“Calm down,” I said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
I didn’t think it was that terrible. Certainly not worse than what he’d done. “Just asking the question. I thought maybe she put him up to it, so I wondered.”
“No!” She picked up her wine and took a drink.
“And it was your idea.”
Her face was red. Her voice rose to a screech. “My idea? What are you talking about? You’re…”
“In the murder game. You suggested she should be drugged and drowned.”
“It was a game!” She swallowed the entire contents of her glass. The macaroni boiled over. Thick, foamy water, like something toxic, spread across the stove and hissed on the burner. Lisa whipped around. She turned off the heat. The timer began chirping to announce the macaroni was done cooking. She shoved her hands into potholder mitts, picked up the pot, and walked to the sink. She heaved the macaroni into the waiting colander.
After she returned the pot to the gooey stovetop and rinsed the macaroni, she approached the table where I was sitting. She refilled her glass without topping off mine. She drank some. She spoke in a low, ragged voice. “I never wanted to play that game, if you can even call it that. I told you that from the beginning. I don’t know why I let you and Randy pressure me into it. And now look. It’s like we brought it on ourselves. Maybe we are guilty of killing her, because we talked about it and imagined it. The things we said were sick. I’m disgusted with myself.” She swallowed more wine. “You better not have told the detective.”
“Of course not. And I was just wondering. You’d be perfectly justified if you had.”
“No.”
“Tom didn’t get that idea all on his own. Maybe she suggested at least part of it. She certainly set him against you.”
“You don’t know that. And even if she did, it’s on him. And still not deserving of murder. No one deserves that.”
“We all die in the end.”
“No one gets to make the decision for someone else. They don’t get to take it into their own hands.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. Maybe next semester, I’d sign up for a philosophy class.
She started crying softly. “Please don’t ever tell anyone the things we said.”
I refilled my wine glass.
She returned to the stove and began making the cheese sauce. She pushed her hair back from her face and twisted it in a coil down the center of her neck. “You didn’t promise.”
“I can’t promise to never tell anyone.”
“You have to. I can’t live my life knowing something so awful might come back to bite me.”
“So you don’t really care about slipping away from your moral compass, you’re more worried about the detective thinking we did something wrong, or your future political career getting derailed by the revelation of a youthful indiscretion.” I laughed.
“Don’t laugh. And that’s not it. Of course I care about those things, but I care more that I did something reprehensible, that I took life so lightly, that I said such wicked things about Dianne. And now she’s dead.” She let out a soft, pained cry.
“I’m hungry. Is the macaroni almost ready?”
“Sometimes I think you’re an animal.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, since animals are smart and self-sufficient, although I don’t think that’s how you meant it.”
She didn’t say anything else.
We ate dinner without talking much. After dinner, we opened a second bottle of wine and I rolled a joint. We went out on the balcony.
“Do you think it’s safe?” Lisa said.
“What?”
“Smoking pot. Maybe the cops are still hanging around.”
“I don’t think so. The only thing they want now is to talk to Randy. And Tom.”
She nodded.
I lit the joint, inhaled, and handed it to Lisa.
We smoked in surprisingly companionable silence for a while. Then we speculated about where Randy was, and whether or not Dianne might have gotten herself wasted and drowned without any help at all.
35
Aptos
After Noreen’s bliss-inducing lasagna and the shock of the eyeless photograph, I’d made a half-hearted attempt at helping her clean up the kitchen. My contribution consisted of covering the lasagna with plastic and wrapping the bread in foil, while she loaded the dishwasher and washed the sauce pans, turning them upside down on the counter to dry. We sat on the couch and finished the wine. When she started to nod off, I escorted her to her bedroom door, assuring her I’d wash the wine glasses. I rinsed them and left them on the counter.
The wine hadn’t made me sleepy at all. I sat in my armchair, feet propped up on a suitcase, watching a video of a pregnant shark. There was a soft knock on the door. I opened it and Jared stepped into my room. As I closed the door, he picked up my tablet, closed the cover, and set it on the nightstand. He climbed into my bed, holding up the covers like a yawning mouth, waiting for me to join him. Once our bodies were wrapped around each other, he put his mouth by my ear. “Let’s run away together.”
“Let’s stay right here and get rid of these clothes.” I reached for his belt buckle and pulled the end out of the metal ring. I unbuttoned them and eased the zipper down. As I tugged them off, he whispered. “I’m tired of being quiet, tired of hiding this. Why won’t you leave with me?”
“Shh,” I said.
“I want you. I need you like air. I…”
“Shh.”
“Who cares? It doesn’t matter if she knows.”
“It does.” I pushed his shirt up and got on my knees. He raised his arms and I pulled it over his head and dropped it on the floor.
If Noreen found out, she might decide to restart the roommate search. I hadn’t signed an agreement. It wasn’t impossible to believe Noreen might change the locks without warning, or do something even more aggressive to force me out. She wanted Jared and if she knew I had him. The more I thought about it, the more I realized there might be something a little crazed in her eyes — a slight blankness and a look of confusion, as if she was never quite sure where she was. Maybe that’s why her ex removed her eyes from the photograph. If he truly was her ex. I was no longer sure about that either. And there was that mirror, reminding me every time I stepped into the bathroom that she had minimal control over her emotions, and a tendency toward violence.
Jared grabbed the front of my shirt. “Slow down.”
“You’re the one who knocked on my door.”
“I wanted to be with you, not just have sex and go back to my room to sleep alone again.”
I sat up. “What do you have against sex?”
He laughed softly. “Nothing.”
I put my finger to his lips.
He pulled me down so my head was close to his on the pillow. He turned and whispered. “We never talk.”
I sighed. I thought I’d made it clear I didn’t expect sex to come wrapped in a pink bow and glitter. I knew he wanted to talk, he’d said it enough times. He wanted a relationship, but still… Late at night, with Noreen in her room, possibly drifting in a light sleep, maybe not sleeping at all, was not the time for a deep conversation. Whispering more than a few words at a time is painful. It strains the vocal chords.
“I don’t want to sneak around,” he said. “It’s stupid. We’re adults. I feel like I’m fourteen, whacking off in my bedroom, one ear tuned for my mother’s footsteps.”
I laughed.
“It’s not funny. Why don’t you want to talk to me, have dinner with me?”
“I already told you. Haven’t you ever had a friend with benefits?”
“We’re not even friends,” he hissed.
“I’m hurt.”
He pinched my hip.
“I thought you were practicing self-restraint? Letting go of attachment. Just go with the flow,” I said.
“Meeting you blew that all to hell.”
I sat up a
nd put the pillows behind me. If he wanted to talk, I could indulge him. I was curious about him. He had money from a source that he’d never revealed. He walked away from a career with a lot of potential and was pursuing a somewhat esoteric spiritual practice while driving an expensive car — a man of contradictions.
I kept my voice low. “Okay. Let’s talk. What made you decide to become a Buddhist?”
He settled next to me and kept his voice equally soft. The pleasure of thinking he’d won emanated from his skin like cologne. “I wanted control over myself. Which I’m failing at miserably. But when you and I get straightened out, I’ll get back to it.”
“I can straighten you out right now,” I said.
He pinched my hip again. I pinched his.
“I’m serious,” he said.
He went on to tell me that all his life he felt controlled by other people. He began to realize he didn’t even control his own inner self. As a child he played soccer and baseball. When he suggested to his father he didn’t really enjoying kicking and batting balls, his father laughed and assured him — of course you do. The note of confidence in his father’s voice made Jared doubt his own desires. Eventually, he mentioned his ambivalence to his mother who laughed and reminded him that all boys liked sports. When she repeated this unarguable fact in front of Jared’s father, his father chuckled that soon Jared would be in junior high school where sports would make or break him. In junior high, he wouldn’t be whining to mommy any more. Team sports paved the way to high school friendships and college acceptance. Even if team participation didn’t generate actual cash for college, there would be a comforting wall around him, corralling the right circle of friends and ensuring he didn’t wander about on his own without a solid identity.
College turned out to be one big stew of groupthink. The goal was to study business, paving the way into business school itself, where you studied the deeper inner workings of business. The world ran on business. Or rather, business ran the world. If you weren’t in business, you couldn’t make a living. There were engineers and businessmen, but far more of the latter. A man needed to make a lucrative income, securing the future, providing for a family, making sure he could afford a home in a good neighborhood where the kids could play on well-established soccer and baseball teams.
He was funneled out of business school into a high paying position.
A year or so ago, he’d wound up reporting to a Buddhist manager named Ren.
“That guy didn’t think like anyone I’d ever met. He was in complete control of himself. It was there in his eyes, a total lack of concern over how others viewed him. Ren didn’t care whether he led the pack. He didn’t care whether he was viewed favorably by superiors or even got credit for his work. He was like steel. The true man of steel. Above it all. He glided through life knowing who he was, unruffled, focused and calm, even when everything around him was fractured or taking an opposite course. He didn’t play sports, but he was completely fit because he did yoga and walked everywhere. That guy walked ten or fifteen miles every day. It was phenomenal.”
“Why did you quit?” I said.
“This was before I quit. Ren left Cisco and started his own company.”
“Why didn’t you go work for him?”
He was quiet for several minutes, providing some space that allowed me to listen for Noreen. I heard nothing. Which meant nothing. She might have been standing outside my door for the previous twenty minutes, straining to hear every whisper. I turned on my side and bit gently on his nipple. “You’re not going to tell me?”
“I guess I wasn’t a good fit for his venture.”
“So you bolted?”
“Sort of.”
“Into the arms of Buddha?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Are you ever going to return to your career?”
“I don’t know.”
“At some point, don’t you sort of need to have a job?”
I waited for his answer, but he remained silent. I touched his face. His eyes were closed, although maybe he closed them when my fingers drew too close. I moved on top of him and touched my lips to his. He held my head in both hands and we kissed for a long time, our bodies pressed together, aching for each other, but not wanting to finish that kiss. There was something he wanted from me and I didn’t think it was just a relationship.
He wanted to swallow me whole, drink my essence so he could become me. It wasn’t obvious to him that’s what was going on, but it was quite clear to me. He thought he wanted a relationship, and that was part of it, but he also wanted what I have — the detachment from not behaving according to others’ rules and beliefs. A disregard for polishing an admirable reputation. A steely inner strength that nothing can touch. Buddhism might be able to give him that, after years, decades, of study and practice. Maybe he was jealous that I had it without effort.
Analyzing him while he was sucking everything he could out of my mouth was rather cold. He was there in the kiss as if his life depended on it and I was somewhere else, thinking I shouldn’t have allowed him into my room after all. Thinking about Noreen and becoming more and more convinced the reason the house was so quiet was that she was standing outside my door, wanting him and considering how to be rid of me, contemplating worse things than defacing a mirror.
It wasn’t as if I was destitute. I had enough money to live adequately if I went back to the motel. But I was supposed to be on an upward trajectory toward a nicer living arrangement, not groveling around a motel with people living on public funds or panhandling or pot sales or sex.
If Joe was still around, I could move to the Ocean Breeze with him, but that would take a bit of doing. And it would spoil the thrill between us. I’d be in a position of need, giving him the advantage and I didn’t like that. The complete equality was part of what drew me to him.
No, it wasn’t a choice. I had to keep Noreen happy until I could work out the raise and save for a few more months. Then I’d look for a nicer place with people who didn’t need me so damn much.
36
It was becoming clear to Jared that Alexandra was more interested in keeping Noreen out of her face than she was in seeing what might develop with him. He understood the concern, and he wondered how long he was going to remain living in an unsettling house, waiting for the distance between him and Alexandra to grow smaller.
The only promising change was that Alex had finally agreed to have dinner with him. Nothing fancy, though. She’d said that before he could even register her acceptance, before he could open his mouth to suggest The Crow’s Nest. It was a relatively casual place, but she wouldn’t perceive it that way. The white tablecloths pushed it too close to fancy. He suggested the Paradise Beach Grille in Capitola, and once again, the moment he finished speaking, she dictated the terms, informing him she’d meet him there after work. Of course she would. She wouldn’t want Noreen to see them leaving the house together. It was exhausting and childish. Alexandra acted as if she owed something to Noreen. Maybe she did.
His thoughts circled again around the possibility that the two of them were playing some kind of twisted game with him — hoping to make him believe one girl was on the brink of madness and the other took on the appearance of a goddess because she demanded nothing from a man. But what would be the purpose? Was Alexandra trying to prove to him that a woman who didn’t want the entanglements of a relationship wasn’t all that much fun after all, despite a frequent male fantasy to the contrary? Was he supposed to get so frustrated with Alex’s untouchable nature that he fell for a needy, clinging woman like Noreen? But why would they do that?
It made no sense. It was simply the luck of the draw. Two very unusual women.
Unfortunately, he was in love with Alexandra. He couldn’t tell her that, not yet. She’d think he was ridiculous. He didn’t even know her. But the strange thing was, he felt he did. He felt that whatever he didn’t know about her would eventually reveal itself to be pure delight, her soul opening to h
im slowly, every day showing more of herself, and there wouldn’t be a single piece of her history that failed to fascinate him or a single aspect of her personality he didn’t adore.
He’d lost his mind.
He found a parking spot two blocks away from the Esplanade. Parking was easier to find on a Tuesday night. Looking for a spot on the weekends involved thirty minutes or more, driving narrow streets and rounding tight corners, waiting for beachgoers to toddle across the street at will, flip-flops slowing their pace. In the summer, it was pointless to bring a car to Capitola at all.
He walked to the restaurant and went inside. He scanned the room and the bar area. She wasn’t there. He wove among the small tables in front of the bar to the door leading to the deck. It was after seven. He felt a chill, wondering if she’d changed her mind, set him up to look like a fool, if only to himself.
He returned to the area near the door and glanced out at the street. The hostess asked whether he had a reservation and if he wanted to be seated. He hesitated for several long seconds while she stared at him, tapping the podium with a purple fingernail. Sitting alone wouldn’t bother him under normal circumstances, but Alex wasn’t a normal girl by any standard, and his feelings and behavior had veered far north of normal the past few weeks. If he waited outside, the restaurant might implement the fifteen minute rule and give away his table. “Okay. I asked to hold a table on the deck.”
“And you got it.” She picked up two menus and a wine list and swept past him, headed toward the back.
Alexandra was only twenty minutes late. Not unforgivable. If he wasn’t so anxious about her to begin with, if she hadn’t turned down so many invitations, it wouldn’t have bothered him at all. As it was, he felt off center and he didn’t like it. She seated herself across from him. Her dark hair was woven into a complicated braid across the top of her head. She wore sunglasses even though dusk was on its way. Her arms were bare, lightly tanned next to her loose white top that dipped in front. When she moved, a thin piece of lace from her bra revealed itself, disappearing each time she straightened. He couldn’t stop watching for it, as if they were playing a game of hide and seek.
The Woman In the Mirror: (A Psychological Suspense Novel) (Alexandra Mallory Book 1) Page 19