by Todd Borg
We heard a car pull up the drive.
“That will be Hannah,” Ryan said. “It’s about time. Her friend Tammy picked her up, but who knows who will be dropping her off. I better go out and see where’s she’s been.”
Ryan and I walked down to the kitchen. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
We heard the distant sound of the side door opening, and Hannah came down the hall.
“Sorry, I’m late,” she announced. She was a plump young woman with stringy brown hair. She carried two grocery bags.
“I thought you’d be back a long time ago,” Ryan said.
“We saw our friends Sue and John at the market, and they asked us to stop by for a quick visit, and I knew that you’d be here with Lily, so I took that liberty. I hope you don’t mind.”
She set down the groceries and turned to look at Ryan. Her look was bold and Ryan averted his eyes.
“What if I’d gotten a call and had to leave?” he said.
“Then Lily would have been fine by herself for a few minutes. You worry too much.”
Up close I saw that her lipstick was smeared, and her snug black top had been tucked in so hastily that it pulled to the side, and one of her lacy black bra straps showed in the neck opening.
She looked at me. “Hi, I’m Hannah.”
I nodded. “Owen.”
Ryan held his head bent forward. He shook it back and forth. Without looking up, he said, “Leave the groceries. I’ll put them away. And I’ll take care of Lily tonight.”
“Okay, good,” Hannah said. “There’s a show I wanted to watch.” She left and went down the stairs.
“Good nannies are hard to find,” I said.
“It’s been a nightmare,” Ryan said. “I can’t count how many nannies we’ve had. I pay her well. She has her own apartment in the basement. I give her rides when she needs them. Why can’t she visit her friends on her off-hours?”
“When she started, did you explain what you expected?”
“Sure. I told her she was to look after Lily. Get her off to school when it starts in a couple of weeks, be here when she comes home from school. Help with the household. Like that.”
“What about boundaries, specific job description, hours you expect her to be here each week.”
“You mean spell out every detail? Why should I do that? Everybody knows what a nanny needs to do. Help raise a child.”
I figured I’d already made my point, so I didn’t respond.
Ryan continued, “If someone told me every detail of how I was supposed to do my job, it would be like a straightjacket. I can’t be creative, innovative, and thoughtful about my work if someone is standing around with a clipboard checking off each item as I do it. But of course, you’re thinking that a nanny’s job isn’t supposed to be about creativity or innovation.”
“I think a nanny could benefit from creativity as much as any other job. The difference is that when it comes to work, there are two types of people. You are the type who throws yourself into your work, because that is what makes it worth doing, that is how you have self-respect.
“Hannah is the type who doesn’t care. Clock in, put in your time - or in her case, don’t even put in your time - clock out, get your pay, and laugh at your employer’s gullibility behind his or her back.”
“Do you think I should fire her? It’s so hard to find nannies.”
“Tell me this. If a stranger approached Hannah in the produce aisle or at a bar and chatted her up, asking questions about her employer, would she deflect the questions in respect for your privacy?”
Ryan lifted his head and stared at me.
I continued. “What if that stranger bought her a few drinks, and then made her a lucrative offer. Here’s a hundred dollars to start. I’m interested in information about Ryan Lear’s work. Just photocopy whatever you can find. You show the papers to me, I’ll pay one hundred dollars for each piece of paper I keep.”
“And you think this because she was late with the groceries?”
“No. Anyone can be late for anything and have a legitimate reason for it. I think it because she doesn’t respect you. Why, I don’t know. But her actions tonight showed contempt. I think she would enjoy selling you out.”
“God, you are scaring me,” he said.
“The person who killed the squirrel scares me.”
“This will be her last night here,” he said.
FOURTEEN
“Let’s say a person did approach Hannah,” Ryan said. “How would we find out who it is?”
“We start with a basic question. Of all the people you know as friends or business colleagues or people you bump into in the course of your day, which of them might want to harm you?”
“I’ve already asked myself that many times. I don’t know. I’ve had no fights with anyone. No one hates me that I know of. No arguments or disagreements, petty or serious.”
“Employees who dislike you?” I said.
“I think they mostly like me.”
“Not Hannah,” I said. “Before tonight, would you have said that about her?”
“I see your point,” Ryan said.
“Your company has competitors. Which of them are hurt most by CBT’s success?”
“None of them. The need for effective drugs is never-ending. No matter how successful we get, it’s unlikely to substantially reduce the demand for the drugs that our competitors produce.”
“Who benefits from Eli’s death?”
“You mean, financially? His father inherited. I called him. He said that our forty-percent investor asked about purchasing the stock. Eli’s dad told him no way, that if he ever sold, it would be to me.”
“You said you were your investor’s biggest irritation. He wants controlling interest in CBT?”
“All major investors want controlling interest. That’s just good business.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Preston Laurence was Stanford B-School, eight or ten years older than me. He’s super wealthy. Started out writing software, sold his company, then switched to investing. He told me once, why should he ride his own successive waves of entrepreneurship, when he can ride the waves of dozens of successful entrepreneurs at the same time.”
“You ever have any disagreements with him?”
Ryan looked into space, then shook his head. “No, we’ve always gotten along really well.”
“I thought you said that he wanted you to build a hypobaric chamber in the Bay Area instead of up on the mountain.”
“Sure, but that’s not a disagreement.”
“It’s the kind of thing I’m talking about,” I said.
“That was minor. That was just business strategy talk. It’s like the times he’s offered to buy more stock. Ten percent from each of us. His goal to have a majority stake in CBT wouldn’t drive him to destroy me.”
“Consider this scenario. What if Preston Laurence did have control over your company? Would he do things differently?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” Ryan frowned.
“Why? Does he think he could make more money if things were run his way?”
“Preston always thinks he can make more money his way. And he’s probably right. But I’m doing well for him. His investment has probably doubled in value in the two years since he bought in.”
“Anyone else like Preston who you get along with, but who may differ with you about how to do things?”
“Preston, nanny Hannah... Maybe everybody.”
“Okay. I’d like to meet the people you are closest to.”
Ryan’s face was immobile. “Since Eli died and Jeanie disappeared, I’m not close to anybody other than Lily.”
“Your colleagues at work, your important employees, any people you see socially. Preston Laurence. Eli’s girlfriend. I want to get a feel for how people feel about you, respond to you.”
“Mostly, they don’t respond to me. I’m a cipher. A basement video gamer. If I weren’t running a company that is grossing cl
ose to a hundred million, nobody would even know my name.”
“Let’s not worry about how popular you are. What is the best way for me to meet these people? Can you set up appointments for me in the Bay Area?”
Ryan shook his head. “I don’t think so. Some of them, like my closest, most trusted employees, are up here, anyway. Eli’s girlfriend is so grief stricken, she hasn’t left his house in the Tahoe Keys since he died. She wouldn’t even go to his funeral. Preston is usually at his ranch in the foothills.”
“Then you could call them, and I’ll go to wherever they are.”
“I don’t know what I would say. I’d get it wrong. They wouldn’t see you. Or they’d be so stiff you wouldn’t learn anything anyway.”
“Then here’s another idea. You’ll have a party. Invite them all.”
“No. No way would that work. I’ve never had a party. No one would come.” Ryan was adamant.
“Sure it will work. We’ll hire a band, and have it catered, and put that info on the invitation. We’ll invite your neighbors up and down this street. When you send out the email invite, publicly copy everyone else. When they all see who might possibly come, they will show up just to be seen, just to network. Even if they don’t care about a party at Ryan Lear’s house, the fact of everyone else possibly coming will make it a big deal.”
Ryan was shaking his head continuously. “It won’t work.”
“Yes, it will.”
FIFTEEN
Street and Lily were still sitting side-by-side on the bed, leaning back against the headboard. Street held the book about Proust. To Lily’s side was the laptop I’d seen her carrying around earlier. Spot was on the carpet at the side of the bed. After the scare and the turmoil and the tears, it was good to see Lily next to Street, happy and content. They looked up.
“Proust is pretty exciting, huh?” I said, looking at the book.
“Well, we talked about ‘Remembrance’ for a bit, but Lily is more interested in horses.”
“I had a good idea,” Lily said. “I showed her the website about Heat.”
“The one put together by the guy we met on the trail,” I said.
Street nodded, then turned to Lily. “How many questions do you think you asked me about Heat?”
“A hundred?” Lily said.
“Sounds about right.” Street grinned. “Will he ever be caught, and where will Heat go, and can he find enough food, and do I think that anyone could ever ride Heat.”
“I’ve got a book in the car with a really cool painting that shows a horse,” I said. “Do you want to see it, Lily?”
She nodded.
I went outside, waved at Deputy Praeger, went to the Jeep and got the Matisse monograph out from under the seat.
Back inside, I sat next to them and opened the book.
“These are all paintings by a Frenchman named Henri Matisse. One of the best things he did came near the end of his life when he was ill and had to stay in bed. He had his assistants paint color on paper, then Matisse cut them up with a scissors and arranged the pieces into pictures.”
I flipped through the color plates near the end of the book. Lily stared, instantly focused on the bold, colorful images.
“Like painting, only with colored paper,” she said.
“Yeah.” I turned to an image that showed a strong graphic of a horse rendered in hot magenta.
“This one is my favorite. It’s called, ‘The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown.’”
“There’s the horse!” Lily said, pointing.
“Yeah. And this fun decorative stuff above the horse symbolizes the rider.”
“It looks like the rider is a girl and this is her skirt.” Lily said.
“It is. You have a good eye. And the bright yellow and green area down in the opposite corner symbolizes a clown.”
“It doesn’t look like a clown,” Lily said, shaking her head. “It looks like another skirt.”
“There is more than one way to show a clown,” I said.
“A round red nose?”
“That’s a good way. But here’s another. Think about what a clown does.”
Lily thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Sure, you do. A clown makes you laugh and have fun.”
Lily pointed to the bright colors in the corner of the picture. “And these colors are fun. Like a clown.”
Street looked at me, raised her eyebrows.
“I know,” I said to her. “Smart kid.”
Lily pretended that she didn’t hear us.
Lily looked at more pictures in the book, then came back to The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown. “This is my favorite, too,” she said. “The shapes for the two people are almost the same. But a little difference in the color makes one a rider and one a clown.”
Ryan came into the room.
“Time for bed, Lily.”
“Can I make a copy of this painting for my wall?”
“We can do that in the morning,” Ryan said. “Better yet, you can draw a picture like it.”
“Can Spot stay with me?”
“Yes,” I said. “We’ll leave the doors open. He can sleep here for awhile and then someplace else if he likes.”
Street and I said goodnight to her as Ryan gave her a kiss.
Ryan caught up with us in the hall. “Thank you. All her life, she’s only had me or a nanny to read to her. I have no friends like that, people who would show a book to a kid, no one else to connect with her at bedtime.” Ryan stood there, awkward.
“You’re welcome, Ryan,” Street said, touching him on his shoulder. “I enjoyed it.”
Street and I went to bed, chatted about Lily, gradually went to sleep.
In the middle of the night, I awoke to a loud noise followed by a yell and then a groan.
I heard Spot bark. I ran out the open door of our bedroom.
In the glow of the bathroom nightlight, I saw Ryan standing in the bathroom doorway, his hand coming out of the sling and gripping the doorjamb, looking at me approaching as if I were a nighttime stalker. His eyes were wild with nightmare visions. Spot stood nearby, looking for something wrong, not seeing it. Ryan didn’t react to Spot, staring instead at the frightening world of his nightmare.
“It’s okay, Ryan,” I said, approaching slowly. I put my hand on his skinny arm, steered him back to his room, and sat him on his bed.
“I had a bad dream,” he said in a whisper.
“It’s over now. Everything’s okay. Spot will be here watching the house all night. Go back to sleep.”
He lay down and pulled the covers over himself. I went back to my room and explained to Street what happened.
In the morning, Street used Ryan’s computer to print an outline of the Matisse painting. Lily began to color it.
Ryan fired Hannah and handed her her last paycheck. She yelled and fussed and cried and pleaded. When he didn’t give in, she stomped away and gathered her things from the basement apartment, called one of her friends, and left, waiting out on the road for her friend to pick her up.
Ryan made up a list of all the people that I might want to meet, and Street and I made arrangements for a party the coming Friday night. I didn’t want music to overwhelm conversation, so I went online and booked a local acoustic band. Street arranged the catering.
Deputy Praeger left and was replaced by Officer Vistamon from the South Lake Tahoe PD. I explained the routine, showed him the doors to the house, and introduced him to Ryan and Lily and Street. Then Street went to her lab to work on her current bug projects.
I left Spot to tend to his new duties as Ryan and Lily’s companion and drove up to my cabin to grab more clothes. I also wrote a letter to a lab I know that does materials testing. I enclosed the little scrap of red leather I’d found on the cliff above the body.
Back at Ryan’s house, I brought Ryan and Lily along as I took Spot for a long walk. Ryan took his slings off, and put his hands in his pockets.
“I called a company to pu
t in motion lights,” Ryan said. “They’re coming day after tomorrow.”
“Good,” I said, as loud piano sounds came from the log cabin adjacent to Ryan’s house and construction site. The notes sounded over and over, some of them quite discordant.
I gestured toward the cabin. “Someone practicing the piano?”
“Tuning,” Ryan said. “That’s Herman Oleson. He’s the piano tuner. He tunes his piano every week.”
“When I first came here, I saw a guy with white hair out on the front deck. He nodded at me. But when I said hi, he didn’t respond.”
“That’s him,” Ryan said. “He had a stroke a few weeks ago. He lost his speech. But everything else about him seems fine. He still understands what you say, still does his own cooking, washes his clothes. And he’s still tuning his piano.”
“I call him grandpa Herman,” Lily said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “After our dad died, we got to know Herman a lot better. He’s been good for Lily.”
“Does he rent the cabin from you?”
“No. He has what we call a life-lease. He was actually born there. Eighty-some years ago. He’s lived there all his life. As property values rose, the state of Nevada kept raising his taxes. Even though he is quite a famous piano tuner and made good money, he kept having to sell his possessions to pay his taxes. Art, antique cars, a coin collection started by his grandfather. During the real estate boom when property values went through the roof, his taxes hit eighty thousand dollars a year. So he subdivided his acreage and sold off the parcels that now have my house and my neighbor’s mansion.
“Unfortunately, Tahoe lakeshore still kept going up. So his last piece was the parcel with the cabin and the area where I’m now building. Douglas County wouldn’t let Herman subdivide any smaller. Yet the assessor was required by law to put a fair value on Herman’s cabin. The last adjustment brought his property taxes back up to fifty thousand. Herman was crushed. He put the last piece on the market. I made a deal with him that I would buy the property, and he could keep living in his cabin.”
“Nice,” I said.