That got him focused—fast. “Wow, that’s good thinking, thanks,” he said.
“I’m not sure you’re going to want me with you in the school office, though,” Shayla said. “I think I’ll just lurk in the hall.”
“What?” Pete said, alarmed as he passed the In-N-Out Burger. “Why? No! Please, I need you in there with me. I need your brilliant writer’s brain to come up with all the questions that I know I’ll miss.”
Now the smile she gave him was full power and beautiful. “Okay, but how about if you go in first. That way you get to wow Mrs. S with—” she made a circular motion in his direction “—that magic, without me there to confuse the issue.”
“This magic?” he repeated with a laugh, although in truth, he relaxed a little. This was more like it. She was not immune.
Still, she gave him her now-familiar chiding look. “Lieutenant. The Navy definitely designed these uniforms for a very obvious reason.”
“Yeah, to keep us from being too hot.” As he approached the turnoff to the high school parking lot, he heard the words he’d said and winced.
Shayla was laughing again, her pretty eyes dancing. “Well, that’s a giant fail on the part of the Navy if the goal of these uniforms is to keep sailors from being too hot.”
“Yeah, that came out wrong. I meant, to keep us from getting too hot. In the, you know, heat from the summer sun…? On the deck of a ship, in the middle of the ocean…? Not a lot of shade when you’re crossing the equator.”
“That must be amazing,” she said, doing that soft-eyed thing that he loved. “To look around and not see land in any direction…”
“Yeah, it’s amazing for about an hour,” he said as he waited for a break in the traffic to make his turn. “But when you’re out there, away from home for six months, it gets way less amazing, really fast.”
“But isn’t it kind of common, for a sailor, to be out there, on a ship, for months at a time?” she asked. “You could’ve joined the Army.”
“Nah, I wanted to be a SEAL,” he told her. “But that’s how they get you. You can’t be a SEAL until you’ve been in for a set amount of time, and you can’t be in the Navy for more than a nanosecond without going out on a WestPac—that’s six months in the Western Pacific. It’s not as bad as it sounds, because you almost always start from Hawaii, which has its perks. But you definitely don’t just join the Navy and show up at BUD/S—that’s what we call SEAL training. It stands for Basic Underwater Demolition slash SEAL.”
“And that’s where you work?” she asked. “As a teacher.”
“Instructor,” he said, as he pulled into an empty space right by the school’s front door. The lights were already on in the front office. “Yeah, that’s what I do.”
She nodded as she opened the door and picked up her handbag.
As they met on the sidewalk in front of his truck, she handed him the file with the photos and said, “I’ll linger in the lobby for just a few minutes, looking at the school art display.”
They went inside, and it smelled exactly the same as his old high school, a few miles down the coast.
“Don’t linger too long,” he said.
Maddie saw that Great-Aunt Hiroko was awake and already working in her garden as Dingo slowly drove past in the early-morning light.
“Is that her?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Maddie said.
Dingo was amused. “How on earth can you tell?”
The old woman was wearing long sleeves, gloves, and a giant sun hat—and with her head down, her face was obscured. Still it was Hiroko, without a doubt.
“Japanese women—at least in my family—can be kinda insane about staying out of the sun,” Maddie told him as he used an empty driveway to turn around, so they could troll slowly back and see the yard from a different perspective. “It used to really piss off Lisa, back in Palm Springs, when someone new at the nursing home took my great-grandmother out into the garden without an umbrella, or even a hat. They’d be all Doesn’t the warm sun feel nice against your skin? and not understand why Gram’d get so upset.”
Gram didn’t remember much, but her insistence on staying in the shade had been one of the very last things to go—even long after she’d lost her ability to form words. Maddie still remembered the look on her mother’s face when they’d come to visit and found Gram sitting peacefully in the sun.
“She’s just an empty shell now,” Lisa had said at the time, but Gram’s shell lived on, while both her own daughter and now Lisa, her granddaughter, were dead and gone.
It was no fucking fair.
“There, lookit, love, that’s the shower thingy where your parents first met,” Dingo said.
And God, yes, there it was—a brightly painted white stall made of wooden fencing, attached to the back of the little house. Maddie could see the showerhead and part of the piping—both ancient gray metal—over the top of the scalloped wood.
Last night, she’d read aloud that stupid story that “Dad” had sent via his girlfriend, Shayla. God, she’d felt stupid—two months in, and she hadn’t realized he had a girlfriend, although why he’d thought he had to hide that fact from her, she couldn’t even begin to guess.
At first Maddie had mocked it—this stupid story of how he’d met Great-Aunt Hiroko and Lisa in San Diego, after living on some dumbass island in the middle of nowhere—even though she’d been secretly moved. Not only had her mother sprung vividly to life again on those pages and pages and pages that he’d written, but this was a story that Maddie had never heard. Still, after the first few paragraphs, she’d turned her head to ask Dingo, “Can you imagine my stupid father with dreadlocks?”
They’d been lying together in the back of the car, parked at one of Dingo’s favorite boondocking sites as she’d read the story on the glowing screen of her phone. He had built a little wall between them with some of his camping gear—her being fifteen really freaked him out.
But he wasn’t scornful in the least. “I’d look like a dolt in dreadlocks,” he said wistfully. “Takes a certain kind of cool to do it right, and yeah, actually, I can imagine him. He could pull it off. Keep going—this is good.”
So Maddie’d read him the entire long thing. And later, after Dingo had fallen asleep, she’d lain awake, staring up at the car’s stained and drooping cloth ceiling, thinking about Lisa and her father as teenagers, and hungering—which was stupid—to know more.
She’d finally fallen asleep, but had woken up way too soon.
One of the worst parts of boondocking, at least in Maddie’s opinion, was the lack of shades to cover the car windows. Not only was that weird when it came to privacy, but when the sun came up, the sun came up. Combine that with having to drive to find a bathroom, and the end result was to be wide awake—even if bleary-eyed—at oh-my-god-it’s-too-early o’clock.
Every morning.
But Dingo was as congenial as ever, even if he was starting to take on a definite too-many-days-without-a-shower funk, and he’d immediately agreed to drive by the beach, to see if GAH—Great-Aunt Hiroko—was awake.
“It’s a little weird that we were planning to come out here today,” he said now, as instead of passing the house again, he stopped at the side of the road, “and then, boom, your da sends that story. We should be ready to bounce—I mean, since he knows her, he might’ve told her you’ve gone walkabout….That is, if you still even want to stop.”
Maddie nodded. “Yeah, I do. But we’ll take precautions.”
Before reading the story, she hadn’t realized that “Dad” knew GAH. It was entirely possible he’d called the old lady and asked her to keep an eye out for Maddie. Now, she took out her phone and scrolled through her contacts to Dingo’s cell number.
“You can do a pretty good American accent,” she said as she backspaced over everything but the D, and then added an A and a D. “If she says anything about you sounding different, tell her you have a cold. And if she asks you anything that you can’t answer, sign off
fast. Pretend that you’ve got another call coming in from your whatchamacallit. CO or XO or whatever.”
Dingo wasn’t happy. “Aaah, love, you’re asking for trouble. What if they talk regularly?”
“If they’re still that close, then why haven’t we visited her since I’ve moved out here?” Maddie argued as she hit the button that would call Dingo’s phone. The old woman in the garden had noticed the stopped car and had pulled herself up to her feet, holding up a hand to further shade her eyes as she looked out at them. “I’m going in, pretending that I’m already on the phone with ‘Dad.’ I’ll put you on speaker so you can say hi—and that’ll distort your voice even more. Remember, he’s a Navy SEAL. He talks in short sentences, with lots of stupid Navy code: SpecGrooFifty-Eight. XO, CO, SEAL Team Four Hundred. NavPacOpIntel, DefConFifteen. Channel Tom Clancy.”
Dingo looked both worried and skeptical as his pants pocket started to ring, but Maddie got out of the car, closing the door with a slam, her own phone to her ear.
“Hello, this is your father,” Dingo said into her ear, his vowels ridiculously flat as she waved gaily to GAH.
“Yes, Dad,” she said loud enough to be overheard as she walked up the path. “Yup, we’re here, the address you had was right—and she’s home.” She raised her voice even more. “Aunt Hiroko? I’m Maddie. Your great-niece. Lisa’s daughter?”
“I know who you are.” The elderly woman had already taken off her work gloves and now she unlatched the gate. “I was sorry to hear about your mother. I wish someone had called me.”
For once, Maddie didn’t try to hide the rush of tears that sprang to her eyes. Still, she forced what she hoped was a brave smile. “I’m sorry—it was…It’s been hard,” she admitted. “And Dad and I are still feeling our way—working on figuring things out. Right, Dad?” She spoke into the phone, directly over Dingo, who was muttering, “Self-help book much?”
“Ten-four roger that!” he said, again with the flat vowels.
“I’m going to put you on speaker in a minute, Dad,” she told him, “after I explain why we’re here.” Shit, she’d said we and Hiroko’s gaze flickered over to Dingo’s car, where his shadowy shape was sitting behind the steering wheel. But he was watching, and he hunkered down a bit so the old lady wouldn’t be able to see that he, too, was talking on his phone.
Hiroko, meanwhile, had returned her impatient gaze to Maddie. In books and movies, old people’s eyes were always filled with patience and wisdom and warmth, but Hiroko’s were both cool and broadcasting a very clear tick tock.
“We’re doing a project in school,” Maddie lied, “in history class, on the way Japanese people were put in camps here in California during World War Two.” Lisa had told her that Hiroko had been obsessed with that historical era.
And sure enough, the old woman took the bait. Her chin came up. “They weren’t camps, they were prisons,” she said. “It was mass internment of an entire group of people—and many of us weren’t Japanese, we were Americans. Japanese Americans, yes, but Americans. I was born here. I should have been a citizen—but until 1952 there were laws that restricted Americans like me from doing things like owning property.”
“Seriously?” Maddie couldn’t help herself. “I mean, yeah, wow, that’s great information. Thanks. Dad thought you’d be a good source, since you know so much about it.” She spoke into the phone. “Good call, Dad.”
“I don’t just know it—I lived it, in Manzanar, a prison camp about four hundred miles north of here,” Hiroko said with a fierceness that would’ve been fascinating to explore—if Maddie had had the time to hang out without worrying that the idiot-asshole drug dealer who was actively hunting her down wasn’t about to find and end her.
“You were right,” Maddie said into her phone. “I think Aunt Hiroko can help me with this project.” She smiled at GAH. “We’re supposed to find primary source material, particularly artifacts. I don’t have a lot of time right now—school starts soon—but I’d love for my group to interview you and—” She cut herself off as if she’d been interrupted on the phone, then added, “Yeah, yeah, Dad, I know, I know.” Back to GAH as she punched the speaker button and held out the phone. The screen clearly read Dad. “He has to get going to work—you know, over at the Navy base—but he wanted to say hello. Dad, you’re on speaker! Say hello!”
“Hello!” Dingo’s voice came out of the phone distorted but definitely male. “Thank you so much for helping my little Maddie-kins!”
Oh, ugh, Dingo, really?
“I haven’t yet said that I would,” Hiroko pointed out, and everyone froze. Well, everyone being Maddie and Dingo. Hiroko calmly bent down and picked up a glove that she’d dropped.
“Oh, well,” Dingo started to say, and Maddie quickly turned off the speaker before he could start stammering and blow this worse than she’d already apparently blown it.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said, “I know you need to go. I’ll talk to you later. Love you, mwah.” She cut the connection and slipped her phone into her back pocket, and then met GAH’s unwavering cool gaze. Clearly, she’d done this wrong, coming in all happy and shit. Now, she tried to match the old woman’s quiet dignity. “I apologize for assuming—”
Hiroko cut her off. “Who’s your friend in the car?”
“Oh,” Maddie said. “He’s just, um…a friend. Who sometimes gives me a ride when I need one.”
“I’m making breakfast. Scrambled eggs. Call him—use your phone—and invite him in,” the old woman said.
If she did that, he’d come up as a very visible Dad on her screen. “Oh,” Maddie said. “No, I’ll just…” She shouted. “Dingo! Hey, Ding! Want breakfast?”
Hiroko shook her head in disapproval, then started for the kitchen door as Dingo came galloping eagerly up the path from the car. “Hurry up,” the old woman said dourly, “or you’ll be late for school.”
That emphasis on school was not accidental. It was obvious that Hiroko wasn’t even remotely fooled by any of this. Maddie knew she shouldn’t go inside. She should grab Dingo and pull him back into the car and make him drive away.
Still, scrambled eggs! She and Dingo had just a few dollars left between them, and the idea of free scrambled eggs was too mouthwatering to turn down.
Besides, if GAH called “Dad”—even if she excused herself and went into the bathroom to secretly use the phone—Maddie would know it, and there’d be plenty of time to get away.
When Shayla opened the door, Mrs. Sullivan was using the phone back in the high school vice principal’s inner office. Peter stood waiting, his hat tucked up under his arm, file folder open on the long, room-dividing counter in front of him.
Nice arms.
Trust Harry to pop into her head and mention that.
Yeah, because it was weird, Harry pointed out. Nice arms?
She had no idea why Peter had said that, but he was talking to her, so shh.
“She knew Fiona immediately, from the photo,” the SEAL reported as Shay closed the door behind her.
They were alone in the room—aside from Mrs. S, who’d left that inner office door open a crack, and Harry, who was invisible to all of the uncrazy nonwriters in the room.
“Apparently there’s been some drama this past week,” Peter continued. “Fiona was living here in San Diego with her aunt, but there was a fire at her condo, and…apparently, she was shipped back home to her parents.”
“To Sacramento?” Shayla asked. That was where the girl had said she was from on her Facebook profile.
“I don’t know.” He couldn’t hide the worry in his eyes. “Mrs. Sullivan didn’t say it in so many words, but I could tell from her attitude that Fiona had been a problem for the school.”
“I’m pretty sure every child in this school is a problem for Mrs. S,” Shayla whispered reassuringly, reaching out to pat his arm—nice arms—which made him smile even as she shushed Harry and snatched her hand back, fast.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But still, a fire
…?”
“Fires happen,” Shay told him.
“After which Fiona was shipped home.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s a budding arsonist,” she argued. “If her aunt’s condo burned, where’s she going to live? She may have gone home simply because she no longer has a place to stay.”
“Okay. You’re right.” Peter nodded. “But bottom line, Fiona’s gone. I find it hard to believe it’s a coincidence that Maddie’s gone missing at the same time that her only friend left town.”
“That’s probably not a coincidence,” Shayla agreed. “Even if it was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because remember, Fiona’s not Maddie’s only friend. There’s also Dingo. It’s possible that the emotional distress of Fiona leaving combined with Maddie knowing that if you found out about Dingo, you’d forbid her from dating him—as any parent would…”
“Well, that’s a first!” Mrs. Sullivan interrupted them as she came huffing out toward the front desk, looking irritated. Of course, the default expression on her Scandinavian-featured, long-suffering, ruddy-cheeked pioneer-woman face was supreme annoyance—she accessorized it with her relentless Margaret Thatcher–inspired wardrobe and the fading blond hair that she wore twisted up into a bun. “The father refused to speak to you,” she told Peter indignantly.
And okay. That was worth getting irritated about. Unless Shay’d misunderstood. “Fiona’s father,” she clarified, and Mrs. S looked hard at her.
“Can I help you, Mrs. DeSoto?”
“It’s Shayla Whitman,” Shay corrected her for the seven millionth time, reminding her, “The boys have their father’s name, which I don’t share.”
“Shayla’s helping me find Maddie,” Peter said, whereupon Mrs. S gave Shay a different kind of look. A knowing look—like the help she was providing was the naked, orgasmic kind.
Some Kind of Hero Page 11