Right now, at her kitchen table in Tim’s old apartment on Collingwood Street, Ruth looked down at the yellow tablet that was filled with her own handwriting and indecipherable scribbles. There were Cindy’s telephone numbers at home, plus her cell phone and office. There was a familiar address and zip code in Boston. Then it said:
Family:
Cindy – Mother – Ruth – Mother –
Dianne – Daughter –
Men –
Boys – Castro boys – Mom –
Crystal Methamphetamine
Speed - Tina
Kidney dialysis –
Kidneys, Livers, gizzards,
eyeballs – HANDS –
golden earrings –
Then there was a bunch of doodling Ruth couldn’t make out… words… numbers… and what looked like a hand with a face behind it. That was it. A hand was covering a face, like Mai Ling’s hand covering her face when she’d been so embarrassed about Nancy Kwan and Rene scolded her. What was Ruth thinking about that for? She had no idea.
The list began again:
Family:
Ruth & Dan Taylor
Dianne – daughter -
Friendship:
Cindy – Sister – Friend – Cindy –
Family:
Ruth Taylor – Sam Connor
Family:
The gay boys…
Nick & Tim –
Artie & Arturo –
Family:
Sam Connor’s daughter –
Jane & Ben Larson and their children:
Sarah, the Magic Child –
Baby Samuel Timothy
Adam –
Ruth was still drawing circles and squiggles and loops in the margins as she re-read the page, but now she stopped. What was Adam’s name doing there among Sam’s family? She might have mentioned Tim to her old friend Cindy while she was doodling and talking on the phone. It wouldn’t have been unusual to have talked about Tim and Nick in the same sentence. And it would have been natural for Cindy to ask if Ruth was seeing anyone, so Sam’s name came up and therefore his daughter – "Jane & Ben" and their children. Where did Adam fit in, though?
Ruth felt a tingle like a cold finger down her spine and sat up very straight in her chair for a moment. It must be the wine. She wasn’t used to drinking in the daytime. When she looked back down at the page, she noticed that Adam was followed by more names:
- Adam –
- Connie – Kyle – Anna – Mitchell -
- David – Randall and Rebecca –
Now she remembered that Randy and Becky were Cindy’s twins. All these names were Cindy’s children in order of age. Adam was the oldest. Ruth had seen their names and pictures in every Christmas card. Their hairstyles and clothing might have changed over the years, but Ruth thought she could recognize each and every one of them, even across a crowded airport lobby, even if their meeting was accidental. These were Dianne’s real siblings; at least they were her half-brothers and sisters. They were more closely related to Ruth’s daughter than she was.
The telephone rang and brought Ruth back to the present. "Tim!" she shouted, relieved to hear his voice, rather than Patrick calling back so soon, or even Sam. Tim would be reassuring to talk to, but mostly she just listened. "Yes, Tim…
yes, I see. Yes, my line was busy… I’m sorry to worry you. I was talking to my old friend Cindy in Boston and also…No… I haven’t seen any television news. Oh, my! Don’t tell me they’re already reporting on that box that came here…"
Ruth reached for the remote to turn on the portable TV
set in the corner of the kitchen. "No, Tim… there doesn’t seem to be anything on the local channels right now. On the radio? Nick did… I see. Down by the wharf there, huh?"
She listened to Tim tell her how happy he was that Nick was on his way down to celebrate a new contract by taking them out to dinner. "The box? Well, honestly, Tim, you haven’t given me a chance. Teresa thought it was flowers at first, but there was a zip-lock bag inside with an eyeball and a nose with a gold ring and a note. They were frozen, too, or at least they had been. If they match the body parts in the bay and the things they found in the sewer pipes on Castro Street, then I guess all that’s missing now is the head. But there were Polaroid pictures of it in the box. Do they still make Polaroids?"
Now she was afraid that Tim was getting excited and she hadn’t meant to upset him. "No, Tim, there’s no need for you to rush over here. I’m fine, really. The police have already come and gone and taken everything away. There’s a patrol car practically circling my block. I couldn’t feel safer. Besides, I’ve already called Sam to come and spend the night. He’s probably on his way right now."
Ruth wished Sam was on his way this fast. She felt lonely in her kitchen all of a sudden and there was a cold draft with the window open, but she didn’t want Bartholomew to come home and not be able to get inside. Where was that cat?
"I could come over if you want me to and wait for Sam with you." Tim’s words through the telephone were tempting.
"No, no… you just give Nick my love and you two boys have a lovely evening. I’ll call you on your cell if anything else comes up, okay? I promise. Don’t forget to carry it with you.
Bye, now…"
Ruth didn’t want to lie to her nephew. She had called Sam. That part was true, but she didn’t know when he would get her message and whether he could come to the city, much less spend the night with her, unless she told him the whole truth.
Still, there was nothing Tim could do about the situation.
Where was Bartholomew? Of all the times when she could use a big furry cat to hold and cuddle, this was one. There was no reason for him to run off today. Dianne was still a few blocks away in Davies hospital. She wasn’t around to torment either one of them.
Ruth walked up the hallway to her living room. The western sky looked clear as a bell. There wouldn’t be any fog tonight and even though it wasn’t very warm outside, it was too nice an afternoon to stay cooped up in here, waiting for something to happen.
She picked up her purse and her cell phone and locked the back door. She even locked the deadbolt on the front door on her way out of her apartment. She often got lazy about locking that one, although she made a big show of locking it once for Dianne on the first day she arrived. She supposed Dianne would be leaving soon, now that the medical tests were back and the truth was out. Dianne wouldn’t waste time looking for a kidney here, now that she knew her real mother and siblings lived in Boston and not in San Francisco. Ruth stood inside the gate and waited to see if a police car really would come by.
It seemed like a long time before any car at all drove up Collingwood Street. There was a single man driving it. He wore his collar turned up and his hat pulled down. Maybe it was an unmarked police car. They probably wouldn’t want to be too obvious.
Ruth just couldn’t wait any longer. She was tired of waiting. Now that she had a plan in mind she felt more in control, more like her old self again. And as soon as she stepped out into the fresh air she felt even better. She wanted to find her cat and she had a pretty good idea where to look for him this time.
Chapter 21
he word spread quickly through Davies Hospital that a wicked witch was residing on the fourth floor. Dianne’s T acid tongue was nastier than any storybook villain. Lab technicians, office workers, even ambulance drivers who had no business on that floor could be seen sneaking past her room to see if the patient in Room #490 could really breathe fire.
No one might have been brave enough to go near her, but a couple of gay male nurses who patronized Arts Bar and Restaurant on Castro Street had recognized Tim and Ruth when they emerged from her room unharmed. They spread the word to their co-workers, many of whom thought Tim was cute.
The sedative they’d put into Dianne’s IV kept her unconscious well past lunchtime, so that meant one less meal for her to complain about. When she finally did come around, Dianne decided to leave the ho
spital immediately. She ripped the IV out of her arm, got dressed and stepped onto the elevator before anyone knew she was awake. No one would have dared to stop her anyway.
Dianne was disgusted that she’d wasted time and money coming to San Francisco. What was she thinking? The sedative was wearing off as she tried to remember why—besides a kidney—the idea had occurred to her in the first place. Her marriage was floundering, but that was nothing new. As her husband’s "business trips" grew longer and more frequent, Dianne had grown tired of sitting home with nothing to do but touch up her nails and argue with the help. She could only spend so many hours in church meetings or ooh-ing and aah-ing over porcelain figurines or stuffing envelopes for Christian political candidates, but where did she have to go?
San Francisco was not the answer. Her first choice would have been to visit her father in Minneapolis. He might have been willing to part with a kidney. She’d always been Dan Taylor’s "little girl," but lately it was impossible to reach him.
He’d created an army of secretaries and receptionists to guard against any reminders of his past. When Dianne decided on San Francisco instead, she thought it smarter to forge ahead without even calling first. What else could her boring little mother have to do than welcome her long lost daughter with open arms?
"Harrumph!" Dianne opened the gate on Collingwood Street. She hadn’t counted on her own mother being an imposter! And she could hardly believe that drab woman who’d raised her, that simple Midwestern housewife had now somehow managed to snag herself a millionaire with a mansion in the suburbs of San Francisco.
Dianne hadn’t counted on coming face to face with her cousin Tim, either. As far as she was concerned, when people ran away to San Francisco, they should disappear for good. If anything positive had come of all this, it was finding out that she wasn’t related to that smart-mouthed pervert after all.
It was even worse to discover that she was related to a bunch of Jews, but she needed them for the time being. She would have to try to be pleasant enough to get a kidney out of one of her step-siblings and then she could shun them. She could spend the rest of her life pretending they never existed and nobody would have to know that she wasn’t born a Protestant.
Dianne had trouble opening the deadbolt lock on the apartment door. Ruth never used it unless she planned to be gone for a while, which suited Dianne just fine. She wanted to be alone, to soak in a hot tub and get the hospital smell off her, then pack her bags and get out of here once and for all.
"Do you need some help there?" Dianne heard a voice behind her. It was the upstairs neighbor, that sickening freak named Marsha who used to be a boy. Dianne cringed at the thought of spending one more night in this God-forsaken place.
She could picture a circus with its sideshow entertainers lined up and down both sides of Castro Street, including her former
"cousin" Tim. She imagined the garish signs behind them: See the Amazing "Half-man/Half-woman" or " Alligator Lady and her husband, the Rubber Man" or " Watch the Sword-Swallowing Boy"
spelled out on gaudy canvasses and billowing in the fog.
"I can get it myself!" she snapped at Marsha. Thank goodness the deadbolt finally turned before Dianne went insane.
Marsha flitted up the stairs to his/her own apartment and Dianne could have sworn she smelled popcorn, salted peanuts and zebra shit. She heard the distant trumpeting of an elephant in the squeal of someone’s brakes on the steep Collingwood hill.
Lions roared in the wind outside.
Dianne set her purse on a kitchen chair and looked at the note-pad that Ruth had left behind. Most of it was gibberish, a bunch of squiggles and doodles and then she saw the name of Cindy and realized that this list of names and telephone numbers in Boston might come in handy. She tore the page from the note pad, folded it and dropped it into her purse. Next she called the airport while the bathtub filled. She would catch the next available flight to just about anywhere in order to get out of this hellhole.
Ruth didn’t even stop at Arts. She figured that if someone was out to get her, he would look in one of two places first—her apartment or the restaurant. Her apartment seemed a little safer than a public place, but it felt too stifling to stay there.
And if she went to the restaurant she’d not only make a target of herself but also risk the safety of the customers and her co-workers. Besides, Ruth was worried about Bartholomew, so she tried to think like a cat.
She crossed Castro Street and kept going on 19th, turned left at Hartford and hoped she could remember which building it was where Bart hid out before. Last time she and Amanda Musgrove had approached it from the back side. She needn’t have worried. A row of avocado green refrigerators stood on the sidewalk out front—exactly like the one in the photograph. Their doors had been removed so that children couldn’t crawl inside and get trapped. The freezer side was just wide enough for a human head. She also noticed that there were only five refrigerators and there were six apartments.
A car pulled out of the driveway, nearly hit her, and sped north in a hurry, close enough for her to get a glimpse of the driver and the passenger. Ruth might not have been able to swear to it in a court of law, but she guessed that the driver was Al Molino, the owner of the card shop next door to Arts. The passenger was his brother Ed from Chicago, who had recently bought this building. Or they could have been the other way around. They weren’t twins, but they looked enough alike to confuse anyone at a glance.
"Good, that means nobody’s home," Ruth thought to herself. Then she wondered why the Molino brothers weren’t in jail. At least Ed, the one who had his name on the deed to this building, should have been in some kind of trouble for having a methamphetamine lab in the basement.
The gate was held open with a single copy of the
"Watchtower" magazine. It was the same issue Amanda used before, with the shepherd on the cover and his flock of sheep on a hillside under a bright yellow sun in a deep blue sky. Ruth also remembered that Amanda put both copies back in her purse when they were finished here the other day. They’d left a stack of Bay Area Reporters in the front hallway, but there was no sign of them now.
Ruth stepped inside and placed the religious tract back where she found it. She had a superstitious feeling about not wanting to move anything. Ruth couldn’t imagine why Amanda had come back here alone, but it was strange to see the gate held open just like last time. She walked down the long, dark hallway to the rear of the building. The room where she’d first discovered her cat was empty now. The cans of paint thinner were gone too and Ruth noticed a row of water heaters against the wall, but they must have been there all along.
"Bartholomew! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Bartholomew!
Are you hiding from me, you naughty boy? Here, baby…"
Ruth’s voice echoed off the walls in the empty room. She thought she heard a cat’s cry in the distance, but it could have been coming from another house down the block or it might have only been her imagination.
She pressed the secret panel and entered the room where she and Amanda had discovered the illegal laboratory. It was empty. The vials and beakers were gone. The hot plates and trash cans and coffee filters had all been removed. The tables were gone too, even the one where she’d found Bartholomew licking the bloody meat cleaver. Ruth hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight, but she didn’t need one. Last time the windows were covered over with cardboard, but now the sunlight shafted through the dusty air.
It looked like someone had attached a high-powered nozzle to a garden hose and flushed everything out of the room.
Exhaust vents for three clothes dryers lined the wall along with plumbing for a row of washing machines. There was nothing sinister about a utility room. Ruth felt silly for having been so frightened.
"Meow!" It was loud and clear this time, but it came from somewhere above her. Ruth ran up the stairs to the first floor of flats. Their lay-outs were a mirror image of each other, running from the front to the back of the building. Both kit
chen doors stood wide open, one halfway off its hinges like it had been broken in. Ruth stuck her head inside each apartment and called, "Bart! Here boy! Are you in here, baby? Bartholomew!"
She climbed another flight of stairs. The apartments on the middle floor were being renovated. One had ladders and drop cloths, roller pans and paintbrushes everywhere. The other smelled of fresh paint and there was a wide-belt sander standing in the middle of the floor in the second room. A chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling, wrapped in an old pillowcase to keep the sawdust off.
Ruth wondered if the Molino brothers were doing the renovation work themselves. Maybe they had just run out of something and were off on a quick trip to a lumberyard or paint store. They might come back any minute and Ruth was getting nervous again. Maybe Amanda had only taken one of the
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