He went over, poked his head in. ‘Hello?’
A woman stood in front of a big canvas, her hair a blaze of fake red, wearing a big apron and black sweatpants. ‘Hello?’ she said back.
‘I’m looking for Kate Waters. Windsong told me about you,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’m a detective on leave from Mesa PD. I’m helping out Chico’s attorney with the investigation.’ And he explained.
‘Ohh,’ said Dakota, her face brightening considerably. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever in my entire life met a detective.’ She smiled. ‘I remember seeing you at Chico’s show at Sail Rabbit. Don’t know how I can help you. All I know really is Kate’s gone to New Jersey.’
‘I’d like to take a look at that tire,’ Malcolm said, ‘the one that blew out. If possible.’
‘Her car’s at Ernie Roger’s garage. I gave her a ride to the airport,’ Dakota said. ‘They came out and put on her spare, and someone drove it there. Kate didn’t feel up to driving it herself.’ She dabbed something on the canvas she was working on, stood back, frowned, then put the brush in a jar of water.
‘I don’t mean to disturb you,’ Malcolm said.
‘It’s okay. Come on in. I’m done, anyway.’ She removed the paint splotched apron she was wearing. ‘Sit down.’
Malcolm came in and sat down on a leather couch with stuffing leaking from a tear in one of the cushions. He had a good view from there of the painting she was working on; it looked like a sunset with a lot of bugs crawling across it.
‘So who’s this ex of Kate’s?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Dakota looked startled. ‘I thought you were here about Chico and the tourists. I mean, to ask me if Carrie said anything to Kate at the Co-op. Which she did not. So first you ask me about that tire, then you want to know about Kate’s ex.’
‘I know, I know. There might be a connection. I’m trying to look at all the angles. From what Windsong says nothing much transpired between Kate and Carrie, but the killer might think something did. I’d like to talk to her,’ Malcolm said. ‘Sometimes people don’t know what they know. The tire thing, I need to check that out.’
‘Her ex, Harry, sounds like a real jerk. But I don’t know about Kate’s paranoia. I mean – I know she got new tires in California, but you never know if you’re getting ripped off nowadays. They could have been retreads or whatever.’
‘I thought she was from back east. What was she doing in California?’
‘God!’ Dakota ran her hands through her red red hair and sighed. ‘Kate’s had such a hard time. She lost her job in Vermont, or rather her job vanished along with the economy, and at the same time her long-term relationship fell apart. She ran off to California to be with this Harry Light guy. She never would have done that if she hadn’t been so vulnerable. Then she realized it was a mistake, so she left him and came here.’
‘Tough,’ Malcolm said. ‘It does sound like she’s had a hard time.’
‘Harry’s a poet if you can believe that. Harry Light. Does that sound like a phoney name or what?’
‘A real jerk, you said,’ Malcolm repeated. ‘Why is that?’
‘He had these sort of out-of-control tantrums. And even after almost three months he’s still emailing her these nasty comments.’
‘No kidding,’ Malcolm said. ‘What do they say?’
‘She wouldn’t tell me. Just that they were nasty.’
‘Harry Light,’ Malcolm said. ‘As in light bulb?’
Dakota laughed. ‘Or maybe dim bulb, is more like it. Anyway, like I said, now she’s in New Jersey.’
‘New Jersey. Of course,’ said Malcolm, ‘that makes sense.’
Dakota laughed. ‘Doesn’t it. Oh, and by the way.’
‘What?’
‘Harry owned a gun.’
‘A gun? What kind of gun?’
‘I have no idea, and neither does Kate.’
Malcolm drove over to Ernie Roger’s garage, outside of town near the Safeway. He saw what he figured might be Kate’s car, a Honda Civic parked over by the chain link fence that surrounded the back of the property. The right back tire was one of those inflatable ones that get you a few miles to the nearest gas station.
A young guy came out, wiping his hands on an old rag. ‘Help you, sir?’
‘Is that Kate Waters’ car over there?’ Malcolm asked, pointing.
‘Sure is.’
‘What’s going on with it?’
‘Not a goddamn thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The owner left it here for us to see if we could fix the tire, but she went out of town for a week, and we’re real backed up here. We haven’t gotten to it yet.’
‘Well, thanks,’ Malcolm said. ‘When do you think you might get to it?’
‘Try back, say, day after tomorrow.’
Malcolm went home and got his gun, not his service revolver but his sport gun, a Ruger Mark III .22 caliber pistol with a bull barrel. He got five magazines and a brick of ammunition from the back of the bedroom closet, a big cardboard box and three or four paper targets. He hadn’t used his gun or practiced for a while now; he figured he was getting pretty rusty. He drove out through the Mule Mountains, made the turn to Sierra Vista, down that same road, Highway 80, where Kate had driven not so long ago.
Just desert, mesquite and jack rabbits and prickle poppies, framed by blue mountains. A few miles down was a shooting range. He parked, got out. No one else was there. Overhead, a hawk floated in the cloudless Arizona sky.
He set the big cardboard box some twenty to thirty feet away and taped on the paper target, white with a big black bullseye in the center. Then he loaded up the first magazine, ten rounds of ammunition, and began to shoot. He shot slow and steady, but he hadn’t shot in a while and his aim was off.
He shot and shot and shot, the whole magazine, then loaded up the next one and shot some more. After a while his aim started getting better, and then a while after that, he was in the groove, he couldn’t miss. Zen and the art of shooting, he thought, aiming and shooting, aiming and shooting. Stopping from time to time to replace the paper target.
He kept going until he was clean out of ammunition and his mind was clean out of any thoughts at all. Not one single thought.
Cindy had turned, smiled, walked away.
But she’d be back.
EIGHTEEN
There was no way Kate was going to spend another night in that house. She packed up everything, put it in the rental car. She took a walk through the house in case she’d forgotten something, opening and closing drawers, looking into closets, just in case there was something, somewhere – paperwork, maybe, that would give her a clue as to Ellen’s home address – but found nothing.
It was amazing how featureless the house was, not even the sparse furniture (a lot of it must have been sold) told you anything about the person who had lived here. Only the photograph in the second bedroom gave any hints. A woman in sunglasses, a bikini and a big straw hat smiled back at her – where was she, when was it taken, was it Ellen’s dead aunt? What was Ellen’s dead aunt’s name, anyway?
Or was it some other relative? It was impossible to tell in what decade the picture had been taken, but it was the only personal thing in the house. On an impulse Kate slipped the snapshot out of the frame. On the back of the photo it said ‘Tall Pine Lake, 2005’. But no name. If something bad had happened to Ellen, the picture could get lost in the shuffle. Kate put it back in the frame and into her backpack. Then, just in case, she left a note for Ellen on the kitchen table, anchored by one of the gallon water bottles.
I showed up, where were you? Kate
Then she left the house, locking the door behind her, putting the key under the rock. She got back in the rental car and sat for a moment looking at the green lawn, the yellow roses blooming on the trellis by the front door. It looked so normal, but this was absurd.
Ellen had been delayed in some weird way, in a dead zone, maybe, like in that TV commercial. A dead zone where technolog
y didn’t work. But somehow Kate thought of a dead zone as a place where only technology worked, where flowers didn’t bloom and no birds sang.
She drove around aimlessly for a while just to listen to Lisa Strange sing on her iPod. Next to Neko Case she loved Lisa Strange the most – had almost all the songs on her last two albums. Winter and Never. Out of time, no place she had to be.
Then she drove to a motel near the Krogers, the Wendy’s, the McDonald’s, the Kentucky Colonel, the Burger King, the Taco Bell. She checked in after making sure they had Wi-Fi.
The room looked like all the motels rooms she had ever stayed in. She took a long shower, checked her cell for a call or a text from Ellen, and then opened her laptop and checked her email once again – still nothing from Ellen. Just in case, she fired off another email and a text to Ellen, then went back to her Ellen folder and reread all the emails Ellen had ever sent her. There was nothing in them that would tell her why Ellen hadn’t shown up.
She googled Ellen Wilson to see if she’d been in an accident somewhere but found nothing. Then she googled film maker and Ellen Wilson together. There was a film-making Ellen Wilson in Seattle, Washington and one in Detroit. None in New York or Connecticut or Jersey though. After a while she gave up.
What about Karen and Sandy, the other two Ooblecks? But Karen had married and Kate didn’t know her new last name, and she’d forgotten Sandy’s last name entirely.
Rick. Rick her ex. They’d liked to go into the city from time to time, and in the last few years she’d been so involved with the arts center that he usually went alone, spent the night. He would still be in touch with people she’d lost track of. But she could hardly bear to think of contacting him – they hadn’t parted as friends. Was he still with Hannah? Would Hannah answer his phone, read his emails and texts? What if she called his cell and he saw it was her calling and didn’t answer?
She could maybe go to Rustic, stalk Rick, make sure he was alone, then confront him. She giggled, playing with the laptop, going to MapQuest to see how far Rustic, Vermont was from this motel.
Five to six hours.
Stupid to go that far, for what?
Because she needed to.
She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes, but she didn’t sleep.
Malcolm went home. The orange cat was lurking by the door.
‘Hey there, kitty,’ he said.
It backed away and hissed at him. He dumped some cat food in the dish out by the porch, then went inside, googled the name Harry Light. See how real this guy really was. Wow. Wikipedia, he had a Wikipedia page. He clicked on it, and there was Harry Light, balding a bit – hah! – wearing a black shirt unbuttoned a couple of buttons more than was necessary and smirking in a knowing, superior kind of way. He already disliked the guy.
Wikipedia informed him that Harry Light was an award-winning poet who lived in California, in the Los Angeles area, and did a lot of workshops and poetry readings throughout the country, including Boston and Vermont but mainly in the Southwest.
He’d written a lot of poetry books. Malcolm scrolled down a list, with weird names like Causal Geography, A Mote of Indifference and Hamburger of Desire.
Hamburger of Desire?
Malcolm exited Wikipedia and scrolled down more listings.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Then an entry made him pause. English Professor-Poet Harry Light Questioned.
He clicked on it.
English Professor-Poet Harry Light Questioned in Grad Student’s Disappearance.
What?
He scanned it for the real information.
Hours before her disappearance, missing grad student Anna Marie Romero had gone to one of Professor Harry Light’s popular workshops. Her car was later found parked by a tennis court near where Professor Light lives. Her mother, Cecilia Romero, notified law enforcement when she failed to come home.
Professor Light denied any rumors that there was more to their relationship than teacher-student.
And Harry Light had been sending nasty emails to Kate.
He searched for more articles about Anna Marie Romero, found just one – Graduate Student Still Missing – with no mention of Harry Light, and that was it. It struck him as strange, this petering out. He had a sense of things being covered over, hushed up. Why?
He’d like to talk to the investigating officer on the case, probably could through his Mesa PD connections. But he was investigating the Cooper murders for Lupita and Chico; how did he get so far afield? But he didn’t care.
He searched a little more and discovered at one site that Harry was doing a reading in Phoenix at some place called the Poetry Barn. Tomorrow night. He’d been planning on going to Phoenix at some point, anyway.
Polly Hampton, Wes Cooper’s daughter, lived in Phoenix. There was the blonde lady, the one the bartender thought was from Phoenix – he’d like to get a good look at Polly Hampton. He googled her without really expecting anything, and there she was – the owner of a store called Polly’s Collectibles in a little mall in Tempe. He could spend the night at his brother Ian’s. He had an open invitation to dinner anytime he was in town.
Well, at least if this Harry Light guy was any kind of danger, Kate was safe and sound back east in New Jersey.
Kate slept finally, then woke, not knowing where she was, and in fact she could be anywhere, from the blandness of the motel room. A dim light shone through a small gap between the double curtains. She looked at her watch: close to nine p.m. She’d slept longer than she’d intended, her internal clock all askew. It was time for a delicious fast food dinner. She got up, brushed her hair, put on some lip gloss. Her laptop was on the meager desk. Time to check for messages from Ellen, yeah right.
First her cell – and sure enough, a text had come in while she was asleep. She opened it. Dakota. Guy came 2 c me, name of—
No time for that now. She opened the laptop and went to her email. Messages of no consequence were piling up, and then she saw it, a message from Ellen, Subject: please help me out.
Of course! Thank God. She opened it.
Hello, I am sorry I didn’t inform you about my travel to Europe for a program called Empowering the Youth to Fight Racism, HIV/AIDS, and the Lack of Education, the program is taking place in three major countries which are Belgium, Spain, England. But I am presently in England, London to be precise. Unfortunately all my money and traveling documents were stolen in my hotel room during a robbery incident in the hotel where I lodged. I am so confused now:I don’t know what to do. Please could you urgently assist me with a soft loan of $1,800 pounds—
Damn it! Kate hit delete. A scam. A stupid scam. And that meant that Ellen’s email was probably compromised too. Kate kicked the leg of the desk hard and hurt her foot.
Vermont, she thought. First thing in the morning. If she left at eight she would be there by early afternoon. Suddenly, she remembered Dakota’s text that she hadn’t bothered to read. She read it now. Something about Malcolm, the guy she’d met at the gallery, needing to talk to her. It even included his cell number. Yeah, right. This was hardly the time. No way she was going to call him. But she’d promised Dakota she would kind of stay in touch. She texted her: GOING 2 VERMONT
Migas, Chico was thinking as he rested, for no reason other than boredom, in his cell. The guy who’d had the bunk below him was gone, and no doubt a new guy would appear very soon, but right now Chico was alone lying on his back, thinking migas. Corn tortillas fried in a skillet with eggs. He was thinking Lupita’s migas. They were special – she added a can of those Ro-tel tomatoes, that had the green chilies in them and something else he wasn’t sure what, but the result was, in Chico’s opinion, the very best thing on earth you could eat for breakfast. You could eat migas for lunch too and maybe even as a light supper.
He’d never really liked bologna, one of the jailhouse staples, and now the thought of it, compared to the spiciness of the chili and tomato next to the earthy flavor of the corn tortillas and the bland deliciousness of the e
ggs, made him feel slightly sick, or would if he weren’t so hungry most of the time that he would eat anything.
Lupita came to see him regularly, and so did his nana, but they just cried and made him even more depressed. His lawyer kept saying, ‘Be patient, be patient, it’s going to work out,’ but how did he know, really? He was just a lawyer. Besides, look at all those people that got convicted on no evidence at all, especially in Texas, only one state away, and besides, this was Arizona, home of SB1070, a totally racist law directed, in his opinion, not only at illegals but also perfectly innocent Hispanic citizens like him.
Anything could happen.
Right now he didn’t have it so bad, really, the guards trusted him with little tasks, wheeling the cart from the library, that kind of thing, but there was nothing, nothing to look at that wasn’t industrial, bland, nothing except the faces of the guards and the other inmates
The really bad crazy guys, of which there at this moment two, were kept separately. He wished he could see them – the faces of the really bad guys might be interesting.
Migas, he thought, migas.
NINETEEN
A few miles away from Rustic, Vermont, Kate stopped at a little tourist store and bought a big straw hat and some bottled water. She put the hat on the passenger seat and drove the winding road through the mountains she and Rick had traveled frequently so long ago. The closer she got, the more nervous she felt. She passed the sign: Rustic, 3 miles.
Where would she sleep tonight? Then, just before town, she remembered there was the ancient Shady Grove Motel, little wooden attached cabins all in a row, office with a peaked roof at one end, tall trees all around. And, sure enough, there it was. She parked in front and went in to make sure they had a room.
Inside, a punkish-looking kid with bright red streaks in his hair was at the desk. She didn’t know him.
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