A Shadow in the Water

by April Hill

  “Another cop movie?” I snarled through gritted teeth. I was staring at a lopsided sign that read, “Wait! Did You Remember to Wash Your Hands?”

  When I lifted my head, I saw in the mirror that Matt was grinning. “John Wayne movies,” he said, chuckling. “My favorites.”

  “It figures!” I snarled. “You right-wing sadist!” That’s when I kicked him in the shin with my bad foot. An error in judgment, of course, for both my big toe and other areas of me that were about to come under fire. An apology was already on my lips when Matt yanked me off the counter in one swift motion and bent me over his thigh. This time he used his bare hand, lower, harder, and with deadly accuracy. Big Duke Wayne couldn’t have done it better.

  There is a place on the female anatomy, where her rear end meets her upper thighs—an exquisitely sensitive undercurve that I’ve heard called—for fairly obvious reasons—the “sit-spot.” My own sit spot was already pretty well-worked over, but Matt laid every single new smack right on target, on that same, agonized spot, until I was writhing and hopping up and down from foot to foot, gasping for breath and begging him to stop. When I finally added a whole string of “pleases,” he did stop, but I didn’t realize it for several seconds. That’s how badly my ass was throbbing.

  While I rearranged my rumpled clothing, Matt unbolted the door, and like the gallant fellow he is, held it open for me. There were three guys standing outside, grinning like clowns, so I tried to look unconcerned, as if having my butt set on fire in a public restroom was par for the course. Instead, I blushed down to my toes and just kept walking. When we got back to his office, though, I pounded on his desk, and whispered as loud as I could. “Goddamn you, O’Connor, do you always go around beating cripples?” I wriggled my grubby cast at him. “Even if I weren’t disabled, that was police brutality in there, and you know it.”

  Matt looked around to see if anyone was watching, and casually flipped up the back of my skirt to check the damage.

  “Damn, you’re right!” He reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a thick, multi-paged form, and slapped it down on the desk on front of me. “There you go. Fill that out in triplicate and take it down the hall. Fourth door on your right. You’ll probably need a couple of photos, though. Hang on a second.” He motioned to a tall guy sitting two desks away from us. “Hey Sanchez, you got your camera on you? This lady needs pictures.” He turned back to me, smiling evilly. “You want to go in the other room with Sanchez, here, and document the …”

  “Never mind!” I snapped. “Are you going to drive me home, or not?”

  He closed the desk drawer and locked it. “Let’s go. And if you’re polite, I’ll even buy you dinner. Did you wash your hands, like the sign said?” The cheerful bastard was smiling again.

  I didn’t want to go in anywhere, looking and feeling like I did, but Matt spotted a scruffy little diner that looked about right. Even in a dump like this one, though, the waitress stared at me like I was a bag lady with big warts on my nose, swilling a half-pint of cheap gin from a brown paper bag. Like maybe I’d staggered in off the street to stuff my face with half-eaten leftovers from the uncleared tables. I was still rumpled and damp, and the pink liquid soap had dried now, stiffening my hair and the front of my blouse. My rear end still burned, and my nose was red. Every guy’s dream date. Matt was immaculate, of course, the way he always is—sort of like my parole officer.

  After we had ordered, Matt pointed to the cast on my foot.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. What really happened?”

  I made a face, determined to stay in a foul mood. It wasn’t too hard, with my butt stinging. “I fell off the deck—through the deck, to be precise. Carlotta likes to do her own home repairs. The car kick came later, and finished the job. The cast will be off next week, when I can scrape up the cash for the doctor.”

  Matt shook his head. “I can take care of it, if you’ll let me.”

  “I don’t need charity, Lieutenant.” I sneered. “Certainly not from you.”

  “It’s not charity. Gwen. Even after … Well, anyway, I still think of us as friends. Besides, where’s your landlady in all this? Shouldn’t she be responsible?”

  That word “friends” hurt, but I tried not to let it show, and laughed at his naiveté about my management/employee arrangement with Carlotta. “You obviously don’t know Carlotta. She thinks sweatshops are the American way. Anyway, she’s off in Mexico, somewhere, loading up on more authentic, machine-made folk art. If she doesn’t show up fast they’re probably going to turn off the damned electricity and gas.” I could have bitten my tongue the moment I said this. Every word out of my big mouth was making me sound more pathetic.

  Matt reached across and took my hand. “Gwen, please let me…”

  “Let’s just forget it,” I said curtly. “I’m starving, and I’d like to get home and clean up, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Generally speaking, nothing interferes with my appetite, even when I’m dressed like a homeless wino and can’t sit down without yelping. Before Matt finally pried the fork out of my hand and drove me back to Carlotta’s, I had managed to wolf down a double cheeseburger with fries, a large vanilla milk-shake, and a slab of cherry cheesecake—with whipped cream.

  When we got back to the house, Matt went inside the way he always did, indulging his paranoia by checking for burglars, or serial killers, or werewolves—whatever it is he was expecting to find. Unwilling to risk another over the knee encounter, so soon, I stood on the back steps and waited for the all clear. When he came back, I figured he was going to say goodnight and leave, but I was wrong. Politely ignoring the way I looked and probably smelled, he leaned down and kissed me in a way that told me he had a whole lot more in mind than just the one goodnight kiss. When he pulled me close against him, the hardening bulge between his legs suggested that we were a little bit more than friends, after all.

  Yes, I did try to stay mad at him, but it didn’t work. I had waited too long for this moment to let some little thing like The Fiery Ruler-Spanking From Hell get in the way. I let myself sink against Matt’s chest, and sighed with pleasure when he slipped his hands inside my blouse. A long, hot, shared shower, my brain was telling me, soaping one another from head to…

  Just when I was about to suggest shedding our clothes and moving on to the shower, we heard a small, piteous whimper, and Benjamin crawled out from under the couch. He slunk across the floor to us on his stomach, whining in terror the way he does when he finds a mouse or a cricket in the house. Courage has never been one of Benjamin’s strong points.

  Matt knelt down and stroked Ben’s back. “He’s shaking like a leaf.”

  I sat down on the floor and gathered Benjamin into my lap to check him out. “He’s not hot or anything. Something must have scared him. He’s not the bravest beagle on the…”

  I stopped talking when I realized that Matt had already pulled a gun from the back of his belt.

  “Stay where you are, and be quiet,” he ordered. He looked around the room, then moved quickly across to the kitchen door and swung it open with one arm. For several long moments, he disappeared, and when he came back outside, he was holding a piece of paper by one corner.

  “This was taped to the refrigerator door.”

  “What is it?” Benjamin was still trembling in my arms, but having found a big splotch of cherry cheesecake on my blouse, he consoled himself by licking it off.

  Matt read the note aloud. The message was short, to the point, and in my opinion, unnecessarily graphic.

  “Open your big mouth to the cops, and we’ll cut your fucking heart out and shove it up your fat ass.”

  “Fat!” I yelped. “Why the hell do demented killers always have to be so rude?” I tried laughing, but the laugh came out a little on the hysterical side. “I don’t suppose it’s signed, is it? Carlotta and I have a lot of secret admirers.”

  Five minutes later, the dust and gravel patch Carlotta likes to call our “rear garden
” was full of flashing black and white police vehicles, and everything in my already chaotic life began to get even worse.

  * * * *

  As already noted, the house where all this happened belonged to Carlotta—a somewhat obese, elderly woman known around town as Carlotta DuValle—not her real name, thank God, but it went nicely as part of “Carlotta’s Craft Cottage—Crafts, Curiosities, and Candies.” It may have been nothing but an artsy-fartsy “down by the seaside” tourist trap that added nothing at all to the high cultural tone of our up-scale community, but Carlotta’s tacky little shop did keep the proverbial wolf from the door. The “candies” part of the business tanked a few years back, when Carlotta’s homemade tutti-frutti divinity fudge was implicated in the hospitalization of a significant number of patrons who had made the mistake of actually eating it. The afflicted customers became unwilling hosts to an unusually ravenous intestinal parasite normally found in the steaming jungles of Central America. Carlotta got busy swabbing out the kitchen with three gallons of bleach, and enlisted the aid of her pal Oovie to dump the remaining fudge makings off the end of the pier before the health department got its act together. With no real evidence, the eventual charges didn’t stick, but Carlotta wisely decided not to push her luck by dabbling in any more confections. She left the word “candy” on the sign just because she liked the alliteration.

  While I always tried my best never to eat at Carlotta’s, I did work very hard for her, as part of a rather loose arrangement wherein she overworked me, and I worked as little as possible and stole frozen TV dinners from her fridge. (This wasn’t simple larceny, but the only safe way to dine when at Carlotta’s.)

  About the most charitable thing you can say about the house we shared is that it provided local color in our otherwise cookie cutter, rich-kid neighborhood. Everything about the place was aggressively, do-it-yourself tacky. The exterior was sheathed in warped sheets of quarter-inch interior plywood, and covered with the swatches of mismatched asphalt tile and random pieces of linoleum that Carlotta had pilfered from condemned buildings. In a transparent effort to annoy her neighbors and make her home as offensive to prevailing community standards as possible, she kept a pair of stained, rump-sprung upholstered couches on the front deck facing the beach, and had recently painted all the trim, shutters, and flower pots florescent pink. We got a lot of threatening notes from an assortment of city agencies, which Carlotta taped to the refrigerator door like wedding invitations, and then ignored. She often complained that, “Those dumbass movie stars these fools keep puttin’ in office keep tryin’ to use that fuckin’ M&M domain shit to steal my house out from under me.” She meant Ronald Reagan. At close to eighty years old, after tripping out on LSD far too many times in her youth, Carlotta sometimes operated under a cloud of confusion, and was under the impression that either Mr. Reagan was still the governor of California, or that other movie star whose name I can never spell right.

  Carlotta and her first husband (there had been four, I think) bought the house in the mid fifties, at a time when they were both pot-puffing post-surrealists and the area was still colonized by beatniks and surf fanatics. Now, though, the area is infested with movie stars and the “nouveau-riche,” and most of the low-slung little surfer shacks that once lined the coast highway are nothing but memories. The frail skeletons of some of the older places were simply cocooned—embedded into the pastel walls of larger, grander dwellings that eventually morphed yet again, rematerializing as mock Venetian villas with six bathrooms, or as ersatz Moorish seraglios with fountains and courtyards of gleaming Spanish tile.

  Carlotta’s lot was one of the largest within striking distance of Malibu, proper, and could have been worth a king’s ransom if she’d sold it, but she insisted that the house had good karma, and she planned to die there. She and her ratty little house had survived a number of skirmishes with various developers, zoning commissions, and/or neighborhood enhancement committees, certain members of which are fond of leaving notes on the door or the crushed mailbox. The notes often addressed Carlotta, (and me, by association) as trailer trash sluts, or low life scum, which sounded like the title of a country-western song. I preferred to think of our home, and maybe even us, in more simple terms—as urban blight.

  And now, a word or two about moi:

  When I was working for Carlotta, I painted lighthouses—or rather, pictures of lighthouses. I painted likenesses of every lighthouse on the eastern and western seaboards, and when I ran out of lighthouses that actually existed, I started making them up. No one seemed to notice when I invented fourteen new lighthouses in Maine, alone. People in California don’t get to Maine a lot, or to Nova Scotia, apparently. In that last year alone, I created twenty-two new lighthouses in Nova Scotia, with names like Windswept Point and Windwhipped Bay, and Windjammer Cove and Windhaven Harbor. (Wind is a very big deal in the lighthouse genre.) I was working on Oregon and Washington state, at the time, which was a bit more dangerous, since they’re closer.

  Carlotta could barely contain her glee when I broke my toe, because my injury kept me closer to home, where I could slave away on a new line of quaint, homey lighthouses, with sweet little attached cottages. It was always evening or twilight in Carlotta’s thatched cottages, and the windows were always aglow with cozy firelight. (Cadmium-orange, right out of the tube.) And shutters, of course. Carlotta liked shutters and flower-boxes and wishing wells, and she was bonkers about cottages and lighthouses illogically smothered in pink and yellow roses. “Rose Haven Cottage Light” was one of my big successes. Carlotta sold the prints in limited, signed editions, as well as decoupaged onto wastebaskets, coasters, and placemats. That year, she had introduced “Rose Haven Cottage Light” toilet seats and toothbrush holders, and told me they were flying off the shelves.

  How, you might ask, did this irresponsible woman (me) get along, and pay her bills?

  Considering what I’ve already told you, that’s probably a very dumb question, but the truth is that all of my bills remained in seclusion at the post office, which I found a whole lot cheaper than actually paying them. I did pay my rent, which, by a stroke of excellent financial good-fortune, included all utilities, except for the telephone. Well, “pay” is probably too strong a word, implying a check being written and mailed on a timely basis, but then, Carlotta was not in a position to get tough about it. Back then, I calculated my hourly rate of pay at something approximating thirty-four cents an hour.

  Yes, I had no pride. I assume that’s what you’re thinking. I did have pride, when I was just out of college, with a BFA from NYU under my arm and hopes in my heart of a bright artistic future. I spent three blissful years as a genuine brush and paint textile designer in Manhattan before the company computerized and then went under, leaving me jobless. So I went back to my first love—painting. After another two years, I’d sold four paintings out of a cramped co-op gallery in Soho run by a group of starving beatnik wannabes. When the check for the last painting bounced and the buyer skipped town, I threw in the towel.

  A year later, as I toiled for my living cutting custom mats at a craft store in Brooklyn, I realized the terrible truth. I liked to eat regularly and I didn’t like frostbite. So, I packed up and moved to California. And as the old saying goes, the rest is history.

  Chapter Four

  After Matt found the threatening note on Carlotta’s fridge, he gave me like five minutes flat to gather up what I needed before whisking me off to a motel—for “safekeeping.” He dropped poor Benjamin at a kennel, then deposited me in the back room of this super-seedy rat hole in Hermosa Beach, in the company of two cops whose idea of keeping me safe was to guarantee my early demise by polluting my lungs with second-hand cigarette smoke. To pass the time, they ignored me entirely, and engaged in what seemed to be one, endless, boring game of cards.

  So, for one solid week, I lay on the lumpy bed in my grungy little room and read old movie magazines. Before long, I knew more about the personal problems of people like Jennifer Lope
z and Cameron Diaz than is probably healthy. But reading all the crappy magazines wasn’t a total loss. I learned that Monica Howard and Luke Thatcher—that year’s glamour movie couple—were looking for a love nest in Encantada Cove, not far from Carlotta’s, which was sure to increase the number of gawkers trespassing on our normally secluded beach. I also found this article that revealed a well-guarded diet secret used by the beautiful people of the world. If you ate and drank absolutely nothing for precisely ninety-six hours, you’d lose fifteen pounds, like magic. No exercise at all. Was that great, or what? There I was, lying around like a slug all day, anyway, so what could be more perfect than a diet that required nothing of me but sloth and sleep, my two favorite activities even when I’m not trying to take a off a few pounds?

  The cops ordered all our meals from the coffee shop across the street, so I began dumping mine in the trash, which wasn’t such a terrible sacrifice, considering how most of the stuff looked and smelled.

  So, I said to myself, if four days are good, wouldn’t six days be even better?

  By the sixth day of captivity, and approaching my fifth day of virtually total starvation, (I cheated with a couple of diet Cokes during the first four days,) I was mad with hunger and thirst, and crawling the walls with boredom. I had probably lost a significant number of brain cells, as well, but I was thinner—weak, shaky on my feet, and hallucinating about Big Macs and Super Size fries—but definitely a little thinner. At one point in my delirium, I became convinced that a pair of orangutans was climbing through the window. It was actually the tattered orange drapes, in a breeze.

  I would like to blame what I did next on starvation-induced insanity, but the truth is, I was really pissed off at Matt. Although he phoned me every day, I had seen him only twice since he stuck me in the motel, and both times he had promised to spring me the very next day. Lies, all lies! So, when my early release was denied yet again, I decided to bail out and find my own temporary safe house. It was a cinch, really. After my card-playing jailers had dozed off that night, I popped the screen and climbed out the rear window into the parking lot.