Bad Weather

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  Dez nodded. “Is there a book or something you can recommend? You know, so I can figure out, uh, what to tell my friend?”

  Gallows smiled. “The law library has a couple of books on just this sort of thing,” he said. “If you can wait until Monday, I can gather a couple of recommendations for you.”

  “Okay,” Dez said, unsure. She was impatient, although she wasn’t quite sure why.

  “Well,” Dr. Gallows said, reading her as easily as he must have been able to read juries in his heyday, “if you can’t wait until Monday, the law library is open all weekend. In fact, it might be good for you to do your own research on this. It will teach you to think like a lawyer, and not just rely on the perspective you’ll have as a peace officer.” Dr. Gallows paused. “You know, as a criminal justice major, you’re one of the few students who aren’t in the law school or pre-law programs who can even access the law library. You might want to take advantage of it. It will likely give you a leg up when you’re applying for law enforcement positions after graduation.”

  Dez smiled, thanked him, and walked up the steps from the lectern to the exits.

  Her head swam as she started to walk back to her apartment. The sky was still gray and foreboding, but the rain had tapered off overnight, and Dez was glad to have the respite. She thought about what she might find in the law library—and then wondered if there had been a case already decided on this topic. Perhaps Jennifer Morgenstern had already brought up a civil case against Frank Bethany. And perhaps if she knew where to look, she could figure it out.

  She had been waiting at the light to cross Bellflower Boulevard, but Dez turned right and headed to the law library instead.

  ◆◆◆

  “So you’ve never used LexisNexis before?” the girl behind the law library counter said. She was one of the whitest girls Dez had ever seen, pale skin the color of a new tee shirt, her blonde hair the color of baby powder, with just the subtlest of goldenrod streaks. The girl didn’t have a freckle, mark, or blemish anywhere on her face, which made Dez hate her a little bit. She had small features: beady, keen green eyes that kept darting around the room, and a tiny mouth with pale lips. She wore no makeup, and looked young, even for a college student. Dez wondered if she was some wunderkind, the Doogie Howser of law students. The girl wore a chunky sweater of alternating blue and aqua horizontal stripes—as well as a judgmental look on her face.

  Dez looked down. “Uh—no, not really.”

  “Not for any of your classes?”

  “I usually get everything I need in the regular library,” Dez said carefully.

  “The regular library.”

  “Well, I’m not pre-law, or anything,” Dez said, a note of protest in her voice.

  “We have one of the most comprehensive law libraries in the state of California,” the girl said condescendingly, “and you’ve spent nearly four years at this university without coming here?”

  Dez had had enough. “Yes, despite your incredibly welcoming attitude. Hard to believe.”

  The girl scoffed. “Do you want me to help you with LexisNexis or not?”

  “I do,” Dez said. “That’s why I came up to the desk. I wasn’t looking for a lecture on my life choices.”

  Visibly rolling her eyes, the girl got up from her chair and walked Dez over to a bank of keyboards and monitors. After showing Dez the search functions and how to find the text from the results of the searches—the girl went so fast, Dez could barely keep up—she turned quickly and went back to the desk, where she immediately started arguing with another student who had walked up.

  “Well, at least it’s not just me,” Dez muttered.

  She typed in Jennifer Morgenstern at the search cursor.

  The system thought for a few minutes, the cursor blinking in the top left corner. Dez knew these systems were much faster than doing all this work by hand, but it seemed a bit silly to just sit back and watch a blinking cursor. Zen and the Art of Legal Database Searches. She sighed and leaned back, wondering if she perhaps should have brought Exodus Nights.

  After what seemed like hours—but, Dez saw by her watch, was less than ten minutes—the system kicked back four hundred and thirteen thousand instances. Dez swore at herself under her breath. She had let herself get unnerved by the law library assistant and forgot about the Boolean search. She typed Jennifer AND Morgenstern. She paused, and then for good measure—and remembering the girl had told her to hyphenate multiple-word location searches—typed AND New-Hampshire.

  The system’s screen again went black for a moment, with only the cursor blinking in the left-hand top corner. She hoped this wouldn’t take as long as the first search. One minute turned into five, but finally the search was complete.

  Five results came back. In the first four were cases, the Jennifer and the Morgenstern weren’t the same person. The fifth one, however, was a bull’s eye. Morgenstern v. Bethany, 1986. It was a civil case in Nashua, New Hampshire.

  The plaintiff’s filing was there for Dez to read—and she did. Jennifer Morgenstern was suing Frank Bethany and Showcase Monument Publishing for intellectual property theft. And it was exactly what Dez thought it might be—she accused Frank Bethany of stealing significant portions of her novel Murder on a Lifeboat for his book Exodus Nights. She claimed damages of over half a million dollars and wanted to be named as co-author and have a cut of the future proceeds of the book. Frank Bethany was represented by, as Dez figured out, a Showcase Monument Publishing lawyer.

  The opening arguments had been given in the case, and there was a list of witnesses. Dez recognized a few of the names from the Dartmouth paper’s editor box. But the first witness scheduled to appear—a man named Aaron Hawthorne—failed to do so. The judge had granted the plaintiff’s request for a recess, and then, Dez read, the suit was withdrawn.

  Just like that.

  Dez didn’t like the way that looked at all.

  She did another search for Frank Bethany, in both New Hampshire and New York, where Showcase Monument was based. She found some references to Exodus Nights in a transcript from another case; she found a case in which another Dartmouth professor, suing a neighbor, had called Frank Bethany as a witness. But nothing useful. As far as Dez could tell, Frank Bethany made no other appearance in court in New Hampshire, and for that matter, neither did Jennifer Morgenstern.

  Dez couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do next. And she had no idea what to say to Frankie the next time she called.

  Dez sat back and took everything in. Jennifer Morgenstern had been wronged by Frank Bethany—or at least thought she had been wronged—in New Hampshire five years before. Now she moved all the way across the country and was introducing herself as the Frank Bethany. Was there a method to Frankie’s madness? And what was Frankie trying to get out of it? Stalking? Revenge?

  Dez logged off the search system and walked past the dour white girl at the entrance, who said “You’re welcome” pointedly as Dez exited. But Dez was too preoccupied to respond; it barely registered with her that the girl had said anything.

  It was almost eleven, and instead of walking home in the damp, piercing January chill, she crossed over to the campus commons and got a cheap turkey sandwich and a Diet Coke from the deli. She sat by herself and listlessly flipped through one of her law enforcement textbooks.

  What would Dez have done in that situation? Supposing Dez had written a crime novel that Dr. Gallows had stolen and rewritten, would she sue? If she sued and her first witness failed to show up, would she move to New York and introduce herself to her dates as Roberta Gallows?

  She looked up when a ray of sun broke through the clouds and realized she had been there for over an hour. She finished up, cleared her table, and walked to her apartment. When she opened the front door, she saw Rhonda on the phone.

  “Oh—she just walked in. Hang on.” Rhonda handed the phone to Dez with a knowing look on her face. “Here you go, Desirée.” Dez felt her heart speed up just a little bit.

 
“Hi, Desirée,” Audrey said.

  “Audrey!” Dez said, a little more enthusiastically than she had intended.

  “Listen—I talked to the manager here, and he showed me how to put in a special order for that book you wanted. Um—Murder on a Lifeboat, right?”

  “Right,” Dez said. “Wow, you can do that?”

  “Well, since it’s officially out of print, we may not get a hit on it,” Audrey said. “It was remaindered a while ago.”

  “Remaindered?”

  “Oh, sorry, book nerd term. It means they’re not selling well and publishers are getting rid of them at a big discount. It also means they can’t be returned to the publisher, which means the chance that they’ll have one in stock are small. But you never know. At least the request is in the system now, so if there is a copy returned, they can ship it out to you.”

  “Oh. All right, cool, I guess.”

  “Yeah, it’s not great news, but it’s better than nothing. And since it got remaindered, you might be able to find it at a random bookstore for a lot less. Maybe two or three dollars instead of sixteen or seventeen.”

  “Is it in paperback?”

  “Nope, it didn’t sell well enough for that. Just the hardback.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for letting me know.” Dez looked over at Rhonda.

  “Ask her out, fool,” Rhonda said quietly.

  “Can I—uh—can I thank you for going through all that trouble?” Dez said.

  “Oh, I actually love tracking down books like this. I’m going to get it for you, just you wait.”

  “Well—” Dez paused, gathering herself up again. “I still think it’s going above and beyond. Maybe I could take you to dinner tonight?”

  “Sure!” Audrey said, brightly. “I’d love that. Is late okay? I get off at nine.”

  Dez tried to temper her enthusiasm; maybe Rhonda was wrong about her pessimism. “That’s cool.”

  “Great! Maybe we can go to Jack and Jill’s, that new diner down on Sixth Street in Long Beach. That’s closer to my place, anyway.”

  “Oh—you live in Long Beach?”

  “Yeah, right off Pine.”

  “I’m in Long Beach too. The student apartments off Bellflower.”

  They talked for another five minutes until Audrey said she had to get back to work—her break was over.

  Dez hung up, giddy.

  9

  By March, Dez thought of Frankie—when she thought of her at all—as “the crazy writer who got ripped off”—or, more often and more happily, as the reason Dez had met Audrey.

  Dez and Audrey had fun together—and they were together all the time. She loved that Audrey smelled like books. She loved the feel of Audrey’s hands, whether it was a gentle touch on her shoulder after dinner, or the passionate grip around Dez’s wrists during their lovemaking. She was spontaneous, agreeing to drive up the California coast, just on a whim, when they both found themselves free from their restaurant and bookstore jobs one weekend in February. They had stayed in a cheap hotel in a little city in Dominguez County called Estancia, where they walked on the beach, ate at a cheap but delicious burger place, and Dez got a job application from the sheriff’s office. That night, they got drunk on tequila a block from the hotel, and they walked back, giggling, Audrey’s hands on Dez’s hips. When they got to their room, Dez threw the door open, and Audrey spun Dez around, giving her a full, passionate kiss before they closed the door behind them.

  Dez had often been the dominant one in her relationships, especially since moving to Long Beach. She always seemed to pick the shy, tentative, inexperienced ones. Frankie hadn’t been the only girl Dez had broken in on the whole Sapphic thing.

  That wasn’t the case with Audrey, though. Audrey had been in relationships with women since she was sixteen years old. Like Frankie, Audrey was older than Dez, but unlike Frankie, she wasn’t critical of Dez’s education status, or her age. Likewise, Dez didn’t criticize Audrey’s job at the bookstore; she couldn’t find any work relevant to her art history degree.

  Rhonda had blown up at Dez one night in mid-March.

  “Okay, I like Audrey and all,” Rhonda said, “and she’s clearly a better fit for you than Frankie, but you’ve seriously been with her every day for the last six weeks. It’s like you went on your first date and they stitched you two together like some sort of Frankenstein horror movie.”

  Dez apologized, but in the back of her head, she was thinking about the feel of Audrey’s lips on hers. She knew there was only six hours before the end of Audrey’s shift at the bookstore and felt a pang of pain as she called Audrey to cancel to go with Rhonda to see some lawyer movie that starred Joe Pesci and the Karate Kid.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Audrey said. “I understand. I’ve actually got a lead on your book.”

  “My book?”

  “Murder on ze Lifeboat,” Audrey said in a low voice, affecting a bad Russian accent. “My contacts have informed me of some een-teresting possibilities.”

  “Okay, Natasha,” Dez said.

  “Natasha? Should I call you Boris?”

  “As long as you don’t have moose and squirrel in bed with you when I stop by later, you can call me whatever you want.”

  But Dez didn’t want Audrey to find Murder on a Lifeboat anymore. She hadn’t thought about Frankie—or Jennifer Morgenstern—since that trip up the coast to Estancia. If Dez were in Audrey’s position, she would have given up looking for that book weeks ago.

  Dez’s night at the movies with Rhonda was enjoyable. Rhonda opined frequently about Marisa Tomei’s stunning good looks, while Dez couldn’t get past her Brooklyn accent. Dez felt a twinge of sadness that her friendship with Rhonda was going on the backburner, but just the same, she kept pushing down the desire to look at her watch, counting down the minutes until the friendship night was over so she could go to Audrey’s apartment.

  ◆◆◆

  The Saturday before Long Beach State’s spring break dawned gray and surprisingly cold for April in Southern California. Dez had gotten used to thunderstorms growing up in Lake Charles, but after she moved, she barely saw one a year. Now the forecast called for thunderstorms that afternoon, and into the evening.

  “Okay, missy,” Dez said, spitting out the toothpaste while Audrey put on her makeup. “You said you had something planned for my birthday. You think it’ll withstand this freakish weather?”

  Audrey brushed her long, shiny black hair. “I might have to change the order we do stuff in during the day. I think the rain will hold off for a few hours. And I’ll have to give you your present early.”

  “Oh hell no,” Dez said, smiling. “How dare you ruin my birthday by giving me my birthday present a few hours before you wanted to.”

  Audrey reached out and touched Dez lightly and affectionately on the nose.

  They were out of Audrey’s apartment a few minutes later, and they walked south on Pine, toward the beach. Audrey carried one of her larger purses.

  “Our first stop this beautiful, cool April morning will be Benedict and Company,” Audrey said.

  “Oh, fancy-schmancy,” Dez said.

  “Well, you’re worth it,” Audrey said, smiling.

  At brunch, after they had both ordered the French toast, Audrey pulled out the large, heavy present from her purse.

  “That’s why you’ve been carrying that monster purse,” Dez said.

  “Yes. And that’s why we’re going home before we head to the beach. I thought we could try to relive our weekend in Estancia without actually driving all the way up there.”

  “The tequila bar and the after-party too?”

  Audrey got a wicked look on her face. “Most definitely the after-party. I’m not sure I’d want to go to the tequila bar. That was a hangover I won’t soon forget.”

  “That’s cool. I liked the after-party better anyway.”

  “Okay.” Audrey clapped three times and put her elbows on the table. “Enough talk. Open it up.”

  Dez s
miled at Audrey and tore off the ribbon and the wrapping paper.

  As Dez expected, it was a hardback novel. She was wondering if Audrey had gotten her the Michael Chabon she’d been hinting at. Or maybe the new Louise Erdrich.

  Instead, it was a book she never expected to see: Murder on a Lifeboat. A novel. Jennifer Morgenstern.

  She ran her hand over the cover. It was a picture of a life preserver with the word “Murder” on it, laid out as if the word had been printed on the preserver itself. And “on a Lifeboat” was in a script that belonged on a romance novel.

  The cover showed a bit of wear, a slight discoloration on the corner. She turned the book over and saw where the original price sticker had been pulled off incompletely; the remnants of the white label, discolored by a few years of bookshelf dust, left its telltale signs.

  “I found it,” Audrey said proudly. “You would not believe what I had to do to get this damn book.”

  “Wow,” Dez said, needing to sound impressed and surprised instead of anxious. She didn’t want to bring up Jennifer Morgenstern or Frankie, and certainly didn’t want to talk about the one-night stand that felt like a lifetime ago.

  “I finally tracked it down at a used bookstore when I went up to Hollywood a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “Two weeks ago, in fact. You know when that was?”

  Dez nodded. It had been the night that Dez spent with Rhonda and Joe Pesci.

  “And I thought it was fate, you know? You and I met because you were looking for that book. And I looked and looked, through the computer at the store, and I even looked at that used bookstore up the coast—do you remember how weird that place was?”