Behind Morasco, Robin was handing the shovel to the rabbi, her head bowed low, as though her neck couldn’t take the weight of it. “Me neither, actually,” the detective said. “I never knew the Blooms when they were alive.”
Quentin’s eyes widened. “Is Mrs. Bloom—”
“No, no. I misspoke. I’m just saying . . .”
“Yeah, I get it.”
Morasco’s gaze moved to the phone in Quentin’s hand. “You still working on the podcast?”
“No. I mean . . . I am. I will. But I’m not here in a professional capacity.”
“Well, I appreciate you keeping your distance, anyway,” he said. “I’m sure the family does too.”
Robin had joined her husband. The rabbi was speaking again, urging others to take up the shovel. “I should probably go,” Quentin said.
Morasco nodded—probably the reason why he’d come back here in the first place, to politely kick Quentin out of the cemetery before the Diamonds caught sight of him.
Quentin started to leave.
“Listen, Mr. Garrison . . .”
“Yeah?”
“If you wind up including the shooting as part of your podcast . . .”
“I’m not going to do that. I swear. I would never record and report on something as private as this funeral.”
“Okay, fine,” he said. “But if you change your mind and decide to branch off into this case. And if, in your reporting, you find out anything that might help us . . . Anything at all that stands out to you . . .”
Quentin exhaled. That wasn’t what he’d expected to hear. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes. Of course.”
“You still have my card?”
“Yes.”
“Great. Thanks.”
Quentin looked at him. “You don’t have any leads as to who could have done this?”
He smiled a little. “Every lead helps,” he said. Which wasn’t an answer at all.
They said a quick good-bye, and Quentin headed up the hill and into the parking lot, past rows of cars, the waiting limousine, the empty hearse . . .
Quentin tried reassuring himself: During his interview with Morasco and his partner, he hadn’t told any out-and-out lies. Dr. Bloom seemed like he was in pretty good spirits, he had said. Which had been true, at least at first. He told me he’d be happy to serve as an expert on my podcast, but said he wasn’t as up on current theories as he once was. Also true. We exchanged numbers and agreed to talk later. True. But.
At the end of the interview, Quentin had shaken hands with Morasco and his partner, who had even told him he’d be “happy to provide law enforcement expertise for your podcasts.” And Quentin had felt emboldened enough to ask a question. I was just wondering where you got my number. You know . . . to call me in the first place.
It was in his phone. The partner had said it before Morasco could stop him.
Dr. Bloom’s?
Yeah. He typed your number in, but never hit send.
Quentin spotted his rental car and made for it, trying not to think about how he’d never know what Dr. Bloom might have wanted to tell him, how that was the true source of this disquiet, this powerless feeling. And how, on many levels, it upset him more than the man’s death. “What kind of a person am I?” he said as he reached his car. He said it aloud and without thinking, as though he were recording one of his journal entries.
And the answer came from deep within. Your mother’s son. Your grandfather’s grandson. That’s what kind of a person you are.
He put his key to the lock, but it didn’t work. He turned it around, tried again, then took a look at it to make sure he wasn’t going insane from lack of sleep, mistaking his real car keys for his rental car ones.
“Excuse me,” said a voice behind him. An older, female voice, honeyed and soothing.
Quentin turned. He didn’t know her, though he had noticed her earlier. He’d seen her hugging Robin—a gray-haired woman with perfect posture and tanned, weathered skin, dressed all in black. She’d stood out because she’d seemed sadder than most of the other guests, and up close her sorrow was all the more evident, her drawn, lined face stained with tears, her laser-blue eyes wet and glowing. But her voice was calm. Most everyone has something surprising about them, and in this woman’s case, that was it: the sunshine-sweet sound of her, coming out of that rugged exterior. “That’s my car.”
“Oh . . .” Quentin stepped back. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
The woman smiled, her face softening and becoming something different. Something familiar. Where do I know her from? Quentin didn’t have an answer.
“Rental cars,” she said. “They all look alike.”
“Do you mind my asking,” he said. “How do you know the family?”
“Oh, I’m an old, old friend.”
“Of Dr. Bloom’s?”
“Actually, it’s Renee and I who go back.”
“How far?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sorry.” Quentin cleared his throat. “My name is Quentin Garrison. I’m from an NPR affiliate in Los Angeles.”
“Okay . . .”
“I’ve been out here working on a podcast. It concerns the Blooms, and I thought maybe I could get some insight from you.”
“I don’t think I can give you very much insight, Quentin.”
“Were you close to Renee?”
“Present tense.”
“What?”
“Renee is still alive. I am close to Renee. Present tense.”
Quentin smiled. “That’s the insight I’m looking for. I’d love to talk to you, ma’am.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t know Mitchell or Renee. You’re only here to cover the home invasion. I’m not going to fault you for doing your job, but honestly, Quentin, I think you’ll get a far better response from the police, the coroner . . . People like you.”
“Like me?”
“People who are only interested in the Blooms because they’ve been shot.” She said it patiently, warmly. “I don’t mean to cause offense.”
The limousine passed them, Robin Diamond and her husband inside. Quentin stared at it. He couldn’t help himself. He hoped she wasn’t staring back. “No offense taken,” he said.
“I know you’re just doing your job.”
“I’ve been here since before the home invasion, ma’am,” he said. “I spoke to Mitchell Bloom when he was alive. I believe I was one of the last people to do that.”
The woman’s lips parted, but she said nothing. Her bright eyes drilled into him.
“We only spoke once but he seemed like a very good man.”
“Why did you speak to Mitchell? Why are you out here?”
Quentin exhaled. “Can I get your name, please? Can I buy you lunch? I promise I’ll tell you everything, if I can just get a few moments of your time.”
The woman bit her lip. She gave Quentin a long appraising look, as though she were trying to read his mind. The silence went on for an uncomfortable while. And when she finally spoke, it felt like a victory. “Don’t worry about buying me lunch,” she said. “I’ll pay for my own.”
HER NAME WAS Nicola Crane, and Quentin followed her in his identical rental car to Ruby’s Diner—a place with Formica tables and orange vinyl booths and waterproof menus thick as doctoral theses. In snooty Tarry Ridge, this place stuck out like a dollar bill in a stack of hundreds, and it made Quentin like Nicola Crane for choosing it. They sat across from each other at a booth next to a window and exchanged business cards—Nicola’s consisted of her name, a phone number, and a P.O. box in Philadelphia—and quickly dove into the menus. “I think I may eat every meal here from now on,” Quentin said.
Nicola smiled. “You could do worse.” She pushed her menu aside. “I’ve been spending a lot of time here, since . . . well, for the past two days.”
The waitress sauntered up to the table—a bored blond teenage girl who wore a Breitling watch wit
h her polyester uniform. “What can I get you two?” she said, flatly, “you two” clearly a feeble attempt to sound homey and welcoming.
Quentin guessed she was a rich Tarry Ridge high schooler, and the summer job was some sort of bug up her parents’ collective ass having to do with learning the value of a dollar. “What would you recommend?” Quentin said.
She yawned. “Everything’s okay.”
Quentin ordered a stack of blueberry pancakes, a side of turkey bacon, and coffee. Nicola asked for coffee and cinnamon raisin toast, with cream cheese and strawberry jam.
The waitress smiled at her. “That’s what you ordered last time,” she said.
“Comfort food.”
When the waitress left, Nicola said, “So . . . is your podcast about Mitchell’s work in psychotherapy?”
“Not exactly.” Quentin took a sip of his water. “This is going to be a little hard to explain.”
The waitress returned with their cups of coffee, a creamer, and a stack of sugar packets. Nicola poured around five fingers of cream into her cup, stirred it in.
Quentin waited until the waitress had left before he spoke. “I’m doing a podcast on the Cooper/LeRoy murders.”
She took a delicate sip of coffee. If the names were in any way familiar beyond their historical significance, it didn’t show on her face. “You spoke to Mitchell as an expert, then? I know he did quite a bit of research on mass murderers when he was working on Wards Island.”
“No, ma’am,” Quentin said. “I was asking him about Renee.”
Nicola’s eyes widened. “Pardon?”
“I’m not telling many people about this. Not yet. But you seem like you might be able to solve this for me.”
“Solve?”
Quentin weighed it all out in his mind—the promise he’d made to George Pollard, the potential knowledge Nicola Crane had. “A man contacted our station,” he said, exhaling slowly. “He’d seen Mrs. Bloom in a video. It was on the website Robin works for. They talked about Mother’s Day movies . . .”
“Yes,” she said. “I saw it.”
The waitress was back with their food. She set the plates down with a condescending smile, the diamonds on her Breitling glinting. “Anything else I can get you two?”
“No thanks,” Nicola said.
Once the waitress was gone again, Quentin leaned forward, watching Nicola’s placid face. “The man who contacted us,” he said. “He claimed to know for a fact that Renee is April Cooper.”
Nicola stared at him frozen, butter knife poised in her hand.
Quentin started to explain more but she stopped him. “I know who April Cooper was.”
“Oh. Well then . . .”
“Who is this man who contacted you?”
Quentin took a sip of his coffee. “I’m sorry. That’s the one thing I can’t tell you,” he said. “But I will tell you this. He claims he met her after her death.”
“After.”
“Yes.”
She took a bite of toast, her face relaxing. “He’s insane.”
“You’d think so.” He poured syrup over his pancakes and started to cut them up in pieces. Nicola didn’t say anything, but he could feel her watching him, waiting. She wanted more information from him. But he wasn’t here to answer her questions. That wasn’t how this worked. You have to give information to get it. He cut off a perfect bite of pancake—just the right size, the right amount of syrup, topped off with a sliver of turkey bacon. He put it in his mouth, taking his time to savor it fully before he put the fork down and met her gaze. “How long have you known Renee?”
She took another sip of her coffee. “Since we were children.”
Quentin’s eyes widened.
She smiled. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“It’s just . . . You’re the first person I’ve met who can even prove to me she had a childhood.”
She shrugged. “Well, it wasn’t the happiest childhood.”
Quentin’s phone was in his lap. He picked it up and tapped at it a few times, trying to make it look as though he was receiving a text. “One sec,” he said, as she watched him with her ice-blue eyes. Discreetly, he turned on the voice recorder, then placed the phone facedown on the table. “Please,” he said. “Please tell me about it.”
Nicola took another bite of her toast, the cream cheese thick, the jam drizzled on. She chewed politely and swallowed, dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin. Nicola Crane had the look of a frontierswoman but the manners of a debutante. “This was Renee’s favorite dish, you know, when we were kids.”
“Really?”
“We used to eat it all the time together—cinnamon raisin toast, cream cheese, strawberry jam. She used to make it for me, which is probably why I’m finding it so comforting now.”
“So you’re not blood relatives,” he said. “You and Renee.”
“We were in the same foster home back in the mid-’70s. Little town in Arizona called Brittlebush.”
Quentin drank his coffee. “How old were you both?”
“She was older than me—maybe seventeen? There were a lot of kids in that house, but she was . . .” Quentin watched her face, the way her eyes clouded, then stopped, shifting back to the present. She took her napkin and again dabbed her mouth.
Nicola said, “You know what oscars are?”
“Academy Awards?”
She laughed a little. “No, no. Fish. Big ugly, mean-looking things.”
“Oh. Yeah, I think so.”
“Our foster dad kept two of them, in a tank in the kitchen. Funny. I can’t remember what he looked like—the foster dad. But those awful fish . . . I still have nightmares about them.”
Quentin took another bite of pancake. “Oscars.”
“They eat living things,” Nicola said. “I guess all fish do, but these . . . the foster dad fed them live goldfish. Renee and I were in the kitchen—I think we were the only ones who saw. I was young and very sensitive. I’d lost both of my parents and I was still . . . hurting.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Anyway,” she said. “I saw one of the oscars eat the first little goldfish and I started to cry. The foster dad told me to toughen up. ‘It’s the food chain,’ he said. ‘It’s life.’ But Renee wasn’t having any of it. These poor goldfish were darting around that tank and the two giant oscars were scooping them up into their jaws and she told the foster dad—his name was Bill, that’s it . . . Bill Grumley. God, I haven’t thought of that name in forever . . .” She took another bite of her toast, chewed, and swallowed.
Quentin said, “What did Renee tell him?”
“‘You’re heartless.’”
“Huh?”
“That’s what she said. She told Bill Grumley, ‘You’re heartless.’ And he laughed at her . . . ‘Nature is heartless, girl. You’d best get used to it.’” A shadow passed over Nicola’s face, clouds massing outside the diner. Her gaze traveled beyond Quentin, to some distant point over his shoulder, in the past, a million miles away. “Renee woke me up in the middle of the night. She was holding a paper cup. She shined a flashlight on it and showed me. There was one goldfish inside, swimming around in about four inches of water. ‘Those bastards got full,’ she said. ‘He was the only one left. I saved him.’”
“What did you do with the fish?”
“We sneaked downstairs, out the back door. I knew we’d get in so much trouble if the foster dad or his wife caught us. That was one of the rules. Probably the most important one. No leaving the house on our own.”
“But you left anyway.”
“She left,” she said. “I followed.”
“You were younger.”
“She was braver,” she said. “We were barefoot, in our nightgowns. There was a park down the street. It had a pond. She dumped the cup into the pond and the goldfish swam away.”
“That must have felt good.”
“To me, it felt wonderful.”
“But to Re
nee?”
“Renee,” she said. “Renee . . . When we were walking back to the house she was very quiet. I asked her what was wrong, and she wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t speak. I assumed she was frightened, you know?”
“Frightened?”
“It was a gossipy neighborhood. Even though I was just a kid, I knew we probably wouldn’t get away with it. Someone would notice two girls in their nightgowns, walking to the park at three in the morning.”
“Of course.”
“That wasn’t it, though,” Nicola said. “Renee was upset about all the fish that had been eaten. She was upset because she hadn’t been able to save the others.”
“That’s very touching.”
Nicola smiled, her face again going familiar. “Quentin?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you doing this podcast?”
“Well . . . I did tell you about the call from that man.”
“I mean . . . why not something scarier—Ted Bundy or Charles Manson? Or something unsolved like the Zodiac? Why not something more recent? Why do an entire podcast on these obscure murders just because you got a call from some lunatic?”
Quentin swallowed his coffee. It wasn’t part of his plan, answering questions like this one. But there was something about Nicola Crane—the sunshiny voice, maybe, or the deep, caring lines in her face, the warmth in those strangely bright eyes or the unshakable feeling that he knew her from somewhere, someplace . . . Whatever the reason, he felt eager to do the talking for a change. Do I want to confess? Is that it?
Quentin forgot about the voice recorder and talked. He tried to explain what it was like to grow up with a mother who never hugged him and only held his hand at the cemetery and seemed indifferent to his presence in her life. He told her about his many attempts to get Kate’s attention—first by getting good grades, then by getting bad ones. He talked about how strung out his mother had been, so wasted she often forgot to feed him or clean the house or make sure he got off to school okay. How even in rare periods of sobriety, she’d been completely disinterested in her own son, and how different that all might have been, were it not for April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy and what they had done to Kate’s family.
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