Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  Beginnings

  A Kate Martinelli novella

  Copyright © 2019 by Laurie R. King

  All rights reserved.

  Contact: info@LaurieRKing.com

  ISBN-10: 1732464723

  ISBN-13: 978-1732464728

  I

  All stories begin. A newborn’s wail, a doctor’s news, the squeal of brakes on the road outside—with most stories, there’s a place where you can look back and say, That’s where it started . Where I met the guy, where I decided the life, where I took one turn and not the other.

  And I heard once (probably from Lee, she tells me most of those things that stick in my brain) that a good story loops around, to tie up its end with its opening.

  My name is Katarina Cecilia Martinelli. I’ve been a cop for thirty years, most of that time working homicide. My job is to build a story around a body—how it got there, who was responsible, and if it was murder. I know all about stories that are both an end and a beginning, because someone’s end is where I generally come in, that awful chapter of a family’s life that opens with an anonymous ring on their phone or doorbell.

  I’ve done a lot of family notifications in my life, standing to deliver that devastating news. And not once, in all those years, have I said the necessary words without thinking about the night I was on the receiving end.

  It was my second year of university, in the early weeks of 1983. Not a great time for me, and like a lot of college kids, I often buried my loneliness inside a boozy party. That’s where I’d been that night, when I let myself into my Berkeley dorm room and stepped on a note someone had slid under the door.

  Casey, see the RA, your family’s trying to reach you.

  Did I know? Standing there in my short skirt, big scarf, and illicitly tipsy brain, squinting at the sheet of paper in my hand—did I have any idea? I was twenty years old, troubled by a love I didn’t yet recognize, alone while surrounded by friends, swamped under a load of classes for a major I wasn’t sure about. The last thing I needed was for my family to reach out, to find out…

  I remember a shiver of cold as I read the note—though if there’s one thing I know from being a cop, it’s that memories can’t be trusted. And the days that followed, the weeks, were enough to scramble anyone’s mental filing system.

  I do know that I considered not going to see the Resident Assistant, not calling my family. It was late, I had an early lecture, and the last thing I wanted was to get sucked into one of my mother’s problems. Into anything to do with Diamond Lake, for that matter.

  But at twenty, I was still enough of a good Catholic girl to hunt through my change purse and walk down to the pay phone on the floor below. After all, it might be Patty who needed me. My kid sister, nearly seventeen, restless with hormones and stuck at home with The Neurotic.

  Yes, it was about Patty.

  And no, there was nothing I could do for her. Not any more.

  II

  Skip forward thirty-two years, after that winter’s night of 1983. Yes, really—to the evening of March 24, 2015, when my wife and I were dressing for a party. And I was running late, as usual, because of work.

  “Fifteen is not an easy age,” Lee was saying.

  “Jesus, fifteen. How can you and I have a fifteen-year-old daughter? Aren’t you only, like, thirty?”

  “Yeah, right. My dear thing, you and I both qualify for AARP membership. I’m ten years from Medicare. You are only three years from a full pension. We both—”

  “Oh dear God in heaven, stop.”

  We were interrupted by a stern voice from downstairs. “Moms! We gotta go !”

  I shouted back over my shoulder, half-buried in the depths of the closet. “Two minutes—I can’t find my shoes.”

  “If it’s the shiny black ones, I have them! Wear your other pair.”

  “Hey,” I protested.

  “You’ve had them for months and you never wear them. Come on !”

  I crawled backwards onto my heels and glared at Lee. “When did our sweet baby turn into a teenager? She says she’s wearing my shoes and I picture a four-year-old clumping around the house.”

  “She’s nervous about The Boy. And speaking of ancient and tottery, could you hand me my cane? The pretty one.”

  “You okay?” She’d been sitting when I came in, so I hadn’t seen her moving around yet.

  “Fine, it’s just the cold makes me stiffen up, I might need it later.”

  It wasn’t the cold; it was the bullet she’d taken in her spine. Long years of grim therapy, cutting-edge medicine, and sheer luck meant that she walked now instead of using a wheelchair—but she would never stand up without considering how to do it. Just like I’d never shake the guilt I felt, every time I saw her brace herself to rise.

  Because like I said, I’m a cop, with the San Francisco Police Department, and it was my very first case in Homicide that brought the gunman to our door. I did nothing wrong—nothing that everyone else in the department didn’t do wrong, up to and including my then-partner, the great Al Hawkin. But it was Lee who paid for our collective inattention. The one who was still paying.

  I watched her stand now. She was working to make it look nonchalant. At the same time, I could see it wasn’t as bad as it sometimes got in the cold, so I handed her the brightly patterned cane and headed downstairs.

  I was distracted—by Lee, by the guilt, by dark thoughts. By the snark in a teenaged voice. And it was wintry, as it had been on that night in my dorm room thirty-two years before, and maybe there was something about the light in the hallway. Whatever the cause, when I looked down and saw Nora at the foot of the stairs, I blurted out something I’d never have said if I’d been paying attention.

  “Jeez, you look like Patty.”

  She didn’t normally—no reason she should, since they weren’t biologically related. Nora’s hair was blonde and curly like Lee’s, she wore glasses, and she didn’t always bother with makeup. Tonight, though, her hair was pulled smooth against her head, and she had on her new contact lenses. Also her makeup was pronounced and that salmon-pink she was wearing matched a shirt my sister had adored and that impatient tip of her head…

  Anyway. Deep down in my traitorous brain, a long-buried memory had twitched and made the jump onto my tongue.

  Her frown deepened. “Who’s Patty?”

  Oh, crap . I continued on down the last stairs. “She was my younger sister.”

  “You have a—oh, yeah. Car accident, right?”

  “Long time ago. Honey, you look fabulous. Even if you are stealing my shoes.” I threw my arms around her—I’ll admit, with a touch more emphasis than I might have, if I hadn’t been trying to distract her. “God, you’re a giant!”

  The two inches of borrowed footwear along with the height she’d got from Lee meant that I—who’d come down the stairs barefoot, carrying the second-rank heels—almost fit under her chin.

  “Just what every teenage girl wants to hear, that she’s a giant,” said Lee from behind me.

  “Basketball players would,” I protested.

  “Oh, like I play basketball,” Nora drawled. “Can we please just go? Logan’s been there forever, and Daniel texted that he and Al and Jani just got off the freeway.”

  So I stepped into my shoes and fetched our coats, and out we went into the cold night air to Nora’s birthday dinner, where friends were gathered and fun was had and nothing more was said about a long-dead aunt.

  But this was Nora. Who, genes or not, had been born with a cop’s inability to ignore a blatant clue. I wasn’t surprised when the topic of Patricia Martinelli came back to life, the following evening as we were setting the table for dinner. Furious
at myself, but not surprised.

  “So,” Nora said. “I Googled Aunt Patty.”

  My arm hesitated briefly in the act of reaching for the plates, but my voice gave nothing away. “You can’t have found much.”

  “No, and it took me a long time to even dig up a little notice in the papers.”

  “I’m surprised there was anything at all. Single-car accident, not much to report. Can you grab the silverware?”

  “The article said the coroners found no sign of alcohol or drugs.”

  “I think they decided in the end that she’d hit a patch of ice.”

  “Really? In California?”

  “Well, it was winter. And the middle of the night.”

  “Had she been out partying?”

  “She might have. Patty was… making some inappropriate friendships, around that time.”

  “Ooh, your sister liked the bad boys? But they did say she wasn’t drunk or high.”

  “I’m not sure how thorough the lab work would have been, with no particular crime on hand. Hon, could you pour us some water?”

  “Do you think she—”

  “Nora, can we not talk about this over dinner?”

  * *

  I knew the moment I said the words that it was a mistake, and indeed, dinner was punctuated by all the awkward silences and artificial small-talk a parent comes to know, and dread. When we’d cleared up, I had reports to write, Lee had a book, and Nora went to do her homework.

  But later, while I was brushing my teeth, Lee said, “You know she’s not going to let it go.”

  I spat and rinsed, pulled on the t-shirt and shorts I sleep in, and climbed into bed beside her with a book of my own. “Yeah, I know.” I’d given Nora a clear signal that the death of my sister was both important and problematic. The kid wouldn’t stop chewing at it just because I didn’t want to go there.

  “Why is your sister’s death still such a tender spot, after all these years?” asked the therapist I married. “Is it because Nora’s getting close to Patty’s age?”

  “I suppose. When I went off to college, Patty didn’t have anyone to rein her back. She made some bad choices, then some worse ones.”

  “Nora hasn’t made any bad choices.” I looked at Lee over the top of my reading glasses, forcing her to add, “…to speak of.”

  We were both thinking of the same questionable choice: The Boy, whom we had sat across from in the restaurant the night before. And what kind of a name was Logan , anyway? Didn’t parents think before saddling their kids with a Superhero’s name?

  Al, of course, had picked up my lack of enthusiasm over Nora’s romantic choice. Al was her god-father. He’d been my partner for so long, we finished each other’s sentences like a married couple—even now, five years after he’d “retired” to the SFPD Cold Case unit. He seemed to find The Boy’s effect on me funny. So when he said in my ear as we were leaving, “Let me know if you want me to run his juvie record,” I knew he was joking. Mostly. Though it was true, me being on active duty meant that a personal search could blow up in my face, while he had less to risk.

  I thanked him, glared at The Boy to stifle any thought of a good-night kiss, and removed my fifteen-year-old daughter from the restaurant before things got ugly.

  “Why couldn’t she fall for someone like Daniel?” I grumbled to my wife.

  “Daniel’s twenty.”

  “I said like .”

  “She’ll fall for someone dependable when she’s ready to be serious.”

  “Hope you’re right. What about you—did you ever have boyfriends?”

  “I had friends who were boys, but no. I knew early on where I was going.” Unlike some of us, who’d grown up wearing a shell of heterosexuality until the pressures cracked it wide open. “And Logan’s not that bad, for a sixteen-year-old.”

  “Almost seventeen.”

  “Still sixteen,” Lee said firmly.

  “Good thing for him, or I’d have to go have a talk with him about statutory rape. The humiliation would make Nora hate me forever.”

  “I would pay to listen in on that talk.”

  “You’ll just have to use your imagination.”

  “But seriously, Kate, you need to open that door and let Nora in. She wants to know about your sister. All you have to do it tell her why it hurts.”

  “Yeah, is that all,” I muttered, and pointedly opened my book to read.

  But the story in my mind when I finally turned out the light did not come from the pages. It came from my past.

  My sister had died in a car wreck on a lonely central California road, two weeks before her seventeenth birthday. I’d seen her not long before, when I went home for the Christmas holidays, but we hadn’t seemed to connect any more. That distance between us may explain why, for months after her funeral, my mind kept trying to shape her senseless death into a story—explaining her final days, hours, minutes. I never really managed to create a satisfying narrative. But as I lay listening to Lee’s slow breathing, it came to me that my habit of visualizing a crime by fitting its pieces together—making a story out of victims and perpetrators, outside influences and timelines—had started that winter with Patty’s death.

  * *

  The car is traveling far too fast along Pipeline Road. The girl behind the wheel doesn’t have a license—hasn’t even passed driver’s ed yet—but she “borrowed” a friend’s car from a drunken party for a private joy-ride along the back roads of Diamond Lake. Freedom, daring, giving the finger to everyone who wants to keep her locked down out here in the sticks—mother, teachers, sister, friends. She races along, hair streaming in the wind, laughing at her own impetuous daring.

  …No: no wind, not in January. The car would be closed up tight. But the grin on her face—the grin of the joyous troublemaker—that’s there, for sure.

  And of course, she’s going too fast. And of course, she hasn’t fastened any damn seat belt. The heavy old clunker shimmies a little on the uneven road, maybe finds a patch of ice, and when its inexperienced, slightly drunk driver tries to correct it, tries to hit the brakes, the wheel snaps around. She loses control and the car smashes into a tree.

  Patricia Martinelli is dead the instant her skull meets the side of the car, with only a brief flash of terror to stain her joy.

  III

  There was nothing I wanted more than to forget it entirely, nothing I wished less than to open that particular door and show Nora what lay inside. But Lee was right. She generally is, when it comes to matters of the heart.

  The next morning as I put Nora’s toast in front of her, I said, “Let’s talk about my sister after dinner. If that’s good with you?”

  She looked up, surprised and a bit wary. “Sure. I mean, if you’re okay with it?”

  I shrugged. “You’re curious, which I get, but it’ll take more than a five-minute conversation over the dishes. However, you have to finish your homework first.”

  She grimaced—but she did give me a hug as she was leaving for school. And I dutifully went to dig out the thirty-year-old shoe box from the upper reaches of the bedroom closet.

  There isn’t much left of Patty. After the funeral, when I was back in Berkeley, Mother had stripped my sister’s bedroom and given everything away. Mother herself died only two years later, as if tormenting us had been all that kept her alive. And when I started clearing the house after that second funeral, I’d been shocked to discover that she’d stripped away a lot more than clothes and posters.

  Every photograph of Patty was gone from the family albums. My sister had been turned into a ghost of empty corner-mounts and blacked-out labels. At first, I thought Patty had taken them herself for some school project, or in a fit of adolescent rejection—until I came to the big, formal portrait from the family reunion when we were small. Patty and I had been in the front row. Only now, Patty’s face was a neat oval of indelible black ink.

  That was the day I burned my own past and buried its ashes, driving back to the Bay Area raw
and naked and newly born. I had no past, nothing that did not fit into the two cardboard boxes in the trunk of the car. And in case you’re wondering, no: being aware that my mother was mentally ill doesn’t soften my dislike for her. She was an awful woman, manipulative and vindictive, even when she was being stable.

  After my first shock of finding Patty gone from Mother’s version of history, I’d launched into a furious and tear-soaked hunt through the envelope of negatives. Even those had been gone through—but after hours of squinting at the strips of film, I managed to salvage nine images of Patty that Mother had overlooked in her purge.

  Those nine prints were in the shoe box now, along with seventeen of Patty’s letters, a few bits of inexpensive jewelry that had survived because they happened to be in my room, and a caricature sketch of me in a cop uniform. (An oddly prescient gesture, since I never thought of entering the force when she was alive.)

  Also, Thed Bear. A small, once-soft, once-brown stuffed toy that had been the focus of sisterly competition, one-upsmanship, and barbed practical jokes throughout my childhood. Someone gave him to me as a birthday present when I was six or seven, and Patty had immediately claimed the bear as hers. I took it back, and thus a ritual began. I would notice that it was missing, and when I went looking, I’d find it in her bed and returnh it to mine. There it would stay, in with my other stuffed companions, for days or even weeks, until I’d happen to look around and discover it was gone again. As we grew older, the contest grew more complicated. I’d find Thed dressed in clothes from one of Patty’s dolls and replace the dress with a necktie, arranging him on my desk or reading one of my books. The next time Patty appropriated Thed, she would mark her ownership by adding a bit of feminine jewelry—not removing what I’d given him, just overwriting it.

  Gender was key. To me, the bear was masculine, and named Ted. (Not very creative, I admit.) To Patty, it was female and Theodora. Somewhere along the line, we’d compromised on Thed, but never compromised on our claim. And we never, ever brought Mother into the argument. We learned early that Mother’s solution to conflict could be instantaneous and devastating, and neither of us wanted to see Thed thrown into the fireplace as other sources of arguments had been. Thed was private, Thed was ours, and Thed was a form of communication shared by no one else in the world.