by David Downie
Holding on to the word “grave,” James recalled what the locals had always said about the scenic, serene site of the Beachcomber Motel—that it was where the Yono tribe had been massacred a century and a half earlier, then buried in a mass grave, and that’s why it had become the town’s first graveyard, all trace of it gone now, except on certain century-old maps kept in the library at the junior college. Had Beverley ever dug up bones or gravestones? he wondered idly. Egmont had. James would have to ask her. Now that he thought of it, hadn’t he seen something long and bleached and tibia-like caught in the roots of the cypress, the roots he had sawed through with Egmont’s old saw, its blade sparking and bucking?
His thoughts were interrupted by a sharp rapping from the hallway. “Feel free to use the blow-dryer,” Beverley shouted, her percussive voice cutting through the closed door. “It’s in the drawer on the right. There’s a big plastic comb, too.”
Dressed in a baggy canary-yellow sweat suit emblazoned with the number three, its elasticized pants slipping off his hips, James carried his boots and shuffled barefoot back to the kitchen, where Beverley had set two places at a small Formica-top table in the corner. His hair, still wet, spread on his shoulders, merging with his long wet beard.
“Couldn’t find the dryer?”
“I have never used a blow-dryer in my life and never will,” he said, trying but failing to make his words sound lighthearted. “The notion and the noise are an abomination.”
“Suit yourself,” she said lightly, “I can tell you’re a stubborn cuss, same as I am.”
James considered for a moment and settled on something neutral. “You’re a fine judge of character, Beverley.”
“I wasn’t head of personnel for nothing,” she quipped, steering him into an old wooden chair. “Now they call it human resources or HR, because one good word wasn’t good enough, they had to use two weak ones.” She paused, catching her breath. He had noticed this lack of breath and wondered if she had the beginnings of emphysema or some other form of lung disease. “Beer or wine or water,” she gasped, “or is it milk or more coffee? I have no Barolo or Cabernet Sauvignon, I’m sorry to say. White is my poison, screw-top, jug stuff.”
James lifted a gnarled finger and pointed at the beer and the water, thanking her for one of each. “You were right, Beverley, that shower was heavenly. I shouldn’t have used so much water. I got carried away.”
“Heavenly?” she teased, laughing out loud. “What kind of word is that for a tough old lumberjack like you?” James blushed and though most of his face was hidden by hair, she could see the wave of pink spread across his forehead and neck. “Won’t you call me Bev, Jim?” she pleaded. “Call me Bev or Tater, for goodness’ sakes.”
He shook his head. “I will not.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said, swallowing the entire glassful of water in a gulp then reaching for the beer, “you do not look like a potato.” Tempted by an image of a dancing hippo from Fantasia dressed in pink and mauve like a fuchsia blossom, he opened his mouth to speak, changed tack, and said instead, “‘Beverley’ is euphonic. ‘Beverley’ is your name. Bev, Tom, Dick, Doug, Dave, Tim, Jim—they make me nauseous, I’m afraid to say, with regret, I do not like nicknames, I try not to diminish people.”
“No point moving on to last names, then,” she said, letting out a percussive guffaw. She beamed with pleasure dishing out the stew. “Bœuf aux carottes,” she announced in French. “For your information, I don’t know what my last name is. I took my first husband’s name and he left me, I don’t blame him, though he never complained about the food. I took my second husband’s name and I threw him out, the louse, his name was Solomon. I took my third husband’s name and he died on me, bless his soul, he was the keeper and we only had ten years together. All I know is, there won’t be a number four. Been there, done that.” She caught her breath and fiddled with her necklace. “I can see you are thinking I talked Number Three to death, and you may be right. You are in no danger. I’m no cougar, and I’ll bet you’re at least five years my junior, young man.” She drew breath and lifted her fork, wishing him bon appétit with a fine French accent then digging in. “Drink your beer, Jim. Like I was saying, I am no maiden, so I am not going back to that name, either. I’m just Bev or Beverley if you insist.”
“And I’m James.”
“Cheers, thank you for the tree,” she said, silenced momentarily by the necessity of chewing the stew and swallowing the glass of jug Chablis she was clearly enjoying. “By the way, James, while we’re at it, you aren’t from New York City, are you? I didn’t think so. I lived in New York and never came across an accent like yours. You speak what my father, the schoolteacher, used to call standard English, very flat, very proper, like my boss when I was at Waste Disposal in West Bernardino, down south, height of my glorious career.” She savored another bite, took a sip, took another sip, and waited to see if James would react.
“Delicious,” he said, “compliments to the chef.”
“That’s me,” she said, “made from scratch. I do not go in for processed food. I make big batches and freeze them. Imagine, Jim, I own thirty-two cookbooks totaling 3,859 recipes. I counted them at my husband’s behest and recounted recently just to be sure. Number Three was very precise. It must’ve been the engineering background.” She reached over and served James another mound of beef stew and rice. “Now, that deputy who was here, Tom Smithson, I call him Tom Cat because he’s always licking himself and full of self-love, he might think you’re from New York, maybe, but I know better. Tom’s a caricature, though he doesn’t know it and couldn’t spell the word if his life depended on it. He’s a certified imbecile. Have you ever seen a deputy wear a helmet inside a police car? Or practically draw his sidearm when someone holds out some crushed cypress leaves to sniff? And why can’t he just describe a man’s probable height and weight—in your case six-foot five and one-hundred-sixty-five pounds, I’m guessing—instead of going on and on as he did?” Beverley paused and eyed James. “He’s never even been down to the city. I know that for a fact from his uncle, the sheriff. But I am not like the local variety of peckerwood, redneck, or hip-neck, as they call the hybrid-type hicks and hayseeds here. I have traveled, I went to Canada and Mexico with husband number two, I lived and worked in Upstate New York and Los Angeles, and you’re from neither, am I right?”
“You are right,” James said. “Your stew is excellent, Beverley. Do I detect a pinch of allspice or nutmeg? You must have taken cooking classes, or are you a talented autodidact, I mean to say, self-taught?”
“I know what autodidact means, Jim, I mean James, and don’t go trying to change the subject sounding like a professor. If you think I’m in with the Tom Cat and the Blue Meanies you’re wrong, by the way, we all know about playacting, don’t we, so I just play along with them and they don’t bother me because, frankly, I’m an old white woman with a business, and I pay my taxes. What they fear are the tree huggers and the dealers and the outsiders like you, and anyone who might blow the whistle on what they’re up to in this county, heaven knows what that may be.” She drew breath, felt for her pearls, poured herself another glass of wine, and reached toward the fridge to get James a second beer.
“No, I won’t,” he said, “I’ve got work to do this afternoon.”
“I thought you were retired,” she said, handing him the beer over his protestations. “A retired professional from the city, I’m guessing, am I right?”
James took his time chewing and swallowing and finished the first bottle of beer. She unscrewed the top on the new bottle for him. He took a swallow. “When did I say I was retired?”
“You don’t say much of anything in your opera-singer voice until someone needles it out of you,” she quipped. “Now, to get back to what I was driving at before you got me off the track, I did not ask them to put in that surveillance camera or to come over and pester you when the tree fell, and that’s why I ran interference, otherwise you’d
be eating Spam at the new county jail right now. Everyone in town knows that lot is where the kids come down to indulge in what we used to call necking but now starts at age twelve and involves everything below the neck. They call it snoggling or something appetizing of the kind. Sex and drugs, James, forget the rock and roll. They listen to synthesized drums and jungle music, no offense meant to jungle dwellers, but it does come all the way across the garden and right through the walls, like a bunker-buster artillery shell, or those assault weapons they use for target practice and to scare regular folks away. Yes, I did notice you picking up the shiny brass cartridges on the beach this morning, and I’ll bet you still have them in the right-hand pocket of your windbreaker. They make a tinkling and rattling noise when you walk, and I know the difference between seashell noise and gun-shell noise, and so does that deputy, Tom, who also saw you picking them up, just like I did.” She came up for air then dove back in. “If you had kids, you’d understand what I mean about the music, but I can tell you don’t have them, never mind how, but the black socks you wear are a clue.” She finished her glass and refilled it before continuing.
“Because the sheriff is a spoilsport, he figured if everyone knew there was a camera up there, the action would move elsewhere, and he was right. For the drugs, they now drive into my lot right here, and do their deals thinking I can’t see them through the deer fence, but if I tell the sheriff, he’ll put up another camera, and the next thing you know he’ll see the color of my undies, pardon my French. I did take five years of French, but never made it to Paris. Next time around, I will.”
James opened his mouth to speak, but she was too quick for him.
“I am no namby-pamby latte liberal,” Beverley began again, “and I am glad they got rid of the gangs and growers, even if it was brutal, but I don’t like cameras pointed at me, and I never was cozy with law enforcement, especially these rural sheriff types who think the West still has to be won. I’ll bet they can see the title of that rare old book you’re reading,” she added. “What are you reading, if you don’t mind me asking? You look very comfortable and satisfied in your deck chair, taking a wind-bath each afternoon.” She cackled this time, a variety of laugh he had not heard from her up to now. Her teeth gleamed. “I haven’t dared disturb you, so I’m thankful the tree fell.”
James shook his head in astonishment and tried but failed to repress a mirthful chuckle. “Well, it’s a strange thing you mentioned Rasputin,” he said. “I’m reading the autobiography of Prince Kropotkin, my great-grandfather’s first edition. Have you read it?”
Beverley brightened, acknowledging that no, she hadn’t read his great-grandfather’s first edition, if that’s what he meant with his dangling modifier of a question, but she knew who he was, Kropotkin, a prince of the tsar’s family, and a revolutionary who had an impressive beard and wild hair like his—James’s. She remarked that the Tom Cat and Harvey wouldn’t know Rasputin from Kropotkin or Stalin and might even be glad to see a Russian name on his book, because Russia was big these days, strategic and commercial partners, we were, and right across the Pacific, with plenty of local investment along the coast, especially in the haulage and petroleum businesses. “I did not finish college, it’s true,” Beverley admitted, “the children came along, two of them, and then I wasted a few more decades shuffling papers about garbage disposal and sewage treatment, the diapers were good training, I guess, but like you, I am a child of the ’60s and ’70s. I never went in for the cult of ignorance, unlike the younger generations. Sometimes I wonder how I wound up in this place. It was Number Three’s idea, not mine. That darned seventeen, the number, I mean.”
A note of seriousness stole into her voice for the first time. “Do you have a favorite number,” she asked, “or a favorite suit of cards?” Watching James shake his head, she cleared the dishes and, unbidden, poured two mugs of coffee, her face lighting up again. “There’s peach cobbler,” she said, “or tiramisu, take your pick or have both. I guess you could say the tiramisu is to die for.”
James held up his hands, uniting them in prayer. “Neither, thanks. You’ve defeated me.”
Beverley clucked and crossed her arms. “For a man your size, as active as you are, up before dawn and scurrying like a snipe on the tide line, you don’t eat much,” she opined. Releasing her arms, she helped herself to the cobbler. “Number Three always wanted two desserts, bless his soul. He keeled over right there, where you’re sitting, with the spoon still in his hands. It was tiramisu, his favorite. His people were Italians, way back when, that’s why I know Barolo.”
“I’m sorry,” James said and meant it.
“Oh, don’t be, he died happy, I look forward to a similar swift and sweet departure, believe me. It’s just he inconveniently didn’t think of what old Tater was going to do with the hotel all on her lonesome and pushing seventy. Thank god he finished installing those hot tubs and redoing the plumbing—he was an industrial plumbing engineer, and I guess you could say when he left, he left me flush.” She paused to touch her pearls, her cheeks reddening as she laughed. “We are sitting on a plentiful aquifer. That’s why I don’t mind folks taking long showers, you see. The gray water is recycled, only the black stuff goes into the septic tank, and it isn’t wasted, either.” She raised a hand and waved toward the ocean. “Those eucalyptus trees down by the access road found the leach lines and have grown about forty feet in two years, I am not kidding, I guess they like the tiramisu.” James opened his mouth to express his condolences but felt at a loss, wincing at the image. “How long has it been for you anyway?”
“Since what?” he asked.
“You know what.”
He sat back and glanced down at the mug cradled in his hands. “Since she died, you mean?”
“That’s it, you win the cigar.”
“How did you know?”
Beverley ate in silence for two bites, then could restrain herself no longer. “I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, I have a complete collection of Agatha Christie, and I watched Murder, She Wrote a hundred times. Besides, Number Three was the president of the Scarlet Goose, that’s the Sherlock Holmes Society of Northumberland, Illinois, where we lived for a spell, and I guess I caught the disease myself.” She sighed, put down her fork, and rocked back in her chair. “Even he didn’t get certain details, though. Men just do not notice things the way we do, and that’s why so many people say Sherlock was gay, I mean Conan Doyle. Why that would make him observant I do not know. You are well trained, my good fellow, Holmes might say, not to mention housebroken, as mama used to say of my dear old dad. No bachelor I have ever known is tidy, clean, and quiet, lives like a monk, has a hangdog look all the time, and wears an old wedding ring he’s always twisting around, or black cotton dress socks in hiking boots, unless he’s a recent widower without offspring to set him straight.” She paused, wheezing and drawing breath. “I also happen to think you are usually short haired and clean shaven and have about as much in common with the Rasputin look as I do with a chinook salmon. I take that back, I feel great kinship to salmon and so do you, I’m guessing. If I were to take another educated guess, I’d say you are a quester pining over something, you’re rudderless and full of regrets. Luckily no one has asked for my opinion and I may be off base entirely, I certainly hope so.”
James was not sure what startled him most, her unexpurgated perspicacity about the loss of his wife, Amy, to lung cancer twenty months earlier, or his socks and hair and passion for wild fish. “I wish I’d had you as a researcher,” he said. “You would have saved me lots of time.”
Beverley drummed her boneless fingers on the tabletop and smiled broadly. “I figured as much,” she said, triumphant. “I would not only have saved you time, I would have won you plenty of court cases you probably lost.” She finished the last bite of cobbler and took a sip of coffee, her fingers sliding the pearls along their string. “Perry Mason, you are, or were, and I’m Paul Drake, or less modestly, Sherlock Holmes reincarnate, though
I think Moriarty might be more like it.” She guffawed, raising her eyes to a sign on the wall above the sink. It read BAKER STREET. “You hadn’t noticed it?”
He shook his head.
“Did you notice the colander collection?” she asked. “Did you happen to count how many I have there?”
James shook his head again.
“Seventeen,” she said, “some are a century old.” She paused, smiling. “Have you counted the number of steps or treads, if you prefer, in the staircase up the cliff?”
Opening his mouth to ask why he should bother, he shut it when she answered for him. “No, you haven’t,” she said, “yet you’ve been climbing that staircase at least twice a day for ten days. If you had counted the treads, you would’ve known there were seventeen of them, and having seen those colanders and that Baker Street sign, you might have understood instantaneously why my Sherlock of a husband Number Three had to buy this place, he just had to, the same way he had to own seventeen guns, not sixteen or eighteen. That conviction would’ve been bolstered by the knowledge that there are also seventeen treads in the second set of stairs to the beach from the end of the garden. I’m guessing you’ve also been up and down those stairs many times in your life, though possibly not recently. Now, had you been aware that Number Three and I first came to view this choice piece of property on June 17, exactly seventeen days after we had started searching in this county, and that it was five o’clock in the afternoon when he counted the treads of the stairway, and five P.M. equals seventeen hundred hours in military time, as you know all too well, you would further have understood the absolute necessity of the move. Why Holmes or Doyle was fascinated by the number seventeen is another issue we can discuss some other time. In the meantime, I repeat my offer of loaning you a gun or three. It would have to be an odd lot, out of respect to Number Three.”