Fire and Rain

by Katy Munger

  "He does sound like a special man," I said.

  "He is. He's not doing what he does to feel better about himself. I think he really wants to make the world a better place. How many people can you say that about?"

  “Not enough,” I agreed.

  “Whatever award he was nominated for, he deserves it,” Shirley said as she shook salt and pepper into the pot. She glanced at me. "What award is it, anyway?"

  Was it my imagination or had a trace of suspicion flickered across her face?

  "Oh, the Order of the Longleaf Pine," I improvised, repeating the name of the only statewide award I could think of at that moment. It was highly improbable that an addiction counselor would win such a vaunted award, which was usually reserved for politicians and poets who had brought North Carolina glory. But Shirley did not think it odd.

  "Well, you just tell that Governor Barnes that I said no one deserves it more than Robert. And while you’re at it, could you also tell the Governor that his wife looks trashy with all that blonde hair? She’s not fooling anyone. She’s at least as old as I am.”

  "I will," I lied. I sniffed conspicuously at the smells coming from the boiling pot, but Shirley was done feeding me for the day.

  "I can't let you talk to any of the residents, you know,” she said. “Their identities are confidential. You're lucky I felt like talking to you, because that’s all you're going to get."

  It was a uniquely Eastern North Carolina dismissal. I was disappointed I could not talk to the residents, but trying to get around Shirley felt disrespectful—and that mattered to me more than the rules. She’d been generous with her time and her thoughts about Robert Tinajero. It would have to be enough.

  This left me no choice but to stand and head for the door, reluctantly leaving my would-be lunch behind. I paused at the kitchen door and looked back at Shirley. "Thanks for talking to me today. Any chance…?" My voice trailed off as I stared at the chicken-and-pastry bubbling away on the stove, emitting a delicious-smelling steam that screamed rich broth and wet carbs.

  Shirley looked me up and down with a critical eye. "I think maybe after all that peach cobbler, a salad might do you some good. I recommend the Dine-and-Dash. It’s about three miles down the road and dining and dashing seems to be your speed. They have an all-you-can-eat salad bar."

  Wow. Everyone's a critic. I took my slightly bigger ass out the front door and down the driveway, pondering the mystery of Robert Tinajero. I did not know what he had once been, most likely in addition to being an addict, but what he was today appeared to be absolutely genuine. And if he was that caring and that good, why would any of the residents of The Farm try to get back at him by kidnapping one of his daughters? I had found out what I come to discover, that he was who he said he was, but I had not found out much more. Perhaps it was time to pay him and his wife another visit.

  ●

  Robert Tinajero was in his front yard methodically riding a lawnmower back and forth, leaving fresh strips of close-cropped grass behind him. It was hypnotic watching his progress—but I knew that this might be my only chance to speak to him without his wife standing guard. I stopped my car at the end of their driveway near a corner of the field where he was maneuvering the mower around a mound of rocks. The sun was hot on the back of my neck which, contrary to popular opinion, was not already red.

  “You again,” he said, cutting off the mower and staring down at me.

  Wow. He could fit equal parts disdain, suspicion, and curiosity in two simple words like nobody I had ever met.

  "Roxy hired me to help find Candy,” I said, trying not to sound apologetic.

  “I know. She told me. Are you getting anywhere?”

  “Not really,” I admitted reluctantly.

  He climbed down from the mower and stood close to me, his muscled frame blocking the sun. Sunbeams seemed to radiate off him like lightning. His expression softened. “I heard the club owner who got killed was your friend.”

  “Good friend,” I explained.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Real friends are hard to come by.”

  “They are indeed.” We stared at each other for a moment. He had an intense gaze that pulled you in rather than intimidating you.

  "I need to talk to you without your wife present,” I said.

  “Well then, you better talk fast. Soon as she sees you, she’ll go full throttle, guaranteed. I don’t think she likes you much.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I’m reserving judgment.” He grinned.

  “Roxy’s in jail. She went Full Metal Jacket on some police officers.”

  “I know.” He shook his head. “She’s a hothead. Nobody’s going to argue with that.”

  “You’re not going to go see her?”

  He stared at his house. “I don’t want to stray far from here.”

  I understood. He was waiting for the kidnappers to call with instructions and he wanted to be ready.

  “What about your wife? She’s not planning to go see her?”

  “My wife thinks Roxy needs to learn a lesson and that a night or two in jail might do her some good. I don’t agree but, to be honest, Lavonia and Roxy aren’t that different in temperament and I’m not anxious to provoke my wife.” He was silent for a moment, then asked, “Have you uncovered anything to lead us closer to finding Candy? Roxy said you were working on it and I’ll be honest—I don’t have a lot of faith in what law enforcement has done so far.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I haven’t. But I’m going to keep trying. That’s why I’m here. I think you’re hiding something from me and I need to know what it is. I can’t find Candy without knowing the whole truth."

  He was silent, looking me up and down, as if trying to gauge whether I was worthy of the truth. Normally, I have no problem being judged. I can take or leave just about anyone. But this time I found myself hoping with all my might that I would pass his muster. It took less than ten seconds for him to decide he could trust me, but it felt more like half an hour. "The girls aren’t mine," he said softly.

  The afternoon stopped in its tracks. The air hung heavy with heat and the calls of song birds from the nearby forest chimed along the edge of the cleared field. It felt as if the whole case could hang on his next few words.

  "When I first met Lavonia, she’d been left by Candy’s father, some drunk who chose her for the shock effect then abandoned her once the hard work of being a parent kicked in."

  So Robert Tinajero was a rescuer. That was a shame. Rescuers are never attracted to me. I’m too damn stubborn to admit I need help.

  "Who was the father?" I asked. "Could he be involved in Candy's kidnapping?"

  Robert shook his head. "He's dead. No surprise there. Lavonia met him at a bar where she danced and he worked as a bouncer. She knew when she moved in with him that he was a bad bet and she'd be lucky to get a couple years out of him. He disappeared after a year and a half, and the next she heard, he was serving a ten-year term at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. He died about eight years ago. But don't tell her I told you about him," he warned me. "She'll kill me if she knows I told you."

  I stood under the burning sun, trying to do the math.

  “They were together for a year and a half?" I asked. "How did they have two kids in a year and a half? I thought Roxy was older than Candy?"

  "She is," Robert said, evading my eyes. "She's not actually Candy’s sister. She's Candy's first cousin. Lavonia has a sister in St. Pete drinking herself to death. She gave up Roxy a few months after she was born. My wife could not stand the thought of Roxy being handed over to strangers, or the state, so she took her in. She raised Roxy as her own daughter, even when she had no help.” He was silent for a moment. "I think maybe that's why her first husband left her. I think he figured that was too much exotic for him.”

  “Is Roxy’s birth mother a little person, too?”

  “Yes. And before you ask, I have no idea who Roxy's father is or what he looked like. The girls don�
�t know about anything about their real fathers. They look at me as their father and that's that."

  “Don’t you think you ought to tell them?” I asked.

  “Do you know what it might do to Roxy if she found out her own mother gave her away and Candy’s not her sister? That would take away the only thing she has in this world that softens her edges. We’re all she’s got. Don’t you think she’s angry enough as it is?”

  “Yes, I do.” I had no appetite to argue that point. Besides, I had an even more difficult question to ask him. "What did you mean when you said that Lavonia met her first husband at a club where she worked?" If he was saying what I thought he was saying, it confirmed what Bobby D. had said about Lavonia Tinajero having once been a stripper.

  His face flushed a deep red underneath his autumn tan. "I can't tell you the answer to that."

  A sharp crack echoed over the field. I knew that sound well: it was a screen door slamming because someone was in a hurry. Lavonia had spotted us and roared out the front door of her house like a heat-seeking missile, ready to intervene in our conversation. Either she had a jealous streak or she was not in the mood to air their secrets. I had to work fast. "You don't have to tell me," I told him. "I figured it out myself. She used to dance for a living, too. That's why she’s so ashamed of what the girls are doing. She never wanted them to follow in her footsteps. Why did she let them?”

  "We had no choice," he answered, sounding angry. "People who have it easy have no idea what it's like to have nowhere else to turn. Lavonia began dancing because she was young and that's what the women in her family did. It was the only way they could make decent money. About eight years ago, when Robert Jr. was diagnosed as schizophrenic on top of everything else, we knew medication alone would not do the trick. We couldn’t control his outbursts once he got older. We had to find a place that would take him, that could keep him from hurting himself or others, but still give him a life with some freedom in it. And when we heard how much that would cost? Well, the girls had cousins up north dancing who were making serious money and they insisted on following in their footsteps. We could not stop them." His voice dropped. "We did not try to stop them. Because the truth is that none of us had any other way to pay for what Robbie’s care costs us."

  "I'm not judging you," I said. "And believe me when I tell you that I know what it's like to have no other choices. I wasn't exactly raised at the Ritz."

  Lavonia was halfway down the driveway, her expression furious. She trundled toward us like an angry groundhog. I only had another thirty seconds alone with Robert.

  “Do the girls know your wife used to dance?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “No. But if they do, they hide it from us.”

  I didn’t think they knew. But I was not about to be the one to tell them.

  "When did your wife get religion?" I asked him.

  "A few years after we married. My wife needs something to believe in. When she sets her mind to something, she doesn't give up. She made her mind to believe and that was that."

  "And when did she make you join her?" I asked, guessing that she had been the driving force behind his conversion to fundamentalism.

  He looked away, his face impassive as he watched his wife draw closer. "I believe what I believe because I choose to," he said. "Either you understand that or you don’t. I don't have to justify my beliefs to you."

  "Fair enough," I said.

  And then Lavonia was upon us.

  "What are you doing back here?" she demanded. For such a short woman, she had a big presence. She was taking me on, toe-to-toe. I pitied anyone who got on her bad side. But I also knew that her antagonism came from a lifetime of being judged by others for what she looked like and I was not going to condemn her for it.

  "I'm trying to do my job and find out who took your daughter," I told her. “And if you really wanted to find Candy, you would tell me the truth. Otherwise, you're just going through the motions. God help you if that’s the case. I can't imagine a mother abandoning a daughter to her fate simply to keep the world from knowing a few secrets no one cares about anyway."

  I was just getting started, but Lavonia's face stopped me from going further. She had heard what I said.

  "I'm sorry," I told them both. "But I do want to solve this case and it's not fair for you to ask me to do so and then not tell me what I need to know."

  A look passed between them. I could not quite figure out what it meant. Then Robert gave his wife a slight nod. "She's been asking about the girls," he told her. "I let her know who Candy’s real father was and that Roxy was your niece. I had to."

  Lavonia turned away from me, hiding her expression. "Come on in, then," she said over her shoulder. "Lunch is ready. I made chicken-and-pastry. You might as well join us. I'll tell you everything you need to know about the girls."

  The truth plus the chicken-and-pastry I had been denied earlier? Sometimes, the Universe rewards you for stubbornness.

  ●

  An hour later, belly full, I left the Tinajeros behind and headed back toward Durham, wondering if I had learned anything that might possibly help me and whether I had, in fact, been given the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I doubted it. Lavonia had told me the same story her husband had revealed and then gone a step further, offering me the details that he had left unsaid. Lavonia admitted she’d had Candy with a worthless piece of shit, though she referred to him as her first husband and made it sound as if he was simply some sort of romantic troubadour who could not settle down. Soon after giving birth to Candy, and disgusted with her sister’s lack of maternal instincts, she had adopted Roxy. Not long after that, Candy’s father, aka the worthless piece of shit she had supported, in addition to her two daughters, left her high and dry for a cocktail waitress who worked at a bar down at the coast near the Cherry Point Marine base. When Lavonia met Robert soon after, he had challenges of his own—an ex-girlfriend who had died of a drug overdose, leaving behind a very young son, a son who had been fathered by Robert in a moment of carelessness. The boy had come to live with his father out of necessity. After that, I had to read between the lines a little but I thought I now understood what had brought them together. Robert had taken his responsibilities as a father so seriously that Lavonia had started to fall in love with him for it. Soon after, height differences aside, they had discovered that they had much in common. They shared the same hopes and fears for their children, and it had seemed natural for them to join forces. Though they did not say so outright, it also sounded as if the religion had kicked in about that time in their lives. The inflexible beliefs of their church had led them to marry and to blend their families into one.

  Which meant, I realized, that Robert Jr. was not Lavonia’s son. Nor was he a blood relative of the girls. Yet Candy and Roxy clearly loved their stepbrother so much that they were willing to put up with drunks and the sleazy world of strip clubs to make sure he was safe and well-cared for. They had big hearts under their sequined push-up bras.

  Yet for all I had learned from the Tinajeros, I could not shake the feeling that something had been left unspoken. Part of this feeling came from Robert’s jumpiness during lunch. Lavonia had seemed calm, if frosty, but Robert had constantly looked out the windows, at the telephone, or at the clock on the dining room wall, as if he were waiting for something. Had the kidnappers called again? He and his wife both denied this suggestion vociferously. But fear hung in the air like an apparition, fed by still more secrets left unsaid, and I had not been able to learn more. When I pressed them on who might have taken Candy and suggested it might have been someone connected to their lives, Lavonia grew impatient with me, repeating what Robert had told me in a snippy voice: her ex-husband was dead, her sister too drunk and disorganized to be a threat, and she knew of no one else in her past who might be seeking revenge by kidnapping her daughter. What little family she had left from her generation was supportive and had never mentioned her past to Candy and Rox
y. No one else from her past even knew she had moved to North Carolina after leaving dancing behind.

  If she felt shame at the hypocrisy of having once been an exotic dancer while judging her own daughters for following in her footsteps, she did not show it. Lavonia Tinajero appeared to possess the ability to ignore what she did not want to acknowledge while feeling justified in pushing her sanitized reality onto others.

  I thought of Robert Tinajero as I drove back toward Raleigh. His wedding vows to Lavonia had no doubt changed his life forever. He had gone from being a single man to having to support four other human beings virtually overnight. Yet I could feel no resentment from him. He’d said little during our lunch conversation, methodically demolishing a plate of chicken-and-pastry. I tried to match him fork-for-fork, but in the end, like the slow but steady tortoise, he’d left me behind. He had to do an awful lot of physical work, I thought to myself, to stay in shape while eating like that.

  As I drove toward home, my mind wandered back to the lunch Lavonia had served, a preoccupation of mine born from those periods of hunger I had gone through as a child. Consumed with memories of her cooking, at first I did not notice the motorcycle following me down the country road that led me to I-64. It was only when I slowed down at a crossroads that I realized I was being followed. Doubling back, I returned to the convenience store I had just passed and parked, heading inside to buy a Red Bull to revive myself from my caloric overload. The motorcycle that had been following me slowed as it passed the store, but did not stop. Then it accelerated as it made a quick U-turn and roared past again on the way back toward the Tinajero’s house. It was a stripped-down ape hanger, handlebars stretching absurdly toward the sky, with a biker of considerable girth perched on the seat leaning low and back, a minimalist leather helmet covering his head like half of a deflated basketball. It was impossible to see little more than that he was heavyset with a dark Fu Manchu mustache before he was gone in a thunderous roar. I was left standing on the front porch of the country store, wondering why there were bikers watching the Tinajeros and why this one had decided to follow me—and then given up. As I took a seat in a rocking chair to enjoy my Red Bull and think it over, my phone rang. I did not recognize the number, but I was desperate enough for a lead to answer.