I snatched the slip of paper out of her hand and began to dial. Julia could wait; Jim wouldn’t. He answered on the third ring. “It’s Em,” I said. “What’s the plan?”
Jim’s shy voice was barely audible over the sound of a diesel engine echoing in the tight confines of a garage; he must have forwarded his calls over to the firehouse. “My flight gets in tomorrow at twelve-fifteen. I was wondering if—”
“You need me to fetch you at the airport?” I asked a bit too abruptly. If Betty had leaned any closer to the phone, she would have fallen into my lap.
“No, ah, no … I’m going to rent a car. I was thinking I could see you sometime in the afternoon. I have to talk to my aunt’s lawyers and so forth, and—”
“Sure. Where are their offices? I can meet you there.” As in, Don’t come here; my landlady will leave us no privacy.
Jim gave me an address in Lafayette, a small town not far from Boulder.
“What time’s your appointment?” I asked.
“Two-thirty.”
“Okay, let’s say they take an hour or so. I can be there at four.”
“Fine. And Em—”
“What, Jim?”
“I’m ah—”
“Me, too, Jim,” I said, not the least bit sure what he had been about to say. “Gotta go now. I have a redheaded carnivore here sizing me up for the frying pan.”
“You what?”
“Four o’clock tomorrow.”
“Sure.”
I pushed a forefinger down on the phone button to break the connection and dialed Julia’s number. I caught her just turning in for bed. Without preamble, she said, “I’ve decided that if you’re so interested in those damned journals, you should just come get them. My office, two o’clock tomorrow, and don’t be late.”
“No problem,” I told her, mentally reckoning the time it would take me to drive from Denver to Lafayette. I could make it. I said good night and hung up the phone. And smiled back sweetly at Betty the lioness Bloom. And went to bed.
I dreamt all night about a baleen whale as big as the universe that was trying to kiss me, which seemed all right, except that its kiss sucked me perilously close to its vast filtration system, and I didn’t want to become food.
The next morning, I stumbled down the outside stairs from my room at about 7:30 and found Betty already up, dressed, and setting out what looked like a tea party in the backyard. She had a nice damask tablecloth right down on the ground, and on top of it she had placed a plate of half-chewed doughnuts, a jug of coffee, and her nicest cups and saucers. She began to pour. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
Still pouring, she said, “My friends the raccoons got into my car again last night and ate half my doughnuts. I just thought they might like a little coffee with them, you know? Kind of dip them, with their scraggy little pinkies in the air?”
Taking advantage of Betty’s removal to the backyard, I hurried inside and telephoned Sergeant Ortega, who was already in his office. “Al Rosenblatt,” I told him.
“Who?”
“The man who was in Fred Howard’s office when I interviewed. His name is Al Rosenblatt. You know anything about him? He was at dinner at the Howards’ last night. Menken took me. Something about a deal Menken didn’t want to become involved in.”
Ortega made a hmm-hmm-hmm noise, which meant, I’m thinking about this. “You meet me here for lunch, okay?” was all he said.
“Sure, what time?”
“Noon okay?”
“Noon it is.”
Next I dialed Ginger Henley at the UPS in Douglas. “Oh, Em,” she said. “Hey, Laurie here says you wanted to know who’s been shipping sacks of drilling mud in and out of here. I thought that was kind of strange, too, so I talked to the guys who drove them in. They came from Canada.”
“Canada?”
“Yeah, Edmonton. There’s oil up there, isn’t there?”
Canada. I thanked her and put down the phone, wondering why in hell anyone would import drilling mud from Canada when it could be had sixty miles away.
No sooner had I laid the phone to rest in its cradle than it rang again. Betty was still outside, now reciting her ritual curses at the raccoons, so I answered it. “Miss Hansen?” a woman’s voice asked. It was a familiar voice, one I’d heard recently, but I couldn’t place it at first.
“Speaking.”
“Please hold for Mr. Howard.”
“Mr. who?” I began, but I’d been put on hold.
A moment later, Fred Howard’s uncouth voice came over the line. “This Hansen?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, we got a job for you. You report immediately.”
I stared blankly at Stanley, who had a moment earlier ambled in the door, taken a very messy swill of water from his stainless-steel dish, and flopped onto the kitchen floor. Stanley stared back, clearly affronted.
“You there?” said Fred Howard. He sounded anxious.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Just how soon is immediately?”
“Today. This morning. Your flight leaves this afternoon.”
“Where are you sending me?”
“Africa.”
“Well, I don’t know … .”
“Hey, you sounded so interested,” Fred said boisterously. “And just this morning, y’see, one of our well-site guys had to take this emergency leave.”
I glanced at the black plastic kitty-cat clock on the wall in Betty Bloom’s kitchen, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. The kitty cat’s tail and eyes switched back and forth to tick the seconds away, ticktock, ticktock. “Well, Mr. Howard,” I said, idiotically slipping into employee-boss formality, “you got to understand, I don’t even have a passport.”
“Right. Right—that’s why we gotta get started early! Got a full day for you.”
“You haven’t even said what you’re going to pay me.”
“Pay you? Oh, of course, of course. Yeah, well, I’ll match whatever Menken was paying you. Plus ten percent. Full housing benefits for overseas duty, of course. And a servant. Food. All that stuff. You’ll make out.”
Tecktock ticktock. It was 7:50. At ten o’clock, I could be at Boomer Oil to find out what was going on; noon at the Police Department, to assure Carlos Ortega that I was still alive; two at Julia Richards’s office, to get the journal; four in Lafayette. It was going to be a full day. “See you at ten,” I said, and headed for the shower.
Fred Howard’s secretary handed me a mound of papers to sign and assigned a “helper” to walk me through the process of getting a passport in a tearing hurry. This “helper” was big and male and shadowed my every move. When he followed me to the bathroom and waited outside while I peed, I decided it was time to terminate my employment with Boomer Oil. I told him I’d need to get a copy of my birth certificate, which was still in storage with a box of important papers in Elyria Kretzmer Finney’s basement. He said he’d drive me over there. I used the hide-a-key to get in, fumbled around for a minute or so looking through my boxes, then allowed as how I had to use the bathroom again. The upstairs bathroom at Elyria’s house has this neat window that looks like it doesn’t open, but does.
I’ll wager I was climbing onto the number 32 bus headed back downtown before the big guy figured it out, and I would have a little explaining to do with Elyria if he got mad and tumbled the place before letting himself out, but there you have it. Nevertheless, I was fifteen minutes late for lunch with Sergeant Ortega.
When I got to his office, I found he had company: two men in dark suits, cooling their heels, waiting for me. They goose-stepped me down a hall and sat me in an interrogation room, opened a folder, turned on the recording machines, and showed me a black-and-white glossy of Al Rosenblatt, a grainy candid blown up from a negative that had held a much larger image. “That him?” one of them said.
“Yes, that’s him.” There was no doubt; I’d know those needle eyes anywhere.
One of the suits slapped the folder shut. The other walked m
e through the story of where I’d seen him and what he’d been doing. “Now you tell me why you want to know,” I said when I was done spilling what paltry little information I had.
Ortega closed his eyes and shook his head, a barely perceptible jiggle: the gesture said, Don’t ask. Let it drop.
I sighed. “Well, if it’s so hush-hush, Carlos, then you’ll probably also want to know that Fred Howard phoned me up this morning first thing and offered me a job.”
The suits rotated their heads toward me with an audible click.
“Starting immediately,” I said. “In fact, that’s why I was late. He’s goosing me through a passport application so I can be on a plane for Africa this afternoon, complete with heavy-weight escort.”
“Don’t go,” Ortega said.
“I have no intention of going,” I answered. “You think I’m nuts? I’m sure West Africa is lovely to visit this time of year, but there’s nothing wrong with my nose. I know rotten fish when I smell it.” Okay, so I’d allowed myself the fantasy during the hour it had taken me to drive into Denver and park the truck. I would have loved to go to Africa; it was just that I also wanted to make sure I came home again, and in good shape. I would have been more stupid than naive if I had deluded myself that there weren’t at least twenty men on Fred Howard’s Rolodex he would have called before me if his offer had been legitimate. No, it was clear that Fred Howard simply wanted me out of town. Way out of town. I had simply played along to see what I could learn, and to see if I could get a free passport.
The boys in suits had another twenty questions for me. I filled them in on what I knew of Fred Howard’s business dealings, finishing off with a thumbnail summation of the state of the oil business. “Foreign money’s buying out some of the midsized to small oil companies,” I said. “These are privately held corporations, so the buyout is absolute. I can only imagine what that does to boys like Fred Howard, who go from being biggish fish in the local pond to little guppies in the holding corporation ocean. Maybe he’s even looking down the barrel of a forced early retirement with reduced upside.”
The suits looked pensive for a moment,, then excused themselves. Ortega said, “They’ve been tracking Al Rosenblatt for years.”
“Who are ‘they’? FBI? DEA?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Carlos—”
He waved a hand at me. “Em, you know I can’t talk about this stuff.”
“Then they’re narcs.”
“Please, Em, you stay here with me awhile, okay?”
“But I’ve already told you everything I know.”
Ortega closed his eyes, said, “Even if they know that, there’s such a thing as revenge.” When he opened his eyes again, they shone with moisture.
I think it was about then that I began to realize exactly how much trouble I was in.
Julia met me in the waiting room by her secretary’s desk and all but threw the journal into my lap. “There. Now it’s your problem,” she said.
“You read it, didn’t you?”
Julia set her jaw in anger. “You want to know who Chandler Jennings is? I’ll tell you who Chandler Jennings is. He’s a drug dealer, pure and simple. You wanted coke back in college, who’d you go to? Our boy Chandler. You want to know how he got that nickname? Chandler means a candle maker. ‘Go to the Chandler,’ they’d say, ‘he’ll light you up.’”
I hadn’t even gotten up from where I sat in the depths of yet one more swank overstuffed waiting room chair, so sudden had been her appearance and assault with the book, so I just sat there and stared.
Chandler. Drugs. Colombia. Oil. Miriam. I was finally beginning to connect the dots.
Julia stood in the middle of the waiting room. She stared not at me but at the book on my lap, and now that the strength of her anger had drained away, I saw at last the pain that dwelled beneath it. So Chandler had gotten through to Julia, too. What had it been, a lost weekend of experimentation with drugs and sex? Or had she found the experience pleasant but too short? And now she had read Miriam’s journal.
“Do you think he lit Miriam up?” I asked gently.
She shook her head. “Miriam? No. She was a cheap drunk. Hypersensitive even to aspirin, and she didn’t like the feeling of being high, or at least not on chemicals. Wouldn’t touch drugs with a barge pole.” A moment later, she turned and started back into her office.
“Wait. Do you know how I can get in touch with him?” I asked.
She let out her breath soundlessly, her shoulders falling, and only then did I know she had been holding it. “No,” she said tiredly. “Men like Chandler don’t leave a forwarding address.”
I took the journal to the privacy of the cab of my truck and opened it, my hands scurrying ahead of my sight. The whole case was flying open now; seemingly unrelated pieces of the puzzle were connecting. But here in my hands lay the beating heart of the mystery.
I found Miriam in a fugue:
August 2
Cecelia just watches me. I have to tell him it’s over, and then I’ll tell her not to worry, and somehow let her know that he won’t be coming again.
August 5
Chandler came again today and I tried to tell him that he couldn’t come here anymore, but every time I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would never feel his touch again. Then when he came to me and put his arms around me, it was like he knew. He walked out the door with a look on his face that was spooky. I didn’t even have time to feel relieved before the longing set in.
As disgusting as I feel about my deceit with Joe, Chandler’s been a friend to me, and I didn’t want to hurt him. I keep staring at the telephone, willing him to call, so I can explain. But I must care more for Joe, or I would have left with Chandler. Or maybe it’s just what I’ve always known, ever since that time senior year: I don’t love Chandler.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I look out the window and wonder where I am, because I am that girl I was and I’d so much prefer that this present time and place hasn’t happened yet.
August 21
I’ve tried to tell myself again and again that it isn’t him I need; it’s the sex. But sex smells like him now. Feels like him. Sounds like him. My body even smells like him. Belongs to him. And yet I don’t love him. I can’t find it in myself even to weep.
There was a break of several weeks. When Miriam started to write again, it was from another location. If I had to guess, I’d say it was Aspen, that ski resort in the high Rockies where the rich and famous try to look swell on skis. That’s where Cecelia’s refrigerator-door limerick had sent her, anyway. Except that wherever Miriam was, she was not there with “a friendly looking dope.”
September 30
There’s no beginning or end to this, so the middle is as good a place to start as any. I’ve been here over a week now, and the therapy is helping, I think. Julia said that this woman could help with whatever was bothering me, and at least it’s a relief to be away from home. I thought I was going to have to talk in a straight line, but that’s not how things happen around here.
Joe doesn’t know where I am. What a strange feeling. In all the years we’ve been together, I have always been right where he knew how to find me. Right where he’d left me. I guess he’ll know where I am when the bank statement arrives. I’m not so ignorant that I’d do this on a credit card. God knows, Joe knows how to track something as transparent as that a whole lot faster. I even paid cash for the gas to drive here so he wouldn’t know for just once in his life even which direction I took off to. I just hope he takes good care of Cecelia, and reads her note to him, or the parts that would be okay for her to see.
October 22
The therapist says I should write. What an irony. I’m the one who’s kept a journal since I was how old? and I can’t figure out anything to say.
October 30
Write something. What? Five days a week, I sit with this therapist, and words tumble out of my mouth, but I don’t seem to
have anything to say. She says I’m depressed. She’s offered medication for it. I think I’d rather feel the pain for a while.
She’s asked about my parents and all that stuff, and we talk about it, but I’m beginning to get angry. Sure, my life as a little girl wasn’t perfect, and sure, there were jerks who didn’t understand me and all that stuff, but damn it, I’ve made a mistake and I feel sick about it! Can’t she understand that? I want to take the pain of it and ram it through my hand like a thorn so I’ll keep on feeling it and never stop. She asks if I think Joe or Cecelia were really hurt by it. I can’t understand that logic.
November 6
I’m supposed to write down my dreams. I don’t remember the dreams I have at night, never have. She says that if I keep paying attention to them and write, write, write, I’ll likely start to remember them. Bullshit.
November 7
I hate this.
November 8
I hate her.
Miriam had moved in her grieving from numbness into anger, and its strength was beginning to push matters to a head. How I wished she’d written more in those days, left greater detail of her flight into depression, and hiding, and psychotherapy. I hadn’t yet met the emotional beasts that stared at her from the edge of her campfire, and I knew nothing of the process she used to chase them away. But I kept on reading for the parts I could understand, looking for that strength that had helped her grow. Had that strength, ironically, been Chandler?
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