No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  I reached into my purse and pulled out five twenty-dollar bills. “Was it more than that?”

  I had her interest. “Hyperthetically, what if I had, like, been paid to make some shit up?”

  Of course, she meant hypothetically. No wonder she was failing most of her classes. I pulled out two more twenties.

  “Let’s talk hyperthetically.” I felt a little bad for mocking her, so I softened my tone. “You’ve already been paid by whoever hired you, so anything I give you would be like a bonus. I’ll give you forty bucks for every hyperthetical detail I find useful.”

  I needed to stop doing that.

  Hannah thought it over, but only for a few seconds. “Okay, maybe someone asked me to start the rumors, but I didn’t mind. Like I said, Mr. Larkin’s hot.”

  I remembered Brooklyn’s story about Hannah in her bloodied ballet slippers, digging a grave for her dead dog. And I thought about how ill-tempered I had been at her age. That and a couple of deep breaths kept me from giving in to my anger. Not that it was easy.

  Hannah’s boyfriend continued to stare at the ground, his eyes focused on a small weed growing in a crack. He used the toes of his sneaker to grind it into the blacktop.

  I turned my attention back to Hannah, handing her forty dollars. “Who asked you to start these rumors?”

  She shrugged. “Some bald dude I met in the parking lot.”

  I kept my expression neutral even as the words settled against my eardrums like spikes: Some bald dude.

  “He gave me a few hundred bucks,” she said. “I told you two things, so is that worth eighty?”

  I gave her forty. “Can you describe this man? I mean, other than being bald.”

  “He was a big guy. And old. Like forty or fifty.”

  I handed over two more twenties. I tried to calculate how much more information I could buy.

  “Do you remember anything else about this man? His car? His clothes?”

  “No.”

  “Did he have a scar?”

  I held my breath as she considered the question. “I don’t know. Maybe.” When I didn’t hand over any cash, she added, “Come on, I should get something for that.”

  I gave her another twenty. “Did he say anything about why he would want you to start the rumors?”

  She shook her head. “He said something like, ‘You wanna make three hundred dollars?’ Then he told me to start telling my friends I’d had sex with Mr. Larkin. That was it. When I agreed, he told me he’d know if I didn’t keep my end of the bargain.” Hannah’s face lost the sneer, and she wrapped her arms around herself. “He looked kinda creepy when he said that. Then he walked away, off campus. I never saw his car, and he never came back.”

  “When was this?”

  She held out her hand, palm up. I gave her another twenty.

  “I don’t know. About a month ago?”

  So long before that night on the trail.

  Unnerved, I got back into my car. I expected Hannah and her boyfriend to try to rope another stranger into buying them alcohol, but the boy shook his head and started back in the direction from which they had come. The boy seemed to have some sense after all, even if he could’ve used better taste in the company he kept.

  30

  Perla lived in an apartment in Fountaingrove, once a Utopian community founded by vintner Thomas Lake Harris. At the time he lived, Harris was believed to be immortal and thus lay dead for months before his followers admitted he wasn’t sleeping.

  No immortals currently resided in Fountaingrove, although some of its wealthiest residents came close. A few years before, that’s what the area was known for: its Utopian roots, its mini-mansions, and the expressway that divided it. But that was before a firestorm that burned more than 36,000 acres and left twenty-two people dead.

  Among the houses that had survived the devastation were apartment and condominium complexes carved into the hillside, named to pay homage to the million-dollar views—views now marked by blackened manzanitas and the skeletons of homes being rebuilt.

  I stopped at one such place now, Vista Bella, an upscale community of townhomes done in earth tones and stacked stone. I climbed the steps to the apartment number Zoe had given me. I rang the doorbell, then rapped softly on the door.

  My knocks went unanswered. I called Perla several times, but my calls rolled to voicemail.

  I weighed whether I should try the knob. Perla’s lack of response worried me. It was likely locked anyway.

  It wasn’t. Just like the door at the abandoned house, this one opened in invitation. I pushed it open, just a little, and called her name. “Perla?”

  I risked a single step over the threshold, into the living room, which was dark and crammed with furniture too large for the space.

  “Perla?” I called again.

  Still no response.

  Though I felt like an intruder, concern drove me deeper into the apartment. I walked quickly through the other rooms—one bathroom, one bedroom, and the kitchen. On the kitchen counter rested a mug of coffee and half a muffin. I dipped my finger in the coffee, piercing the oily sheen to test the temperature. Cool. The meal could have been abandoned midway through, or Perla might not have felt like cleaning up after herself. When I had been single, my clothes remained in puddles on the floor until laundry day.

  So all I had determined in my quick search of the apartment was that it was empty, but I really had no way to tell how long it had been that way.

  Nothing seemed out of place, so I left Perla’s apartment, locking the door behind me.

  On the way to Zoe’s, I stopped at home to check messages on the landline. There were two. The first was a sales call. The second was from my father: “I can’t reach you on your cell, and I just wanted to give you a heads-up . . . I’ll be there early tomorrow.” He gave the name of his hotel and his room number.

  Stubborn man. I allowed myself a brief smile.

  For the second night in a row, when I got to her home, Zoe waited.

  My friend offered me the use of her computer to check my email. Then she hugged me, with less than her usual enthusiasm, and said, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  I didn’t like the way she said that.

  I knew I needed sleep, too, but instead, I logged on to the computer. Most of the messages were work-related, and I was preparing to log off when one email stopped me.

  Linda? Who’s Linda?

  In my exhaustion, I stared at the screen for a solid thirty seconds before remembering: Linda was the manager from the coffee shop I had visited earlier. As I had requested of the barista, she had emailed me a video link with a one-word subject line: Thursday.

  The day Sam disappeared.

  It looked like I owed Josh two hundred bucks.

  My finger hovered over the video’s play icon. My lungs seized, and my finger froze there, unable to tap play.

  I inhaled deeply, but it did little to steady me. I couldn’t bring myself to view the video because of what it represented: truth. Ozzy, Brooklyn, Helen, Carver, maybe even the police, they all had their agendas. But the coffee shop manager had sent this video because I had asked for it. She didn’t care about Sam, or about me. We were strangers to her, and she to us. Unlike the photo left in Audrey’s backpack, I had no doubt about this video’s authenticity.

  I tapped play.

  The manager had sent only the clip that interested me, so the couple walked immediately into the frame. A petite brunette wearing a ponytail and yoga pants, followed by a tall man with dark close-cropped hair. I recognized the crooked grin even from a distance. I rested my fingertips on the screen, on his face, but felt cold glass instead of skin.

  Sam.

  In the video, Brooklyn took a seat at a small table on the patio, her back to the camera. Sam sat opposite her, his face fully exposed. He leaned into the table, his grin slipping, his expression suddenly serious. He reached forward to place his hand on top of hers.

  I tried to convince myself it was a gesture
of comfort even as his hand lingered.

  Still, I forced myself to watch. I couldn’t read lips, so I tried to read body language.

  Brooklyn seemed to relax when Sam touched her, her erect back softening into a slouch as she, too, leaned forward. I wondered what other gestures they might have shared had there not been the table between them.

  I was so fixated on the images that I didn’t at first notice the time and date stamp in the corner. The coffee shop was a few minutes from the high school, and the couple had been recorded at 12:23 p.m.—on Sam’s lunch break. They wouldn’t have had time for a tryst and an espresso.

  But did that make the subtle intimacies the couple exchanged better, or worse? It was one thing to meet for a hookup, but another entirely to meet because of a connection.

  Then I remembered: Sam had been suspended by then. They would have had all the time they needed.

  On the screen, Brooklyn reached across the table, touching Sam’s face, and my own cheeks burned as if slapped. Sam brushed her hand away and, for a moment, I allowed myself to believe the gesture was driven by loyalty to our marriage. But then he smiled again, and his hand was back on hers.

  The digital stamp read October 24. The video wasn’t from the day Sam disappeared at all, but from a full week before. The video may have corroborated Brooklyn’s story that she knew Sam, but otherwise, like Helen’s house, it was a dead end.

  When Sam and Brooklyn stood to leave, I moved my mouse to stop playback. Then I saw him: a man at the table behind theirs, obstructed until they moved offscreen. The man was in the corner of the frame, barely visible, except for a thin crescent of his hairless head.

  31

  Despite my certainty that I would never sleep again, exhaustion had overwhelmed me. I had fallen asleep on Zoe’s couch, which was very comfortable for sitting but not so much for sleeping. As I shifted into a sitting position, removing the one-eyed Smooch from my chest, my stiff limbs protested and my neck cracked. In my twenties, I could unfurl from any position with the grace of the cat I had just displaced, but now I popped and snapped like a bowl of crisped-rice cereal.

  I checked the time on my phone. 5:48 a.m. I needed to go to my father’s hotel once the kids woke up, but I wasn’t going anywhere without at least a gallon of coffee. I moved into the kitchen and sat on one of the stools that butted up against the countertop. Boo sat on the kitchen mat, tail wagging and nose wriggling.

  I had watched the section of video that featured the bald man so many times the night before, my eyes still felt as if they had been bathed in saltwater. There were no better angles, and the more often I watched, the less certain I became it was Carver Sweet. I forwarded the clip to Detective Rico anyway. The Santa Rosa Police Department had better tech and clearer eyes than I did.

  Zoe pushed an omelet in my direction and brought me a mug of coffee, a piece of wheat toast, and a small bowl of sliced apples.

  “You’re totally getting a raise,” I said, alternating between bites of green-pepper-and-mushroom omelet and sips of coffee. I usually skipped breakfast, but since I hadn’t eaten since the half of a sandwich from the coffee shop, I figured this was more like a really late dinner. “Have you heard back from Perla?”

  “Not yet. But there’s something I want to show you.” When I arched an eyebrow, she added, “After you eat.”

  She arranged strips of bacon in the skillet. “Daryl texted last night. Lester’s apparently doing well, and he insists he’s bringing in lemon bars on Monday.”

  Lemon bars were Zoe’s favorite. “Better than his brownies.”

  “I don’t know about that. He asked if I wanted regular, or ones with a ‘kick.’” Zoe flipped the bacon in the pan. Then she turned down the heat and faced me, arms crossed. “I’ve needed to talk to you, but I wanted to wait until you got some sleep,” she said. “I love you, Cassie, but you need to stop.”

  So the omelet was a bribe. “Love you, too, Zoe, but I can’t.”

  “That man could’ve killed you last night.”

  “I don’t think I’m Rico’s favorite person, but I don’t think he’d harm me.”

  “You know that’s not who I’m talking about. For whatever reason, Carver Sweet seems to hate you.”

  “Brooklyn says he loves me.”

  “You know what I’m saying. He seems intent on hurting you.”

  When I thought of all my family had been through, my cheeks flushed with repressed anger. “I won’t give him the chance.”

  “Seems he had one last night.”

  “I’m still here, unscathed and eating breakfast. Great omelet by the way.”

  “You’re not changing the subject.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing. Coffee’s delicious too. Do I detect cinnamon?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  Along with my father, Zoe was the second person in half a day to express that sentiment. They weren’t wrong. I was a little worried about myself.

  “Listen, Cassie, I know you want to find Sam, but you’re being reckless, and stubborn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not a compliment.”

  “You said you had something to show me?”

  She sighed and retrieved an envelope from a drawer. I pushed my plate away, no longer hungry. I knew what was in that envelope.

  “I need to get that photo to Detective Rico,” I said.

  “I can get it to him, but first, you need to look at this.” Zoe laid the picture on the counter, then pulled out a magnifier from the same drawer. “Two things. Look at the edge of the mattress.” She held the magnifier over the far right of the image, where the mattress met the edge of the carpet. “It’s just a little off. Not quite as straight as it should be.”

  Even under the magnifying glass, the mattress looked straight to me. As much as I wanted to believe the photo was fake, I wondered if Zoe was finding flaws where none existed.

  She read the skepticism on my face. “The second thing is more obvious.” She moved the magnifying glass so it hovered over where Sam’s arm crossed his lover’s body.

  “See the woman’s hips here?” I appreciated that Zoe used the word woman, not girl. She slid the magnifier upward, over the point where my husband’s arm crossed the woman’s midsection. “Now look at the spot right above her waist.”

  I could see it. Kind of. Something was off, but I couldn’t name what it was. Zoe pointed. “The woman’s waist doesn’t quite blend with her hips.” She traced a line, and though the difference was slight, I understood what Zoe was saying.

  “Her top half’s just a little smaller than her bottom half.”

  Zoe nodded. “As if someone wanted her frame to appear narrower. Younger.” She dragged her fingertip to the edge of the mattress. “That’s also why this part curves slightly.”

  For a moment, I got caught up in Zoe’s excitement. The photo was doctored. But then I realized what she hadn’t said.

  “So the photo was manipulated to make the woman in it appear younger. But she wasn’t inserted entirely? Like a photo of Sam wasn’t combined with a photo of the woman?”

  “Probably not,” she admitted. She quickly added, “That doesn’t mean there aren’t other explanations.”

  “Such as?”

  Zoe had spent a lot of time with the photo, and that she hesitated told me what she couldn’t say aloud. Still, she tried. “It could be an old photo. From before you and Sam were together.”

  I looked at the photo as a wife, not an evidence technician, and traced a small scar above his hip. We had gone to Tahoe a couple of years before. Leo had given the sled a push while Audrey was still settling in, and the bad angle led Sam and Audrey into a rock. Sam wouldn’t have gotten hurt if he hadn’t wrapped himself so completely around our daughter.

  “It isn’t an old photo.”

  “Since the image has been manipulated, at least we know now it could be Brooklyn, right?” Zoe said, as if I might find comfort that Sam had cheated on me with only one woma
n.

  I had little enthusiasm for her theory. “Hair color’s right, I guess.”

  Leo shuffled into the kitchen, and Zoe and I both jumped.

  “You’re up early.” I folded the photo and handed it back to Zoe, who slipped it back into the drawer.

  “I smelled bacon.” Leo grabbed a handful of the strips but stopped. He wrinkled his nose. “Is something burning?”

  My eyes dropped to the pan, but the bacon sizzled half-cooked, and the fan above the stove would’ve eliminated any smoke there. In the air, I detected nothing but the scent of bacon and coffee.

  Zoe turned off the burner anyway, and we both scanned the room. The air remained still, clear.

  Suddenly, my fingers tingled, an icy finger trailing my backbone. Zoe started, “I don’t—” but I interrupted.

  “Wake your sister.”

  Because I smelled it. Smoke, subtle but acrid, the scent of smoldering wood corrupted by—something.

  I turned to Zoe to ask her to call 911, but she already had the phone in her hand.

  “Do you have a fire extinguisher?”

  She pointed to the closet.

  On legs that weren’t entirely stable, I ran to the closet, grabbed the extinguisher, then leashed Boo.

  “Where do you keep Smooch’s crate?”

  Zoe cradled the phone and pointed again, this time toward her bedroom.

  As I crated Smooch, I identified the second scent. It was the smell of road trips and boat docks, benzenes and hydrocarbons, evil and intent. Gasoline.

  Leo returned with a groggy Audrey at his side, moving with greater speed, no longer motivated solely by my urging.

  “Fire Department’s on its way,” Zoe said. She grabbed her purse, keys, and the crate, while I lifted Boo, tucking him under the arm that didn’t hold the extinguisher. A few quick strides and I was at the front door, placing my palm against it. Warm, not hot. Still, I gestured Zoe and the kids toward the back door. There, Zoe joined me in placing a hand against the wood. Cool to the touch.