by Nancy Bush
“Politeness ain’t my strong suit, darlin’.”
“Oh yes, it is. You can be as polite and charming as a politician stumping for votes. Worse, even.”
“Tell Ogilvy to give you a price.”
“I can tell this is a bad idea. I don’t know why I even told you.”
“’Cause you want me to rescue you,” Dwayne said equably, and that sent me into overdrive. Every time I think I like him, he makes me crazy. It was far better when we were just compatriots. Buddies. Partners. And the hell of it is, I fear deep down I might be the only one of us who truly feels all this angst. I think Dwayne likes me fine, trusts me, is attracted to me, in fact. He’s just not as worked up about the whole thing as I am.
“I’m not even having this talk,” I said, walking away from him, toward the edge of the dock. “You want to tell me about what’s going on over there, then tell.” I swept an arm to encompass the south side of Lakewood Bay.
“Maybe I’ll buy your cottage,” Dwayne said as if the idea had just struck him. “Then I can be your landlord.”
“What fun,” I snarled.
He started laughing so hard I thought he’d split a gut. What is it about men that makes them goad me? Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe it’s the whole female gender.
No, it’s probably just me.
When I didn’t think it was a full-on laugh-riot, he finally pulled himself back from the edge of hilarity. Taking off his hat, he swept a hand through his hair, sank back on the lounge, then turned his attention back to his new friends. I watched the transformation as he gazed across the bay, his expression sobering.
“There’s trouble over at Rebel Yell,” he said. “They have two teenaged girls. The younger one’s been crying her eyes out. The parents alternate between trying to talk to her and losing patience and yelling. She hasn’t been yelling back, which is a change.”
“For the better, it sounds like.”
“Not so sure. Something’s eating at her. I think the gal’s got some big secret.”
I should add that Dwayne says all this with a drawl and a lot of “g” dropping, like he’s from the South somewhere, although that hasn’t been firmly established yet. Sometimes my vast ignorance of Dwayne’s history bothers me. He seems to be on a need-to-know basis only, when it comes to talking about his personal life. Since the Violet thing, I’ve steered clear of any discussion about his history that might provide more insight into him. I’ve known Dwayne for nearly five years as an acquaintance, and our friendship has developed largely because Dwayne wanted me to come work for him. A part of me thirsts for more information—bits of data that I can obsess over whenever I start thinking maybe, just maybe, Dwayne and I could be a “thing.” But that other part of me—the sane part—wants nothing to do with him. He could be bad for my mental health.
“High school secrets,” I mused. “Test cheating, alcohol stealing and drinking, pot smoking, pregnancy…”
“I vote pregnancy,” Dwayne said seriously.
“Who’s the daddy?”
“That’s what I need you to find out.”
“Hell no.”
“She’s a good kid. Gets good grades. Plays soccer. Or played. I think she quit the team. Lots of yelling over that. Her older sister’s a piece of work. Bossy. The parents are always trying to get her to behave, but you can tell she just tunes them out. Reminds me of Tracy.” He grimaced.
Tracy is Dwayne’s niece. And yes, she is a piece of work. Luckily, she lives in Seattle and neither Dwayne nor I have seen her since a spectacularly horrible few weeks last summer.
“But she’s protective of the younger sister. When she thinks of it, anyway.”
“This is a family problem between Mr. and Mrs. Rebel Yell—the Wilsons—and their two daughters. Not for me to get involved.”
“You’re good with teenagers.”
“Do you hear yourself?” He reached for the binoculars again, but I snatched them away from him. “So help me God, Dwayne. I can’t have you look through these one more time. Now, what did you mean by that? I’m not good with teenagers.”
“They’re your best sources of information. I wish I had your gift,” he said, and with a muscular twist from his deceptively relaxed position, he grabbed my arm and the binoculars and wrested them from me. “Steal a cripple’s binoculars,” he muttered.
He was lucky I didn’t smack him alongside the head with them. No one makes me want to act infantile quicker than Dwayne Durbin. It’s like a bad sitcom where you just know the man and woman are going to get together because they’re either acting like they’re going to throttle each other, or they’re goofily trying to one-up the other, or they’re each trying to set the other one up with their best friend with hilarious results.
Half the time I cannot believe my own embarrassing thoughts.
Dwayne’s blue eyes assessed me. “No witty comeback?”
“Teen pregnancy? Dwayne, I’d be useless to the girl. She needs to talk to her parents about it. Maybe she already has. Maybe that’s what the yelling’s about.”
“They’re always yelling. If she’d told them, something new would have happened.”
“You’re making up a soap opera. You don’t know anything.”
“She’s been hanging around at Do Not Enter with a bunch of other kids. They’re drinking and sneaking around. Pretty cagey about it, but I’ve kept an eye on them. They string colored lights. Little ones. Just enough to give themselves some illumination, but not draw too much attention.”
“Do the parents have any idea?”
“No one does, otherwise they’d be busted. There are a lot of guys hanging around. The girls seem to wait to be picked.”
“You have kept an eye on them.”
“I’ve had to watch from inside,” Dwayne admitted. “If my leg were better, I’d go up to the attic and watch from there.”
Dwayne’s cabana has a steep set of stairs to an attic whose roofline makes it hard not to hit your head against the slanted walls. To my knowledge, it’s full of boxes and junk, like Ogilvy’s garage.
“If your leg were better, you wouldn’t have started watching them in the first place,” I murmured.
“Probably.”
“Look, Dwayne, I’m meeting with Gigi later today. I met with Sean last night. I’m finally moving on the Hatchmere case. You were right when you said things would get going. I’m busy, and anyway, it’s not my place to step into some teen scene with sex, drugs and alcohol.”
Dwayne said, “You know those guys, the ones who smile and act responsible and polite in front of parents. The ones who lie through their orthodontia-perfected teeth. Who play sports and give talks on the responsibility of today’s youth. Who denounce drugs and alcohol, then get wasted every Friday night after the football game. The ones who lie to their parents and feel powerful about it. Who promise that they’ll take good care of their younger siblings, then damn near kill them with alcohol poisoning the first chance they get. You know those guys, Jane.”
“Ye-ess…”
“Those are the guys at Do Not Enter. The ones who tell a girl she’s special, say they love her, say they’re her boyfriend to talk her into sex. They’re the same ones who turn their back when she tries to talk to them and whisper and snigger to their friends.”
I’d never seen this side of Dwayne. He was dead serious, and it made me wonder what had happened to him when he was a teenager. Was there a girl from his past who’d been used and abused by some guy? A girl he’d cared about? Someone he couldn’t save?
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, engaged in spite of myself.
“Find out who these guys are, Jane. Get me their names.”
I gazed across the water. Was I really thinking about helping him? “I suppose I could go to Friday night’s football game.”
“It’s the civil war between Lakeshore and Lake Chinook.”
“You’ve done your homework, haven’t you?”
“I’m an investigator.”
I gave Dwayne a sideways look. He was smiling, but he looked more relieved than pleased, which made me decide his motives were in the right place. “Okay, Jimmy Stewart. I’m sure I’m going to be sorry, but what the hell? I’ll try to meet them.”
“Hal Jeffries.”
“What?”
“The character Jimmy Stewart plays in Rear Window is Hal Jeffries.”
“It worries me that you know that,” I said, but I was committed all the same.
Roland Hatchmere’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development where all the streets were named from the Tolkien fantasy novels: Elf Lane, Hobbit Drive, Aragon Avenue. His home was a tri-level on Rivendell Road; street level being the main floor with an upstairs over the garage and a basement at the sloping western end. There was a lot of glass, a lot of decks and a sweeping entrance lined with impatiens that had been beaten down under the torrential hail. The house itself had an early seventies look and feel, not my favorite architectural era, but the grounds and view up the Willamette River toward Portland’s city center were spectacular.
I parked my Volvo under the dripping branches of a large maple. As I climbed from the car, soggy yellow and red leaves floated onto the hood. A breeze shook through the limbs, sending a cascade of water onto me as I hurried for the front door.
Ringing the bell, I huddled under a narrow overhang, which, I learned, served more for looks than function, then tried to push myself inside when the door opened. It hadn’t worked last time. It didn’t work this time.
Gigi Hatchmere stood in the way with her patented scowl. “You’re dripping,” she said.
“Sorry.”
My boots were soaked and leaving little wet puddles. I slipped them off and, though reluctant, she finally allowed me entry, across a mahogany-lined foyer to a living room with wide windows and no discernible walls. The view was amazing, a wide screen of sky over the roofs of houses down the hill. Portland lay spread across both sides of the river. I could almost count all the bridges and in the far, far distance was the mesalike crown of Mount Saint Helens, which had blown its top in 1980.
Gigi was about my height, five foot seven, and she was slim and serious. Her hair was dark brown as were her eyes, and she wore it straight and parted down the middle like a child of the sixties. She might have been pretty if there were any joy in her expression, but mostly she just looked pissed off.
“So, you’re working for that woman,” Gigi said again, as if telling herself enough times would finally hold the information in her memory. She stood in the center of the living room, which seemed to have acres of cream carpeting. I wiggled my toes into its warmth, admiring the room in spite of myself. Maybe I was just growing envious of other people’s homes because I felt like I soon might be without one. I wanted to practically drop down and roll in the carpet. I would have, too, except I needed to massage Gigi Hatchmere’s bruised feelings if I hoped to learn anything from her that might help Violet.
She stared down at my socks, which were slightly damp. I wondered if she worried they would leave dark stains in the carpet. I wondered, too, if it would be polite or rude to offer to take them off.
“Would you like something?” she said grudgingly. “I was going to open a bottle of wine.”
“Anything’s fine,” I said affably.
“Well, come on in.” She turned around a partition that left a twelve-inch gap at the ceiling into a kitchen decked out in dark brown granite and darker brown cabinetry. The appliances were trimmed with matching wood veneer panels. Gigi gestured to a solarium that ran along the south side of the house and opened into a garden. The room was basically a walkway with a sloped, windowed ceiling and glass walls that looked onto an inner atrium. Wet leaves lay limply against the overhead glass and I looked up at them as I walked along the solarium. An Asian-influenced buffet, ornately carved, sat at the end of the walkway. On a warmer day, the benches inside the atrium looked like they’d be a nice place to settle in and read a book or just commune with the foliage.
I wondered if Gigi meant for me to stay in the solarium, but as there was no place to sit, I decided she’d simply given me an invitation to look around.
I returned to the kitchen where Gigi had pulled out a bottle of cheap white wine. I know this because it’s the kind I buy. She saw me glance at the label and said, “Daddy’s estate’s in probate. It’s not like we have any money. Want something better, ask Violet.”
Had I made a judgment call? I shrugged. “That’s my brand.”
“Poor you.”
She scrounged around on a lower refrigerator shelf and found a plastic party tray with cubed cheese in varying flavors. It might have been opened for a while. Certain sections of the tray looked picked over. I checked my inner “yuk” meter and decided I didn’t care. Free food and drink? That’s an automatic yes. I have my priorities in line.
Though slightly lactose-intolerant, today I was willing to take a chance on the cheese and go for broke.
The crystal stemware was Waterford. When, and if, Gigi inherited, she would get some nice things.
“That’s where Emmett found him,” she said, inclining her head toward the solarium. “I thought you’d want to see.”
“In the solarium?”
“Uh-huh. The tray was on the floor beside him. Violet didn’t bother to wrap it, just put a ribbon on it. The ribbon was still on it.”
“Was anyone else there, when Emmett found your father?” I asked as Gigi handed me a glass.
She eyed my hand, watching me like a hawk. Her expression revealed she was already regretting giving me the good stuff. “It’s crystal. Don’t break it. No, Emmett was alone.”
“I’ll be careful. That must have been hard.”
“It was terrible!” She tossed back a gulp of her drink. She had all the finesse of a stevedore. Apparently the worry over the stemware only applied to me. “The whole thing was terrible. And it started out so great!”
“Tell me about it,” I encouraged.
She gestured for me to sit down at the glass-topped kitchen table. I took a chair, which was molded white plastic and surprisingly comfortable.
“We got to Castellina around ten. That’s where we were doing hair and makeup. It was just Deenie and me, and my hairdresser, of course—she did my makeup, too—but Melinda, my stepmother, stopped by and brought mimosas. It was so fabulous. Do you know Castellina?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It means ‘little castle’ and it’s just so pretty. It’s owned by the Buganzi family, too, like Cahill Winery. It’s kind of a package deal for weddings, if you want to go that way.”
I nodded. Castellina was the Portland estate used as an entertainment venue by the Buganzi family who also owned Cahill Winery just outside the town of Dundee, in the center of Oregon’s wine country. Before the Buganzi family purchased it, it was a rambling, slightly tired, turn-of-the-century old maven of Portland’s West Hill’s architectural scene. Buganzi razed the old home much to a horrendous outcry and a ton of city fees, as he did it gleefully and without permits. Then he built Castellina with its fairy-tale castle design. I’d only seen it from the outside, but people either gush and rave or roll their eyes and wail about its design. Nevertheless, it’s become as popular a place for weddings and parties as Cahill Winery itself, which is about forty-five minutes from Castellina on a Saturday afternoon. Apparently Roland Hatchmere had reserved both venues for his daughter. I’ve heard Cahill produces a more than respectable Pinot Noir, but I’ve never put it to the taste test, its price being outside my budget.
“The weather was just beautiful. We didn’t know how it would be, October and all, but it was just such a great day.” Gigi gulped again and topped off her glass. I chewed on a piece of cheddar and sipped. “I had this great dress, too. It’s a Millie V.,” she added in an aside, looking for my reaction. I had no idea who this designer might be, so I just nodded enthusiastically and sipped some more. I love wine for this reason. Not just drinking,
but a whole host of social moves. I can drink and nod and it won’t appear as if I have nothing to say.
“Anyway, everything was perfect. The veil was kind of sucky, actually, but I got rid of it pretty quick. We were having a great time with the mimosas. Melinda brought the champagne, and it was nicer than I expected of her. I mean, we don’t hate her, but she’s not our mother. She never let me have a drop before I turned twenty-one, so I just didn’t think she had it in her.”
“You’re twenty-one now, right?”
“I turn twenty-two in April. Sean’s twenty-four, but I’ve always seemed older than he is. I mean, he’s a complete fuckup, but he is my brother. He used to buy for me before I was legal. We gotta look out for each other.” She said this rotely, without emotion, as if she’d heard it somewhere and thought it might be a good time to trot it out.
