No Love Lost

by Lynn Bulock

  Her inky hair swung in a chic cut around her shoulders and her eyes glittered with almost the same shade of ebony. Her unlined face made her look barely old enough to have a child Cai Li’s age, and I doubted she’d had any kind of work done. Maybe she had married as young as I had. If that was the case, what did she think about the kids marrying this young? “We give our children traditional names to keep the old ways alive. But they are American.” She said the last word, in her lightly accented English, with mixed resignation and pride, shaking her head. “In Vietnam, Cai would listen to her parents about getting married. Some people her age still use matchmakers there. Here there is no asking, just telling.”

  “I know what you mean. Ben just came home after they stayed up all night together and said they were engaged.” I took a sip of the green jasmine tea with its earthy notes of grass and flowers and looked at the mug Mai had put in front of me. Like several at my house, it proclaimed the owner a middle school honor roll student. I wondered if it belonged to Cai or one of the two younger brothers she’d mentioned. “We all want the same thing for them. Just more chances than we had ourselves.”

  Mai nodded. “When we came here, we were refugees. Teenagers, we go to work right away. My children became American citizens first, then their father and me. Duc worked two jobs, went to night school, later took the CPA exam. After that, my turn to go to school. I just learn more English and some business. We work hard, so our children don’t have to work so hard.”

  That had such a familiar ring to it. “Ben’s father and I are divorced. You probably know that from Ben.” Mai nodded. “We married as young as these two want to, and it was a mistake. Neither one of us was ready.”

  Her answering smile only lifted one corner of her mouth. “When we marry, Duc is twenty-two, I am twenty-four. Old for Vietnam, still young for here.”

  I revised my estimate of her age upward a bit, doing the math in my head. Looking around the plant-filled kitchen with a prep area and breakfast nook about the size of the entire living, dining and kitchen areas of my apartment, it was clear all the Phams’ hard work had paid off. “Does it make you unhappy that the kids want to marry so young?”

  “A little. But it is good they are free to do it. And I understand, this is the Christian way. Duc and me, we are more Buddhist than Christian. Sometimes Cai Li takes me to her church. It is a good place. Mike and Doug like to go with her.” She wrinkled her nose slightly as she said the names. “Her brothers, we name them Minh and Duc. But they go to school, they come home Mike and Doug. Cai Li keeps her Vietnamese name, but falls in love with an American boy.”

  She drank some tea and picked up a cookie, then put it down. “Your family. Do they care Cai Li is Vietnamese?”

  Her question made me speechless for a moment. I thought before I answered. “I don’t care. She’s bright, funny and beautiful. I wonder what someone as mature as she is sees in Ben sometimes. Hal, Ben’s father, doesn’t seem to care or notice, either. I don’t know how Hal’s mother and father will feel about it. They’re from the South, from Tennessee. His father is a Korean war veteran.”

  Mai nodded again. “Duc’s mother live with his sister in Westminster. First time one of her grandson brings home blond surfer girl, she nearly have a stroke. Now things are better. When she is here for Mother’s Day, she met Ben and she even like his ” Obviously struggling for the word in English, she drew fingers over her chin.

  “That goatee? If your mother-in-law likes that, she’s one step ahead of me. I’d be thrilled if he shaved it off.”

  We laughed together then, and I began to get the feeling that whatever the kids finally worked out, they just might be okay. Okay, so none of us was thrilled by the fact that our nineteen-and twenty-year-old kids wanted to get married. But obviously they’d been raised right and it looked as though we were just going to have to trust the Lord on this one. Handing things like this over to God was still the hardest part of my maturing faith. Maybe it always would be.

  When I got back to the apartment Ben was still there, which surprised me. He had told me he was going to start looking for a summer job and I’d expected to find him gone. But there he was, sitting on one of the stools at the counter on the pass-through into the kitchen. When I came into the room, relief washed over his face.

  “I’m glad you’re home. Dad called and I didn’t know what to do. I knew you were at Cai’s and I didn’t want to call you there, but he sounded really upset.”

  I knew before I asked what had probably happened, but I had to ask anyway. “Did they hear from the medical examiner?”

  “Yeah, they did. Even worse, Dad says Nicole’s father came up and looked at the body and everything, and he agrees with the police. It’s definitely Nicole that they found, Mom. And Dad says the sheriff’s department people told him not to go anyplace without telling them.”

  Ben’s grim expression said that he knew what that meant. He had his own brush with being a suspect in Frank Collins’ murder in November, even though the suspicion against him was mercifully brief. After that, he knew what the words “don’t leave town” meant.

  “Ben, they pretty much have to say that. Until they know how Nicole died and who might have been involved, they’re going to be suspicious of the people closest to her. You and I know that the idea that your dad would harm Nicole in any way is pretty far-fetched. But the medical examiner and the sheriff’s department don’t know that until they do more investigation. More than likely this is all a tragic accident of some kind and they’ll find that out quickly. The next couple weeks will be hard on everybody, but we can pray that whatever happens will bring out the truth and bring it out quickly.”

  Ben swallowed hard and nodded. My heart ached for him. While I wanted him to be more mature, this wasn’t the kind of experience I had in mind to help mature him. Even if Hal and I had been at each other’s throats over our divorce for the last fifteen years, which we hadn’t, this wasn’t a trial I’d wish on him, or even my worst enemy. When I said that the next few weeks would be hard on everybody, what I didn’t spell out for Ben was that it would be as hard on me as anyone else. If the medical examiner thought this really was a murder, my ex-husband would be high on the list of suspects and Ray Fernandez would be one of the main people trying to prove him guilty.

  It took another hour for me to figure out what to say to Hal when I called him back. In between I consoled Ben a little and tried to assure him that Mai Pham and I had gotten along well with each other. I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, which was that we both thought our kids planning a wedding was a great idea. But at least I could tell him that Mai seemed like a really nice person and both moms could agree that we really liked each other’s kids.

  To get a smile out of Ben I told him what Mai said about Cai Li’s grandmother and his beard. He grinned, saying that he had been making sure the goatee was neatly trimmed all the time because both Cai Li and her grandmother’s opinions were important to him. “I know what your opinion is, Mom. But as long as Cai Li likes this,” he said, stroking the scrawny blond fur covering his chin, “it’s going to stay.”

  I patted his shoulder, marveling again how much I had to reach up to do it. “I know you didn’t grow it to impress me, son. And I’d be foolish to think you’d shave it off to please me, either.” Especially when his lady love liked the awful thing. That was the difference between Ben and his father at the same age; when Hal’s mother had complained about the way he dressed early in our marriage, he went back to the prep button-downs I hated. Lillian had always had more influence with Hal than I had, which made for a lot of strife. I couldn’t very well fault Ben for the very behavior I’d told my Christian Friends group I had wanted to see from his father.

  Right now I felt like calling one or more of those friends. Probably any of them would be able to help me call Hal and say the right thing. But Linnette would be upset to hear about Nicole’s death, and almost everybody else was at work or otherwise busy. This time I’d ha
ve to rely on prayer and good common sense to get me through.

  In the end things were far easier than I thought they would be because Hal wasn’t answering his phone. Getting his answering machine made it easy to tell him how sorry I felt, and how I’d be there if he wanted to talk later. Once that was done I picked up the Want Ads out of the local newspaper and went through them seeing if anything struck me as a likely possibility for Ben. When I showed him my circled “finds” he shook his head.

  “That’s pretty old school, Mom. These days you get on line to find jobs. I’ve been working on it most of the day, and one of my suite-mates said he’d put in a good word at the office supply store where he’s been working since senior year in high school.”

  It sounded like a good plan and I told him so. “It beats being a camp counselor or mowing lawns, anyway. I’m going to go pick up the application and try to get an interview this week.”

  I resisted asking him if the job paid enough to support him, because I knew it didn’t. If he got the job his first paycheck would bring that home far more clearly than I ever could.

  *

  When my phone rang about six in the evening I didn’t bother to see who was calling before I picked it up.

  So Linnette’s voice on the other end surprised me a little; I figured it might be Hal returning my call and I told her so, filling her in on the news about Nicole. “Hmm. Playa del Sol sure doesn’t waste any time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they’ve already had someone from community relations call and tell me to be prepared for a different person to lead our therapy group on Wednesday. The voice mail I got said there would be a letter in the mail soon explaining everything, but they wanted to keep their clients from being surprised by the change.”

  “Hey, I can imagine some of Nicole’s patients will be really thrown for a loop over hearing this news.” As I talked, a picture of Zoë flashed in my mind. She would probably blame the loss of her therapist on the evil forces she saw everywhere. I could only imagine what sorts of damage the death of a therapist could cause for a person as unstable as Zoë appeared.

  Linnette sounded a little confused. “The one odd thing is that Nicole had already told us we’d have someone else leading the group this week anyway. She said another doctoral student who needed the clinical hours, her friend, Monica something, would be leading the sessions because of the upcoming wedding.”

  “So the hospital could have waited until next week to say anything,” I said, more thinking out loud than anything.

  “Probably two or three weeks. I mean, even therapists take a honeymoon, don’t they?”

  “I’d have to think so. That part of the plans never came up when I’ve been talking with Hal.” When my shoulders sagged a bit with relief, I realized I’d been holding them tight and stiffly for quite some time. It was good to realize that I hadn’t heard every detail of Hal’s problems and planning. Maybe he had at least one other friend to lean on so that he could spread his troubles around.

  The name Linnette mentioned rang a bell. “I wonder if it’s the same Monica who was the third person at the bachelorette party.” I told her about Hal’s statements so far and his phone calls from Monica. “She apparently told Hal and the police that the three of them went back to her house after their partying. The last either she or Cat claims to have seen of Nicole was her getting in her car and leaving Monica’s condo.”

  “If it’s the same person, I wonder why they’ve got her leading our group,” Linnette mused. “She’s probably almost as upset as Nicole’s family about her being missing, and now knowing that she’s dead.” Linnette sighed. “I can tell that this is going to be a real tough group session Wednesday. How much do you think they’ll tell us?”

  “I have no idea. They’ll probably be fairly upfront about her death, I’d assume, because you know this will make the papers. Even if it’s an accidental death, the police reports from last night about picking up an unidentified body should generate some interest among the news outlets.”

  Saying it to Linnette was the first time I’d thought about that, and it made me resolve to be much more careful about answering the phone. Harris is a fairly common last name, but if Sam Blankenship at the Ventura County Star caught wind that I had any involvement in a case like this, however far removed, he’d be calling me any old time. Sam wasn’t a bad guy, and so far he’d been more than fair in his dealings with me as he’d reported his way up the ladder on the crime beat. He’d used his writing about my late husband Dennis’s murder to interest editors in moving him out of covering just features, and I knew his story about Frank Collins was one of several that made him a regular contributor to crime news around the county. Nicole might have been found too late last night to make today’s paper, but we could all count on seeing something in the Star tomorrow.

  *

  It was actually Sam’s article the next morning that kept me from having to ask Hal any more questions about Nicole for a while. Like any good reporter, Sam had found as much information as possible, including wringing all that he could out of someone at the medical examiner’s office. I had to imagine it wasn’t Meg Halloran; she didn’t strike me as the type to talk to reporters more than she had to. Tuesday, another gloomy June morning found me sipping coffee and reading the front page of the Star’s local section.

  What I read made me more than a little uneasy. My mind raced as I read, trying to figure out how to explain part of the information for Ben. According to the preliminary autopsy report that Sam quoted, there appeared to be high levels of alcohol and perhaps several drugs in Nicole’s system, and even more depressing, there was water in her lungs. The water was an obvious thing that would need little more study except to verify that it was seawater or not. The alcohol and drug screens could take weeks, according to Sam’s sources.

  Ben got up and I told him all of this, to which he responded in confusion, as I expected him to, over why I looked glum. “Water in her lungs will more than likely make the medical examiner’s final ruling suicide or homicide,” I explained to him.

  “Does that mean she drowned?” Ben looked solemn, and I could tell that he was working through in his mind what that might mean for the suspicion falling on his dad.

  “It does, or at least it means that drowning was part of what caused her death. In any case, it definitely means she was alive when she went into the water.” And it posed a few questions that I’m sure Ray or whoever was heading up the investigative team for the sheriff’s department would be asking.

  How did a young woman whose car was in her driveway at home get into the ocean at least seven or eight miles away from there in the middle of the night? She obviously had to have help of some kind, whether it was someone who transported her there willingly or someone disposing of what they thought was a body. I couldn’t imagine Hal could do either, but convincing a trained law-enforcement expert of that would certainly be an uphill battle.

  The number of problems all this raised for my ex-husband made me feel sorry for him. Just days ago he’d been facing what ought to have been one of the happiest days of his life. Now there was sadness in front of him, and plenty of contention. Instead of a wedding there would be a funeral, and the money Hal’s parents had probably planned to use for a big rehearsal dinner might go for a good criminal lawyer instead. “Do you think they’ll arrest Dad?” Ben asked.

  I have always been as honest as possible with him, and I didn’t intend to start lying now. “It might come to that. For your sake, and for his and your grandparents, I pray it doesn’t happen. But I’ve seen enough police investigation by now to know how this might all look to the county sheriff’s department.” And along with praying for Hal and his family, I’d pray for Ray, too. I’d pray for good judgment and discernment, with the hope that if someone did have to arrest my ex-husband, Ray Fernandez wasn’t the one to do it.

  NINE

  “I imagine you could start driving yourself to your therapy session
s any old time,” I remarked to Linnette as we headed down the freeway toward Playa del Sol.

  “Pretty soon,” she said, settling her latte back in the cup holder. “But with all the commotion going on with Nicole’s death, I’d just as soon have company this week. Besides, I thought you might want to take a look at everything one more time.”

  “I do, but quietly. If Ray finds out that I’ve done anything but drive you to your group therapy session and back, he’ll blow a gasket.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it that way. I hope I don’t get you in trouble just by asking for another ride.” Linnette sounded worried. Little things like this told me my friend wasn’t back to one hundred percent normal yet, although she was definitely on the way there. She’s usually plenty considerate of others’ feelings, but not in a way that puts herself down. I waved off her concern.

  “I’ve brought plenty of books to study with, so even if the detective shows up on the job, he’ll see that I’m not ‘snooping around,’ as he calls it.” To back up my statement I spread my books out on my bench in the courtyard as soon as possible once we got into Playa del Sol and Linnette headed toward her therapy session.

  I wondered if Zoë was there, and how she’d handle the news that Nicole wasn’t coming back. Linnette seemed to need all the stability she could get right now, so somebody like Zoë, who had far more challenges, could be even more disturbed by her therapist’s death.

  I wondered if Monica or someone in charge at the facility would even tell Nicole’s patients that her absence was due to death. Nothing Linnette had gotten from the hospital had said Nicole was dead—she only knew that from me and the newspaper. How did privacy laws work in that respect? I made a mental note to ask someone about that if I got a chance.

  That chance came sooner than I expected. Ten minutes later, while I was deep into my reading, a tall figure stood next to me. When I looked up I saw it was Catalina, the nurse I’d seen leading Zoë another day. “Hi. Am I in somebody’s way?” I couldn’t think of a reason for her to stand by me quietly.