by Sara Gran
After that I found my car. It hadn’t been towed but there were a handful of tickets on the windshield. I threw them out and drove to Chinatown, where I had tea and steamed ginger fish for lunch, and then I went to the library and spent the rest of the day and the next day and the next day reading about bees.
There was no such magazine as Beekeeper’s Quarterly, as I’d hoped. But there was Beekeeping Times. The library had three years’ worth of back issues. I read them all. On the third day at 11:11 on the forty-fourth page of the thirteenth issue of the ninety-ninth volume of Beekeeping Times, I found a letter to the editor:
To the Editors:
Please note that, contrary to what Mr. Addelson states in his September 15 article “Nothing New Under the Sun: Ancient Trends in Beekeeping,” most ancient images of, and references to, beekeepers were not “high-status men” but women. Archeological and scholarly research, combined with ethnographical analysis of beekeeping cultures around the world, confirms that women were always at least as prominent as beekeepers as males. Perhaps, in some spheres, more so. The author may want to examine Emilia Gustav’s survey Blood & Wax: A History of Women & Bees.
Sincerely,
KA
Fayetteville, AR
I went back to the artist’s statement I’d read by Ann. I checked the citations at the end. There it was in her bibliography, third after R. J. Revice’s Natural Pigments and Eleanor Vraylon’s The Equine in Art. Emilia Gustav’s Blood & Wax: A History of Women & Bees. I was already in the library, so it took just a few minutes to find out that Blood & Wax: A History of Women & Bees was not in this library, or any other in Los Angeles. It was not a common book.
Of course, I couldn’t prove Ann had written the letter. And I didn’t know if anything in the letter—the stuff about bees—was true. Or what kind of person would think it was true.
But I felt I could say for sure that it could have been her. And that if Ann was alive, she would not be in Fayetteville, AR, and would not be using the initials KA.
* * *
The beekeepers didn’t cave as easily as I’d hoped. They were a pretty antiauthoritarian bunch, which I hadn’t expected. Only one of the people on the Beekeeping Times masthead lived nearby, in Ventura, a little town northwest of Los Angeles.
I drove up there and figured I’d charm whatever I needed out of her with my slick urban wiles.
“If you don’t have a warrant,” Maggie Simowitz said, standing six feet tall in her white beekeeping gear, “you can fuck yourself, and get off of my property.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m actually—”
“Get off my property,” she said. “Before I let my fucking bees out.”
I got off her property. I reserved my hotel room in Hollywood for another week. I couldn’t get anyone at Beekeeping News or any other beekeeping concern to talk to me. I guessed they figured they could live off honey and propolis and fuck the rest of the world. They had bees and honey; we had bad ideas and guns.
Finally, after ten days, I figured out how to get their subscriber list. I bought it. It took another thirty-five hundred bucks that I didn’t have, and I had to fabricate an elaborate scheme about working for an upscale marketing agency, involving stolen letterhead and a PO box that cost me eighty dollars more, but it worked. Eight days later I got the list in the mail. The marketing company I’d bought it from would bill me.
It was nine hundred names long.
I assumed if Ann had a new identity she would be smart enough to stick to it consistently. So I didn’t worry about her using a man’s name or having layers of false identity laid into her magazine subscriptions.
I figured she’d started again.
* * *
Tyler wasn’t his real name. It was good enough for me. I’d met him a few years back on the Case of the Silent Owl. I hadn’t quite believed him when he told me computers could talk to each other, but now it seemed to be an established fact. They had talked and were talking and no doubt were having conversations all on their own, without any input from dull mortals and their flesh.
Tyler lived in a loft by Skid Row with high ceilings and dirty windows patched with plywood and wires everywhere: computers, keyboards, guitars, boxes with dials and buttons and switches, some of which were musical instruments and some of which were computer things. He was about my age and blond and would have been attractive if he did things like wash his hair or change his clothes or cover up the bad math tattoos on his arms.
I went to him with the list of five hundred women.
“So what’d you want to know about them?” Tyler asked.
“Anything?” I asked. “Everything?”
I sat on a dirty sofa near the main computer area in one corner. A guy slept on another dirty sofa across the room. As Tyler and I spoke the other guy woke up, scratched himself, noticed me, said nothing, and began brewing a pot of what I guessed was coffee on a hot plate.
“Can I have some?” I called out. “If it’s coffee?”
“Yeah OK,” the guy said.
“Well, sure,” Tyler said, referring to my earlier question and not the coffee. Or maybe also the coffee. “If you have infinite money and unlimited time, that sounds good. Otherwise maybe let’s have a plan.”
The guy brought me coffee in a chipped white mug with red hearts on it and Tyler and I came up with a plan. Tyler would train his electronics to sift through the women by age and reality—the degree to which he could, with the internet’s web spinning into newspapers, county databases, and hospital records, verify any of these women existed. I would pay him five hundred dollars, which I would pay him in the near future. If he told anyone, or I didn’t pay him, we were fairly likely to kill or at least wound each other. We’d both figured that out fast enough on the Case of the Silent Owl. So no worries there.
Three days later he came back to me with a list of nine women who could be Ann. I’d spent those three days reading more about bees and reading more about art and generally making a pain out of myself in the library.
This time in the big loft near Skid Row the guy who made coffee was gone but there were two girls on the dirty sofa, not sleeping, sitting up and smoking and talking about other girls they knew. The girls both had black hair shaved around the nape of the neck and tattoos on their shoulder and minimal clothes. They looked about twenty.
“Hey,” I said to them.
“Hey,” one of the girls said back. “I like your hair.”
I thanked her and said I liked her tattoos. I asked if she was going to make coffee and she said no but the other girl said she could and she wouldn’t mind some and so she did. I found Tyler in his computer corner.
“Hey,” I said.
“Lady,” he said. “Girl.”
“Claire’s good,” I said. “Claire is cool.”
“OK, CLAIRE,” he said, and he told me about the nine women who could be Ann.
Three of the women I dismissed out of hand. One lived in the dull suburbs of Atlanta, one in the cold suburbs outside of Cleveland, one in a housing project in Chicago. I didn’t figure any of them for Ann.
That left six.
While I was there I asked him to poke around and see what was out there about Ann and he did.
“You know about the lawsuit?” Tyler said.
I did know about the lawsuit, but I’d forgotten. An old newspaper article from 1992 glowed on the page: “Artist Sues Technology Firm.”
“Well,” Tyler said. “Let’s look at the lawsuit.”
Ann had sued a technology company that did something with computers for using one of her images as their logo. They’d put it on T-shirts. The lawyer asked Ann what the harm was. Even if the designer had drawn some inspiration from her work, so what? Who did it hurt?
(silence)
(silence)
Q: Would you like to—
A: No, I heard the question, I just—I mean. Do you know what you’re asking me here?
(silence)
A: Imag
ine taking a knife. Imagine taking a nice big kitchen knife and putting it right here—(indicates central torso). Can you imagine that? Are you all with me? Now imagine taking that razor and you cut. You cut and you cut and you cut—and it hurts like hell, it hurts just like you think it does—and you bleed until you find something inside you—until you find something good enough and pure enough and broken enough that you—that this is the very best part of you, this is the essence of you, this is all of your pain and all of your joy compressed into this little, this bloody little thing, like an organ, like a material manifestation of your soul—you cut and you cut until you find this secret thing, this nameless thing, and at great, you know, great personal fucking expense you cut some more and you tear this fucking thing out of yourself, and you leave yourself bloody and raw, and hopefully everyone else in the room too, hopefully you are all in this together, all of you, you know, traumatized or enlightened or whatever by this.
And that thing we find, that thing we find when we cut, is the best thing we have. It’s all we leave behind when we’re gone. And your client wants to use it to do the single most boring, useless thing on earth: make money.
(silence)
* * *
I felt there were three things in the world: there was me and there was Ann and there was the mystery between us. And for no reason that made any sense and for no reason I could put into words; even though it was now technically illegal—me not having my license and no longer being under Adam’s supervision—; even though it was putting me even further in the money-hole I’d dug for myself, my debt to Tyler growing by the moment, hotel bills piling up and no paying jobs in sight; even though no one had hired me, even though no one cared; even though everyone missed Ann and no one would miss me; even though Ann was loved and I was (at best) hated; even though Ann wanted to be lost and I was praying every day to be found—for no reason at all the only thing that mattered, the only thing that was real, was solving that mystery and if I got hurt or if I got lost or if I died—no matter what came in my way and no matter who came in my way I was going to solve it. I was going to solve it and there was nothing else except solving it, and everything that before the case that had seemed like real life was now just an undifferentiated mass of gray because I had this.
I had a case. I had a mystery.
* * *
The first woman who wasn’t Ann was dead and had last been seen in Maryland. The second had lived in Pensacola, Florida. She had moved and I never found her but I could tell by the sad and wrong color of periwinkle blue she’d painted her house it wasn’t Ann. The third woman was a married Korean American woman with four children in Oregon.
The fourth was Ann. I guessed she wouldn’t live too far from the sea and I was right. I promised her I would never reveal the place. I haven’t and I won’t.
Ann’s house was about eighty years old. It was a small, plain, gray house a few blocks from the ocean and a few blocks another way from the island’s small downtown. Out front was a garden of what I thought were wildflowers and a few fruit trees. It was a lazy place full of nothing. The island was not a resort. People rode bikes or drove small cars or, if they needed them, pickup trucks.
Two chickens roamed around, one red and one black.
I didn’t know what to do. A few monarch butterflies poked around at the wildflowers.
There was a fence around the property. I walked down the length of it. At the end was a driveway-type space along the side of the house.
I looked down the driveway-type space between the houses.
The first thing I saw were sparks. There was a gap between the edge of the fence and the start of the neighbor’s fence, and I slipped through it and walked toward the sparks.
As I got closer I saw the sparks were coming from a welding set-up. She was joining together parts of steel that looked like some kind of car she was turning into a snake. The thing was about ten feet long and somehow at the same time seemed both like a pile of rusty garbage and like a living, vibrant, snake that might lift its head up any second.
She was older now, with gray curls mixed in with her black hair. When she took off her safety glasses I saw she had lines around her eyes.
When she saw me she knew. I don’t know how she knew—no one had ever pegged me for security before—but she did.
“So I guess you came to charge me with something or other?” she called out across the yard. She looked different but in her face I saw some of the hardness from her Vogue photo. I wouldn’t want to fight her. I would win, of course, but it would be a long and ugly fight before that happened.
Not that I wanted a fight.
“No,” I said, frowning. “I just came—”
She looked at me.
“I came,” I began again. “I. I came because.”
I started to cry.
“Come in,” she said.
* * *
In her house she asked me not to tell anyone what she said or what we spoke about. She said a mystery was not a bad piece of art for her to leave behind. She said after she died she wanted it all to come out piece by piece, like a giant puzzle.
“I want it to have meaning,” she said. “And I want it to be delightful.”
I ran my theory of the case by her and I had it pretty much right. She wouldn’t tell me what I didn’t know—where she got the body, how she and Merritt kept in touch, what happened to all her money, when she drew the bee—but she did confirm what I already suspected.
“People kept my secrets,” she said. “I owe it to them to keep theirs.”
She wasn’t surprised about Carl. She’d seen it in the papers, and she’d always suspected him, anyway. I told her the details and she was interested and sad. She cried a little when she talked about Merritt. She told me about opening the paper one day and seeing his death there on the front page, under the fold, like a bad joke. She said she actually looked around the room, thinking for a moment that maybe Merritt was there, playing a trick on her.
Finally she asked the obvious question: “Why are you here?”
I told her the story about the four hundred hours. About how I needed to close the case. I told her about meeting Constance and about losing Constance. About the years spent driving around the country alone, about nights in motel rooms where no one would find me if I died. About knowing no one would miss me when I left the earth. About how wrong I was to think life would ever be different than this. About how I wished to fucking God I’d never met Constance, if it was going to end like this.
“How did you do it?” I asked Ann, finally asking the question I’d come there to ask.
“Do what?” Ann asked.
“Live without Merritt,” I said. “I can’t keep doing this.” I started to cry again. “I can’t live without anyone. Just no one. I can’t do it.”
Ann looked at me.
“Of course you can,” Ann said. “Look, you are. You’re doing it.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m fucking up everything. Everything I’ve done has been a mistake.”
“Yes,” Ann said. “Probably. That’s what it means to be a person. It means you make horrible decisions, and you fuck everything up. It means you love people, and they leave. It means sometimes no one loves you at all. That’s the state of like 90 percent of humanity at any given moment. You don’t need to make a religion out of it. You don’t need to memorialize everything that hurts. Everything changes, and half of finding peace in life is to stop resisting it. Someone who loved you yesterday doesn’t love you today. Someone you loved is gone now.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t go through this again.”
“You can,” Ann said. “You can and you will. You’re tough. It’s not like you’re going to curl up and fade away. You’re going to be here either way. But you have to decide to try. To try just a little. To be a little open to something good again.”
She could tell by my face I was not encouraged. Maybe she could also tell that I didn’t do well with subtle
ties. She tried again: “When your heart is broken,” she said, “you can cling to your old, ugly, broken heart, and let it make you ugly. Or you can let that broken heart fall away and die, and let something new and beautiful be born. Your heart will break again, and nothing will change that. The only variable is if you’re going to enjoy life, at least a little, between the broken hearts.”
She put one hand on my face. Her hands were dry and calloused and strong. Touching another human being immediately made me feel like I was fucking something up. If I and another person were getting close, it was a sure bet that even as it was happening, I was ruining it.
“Let this make you beautiful,” Ann said. “Just a little bit. Just one little inch of you. The rest of you can stay ugly and mean and bitter. Someone loved you. She was your friend. You miss her. Let her make one little piece of your heart beautiful.”
I told her I didn’t think I could do that. She said she thought I could, and I would. I promised to keep her secrets. She believed me.
I left, and began the five-day drive back to Los Angeles.
In Nashville I stopped at a tattoo studio I knew from the Case of the Haunted Horse Barn. I told Natalie, the tattooist, to make one small piece of my heart beautiful. First she made a box, one square inch, just where my left breast met my sternum. In the box she poked a yellow sun coming up in a pink-and-blue dawn. It was nothing like the rest of my tattoos, which were dark and not pretty: quotes from Détection; a fingerprint; a magnifying glass.
That night, in my hotel room, we took a bath together, Natalie making sure my one beautiful inch didn’t get too wet, or get hit too hard over the course of the night. I didn’t sleep, and when dawn came I got up and looked out the window and watched the sun rise over Nashville and I thought, Well, maybe I could Maybe I can.
Maybe.
* * *
When I got back to Los Angeles, twenty days after I’d left, I went right to Adam’s office to wrap up my paperwork. To get my hours, get my license, and go home.