by Nova Jacobs
He wasn’t looking forward to the news he had to give Hazel. He had considered not telling her at all and sparing her the anxiety, but one of the family was bound to let it slip—assuming they, too, had gotten their notices from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Gregory’s attention was diverted by the sight of a girl, seven years old maybe, seated in a sedan one lane over. She had clearly been crying, which triggered in him an involuntary mix of compassion and fury. He couldn’t stand the sight of a sad child, so much so that he had turned his entire career at the LAPD into rescuing them. Now that he was a father, the intensity of his reaction to seeing unhappy children was almost unbearable. While most new parents became myopic in their fixation with their own offspring, for Gregory, it was as if every child was his own.
He looked back at the girl, whose resemblance to his sister at that age—unbrushed hair, wide-set eyes—was startling. Something about the way she stared, toy gripped to chest . . . Gregory would tell his sister the news tonight. He would wait until his wife had gone to bed, then put on a pot for tea.
Haze?
“Yeah?”
She would look up from her mug, a flicker of concern passing over her face.
I have something to tell you.
There were so many things he could tell her, but for tonight, he would stick to just one.
He’s out of prison.
“What?”
He’s out.
“I don’t believe you.”
Yes, well . . .
After a lengthy explanation, he would try to persuade her not to worry, but Gregory himself was having a difficult time ignoring the secret dread that had been compressing his insides like a C-clamp. Aside from Hazel, Isaac was the only one who would have understood his current apprehension. But now he was gone. No matter how much Gregory tried to tell himself it would all be fine, he didn’t quite believe it. And he wanted to, if only for this evening.
* * *
About a mile from home, Gregory realized he was being followed. But when he identified the car’s retro headlights as those of a 2005 Ford Thunderbird convertible, he relaxed. There was only one person he knew who drove that car: Fritz Dornbach, Isaac’s accountant of nearly fifteen years. Because of Fritz’s additional law degree, he also did some legal work for the family. But his main purpose had been to shield Isaac from having anything to do with bookkeeping, banks, or money, a role in which Fritz seemed to take particular pride. One could almost see him boasting at the annual CPA conference about his genius client: “Sure, he may be close to solving Goldbach’s conjecture or whatever, but swear to God, so much as show him his own checkbook, and he’s out in the barn frantically petting rabbits.” But Isaac’s distaste for money management had nothing to do with ineptitude. “Finance isn’t math,” Gregory’s grandfather liked to say, “it’s number enslavement.”
The convertible overtook him, and by the time Gregory pulled into his driveway, his diminutive pursuer was standing in front of the house, his peppery hair comically windblown. Fritz had on his optical-illusion shoes, the ones designed to boost height while obscuring where his actual feet were resting. It wasn’t much of an illusion.
“I called,” Fritz said. “Maybe you couldn’t hear the ringing coming from your purse.”
Gregory wasn’t in the mood for banter. “What’s up, Fritz?”
From behind his back, Fritz produced a folder, decorated with an illustration of a monarch butterfly. “My assistant picked out the folder,” he mumbled.
“Am I supposed to know what this is?”
But Gregory had some idea. Just days after Isaac’s death, Fritz had left a lengthy message on his voice mail: “Why is everyone, including your friends at the LAPD, acting as if a perfectly happy guy electrocuting himself is normal? I mean, before he’s even finished breakfast? A breakfast with two place settings, I might add.” But had his grandfather really been happy? With his work stalled (he hadn’t published anything serious in years) and the love of his life in a home for the senile, that was debatable. As for the extra place setting, this had been explained away by the housekeeper, who said that Isaac often made an extra breakfast for her on the mornings she stopped by.
Fritz held out the folder. “It’s the bank records I was telling you about. Steady cash withdrawals at the end of each month for the last five and a half years. Not a ton, but not exactly pocket money.”
“I don’t see how it’s my business.”
“You’re the detective—at least have a look. I drove all the way over here.”
Gregory relented and took the folder. “You never asked him about it?”
“Once or twice, but all he said was that he liked cash. I teased him about slowly stashing a fortune away in that rat’s nest house of his, but then I forgot about it.” Fritz turned in the direction of Pico Boulevard, where a car horn had started wailing. “He never did fix that gridlock thing, did he?”
“Gridlock isn’t real mathematics. Or that’s what he said when he lost his funding.”
Fritz moved to his car. “You know what he told me once? That the whole universe is one giant computer, and every second it’s calculating its own future down to the last detail—right down to some guy getting angry on the road.”
Gregory nodded. “He did like a good metaphor. Join us for dinner?” Fritz had become something of a family friend over the years, but this was less an invite than an end to the conversation.
“Can’t, I’ve got a date. But I’m having a little masquerade in Hollywood this weekend, if you and Goldie are up for it.”
“Not sure I can handle one of your parties, Fritz. We’re taking Lewis trick-or-treating.”
“Right. Another time, then?”
Gregory watched the accountant maneuver himself back into the driver’s seat of his Thunderbird. It wasn’t unlike watching a child clamber onto a chair, and for some reason the image made him sad, and he turned away.
* * *
After putting his son to bed, Gregory sat down to a late dinner with his wife and sister. Though he had seen Hazel the previous Christmas, it felt as if it had been much longer. She looked healthy but older: cheeks not quite as round, eyes not quite as hope filled. But then again, he knew his own face was looking increasingly excavated.
On account of their guest, Goldie had made a dinner featuring several complicated courses. In addition to putting in extra time in the kitchen, she had also put some effort into her appearance: her brassy curls were pulled up from her neck, her lips painted coral, and her cheeks dusted with bronzer. His wife wasn’t pretty exactly, but she did her best to highlight her assets.
“Such a beautiful service,” Goldie said halfway through dinner, a phrase she had uttered at least ten times since yesterday. “Wasn’t it beautiful?”
Hazel, who had stayed mostly quiet since her arrival, mumbled in agreement. She seemed unusually distant, though Gregory knew the same could be said of him.
As his wife chattered on about the funeral, he imagined letting the news fall right there at the table, followed by Hazel’s disbelief.
“But it was a life sentence.”
He was well behaved.
A pause as she considered recent events.
“The timing is weird, isn’t it?”
Maybe, but you know what Isaac would say: ‘concurrence of events,’ and all that. It doesn’t mean—
“Did Isaac know he was out?”
We didn’t have much of a chance to talk about it—
“Daddy!”
Gregory’s interior stage play was interrupted by his two-year-old son, who had tottered into the room grasping a rubber fish Hazel had brought as a present. As Lewis began to explore the tail with his mouth, Gregory made a mental note to check the toxicity of the material.
He pushed back his chair. “I’ll put him down.” He took up Lewis in one affectionate swoop and, planting kisses all the way down the hall, went to deliver the second bedtime story of the night.<
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* * *
When the dishes were cleared and his wife had turned in, Gregory put a kettle on and sat Hazel down in the kitchen. In the event she didn’t believe him, he was ready to produce his letters from the Department of Corrections. But Hazel looked tired and distracted, and was rapidly losing her ability to engage as the evening wore on. She would be calling it a night soon, going back to the house to enjoy the comforts of her old bedroom. He was certain that plying her with hot chocolate would do the trick, but when he handed her a mug with the name of her store, The Guttersnipe, printed along the rim, she seemed to crumple.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She got up, surprising him by grabbing some Captain Morgan from a shelf. She wasn’t a big drinker, but gave both their mugs a liberal splash. As Gregory looked down and watched the cool rum disrupt the harmony of milk and chocolate, he imagined the liquor, milk, and cocoa particles following a dispersion equation of their own making. It had been years since he’d studied fluid dynamics in school, but moving gas and liquid still had the power to command his attention. To this day, he stared entirely too long at the whorls escaping a smoker’s lips or a stray seed pod gliding along the surface of a pool.
He took a sip of the spiked chocolate and waited for Hazel to look up. Although he’d long ago lost the ability to read her moods, he could see that something was wrong, beyond the loss of their grandfather.
“You all right?”
She shrugged. “Just the usual self-evaluation that happens when one of the few people you care about dies. And the other one has lost her mind.”
Tell her now. But before he could form the words, she was wiping away tears with the back of her hand.
“Did I tell you I lost my apartment last month?” she said.
“You didn’t mention that, no.” He tried to maintain a calm expression.
“Did I mention that I’m so embarrassed about it that I haven’t even told my boyfriend? My very successful boyfriend, who wouldn’t at all secretly judge me?”
“Jesus, Haze. Where are you living?”
“In a charming cupboard in the back of my store.”
At the thought of his sister trapped in a tiny, dark space, Gregory felt a dizzy spell coming on. Or maybe he was just tired. He put both palms flat on the table and took a deep breath—a grounding technique he had used when they were young, whenever it felt like their wobbly little world might spin off its axis. Hazel reached over and touched his arm.
He forced a smile. “Well, it all sounds very cozy, Haze.”
“Oh, it is. So cozy it’s slowly killing me.” She took a hard swallow from her mug. “I guess I could close the shop. Get a job, like you hear about. But the thought of spending the rest of my life being harassed by some boss, and surrounded by those fluorescent lights and awful ceiling tiles, you know the ones—” She caught herself. “Sorry.”
“No, no, I like depressing lighting and bad ceilings. I actually prefer it.”
She started to laugh, but her eyes didn’t follow, and soon she was crying harder than before.
He wished he could say something to make her smile, as he’d been able to do when they were small. She would have been curled up on a twin mattress, sad face pressed to her teddy bear Cedric—an oddly posh name, given their surroundings. Though Gregory, now thirty-three, was barely two years older, he had once taken on his role as big brother with gravity, always hunting for new ways to protect and comfort her.
In the absence of Kleenex, he offered her a stack of napkins. “You know you can come live with us. I mean it.”
“I appreciate it, but”—she took a napkin and pressed it to her eyes—“what the hell am I going to do?”
“Have you thought of going back to school?”
She groaned. “Why does everyone ask me that like I’m some illiterate dropout?”
“What did Isaac say about all this?”
Hazel looked away. “He only would have tried to give me money, and I know he didn’t have any. All of it went into the house and taking care of Lily.” Talk of Isaac’s money made Gregory think of Fritz’s butterfly folder.
By the time they reached the silt at the bottom of their mugs, he knew he wasn’t going to be telling his sister about Tom. Because if he told her that on top of everything else, their former foster father was out of prison, she might have a mental collapse right there at the table. The news would have to wait until he could do something about Tom. Something concrete. Or at least until Hazel was back in Seattle, far from the man who could once again infect both of their lives.
– 5 –
The Letter
At almost two in the morning, back in Beachwood Canyon, Hazel awoke from a nightmare—something about the bay engulfing Pioneer Square and her shop floating out to Puget Sound. As she lay in the dark of her old room, with the lingering image of herself marooned on a slab of shelving, she wondered why her dream symbology had always been so irritatingly obvious. Yes, her store was “underwater”—got it. Why couldn’t she have coded, indecipherable dreams like most people? Yet behind all the unambiguous imagery, there had been something lurking: Isaac’s letter.
Hazel had read the letter countless times that day and felt just as helpless and confused as the first time. She had almost told Gregory about it after dinner, tempted by what felt like a precious, fleeting moment of brother-sister camaraderie. Instead, she’d offered up a list of substitute miseries—all completely valid, and certainly responsible for her stress levels, but not the real reason she had totally lost it at her brother’s kitchen table.
It was an unusually blustery night. The house creaked and moaned under the strain of the wind. A stiff palm frond fingernailed its way back and forth across a window. She’d forgotten how spooky the house could be after dark, but felt comforted at least that Sybil, Jack, and their daughter were sleeping downstairs. They had intended to stay with Philip and Jane in Pasadena before flying back home to the Bay Area, but had returned to the canyon after Sybil quarreled with her parents. Hazel had gathered little about it other than what Jack had whispered to her: “Not easy being the offspring of a genius, you know . . .”
Hazel let her gaze fall across the room, where a shaft of moonlight illuminated the spines of her mystery novels—one of which concealed Isaac’s letter. Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, to name a few: they were all books she had read greedily as a child, but whose plots later congealed into a single generic mass. Once in a while, a certain character or revelatory moment would float back to her, but she could rarely remember which book or author. Now a fragment of something seemed to be calling to Hazel from the shelf—something to do with the murder of a paperback writer.
She got out of bed and threw on a pilled robe. She remembered the story now, or at least the end; the entire solution hinged on a single clue left on the ribbon of a typewriter. When the hero-detective unwound the spool, he found the final thoughts of the victim, including the identity of his killer, left in the negative imprint of inked ribbon: Mykilleris . . . The story, though not terribly sophisticated, had ignited her young imagination, and now—thinking of Isaac’s typewriter—she couldn’t get to his study fast enough.
She slipped out of the bedroom and made her way down the hall, careful to avoid the rickety floorboard. The house was still, and the only sound came from a chronically leaky bathtub faucet. Tat-a-tat-tat . . . The drips pounded the porcelain with the discipline of a drum machine, and it seemed that even in this tedious sound, her grandfather was present. Many years ago, Isaac had sat in the kitchen with her and Gregory, lip-syncing to the rhythm of an intensely weepy kitchen faucet with uncanny precision—tat-a-tat-tat-o-tat-a-tat-o-tat-tat!—while she and her brother giggled uncontrollably, delighted by his ability to inhabit the spirit of the tap.
“See, the drips only appear random,” he told them after their laughter subsided, “but if you listen carefully, you can pick out the pattern.” And with a pen, as if jotting off Mors
e code, Isaac marked out the dots and dashes of the “chaotic” system, which, he explained, was not chaotic at all—for chaos theory had been clumsily named. Short drip, long, short, silence. One could alter the system, making it more or less complex by loosening or tightening the handle. “And you know,” he continued, “bad plumbing isn’t the only thing that drips. The entire world drips, too, and if you pay very close attention, you can anticipate the next drop.”
Everything, of course, had been a game to her grandfather, and Hazel had to ask herself: Was he playing a game with her now?
The study was as she’d last seen it: all dark wood and heavy books, an egghead’s sanctum. She rolled aside his chair, ducked beneath the massive desk, and lifted Isaac’s ancient IBM from its home on the floor. A gentle tug of the cord revealed that it hadn’t been unplugged since its last use. She lifted the case and took out the ink cartridge, holding it to the desk lamp. She slowly pulled the ribbon loose like dental floss, but there were no fossilized letters in the ink, only shiny new ribbon. The cartridge had been replaced. She tipped the garbage can with her foot. Empty. So that was that.
As Hazel attempted to respool the ribbon, she heard a noise. After a pause, she heard it again. The floorboard outside. On instinct, she stood up and yanked the typewriter onto the chair, letting the ribbon fall to the floor. She rolled the chair under the desk and turned to the nearest bookshelf, pretending to examine the titles. The door opened, and Sybil, in a girlish nightgown that just brushed her knees, stepped into the dim light.