by Otto Penzler
The initial conclusions reached in Tom’s murder investigation proved much the same as the inconclusive final one. They had been thorough, questioned all of Tom’s friends. Certainly Penny might have wanted him dead given how humiliated, how mortified, she was by the photographs that had been recovered along the coast. Asked to look through them, she did the best she could. While she did seem to think Tom had been with her on some occasions when this or that shot was taken—they were all so awful, so invasive, so perverse—she couldn’t be sure. Given that he was present in none of the exposures, that the camera used was his, and so forth, there was no reason to look elsewhere for the photographer. Penny had a motive, but also an alibi, like everyone else.
None of it mattered, finally, because good came from the bad. Our family was closer than ever, and Dad seemed, after a few months of dazed mourning, to shake off his long slump. He brought his Ojai bartender girlfriend around sometimes, and Molly made dinner. Penny, too, was transformed by the tragedy. Before my watchful eyes she changed into an even gentler being, more withdrawn than before, yes, but composed and calm—some might say remote, but they’d be wrong, not knowing her like I did. It was as if she changed from a color photograph to black-and-white. I didn’t mind the shift. To the contrary.
The morning Penny came down to Bayside to speak with me was lit by the palest pink air and softest breeze of late autumn. I’d been the model of discretion in the several years that followed Tom’s passing, keeping tabs on Penny out of respect, really, making sure she was doing all right in the wake of what must have been quite a shock to her. Never overstepping my bounds—at least not in such a way as she could possibly know. Meantime, I had matured. Molly told me I’d become a handsome dog, as she put it. Her girlfriends had crushes on me, she said. I smiled and let them play the golf course gratis. Why not? Then Penny turned up, unexpected, wanting to give me something.
“For your birthday,” she said, handing me a small box tied with a white ribbon. There was quite a gale blowing off the ocean that day and her hair buffeted about her head. With her free hand she drew a long garland of it, fine as corn silk, away from her mouth and melancholy eyes. It was a gesture of absolute purity. Penny was a youthful twenty-one, and I an aged nineteen.
I must have looked surprised, because she said, “You look like you forgot.”
She followed me into the office, where we could get out of the wind. All the smugly privileged faces in Gallagher’s nostalgic gallery had been long since removed from the walls and sent off to his surviving relatives, who, not wanting much to bother with their inheritance of a slowly deteriorating putt-putt golf park, allowed me to continue in my capacity as Bayside steward and manager. Like their deceased uncle—a childless bachelor whose sole concern had been this fanciful (let me admit) dump—they thought I was far older than nineteen. The lawyer who settled his estate looked into the records, saw on my filed application that I was in my mid-twenties, and further saw that Gallagher wanted me to continue there as long as it was my wish, and thus and so. A modest check went out each month to the estate, the balance going to moderate upkeep and my equally moderate salary. What did I care? My needs were few. I spent warm nights down here in my castle, or the windmill, and was always welcome at home, where the food was free. And now, as if in a dream, here was my Penny, bearing a gift.
I undid the ribbon and tore away the paper. It was a snow globe with a hula dancer whose hips gyrated in the sparkling blizzard after I gave it a good shake.
“How did you know?” I asked, smiling at her smiling face.
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Molly told me this was your new thing.”
“Kind of stupid, I guess. But they’re like little worlds you can disappear into if you stare at them long enough.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid.”
“Yours goes in the place of honor,” I said, taking the gift over to my shelves lined with dozens of others, where I installed the hula girl at the very heart of the collection.
Penny peered up and down the rows, her face as luminous as I’ve ever seen it, beaming like a child. She plucked one down and held it to the light. “Can I?” she asked. I told her sure and watched as she shook the globe and the white flakes flew round and round in the glassed-in world. She gazed at the scene within while I gazed at her. One of those moments which touch on perfection.
“Very cool,” she whispered, as if in a reverie. “But isn’t it a shame that it’s always winter?”
“I don’t really see them as snowflakes,” I said.
“What, then?”
Penny turned to me and must have glimpsed something different in the way I was looking at her, since she glanced away and commented that no one was playing today. The wind, I told her. Sand gets in your eyes and makes the synthetic carpet too rough to play on. In fact, there wasn’t much reason to keep the place open, I continued, and asked her if she’d let me drive her up to Santa Barbara for the afternoon, wander State Street together, get something to eat. I was not that astonished when she agreed. Cognizant or not, she’d been witness to the character, the nature, the spirit of my gaze, had the opportunity to reject what it meant. By accepting my invitation she was in a fell stroke accepting me.
“You can have it if you want,” I offered, taking her free hand and nodding at the snow globe.
“No, it belongs with the others.” She stared out the window while a fresh gale whipped up off the ocean, making the panes shiver and chatter as grains of sand swirled around us. I looked past her silhouette and remarked that the park looked like a great snow globe out there. How perverse it was of me to want to ask her, just then, if she missed Tom sometimes. Instead, I told her we ought to get going, but not before I turned her chin toward me with trembling fingers and gently kissed her.
As we drove north along the highway, the sky cleared, admitting a sudden warm sun into its blue. “Aren’t you going to tell me?” she asked, as if out of that blue, and for a brief, ghastly moment I thought I’d been found out and was being asked to confess. Seeing my bewilderment, Penny clarified, “What the snowflakes are, if they’re not snowflakes?”
I shifted my focus from the road edged by flowering hedges and eucalyptus over to Penny, and back again, suddenly wanting to tell her everything, pour my heart out to her. I wanted to tell her how I had read somewhere that in some cultures people refuse to have their photographs taken, believing the camera steals their souls. Wanted to tell her that when Tom demolished my collection of adoring images of her, not only did he seal his own fate, but engendered hers. I wished I could tell her how, struggling with him in waves speckled with swirling photographs, I was reminded of a snow globe. And I did want to answer her question, to say that the flakes seemed to me like captive souls floating around hopelessly in their little glass cages, circling some frivolous god, but I would never admit such nonsense. Instead, I told her she must have misunderstood and, glancing at her face bathed in stormy light, knew in my heart that later this afternoon, maybe during the night, I would be compelled to finish the destructive work my foolish brother had begun.
GRADUATION DAY
Ian Rankin
We flew into Scotland on some carrier called Icelandair, which was a good and a very bad start to proceedings. Good, in that I hadn’t booked the flights: our travel arrangements had been Mike’s responsibility. During the drive to the airport, he’d kept telling us how he’d got this “great deal”: Boston to Glasgow via Reykjavík, business class, of course. Their idea of business-class food was raw fish—lots of raw fish.
“Where am I, Japan?” the Boss kept saying.
So the good news was, Mike had not endeared himself to our employer. The bad news was the fish.
There were four of us. Mike and the Boss, plus Pete and me. You better call me Micky. Or if you prefer a little formality, Mr. Dolenz, seeing how he was my favorite Monkee. I loved that show, still try to catch the reruns and have most episodes on tape. What f
ollows is by way of a true story, with names and maybe one or two incidents changed to protect the guilty. So there’s me—that’s Micky—plus Mike and Pete. Then there’s the Boss, of course, but I can’t bring myself to call him Davy. “Davy” just isn’t his style. So maybe he should stay “the Boss.”
Mike thinks he’s the suave one, Mr. Sophistication. He does his job, but always with the air of thinking there could be something better for him out there someday. He thinks he’s the brains of the outfit, too. The Boss’s right-hand man.
Pete is just the opposite. He wears expensive clothes, but they don’t sit right on him, and I swear, he buys a new pair of shoes? They’re scuffed in the first hour. It was the same when we were kids: new pants, new shoes, Pete had worn them in big-time by sundown. Pete is not overendowed in the intellectual department, but he is the approximate size of an abattoir door. Even the business-class seat proved a little troublesome for him, and when the steward turned up with the food, Pete was the usual soul of diplomacy.
“I can’t eat that crap,” he said. Instead, he gorged on the snacks and some fresh fruit, the latter being maybe the first time I ever saw him eat something that didn’t come in a wrapper or container of some kind.
“Careful, Pete,” I told him. “That stuff’s actually good for you.”
He had the headphones on and couldn’t hear me.
Meantime, I tried the fish, but only when the Boss wasn’t looking, and I have to tell you, it was fine, and not even all of it was raw. I read in the magazine that it was traditional, but kept the news to myself. Mike, meantime, who’d made sure he was sitting next to the Boss, kept staring down at his own plate, knowing if he ate any he’d start getting looks from his neighbor. Whenever Mike glanced over in my direction, I made sure I was chewing.
We landed in Scotland late afternoon, to discover that our final destination, the ancient city of St. Andrews, wasn’t anywhere nearby. In fact, it was on the other side of the country and, studying the map we’d been given at the information desk, was actually in the middle of nowhere.
“We’ll take a cab anyway,” the Boss said. But Mike had another suggestion.
“What if we rent a car? We need transportation while we’re there, right?”
“We can take cabs.”
“What if there aren’t any?”
“Jesus, Mike, it’s got this huge university. It’s the home of golf. We’re not talking some hick town here.”
“Actually,” the woman at the information desk piped up in a heavy Scotch accent, “St. Andrews isn’t all that big. I went there on holidays once when I was a child. Just a few thousand people…”
Well, that’s what I think she said. We just stared at her, then at each other, shrugged eventually. As we moved off, searching for Avis or Hertz, the Boss mumbled:
“We’re not still in Iceland, are we?”
“The signs are all in English,” I pointed out.
“Yeah? Then what language was she speaking back there?”
It was raining outside, not torrential but pretty good. We’d got through Customs and Passport Control, so should have been starting to relax, but we knew we couldn’t do that till we were on the road. I was pushing one cart. It had my bags, plus Mike’s and the Boss’s. Pete had another cart to himself, two cases on it. Just clothes and stuff, unless someone got real nosy and happened to notice the weight. Then maybe they’d take their search a little more seriously and find the false sides and our personal firearms. Mike had taken care of the auto, and we were loading the cases into the back. Bit of a squeeze in the trunk.
“Biggest one they had,” Mike said, but the Boss’s look said he had work to do before he got back on his good side.
“Got a great deal on it, too,” he added.
“Probably means it runs on raw fish,” the Boss grumbled.
Not that the Boss was tight with money or anything, but the business hadn’t had its best year: lots of competition from new start-ups, established suppliers and clients a little rocky. Lean times made for financial constraints. The Boss had talked of traveling to Scotland alone. It took a lot of persuading that this was not a good idea. All those new competitors meant you never knew when someone might decide to take a try at whacking you. The farther the Boss traveled from home turf, the greater the risk. This was the argument we used. Then he balked at the idea of four of us.
“Who you going to leave behind?” I’d told him. His look had given me my answer: Pete. My own look had asked a silent question: what if we need a fall guy? If there was trouble ahead, a patsy could always come in useful.
Back when Mike had been getting us transportation, I’d gone to the head, returning by way of a little book and newspaper concession where I’d spent the first of my British money on a guidebook. As we drove slowly out of the airport, I started to read it.
“They drive on the left here,” I reminded Mike.
“Contrary sons of bitches.”
The rental desk had provided another map, and the Boss was trying to make sense of it. He passed it back to me.
“Designated navigator,” he growled.
So it was me, Micky Dolenz, who ensured the show went on, guiding Mike as he gripped the steering wheel like he was trying to choke a repayment out of someone.
We didn’t do too badly in the end, though the roads left much to be desired. The last twenty, thirty miles, it was two-lane stuff, tractors and delivery trucks, and all these switchbacks. The Boss kept saying he should have brought the motion-sickness bag from the airplane. When I looked over toward Pete, who was sharing the backseat with me, he was gazing out of his window.
“Fields and trees,” he said quietly, as if he knew I was watching. “That’s all there is out there.”
And then suddenly we started seeing coastline. “That’s St. Andrews, gentlemen,” I told them. Then I started reading from the guidebook. The Boss turned in his seat.
“It’s not a city?”
“Just barely qualifies as a town,” I replied.
Mike was shaking his head. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t like what?”
“Middle of nowhere… small town… We’re going to stand out.”
The Boss stabbed a fat finger into Mike’s ribs. “The travel was your responsibility. How come you couldn’t do what Micky did, buy yourself a guidebook? That way we’d’ve known what we were dealing with.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” I agreed. When Mike looked at me in the rearview, I knew he wanted to give me a forearm of his own, right across my mouth.
Our hotel was the Old Course, and was easy to find, practically the first thing you saw as you drove into town. When we were shown to our rooms, Pete went to the window.
“Nice grounds,” he said.
“That’s the golf course, sir,” the bellhop informed him.
And Jesus, I suppose it was beautiful—if you like that sort of thing. Me, I prefer the pool hall: cigar smoke and brightly lit tables, jokes and side bets. That’s pretty much how I got started in the business. By the time I was seventeen, the Boss—then just approaching forty—said I’d spent so much time in pool halls, I could run one standing on my head. So he gave me one of his to manage, and Pete, who’d always hung around with me, hung around until he was part of the business, too.
“How could we have lived so long and not seen this, Micky?” Pete asked as the bellhop left with some more of my British money. Something else I’d learned in my guidebook: they didn’t like it in Scotland if you called them English. “British” was okay, mostly, though the book’s author had hinted that things might change with the Scottish Parliament and everything.
“I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “Boston’s not so bad.”
He looked at me. “It’s not the world, though.”
“Only world you and me are likely to know, pal,” I told him.
Just before dinner, I took a look in the hotel shop and came up with a couple of local books, one about golf and one about the tow
n. This last had a good long section on the university, so I was able to tell the Boss a few things as we ate. There seemed to be a lot of our fellow countrymen in the dining room, and during the course of the meal, at one point or another, practically every one of them made the same gesture: gripping an invisible club and swinging it. They were illustrating some smart play they’d made, or maybe some unsmart one.
We were the odd ones out. I noticed there was almost a uniform: either loud sports shirts or woolen V-necks. We weren’t dressed that way. We were dressed normally.
“That’s interesting, Micky,” the Boss kept saying. At first I thought he was being ironic, but he wasn’t: he wanted to know what I knew about the place. Pete wasn’t taking much of it in. He kept craning his neck, trying to see past the other diners, trying to spot more countryside through the darkening windows.
Mike arrived just as we were being served coffee. “I don’t like it,” he said. He was in full bodyguard mode now, and had forgone dinner to “check out” the town. “It’s a security nightmare,” he added. “Know how far the nearest hospital is?”
“For the love of God, Mike,” the Boss snarled. “There’s not going to be any hit!”
“Couldn’t pick a better place for one,” Mike argued.
“This is a family thing, Mike,” the Boss went on. “I appreciate your concern, but do us all a favor and lighten up!” The Boss made sure his words had hit home, then tossed his napkin onto the table. “Now, you going to eat something or what?”