by Nevada Barr
“True,” Rose admits. “But he did it in a kindly way, and with exquisite manners. Kids today!” Rose huffs. “They are way smarter, and more sophisticated, than we were at their age.”
“We were the last of the feral children.” Marion sighs. “Allowed to run free.”
“Little savages,” Rose agrees. “Mel is like a young Hillary Clinton—but universally lovable. You should have seen the way she took over, got help, transported the victim, opened the field hospital, found shelter and food. Mind-blowing.”
There is a flat silence from Marion’s side of the ether.
“What?” Rose demands.
“You promised me,” Marion says.
“I promised you what?”
“That you wouldn’t go gaga over the grandchild.”
“I didn’t!” Rose protests. “Not for years.”
“You called her a human larva. You insisted she wasn’t even your grandchild. She was Harley’s.”
“That was a relative truth. The absolute truth is that any child who falls asleep in your lap is your grandchild.”
“You are confusing kids with cats,” Marion says with asperity. “Admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“You’re gaga.”
“I will not dignify that with a response,” Rose says.
“Harumph.” Marion tires of the subject. “I haven’t gotten every page of the MCU patient files stopped and sorted yet. Maybe tomorrow. I did run into a piece of luck while I was exploring.”
Rose waits while Marion fiddles with her computer. There is nothing to hear, but Rose has listened to that particular brand of nothing so many times over the years, she can practically tell if Marion is on iPad, laptop, or PC.
“You’re on speaker,” Marion tells her. “Can you still hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“There are several services on the web that analyze print art—for a fee.”
The images that Rose had made using the severed finger, photographed and emailed to Marion; the connection takes Rose a second.
“Got pen and paper?” Marion asks.
Rose sits up and looks around. “I’m in a teepee,” she says. She sees an Indian-chieftain-style headdress and half a glass of leftover grape juice. Could quill and ink be that easy?
“Can’t you text me or email me?” Rose asks.
Silence, spiced with paranoia, pours out of the earpiece of Rose’s phone. Once upon a time speaking aloud or, worse yet, writing a secret down was the height of indiscretion. Now they provided the only hope of genuine security.
“Hang on,” Rose tells her sister. She plucks a feather from the headdress. It is an actual feather, not plastic. She cuts the quill at an angle with a Buck-knife-look-alike that is dull enough for a ten-year-old suburban Indian to play with, then dips it in the Welch’s. Dragging aside the wolf pelt, she tries it on the white canvas of the teepee floor.
Not great. Not easy, but doable.
“Shoot,” she says to her sister.
“Edward ‘Eddie’ Martinez. Twenty-nine, male, Hispanic. Jailed twice. For assault at age seventeen. For assault and battery at twenty-two. Served six years. Paroled January of this year. Address 1477 Palmetto Drive, Charlotte, North Carolina.”
Rose scratches the information laboriously onto the canvas.
“Do you want his parole officer’s contact information?” Marion asks.
“Why not.” Rose scratches that down as well.
“You owe me four hundred twenty-seven dollars. Pay me on PayPal,” Marion says. “And, interesting note, the night nurse is not now, and never was, in ICU. The first time you dosed her, she was just sent home. This time nobody is admitting anything happened.”
“Did you poke and explore?”
“Nope. Went old school. Called the nurses’ landline in the MCU this morning. They deal with old people; they expect us to call on the landline. Asked for Karen. Nice lady says, ‘Karen’s not here.’ I say, ‘Eek, eek, she told me to call her at work! (Dither) Is anything wrong? (Natter) Did she have an accident? OMG! OMG!’ (Shortness of breath) ‘No, ma’am, just a little tummy ache a day or so back. She’s been back on duty since.’”
“Either Longwood or the news station made up the story about Karen being in the ICU. A lie is suspicious,” Rose says.
“No ICU, no news, local or otherwise, about your adventure of last night.”
Rose thinks about this for a while. The candy striper saw her. The silent alarm went off; the door tried to close Rose in the unit. The night nurse should be in ICU—or at least home nursing a massive hangover.
“What do you bet she didn’t tell her boss the whole truth?” Rose suggests. “The candy striper probably thought I’d just walked in; she didn’t know I’d been to the lockdown. Karen doesn’t know why I was there, that I stole the files. I bet she woke up around four A.M. with a terrific headache, got scared, and never told a soul.”
“Afraid she’d get fired. I’d fire her. I’m hanging up now,” Marion says.
And she does.
* * *
Pacing in a teepee is not particularly satisfying, but Rose is managing it. Mel and Royal sit on the floor cross-legged amid the clutter of items Rose asked Mel to bring. They watch her, heads following as if viewing a truncated tennis game.
“We’ve got the knifeman’s information, but what do we do with it?” Mel muses.
“Give it to the police,” Royal says. Royal is a sensible boy. Rose likes him. During the medical triage and powwow the previous night, Rose learned his dad is an honest-to-gosh Secret Service agent working for Homeland Security. She suspects Royal of having inherited right-wing law-and-order tendencies. That might not serve her in the present crisis.
“No police,” she says, stepping over the wolf’s head. “They’ll bundle me off to some psych-evaluation institution and keep me there until I rot.”
“Gigi thinks women of a certain age are not given proper credence,” Mel says. It is a direct quote from one of Rose’s tirades.
“Old people are like sheep,” Rose grumbles. “Everybody wants to fleece us.”
“That’s because you’re so helpless and fluffy,” Mel says.
“I refuse to be fluffy,” Rose fumes. “Since guns are legal, there should at least be a law that you can only buy them if your Medicare supplement covers the expense.”
“Do you want me to get you a gun, Mrs. Dennis?” Royal asks. He sounds absolutely sincere.
Mel drops her jaw. A gesture identical to her mother’s, Rose notes with a stab of pain.
“You know where and how to buy a gun?” Mel asks incredulously.
“No,” Royal says. “But I could lend her one of Dad’s.”
This strikes Rose as hilarious, but she doesn’t laugh lest she offend. She knows nothing about the workings of the fourteen-year-old male mind. Or any male mind, for that matter. She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, “Nothing,” he wasn’t lying.
“No guns,” Rose says.
“She only poisons people,” Mel tells Royal in a stage whisper.
“Only when there is no other recourse,” Rose defends herself.
“Mr. Martinez was probably the hired help,” Royal says. Mr. Martinez—Rose does so admire his manners. “The police could find out who hired him.”
Such faith the boy has.
“I can find out who hired him,” Rose says.
“How?” Mel asks.
“I’m going to ask him.”
The kids exchange a look.
“Um … won’t he just kill you, Mrs. Dennis?” Royal ventures.
“Like meet him at midnight in a haunted house, and the next day your body is found floating facedown by the docks?” Mel asks.
“I don’t think there are any docks in Charlotte,” Royal says.
“You know what I mean.”
“Sort of,” Rose says. “But better, and without the floating-facedown part.” She stops pacing and folds down to t
heir eye level. “I’m going to follow him. When he goes someplace where he can’t murder me—or at least not without it being labor intensive—I’ll ask him who he’s working for.”
“Have you run this by Great-Aunt Marion?” Mel asks.
“Nope. I won’t until it’s over,” Rose says. “She’d try and talk me out of it.”
“And we won’t because we’re just crazy kids?” Mel asks, affronted.
“No. Because Marion is my older sister,” Rose explains. “For the last sixty-eight years it has been her job to talk me out of harebrained schemes. You guys won’t try and talk me out of it because you have too much respect for your elders.”
“So true, Gigi Rinpoche,” Mel says, bowing.
“Thank you, Grasshopper.” Rose bows back.
Royal starts to get up, then settles back down. He starts to speak, then doesn’t. After a longing glance at the teepee flap, he blurts out, “We’re underage. At worst we’ll get six months in juvie.”
By eleven o’clock Rose is on stakeout. 1477 Palmetto is half of a dilapidated duplex in a deteriorating neighborhood. What had been a two-way street when the homes were built has become a four-lane highway. Zoning has gone by the wayside. Between forlorn little houses and duplexes built in the twenties and thirties are commercial ventures: Pay Day Loans, Latrina’s Lounge, comic-books shop, vape shop. Rose’s chosen lurking spot is a red leatherette booth at the Arby’s across from Eddie Martinez’s address.
He is home, she guesses. The pickup parked on the weedy lawn is the one she’s seen him in twice before.
Shortly after eleven thirty he emerges. Wearing pajama bottoms and a muscle shirt, he sits in a battered overstuffed armchair on the dilapidated porch, drinks from a coffee mug, and smokes a cigarette.
Near one o’clock, he comes back out in shorts and the muscle shirt to move his truck and mow the tiny front yard with an old push mower.
Rose gets another cup of coffee. She’d thought the life of a hired assassin would be more interesting.
At one forty-seven, he again comes out. From a shed behind the duplex, he loads a mower and two five-gallon plastic buckets containing tools into the back of his truck.
Rose has Lyft up on her phone. She’s loaded in the Arby’s address and a bogus destination. They won’t let events progress without all the boxes filled. On her screen she can see a minuscule car orbiting the area three minutes from the Arby’s. Rose requests a pickup.
For the next three hours Rose surveils Eddie Martinez mowing lawns, clipping hedges, pulling weeds, watering plants, and, inevitably, donning a gas-powered leaf blower that makes as much noise as a diesel truck clawing its way up a steep incline and harassing the leaves.
At each stop, Rose skulks. In residential areas it is harder to find cover, but she makes use of a park, a playground, and a couple of big friendly trees. To pass the time, she texts. An article she’d read said the average high school student texted fifty times a day. Even with time on her hands, Rose doesn’t come close to that. Meditation is more entertaining than texting, and the point of meditation is to do absolutely nothing as long as possible.
Tailing a person via Uber and Lyft proves amazingly efficacious. As soon as she sees Eddie loading his equipment into his truck, she calls for a pickup. The drivers seem delighted to enter into the cloak-and-dagger aspect. Rose suspects her harmless fluffiness puts them at ease. Always a different car and a different driver. Sometimes Rose sits in front, sometimes in back. And, too, Eddie Martinez seems oblivious to the fact that he might be the stalked, not the stalker, for a change.
Five thirty finds Rose back in her booth at the Arby’s across the street from the duplex. She drinks a cup of coffee while he washes his truck with loving care, stroking the hood dry with a chamois cloth.
She calls Mel. “Hit men are really boring.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“He was always more or less alone—no witnesses—and surrounded with sharp objects. Besides, I promised I’d call you before I made contact,” Rose says.
Mel, and now Royal, are well and truly in Rose’s perilous pickle. More than once she’s considered playing the authoritarian, insisting Mel keep clear. She hasn’t done it. Mostly because it won’t work. Rose is the younger of two sisters. She’s never had children. Never wanted children. Never even babysat children. Marion didn’t have children, so no little nephews or nieces to dandle. When Mel came along, Rose had no concept of how to be a mother, much less a grandmother. So she just played with the kid. The two of them had been co-conspirators Mel’s whole life. Thirteen and sixty-eight, yet on some plane they are equals. Mel won’t blindly obey Rose any more than Marion will.
Reap what you sow, Rose thinks, not regretting a moment of the sowing.
“Are you coming home? I mean to the teepee?” Mel asks.
“I’m going to hang out awhile longer,” Rose says. “See if he goes out. If he seems settled in for the night, we’ll try again tomorrow.”
An hour later Eddie emerges from the duplex a changed man. He wears chino pants, creased and clean, a short-sleeved, button-front plaid shirt, and shined cordovan penny loafers. His thick short hair is plastered to his skull with water or hair cream, a part as straight as a ruler’s edge dividing the dark cap.
Rose requests a Lyft that is four minutes out. Antsy, she leaves Arby’s and hovers on the sidewalk, a fat telephone pole between herself and her quarry.
As Eddie is backing out, seat belt fastened, hair checked in the rearview mirror, a silver Prius driven by Brian pulls up to the curb. Rose hops in the front passenger seat.
“Follow that truck,” she says.
“You got it,” Brian replies with a rakish grin. Evidently he’s grown up on the same movies and TV shows as Rose. He is a striking-looking man, midsixties, all lean angles and raw bones, wavy gray hair nearly to his shoulders.
“Trick is to stay back, but not too far back,” he says.
Rose raises an eyebrow.
“Mansplain?” Brian asks. He has what Rose always thinks of as Paul Newman–blue eyes.
“What are we following him for?”
“The usual,” Rose replies.
“Cheating boyfriend?”
Rose snorts.
“Hey,” Brian says. “Times they are a-changed.”
“Not cheating on me,” Rose says. “On my husband. That’s our pool boy.”
Brian laughs. “Okay, don’t tell me. Secret squirrel. The plot thickens.” He pulls out, the Prius not making a sound, and falls in behind Eddie’s truck.
In an old neighborhood of small houses with nicely kept yards, the pickup truck parks under a live oak. Eddie gets out.
“Drive past,” Rose says. In the side-view mirror she sees Eddie smooth his hair, then knock on the door. “Go around the block, then park.”
“Ten-four.”
Eddie isn’t long. Brian has just parked the Prius when he comes out of the house accompanied by an attractive woman, dressed with a Hispanic flair for figure-hugging clothes and neon-bright colors. Holding her hand is a little girl of four or five wearing pink leggings under a short purple dress, and sparkly shoes. Curling black hair falls to her waist. It is kept off her face by a plastic diamond princess tiara.
“Any cuter and she’d be a puppy,” Brian says.
“Grandchildren?” Rose asks.
“Guilty,” Brian replies. “The youngest is about the age of the princess.” He nods at the little girl Eddie is buckling into the center of the bench seat in his truck.
“Any pictures?” Rose asks to be polite.
“Not that far gone,” Brian says, and smiles. One of his front teeth has a chip in it, adding to the roguishness. “They any relation to you?”
“We are all one,” Rose intones sententiously.
“Namaste that,” Brian says.
He eases the Prius away, trailing a block or so behind Eddie and the woman and child.
In a mile or two the neighborhood changes from working
poor to rising trendy, with bars and restaurants that are still home to the locals but in a few years will probably be teeming with noisy thirty-somethings and well-to-do college kids.
Eddie drives into a parking lot next to a yellow stucco building. VINCENZO’S FINE ITALIAN FOOD is painted in script on a hanging sign bordered with ironwork in the shape of a grapevine.
“Drive by?” Brian asks.
“Please. Let me off around the next corner.”
As ordered, Brian rounds the corner, then pulls the Prius to the curb. “Do you want me to wait?” he asks as Rose opens the door.
“No, thanks. I might be a while.”
“No charge,” he says.
Rose smiles and closes the car door. Then she calls Mel. “I think this is it. He’s on a date, a woman with a little girl.” She gives Mel the name and address of the restaurant.
“On our way,” Mel says. “Where shall we meet you?”
“I’ll text. You promise you won’t come in?”
Mel sighs gustily. “Not unless we hear gunshots.”
“Especially not then,” Rose pleads.
“Okay, but if you bleed to death with two qualified first responders across the street you’ll only have yourself to blame.”
“I can live with that,” Rose says.
“No pun intended,” Mel says.
“That was not a pun.” Rose puts the cell phone into the front zipper pocket of the backpack Mel lent her. For a moment she dithers. In the morning this had seemed like a brilliant idea. After a long tiring day, aching and weary and seriously in the mood for a good stiff drink and a hot bath, it seems like …
Like the only viable idea.
Either she gives up and lives in terror every minute of every day, or she soldiers on. Rose slips the backpack over her shoulder, turns the corner, and walks purposefully toward Vincenzo’s, whistling the theme song from The Bridge on the River Kwai under her breath.
CHAPTER 21
Before reaching the restaurant, Rose leaves the sidewalk to walk through the parking lot. She notes down Eddie’s license plate number, then continues to the back of Vincenzo’s. She’s never known a restaurant not to have a back door, usually opening out of the kitchen into a garbage collection area, but she isn’t taking any chances.
