“But you know me,” I pointed out.
“That is not to know your sister,” he said. “I do not know my siblings.”
“You had siblings?” I asked.
“Of course. I was the youngest of a litter of five.”
“I didn’t know that, Pepe. You never talk about your family.”
“That is because I was taken away from them when I was only six weeks old.” He seemed sad as he spoke.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said. Then I thought about my own family story, which was also full of abandonment and loss. My parents had died in a car accident when I was sixteen, and my younger sister had been kicked out by my big sister three years later when she was seventeen and disappeared altogether three years later. Although we live only about twenty miles apart, I’m not close to my big sister, Cheryl. Still I got an immediate urge to see her, if for no other reason than to let her know about Terry.
Instead of driving home, I headed for the floating bridge. Its official name is the Governor Albert D. Rosellini Bridge—Evergreen Point, but everyone just calls it the floating bridge. And it’s the longest floating bridge on earth. Two high-rise sections connect the bridge to land, but the middle section lies just above the surface of Lake Washington. You can look out as you fly along (or crawl if it’s rush hour). On the south side, the dark blue lake water is calm and glassy, and on the northern side it’s usually choppy, with little peaks of white on the tops of the waves.
My sister and her husband live in the Issaquah Highlands, a once-rural area rapidly being covered by developments, just east of Bellevue, Seattle’s little sister of a town. Bellevue tries hard to look glamorous and grown-up with its office towers and shopping malls, but it’s smaller and less cosmopolitan than downtown Seattle.
Cheryl lives in a development called Stonybrook, where all the streets are curved in on themselves and all the huge three-story houses are crammed into tiny lots with only a few feet between them. Cheryl’s house looks just like its neighbors, up to the basket of purple petunias dangling from a pot on the porch. I pulled into the driveway behind my sister’s silver minivan, which displayed a BABY ON BOARD bumper sticker. The baby was now eighteen months old and having a screaming, squalling meltdown, judging by the sounds we heard when we got out of the car. Pepe began shivering. He is not afraid of much, but he is afraid of children.
“Oh my ears! My delicate ears!” he said.
“You can stay in the car,” I told him. I knew my sister did not want a dog in her house.
“But no, I have a job to do, and so I must do my duty,” said Pepe, marching by my side up the front steps.
I was surprised Cheryl could hear the doorbell what with all the yelling going on inside, but she answered the door with D.J. hitched up on her hip. His face was bright red and his cheeks were covered with snot. But as soon as he saw Pepe, his eyes widened and his screams stopped.
“Doggie!” he chortled, holding out his slime-covered little fingers.
“Well, your dog is making himself useful for once,” Cheryl said. She set D.J. down on his wobbly feet (he had just started walking at eighteen months—Cheryl carried him everywhere, so there was really no reason for him to learn). He lunged for Pepe, who darted behind me.
“Let him pet the dog!” said Cheryl.
“He might hurt him!” I snatched Pepe up into my arms.
“You’re right!” said Cheryl. “Your dog has sharp teeth.”
“Doggie!” wailed D.J., throwing himself at my legs and attempting to climb up me.
“Be nice to your auntie Geri,” said Cheryl, trying to detach D.J. from me, but he clung like a little monkey while Pepe shivered in my arms.
“Speaking of aunts,” I said in a bright voice, even though I doubted D.J. could hear me over his earsplitting shrieks, “I just found Auntie Terry.”
But Cheryl heard me. “What?”
“I found Terry,” I said, with some pride.
“I found her,” said Pepe.
Cheryl frowned. “D.J., let go this minute! Or I’ll put you in a time-out!” She tried to pry him off me, but he just held on tighter.
“OK, you are now in a time-out!” said Cheryl. She unlatched his fingers from me, one finger at a time and carried him away down the hall, howling and kicking and hitting. Even when she closed the door to his room, I could still hear him shrieking.
While Cheryl tried to quiet D.J., I stood in the living room and looked at the framed photos displayed on the mantel over the glassed-in fake fireplace. Photos of D.J. and his big sister, Danielle. Danielle posing with her chubby chin propped on interlaced hands. D.J. clutching a bright blue bear. Also on the mantel, photos of Cheryl and her husband, Don (I call him Don the Dentist). The wedding party: including me as bridesmaid (in an awful baby blue chiffon gown) and Jeff, my ex-husband, on the groom’s side, looking ever so handsome with his slightly shaggy hair and dark blue velvet sports coat. A little farther along, our wedding, which took place a year later, with Cheryl as my maid of honor and Don as Jeff’s best man. Terry was already gone when Cheryl got married, so she didn’t appear in these photos.
While I was looking at the photos, my cell phone buzzed and I saw that Felix was calling. But just then, Cheryl came back into the room.
“Do you have any photos of Terry?” I asked her.
“Somewhere,” she said. “I don’t put them out. I don’t want to try to explain who she is to the kids.” I knew my sister disapproved of Terry’s lifestyle (what we knew of it). And she also felt guilty. After our parents died, she had to be a guardian and mother figure for us. When Terry went wild, Cheryl, applied the advice she got from parenting experts at the time and threw her out of the house. Terry never forgave her for that. No wonder Cheryl was so overindulgent with her own kids.
“Where’s your dog?” she asked.
I hadn’t even noticed he was gone. “Probably in the kitchen,” I said. Pepe is very impressed with Cheryl’s cooking, since she cooks American classics like meat loaf and roast beef.
Sure enough, he was sitting in the middle of the floor, staring up at the granite counters, his little nose sniffing away. I could see what caught his attention: a plate of home-baked chocolate chip cookies. They gave off a delicious aroma.
“Might as well have a snack,” said Cheryl. I could still hear D.J. wailing in the background. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of milk and poured us each a glass. She put out two sunflower plates on the round glass-topped table set into an alcove off the kitchen, brought over the plate of cookies, and motioned for me to sit down. Pepe pawed at my legs, wanting me to pick him up and put him on my lap but I ignored him.
“So what’s the news about Terry?” Cheryl asked as she came over to the table with the glasses of milk. “Did you find her online?” She knew that I had been searching for Terry for years.
“No, I saw her in person!” I said.
“You’re kidding?” Cheryl sat down with a thump. “Where?”
“At a ranch out near Cle Elum,” I said.
“What were you doing there?”
“I was working a case,” I said. I helped myself to a cookie, broke off a piece, checked to make sure there were no chocolate chips in it, and held it out to Pepe under the table. He immediately carried it out onto the kitchen floor, where he sat down to polish it off with gusto.
Cheryl frowned. “So you still think you’re a private detective?”
Cheryl didn’t think too much of my new profession. She didn’t approve of my being an artist either, which is why I dropped out of college, abandoning my art degree for interior design (more practical). To be fair, it was also because I needed to support my new husband, who was getting his MBA. Cheryl also didn’t approve of our divorce, but there wasn’t much she could do about that.
“I am a private detective,” I said, “or to be more precise, I’m training to be a private detective. And my assignment was to go undercover in this cult—”
“That sounds really da
ngerous,” Cheryl said.
“Not with me at her side,” said Pepe, licking his lips.
“Cheryl, I’m trying to tell you about Terry!”
“Yes, yes, go on. I’m listening.”
“She belongs to the cult. She’s got a new name.”
“What?”
“She goes by Flicker.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“They all have names like that. Leaf. Flint. Fox. Artichoke.”
“What kind of cult is this?”
“The Dogawandans.”
“Never heard of them.”
“They worship an ancient warrior spirit who talks through a dog. Or maybe it’s an ancient warrior dog. I’m not quite sure.”
“I think Dogawanda is a dog, for sure,” said Pepe. “His wisdom is that of a perro.”
“Geri, you’re making that up.”
“No, I’m not!”
“That sounds ridiculous!”
“Actually it makes some kind of sense when you’re there.”
“It’s not ridiculous at all,” said Pepe. “Everyone should listen to dogs.”
“So did Terry explain what she’s been doing all these years?” Cheryl asked. “Why she hasn’t contacted us?”
“No, not really. She told me she couldn’t tell me. She said she was trying to protect us.”
“Probably just trying to protect us from knowing what she was really up to,” said Cheryl. Terry had been running with a rough crowd right around the time she disappeared.
“I suppose it’s possible she went to jail,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t want to tell us. She did mention needing to make a fresh start.”
“Perhaps she is a fugitive,” said Pepe, “and that is why the police came for her. Like Corinna in Paraiso Perdido. She was living under a false name . . .”
“This is not one of your Spanish soap operas!” I said.
“It sounds exactly like Paraiso Perdido,” said Cheryl.
Really? Did everyone watch telenovellas except me?
“Corinna came back to town but would not explain where she was for the last ten years,” Cheryl said.
“Maybe she has amnesia,” suggested Pepe, “like Corinna’s sister, Lourdes.”
“What’s next?” asked Cheryl. “When do I get to see her?”
“That might be a little difficult,” I said. “She’s under arrest at the moment.”
“What?”
“Yes, while we were there, we found a dead body—”
“This is exactly why you must stop working as a private detective!” Cheryl declared. Well, she might be able to order her husband and kids around, but she couldn’t boss me anymore. I decided to ignore her as I had in the past.
“—and it seems that the sheriff thinks Terry did it!”
“For all you know, she had been in prison the past ten years, like Corinna,” Cheryl said.
“A good point!” Pepe declared. “Or perhaps she has traumatic amnesia, like Lourdes. She was traumatized because she believed she had committed a murder. Only she had really been framed but she didn’t know that.”
“Come on, Cheryl,” I said. “She’s our sister. She’s not a murderer.”
“We don’t know anything about her and what she’s done in the past,” Cheryl pointed out.
There was some truth to that.
“I’ll find out,” I said.
“Yes, this is a case for Sullivan and Sullivan!” said Pepe, referring to the name of the fictional detective agency he thinks we are running.
“I’m heading back up there tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll figure out what’s going on and let you know.”
“OK, Geri,” said Cheryl with a sigh. “But please be careful. You don’t know what’s going on. I can’t afford to lose another sister!”
Chapter 18
I cried on the way home from Cheryl’s. I couldn’t believe that she seemed so willing to believe the worst of Terry. Or that she was so dismissive of my skills as a detective. I had dreamed for years about reuniting my splintered family, and now it seemed that finding Terry might push us farther apart.
“Geri,” said Pepe as we crossed back over the floating bridge, “I am sorry you are sad, but I do not understand why.”
“Well, I just want both of my sisters back in my life.”
“So it is important to you to be close to your siblings?”
“Well, yes!”
“You do not believe, as Dogawanda does, that you must make your own pack?”
“Pepe, that stuff is silly.”
“I do not know. I have not seen my siblings for many moons.”
I blinked. Since when did Pepe speak like a movie Indian or a New Age guru? Oh, maybe since we met a New Age guru!
“Does that bother you?” I asked him.
“No, I have made my own pack and I am happy.”
“Who is in your pack, Pepe?” I asked as I turned off on the curving off-ramp that would take me home.
“Just you.”
“Then how much of a pack is it?”
“We can adopt others. I have not found the proper compadres yet.”
“Jimmy G?”
“Too estupido.”
“Brad?” I named my best friend who runs a little antique shop.
“No, he stuffs animals.” Pepe hates the taxidermy animals that Brad collects.
“Albert?”
“Are you loco? A cat cannot be part of a dog pack.”
“What about Felix?”
In answer to that, Pepe just snorted and turned his head away.
Speaking of Felix, I realized I had not checked his message. I pulled over, fished my phone out of my purse, and dialed voice mail.
“Geri, I’m thinking of you and wishing you were here,” he said. “We’re filming at Sandpoint, probably until late tonight. If you get this message, you should come by. Warehouse thirteen.”
Wow! Just what I needed to take my mind off my troubles. I was curious to see how a movie set might be different from the sets on Dancing with Dogs, the reality TV show in which Pepe and I had participated a month earlier. And Sandpoint was just a few minutes away.
Sandpoint is the name for the old naval air station that was abandoned in the late 1950s. I’ve always loved it. There is something about abandoned buildings that intrigues me. The lives lived there. The melancholy that hangs over them. The three-story brick barracks are all boarded up, and that makes me sad. I imagine they are not earthquake safe, but I think of how many people they could house, considering how many homeless people have to sleep on the streets every night in Seattle.
But the huge hangars have been converted to various uses. The University of Washington uses one for their purchasing department. And the Seattle Public Library leases another to store all the books donated for their semiannual book sales. On the days of the sale, the warehouse is filled with long tables, each one lined with books, and people shuffle up and down, craning their neck to look at titles, filling boxes and shopping carts and bags with their finds.
The rest of the grounds have been converted to various uses, including a rock-climbing wall, a marsh restoration area with trails, a big community garden, and an off-leash area for dogs. I pointed this out to Pepe as we drove through the front gate and past the closed stand where a guard used to check credentials.
“I do not need permission to go off-leash,” he said. “But if there is a food vendor, I would visit them.”
“Well, if this is anything like the Dancing with Dogs set, they’ll have a craft service,” I said as I pulled into a parking space in front of warehouse thirteen, right behind a truck that read NORTHWEST LIGHTS AND SOUND.
The large loading doors on the side of the warehouse were open. The space inside was dim and filled with equipment and people. We spotted the craft table right inside the door. Coffee urns and Styrofoam cups. A plastic tub full of ice and plastic water bottles and cans of pop. Platters of sliced cheese and lunch meats. Pepe was prancing around on his hind l
egs, trying to get the attention of the bored girl sitting behind the table, who was talking on her cell phone. Pepe’s nose didn’t quite clear the table, so she couldn’t see him. I went over and helped myself to a paper plate and some cheese and ham, then set it on the ground in front of Pepe.
The center of the warehouse was occupied by a mock-up of the inside of a cabin, with a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room arranged side by side. Fake trunks of trees were visible through the windows. It was designed to look like a summer cabin, down to the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books on the shelves. I wondered for a minute if I could get a job creating sets. That would be a perfect transition from staging and possibly more fun, or at least more lucrative, than being a private detective.
At the moment, nothing was being filmed. The big cameras were unmanned. A knot of people stood in the center of the room, talking and gesticulating. One woman carried a clipboard. A guy I assumed was the director sported a backward-facing baseball cap and a sports coat. Chloe was in their midst, wrapped in a pink chenille bathrobe. Felix must have spotted me when I came in because suddenly he was at my side, giving me a big hug.
“So glad you came, Geri!” he said. “Let me show you around.”
But just then, the director shouted, “OK, everyone! We’re ready to shoot.” The room came alive. All the guys who had been standing around drinking coffee or who were standing outside smoking, came pouring back in and began tinkering with lights and moving cameras. Chloe stood in the center of the set, still wearing the bathrobe and shivering.
The lights came up, but somehow they made it look like it was night in the cabin. One lamp glowed orange. Orange like the eyes of a wolf.
The cameras began moving, zooming in on Chloe, who positioned herself by the door. The woman with the clipboard approached her and held out her hand. Chloe stripped off the bathrobe and handed it to her. She was nude, and her body was covered with long red stripes, the stripes of claws, the stripes I had last seen on Tammy’s arm.
“Action!” said the director, and the cameras began filming as Chloe pretended to be terrified. Her eyes wide, she pressed her nude body against the door while someone else thumped and rattled the doorknob on the other side. I couldn’t take it and turned abruptly and left.
The Big Chihuahua Page 8