The Zaanics Deceit (Cate Lyr #1)

by Nina Post

  As she went from the personal care items to non-perishables to perishables for the mini fridge she’d requested for the room, Cate assiduously avoided any items from family-owned companies. She refused to support them. And she knew which brands to avoid, even the subsidiaries, even the ones that didn’t brag about it — as though being a family-owned company was inherently better in some way, more worthy of the customer’s money. Maybe there were exceptions, but most of the warm fuzzies were skillful PR.

  When the cashier rang up her purchases, Cate could be reasonably certain that she hadn’t supported any family-owned companies, and that she had, at least, made a good effort to avoid it. On the way back to the hotel, she passed a small empanada restaurant with a queue that went around the block. Must be new. She’d been away a while, but there seemed to be even more of a fervor over new restaurants, especially in SOMA. The effect of a place being popular was magnified by ten because everyone had new technology and didn’t want to miss out on the latest trend. Everyone was so connected, but she was spinning out at a distance, trying to hold on to the rope.

  After dropping off her bag of groceries in the room, Cate went down to the restaurant and holed up in a booth with a bowl of hot chowder and her glass of wine.

  She didn’t notice the small man at the bar drinking tequila, or feel a jolt of recognition for the older woman across the room. She also didn’t see Erin Hornfel, the black-haired woman in her twenties who was watching Cate from outside the hotel, a spotting scope at her eye.

  Only six pages into her book, Cate’s phone buzzed.

  “Come to the opera with me tonight. It’s Verdi’s Rigoletto.” Benjamin, enthused.

  She groaned. She hated the opera. He knew she hated it. “I’m in a seventh inning stretch with my chowder, and all I want to do tonight is watch a movie. From bed.” But she would go because she wanted to see him.

  “Do you have something to wear?” As though she already agreed.

  “Just these orange hunting overalls,” she told him. “But I’m finishing the chowder.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of separating you two. I’ll meet you there. The performance starts at eight and ends at nine-thirty.”

  She wouldn’t be staying that long.

  Before the performance started, Cate ordered a champagne at the kiosk in the lobby of the War Memorial Opera House and glanced around for Benjamin. For a second, she worried she wouldn’t recognize him, then scoffed at herself. Of course she would, and he was Mr. All-Seeing Eye, so he’d almost certainly recognize her. She wondered if he would approve the black wrap dress in travel-friendly fabric that was her standby outfit for looking presentable. Thankfully, she had also packed a pair of black ballet flats and a few pieces of jewelry, so he shouldn’t gasp in dismay when he saw her.

  There was still no sign of Benjamin, and then she ran into an old friend from college. After taking the least painful parts of her absurd, lonely life and reshaping them into something succinct and socially palatable, Cate headed toward the doors then froze. After the lights signaled the start of the performance, she was on her second glass of champagne and had walked the length of the lobby multiple times. Anxiety fluttered inside her like money blowing around in a booth in a radio station truck at a baseball game. Coming back was a terrible idea. Was Benjamin her matador, luring her from her place of safety?

  She could leave. She could get a cab to SFO right now and wait for the next available flight. She didn’t have to get involved. Sure, she was technically a Lyr — she had kept the name to avoid the paperwork, and most of her IDs were fake, anyway. But her father told her she wasn’t a Lyr, not anymore. You are no longer a part of this family. You are no longer my daughter. These are not your sisters. Those sentences were embedded in her like shrapnel.

  “Excuse me, may I help you find your seat?”

  Cate’s heart jumped and she pressed her hand against her chest just under her collarbone as she turned. It was an opera house employee, a middle-aged man with a bloodhound face.

  “No thank you. I’m just …” she stopped and gave him a brief smile. “I’m fine, thanks.”

  He nodded politely and walked away.

  The thought of seeing her family again unnerved her, imaging how it would be to see her sisters. See her father.

  And Benjamin and Noah.

  Was she more of a mouse or more of a lion? Would she cower or be brave?

  Cate snuck into the gilded auditorium after the performance had already begun. An usher, a short woman in her seventies, showed her up to the balcony box. Cate thanked her then slipped into her seat.

  She looked to her left at Benjamin — his patrician nose, graying black-brown hair, and ice blue eyes that were warm to her and coldly threatening to most other people. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He only let his emotions take over in the opera house. That was his safe place. “This is one of my favorites,” he whispered, then leaned over and kissed her on the temple. “But she dies at the end.”

  “Spoiler.”

  “You look lovely, Cate. Like an Edwin Austin Abbey painting.” He leaned closer to her and sniffed. “What is that smell?”

  “Caladryl,” she whispered back. “By Yves Saint Laurent.”

  He reached out and touched the odd-shaped pendant on her chain. “You’re still wearing it. It’s nice to see some things don’t change.” He lifted it from where it rested against her skin then turned it over. “Eus Nods,” he said with a smile.

  “Eus Nods,” she said back, with a smile. It was an error in the engraving.

  He turned back, dabbed a monogrammed white cloth handkerchief to his eyes, then handed her a sealed envelope and a business card. Not another facialist, she hoped. Her skin was fine. Gaelen was just being … Gaelen.

  “Open it later,” he said. She peeked at the card. Benjamin had written Noah’s name and local number. She knew she’d need to get the lists from Noah before she could do anything with the first Zaanics book.

  Fifteen painful minutes later, she couldn’t take it anymore. Her anxiety about being back in San Francisco made her restlessness almost unbearable. “I have to go, Benjamin. Thank you for inviting me. It was great to see you again.”

  “Philistine,” he whispered.

  “Sue me for philistinism,” she whispered back.

  “I would have to sue 99.9% of the people in the world.”

  “It’s hard being you, isn’t it?”

  “Au contraire. It must be hard to not be me,” he replied.

  She gave him a peck on the cheek. He kissed the back of her hand then put his attention back to the performance.

  On her way out, she considered calling the number on the card, but it was getting late, and she was still too hungry to deal with it.

  Cate used her card in the door of her room then took the pizza box into the main room.

  Someone had been there since she left it. Was it housekeeping? She’d put the Do Not Disturb door hanger on the handle, but her suitcase was open, her clothes were tossed everywhere, and the bed was unmade. The safe in the closet was pried into, the pockets in the clothes on the hangers had clearly been searched, and even her case on the bathroom sink was in disorder.

  Cate took a tissue and picked up the phone receiver to call the front desk.

  “This is Marcus, how may I help you this evening?”

  “Hello, Marcus. Were there any calls to room 42 tonight?”

  “Let me check.” He paused. “There was one call. They asked to be connected to the room, but the call log doesn’t indicate the caller left a message.”

  “What time was this?”

  “8:52.”

  “Thank you.” She hung up. There wasn’t much else to do aside from call the police, which would be useless, so she cleaned the surfaces with Purell. What was the point of trying to get prints? It was a hotel room. As far as she could tell, nothing was even taken, so what were they looking for? Did they have the wrong room?

  Feeling unsettled and invaded, she show
ered then changed into a faded Asian Kung-Fu Generation t-shirt and got into bed to watch Steilacoom. Tomorrow she’d go to Japantown.

  She absolutely did not think about her father or her sisters, or the fact that someone had ransacked her hotel room. That went just fine until she tried to go to sleep.

  Noah had just wrapped up an exhausting week as a translator and assistant to a visiting South Korean executive whose manic energy made Noah think of Slimer from Ghostbusters.

  All he wanted to do after that was take a few days of paid time off and recover, both mentally and physically. He would sit very still, eat grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, and read in his pajamas. But Benjamin Nightjar called a half a day into his recovery period, and he was surprised enough to pick up the phone, which was when Benjamin said, “Cate has returned.”

  So he abandoned his recovery period and dragged his pulsating, fuzzy head and aching body out to her hotel that cold and overcast morning. And somehow, even though he hadn’t planned it, he wound up following Cate Lyr through Japantown. He tried to do it as stealthily as a 6′ 4″ man could, but everyone around him was so tiny, and his height made him feel like Ymir the ice giant.

  Cate moved with a careful step and paused often to look at things. He loomed at a distance in his long coat, unbuttoned over his business casual clothes, and tried to look inconspicuous.

  She wound through a small sculpture park then continued heading west on Post Street, turning right to go into New People, a tall, glass-fronted building with at least three floors. It was much more difficult to lurk unseen in there, but Cate left the store (after buying one small thing) without noticing him.

  Heading west on Post again, he followed her left onto Webster Street, and then into an indoor mall, one of the few surviving relics from the late 70s or early 80s. Cate headed right for a small, glass-walled stationary store, and he lingered outside the windows. There was no way he could be stealthy in there. Instead, he glanced through the window when her head was turned, and pretended to talk on his cell phone.

  “Pathetic,” he mumbled, and watched as she looked at a lot of things.

  And he waited.

  And he waited.

  She took so long in that store he wished he had brought a picnic lunch. She took so long he wondered if she needed an intervention. She took so long he lost all sense of time, waiting outside that stationary store in a windowless indoor mall. When she finally emerged, Noah was a third of the way into a existential crisis.

  And she had bought just a couple of things. Absolutely mystifying.

  He wished he could see her closer. It felt like cryptid-spotting, but he was nervous about approaching her. What if she didn’t want to see him? He’d visited Cate in the hospital after the ceremony, as soon as he’d heard about her accident, but she was sleeping. At a loss for what to do, he left a flower arrangement, though he thought a sink full of ducklings would be better (he suggested this and the hospital staff were adamant he not do that). When he came back to visit again, she was gone, even though, to him, she hadn’t looked ready to be discharged. She looked like she needed at least another week there. That was the last time he’d seen her, but when Benjamin told him more, it seemed like a completely reasonable response.

  Cate strode out as though energized by her extensive interaction with Japanese stationary. He ducked into a corner, heart racing, then hurried to catch up as she crossed the mall and went into the Kinokuniya bookstore.

  He had never been to Japantown, even though he grew up in San Francisco. He had never gotten out much and only had a few friends here and there. School — and learning the VZ Yesuþoh — took up all of his time. And he was an only child, aside from Jude, who didn’t even live with them. His father spent all of the time they spent together to teach him how to read the characters of the language out loud. They didn’t throw the ball around, they didn’t go fishing or sailing or whatever other fathers and sons did together.

  He’d been a good student and a dutiful son. But really, what was the point of all that work, when he didn’t even know what he was reading? He couldn’t talk about it to anybody. He knew a couple of kids in the sixth grade who were preparing for their bar mitzvah, but he couldn’t commiserate, at least not without violating his family’s trust. And though he and they seemed to be in the same boat, they had a community. What would he tell them, anyway? I’m learning how to speak the characters of a secret language created in the Middle Ages by one of my ancestors. He’d be a pariah.

  So he had never been to Japantown, though he could speak Japanese and often worked with executives from Japan. But he was there now. He was in a bookstore, watching Cate like some kind of weirdo.

  Cate’s phone buzzed. She found a quiet, out-of-the-way corner on the main floor of Kinokuniya.

  “I still don’t like opera,” was the first thing she said.

  “I promised you once that I would always be honest with you,” Benjamin said back.

  “I am being honest with you.”

  “Do you remember when I told you that?” he pressed.

  “I asked the Lyr attorney to always be honest with me? I must’ve been on post-surgery painkillers, or maybe six hours into a sweat lodge ritual.”

  “You were still watching cartoons on TV, and laid up on a sofa with an ear infection.”

  “In that house? Sounds perilous.”

  “I promised you that even though professional and legal reasons prevented me from fulfilling that promise. So I will be honest with you now and tell you that I wish you would make a change.”

  “A change. Like to my hair color? Or do I need an upper-lip waxing? Oh — you mean to my personality.”

  “I wasn’t entirely joking before,” Benjamin said. “I always thought you should be a lawyer. We talked about it a few times. It’s not too late; you don’t have a criminal record — ”

  “Like there aren’t lawyers with criminal records?”

  He paused. “I’m more sorry than you know that things happened the way they did. But you could still walk away. I could help you get into one of the best schools. You could start over.”

  “I already did start over, Benjamin.”

  Cate thought about Morty “Flying Jibboom” Nash (“Nash like the car”), who gave her a job as his secretary in his import/export office. Morty was a sailor and a Navy man, the sixth and youngest child of a single mother who worked in munitions assembly in World War II. After Cate told him after some prodding what happened to her, he told her that she’d been through a hell of a white squall, a dangerous gust that happens in clear weather, with no warning — though you can sometimes tell one’s coming from the foam on the waves. Cate wondered if she’d seen the foam and disregarded it.

  Mort also told her that men were like the four winds — they could make your path smooth sailing, or they could toss your vessel like it was a toy. “As a woman,” he’d told her, “you are, for better or worse, a sailboat to a man’s wind. But you can work around it, to some extent.”

  “I worry about you,” Benjamin said, bringing her back to the present.

  She’d done more than enough worrying herself.

  “I don’t want you to get into any trouble. I’m just afraid you’re pushing your luck.” Benjamin paused, then she heard the smile in his voice. “You’d make a great lawyer. Not a sell-out like me, he said, admiring his Armani suit in the mirror, momentarily blinded by the reflection of his Omega Constellation watch.”

  “Funny.”

  “Think about it.”

  “There’s nothing to think about.”

  “We’ll talk again soon.”

  Cate put the phone back in her bag. He had a lot to say to her. That happened when you just kept saving up what you wanted to say.

  She went back inside and stopped in front of the long magazine section, idly pulling the pendant on her necklace from one side to the other. There was a sudden clamor to her left. The books on an end-cap display toppled to the floor in front of a tall guy in a
coat.

  “Profiteroles!” he muttered like a curse, and hastily gathered the books and plastic support pieces to put back on the shelf.

  She walked over and stopped in front of him.

  “Dolne, Noah.”

  He winced and looked up. “Dolne, Cate.”

  “Shopping for manga?” she asked lightly. “Or looking for profiteroles?”

  He let out a nervous laugh as he stood up. “Yes. Uh,” he shook his head and pressed his eyes shut for a second. “No,” he corrected. “Just …” he swept his arm to the side to indicate, she presumed, the wide realm of retail goods. He knocked a magazine off the stand and caught it. “Books. You know. I like books.”

  “Oh, you read, huh?”

  His face lit up with a grin and she felt that same crack in her heart. Noah and Benjamin had been caught in the riptide, hers and her father’s. Seeing Noah — his height, his charming and awkward grin — made her feel foolish for needing to heal without him.

  Her assistant Yuji entered her office and stood just inside the door. “Ms. Lyr, a Mr. Tristan Billet is on hold for you.”

  Gaelen started to type her notes from the conference call she just wrapped up with a bunch of imbeciles who were probably throwing their own feces against the wall that very moment.

  “I have no idea who that is,” she told him. Tell him to leave a message.”

  “He’s been on hold since your meeting started,” Yuji said.

  “That was nearly an hour ago,” she pointed out.

  He shrugged a centimeter.

  She sighed and looked up. “Did he say who he was?”

  “A linguist.”

  “Oh, him.” She gestured impatiently. “Send him through.”

  Yuji left, and a moment later, one of the lines on her phone lit red.

  “This is Gaelen Lyr.”

  “Gaelen, this — ”

  “Ms. Lyr,” she corrected sternly.

  “Uh, this is Tristan Billet. You contacted me a couple of days — ”

  “What do you have for me?”

  “Well,” he cleared his throat, “I ran some computer simulations.”