Elsinore Canyon

by J. M.

  Crest Cavity Protection

  Johnson’s Baby Powder Pure Cornstarch

  Colgate Peroxyl

  Jessalyn Cranach Non-Abrasive Facial Cleanser

  Jessalyn Cranach Oil-Free Eye Makeup Remover

  Jessalyn Cranach Every Day Skin Toner

  Molokai Shampoo for Blondes

  Charlotte Honeydew Long Hair Conditioner

  Victoria’s Secret Secret Charm Hydrating Body Lotion

  Victoria’s Secret Amber Romance Refreshing Body Mist

  Tampax Pearl Plastic Multipax Heavy Unscented tampons

  Could a person dissolve or crush a powder into any of those things and distill it out? Could a dog sniff it?

  Her clothes were in another “maybe” pile. She felt the hems, cuffs, pockets, and collars. Every jacket, blouse, skirt, and pair of pants. She sniffed them—what did a dog smell?—and refolded them before packing them back up. Could clothes be dusted or soaked in anything? Her lingerie—soft. Swimsuits, soft. Robes, soft. Shoes. She shook them. Could Claudia saw off the heels and glue them back on? Stop asking insane questions. Precious time ticking away on this bullshit. She felt every square inch of the linings of the suitcase and then sorted everything back in, but—she tossed everything back out again. Damn it, why? As if Claudia could cut a lining open and sew it back up without a trace! But Oscar? Perla? Had Miguel been told to hand the flight crew some trinket, with instructions to make sure Dana had it before she got off the plane? A Thank-you-for-flying-with-us gift that would destroy her life? How many operatives and links and variables could you safely have in a plan like this?

  Rosie and Gale were still hard asleep, thanks to Claudia’s Fuckitol. They might vomit and choke to death, and then there’d be an autopsy. No, the stewardess wouldn’t let them choke. Spiking their drinks, was Dana fucking kidding? She knew nothing about drugs and dosages, they really truly might be dying or DEAD on the buff leather tilt-back seats. The three of them had been playing Call of Duty when Rosie dropped off. Gale went next. Dana could see the dope thickening them up. Tongues sloppy, eyes lazy, minds wandering, three—two—one. The stewardess scared her. “Should we get these two some blankets?” she said with a discreet smile. Dana smiled back. “They do this all the time.” Such a little mother. She got their shoes off without eliciting a snore or a blink. Zonked.

  Everything back into the suitcase except the “maybe” pile. Crush. Rub. Smell. Fold. Back in. Maybe she needed to throw the suitcase itself into the tub and soak out whatever was in there. Maybe she could leave things behind. No, not with this crew. They wouldn’t miss anything, and besides, Thai customs agents would board the plane to do the check. Burn everything. Hah. If only you could open a window on a plane. She’d throw it all out and disembark nude.

  Her own laptop. She disconnected the power cord and turned it on. It started up. How could you stuff a battery with white powder or a bottle of something and have it still function? Same for the mouse, which used a drugstore battery. She put the computer into the “maybe” pile. She would have to get a tiny screwdriver from the crew. “As long as I have the time, I’m going to try to see what’s wrong with it.” She could pull that off.

  Her father would try to get her out of jail. He would go live in Bangkok and spend every penny he had to save her life at least, but she would still rot behind bars for years. Or was Claudia planning to kill him, too? Or maybe she was setting something else up, maybe her father was on his way to Asia to meet her for…what? Damn it. No more Oscar-grams, no more clues. The plane clicked across the northern latitude of 61 degrees at a heading of 270 degrees west.

  The International Date Line had been crossed. Deep seas with rogue waves rolled below the aluminum tube.

  Rosie and Gale were still dead asleep and the stewardess had retired to her darkened booth. Dana sat on the floor next to the unfolded bed. She had been awake for twenty-four hours. At her left were two items:

  One periwinkle crocheted bikini, Gale’s

  One Herve Leger ultrashort sequined bandage dress, Rosie’s

  At her right were six empty tubes and bottles:

  Crest Cavity Protection

  Johnson’s Baby Powder Pure Cornstarch

  Jessalyn Cranach Non-Abrasive Facial Cleanser

  Molokai Shampoo for Blondes

  Charlotte Honeydew Long Hair Conditioner

  Victoria’s Secret Secret Charm Hydrating Body Lotion

  The contents were gone. Squeezed, pumped, poured, dumped, flushed. Down the toilet, down the drain. The clear liquids she considered safe, so they were spared and repacked. It wouldn’t be realistic if she didn’t have some cosmetics. Still set to go were the tampons one by one, which would be followed by the cardboard box itself in shreds, then the empty bottles and tubes, sliced to strips with scissors and fed down the hole, and the scissors wiped with rubbing alcohol to remove her fingerprints. She could do it all before Narita, which was just over an hour away. She sighed. The computer couldn’t go, but then she didn’t see how it possibly needed to. She stuck it back in her suitcase. Every last item had been shaken, fingered, held up to the light, folded, poked with swizzle sticks, wiped down, and squeezed. Everything. Twice. The empties would probably keep her busy for another half hour, and then she could dab herself all over with a hot sponge and change into some different pajamas and soak in a blissful sea of sleep all the way to Bangkok.

  In her pocket were four small dark-brown glass bottles swabbed clean with rubbing alcohol, each bearing an unbroken manufacturer’s seal and containing twenty-five grams of Mallinkcrodt Cocaine Hydrochloride Powder USP CII. Maybe the anonymous tip from Elsinore Canyon to Thai customs that a passenger on N12UT was smuggling in medical-grade cocaine had already been placed. There were no e-mails about that, but of course a phone call would do just as well, maybe better. Four bottles. That made it easy to re-gift to Rosie and Gale. All Dana had to do was make sure to pull her sleeves down over her fingers when she tied two of the tiny bottles into the bikini and rolled the other two into the sequined dress and then tucked them back into Rosie and Gale’s bags. She would do that now, first, before she shredded and flushed her boxes and bottles. And then she would place a call to Thai customs herself to clarify everything.

  A cold, bitter wave rolled through her. To think, just hours earlier she had been battling her conscience over an accidental shooting—of an evil spy yet, who had virtually placed himself in the path of her bullets—and look at what had been planned all along for her. The things Polly had about her on his laptop! And as for the death-doctor, where had Dana been in her prayer? No mention of the grieving stepdaughter who showed her wounds every minute. As for the two accomplices, Dana would give them a chance. They might chicken out at the last second. They might arch a meaningful eyebrow to signal her of danger, or give up the scheme with a casual “Fuck this.” Or the whole thing might go bust in a shit-happens kind of way, the customs agents changing shifts or forgetting or screwing up—or the plane might actually land in the Maldives. Whatever happened, Dana would play as long as Rosie and Gale did. If they played to the end? She had some idea about quantities and qualities—she’d done a little research in the past few hours. In Singapore, for instance, fifty grams each would officially get them hanged. Maybe they would get pricked—lethal injection in Thailand since 2001. They had answered that e-mail and they knew she wouldn’t be getting out of the airport, and she couldn’t have two murder accomplices shadowing her in some unhelpful foreign land. She could always get back to the Bangkok prison later and explain or bribe or whatever you did to get your rich American girlfriends out, but for now Rosie and Gale would have to pay for the mistake of mixing themselves up with people whose blood ran hot, not cold like theirs.

  PLEASE HELP PHIL

  As of Tuesday, Mr. Hamlet was not a criminal suspect, Oscar having backed his story up to a tee, and it was 99 percent certain that he would not be charged. Polly was in a coma at St. John’s, where Laurie was maintaining a vigil. Phil had been sent
back to the cottage by everyone who had anything to say about it.

  I kept my voice even and edged my chair so I could get Phil’s attention without jarring him. “Isn’t it out of tune?” I said. It was the third time. I waited. “Phil?”

  “There’s more,” he said. He slouched over his guitar and played some twingy twangy nothing, then stopped. “I’m a bad boy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  He talked idly while he plucked. “Cat’s in the cradle, fork and a ladle, what have I done, what have I done, what have I done.”

  “Are you talking about something in real life, Phil?”

  “That’s all,” he said. That was all it had been for over an hour.

  He shoved his guitar to the side and hurried past me out of the cottage. I followed him to the door and rolled out after him on the rocky ground as far as I could before my wheels sank into the sand. He ran and leapt his way down to the beach, and stopped at the water’s edge. I watched for another solid hour as he stalked the shore and stared out at the horizon.

  Laurie stood at my side and peered down at Phil where he still lingered on the shore. “Thanks,” she said tersely. Marcellus’s truck idled nearby and he looked at me urgingly from behind the wheel.

  I tried again. “You know it was an acci—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that several times.”

  Marcellus stepped out of the truck and called. “I’ll give you a hand, Horst!” It would be hard to wheel back up through the rocks and dirt to my car, and Laurie certainly wasn’t inclined to help.

  “Just to let you know,” I said to her, “he’s fried. If I were you I’d keep an eye on him.”

  “I know my brother. I’ll know what to do for him.”

  “Good. I hope you know what to do for yourself.”

  She flew at me. “Oh, what’s that supposed to mean? I should let the Hamlets walk all over me? I should calm down and be nice to the people who shot my father?”

  “What makes you think—”

  “Calm people. Plenty of them at the hospital. Their fathers haven’t been shot by one of the untouchable Hamlets!”

  “I’m sorry, sorry.”

  “You get along with them so well. Maybe you could pass on a message: I know they bury bodies.” She leaned over me. “My father worked for them for a long time, and not all their filthy secrets are safe.”

  “I’ll tell them you said so.”

  She leaned away, and Marcellus appeared; he pushed me up the soft slope to my car. I felt Laurie’s eyes on me as I transferred to the driver’s seat. Thank God once again, I was the smoothest crip in town. Press, swing, I was in, no fumbling or flopping for want of Laurie’s help. Marcellus ran ahead to his truck, and I followed him in my car up to the main house.

  “Gives you an idea of what the drive up here was like,” he said as we entered his office.

  “She thinks bodies are buried?”

  “She’s throwing it around that the trip to the tropical paradise is fishy—some kind of escape plot. And she swears she’s going to shake all the skeletons out of the Hamlet closets. You might see it in the news; she’s talking to anyone who’ll listen.”

  “Is there anything to it?” I asked.

  “Fsh. Didn’t you ever listen to Polly?”

  “Well, yeah. So. His bullshit lives on.”

  Marcellus squinted. “That might make a good epitaph.”

  As it happened, no epitaph was contemplated for the time being, as Polly lingered in his coma and his vital organs were functioning. I went back to Santa Barbara, banished from Phil’s company by Laurie. Since Dana had asked me to take care of him, I googled “delusional” and “trauma.” From what I eventually learned, there were a few other terms I could have plugged in, like “babbling like a loon” and “drooling.” I didn’t know yet that Phil barely recognized Laurie, demanded to see Mr. Hamlet and then just talked and sang a lot of nonsense at him, stopped eating and sleeping, and kept accusing himself of some unspecified crime. I waited and worried as usual. Dana was engaging in her favorite post-crisis mode of communication—torturing me with silence.

  Dr. Claudia had passed out with her brain in disarray. The vital conversation with Garth, about getting Dana on a plane, had never taken place. When she awoke with her head in Oscar’s lap, she received a cascade of news that made her wonder whether she was still sleeping or hallucinating. That was well and good, Oscar assured her. Plenty of people would give anything to have such blissful ignorance of the night’s events. His sixth sense had told him to claim responsibility for the Maldives flight.

  And this was now. It was the mellow part of the afternoon. She turned her smooth, tanned body against silk sheets and hung up the phone in the Green Suite, so named for the rich hues of its velvet and brocade décor. She had chosen it as the temporary, or perhaps permanent, alternative to the master bedroom, which had been scrubbed of Polly’s drops and traces although not the guilt and fear, which were indelible. Mr. Hamlet sat next to her, his arms spread across the plush headboard and the fingertips of one hand working the center of his forehead.

  Dr. Claudia’s hand lingered on the phone. Turmoil like this could not last forever. If nothing else, it was running out of people to touch. Its essence was uncertainty, and some philosophical or physical principle would eventually force certainties to emerge. When she found the replies from Rosie and Gale, sent from the plane shortly after midnight, she had set her nerves to go off in twenty-four hours. Oddly, disconcertingly, nothing happened. Twenty-four hours passed, then another twenty-four, and now it was heading into another twenty-four without a word from the other side of the world. Dr. Claudia thought of Dana as of a hapless soul run afoul of some huge, ineludible machinery—a spider washed down a drain, a kitten left in a freezer—and wondered what Dana’s current stage of misfortune was. No desperate phone call from her, no notification from the State Department. The State Department, wasn’t that how it would happen? Or perhaps a public defender from Thailand, using Dana’s cell phone. Didn’t they make phone calls from prison over there?

  The situation with Rosie and Gale was just as strange. The Singapore Air tickets were still unclaimed. Well, who knew? They were far away, with freedom and money. Southeast Asia didn’t seem like their type of playground to Dr. Claudia, but they might be doing nightclubs with a couple of billionaire boys from Arab latitudes or Slavic longitudes. Or they might be running up a monstrous tab all by themselves at some five-star resort. Lord, what was happening in that splotch on the map?

  Dr. Claudia turned away from the phone to touch her husband’s bare knee. “He’s being looked after.” She sat up and stretched her hands out to him comfortingly. “Garth? We’re doing everything we can.” He allowed her to take him. She rolled between his legs and kissed the backs of his hands, then the palms. Then his fingers, one by one. She looked up at him tenderly. “There is nothing more we can do. It’s up to him, and his…his guardian spirit now. Garth, he’ll be fine. Youth is resilient. People have suffered shocks like this and come back.”

  Mr. Hamlet gave her a soft, painful smile. “Are these things happening for a reason? I feel like something I did set it all in motion.”

  “Garth, don’t take on such guilt—”

  “Why is it such a storm of shit?”

  “That’s the way it is with bad news. It comes in storms, not drops.”

  “But this is a storm of storms.” He gathered his wife’s hair in his hand as she kissed the inside of his hip. “Polly comatose and fighting for his life.” She slid her lips down his groin. “Phil in that nether-world, no better than Polly.” The inside of his thigh. “Laurie spreading these rumors. I wonder if people are listening to her.” He curled down in bed and cradled his wife’s head in his hand.

  “We’ve got to live with that,” she said. “It’s too clear what happened. We shouldn’t have…cleaned up, so quickly.” The phone rang again. She gave Mr. Hamlet a kiss and rolled away. He watched while she talked to some bear
er of further bad news; her eyes lowered and her elbow stiffened at an awkward angle. She hung up. “Laurie’s here. She’s come straight from the hospital.” Mr. Hamlet bolted forward. “No, it’s not that. But someone has to talk to her.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “We’ll both go.” They pulled on their clothes and made a quick trip to the bathroom to swab off their coital musk.

  At the door, Mr. Hamlet tugged the inside of Dr. Claudia’s elbow.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t the life I meant to give you. I’m going to make it better.”

  “As long as I have you.”

  He kissed her. They skimmed down the hall. Voices drifted up from the foyer: Miguel’s apologies alternating with Laurie’s hurt, angry syllables. “I’m not leaving without it! Call the police, go ahead! I’ll be happy to tell them why I’m here.”

  Mr. Hamlet ran lightly off the staircase. “Laurie, I’ll help you. Thank you, Miguel.”

  Laurie’s nose and eyes were chafed from crying. She turned them on Mr. Hamlet accusingly. “I can’t find my father’s hard drive.”

  Dr. Claudia’s stomach churned. Polly’s files. Holy God, the most obvious thing in the world. She hadn’t even thought—where was her mind? Polly, that paranoid, indiscriminate scavenger, he could have collected—the things Danielle knew. Danielle had never mentioned him, never threatened anything about keeping records. And Polly wasn’t smart enough to read evidence—but someone else might be. She tried to speak evenly. “Which hard drive?”

  “His laptop. It’s not at the cottage, so it better be up here.”