“What about before that, Pops?” Cayenne gripped the rail at the foot of the bed.
“‘Keep your mouth shut, old man, if you know what’s good for you.’”
“Shut about what?” Cayenne’s mother asked.
Tag spoke quietly. “Did you get a decent look at him?”
“It happened so fast. White guy, short hair. Tattoos all down his arms.” He tried to raise his left arm, but the IV tube got in the way. “Used to be a nice neighborhood, when we raised our kids there. Then a killing and this.”
“Maybe it’s time to think again about coming to live with us,” his daughter had said. He did not protest. His eyelids fluttered shut, and I’d been about to suggest we go when Tag reached out and touched the old man’s hand.
“Patrol officers are checking around your house, and they’ll interview the neighbors. We’ll do everything we can to make your neighborhood safe again.”
Safe in my loft, I stared at the Viaduct, the lights racing past. The cool wine could not quench my guilt. Louis Adams, patriarch, had been attacked because someone thought he’d seen something the night of Bonnie’s murder.
But no one would have ever made that connection, if not for me. If they hadn’t seen me chatting with him on the steps last Saturday. Or they’d seen me this morning, when I stopped to visit after finding Bonnie’s van.
I’d led the attacker to him.
Maybe the police didn’t need my insight, my knowledge of the people involved, my willingness to ask any questions that occurred to me, not bound by protocols or procedures or preconceived ideas.
Maybe I needed to spend more time in my shop. More time with customers, preventing Bridezilla repeats. More time building relationships with the food press, so I didn’t have to bite my nails, worrying that one wrong word from Nancy Adolfo could destroy us.
More time calling on commercial accounts, so we could avoid situations like the one Sandra had reported at the staff meeting. If he wasn’t important enough to get a call from the “boss lady,” a chef had told her, then he saw no reason to give us his business.
Maybe I needed to focus on my sorry love life. All week, Ben had ignored me while he chased a story. But I’d been equally bad, more interested in what he dug up than in him. The feelings I still had for Tag had been enough to remind me of the feelings we’d once shared and make me long to feel that way again.
I didn’t know what my mother saw in Ben’s stars, but I knew what was in my heart.
I picked up the glass float the gillnetter had given me last Sunday at Fisherman’s Terminal and cradled it in both hands. It had traveled a long way, caught for who knew how long in an abandoned net, then hauled to the surface. In a ghost net, the fisherman had said. You never know what you’ll find.
Was I messing up what mattered most because I was too busy pretending to be Nancy Drew or Dame Frevisse? My shop was suffering. My love life was plummeting. My relationship with my mother was in turmoil. My best friend had withheld the truth from me, for thirty years. My assistant manager was stressed beyond belief, and the employee I had such hopes for might never forgive me for what had happened to her grandfather.
It isn’t quitting to realize you’re in over your head.
I wanted to pace, to work out the problem on my feet, but not with a sleeping dog across the room and a sleeping mother upstairs.
As a kid, I’d thought that once you got to be twenty-five, you had your life all figured out and you lived it. Then I turned twenty-five and there went that illusion. So then I hit forty and it finally seemed, in the year or two after, after everything fell apart, that I had put my life back together the way it was supposed to be.
And now it was falling apart again.
If Laurel were here, she’d tell me I was churning, letting one negative thought spiral and drag me down.
But Laurel was home asleep, as I ought to be. I carried my wineglass to the kitchen.
Maybe the Universe needed to stop dragging me into these situations. Because I was not about to close my eyes and ears to the troubles around me. I’d been given a talent and a natural curiosity, and I had an obligation to follow through.
It wasn’t just curiosity or nosiness, though I’ll never believe those aren’t good traits. Useful traits.
The success of a life depends on the choices we make.
And I was never going to choose to turn my back on people in need.
* * *
The Wednesday night mist had left a Thursday morning shine on the world outside my loft. The Sound—what little I could see of it—sparkled. Outside, water glistened where it had pooled on the mint leaves and in the cupped petals of my zinnias.
Inside, all was quiet. My mother and the dog were gone.
I tugged at my rat’s nest of hair and took a shower. The moment I toweled off, the smell of coffee enveloped me. I pulled on a robe and checked my phone, then poured a cup and joined my mother on the veranda.
“How is Cayenne’s grandfather?” she said.
“Surprisingly good.” I took the empty bistro chair, the bright green of spring pea shoots. “She texted this morning to say the surgery to repair his broken arm went fine, but they’re going to keep him a couple of days, to make sure that knock on his noggin isn’t causing any internal bleeding.”
“I thought I might fill in for her this morning, until Carl picks me up.” She sipped her coffee, eyes averted.
“Sure. If there’s time after you talk with the detectives.”
She let out a long sigh. “Why is it we put off doing what we know we need to do? We only make it harder on ourselves, churning things over in our minds.”
Churning. The same word I had used in my internal rant last night. I knew with the next sip of dark roast that I would call it quits with Ben today. Or whenever we managed to get together.
And in the sip after that, I realized how pissed I was at her. Not sure I trusted her to reveal all the gory details. “And I’m going with you, like it or not.”
She reached out and gripped my hand. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I texted Sandra to ask if she could come in early and open the shop. You can’t hear grumbling in text messages—one of their advantages—but I knew that despite her stress over Mr. Right’s condition, she’d do everything she could for me.
And as soon as this is over, I vowed, I’m doing everything I can for her.
• • •
“WE understand Mr. Adams is expected to make a full recovery,” Detective Spencer said an hour later as we took seats around the small conference table. Behind her, Detective Washington closed the door. “He gave us a good description, and we’re interviewing all the neighbors. But if you’ve got any leads, please, fill us in.”
“Wish I did,” I said. “Obviously someone thinks he saw something important. Or—”
“Or what?” Tracy looked his rumpled self, but I knew he’d been at the hospital or down on Beacon Hill much of the night. He’d earned the wrinkles in his jacket and the bags under his eyes.
“Or maybe someone saw him with me, someone who knows I’ve been investigating, and thinks he must have given me the critical details. But no one’s come after me—”
Or had they?
They all stared.
“I was sure it was just an accident.” I dug in my tote while telling them about the white SUV that had nearly struck me in Pioneer Square after I’d gone to meet Hannah Hart at the gallery. I held up the parking stub. “Eureka! Partial plate number, from a witness.”
“White SUV,” Tracy said, taking the ticket. “That narrows it down.”
“It actually might,” Spencer said. “The vehicle Mr. Adams saw hit the street sign was a white SUV. I’ll see if CSU can get a paint sample.” She picked up her cell and stepped to the corner of the room.
I wondered what Hannah drove.<
br />
“So many threads here,” Tracy said, “I hardly know where to start. You do weave a tangled web, Ms. Reece.”
My mother had insisted we bring a box of baby cinnamon rolls. I pushed them closer to him. A combination peace offering and sabotage for his diet.
“Start by explaining how you tracked down the elusive Hannah Hart,” Spencer said.
“Used the artists’ grapevine.” The cinnamon and sugar scent got to me, and I took a napkin and a roll from the box. “You remember my former employee Tory Finch. She has a friend who has a friend who knew—but Hannah blew us off.”
Their faces told me they hadn’t been able to catch up with her, either.
“In this business,” Detective Washington said, his tone level, his gaze locked on my mother, “you learn fast that when people avoid you, it usually means they have something to hide.”
“We told you everything we knew—the detectives on the case, I mean. It was long before any of you were on the force,” my mother said.
“Not true, ma’am,” Washington said. “I was a young patrol officer. I responded to the scene at the Strasburg home, and I assisted the detectives with their inquiries.”
“It was a tragedy. And I have always regretted”—she took my hand and squeezed it, then focused on the big detective—“that we were not able to prevent it. That’s the real reason the Grace House community fell apart. We did not know what Roger and Peggy were planning. We thought she’d been killed in the explosion. We—” She broke off, her cheekbones damp.
She told them what she’d told us last night, how the rest of the group had been kept in the dark. How angry they’d been at their friends for the murderous betrayal, for killing in the name of justice. “By that point, Roger and Peggy were on the periphery. He still worked in the Pantry, and she worked in the day care, but they rarely came to community dinners or meetings. I don’t remember where they lived—”
“In a basement apartment in Ballard,” Washington said.
“—or what other jobs they held. We broke up the household—Ellen and Greg, and Chuck and I—not because of any disagreement between the four of us, but because we realized it had become a lie. We started with good intentions, and I think we truly did share the same values and philosophy. But over time, we grew apart. We lost focus. Too many people came and went, working on a pet project for a few months, but never committing. We weren’t a community anymore.”
“Ms. Manning never contacted you? None of you ever suspected she’d survived?” Washington pressed harder.
“I can only speak for Chuck—my husband—and me. We had no idea. But I don’t believe the others knew, either.”
“And yet, apparently, she snuck back into the house and hid the bracelet,” Tracy said. “Before she took off for parts unknown.”
Mom’s chair squeaked as she rocked, her lips tight. “I never had any reason to tell anyone this until last night, when I told my children.” She told them about the driver’s licenses and the explosives, the anger and suspicion. It was a long story, and an emotional one, but she powered through, determined to end the lies and the secrets.
You could have heard a pin drop.
She gripped the arms of her chair and sat up straight. “What else did she do in my name? Who else did she harm?”
So much for trusting the Universe.
Detective Washington set his coffee on the table and broke the silence. “If you truly didn’t know she’d survived, then you have no reason to feel guilty for anything she did.”
My mother leaned forward. “Do not mistake my anger for guilt, Detective. I am no guiltier than anyone in this room. We were betrayed. We built a community based on trust, on good works, on radical hospitality, and we were betrayed. There has never been a day in my life since June of 1985 that I have not grieved for the Strasburgs, and for all of us, for what we lost. But I have never felt guilty.”
I had never heard such steel in her voice. Go, Mom.
From her seat at the end of the table, Detective Spencer spoke. “You won’t be surprised to know that Peggy Manning was also a pseudonym. And we confirmed your suspicion—she never did officially enroll at the University. The lab ran the prints from the vase Detective Washington bought.” She pointed at a vase, ten inches high, sitting in the middle of the table, in its plastic evidence bag. The same pale green as the porcelain piece I’d seen at her stall in the Market, the same simple flute shape as the one on Sharon Stinson’s desk. “And we took more prints, from her apartment, the studio, and the van. Unfortunately, as you know, prints can’t give us a name unless they’re already in the system.”
“Meaning—?” My mother drew out the word, sentence unfinished.
“Meaning,” I said, “that we might never know who she really was.”
“We do have a couple of leads, from the FBI,” Spencer continued. “The most promising is an heiress from Connecticut who went missing in 1968. She’d been involved in the antiwar movement, with a group best known for a series of bombings. After an accidental explosion that killed two of their members, the group splintered. One faction continued setting bombs but focused on property damage. They even sent out warnings, to limit the risk of injury.”
My mother’s mouth fell open, her posture rigid. “So it was Peggy who took the explosives. Not Roger.” She spoke slowly, deliberately, the gaps between her words filled with pain. “Detectives, you have to believe—we never had any idea that she knew the first thing about explosives.”
Washington broke the silence. “The explosion was so loud, it rocked houses on the other side of the lake. It flattened two-thirds of the Strasburg house, took out half the house to the north, and knocked down the garage on the south side.”
And yet, a woman and two young boys had survived. Miracles do happen.
Beside me, my mother breathed in large gulps of air.
“Some people”—Spencer opened a folder—“are too extreme for the extremists.” She laid a photograph from the FBI files in front of us.
Déjà vu all over again. Beside me, at the sight of young Peggy—or whoever she was—my mother breathed in sharply.
“Whoever she was,” Tracy said, “that bracelet pretty much proves her involvement in the Strasburg murder. What puzzles me is why take it, then stash it in the house?”
My mother shook her head, baffled. “No idea.”
“One of the quirks of the community,” I said, “was a fervid antimaterialism. As if the older our couch and the more secondhand clothing we wore, the better. Style was too—I don’t know, middle class. Sorry, Mom.”
She smiled wryly, no humor in it. “The simple life, gone too far. It sounds so judgmental now.”
“And it backfired. Five kids in the house, and we’re all chronic collectors and remodelers. Oh. You said she was an heiress.” I reached for the vase, the plastic crinkling as I turned it over to point to the double diamonds on the bottom. “Jewelry, wasn’t it?”
Spencer nodded.
I remembered my first thought when I saw her work and read her name. I remembered my mother’s comment that Peggy always seemed to want one thing and choose another. “She wanted a simpler beauty. Her name betrays her. Bonnie Clay. Pretty Pots.”
A wave of sadness rippled through me, to think that her true name and fate might never be known.
Who were you, Bonnie Pretty Pots? Why did you always need to leave?
And why did you come back to us?
Twenty-seven
You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.
—W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts
“Pepper, slow down.”
Hard to do with a full head of steam. And I was steamed. Ticked. Mad as a wet hen. Pick your metaphor, it fit.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Secrets, Mom. I am so sick of secrets. I’
ve done little but deal with all this the last twenty-four hours, and I can’t hold it in anymore.”
“So much about parenting is a judgment call. You do your best, and then you wonder, and worry.”
“Don’t play the parent card, Mom. That was a long time ago. You never thought, in all those years, that maybe you should tell us? It changed our lives, too.” Even though we didn’t know all the details or remember all the players. It’s emotional memory—you remember that something went wrong, that you were hurt, and if you don’t know why, you try to work out the reason. As often as not, you’re wrong.
“It never came up, until last night.”
“It came up last week.”
We were standing on one of the patches of purple glass prism lights that dot the sidewalks near Pioneer Square, skylights for the basements that had been street level before the regrade after the Great Fire of 1889. We were standing on the sidewalk barking at each other.
“Pepper, I’m sorry. This whole thing is a mess that won’t go away. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you sooner, and I’m sorry I disappointed you. I need to be alone for a while. Go back to your shop and do what you do well.”
Ah, but what was that?
I watched her walk away, feeling lower than a toadstool’s back end, to quote my grandfather Reece. I hated arguing with my mother even more than I hated behaving badly in public. More than I hated being kept in the dark.
Her small figure got smaller in the distance. I understood she hadn’t wanted to think about the past. It was a troubling time. She wasn’t proud of it. Who among us doesn’t have a moment—or several—like that?
I aimed north, hugging myself as I walked. The problem—the reason I was having trouble forgiving both myself and her—was that when facts are doled out piecemeal, one at a time, you form an impression, and in two shakes, you have to change it. Like putting together a puzzle of a cat, then getting a piece that convinces you it’s a dog. Or an umbrella.
It seemed probable that Bonnie—Peggy, or whatever her name was—had gathered the explosives and hidden them in the garage. But while my mother was adamant that they had been disposed of—legally, she insisted—it was obvious that Bonnie had kept another stash. A small one, but big enough to do serious damage.
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