The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries)

by Melissa F. Olson

  Or whatever. “Was he employed anywhere?”

  “Sometimes he would pick up a little extra cashing working for a moving company...but mostly he was trying to be a serious writer,” she added defensively, as if I’d accused Jason of being a lowlife. Which I kinda thought he was. “So he couldn’t be seen taking shifts as a busboy or something.”

  “Did Jason have any friends he spent a lot of time with?”

  “Not really – when he wasn’t with us, he went out by himself to work at Coffee Bean. He did go out for a beer with Conrad once in awhile, though.”

  “Oh?” My ears perked up. “Did those two get along?”

  Starla laughed nervously. “Well, you know. Most of the time. Jason tried really hard, though – he was always the one who called Conrad to hang out. I think he wanted them to have a good relationship, you know, for me.” She sounded proud.

  “I see. Listen, Starla, I think maybe I need to come back out there,” I said, trying not to sound depressed about it. I wasn’t in the mood for another trip, even if I could figure out how to keep my reasons from Toby. “When I was in LA before, I was just trying to find Jason, and my search ended when...uh, when I found him. Now I need to come back and visit some of these places, talk to baristas, other writers, your brother.”

  “You want to interview Connie?” There was a note in her voice: not hurt, exactly, but the potential for hurt if I found her brother in any way suspicious.

  “Yes,” I said cautiously. “It’s possible that Jason mentioned something to him during their time together that would help with case.” And I needed to check his alibi for when Jason had died.

  “Okay, um, I guess that makes sense,” Starla said thoughtfully. “I can pay travel expenses and stuff. Whatever you need. When do you want to come back?”

  “Let me check out some flight info and get back to you.”

  Toby called to say he’d figure out supper, and be home around 7:30. I beat him by about ten minutes, and the moment I sat down on the couch my temporary elation faded and I suddenly felt pulled toward sleep. I didn’t have the constant exhaustion I’d felt at the end of my first trimester, but I still got worn out really easily, which meant Toby often came home to find me passed out in unplanned catnaps. He usually woke me up to eat, and then I occasionally just went back to sleep for the night. Which felt as pathetic as it did fantastic.

  That night, though, when Toby woke me up I knew something was off. I opened my eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. “Sorry, what?”

  “I said, what the hell is this?” He held up a manila file folder. Jason Anderson’s file.

  I blinked. “Did you go through my bag?”

  “I needed a pen to sign for the Chinese food, so yes, I looked in your bag. Tell me the truth, Selena: have you been working on this case?” He glared at me, daring me to answer.

  I sat all the way up and rubbed my face, trying to clear my head.

  “I’ve just been making a few calls here and there, checking how the LA investigation is going.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously, babe, it’s no big deal.”

  “No big deal?” he snapped. He opened the file and shoved one of the pages of notes under my nose. “You visited a maximum security prison?” He tossed the paper, letting it waft to the bedroom floor, and pulled out another. “You agreed to pick up the case for a new client?” That one he practically threw on the floor. Stupid case notes. “Explain to me how this is no big deal. How this isn’t you going back on your word to me.”

  The smart thing to do here would have been to tell him about the Camry and my certainty that the killer was following me, but I rarely manage to do the smart things. And he would just ask me when this had all happened, and point out that I’d started digging into the case long before seeing the Camry. So instead I said probably the stupidest thing possible. “Honestly? What did you think I was gonna do?” I said tiredly.

  That stopped him short. “What?”

  “Toby, you’re looking at me like I just kicked your puppy, but what were you expecting? That I could just drop it? That I would become a completely different person who would let the whole thing go? Do you really not know me at all?”

  Wrong move, Lena. “This is your defense?” he said incredulously. “That you’re so...immature and reckless that I should never have believed your promise to begin with?” His tone was dangerously close to growling, and I tried not to flinch.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “That I’m the way I am. The guy attacked me, Toby. It’s not that I lied to you deliberately when I said I wouldn’t go after him, it’s that I just wasn’t capable of keeping that promise. That’s not who you married.”

  Toby sat down on the bed beside me, still looking angry and hurt, but also just...sad. “Lena. You’re pregnant.”

  “You think I don’t know that? Look at the size of my cankles.”

  “Stop it. Just stop it, with the jokes. You are supposed to change, to grow up. You’re supposed to start putting someone else’s needs before your immature, stubborn impulses.” Then he looked into my face and said the one thing I had feared from day one. “Honestly, Lena. What kind of mother are you?”

  I felt like I’d been punched in the face. “Please don’t say that to me. I’m trying.”

  “Are you?” he countered. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’re barely taking an interest. Most of the time you walk around like the baby, our child, is this awful thing that you’re pretending isn’t happening. You have a responsibility.”

  My fingers clenched into fists. “I’m not an eight-year-old with my first kitten, okay? I get it. I’m taking my vitamins, and eating right, and I stopped boxing-”

  “This isn’t about your body, Selena. It’s about you having some fucking consideration for the tiny person inside it.”

  I clenched my jaw. “You said we would figure out how I could be both things,” I said through my teeth.

  His face hardened. “Yeah, well, I’m taking it back.”

  “You’re taking it back? Now who’s being immature?”

  Being an adult, Toby ignored this. “I really thought some kind of instinct would kick in here, Lena, and you’d start to see this baby for what it is: an extension of us. A person. But you don’t, do you?”

  I looked away from him. He was a person, I was a person. Nate was a person. But the thing that was happening to my body? “No.”

  “Thank you for being honest.” He stood up and opened the closet, taking a small overnight bag off the top shelf.

  “You’re leaving?” I asked, though I should have been expecting it.

  He barely looked up from packing. “Lena, I don’t know what else to say to you. I need some time to myself to think about things.” He paused. “Unless you’re willing to drop the case for real.”

  My temper boiled over. Why should I? Why should I have to change who I fundamentally was just because I’d gotten myself knocked up? And why did he have to be so goddamn patronizing about it?

  I didn’t have to say anything. Toby just looked at my face and my clenched fists and sighed. “Fine. I’m going to crash with Blake. I’ll call you.” Blake was his old partner from the force.

  “I might not be here,” I said to the ceiling.

  He paused on his way out the door. “Where would you be? Rory’s?”

  “I have to follow up on a lead in LA.”

  I risked a glance at his face, and saw it turning cold and hard. “Of course you do.”

  He didn’t slam the bedroom door, or the front door as he left. I glanced at Toka, who was sitting on the floor of the bedroom, looking bewildered. “He,” I told the dog, “is a grownup like that.”

  Then I started to cry.

  32. Don’t Be Stupid Lena

  On Saturday morning, Nate took the bus to Great Dane Comics, as usual. Most of his days at the store were spent helping Peter: stocking inventory, st
raightening up shelves, answering the phone. Some days, though, there just wasn’t much for him to do, so Peter handed him a stack of comics and pointed towards the overstuffed armchair in the very back of the store. Nate read for hours, lost in the adventures of beings with far more important problems than his own.

  That Saturday ended up being a reading day. The Wednesday before, Peter had designed a little booklist of Hollywood writers who’d moved into writing comics and vice versa, and now Nate was working through the Joss Whedon X-Men series. He was so lost in the adventures of Kitty Pryde that he almost didn’t hear Peter call him for lunch.

  At the front desk he spotted Lena, holding a big bag of tacos. She was a full three hours early to pick him up. “Hey,” he said hesitantly. He looked her over. She was wearing jeans and a billowy blue top that almost hid her swelling stomach. She seemed tired, and her eyes looked red, but her smile was as lively as ever. “Um, change of plans?” Nate asked.

  “Eh,” she shrugged. “I was bored, so I thought I’d bring you guys something to eat. Don’t worry,” she continued, seeing his face. “We don’t have to go right now. We have time.”

  He nodded, trying not to look too relieved, and picked through the bag, selecting a chicken taco. The three of them stood around the counter, emptying the taco bag, while Lena quizzed Nate on what he’d been reading. She nodded her approval at the titles he recited, and asked him about his favorites so far.

  “I like everything, so far, but I think...Batman has the best stories.” Nate looked anxiously at Peter, but the older man just nodded agreeably. “I just wish so many of them didn’t end with him getting into a fight with Superman.”

  Lena laughed, and the sudden movement made her drip taco sauce down her clothes. Most of it landed on the blue shirt and stayed there. “Oh, crap,” she groaned, swabbing at the stain with a paper napkin. “That’s like my second outfit of the day already. It’s supposed to be the babies that need to change all the time. Nate,” she said solemnly, “Don’t ever get pregnant. It makes you a klutz.”

  He nodded seriously at her, and Lena laughed. “Come on, kid,” she said, crumpling her last wrapper into a ball and grabbing her purse, “let’s go for a walk.”

  He followed her out the door and into the warm May weather. It was a sunny, windy Chicago day, and they took off down busy North Ave in silence, wandering through the crowd of people enjoying the weather. Finally, Nate asked her how the investigation was going.

  “Good, I think,” she said. “Right now I’m trying to piece together a timeline for Jason.”

  “You mean, like, what he did in his last few days?”

  She nodded. “And also what he did before his last few days. Figuring out what his regular life was like might help me find anomalies.”

  “That’s cool. So where are you right now?”

  “Right now...I think I’m taking a trip back to LA. To talk to some more people. I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think I’m unable to put the puzzle together. I think I’m missing a piece.”

  “Like what?” he asked, then immediately realized what a stupid question it was. How would she know what she didn’t know?

  But Lena just shrugged. “I’m not really sure. But there’s a lot of time in Jason’s life that’s unaccounted for. Maybe he spent a lot of time with other writers at the coffee shops he visited, maybe one of them knew something, or was trying to steal his script. Or it could have something to do with something else he was into...” she hesitated, and Nate rolled his eyes.

  “Come on, Lena. Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Okay, um, it could be drugs, or an affair, or gambling debts that got him in trouble. Something along those lines, that Starla wouldn’t necessarily know about.”

  An idea was forming in Nate’s mind, but he was trying to keep it off his face. Sounding as casual as possible, he asked, “so when are you going?”

  “Probably on Tuesday, if I can get a ticket.”

  Be cool, Nate, he thought. “Will you call me and let me know, so I can figure out if I need a ride home for Wednesday?”

  “Of course.”

  I didn’t know what to do with the rest of my weekend. I considered going to visit Rory and the kids, but I wasn’t in the mood for any kind of “I told you so” lecture, much less Rory explaining how Toby was right and I was wrong. I called him a couple of times, but he never answered, which was almost just as well. I had no idea what I was going to say. On Sunday morning I booked a flight to LA for Tuesday afternoon. I called Toby again and left a message that maybe we could talk when I got back.

  I made myself busy by taking Toka to the park, doing some laundry, and cleaning the Big Glorious Kitchen. Finally I ran out of ways to avoid thinking about my husband, and I collapsed on my bed with the dog curled up beside me. Were Toby and Rory right? Was I basically a child myself? I tried to picture myself a few months into the future, when I’d have a baby to take care of, but I just came up blank. I thought back to that day, months ago, when I’d found out I was pregnant. Had I been happy at all, or just...what? Scared? Upset? That moment, when I’d looked at the pregnancy test...it had been so important, but gone by so quickly. Then I thought about my first positive pregnancy test, and I felt...loss. I had lost so much the day Matt Cleary died.

  Toka nosed my elbow, encouraging some affection, and I obliged. Then I rolled over, with some effort, and pulled my big photo album off the bottom shelf of my bedside table, heaving it onto the bed beside me. My New Year’s resolution last year had been to actually remember to develop and store my photos, and I’d compiled two of these enormous albums with the last few years’ worth of pictures. Then I’d promptly forgotten and started just piling up photos on my hard drive again.

  I paged through the front of the book and found the shots I’d taken when Rory was in the hospital having Logan. It had been a Saturday evening, and Toby and I had taken Cassie for the day. We entertained her at the apartment for a few hours, took her for ice cream and a kid’s movie. When it looked like Rory was getting close we’d taken her to camp out in the hospital waiting room with puzzles and coloring books. That was when I’d remembered that Rory had asked me to take pictures from the whole day, so Cassie could look at them later and remember what she was doing just before her brother was born. Oops.

  The first shot from that day was of Cassie and me, our heads bent over a Little Mermaid coloring book. She was working so hard to stay within the lines. Then there was a shot of Toby reading a newspaper while Cassie slept against his shoulder. I turned the page and saw the first photo of Logan, taken only a few minutes after he was born. Rory looked exhausted and serene, ready to burst with satisfaction. There were pimples on her face and sweat plastered her hair to her head, but Mark was looking at her like she was Helen of Troy.

  The opposite page had a photo of Toby holding the baby. His face was full of wonder and longing, and I remembered seeing him there and thinking, maybe we could do this. Maybe I could do this, if for no other reason than for him.

  My eyes started to tear up, and I closed the book carefully, no slamming. Way to go, me.

  It wasn’t like I was incapable of recognizing that sometimes I was wrong, and needed to accept the consequences. There were things I’d been wrong about–the way I’d first handled the whole Matt Cleary situation came immediately to mind, but smaller things, too. I’d been wrong plenty of times. But now I was stuck in this situation where I couldn’t figure out for certain whether or not I was right. Did I owe Toby the mother of all apologies, no pun intended, or did he owe me? Did I have the right to do what I wanted with my body, including taking it into gunfights, or did I have a responsibility to keep the baby safe?

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when Toby had accused me of being a bad mother. If I was really convinced that I was right, why had that stung so much? But if Toby was right, then I should basically retire and resign myself to child-rearin’ at the homestead. I couldn’t think of any other options,
except to have the baby and leave it. And that thought made me want to curl up under my desk and die.

  So that was something, I guess.

  I remembered how badly I had always wanted to be a cop, and Cristina’s dreams for me to apply for the FBI. Then I felt a great swell of displaced ambition and longing, suddenly overwhelmed by what could have been. How had I gotten to this moment?

  The next day was a Monday, not Nate’s usual day at Great Dane, but I’d called and arranged for him to spend that evening there, since I wouldn’t be around to drive him on Wednesday. Rory and Dad were both parked in their spots, so I had to park the Jeep a few blocks away when I went to pick him up. As I made my way toward the store, feeling like I was carrying a sack of potatoes near my midsection, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned my head to check with a no-eye-contact-half-smile prepared, the kind that city dwellers have been administering for generations: it’s an expression that says “I’m non-threatening, but I have no interest in engaging with you in any way.” But when I turned, there was no one there.

  The weather was warm and muggy, but goosebumps prickled on my skin. Was someone following me? I stayed still, openly staring in the direction I’d come from. I could see a couple walking with a stroller, two different people with dogs on leashes, and a pack of kids being led by a very harried-looking mother. But there was no one directly behind me. Maybe this really is all in my head, I thought. What if nobody was after me at all? I’d been so afraid Toby would try to convince me that there was no menace, but what if my gut was off the whole time?

  The thought scared me. But for the moment, there was no point in standing in the middle of the sidewalk glaring at nothing. I shook it off and went into Great Dane.

  When I walked through the door I said hello to Nate, who was curled up in one of the armchairs in the back, and waved at my father, who was talking to two enthusiastic-looking teenage girls who were both wearing t-shirts that said “C2E2 2010.” I wandered over to the independent section and started paging through some Dark Horse novels. What hadn’t I read?