Follow the Dotted Line

by Nancy Hersage

  “No. Not really.”

  She went again with the, “Okay.”

  “Except—I sort of wanted your advice on something.”

  “Really?” This was novel. Her kids rarely wanted her advice and never directly asked for it if they did. “About the audit?” she assumed.

  “About the auditor.”

  “The auditor? Was there something wrong with him? Do you think he treated you unfairly, Ian?” she said, jumping right in to ferret out the problem.

  “No. No. She was fine, Mom. Really.”

  “You had a woman? How refreshingly progressive.”

  “Yup. So I just wondered if you think it’s okay for me to ask her out?”

  “Did you say, ‘ask her out?’”

  “Uh huh.”

  Andy tried to tamp down her amazement. “You want to date your auditor?”

  “No, no. Just ask her out. One time. You know what I mean?”

  “Um, sure. Of course, I know what you mean. I guess.”

  “Do you think that might be a . . . a problem?”

  “A problem?

  “Ethically. Sort of a conflict of interest?”

  Ian was so circumspect about confiding his dating life to anyone, especially to her, that Andy had no idea who he dated or how much.

  “Mom?”

  “Hold on. I’m thinking.”

  She suspected he dated few women and not very often. She couldn’t be sure, but she felt this might be an important answer, and she didn’t want to get it wrong. One thing she did know was that her son was easily embarrassed. He was asking her advice because he wanted to avoid potential humiliation.

  “Why don’t you ask her and then ask her again?” she finally recommended.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, ask her if she thinks it’s appropriate for you to ask her out, and if she says ‘yes,’ then pull the trigger.”

  “Oh.”

  “That way if she says, ‘no, it’s not appropriate,’ you’re covered because you haven’t asked her out. But if she says ‘yes,’ you’ll know it’s fine and that she wants you to ask her . . . or she would have just said ‘no.’”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s like hedging your bets.”

  “Oh, right. I see.”

  More silence. She tried wallowing in it long enough for him to come up with more to say. When he didn’t, she gave up and said, “Does that help you, Ian?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything else you want to say?”

  “Um, thanks, Mom. I appreciate it.”

  “My pleasure.”

  They stalled again. She considered abandoning ship for both their sakes, but Mitch’s indictment was still ringing in her ears. She threw herself once more into the breach.

  “Ian, maybe I could ask your advice on something.”

  “My advice?”

  “About all this stuff with your dad.”

  “Um. Sure. Sure. Anything you want me to help you with, Mom.”

  Andy noted a newfound perkiness in his voice. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to confide a little of what she’d learned. She’d been holding back ever since her findings in Texas had garnered such bad reviews. But she should tell one of her children, and Ian had always been voted least-likely-to-explode.

  “I’ve done some research on Tilda’s three former husbands. I haven’t actually mentioned this to your brother or sisters. I’m not sure if I should. They may think I’m a little, you know, paranoid. Or obsessive. And I know you’re the kind of person who tries not to be critical.” She was probably laying it on a little thick, but if she knew Ian, he’d forgive that, too. “Anyway, I found out that the reason Tilda never divorced any of them is that they all died.”

  “Died?! No kidding. How?”

  “That’s even stranger. There are no death certificates for any of them, and the obituaries I read said they had been cremated. So I guess there’s no way of knowing.”

  “Whoa. Kinda ghoulish, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you should call the police.”

  “I asked an FBI agent I know—”

  “You know an FBI agent?”

  “Long story,” she said quickly, not wanting to explain she’d hired a P.I. without permission. “The important thing is, he says nobody will take me seriously because I don’t have any evidence of crimes.”

  “Oh.”

  She could hear him thinking this over. A better mother would have waited for him to formulate a comment, but now that she was spilling the beans, she couldn’t dish them out fast enough.

  “Anyway, despite what the police might think, I find this whole thing very worrisome.”

  “You mean, you think she might have killed them?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And killed Dad?”

  “Does that sound crazy?”

  To her astonishment, he had his answer ready and waiting “No. No, it really doesn’t. It’s sounds pretty plausible. You think she might be doing this for the money?”

  “Well, that’s usually why people do most things. And Mitch thinks your dad had a couple hundred thousand.”

  Ian exhaled through the receiver, making a trilling noise with his lips.

  “So what are you thinking of doing about it?” he asked.

  “Finding evidence, I guess. What else is there to do?”

  Unlike most people, Ian didn’t bother fumbling for an answer he didn’t have, so once again he said nothing.

  Andy resumed, “I guess I’m trying to figure out if I have a role here. I mean, do you think I should just let it go?”

  “Is that a question, Mom?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, even if you should let it go, could you?”

  Well done, she thought. Very perceptive. “Probably not. Do you think I’m being obsessive?”

  “No. Not really. You’re just doing what you always do.”

  “What I always do?”

  “Yeah. You’re just being you.”

  She wasn’t sure what he meant. But because he was the only person in the family bereft of an arsenal of sarcasm, she knew he was being serious. “Can you be more specific, Ian?”

  “You’re doing that thing you did when we were kids. Living inside your head. In a parallel universe, you know. Trying to turn everything into some kind of story.”

  She opened her mouth to object, but all that came out was hot air. Curiously, he filled the empty space.

  “This whole thing with Dad is uber odd: the lady and the ashes and the hex. It’s kind of like one of your screenplays.”

  It was. It was exactly like the hyperbolic pitches she threw at the network in her former life. Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have an honest child.

  “No wonder you can’t drop it,” he continued. “It’s right up your alley.”

  His insight rendered her speechless, while making him downright chatty.

  “It just goes to show that life doesn’t imitate art, Mom, it imitates movies-of-the-week. The point is, you’ve got the time. And you clearly care about it . . . I mean, him. And no matter what Mitch or the girls say, you’d be doing us all a favor by finding out whether Dad’s actually dead or not.”

  “You think so?” she managed, still processing his analysis.

  “Of course you would. So the only question left is, what’s the hesitation?”

  She was stupefied. Ian had distilled the situation perfectly. Now he wanted her to own up to the essence.

  “Tilda,” she acknowledged.

  “Exactly,” he ratified. “And she should make you hesitate. If what you suspect is true, then she’s dangerous.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you located her yet?”

  “No, not exactly,” Andy equivocated.

  “Well then, since you’re asking my advice, I will say one thing. No matter where you go wi
th this story, stay away from her.”

  “That’s good advice, Ian.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said, firmly. It was as assertive as he’d ever been with her. The sheer effort of it suddenly stemmed his unprecedented flow. “I think I should hang up now,” he announced.

  “Do you have to?” she wondered, with genuine regret.

  “Um. I think so.”

  “All right. But at least tell me first if you’re going to ask the IRS auditor out?”

  He laughed. “If I get up the guts.”

  “Get up the guts!” she cheered. “Make it a good weekend.”

  “Okay, I will,” he promised.

  She paused to let him be the first to say good-bye.

  “Have a good weekend yourself,” he said, sweetly.

  The uncharacteristic gesture made her smile. “Okay. I’ll try.”

  “Doing anything special?”

  “Um, I don’t know. I’m thinking about going up to Big Bear with Lorna.”

  “Good,” he said, mimicking her cheeriness, then deciding he’d gone about as far as he could go. “Well, bye, Mom.”

  “Bye, Ian.”

  “Have fun in Big Bear.”

  “I will.”

  If I get up the guts, she thought.

  Chapter 19

  Free of Pink Flamingos

  As soon at they were in Lorna’s car headed for the San Bernardino Mountains on mid-Saturday morning, Andy began to deeply regret having asked Harley along for the ride. For one thing, he was now wearing a skullcap. Not a game changer but a constant irritation—a bit like poison oak. She spent most of the trip wanting to rip it off his head to make it go away. In addition, he talked nonstop and with a bravado that made him sound like he was auditioning to host one of those all-brains-barred radio talk shows.

  “We don’t really have mountains in Nebraska,” he was explaining to Lorna from his observation deck in the back seat. “That wouldn’t work with the corn we grow. You need flatter land. And mountains tend to be very hilly. And have a lot of trees. Just like you see here.”

  “Cornhuskers. Isn’t that the team name for the university?” the CPA asked.

  Andy understood that Lorna was trying to be polite, which was dangerously close to indulgence, which Harley habitually interpreted as encouragement. No matter how laudable the motive, conversation of any length with him was a slippery slope, and they had been sliding rapidly downward for more than an hour.

  “Why don’t we stop for lunch before we go to the house?” Andy asked Lorna, thinking it might staunch the flow of his mindless chatter.

  “House?” Harley interjected, stuffing his head between the two front seats and darting his eyes from one woman to the other. “I thought Lorna had a cabin.”

  “I call it a cabin, but there are actually four bedrooms and three baths,” Lorna said.

  “Wow. We don’t have cabins like that in Nebraska.”

  “Big Bear Lake is a ski area,” Lorna explained. “I rent the place out to groups of skiers in the winter.”

  “Will there be snow when we get there?”

  “Just in the winter and spring. This time of year it’s fairly warm and very dry.”

  “I’ve never been skiing . . .”

  The conversation droned on without Andy, and she gave up trying to sabotage it. She started to ask herself why she felt it necessary to mute her nephew, particularly in the presence of others, but soon gave up on that exercise, too. She sat back in the new leather car seat and gathered in the forested scenery. The car was slaloming its way up highway 330, maneuvering from left to right around deep curves. They were passing through Running Springs, a slip of a town not far from their destination. They would arrive in a few minutes.

  Lorna’s ‘cabin’ was indeed a house and quite a lovely one, Andy mused. Her friend had bought the property years ago, when she was a young single mom living in the San Fernando Valley, and the southern California housing market took a wicked tumble. Lorna had been saving her money, ready and waiting to invest in real estate when the right moment arrived. The sound of the 1992 crash reverberated all the way up into the mountains, and that’s where Lorna bought. She prompted Mark and Andy to do the same, and they did.

  Over the two decades that followed, Lorna had enlarged and enhanced her investment. It was now one of the nicest homes in Alpine Woods, with a honey-colored log exterior covering a two-story A-frame. The wall of windows on the front of the cabin was aproned by a porch that provided a panoramic view of the neighborhood. From the street, passersby could look into the kitchen and just make out the trunk and branches of a once-living tree that soared from the cabin’s foundation to the interior roofline—right through the countertop. The tree had been Lorna’s idea and the piece de resistance of a rarely mentioned struggle to claw her way out of an impoverished, abusive upbringing in Bakersfield and build a life for herself and her daughter in the big city.

  The Kornacky-Bravos cabin was less a tribute to any personal triumph, as it was a symbol of the misdirection of the couple’s ruptured marriage and chaotic family life. They, too, had bought an A-frame, a smaller but utilitarian house, with three bedrooms and two baths. Built in the late 1970s, the cabin had what Andy called good bones, but the Kornacky household had neither the time nor inclination to do much with them. They had painted a bit but never updated much. Instead, the house became a means of escape from the increasing battles between Mom and Dad over money and fidelity.

  On some weekends, Andy brought the kids up here to get away from the silence of their house in Los Angeles—the one Mark was busy getting away from to avoid his wife and kids. On other weekends, Mark used the house for middle-aged trysts. When the competition for escape from the relationship became unbearably hurtful and then downright embarrassing, they finally ended it with a divorce. Mark got the cabin in the property settlement, along with most of their mutual funds. Andy got the kids and the house in LA.

  Even without any substantial improvements, the property was worth more than $400,000 according to Zillow, largely because it was located in one of the resort area’s posher enclaves. Andy had no idea what her ex-husband had done with it since then. Zillow indicated it had not been sold, but Zillow was not as accurate as the county recorder, and Andy hadn’t had a chance to check there. He could have sold it. Or remodeled it. Or abandoned it altogether. She didn’t have a clue. But she was curious about its fate and about what it might tell her about Mark’s.

  The car was approaching the lake now, a large basin of water nestled in a huge canyon between meagerly forested mountaintops. The lake was another California artifice, like the lake at Hansen where she golfed or Castaic where she hiked. Created by damming the springtime snow run-off from the mountains, this one had been designed for industry and habitation. The shoreline ebbed and flowed with the commands of government officials and engineers, helping to water and feed one of the world’s largest desert populations. Angelinos rarely acknowledged their truly desperate dependence on the magical liquid, and almost none of them knew that no desert civilization had ever survived for all that long in human history. Andy was certain the city was on the ‘decline and fall’ side of its life cycle.

  “Get the Burger?” she asked.

  Lorna nodded and soon pulled into the sloping, pocked asphalt parking lot of a scruffy looking, but scrumptious smelling, restaurant of that name on the corner of Fox Farm Road and Big Bear Boulevard. The menu offered various burgers named after enviable roles in the movie industry like Leading Lady and Child Star with Cheese, along with fries and shakes. It was a glorified, self-aggrandizing drive-in, and the two women knew Harley would love it as much as they did.

  “Well, I feel like we’re the Three Musketeers,” announced Lorna, as they sat down with their respective Directors: two quarter-pound patties, cheese, grilled onions, lettuce, tomato, and the ubiquitous ‘special’ sauce.

  “Why are we the Mouseketeers?” asked Harley.

  “Musketeers,” Lorna corrected.
“They’re from a story by Alexandre Dumas—”

  “Don’t!” Andy snapped. “Please. Just let that one go. I beg you.”

  Lorna smiled and nodded. “A little nauseated by the car ride?”

  “Exactly,” Andy replied, knowing they both meant ‘annoyed by the conversation.’

  “Sorry,” Lorna smiled, sheepishly. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  “You’ll learn soon enough,” Andy said. “Take my word for it.”

  “Will try to restrain myself,” Lorna promised. “Moving on to the business at hand. What’s the plan, Andy?”

  “Let’s go to your place, dump our duffle bags, and then drive by my old cabin to see if Tilda or anyone else is there?”

  “How will we know?” Harley chimed in.

  “I’m not sure,” Andy said. “Let’s have a look first, then we’ll make a plan.”

  After lunch they got back in the car for the short drive to Lorna’s. They made their way through a small neighborhood of sophisticated vacation homes set on half-acre lots covered by scattered nests of dry pine needles and craggy volcanic rock. Lorna had one of the larger homes on the block, but there was plenty of ‘pride of ownership’ in Alpine Woods Estates. It really was a wonderful place, Andy thought wistfully, as they pulled into Lorna’s driveway.

  In the back seat, Harley had his nose pressed up against the glass. “Whoa, this is like a mansion,” he said.

  Lorna smiled. “Thank you, Harley.”

  In the entry hall Harley dropped his bag and gaped at the towering ceiling. Andy had not been here in several years, and Lorna had obviously continued to make improvements to the décor and the furnishings. The place was a stunner.

  “Didn’t know I had it in me, did you?” Lorna prompted.

  “I don’t think I know anybody who has this in them, Lorna. Incredible. When did you go all Sunset on me?” Andy asked, referring to the magazine that set the bar for all things tastefully Californian. “Wait until you see her tree,” she said to Harley.

  “Yeah, I’m waiting for Sunset to write about that,” Lorna joked.

  The tree was in the middle of the cabin’s kitchen. Harley could just make it out from where they were standing. He rushed inside to get a better look, and the women followed.