“Why didn’t you say something back then?”
“I was a kid. Sixteen. Who’d have believed me? And what was there to say? I didn’t see anyone get hurt. No one said anything on the news. If there had been mention of a murder, I would have come forward. But now … well, now it looks like you guys need some help.”
“And the tabloids pay real well for a story like that.”
She fidgeted a second, then leaned back and shrugged. “Yeah, well, that too. But that doesn’t mean I’m lying. I’ve just got a daughter to support is all. And I saw him. I could solve your case for you right this second.”
Cal had stood up slowly, aching all the way down to his toes. He had led the woman to a conference room and taken her statement himself, something he rarely did. Then he filed it in his private cabinet.
He was going to retire, goddammit. He was done with people’s private violence, done with warring families and spite. He was going to spend his life savings on a Winnebago and eat beef to his heart’s discontent. But not before he led one more man to safety.
Cal looked at Jake’s hands on the table, the scar beneath his knuckles he’d never tried to hide. “I told Savannah you two might want to head on out tomorrow morning. Tonight, if you can swing it. Take a tour of the country. Maybe head up to Canada.”
Jake didn’t take his eyes from the television, but the muscles along his shoulders tensed. Finally, he grabbed his beer and drained it.
“A woman’s come forward,” Cal went on. “She was camping the night Roy Pillandro disappeared. Says she got a good look at someone who stepped off that boat with a rifle and a bloody hand.”
Jake stretched out the fingers of his left hand. “Well.”
“We’ll have to set up a lineup,” Cal said. “I can hold it off for a week, maybe two.” He fished into his pocket and took out a cigarette.
“When’s your retirement?” Jake asked.
“The second that woman says it wasn’t you.”
Jake smiled, but not the way Cal wanted him to. Not the smile of a man who was going to do everything he could to save himself.
“I thought I could go with her,” Jake said. “But even if this thing with Emma hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been able to leave. You just get to a point where you can’t run anymore. You get sick of hating yourself.”
Cal lit his cigarette. He had expected as much. Some men just aren’t comfortable unless their heart is broken, unless they’re paying for justifiable acts with their life. Cal put his hand on his shoulder, then got to his feet.
“Lois is waiting for me,” he said. “See, she’s got this strange idea she has to take care of me. Cooks sensible meals and keeps them warm until I come home, no matter what time that is. Sometimes we don’t say a word. We just sit there. But she never goes to sleep unless I’m in bed beside her.”
Jake looked up. “I’m aware of what I’m giving up.”
“I can’t do any more, Jake.”
“I know that. You’ve done more than I ever expected.”
Cal paid for his beer. He squeezed Jake’s shoulder once more before he left the bar.
Savannah sat on the bench in Jake’s garden. The sky was bursting at the seams, glittering with blue meteoroids. All week, the news had been filled with the drama of the collision of Athens Fire and Taurus, two asteroids a mere one hundred thousand miles from Earth, a near miss. But this near miss wasn’t harmless; in fact, it was full of potentially lethal fallout debris. Hour after hour, the newscasters talked of nothing but the rubble headed for Earth. They showed simulated meteorite hits, possible death rates, and the next-to-nothing chance a piece of rock and iron scrap could wipe out life on Earth. Then when real damage started occurring, they couldn’t believe their luck. They sent live crews to every city in the southwestern United States, where the hits were centered.
A ten-foot wide rock had crashed through the eighteenth floor of the Bank of America building in Phoenix, narrowly missing four loan officers. In Amarillo, a whole stable of racehorses had been taken out by a pummeling of six-inch debris. Here, though, the only evidence of anything remarkable was the meteor dust that got into everything. It clung like blue ash to hair and hamburgers and the cleats of tennis shoes. It disoriented the robins, who mistook the ground for sky and kept barreling into it, knocking themselves out.
Meteor dust felt like ice melt, and at the cabin, it had brought autumn on early. A week into August, the aspens hugging Switchback Creek were gold at the edges. The chipmunks no longer stopped to chatter, but ran around ceaselessly, gathering blue-dusted acorns. Tonight, Savannah wrapped a shawl around her burgundy dress, and put on the first of her winter hats, a furry fedora.
Jake drove up at midnight. He’d been at Teton’s Bar all night, but when he got out slowly and steadily, she knew he’d stopped at two beers. She tucked her head against his carving of Superstition Mountain, which he’d stained with henna. He had whittled away at the arms and legs, carving in wrists and ankles. Pretty soon, if her father kept avoiding him, the bench would mean more to him than it did to Doug.
He walked over and sat beside her. He smelled of beer and cigarette smoke, but beneath that, always, of his mountain. She put her hand over his.
“Cal said we ought to leave tomorrow,” she said, and then he squeezed her hand. She looked past the meteor shower to the north and spotted the only red star. It was distant and faint, overshadowed by meteoroids.
“Savannah—”
“You’re not coming.”
He dropped her hand. “They’re going to find me soon. I won’t put you through that.”
She stood up. It really didn’t matter what he thought he could put her through, but how much she was willing to stand. She was jittery, and had been for days. She had to get out of the path of those asteroids. She couldn’t live in a place where all anyone talked about was their chance of death by debris. If she wasn’t optimistic about the future, then all her fortune-telling turned to threats.
She hadn’t been breathing right all summer. Oxygen stopped just short of her lungs. The atmosphere up here was obviously too thin for clear thinking because she wasn’t even sure if the tears in her eyes were from relief or regret or meteor dust. She only knew somewhere along the line she’d lost her smooth gypsy voice, and now even her simplest words cracked with emotion. Now just looking at the people she loved hurt.
“Now that Harry’s got Emma,” she began, then couldn’t go on. The words numbed the corners of her tongue. She wrapped her shawl tight around her. “I don’t want you to come anyway, if you’re only going to leave.”
He stood up beside her, but she could see he was not going to argue. He thought himself a hermit, a man running from his past, but that was not it at all. He’d simply been waiting for his past to catch up to him. He’d been waiting to turn himself in.
She heard a whizzing sound and ducked, thinking a piece of asteroid was falling from the sky. But it was only a pine cone bouncing off the eaves.
“I think we should just say goodbye now.” She was surprised her voice didn’t break, surprised that Harry had been right all those years ago. It was simply stunning that she could love someone this much and still be able to leave him.
Jake stared at her. He could be as still as one of his pine trees when he wanted to. He could not reveal a thing.
“All right then.” He walked down the path to his workshop, then shut the door tightly behind him.
Savannah breathed in and out quickly. Her mother had been spooking her all these years with talk of the terrible things that could happen, all the people she could potentially lose. But that was not the worst. The worst was being able to stand all the losses. The worst was the way a broken heart still beat.
She walked inside, where she left no note, only the Hierophant on the kitchen counter. It was hard to tell who needed to be forgiven; probably they both did. She tossed all her decks except the positive Voyager into the garbage. From now on, she would only work with a deck whose bad
cards were opportunities for redemption.
She tiptoed up the stairs to the loft. Her parents were sleeping soundly, her father tucked against her mother’s back. Savannah leaned over and kissed first her mother’s cheek, then her father’s. Doug’s eyelids fluttered, and she jumped back into the shadows. She held her breath until he was still again, until she could get out of there without saying one more goodbye.
She took Jake’s suitcases out of her car and put them on the porch. She was long past crying. She was going to miss him every day of her life, and that was just the way it would be. But at least she was going where the sky wasn’t falling. At least she wouldn’t be afraid to look up.
She got in the car and started the engine. She really didn’t expect him to come after her, but when he didn’t, she yanked off her bracelets. She tossed them one by one out the car window, leaving a trail she knew he would not follow. She reached the highway by two; by dawn, she was well on her way to San Francisco, where all the things she couldn’t bear to see were hidden in fog.
* * *
As soon as Cheryl Pillandro heard about the lineup, she got a leave of absence from Dillard’s. Maggie Dawson insisted she stay at the Sage Street house, and Cheryl stopped there only long enough to change into the clothes she’d bought at a thrift shop. Torn jeans, red halter top, knee-high black boots, clothes she might have owned fifteen years ago. Roy’s kind of clothes. She looked like white trash, like a middle-aged woman suffering from delusions of youth and garish beauty, and that was exactly how she wanted it. She wanted a man to look her in the eye and think her capable of all kinds of foolishness.
She arrived at the sheriff’s office half an hour later, and raised havoc until a deputy showed her into Cal Bentley’s office. He was seated beside his desk, digging into a supersized bottle of Advil.
“Sorry, Chief,” the deputy said. “This is Cheryl Pillandro. Jake Grey’s mother. She wouldn’t—”
“It’s all right,” Cal said. “She can stay.”
Cheryl waited until the deputy left, then took a deep breath and marched to Cal Bentley’s chair. His eyes widened; probably he thought she was going to make a pass at him, but all she did was bend over, so he could see the blue scar along the back of her neck.
“Steak knife,” she said. She put her foot on his chair and rolled up the jeans. “Golf club.” She held out the arm Roy had broken. “Brute force.”
She walked around the desk and sat down. She’d been sweating on the way over, but now she was cool as ice. This was the first time in fifteen years she hadn’t hated herself, and she drew out the next words, so she could make the moment last.
“Roy Pillandro was a son of a bitch,” she went on. “And I killed him.”
Cal sat back in his chair. He tapped out three more Advils and swallowed them without water. He stood up and walked to the door to lock it. Then he turned around.
“I wish you had,” he said softly.
Cheryl dropped her hands in her lap. By the time Cal got back to his desk, she was crying. He handed her a tissue.
“We’ve got witnesses placing you at your house in Phoenix the night Roy disappeared,” he went on. “Bethany Appleton saw a man coming off Roy’s boat, a twenty-year-old, with dark hair and a rifle. And it would have taken more than a hundred-ten-pound woman to smash in a man’s skull.”
Cheryl looked up. “I’m telling you, I did it. If you’ve got a confession, who the hell cares if it’s the right one or not? Roy’s not here to tell you different.”
Cal knelt down next to her chair. When he touched her hands, she cried harder. She didn’t want anyone’s pity. She wanted a chance for redemption. She wanted to finally start acting like somebody’s mother.
But all Cal did was squeeze her hands. “I’ll do everything I can to keep him out of jail, but it’s almost as if he wants that. I’m fighting him, more than anything else.”
Cheryl stood up. She swiped at the tears that just kept coming. “I wanted to kill him. Roy had so many enemies, someone was bound to do him in eventually. He was dead either way. It shouldn’t have had anything to do with Jake.”
“I’ll try …”
Cheryl walked out. She got in her car and drove back to the Dawson house, where the garden had turned wild in Doug’s absence, the jackmanii clematis claiming a whole sidewalk, the ginkgo tree roots turning over cobblestones. She walked into the house and went straight to the telephone directory. She found a Bethany Appleton on Diaz Street, and picked up the phone.
When a woman answered, Cheryl said nothing, just held the phone to her ear while the woman said, “Hello? Is anyone there? Who the hell is this?”
In the coming week, she would call every Bethany Appleton within a hundred-mile radius. After she’d worn them all down with silence, she would call one more time and do a perfect imitation of Roy. “Whoever condemns a man to hell,” she’d say, “goes there with him.” And then she’d hang up while they both were crying.
Maggie never invited Doug on her shopping excursions. It was hell on him to get down Jake’s mountain on that sorry excuse for a road. But a week after Savannah left, when Maggie walked to her car, he was already in the passenger seat, waiting.
“I’m coming with you. Don’t argue. I mean it.”
Maggie got in the car. He had a blanket over his legs, but when she tried to tuck it in around him, he kicked it off.
“Don’t go crazy now,” she said.
“Why not? Why not now?”
Maggie got a chill up her spine and started the car. Since Savannah had left, the cabin had been eerily quiet. Jake had hardly come out of his workshop. When he did, he stomped along the front porch and threw stones at the rooftop, where they clanked against something hard, then came whizzing back down. He walked for miles, and only came back after sunset, when his legs were trembling and they couldn’t see his eyes.
Maggie knew they had worn out their welcome, but she was not leaving. There was something in the air up here that was making Doug well, and if she had to lie, cheat and steal to keep it coming, she would. Whenever Jake asked their plans, she told him plans were for newlyweds, for people with all the time in the world. “All I plan for,” she said, “is to get up earlier every morning, so I can have more time with Doug.”
Her husband was eating meat and cuddling her in bed again, and she wasn’t going to miss a second of it. She knelt beside him when he worked in Jake’s garden, and never took her gaze off the rise and fall of his shoulders. Sometimes, when his breath shuddered a little, her stomach dropped out. She couldn’t get her breath either and had to sit there until the spell passed.
She drove carefully down the mountain, then north toward the outlet mall. She parked in the handicap spot, though they had no sticker. But hell, she had an open bottle of wine in the back, too, which she sipped after shopping, on occasion. Rules were for people in their thirties who gave a damn.
She helped Doug into the Levi’s outlet, and had him try on a new pair of 501’s. They were three sizes smaller than the pair they’d bought six months ago, but when he walked out of the dressing room, he looked like everything she’d ever dreamed of. The hairs that were slowly growing back on his head were red, of all things. Red and soft as kitten fur. He looked so good in the jeans, she walked up to him and planted a kiss on his lips. A teenager looking at sweatshirts gawked at them.
They bought the Levi’s, then went into Fieldcrest Cannon and found new sheets for Jake. They also bought him sixteen crystal goblets, which he would never use. At Crocodile Rock, Maggie bought a leather purse, and at the Lane store, Doug charged a leather recliner, which they had shipped to their house.
When they were through, they drove to Lynx Lake and brought out the open bottle of wine. They sat on the sand and drank Merlot out of Jake’s new glasses.
Maggie closed her eyes and raised her face to the sun. She still thought life was horrible. God was unjust and downright mean. Then he did something crazy, like give her someone to love. He gave her a mom
ent so perfect, if she didn’t sit still and enjoy every last second, she’d be a goddamn fool.
Doug slipped his hand into hers, and the moment passed. She opened her eyes and looked right at him. His hair was coming in red all right, but the whites of his eyes had turned red, too. There was blood in his urine. It seemed only right that he buy everything he could get his hands on.
“Maggie,” he said, but she shook her head. There was nothing more for him to say, and only a few words left for her.
“I love you, Doug,” she said.
He smiled and squeezed her hand. “I’ve always known that.”
She lowered her head, because if he knew that, then he probably knew the rest. That she was sorry for the things she’d said. That it was easier to be mean than tender. And that there was no way she could live without him.
When Savannah returned to San Francisco, she had two choices: Return to Taylor Baines or work the party circuit, telling fortunes with Ramona. After trying out a couple of parties, she realized it was no choice at all.
Something had changed, and Savannah supposed it was her. Suddenly people were lining up across ballrooms to hear their fortunes. After all these years, she’d discovered the secret of successful predictions: People didn’t want to hear how to be happy. They wanted her to promise them their heart’s desire, assuming this was the same thing. Actually, it wasn’t even close. A heart’s desire was Emma’s safety; happiness would have been keeping her safe herself. When Savannah sat parked outside of Harry’s house, she had what she wanted, but she couldn’t hold it in her hands. She could only hope for quick glimpses through an upstairs window, or a sudden, miraculous change of heart.
Most people, however, didn’t care about this discrepancy. In fact, her business was on fire. After handing out business cards at a few parties, customers started lining up outside her house. Her first client on Thursday night was a man in his thirties with thinning hair. He was shaped like a bell curve, thin at the ends, soft and protruding in the middle, and when he sat across from her, she could feel the fingers of his sadness washing over her. She pulled down her beret and leaned away from him.
The Wishing Garden Page 27