Half Moon Bay

by Alice LaPlante

  The unmarked door is locked, but when Jane identifies herself over an intercom, she is buzzed in. Inside, the space is surprisingly vast, filled with desks and four men and two women working on laptops and talking on phones. A hive of activity. Papers are pinned to walls, photographs of the two girls, both alive and dead, are everywhere. Jane averts her eyes. The woman who greets her and leads her to a chair is brisk. Blond hair, cut in a neat bob. Not unkind. But not wasting any time either. She clicks her phone on record and places it on the desk in front of Jane.

  Where were you Saturday, August 17, at midday?

  Jane has to think to remember. This would have been a day or so before Heidi’s body had been found. Was Jane reading at home? At the beach? One thing is for sure: she was alone. She tells the FBI agent this.

  And the night of September 23 and early morning of September 24? From, say, 2:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.?

  Alone again.

  In bed? Asleep?

  That I couldn’t say, Jane says. She had decided to answer their questions precisely, no more or less information than the question required.

  But you were at Mavericks the evening the McCready girl disappeared.

  Yes.

  We’re not happy that you were at that location at that particular time, the woman says. She had introduced herself to Jane when first greeting her, but Jane has forgotten her name already. Agent . . . Brady? Haden? Something unmemorable.

  Jane shrugs. I can’t help that. She is indifferent to the woman’s questions. Of all the crimes Jane has committed, this is not one that can be pinned on her.

  The woman leans back. Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that you don’t have a car, you could be in a lot of trouble right now.

  Well, I don’t. Have a car. Jane finds her right hand straying to her mouth. She deliberately moves her hand away, fiddles with the button on her jacket instead.

  No, you don’t, the agent agreed. Silence for a moment.

  It’s just that we find certain . . . coincidences in dates and time that make us unhappy.

  You keep using that word unhappy, as if it’s an emotional thing for you, Jane says.

  Does that surprise you? the agent asks. She holds Jane’s eyes for longer than Jane is comfortable with. Jane looks away first. Two little girls have been murdered. Isn’t that something to be emotional about?

  I suppose.

  You suppose?

  I mean yes. Of course. Jane remembers whom she is talking to. She must pretend normalcy. One doesn’t think of the FBI as acting on emotions.

  The agent allows herself a smile. Call them professional instincts, then.

  The agent pauses before continuing. There are certain facts that we are . . . pursuing . . . that make you a person of interest.

  She holds up one finger. First, you yourself lost a daughter last year.

  Jane is startled, although she knows she shouldn’t be. She knows certain facts are a matter of public record. Yet she has flown under the radar here in Half Moon Bay for so long. She should know, in this age of free-flowing information, that she would be caught. Busted.

  Then there’s the fact of your erratic behavior at that time. Allowances were made. But still. Evidence suggests you are not always in control of yourself, that you are capable of unpredictable, not to say illegal, activities.

  Jane nods. She has nothing to say on this point.

  Then there’s the fact that this all started about eight months after you moved here. She holds up another finger. Three. Then she hesitates.

  Jane speaks up. And you think it’s a woman.

  The agent’s face is impassive. A pause. Then she makes a decision, and nods. She is watching Jane closely as she speaks. Yes, we do. There’s the makeup. The tenderness with which the girls are posed. The tableaux suggest a woman rather than a man.

  A bell sounds. The front door buzzes, and the door to the storefront opens. Both Jane and the woman stop and turn. In walks the man whom Jane had last glimpsed in his Mercedes at San Gregorio. She would know him anywhere. The dark broodiness. Out of his car, he is tall. Loose-limbed with broad shoulders. Casually dressed. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He doesn’t look in their direction but is greeted by a man in a suit—another agent, Jane assumes—and led away to a far corner of the room.

  The woman agent’s eyes have followed Jane’s.

  Know him? she asks.

  Seen him around, Jane says. Another suspect?

  You know I’m not going to tell you that.

  Jane likes this woman. She’s straightforward and blunt. She’s efficient. She’s doing her job—all qualities Jane admires.

  The woman plunges in again to the questioning. So we know your history.

  Jane says nothing.

  We know that you have been what many would call unstable. That you are, as they say, capable of going off the rails.

  Jane pushes back. These . . . abductions . . . are the work of a planner, not someone impulsive, she says.

  We know you’re that too. A scientist. A careful and precise thinker. Someone who is patient enough to allow things to grow naturally.

  So I’m being investigated, Jane says. The agent nods.

  Jane’s attention drifts. She has her eyes on the man at the other end of the room. He seems cheerful. He is smiling as he answers the agent’s questions. His shoulders show that he is relaxed; he leans against the back of the chair, stretches out his legs. Now he is laughing at something the agent has said. She sees why the women were smiling in the grocery store as they talked about him. Even from here, she feels his energy, the pull.

  The agent clears her throat to recall Jane’s attention.

  Don’t leave town without telling us. We may have more questions.

  Jane nods meekly and gets up to go. But she has no intention of obeying this woman.

  * * *

  Jane is accustomed to inquisitions. She is nearly always deemed the guilty party. When growing up, her father would call all eight of the sisters into the television room, where he sat in his reclining chair, the judge and jury for their crimes. Who borrowed my razor? Who opened the box of cookies? Who left their bicycle in the driveway? Jane was punished most frequently. Oh, was she punished! She refused to cry, would hold out until she couldn’t bear it any longer. Then she’d given in, finally. This delighted the father.

  Other things amused her father. When bored, he’d summon the daughters. He’d bark out orders. Age! he’d say, and they’d line up, oldest to youngest. Height! And they’d rearrange themselves accordingly. But often he challenged them. Beauty! he’d call. Intelligence! There’d be squabbles and jostling as they fought for positions. There’d be animosity. Hitting, pinching, even biting on occasion. For this game was important to them. It was a competition. They took it seriously. Sister raised hand against sister. The father laughed. That’s entertainment! he’d say.

  But these games also hurt the sisters deeply. Because in other ways, they were all so close. Each could say the names of all the sisters quickly, in birth order, to the amazement of friends and neighbors, none of whom could keep the daughters all straight:

  Bridgetmeganjanereginalucycarolinebarbaraagnes.

  They knew each other’s secret names too. Vain One. Hairy Breasts. Smelly Butt. Pimple Back. Ugly names.

  Shameful names, especially Jane’s. Black Heart. Her sisters would taunt her because of a fascination with a Mass card she’d found in her grandmother’s underwear drawer, of Jesus opening his chest to reveal a glowing red heart. Yours is different. We know. Black Heart! Black Heart!

  * * *

  The Three Sisters Café has been open only a year, since just before Jane moved to the coast, but is already the place in Half Moon Bay to have coffee, power up the laptop, and hear the local gossip. The owners are the twins, Daphne and Chloe—their parents had a sense of humor—and their younger sister, Margaret. Jane now can tell them apart. She knows Daphne is the cook; she has a burn mark on her right wrist from an accident involving a fry
ing pan and hot oil. Chloe is the marketer and businessperson—she orders the supplies, puts the ads and coupons in the Moon News, and pays the bills, always before they are due. But it’s the twins’ younger sister, Margaret, who holds it all together. She knows everyone and everything that is happening in town. But unlike some natural gossips, there’s no hint of meanness or pettiness in her reports. When she tells Jane, They say it’s Fred Barnes, they say he has a thing about dolls, she is withholding judgment and there is no joy in her passing along what is actually quite terrible news. Fred Barnes!

  Look at Jane. Look at how she is attempting to calm herself down. See how she takes a small bottle out of her messenger bag and pops a small white pill. See how her fingers gradually unclench. See how her leg stops going up and down. The pill works fast. It helps that Jane hasn’t eaten anything yet today.

  Why should Jane care? She hardly knows Fred Barnes. Just to say hi to, just from the photos in the newspaper as the football team loses again and again. Fred Barnes has a broad, open face, a triple chin, and a beer gut so massive, it is said, he has to custom-order his belts online. She thinks of him as a genuine, yet crude, sort of man. The killings would seem to require someone with a more delicate touch.

  What’s the evidence? Jane asks next time Margaret comes around with the coffeepot.

  They found a weird collection of dolls in his basement. He’d painted them too. Just like those poor girls.

  Is he in custody?

  He’s at the FBI offices now. But they haven’t charged him yet. Margaret moved on.

  It doesn’t feel right to Jane. As she told the FBI agent, the abductions seem to have a woman’s touch. Although she supposes she should be grateful that eyes have moved past her.

  * * *

  Jane, unstable? Capable of acting irrationally, as the FBI agent had said? Oh, yes.

  One week after Angela’s funeral, Jane tracked down her daughter’s murderer. It was all so easy, what with Facebook and LinkedIn. The woman had a large modern house in Oakland Hills. Surrounded by other new houses in the area where the massive Oakland fire of two decades before had burned down all the charming turn-of-the-century wooden craftsman homes. This house was like all the other glass McMansions that had been built with insurance money. Treeless and exposed to the glaring sunlight, large windows glinting in the sun, many-gabled roofs. Jane parked outside the house. No one was visible.

  The woman had been charged and found guilty of vehicular manslaughter. But she had connections. Her husband was a special prosecutor high up in the court system. The woman was put on misdemeanor probation. She was told to pay $1,000 in fines. She strutted out of the courtroom in red high heels without a glance at Jane or Rick.

  One thousand dollars would barely pay the monthly gardener’s fee for the embarrassment of rose bushes surrounding the steel-and-glass monstrosity. Jane knew the enormous care and feeding—and the gallons upon gallons of water—it would take to have a rose garden of that kind. There must be two hundred rose bushes there, magnificent specimens of Damask, and Centifolia, and Gallica. Angela had always loved roses.

  The woman had wept on the witness stand in court, but the tears had all been for herself.

  If you could know what I’ve gone through.

  Yes. If you could know, thought Jane, sitting in the courtroom, her hands clenched, her fingernails biting into her skin. The woman had had her own five-year-old child in the car. Neither had been injured. The car hadn’t a scratch or indent. Killing Angela had not made a mark on it.

  The woman had not been texting, she insisted. She had not been talking to anyone. Yes, her cell phone was in her lap. Yes, there was a call to her husband of fifteen seconds duration at approximately the time of the accident, but that was a mistake. A butt call? the prosecutor asked scornfully. When your butt was in the seat? Still, the jury declined to convict her. They accepted her story that Angela had run out suddenly from behind a parked car on the dark street. There were no witnesses. The woman got away with murder.

  Jane chose a night when the moon was on the wane. Some light, but not a lot. Two a.m. She carried her industrial sprayer from the arboretum and a five-gallon vat filled with sodium tetraborate. She sprayed all the roses thoroughly. She didn’t miss a single one. She made sure to get the roots as well as the leaves.

  One week later, she drove past the house. It was a glorious disaster. Withered stalks and the blackened remains of the once-towering bushes. A grotesque wasteland, the house’s ostentatiousness mocked by its surroundings. The woman, Hope was her name, came out the door. She did not look at the devastation around her. She got into her BMW and began backing out of the driveway.

  Jane pressed gently on the gas and pulled out of her parking spot so that when Hope finished backing out of her driveway and straightening out her car, her car was face-to-face with Jane’s. They were perhaps five feet apart, but there was no room on either side to pass. Hope made a preemptory gesture with her hand. Get out of my way. Jane is sure she was not recognized. She stepped on the gas and slowly edged her car forward so that it was nearly touching the BMW. Hope looked enraged. She shook her finger at Jane. Jane smiled. She stepped on the gas so that her car kissed the front fender of the BMW. She kept her foot steady on the gas. The BMW, a heavier car, held firm. Jane put her car in reverse. She backed up two feet. She put the car into first gear and stepped on the gas, hard. This time she felt the fender of the BMW give. Hope opened her mouth and shrieked. Jane saw her put her car in reverse, but by that time, another two cars had pulled up behind her and she had nowhere to go. She honked her horn but was merely answered with more honking behind her. Hope picked up her cell phone and began pushing buttons while Jane backed up her car again, this time farther. Ten feet. Changed gears. Gassed it. This time there was a distinct crunch. Jane backed up, and again accelerated, harder and faster this time. Again. Until the front of the BMW was crumpled metal and the windshield cracked, smashed. Broken glass was strewn all over the road. Hope opened her car door and made for the house, talking on her cell phone as she ran.

  Jane calmly turned her car and drove home.

  * * *

  One of the policemen who came to the house later that day had delivered the news about Angela. He was sympathetic but firm. Charges were being pressed. Jane had to come into the station. Jane had to be booked. In her mug shot, she looked mad, her hair awry, an elated expression on her face. Truly insane.

  They found the sodium tetraborate in her garage. Rick had been spending more and more time away—business travel, he’d said—so he couldn’t confirm her presence at home the night the roses had been destroyed. Ultimately all the evidence was circumstantial. Still, that was enough. Jane was fined the exact same amount as the woman who killed her daughter for willfully damaging property—$1,000—and had to pay a $6,500 car repair bill on top of that. She handed over the check with hands shaking in rage. Next time, she thought. Next time she’ll lose more than a car and some roses. She gloried in having an enemy. A face. A body. Bodies can be broken. They can feel pain.

  The court is very sympathetic to your situation, the judge had said. Nevertheless, this is not behavior that can be tolerated.

  Her shrink told her to get away.

  Her boss found her a new job.

  The woman, Hope, got a new cell phone number. She took down her Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Later, a SOLD sign went up on the lawn, scraped bare of the desecrated rose bushes.

  Jane’s friends took turns staying with her. Babysitting time, Jane heard one whisper to her phone from the spare bedroom.

  Jane moved to Half Moon Bay. To keep herself safe. To keep herself out of jail. To go where no one knew her or her history. But nothing could rid Jane of the rage and shame. It was merely tamped down. Waiting to be ignited.

  * * *

  Every Saturday morning, no matter the weather, the flower growers show up at the parking lot of the First Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay a little after dawn and begin setting up their stalls.
Jane never misses the market. She’s not there in a professional capacity, since Smithson’s doesn’t sell cut flowers. It’s known instead throughout California for its indigenous plants, some of them impossible to get elsewhere. But the Ferrochinis, Garibaldis, and small organic farms from Bonny Doon and Santa Cruz come with their vans full of blossoms, which they sell to tourists and locals alike. Jane likes the vibe. The busyness. The canvas tents, as much to protect against wet wind and fog as sun, as the weather can turn in minutes. The large plastic white tubs filled with banksia (Banksia), bachelor’s buttons (Centaurea cyanus), and zinnia (Zinnia elegans), amid the usual roses and lilies. And of course the people. Only happy people buy flowers at 7:00 a.m. on a foggy Saturday morning. Maybe the sad people come later, Jane didn’t know. Perhaps that’s why she never buys flowers. She’s not emotionally qualified. Her plants at the nursery, they’re used to her moods, they even feed on them; her melancholy somehow nourishes the hairy alumroot (Heuchera villosa) and threeleaf foamflowers (Tiarella trifoliata) that she’s growing there. That’s what she tells herself, anyway. The other employees, they just say Jane has a green thumb.

  Saturday, September 27. The flower market. 7:30 a.m. Poorly attended despite glorious weather. Posters of the two lost girls, Heidi and Rose, still papering the streetlight poles and shop windows. Jane makes her rounds as usual. She has found that conforming to habits, going through the motions, is better than the alternative. Structure, Dr. Blanes had told her, is the key to survival.

  She’s on her way back to her motorbike when she hears a call. Hey. Red!

  Naturally Jane looks. You don’t grow up an O’Malley in Big Cabin, Oklahoma, without answering to this, among unkinder things. Other people are looking too.

  She locates the origin of the voice, a man about ten feet away. Dark complexion and hair and eyes register before she realizes she’s looking at the man from the D-A-R-L-I-N-G shrine in San Gregorio. The same one she saw at the FBI office. Closer, he is at first glance less impressive. Tall, but perhaps a bit too thin, his jacket sleeves falling over his wrists. A scarecrow with insufficient stuffing. A narrow leather bag hangs from his shoulder. A man purse, Jane thinks scornfully. But then he smiles. She likes his face. Like is perhaps not the right word. She understands why the women who had seen him kept something back. Secrets about him, themselves. His smile is so personal it should be an affront, yet somehow it isn’t. He is recognizing her, he is promising that he will take her, Jane, seriously.