Power Slide
Page 21
Twenty-one years ago. She’d spent twenty-one years in this house, slowly coming to suspect, and then knowing, her brother had died right there in the chimney he couldn’t get out of. Where she had left him to die.
How had she lived with herself? How had she lived here? I thought of the guy I’d been near to loving that last day we’d been on the pier in Oakland. Him insisting he’d done the unforgivable, me unable to believe that, not of him. I’d buried my face in his chest, pulled him tight to me, and felt him shaking. He’d said, “I let him die . . . I walked away.” I flashed on those chimneys he built in the desert, each more confining than the last. I could almost feel his dread as he lowered himself down inside, trying time after time to make himself stay, to experience even a bit of what he’d abandoned Damon Guthrie to. Each time scrambling out in panic.
I looked at Tancarro. “Why didn’t Damon climb out?”
All the color was gone from his face. “Maybe the rope wasn’t secured. It must have slipped in after him. He fell; he hit his head. He never came to at all.”
No way you could have known. That’s the story you made up to stave off the horror. So you don’t have to think of your friend dying slowly in the dark. How soon did you get it? I wanted to ask. Did you wonder about him when he was coming to realize he was trapped? That time after time he must have tried to climb out and slid back down? When his legs gave out? When he clawed the bricks, screaming silently with his throat dry, his voice gone?
“Enough!” He motioned with the gun. “Walk!”
Slowly, I pushed myself up. My head nearly exploded.
“Move! There, across the entryway. Gabi, get the door.”
Keeping her distance, she stepped around me and wrenched it open. The smell astonished me. It wasn’t decay—not what I’d thought—but mold. All I could see through the doorway was boxes and dark-splattered papers piled, scattered, heaped higher than my head, filling a room twice the size of what she now used for her living room. A wall of paper sealing off the fireplace and her brother’s body. I turned to Gabriella, stunned.
“Don’t look at me like that! I had to live here, in this house, with him because he did that stupid, stupid, greedy thing! Him and his stupid friends and their stupid little plot. He was coming to steal from me. He died. It was his own doing. Not mine. But I’m stuck. I can’t leave with him in there. I might as well be dead, too. And then he—your boyfriend—shows up—”
“You didn’t have to kill him! He agonized over your brother. Why would he tell anyone?”
It was Tancarro who replied. “Maybe he wouldn’t. But maybe he would. I couldn’t take the chance. I’ve been chained to this place for twenty years. I’ve done my time. After all this, I’m damned well not going to jail. And I’m not spending the rest of my life worrying about it.”
He shoved me into that awful room. My feet skidded on papers. I twisted, grabbed a box, and flung it at him. Then I lunged for his legs and brought him down hard. His head smacked the floor. The gun slid free. Gabriella lunged for it, but I scooped it up before her hands hit the floor.
“Move and I’ll shoot.”
They didn’t doubt me.
34
THE PREVIOUS NIGHT now seemed like a blur of flashing lights and police giving orders and racing around. I’d refused medical care—my head ached but I was damned sure it would ache a lot more if I was forced to spend hours in an ER. So, I’d ended up accepting police hospitality instead. And even with my brother Gary’s help, I hadn’t made it out of there till two in the morning.
When he finally dropped me off at the zendo, instead of going inside, I waited till he drove off. Then I walked slowly to the corner. I felt the damp, fresh, night air on my face and breathed in a faint garlicky aroma of tomato sauce, along with the exhaust fumes from a passing car and the sweetly rancid stench of garbage. Each of these familiar odors couldn’t help but remind me of the great boon of just being alive. I wasn’t thinking about Damon Guthrie in that chimney—but I wasn’t not, either.
When I did go back to my room above the zendo, Leo’s door was open. As if it were mid-afternoon instead of the middle of the night, he was sitting cross-legged on his futon reading what appeared to be an obscure Asian text printed on rice paper. It crackled as he turned the page. He was, of course, waiting up for me. I almost hugged him. I tried, but it’s impossible to get your arms around a guy in that position without both of you ending up laughing. And I was even gladder about that. I put my hands together and bowed to him and he met my bow. Then I stepped into my room and flopped down on my futon and slept till noon.
When I finally got up, Leo was reading a different book. “Renzo’s expecting us. Want to head out?”
“Great. I’m starving.”
Then he added, “Various members of your family called. I told them you were asleep. They all said, ‘No rush.’”
“Thanks.” I was in no hurry either. They’d be relieved I was okay. They’d mask impatience while I rattled on about how now I understood why Gabriella didn’t dare heat her house, why Guthrie/Ryan looked so good for a guy his supposed age—because Ryan was so much younger. They’d be polite as long as they could, but what they’d really want to do was talk about Mike. How could they not? I mean, whatever they’d been thinking, separately and together, his impending return had turned the world upside down. But, really, anything any of us might say would only be verbal nerves. We’d all be on eggshells until we actually laid eyes on him, till he was back and we could see how that realigned our stars.
I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt—a bright cab-yellow one that screamed: Alive!—and walked the half block to the café. When we arrived, Renzo was pouring espresso and a basket of his best pastries was on the table.
Leo hadn’t asked about the last twenty-four hours, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to know. I took a long, wonderful swallow of coffee and said, “I wanted to stay till the cops opened up that chimney. But not nearly as much as they wanted me out of the way.”
He smiled and I had the feeling he was picturing Higgins’s reaction to that request.
“It’s probably just as well. I feel like the horror of it all will be with me forever. I understand why Guth—Hammond—could never pull free.”
“Delusion.”
“What?”
“You’re indulging in delusion. You don’t know what happened to Damon Guthrie in that fireplace. You can guess, even make a reasonable assumption, but you can never really know.”
That was what I’d thought when Tancarro had speculated. But it was such a personally unsatisfying answer. Yet, now, I knew that in itself was the point.
“Leo,” I said hesitantly, “can you tell me now what it was Guthrie—I mean, Ryan Hammond—was so desperate to discuss with you? What did he want to return to Gabriella? Just Damon’s wallet and driver’s license? Or was it”—I thought of Mom and Mike and all the years of his life she’d missed—“what he could tell her about what happened?”
“The real issue wasn’t what he had to return . . . but what he was desperate to be given.”
“Omigod, of course. He wanted an alternate explanation of what happened to Damon Guthrie.” Suddenly I could see it all so clearly. “If only Gabriella would tell him Damon had gone to Tahiti or to jail or had become a monk! Any explanation but the one he was already haunted by.”
Leo gave me some time to digest that ultimately depressing fact.
“Tancarro and Gabriella created fictional explanations. Kilmurray buried himself in drugs in Thailand trying for escape. Only Ryan Hammond wanted the truth.”
Leo sat silent a few moments longer. Finally, he said, “Listen, I have a question. I asked him if he’d ever had trouble using Damon Guthrie’s ID. Didn’t Missing Persons check Social Security records? He said no. But how—”
“Higgins asked Gabriella about that. It was like she was personally offended that there was no missing persons’ report. She really blindsided her. What happened, of course, is that in the
beginning, Gabriella was so relieved to have her brother gone, the last thing she wanted was the police to drag him back. Ditto Tancarro. And then by the time they had real questions about him, they didn’t dare make a report.”
He shifted position. “What about your, uh, colleague, Blink?”
“Higgins really didn’t want to discuss that. So, I’d say he’s ridden off into the sunset. The law might be looking for him, but he’ll be a low priority. He’s probably been evading the law since before I was born.”
“And the Bullitt car?”
“Drifted back into the realm of legend—its rightful place.”
I finished my espresso and sat here in my favorite café, holding the warm cup, looking out at the cars sparkling in the sunlight as they whipped down Columbus. “You know, Leo, last night after Gabriella tried to lock me in that horrible room with her brother’s remains, and I came up with her gun and called 911, I waited an eternity for the police to show up. When they finally came, I was so glad to see Higgins walk in I forgot what a pain in the ass she is.”
“Things change,” he said.
35
SOMETIMES EVENTS HAPPEN fast. Maybe it was John proclaiming that Dad was what he was and we’d all just have to accept that. No one believed him—he’d be struggling for the rest of his life to justify Dad’s transgressions—but we were grateful, and impressed. Maybe it was Mike hearing about John. Or maybe Janice knew more about Mike’s location than she’d let on. I didn’t ask. Nor did I raise questions when she said she’d drive Mom and me up to Guerneville on the Russian River to meet him. If the rest of the family complained, Janice didn’t let on. But I figured they understood. Mike was my buddy and protector, the one who made my dreams possible from the time I learned to crawl till the day he walked away. As for Mom, I could barely look at her now without thinking of the times, year after year, I had pictured her face on this day.
“He won’t be the same,” I said. We were sitting three across in the front seat of Janice’s car; Mom and I were scrunched together because we had to be this close now, as if only our proximity was preserving this still unbelievable dream.
“We’ll see.”
I wanted to ask Janice if she’d talked to him, but I didn’t do that either.
The sun was blaring off the August-low water as we sped along the River Road. The windows were all open and I had my hair tied back so it wouldn’t snap in Mom’s face. There was a vacation mood in the whole area, with the promise of rowboats, canoes, swimming behind the summer dams. The promise of good times ahead.
Janice slowed as we came into town and I could feel Mom tense.
The light at the Guerneville bridge turned red. Janice ran it. She cut left off Main Street and veered down a lazy commercial street, moving agonizingly slowly now. At the Veterans Memorial Hall, she made a left and then, suddenly—finally—pulled up to the edge of Johnson’s Beach. The car jerked to a stop.
For a moment all three of us just sat. I hadn’t asked them how many false leads they’d had over the years, how many moments like this had come to nothing. How hard it had been to let themselves hope again. We sat, preserving this moment of safety.
I opened the door and stepped out.
Across the narrow beach two canoes headed downstream, one slicing through the brown water, the other zigzagging as the paddlers laughed. On the sand, all the people looked suddenly alike. I stared but couldn’t see.
None of them was Mike.
“Janice, are you sure . . .”
She didn’t say anything.
“Omigod, there. There!”
I recognized his walk first, that loose-limbed stride with an odd catch in his right hip. His walk! I couldn’t see his face; my eyes were tearing. I wanted to run faster than I ever had. But I slowed to let Mom catch up and she whipped right by me. When I looked up she was hugging him and he’d lifted her up like a little kid. Then I ran and wrapped my arms around him and felt the solidity of him really here.
After twenty years, we had really found him.
He wouldn’t be the same. There’d be awkward times. But right now it was everything I had ever imagined it would be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AGAIN, I AM indebted to stunt coordinator and director Carolyn Day, to writer Linda Grant, and to my superb editors Michele Slung and Roxanna Aliaga. And, as always, to my agent Dominick Abel.
Copyright © 2010 by Susan Dunlap. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunlap, Susan.
Power slide : a Darcy Lott mystery / by Susan Dunlap.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43692-0
1. Women stunt performers—Fiction. 2. California—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.U46972P69 2010
813’.54—dc22
2010008580
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