I kept my hands in my pockets and smiled at the girl. “You must be Mikey’s sister. What’s your name?”
“Lissa,” she called, pumping her legs to the sky.
“Pretty name. Sounds like a dancer’s name to me. I bet you’re a dancer.”
Lissa dragged her feet to slow down then popped out of the swing. She instantly began to moonwalk. I clapped and told her she rocked.
The whole time we were talking Mikey stood stiffly by my side. Finally, he stepped forward and said, “Liss, let me talk to the lady. Go climb something.”
Lissa waved good-bye to me and began scaling a rope wall. She was dainty in a red jacket with cats and butterflies embroidered on the sleeve and wearing Velcro tennies not much longer than my outstretched palm. They had flashing lights in the soles.
Without taking his eyes off his sister, Mikey said in a low voice, “What do you want?”
We stood in the park, side by side, both appearing to be tenderly caring for a child daring the laws of gravity on a play set.
“I want the diary.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You broke into my home and took my stuff,” I said.
“Prove it,” he said.
“You attacked Olivia Chen.”
Silence.
“You hit her.”
More silence.
“I want the book you stole from Olivia and her other stuff.”
“I got nothin’ to say to you.”
“Olivia can identify you,” I said.
Mikey snorted with disbelief. “I wasn’t there, remember?”
I waved at Lissa, and she laughed and waved back.
I said, “You think Lissa likes cat stories?”
The boy hunched his shoulders and turned to me. His eyes were cold and hard. “Stay away from her.”
“Or what? You’ll hit me, too?”
“I didn’t hit . . .”
I cut him off. “I know a great story about a poor little kitten that nearly froze to death in a big, cold lake. I bet Sparky is a toy kitten.”
“How’d you know . . .”
I hadn’t known, really. I just had one of my feelings and followed it. “Your sister looks like a cat person,” I said.
Mikey called out to Lissa not to climb too high. She gave him the thumbs up.
“I told you, I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t want to mess with me, Mikey.”
He wore that old sneer I’d come to know so well. “Yeah, you’re a real bad ass, threatening a four-year-old.”
“You have no idea,” I said.
Watching Mikey with his sister, knowing what waited for them behind the white picket fence every day, I had to bluff. I knew I couldn’t turn in Mikey and his pals, and I wouldn’t be telling Lissa any sad cat stories. But Mikey didn’t know that. He didn’t know that I’d been raised on oatmeal sprinkled with live and let live. Whispering Spirit alumni seldom brought in the authorities. Old habits and all that. Still, I had to get the diary back.
“Start from the beginning,” I prodded him. “Who paid you to rob me?”
“If I tell you, will you leave us alone?”
I nodded.
Lissa hung upside down, her knees clamped to a bar. “Look at me, Mikey.”
“Great, Liss,” he shouted. He gave her a thumbs up, and she returned the gesture, only in her inverted position, her thumbs pointed down. He sighed. “We weren’t supposed to rob you; we were supposed to make it look good. Mess up the place. I don’t know why. It was Hank’s idea to take the stuff. He needed a new TV.”
“Hank?”
“The guy with the pierced tongue.”
“So that’s when you planted the cameras?”
Mikey took a step back. “Whoa. We had nothing to do with any cameras. We’re not like perverts or spies or anything.”
So someone else came in after the boys and installed the cameras. I said, “But who hired you?”
“A voice on the phone. Money left in a paper bag on the bench by the lake. We got a hundred each for messing the place up. You know, you oughta lock your door.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I peered out over the park. It was a quiet spot, surrounded by houses. An asphalt path ran through it and off between the houses, a walking trail connecting this neighborhood to another one.
“Describe the voice. Accented?”
Mikey thought for a moment. “Not Southern or Minnesotan. But there was definitely something there. A man’s voice.”
“And did the same voice hire you to beat up Olivia Chen?”
Mikey ducked his head. This one bothered him. “We were just supposed to scare her. Grab the book bag. But she came out fighting, you know. She goes all crazy on us. Hank accidentally clocked her.”
“An accident?” Disbelief in my voice.
“Yeah, he forgets he’s like Hulk strong sometimes. And then she starts crying and shit. So we ran. The voice on the phone said to take some old book. We snatched the computer and phone to make it look like an ordinary mugging.”
“Where’s the book now?”
“We left it at the usual spot. The bench by the lake. We put the book in a paper bag and swapped it for the bag left for us. Our money. Two hundred each.”
I closed my eyes in disappointment. When I opened them, Mikey was staring at me.
“Did you see who picked up the book?” I asked.
Mikey shook his head. “Didn’t want to know.”
I had hoped to scare Mikey into giving me a name or a description, but he didn’t have one.
“Why?” I asked him. “Why did you do it? You obviously don’t need the money.”
Mikey looked away. He was uncomfortable. When he turned to me, the sneer was back. “Sometimes you just do shit.” Our gazes locked, and I realized that I probably could never comprehend Snowboard Boy’s life. I had never been so desperate to feel in control.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I don’t care about my stuff. But Olivia is another matter. Give her back her computer and phone. I don’t care if you walk up to her in school or leave it on her doorstep in the middle of the night.”
“No way.”
I waited him out, saw his sneer slide away in the face of my silence, watched the nerves set in. He glanced at his sister and back at me.
Finally, he said, “If we do this, we’re square? You’ll leave Lissa alone? You’ll stop stalking us?”
I nodded. “And one more thing. Stop taking jobs from strange voices on the phone. Lissa deserves a better brother.”
Mikey gazed at his sister for a moment. As I was walking away, Mikey called out, “How’d you know it was us? In the apartment?”
I turned and moonwalked backwards. “You put my cat in a bag, Mikey.”
Chapter 19
Abandoned with Armadillo
THE CROW AND BELLA stared at each other through the window pane, beak to nose. Bella sat on the bedroom window seat, riveted, still, except for the tiniest twitch of the tip of her tail. Suddenly, the crow pecked the glass near Bella’s nose. She jumped, flipping backwards off the seat. I laughed. The crow turned to me. I stopped laughing. We watched each other for a moment, then it pecked the window twice, sharply.
I knew it was time to go to New Mexico.
Among Tum’s many tattoos was a crow on his right shoulder. When I asked him about it, he said the crow is the keeper of magic. Some cultures believed the crow brought death and could shape-shift; others believed it created the world. When I was young, I thought Tum not only carried the mark of the crow but was a crow, a man transformed who had shape-shifted, recreating himself, from hell raiser to gentle giant.
Crows are highly intelligent and can be taught to count and communicate with humans. They reme
mber the faces of people they do not like and, in Japan, have found a way to trick cars into opening nuts for them on the roadway.
When a crow comes to your door, pay attention.
I scooped up Bella from the floor and stroked her small head. “Crows are impossible to catch,” I told her. “Don’t take it personally.”
She leapt from my arms onto the window seat, craning her head to find the bird, bumping against the glass. But the crow was gone.
Another Monday yoga class had gone by, sans Jorn and Sebastian. I’d read some of Jorn’s stories in The Independent and, a few days ago, had seen Sebastian coming out of Northern Lights. It was time to find answers about Tiger Corp.
I grabbed my satchel and drove to the Strawberry B&B, a tidy gray Victorian mansion. As I climbed the steps of the white wraparound porch, I passed a collection of rockers and hanging baskets of petunias and verbena. The moment I opened the door, I was hit by the smell of baking bread, cinnamon, and bacon. I heard the clatter of silverware on fine china and the mumbling of voices. I peeked into the dining room. It was bathed in soft morning light from three stained-glass windows—warm gold, rich rose, sacred blue. It was like eating inside a kaleidoscope. The proprietress, Ellen Lacey, maintains one can never have too much romance at breakfast.
On this May morning, there were two couples and no Sebastian Winter enjoying Ellen’s croissants and huge breakfast. I flagged her down as she was pouring coffee, and she placed the coffee pot on a warmer and clattered my way. We stepped out into the foyer.
“I’d like to see Sebastian Winter,” I said.
Wiping her hands on the red apron tied around her neck and waist, she said, “He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Checked out yesterday.” She motioned for me to follow her into the salon, a room set up to be an inviting escape. Warm colors on the walls, chairs and sofas arranged for cozy conversations, tables by the French windows for card playing or puzzles. As usual, Ellen was tottering about in high heels; she even wore them while she cooked. Today I caught a glimpse of red stilettos with platform soles under her pressed khaki chinos. Her crisp white shirt was rolled up to the elbow. Ellen seated me at one of the salon tables and click-clacked off to the kitchen for a basket of croissants and some tea. She returned and sat down opposite me. We each plucked a warm croissant from the basket, pulled it apart, and sighed with pleasure as the flakes snowed down our shirt fronts.
Ellen, only fifty-six, had been in human resources before taking early retirement, moving to Gabriel’s Garden, and buying Doc Hampton’s old place. She had once made her living sizing up people. I trusted her opinion.
“What did you think of Sebastian Winter?”
“Polite. Self-contained. Often on the phone. Likes fine food. Generous tipper. He had the maid wrapped around his little finger.” She patted her lips with a floral linen napkin without disrupting the red lipstick that matched her shoes and apron. “Enjoys puzzling.”
“Puzzling?”
Ellen pointed to the jigsaw puzzle spread out on a table in the corner, a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night. “Mr. Winter often helped me with the puzzle in the evenings. It’s a killer. Two thousand pieces. What was I thinking?” She laughed. “We talked about plays and books. A sophisticated man. He was good at the puzzle. Methodical. An eye for patterns. Said he used to do puzzles with his mother.”
Working a puzzle was such a homey thing to do—not what I associated with Sebastian Winter at all. But then, Ellen was a smart woman, elegant in manner and looks, easy to be with. A perfect hostess, a pleasant companion. Still, I didn’t like knowing about this “normal” side of Sebastian. He was a trickster, and I didn’t trust him, even if he did like cats and they liked him.
“Any visitors?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
I nibbled on my second buttery croissant.
“Wait,” she said, her brow wrinkling in thought. She snapped her fingers. “I did see him once with Julia’s sister. The blonde.”
“Sasha came here?”
Ellen shook her head. “No. I saw them somewhere else. Walking around the lake. Why are you interested?”
“He took some yoga classes. We had a slight disagreement, and I wanted to iron out a few things.”
Ellen was sorry she couldn’t help me. “But he did leave some stuff behind,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
She held up a manicured finger, painted red; grabbed a croissant; and hurried out of the room. I could hear her in her office down the hall. She returned with a handful of papers. She placed them in front of me. “These were all over his room. Doodles. I’ve been intending to pitch them.”
I gingerly moved the papers, placing one next to the other. There were six in all. All drawn on the inn’s stationery. And they were all of trees. I squinted at them, leaned closer.
Ellen leaned closer as well. “What do you see?”
My glance swept from one to the other. I traced one tree with my finger. The trunk had an odd shape, the lines of the bark, the shadows. If I softened my focus, I could make out the body of a woman in a yoga pose. Tree Pose.
Sebastian had left these behind on purpose. They felt like a taunt. What was he saying?
“Can I have these?”
Ellen shrugged. “Sure.”
I gathered them carefully into a pile and placed them in my satchel.
My next stop was Maple Lane, where Jorn lived in his uncle’s old prairie-style bungalow. If I couldn’t corner Sebastian and wring the truth about Tiger Corp. out of him, I’d get it out of Jorn. He was surely recovered from the rumble in yoga class. It was time I reminded him we had a partnership.
I climbed the front steps and knocked.
No answer.
I banged harder and shouted, “Jorn?”
The neighbor next door leaned out over his porch, an identical one to Jorn’s, and said, “He’s gone.”
I sighed. What was with everyone today? No one was where they were supposed to be.
I walked to the edge of Jorn’s porch so the man and I were facing each other, barely fifteen feet apart. “What do you mean gone?”
“Like with a suitcase, man.”
I looked at the guy more closely. He was the typical twenty-something pothead. I had seen a lot of these types in my time. T-shirts always appeared to be just about to slide off their skinny frames. This one had wire-rimmed glasses, long brown hair in need of a trim about three years ago, and a shadow beard. He gave me an innocent smile. I didn’t expect him to focus longer than five minutes so I hurried to ask, “You don’t happen to have a key to the place, do you?”
“Sure, I do. Peter likes me to water his plants when he’s gone.”
“He has plants?”
“A cactus. A real cool one.”
“Can you let me in? I left something here,” I lied.
The man hesitated. Damn, had five minutes passed already? “You, like, his girlfriend?”
“Yoga teacher.”
“Ah,” he bowed his head over his palms now clasped in prayer. “Namaste, yoga chick.”
“The key?”
“Right. I gotta water Armadillo anyway.”
He disappeared into his house and came loping out two minutes later with a key tied to a hubcap.
“So I don’t lose it,” he smiled. “I’m Randy, by the way.”
“Maya,” I said.
“Maya the yoga chick,” he rolled the words around in his mouth. The hubcap banged against the door as he fitted the key into the lock and wrestled with it.
Finally, the door popped open. I hesitated. This was my first step into Jorn’s sanctuary. When Randy looked at me strangely, I straightened my shoulders and entered as if this were familiar territory.
Snooping in people’s houses is like opening a secret door
into their personality. I love it. I’m a sucker for a good house tour. Jorn’s house was nice smelling and mismatched, just like him. I wandered through a small living room decorated in old floral wallpaper, two new leather Mission chairs with ottomans, and stacks of newspapers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Star Tribune. On the fireplace mantel was a red sock and an empty beer glass. The bookshelves that framed the fireplace were packed so tight it was a wonder any volume could breathe. If you pulled out one, you’d get five others, whether you wanted them or not. Nothing but nonfiction.
I walked from living room into the dining room, which apparently Jorn used for writing, not eating. No dining room table. Just a large sloppy desk and rows of file cabinets. I leaned over the desk, afraid to touch anything. There was no computer so he’d taken his laptop.
I heard Randy in the kitchen and followed his voice. “Hey, Armadillo. How’s it hangin’?”
The kitchen was small and much neater than the other rooms. It had a breakfast nook the size of a cubbyhole. Armadillo was a zebra cactus no bigger than my fist, a dark green succulent with white dots in ridges that resembled the stripes on a zebra. Randy was holding it under the faucet and flooding the pot.
“I think Armadillo’s good,” I said.
“Yeah?”
I nodded. “You give a cactus too much water and it’ll explode.”
Randy shut off the water. “No shit?”
“They are desert lovers.”
“So true,” Randy said, carefully placing Armadillo back on the kitchen windowsill. He ran his finger along one nubby leaf, a gesture of good-bye I bet he did every time he came over to drown Armadillo.
Before we left, I took a spin through the two upstairs bedrooms. One was filled with moving boxes, still packed even though Jorn had been in town for months now. The other, where Jorn apparently slept, was a surprise. The only furniture in the hideous pink-painted room was a huge ornately carved sleigh bed. This confirmed my belief that Jorn was oblivious to color but could be saved. The bed was beautiful and covered with an embroidered counterpane in a moody shade of gray-green. It was gorgeous, and I coveted it on the spot. I ran my hand over the lush bedspread on the way to the closet. I pulled the double doors open with a flourish, and the smile dropped from my face.
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