Bad Weather

by Paul Austin Ardoin

  Dez shook her head; sometimes her imagination ran away with her. Her hand was starting to cramp from carrying both Exodus Nights and Murder on a Lifeboat.

  The woman finally walked away, and, as if in apology, the next four people in line simply got their books signed, murmured what big fans they were, and ducked their heads like they were embarrassed to have seen the big-haired woman’s spectacle. Frank Bethany looked up at the line and raked his gaze over Dez before meeting her eyes.

  “You’re next,” he said.

  “My friend just bought your new book,” she said, and Audrey set down her copy of The Apex and the Mountain Lion in front of him.

  “Who should I make it out to?” he asked, smiling the same fake smile he had worn on stage.

  “Audrey,” Dez responded, nudging her. Audrey crossed her arms.

  “Have him sign your copy of Exodus Nights too,” Audrey said.

  “I don’t know—” Dez began.

  “Sorry,” Audrey said. “My friend Desirée is apparently embarrassed that she has one of your paperbacks instead of a hardback. But I told her you’d gladly sign it.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Dez rolled her eyes and set the paperback of Exodus Nights down in front of him, next to The Apex and the Mountain Lion.

  Frank Bethany’s eyes went to the cover of Murder on a Lifeboat. “What the hell is that?” he said in a whisper.

  Dez realized the problem—she wasn’t sure what she had expected, though. Actually, she did realize what she had expected. She had expected Frank Bethany not to recognize the book he stole from. Or, she thought, maybe part of her still didn’t even believe Frankie enough to even consider the possibility that Frank Bethany would freak out about it.

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at,” Frank Bethany hissed, “but get the hell out of line. And don’t ever come to one of my events again.”

  Dez was so shocked she didn’t move for a few seconds, but as the security guard began to step forward, she found her voice and her feet. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t realize it would upset you.” She tugged on Audrey’s arm. “Come on, let’s go.”

  “What’s happening?” Audrey said.

  “He saw the other book.”

  And then behind Audrey, another female voice released a bloodcurdling scream.

  12

  Frankie.

  Dez pulled Audrey behind her; Audrey caught her heel on the carpet and fell to the floor.

  Dressed in black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, Frankie came screaming into Dez’s view. She knocked over the display of The Apex and the Mountain Lion and something glinted in her right hand.

  A hunting knife.

  Frank Bethany jumped out of his chair but couldn’t move out of the way fast enough, and Frankie slashed out with the blade. It caught Bethany’s right forearm, cutting through the sleeve of the tweed jacket. A small spray of blood came out as Bethany stumbled backward.

  Frankie was screaming, but Dez couldn’t make out what she was saying. Frankie raised the knife again.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Dez saw Frankie’s body contort and twist in midair, the knife held out awkwardly in front of her. Her head snapped back once, then twice, and a spray of red came out of her temple and a larger spray from her neck. Dez saw, out of focus, as if she were looking at the background of a photograph, the security guard, a large, silver .45 in his hand, smoke curling lazily out of the barrel.

  “Frankie!” Dez wanted to shout, wanted to scream, but there was chaos. A man behind her pushed her down, on top of Audrey. She saw nothing but feet and legs, the sounds of panicked yelling, people telling each other to get out. The table was overturned. Dez covered Audrey, only vaguely aware that her girlfriend was screaming.

  She turned, trying to go onto her back, and from the corner of her eye, she saw a door into the auditorium close. Did the security officer whisk Frank Bethany in there and close the door behind them?

  She looked back down at Audrey, who was crying.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” she responded. “Are we dead?”

  “No,” Dez said. “Are you hurt?”

  “I think I hurt my arm when I fell,” Audrey said. “And I don’t know where my purse is.”

  Dez slowly got up and caught her breath. She walked over to the overturned table and looked behind it. Frankie—also known as Jennifer Morgenstern—was lying behind it, her body warped into an odd, nauseating pose, and she was missing most of the left side of her face. Blood was pooling on the carpeted floor. Dez had dropped Murder on a Lifeboat and it had landed underneath Frankie’s outstretched elbow.

  Dez didn’t see where her copy of Exodus Nights had gone, but she did see Audrey’s purse. She bent down and picked it up. She turned back to Audrey, who was still lying on the floor.

  Audrey’s arm was bleeding.

  “Oh, shit,” Dez said.

  “I don’t—” Audrey began, and then started to cry again.

  Dez pulled the tablecloth free from the overturned table, then dove down and pressed the tablecloth over the wound in Audrey’s arm.

  “Call 911!” she shouted. “Get an ambulance! She’s been hit!”

  There was more commotion as people started shouting. Dez kept the pressure on the wound; it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It looked like it missed the bone, and there wasn’t enough blood for it to have hit an artery.

  “My dress is ruined,” Audrey said quietly.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Dez said. “We’re going to get you to a hospital and you’re going to be okay.”

  “No, I’m not,” Audrey said. “I’m not going to be okay ever again.”

  “Don’t say that,” Dez said into her ear. “I care about you too much. Please. We’ll get through this.”

  “Who was that woman?” Audrey said.

  Dez felt her heart sink. She swallowed. She thought she could hear sirens. “That was Jennifer Morgenstern.”

  Audrey looked at her in the eyes. They were a little unfocused. “Jennifer Morgenstern? The one who wrote that book I bought you? The one you slept with?”

  Dez swallowed hard.

  Audrey closed her eyes. “Am I dreaming this?”

  “Let’s just get you to the hospital,” Dez said, and the tablecloth was now soaked with blood where Dez was holding it with her right hand over her wound. Audrey started to shake, but whether it was because she was losing blood, or scared out of her mind, or emotionally overwhelmed, Dez didn’t know.

  “I’ve never been shot before,” Audrey said as the doors opened and two paramedics rushed in.

  “Me neither,” Dez said. The paramedics took over and Dez stood up and stepped back. She felt wetness on her face and wiped it off with her left hand. She expected it to be blood. She was surprised to see that her hand came away damp with tears.

  ◆◆◆

  The paramedics told Dez that she wasn’t allowed to ride in the ambulance before she even asked. After the ambulance drove off, a white, mustachioed police officer came up to Dez.

  “I understand you were in the front of the line,” he said. “Are you okay to answer a few questions?

  Dez nodded. She answered his questions. He smiled when she told him she was getting her criminal justice degree.

  Yes, she and her friend were there for the Frank Bethany reading. No, she hadn’t seen the woman with the knife in the theater during the performance.

  “The woman who was killed was Jennifer Morgenstern,” Dez offered.

  The officer’s eyebrows raised. “How do you know her name? Do you know her?”

  Dez thought about the dress with the red cherries, the point of the cheesecake, the East German woman and the silver-tipped arrow, the murder on the lifeboat, waving goodbye to the silhouette of Frankie.

  “I know her book,” Dez said. “She thought Frank Bethany plagiarized it.”

  The officer nodded. “Interesting. Do you know if she threatened hi
m before today?”

  Dez shrugged. “I know she sued him a few years ago and lost.”

  When the officer was finished asking her questions, she walked out into the pouring rain and drove Audrey’s car to the Kaiser hospital off the Santa Monica freeway.

  She stayed in the waiting room for two hours, anxious. She thought about what she might have done differently. Should she have called Frankie back? Should she have told Audrey about the night she spent with Frankie earlier? When she figured out that Frankie had really gotten her book stolen, should she have reached out to her then?

  But Dez didn’t know what she would have said in any of those situations. If she had returned Frankie’s call, she would have only told Frankie that she had started seeing someone else. If she had had a conversation with Audrey about Frankie, it would have been as stilted and difficult as this one had been—or it might have been to cancel that book order. If she had reached out to Frankie about the stolen book—well, she wouldn’t have known what to say; Frankie didn’t even know that Dez knew her real name.

  She looked at her watch: 11:59 PM.

  “Happy birthday to me,” Dez said quietly.

  A few minutes later, Audrey appeared, her upper arm wrapped in a bandage, accompanied by a nurse. “About twenty stitches,” the nurse said, too cheerfully for the middle of the night. “Her vitals look strong. She didn’t lose that much blood, considering. Missed the artery.”

  “You were lucky,” Dez said, and felt the relief wash over her.

  “They’re letting me go home,” Audrey said.

  Dez drove. Audrey curled up into a ball on the passenger seat on the way back to her apartment. Dez explained everything to her—the conversation she had originally had with Frankie, when Frankie had taken credit for Frank Bethany’s work, the research Dez had done in the library that helped convince her that Frank Bethany had plagiarized the book.

  “How many times did you sleep with her?” Audrey said.

  “With Frankie?”

  “Or Jennifer, or whoever she was.”

  “It was just once,” Dez said. “I know, I know, it was right before you and I started dating. But it was also before I realized she was lying to me about who she was.”

  They walked together to the stairs that went up to Audrey’s apartment; the rain was finally starting to dissipate, and Dez was hoping the long rainy season would be over soon. Audrey nodded many times when Dez was telling her about everything, but didn’t ask any questions.

  Dez had plenty of questions, still. Who was Aaron? How had the publishing company gotten the suit dropped? But she didn’t have any of the answers, and so didn’t even mention the questions. She didn’t want Audrey to think this would continue; she wanted to be done with Frankie and Murder on a Lifeboat and Frank Bethany. When Dez was finally all talked out, she gave Audrey a sad but hopeful smile that Audrey didn’t return.

  “I’m really tired,” Audrey said. “I need to get some sleep.” Something in her tone made it clear that Dez wasn’t going to be staying the night.

  “Sure,” said Dez.

  Dez didn’t have her car, but didn’t want to push it—she had put Audrey through enough for one night. Saying goodnight, Dez wanted to wrap Audrey in her arms and kiss her on the mouth, but Audrey just turned and walked up the stairs to her apartment.

  As Dez walked to Pine Street, the rain completely stopped. A couple of cabs passed; Dez tried to flag down the first one without success, but the second one stopped for her.

  When she arrived at her apartment, she saw lights on in the living room; she made sure to make a lot of noise when opening the front door, and by the time she finally stepped inside, she saw two pairs of feet padding upstairs toward Rhonda’s room.

  The next day, Audrey didn’t call, and Dez and Rhonda had their first roommate-bonding night in a couple of weeks. They went to get burgers at a place near the ocean, and got their orders to go so they could sit on the beach and people-watch as the sun dipped down beneath the horizon. Dez, unprompted, told Rhonda what had happened.

  Rhonda was enraptured by the story—a little too enraptured, as she didn’t even tell Dez about the girl who had stayed over the night before. She asked questions in all the right places, and tut-tutted and gasped and swore appropriately.

  “But Audrey is really freaked out,” Dez said.

  “She should be, though, right?” Rhonda asked. “I mean, you’ve got a hot ass and all, but you sure ain’t worth getting shot.”

  “Yeah,” Dez agreed, glumly.

  “Don’t you want to know what happened?” Rhonda said. “Don’t you want to, I don’t know, get a ticket to New Hampshire and find out who Aaron is, and why he abandoned Frankie, and whether or not Frankie had some kind of psychotic break? Don’t you want to tell everyone that Frank Bethany is a fraud? That Exodus Nights is just blatantly stolen?”

  “Not really,” said Dez, hugging her knees. “I just want to go back to the aquarium with Audrey.”

  EPILOGUE

  The rest of the spring break week passed, and Audrey didn’t call, and no one picked up when Dez called.

  She read the initial news articles about Morgenstern and Bethany, small articles that didn’t mention the plagiarism suit. Dez read Jennifer Morgenstern’s obituary in The Los Angeles Times, which was more delicate than it could have been. She also talked over the incident with Dr. Gallows, who was fascinated that Dez had gotten so close to a shootout, but he tried to show more concern than excitement. Dez told him she was in line when it happened, but didn’t let him know that she was at the front of the line when Jennifer Morgenstern was shot right in front of her. She wanted more advice about the book and the plagiarism. He shrugged and said he doubted there was anything that could be done, especially when the author in question was deceased. Dez was trying to figure out what she felt about Frankie, but when she looked at her emotions it was just a mass of confusion and numbness.

  But James Morgenstern, Jennifer’s father, was not so confused or so numb. He flew to Los Angeles to give interviews to anyone who would listen about the book found under Morgenstern’s elbow. He read passages on the radio of both Murder on a Lifeboat and Exodus Nights. He talked about how Jennifer’s publishing house had tricked her into signing away her rights. He named Bethany’s agent and a vice president at the publishing house and used the word “predatory.” And he announced a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter’s estate. The shooting and the lawsuit dominated the news for a few days, and then went quiet.

  Dez considered going to the bookshop to talk to Audrey, but it was so out of her way she knew she’d look desperate. Dez moped around the apartment, although sometimes Rhonda, when she wasn’t entertaining guests, could convince Dez to go to dinner or a movie.

  Dez started applying for positions in the area, and secured interviews at a couple of police precincts. The sheriff’s department from Estancia, the little town on the Central Coast where Audrey and Dez had gone on their weekend away, wanted her to drive up for an interview, and she left after Dr. Gallows’s class the following Friday. She loved the drive up there, and the sheriff talked about sponsoring Dez through a certification program. Before she left, she drove by the hotel where she and Audrey had stayed, but it made her too sad to stop.

  One Thursday afternoon when class was cancelled, Dez drove to BookEarth on Artesia Boulevard, only to find that Audrey had quit to work at a museum, although the older woman behind the counter didn’t remember which one.

  Rhonda finally persuaded Dez to go out dancing with her on Memorial Day Weekend and they met another pair of roommates, Shauna and Elyse, when they were dancing. Rhonda and Elyse were making out on the dance floor before Dez had even bought Shauna a drink. Dez drove everyone back to their apartment, and Elyse was in Rhonda’s bedroom less than five minutes after they arrived. Dez and Shauna stared at the midnight movie on the USA Network, Dez desperately wanting to call Audrey. Shauna fell asleep on the couch before the movie was over. Dez made everyone breakfast in the
morning.

  Both Rhonda and Dez graduated on June twelfth. Dez’s mother finally braved the airplane trip from Lake Charles to see her graduate. Rhonda’s parents drove down from the Central Valley, but her father wouldn’t look Rhonda in the eyes.

  The Estancia sheriff’s department left a message on their answering machine, which Dez heard when they returned from their graduation dinner. The department officially offered to sponsor her for certification training, and said they would offer her a job upon successful completion of the program. She called back the next day and accepted.

  Dez had been on the job for three weeks, when, after work one day, she put a name into the new computer system—Aaron Hawthorne. Of the three hits she got in southern New Hampshire, only one was the right age. That Aaron Hawthorne had died of a heroin overdose in 1989. Dez was surprised by the bubble of rage she felt—why had he skipped out on Jennifer Morgenstern? Had he been bribed? Had he been high? Had he reconsidered? The dead end was staring Dez in the face, and the realization hit her in the pit of her stomach—she’d never know the answers. It made her nauseated.

  The next week, she saw in the Estancia Courier that the estate of Jennifer Morgenstern settled for an undisclosed sum with Frank Bethany and Showcase Monument Publishing. The vice president whom James Morgenstern had accused left the company “to pursue other opportunities.” James Morgenstern was quoted as saying that the result wouldn’t bring Jennifer back, but he hoped the lawsuit would prevent other young authors from going through the same thing.