carrying a book. He opened the book and a folded square of thin drawing paper glided to a stop on the table. I picked up the yellowed paper, unfolded it. Two pieces of paper, actually. I studied them, my throat knotting.

  The first showed a boy of sixteen sleeping in the grass; a graceful sprawl of long limbs, angular features, tumbled hair. There was a good deal of tenderness in the portrayal of a too-thin, too-sensitive face relaxed and dreaming.

  The second sketch was a head study. Same youth: wide eyes and childish mouth; the hollows and delicate bone structure of a child who had been ill a long time and was still fragile. Moreover, it was the face of someone in love as only an adolescent can be, intensely and vulnerably.

  Brett chuckled at whatever he read in my face. I refolded the sketches and tucked them back in the book, which I handed to Brett. He tossed it aside onto one of the faded flowered cushions.

  “You were a cute kid,” he remarked.

  “That was the summer I got sick. Rheumatic fever.”

  “Which left you with a weak heart.”

  “It was the summer my father disappeared.”

  “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” quipped Brett. “So how come they didn’t stick you in some juvey facility?”

  “No one realized Cosmo was gone for good till about eighteen months had passed. By then I was packing for college, so no one bothered. It’s different in a small community. I had plenty of surrogate parents: Micky, Joel—my grandfather, if I’d needed him, I suppose.”

  “I’d prefer juvey.”

  I believed him. “You really hate this place, don’t you?”

  “The scenery’s nice. It’s the people I loathe.” He granted me one of those blinding smiles. “Present company excepted.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Still, the place has its amusements.”

  “Such as pulling the wings off Vince Berkowitz?”

  Another grin.

  “Do you care about Adam at all?” I really needed to know.

  He shrugged. “More than I’ve ever cared for anyone else.”

  What did that mean? In the bright sunlight he looked haggard. A foreshadowing of what he’d look like in ten years when the drinking, the one-night stands and the rest of it caught up.

  “Don’t worry about Adam,” he advised. “He knows exactly who I am. Adam needs to be needed. It’s his frustrated maternal instinct.”

  Jack Cobb’s sky-blue antique pickup pulled into the yard and Jack got out wearing tight jeans and no shirt.

  “Boy howdy,” murmured Brett. “Enter the handyman. What’s his name? Seth? Jude?”

  “Jack Cobb,” I answered. “He’s the mayor’s nephew, and he’s straight—as a yardstick.”

  Brett laughed. “Why that metaphor?”

  I played dumb. “You mean analogy?”

  “Whatever.” He stood up, waved to Jack who was tussling with the ladder in the truck bed. “Yeah, I’d say things are looking up.”

  “Brett—” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to tell him. Vaguely, I remembered Jack from high school; very macho and not too bright. I knew he was well able to take care of himself, so maybe it was Brett I was thinking of—or maybe Adam.

  As I spoke, Brett paused, his expression tightening. “Back off, Kyle,” he said. “You blew your chance. Get in my way and you won’t know what hit you.”

  * * * * *

  One evening, not long after, Adam caught me up on my walk.

  I always took the same route, the path through the woods past the old cemetery. The same path my father had walked the night he left Steeple Hill forever. What had been in his mind that night? I used to imagine him stopping at the graveyard, perhaps seeing himself buried alive, trapped by responsibilities and obligations he had never asked for. I pictured him turning on heel, heading down the trail away from the colony, walking faster and faster until he was running, running through the woods as though running for his life until he came out on the highway.

  In my mind’s eye I could see him hiking along the deserted stretch of road until he flagged down a truck, hitched a ride, watching the lights of Steeple Hill grow smaller and smaller in the truck’s side mirror before he vanished into the night.

  A writer’s imagination?

  But I wasn’t thinking about Cosmo that evening; my thoughts were preoccupied by an unforeseen problem in my manuscript. When Adam called my name I stopped dead, as startled as though one of the graveyard’s tenants had addressed me.

  Adam stepped out of the shadows of the old church, sketch pad under his arm. For a moment I wondered if he was a ghost. The ghost of himself ten years earlier.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Maybe he heard the wariness in my voice. He wasn’t smiling.

  “I wanted to ask a favor, Kyle,” he said. “I wanted to ask if you would try to be a friend to Brett.”

  Has Adam ever showed you his tattoo? Brett had inquired a day or so earlier. Brett had a knack for suggesting things that got under your skin like fire-ant bites. Now I couldn’t help studying Adam and wondering what his tall, thinly muscled body looked like under the paint-daubed Levi’s and old T-shirt that bore the Chinese character hé for harmony.

  I said neutrally, “What does being a friend to Brett entail?”

  It seemed Adam didn’t know exactly because he didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “He doesn’t have a lot of friends. He doesn’t have any here.”

  “Go figure.”

  I watched Adam’s lean cheek crease in a wry smile. “You’re going by what other people have said, Kyle. You haven’t made any effort to get to know Brett yourself.”

  “Give me a break. I’ve seen him in action.”

  Adam didn’t question what I meant by that. Maybe by now he had learned not to ask the questions he didn’t want to hear answered.

  “He likes you,” Adam said. “He thinks you’re funny.”

  At the face I made, Adam added shortly, “He thinks you’re honest, and that counts with Brett. He hasn’t had a very happy life. He didn’t grow up sheltered and loved.”

  I opened my mouth for rebuttal, but then I had to shut it again. The truth was, I did have a happy life, as lives go. And my childhood had certainly been happy. Maybe my father hadn’t been an active participant, but I had been loved and sheltered by the other adults around me—and Adam had been one of them. So I guess it was payback time.

  Not that I was gracious in defeat.

  “What are you ho
ping for, Adam?” I inquired. “The traditional exchange of Hot Wheels? Or do we slice our fingertips and pledge eternal sisterhood by the sea?”

  Adam snorted. “How about not avoiding us like the plague? In the old days you used to be over at the cottage all the time.”

  I watched the harmony character rise and fall with his chest. That was Zen, this is Tao. “Yeah, well…” I shoved my hands in my pockets and gazed at the graveyard, at the trees standing in black silhouette like barbed wire against the sky. Sunset flushed the headstones and statuary red; the angel poised over Drake Trent’s grave looked apoplectic. “I’ll try, okay?”

  It seemed neither one of us had anything more to add, but we continued to stand there, side by side.

  I thought, If the Fates were kind you would have a paunch by now. You would be losing your hair. At the very least you’d have bad breath.

  I thought that Brett was right. If Adam had laid hands on me on the beach, I would have given him whatever he asked—and probably more than he wanted.

  Adam sighed and said regretfully, “You used to be easy to read.”

  I had to laugh.

  But I wasn’t laughing as I lay awake in the warm night, listening to the crickets and the distant sound of “Moonglow” drifting on the breeze. I pictured Adam and Brett dancing on the terrace in the light of the stone lanterns, or lying in each other’s arms in Drake Trent’s huge sleigh bed, whispering to each other the words lovers do.

  Chapter Five

  “What was Cosmo like?” Brett asked idly one afternoon in July.

  We were sprawled on the sofa watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000 on the new television set Brett had finally talked Adam into buying. Brett was drinking Miller Lite and eating microwave popcorn.

  I pondered his question and shrugged. “He was a genius.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Geniuses are hard to get along with.”

  “He was hard to get along with?”

  I scratched my chest, preferring the movie to Brett’s favorite game of Twenty Questions. “Yes and no. He was an artist. You know what it’s like living with someone who has a—a vocation.”

  “A what?” Brett was laughing at me now. “If you mean he was a bore on the subject, I got you. What was he like as a father?”