by Meg Gardiner
Cross my heart and hope to die.
12
It was three o’clock by the time we picked up Luke. Jesse was driving, as his car was not a billboard for obscenities. Clapton was on the stereo, Crossroads. I was staring out the window, downbeat. The relentless sunshine emphasized the bleached, hardscrabble isolation of this place. Jesse, however, waved at the horizon, saying, ‘‘This landscape is astonishing. My God, that’s Mount Whitney, and it must be a hundred miles away. It’s beautiful here. So unconstrained.’’
I grunted. He asked if I disagreed, and I said, ‘‘To get me back here they had to bring me in under arrest.’’
He changed the subject. ‘‘I started to tell you on the phone yesterday about this family who used to belong to the Remnant. A doctor at the rehab center knows them. Their daughter has cerebral palsy.’’ He made a face. ‘‘Pastor Pete apparently expressed his disgust about ‘weaklings’ to others besides me. I spoke to the husband, and he said they’d be willing to talk about the church.’’
I thanked him.
‘‘And that reporter called me looking for you. Sally Shimada.’’ I groaned. I didn’t want to speak to the press. He said, ‘‘She wanted to talk to you about Dr. Neil Jorgensen.’’
I hadn’t been thinking about the plastic surgeon’s death, but my interest was immediately piqued again. ‘‘What did she say?’’
‘‘Just that she really wants you to call her.’’ He imitated her peppy voice. ‘‘Really, really, really.’’
The Hankinses’ front door was open to the fresh air, and when I knocked Wally boomed, ‘‘Enter!’’ Jesse popped a wheelie up the step. Inside we found Wally on the floor, kneeling over a Lionel train set. He looked at Jesse, surprised, but quickly smiled his Saint Bernard smile and came over to shake hands.
I hated this moment. The looks, the unspoken questions, the uneasiness able-bodied people often manifested around a wheelchair—it always balked me. Jesse usually rolled over it, like jumping curbs, but I worried about it wearing on him.
Wally, however, was affable, and Abbie could not have beaten around the bush if she’d had a map. She gave Jesse a frank look over her glasses. ‘‘Well. There are certainly a few things Evan didn’t tell me about you. Was it a car wreck?’’
‘‘Hit and run.’’
‘‘Bummer.’’ She looked at me. ‘‘That’ll teach me not to complain about my knee surgery anymore. And jeez, look at you; let’s put a bag of frozen peas on that eye.’’
In the kitchen I said, ‘‘How’s Luke?’’
‘‘He’s been great. Quiet, but no probs. He’s out back with Travis and Dulcie.’’
Through the kitchen window, the kids raced in and out of view. Luke was running behind a Little Tikes push-car, propelling it around the lawn. Dulcie sat at the wheel, steering erratically. Travis was spreadeagled on the car’s roof, shrieking and sliding from side to side.
‘‘They’re fine,’’ Abbie said. She handed me the peas. ‘‘But before they come in, what’s going to happen with Luke’s mother? Will she take him, since Brian’s in jail?’’
I shook my head. ‘‘Brian has sole custody, and he’s made me Luke’s guardian. Tabitha can’t even visit him without going to court. And if she tries to get custody, she’ll face the fight of her life.’’
‘‘Good.’’
Jesse had found the high school yearbook on the table. Abruptly he snorted, held it up, and pointed to my class photo. Braces, bad hair, and a distressing attempt at eye makeup.
I said, ‘‘I’d like to see one of you, back when you were learning to shave.’’
Then I had a thought. I asked him to look up Antley, the name of the woman who owned Angels’ Landing. He flipped through the index and shook his head.
I thought some more. ‘‘Try Hopp.’’
There it was, page one sixteen. I said, ‘‘Casey Hopp. Know the name?’’
Abbie shook her head. The photo showed a group of students slouching against a chain-link fence, with the caption: Detention Club. Casey Hopp was at the edge of the group, wearing a grungy flannel shirt, a beanie pulled low, and a glare.
Abbie said, ‘‘Is that a girl or a boy?’’
I couldn’t tell. But I was going to find out.
The back door banged open and the kids came in, out of breath. Dulcie and Travis immediately gave Jesse the full stare. Luke came over to him, an inscrutable worldliness limning his little face, one hand raised in greeting like a movie-version Sioux.
Jesse said, ‘‘Hey, little dude. How’s it going?’’
‘‘My dad’s in jail.’’
‘‘That sucks.’’ Mr. Matter-of-fact.
Dulcie tugged on Abbie’s shirt. ‘‘I thought you weren’t allowed to say suck.’’
Abbie rubbed her shoulder. ‘‘Sometimes you just can’t say it enough.’’
We stayed that night in China Lake, simply too tired to drive. In the morning I spoke to Brian. He sounded more dejected than before. The night in jail had sapped his spirit. It was sinking in: There wasn’t going to be a quick fix.
Playing the good citizen, I informed Detective McCracken that I was leaving town. He was displeased, but didn’t stop me. I asked him how long it would be before I could get access to Brian’s house, and to my surprise, he said, ‘‘Anytime. The techs finished with it yesterday. We pulled down the tape.’’
Steeling myself, I decided to get in and out quickly, just retrieve my gear and pack a few things for Luke. But after standing outside for five minutes I couldn’t bring myself to open the door. Thinking I might ease into the idea of going inside, I walked around to the backyard. The garbage can was gone, the patio a mess. I didn’t approach the spot where the fire had been. Instead I peered through the sliding glass door at the dishevelment inside—the trashed furniture, scripture-scrawled walls, tracks of firefighters’ boots. It looked debauched.
‘‘Evan?’’
I jumped.
Marc Dupree walked onto the patio. ‘‘I just came from seeing Brian. He told me I might find you here.’’
He was completely put together: voice creamy, aviators’ wings shining on his shirt, trousers creased sharply enough to slice a cake. The khaki uniform complemented his brown skin. His sunglasses reflected the keen morning light.
‘‘I wanted to make sure you know,’’ he said, ‘‘everybody in the squadron is in Brian’s corner one hundred percent. This is totally bogus.’’
‘‘Glad to hear you say that.’’ There was something else. I said, ‘‘What is it?’’
‘‘It’s just . . . shoot. There’s no delicate way to put this.’’
‘‘Then speak frankly, Marc.’’
‘‘Well . . .’’ He glanced off at the mountains. ‘‘You know that Brian thought Peter Wyoming was sleeping with Tabitha.’’
My head started pounding. ‘‘No, I didn’t know that.’’
‘‘All this time he’s been wondering who it was, and when he finally gets a chance to confront him, the bastard gets shot in his house.’’
My heart sank. ‘‘You think he had a helmet fire.’’
He put up a hand. ‘‘I’m not saying Brian did the killing. I’m saying he melted down when he found the body, which is why he left the scene.’’
A love triangle. This was awful. This was motive. I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘‘You didn’t tell this to the police. Say you didn’t.’’
‘‘Of course not. I’m telling you so you’ll understand why he acted out of character. He feels enormously guilty about leaving you to find the body.’’
With his eyes hidden behind the aviator shades, all I saw when I looked at him was my warped reflection. Something wasn’t right here. His posture, his rectitude, didn’t jibe with the way his wide mouth pinched after he spoke.
It hit me: He should have been Brian’s alibi.
‘‘Marc, you told the cops that Brian was at your house Friday evening, that he left for only a few minutes. Didn’t you?’’
The expression on his face didn’t change. ‘‘I told them I had total confidence that he was innocent.’’
‘‘That’s not the same thing.’’
‘‘Brian did not commit this murder. Period. I’m offering you my word on this.’’
‘‘So you didn’t alibi him.’’ My head was really hammering. ‘‘Why in hell not?’’
‘‘I can’t, at this moment in time.’’
Like a dust devil, suspicion began spinning in me, dragging up memories from China Lake—of the stone-faced lying that went with military secrecy, of the dispassionate smoothness with which a uniform could invest a liar.
I said, ‘‘You can’t alibi him, or you won’t?’’
The wind lashed up. Though it made me wince, it didn’t so much as cause a quiver on his sleek, pressed facade.
He said, ‘‘I’m telling you this much as his friend. But that is all I can say at this moment. I thought you would be pleased to hear it.’’
‘‘Brian is up the creek without a paddle. It does him no good for you to hand me a bouquet.’’
He said, ‘‘Your brother is straight about this. You should be too.’’
Straight—that meant Brian knew Marc wouldn’t speak up in his defense, and accepted it. All at once I wondered if Marc had in fact been home Friday night—or whether Brian had gone to Marc’s house at all. I wondered if, instead, they’d been on the base.
What if Marc had been on duty, night-flying over the back ranges, performing a classified weapons test? If so, he wouldn’t even have told his wife. And he wasn’t going to tell me or the police. Briefly, for one fissile moment, I hated it all. The navy, my whole family tradition—all it meant was bigger booms, new and improved death, all to protect the edge, to ensure that the U.S. Navy swung a bigger dick than the other guy. The Big Ssssh was part of the strategy, and it was the reason crackpots believed there were aliens running around Area 51, and CIA satellites that watched you take a pee, and that government concentration camps lay beyond the horizon, awaiting prisoners of the beast. And the irony? In the end, the navy’s new toys got written up in Aviation Week anyway.
But Marc Dupree was not going to violate regulations even to save Brian from a murder charge. Standing there, beyond the vault of reason, I felt my own head ignite.
‘‘You have a different concept of friendship than I do. I’ll see you, Marc.’’
I went inside and slammed the door behind me.
Dust motes rose and jigged around the hallway when I stepped inside. I was shaking with anger. The air smelled acrid. Fine black fingerprint powder covered numerous surfaces. On the living room floor a deep red stain spread in an irregular circle. A thin trail of blood ran across the carpet to the patio door. Queasiness grabbed at my stomach. Somehow I hadn’t seen it the night of the murder, perhaps distracted by the vandalism—the brighter, bigger, redder things scrawled on the walls. I found myself surprised that the trail wasn’t thicker. And I thought: Why had the killer dragged the body outside?
Conceivably he had set the body ablaze to destroy evidence. Fingerprints, fibers, evidence that he had scuffled with Wyoming, whatever. But if that was the goal, the killer could simply have burned the whole house down. No, a deeper motive underlay the method of destruction.
Stuffed in a trash can. If that wasn’t symbolic, nothing was.
A banshee image hissed in my head: the killer hiding in the house while Brian stumbled on the scene . . . hiding, and waiting, and then arranging the macabre pyrotechnic exhibit for my interactive viewing horror. The hatred, the disdain, and the cool nerve it must have taken—it staggered me.
Outside, the wind licked the walls of the house. I hurried to gather up my things. I wanted someone to come in and rip out the carpet, wash the walls, and paint the whole damn place. But, turning the key in the lock, I doubted whether Brian would ever make this his home; whether he and Luke would ever, in fact, set foot in the house again.
A hot and capricious crosswind chased us all the way to the coast. It was a Santa Ana, a wind that strips the view to a bright and exposed base coat, a wind that opens abrasions. The Pacific glared gold in the sun, with whitecaps shearing off toward the west.
Luke was riding with me, and he was the one who spotted the brown cloud seeping above the mountain-tops. We were only twenty minutes from Jesse’s house. Here, the coastal range butts up against the shoreline. Above the peaks, in the brilliant sky, rose a single cloud.
‘‘That’s smoke,’’ Luke said.
I hunched and peered out at it. ‘‘You think so?’’
‘‘I think there’s a fire.’’
I thought he was right. I turned on the radio. The station was playing its usual anxious-white-boy rock ’n’ roll, so cataclysm hadn’t yet descended. But it was high fire season, that time of year when the world saw news footage of movie stars wielding garden hoses against a mile-wide flame front, trying to douse their Malibu digs. Anything was possible, and could happen in the snap of a finger.
Californians attack fire as mortal enemy, as tragedy, as monster. But fire is integral, in fact vital to this ecosystem. It’s restorative, a form of purification. Some local plants actually need the heat of the flames to germinate. What has gradually become a tragedy is fire suppression, a hundred years of snuffing out blazes in their infancy. The foliage builds up and up, so that when a fire inevitably starts, the resulting blaze is a conflagration, huge and devastating. Still, if it’s your house, your town, you stand and fight.
A minute later we got a better view. In the mountains behind Carpinteria the cloud rose in a fat pillar, spreading high into the sky. At its base, along the chaparral-covered slopes, it was a thick and churning column.
Luke pointed. ‘‘I see the fire!’’
Briefly a flare of red spurted from the brown boil. I blinked, and it was gone.
Traffic began slowing. People were simply rubbernecking, but if the wind blew the fire this way, the CHP could close the freeway, and that would be a mess. The 101 Freeway is the main road into Santa Barbara, which lies like a bracelet between the mountains and the ocean. The city is vulnerable to road closures. Several years back a toxic chemical spill shut down the 101, virtually cutting off traffic to Los Angeles for weeks. I lurched to a stop in a hail of brakelights.
Luke said, ‘‘I bet they’ll send the planes.’’
The U.S. Forest Service has an air-attack base at the Santa Barbara airport, and when a big wildfire hits, the planes soon lumber into the sky. We had seen them that summer, DC-7s and C-130s and P-3s, flying to fires in Montana and Arizona. Heavy at takeoff, they strained off the ground, piston engines roaring, skimming the roads and buildings beyond the runway. Old warriors, they looked heroic.
Luke squirmed for a better view at the smoke. ‘‘Look! It’s number twenty-three!’’
He pointed at a bright streak, white with an orange nose and tail, flying low, almost invisible against the mountains. It angled toward the fire and, just before it disappeared into the cloud, opened its bomb bay doors. Red slurry dumped from its belly, pluming down on the flames. A moment later the plane broke out of the smoke, climbing to escape the turbulent air near the fire. It banked toward the coast, heading straight for us, getting larger, louder, until it grumbled overhead only a few hundred feet off the ground, engines booming loud enough to shake human bone.
Luke said, ‘‘Wow!’’
‘‘Really.’’
It banked right over the ocean, heading for the airport to tank up.
‘‘What happens if they fly through the fire?’’ he said.
‘‘Those planes are tough. They’d be okay.’’
‘‘They could paint the plane with the red stuff, so it wouldn’t burn up.’’ He watched it receding along the coastline. ‘‘Should we say a prayer for them?’’
I looked at him, surprised. ‘‘If you want.’’
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. ‘‘Should we say a prayer for the other fire pilots, too?’’<
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The sobriety on his face was devastating. I said, ‘‘Do you want to say a prayer for all pilots?’’
He nodded and shut his eyes. I found myself unable to pray along, angry, knowing that the universe was cruel enough to trick a little boy, to let him send out his deepest longings without promise of an answer.
13
When we finally reached Butterfly Beach, Jesse took Luke bodysurfing. I skipped it, sitting outside on Jesse’s deck with a cold Heineken in hand, watching the two of them make their way into the surf. Salt spray was luminous in the air. Luke was a sprite, wiry arms waving as he met the first breaker and it broke around his legs. He yelled, ‘‘It’s cold!’’
Jesse came behind him, sitting on the sand, sculling backward on his butt, pushing with his better leg, pulling with his arms. When he bought the house, with the sand and the rocks between him and the surf, I thought he was subjecting himself to a nasty joke, a constant, cosmic black eye. Instead he had spent weekends clearing a path to the water. Now, a minute behind Luke, he rolled into the breakers. He embraced a receding wave and became an aquatic creature, graceful and confident, gliding toward Luke, arms arcing in that easy, powerful freestyle he had, water shimmering on his shoulders in the sunlight.
I tilted my head back and drank deeply. An air-attack plane hunkered by, heading back to the airport.
When Luke and Jesse splashed back up onshore, I swaddled Luke in a thick yellow beach towel and ran him a shower in the guest room. The house had three bedrooms veering off the large open space comprising living room, dining area, and kitchen. Just as Jesse came through the patio door, I was looking in his refrigerator. I asked him what he wanted for dinner, onions or baking soda. He coasted toward the far side of the living room, rubbing a towel through his hair, and said, ‘‘I haven’t had time to shop.’’ He put a CD on the stereo. Hendrix, Electric Ladyland. Turning up the volume, he went into his room, heading for the shower.
I scrambled eggs, toasted a couple bagels, and called it dinner. Jesse emerged after his shower, barefoot, in a white T-shirt and jeans, and said, ‘‘Smells good.’’ He set the CD to play ‘‘All Along the Watchtower.’’ Hendrix’s guitar hit me like wind shear, like a scythe.