Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  Thed was scarcely recognizable as a bear, having lost some of its fur and much of its shape, while accumulating various holes, mends, ink, paint, and jewelry. Thed was fickle, siding with whichever sister had abducted him last, and changed sex with ease, moving from lacy pinafore to Roman toga without expressing a preference. Thed was a daredevil, having gone up in a neighbor boy’s rocket once (and retaining the burn-marks.) Later, he’d spent some weeks buried in the garden until Patty figured out my clues.

  And very occasionally, Thed was a message of generosity and comfort, who would appear, unexpectedly, on the pillow of the sister in greatest need.

  I’d never figured out why Thed survived Mother’s scorched-earth final clearance of Patty’s things. Was it because, sometime during my last Christmas home, I’d picked him up out of habit and put him in my room? Or had Patty felt my loneliness and agitation during that unwilling visit and, despite her own adolescent preoccupations, left him tucked under the covers of my bed?

  It troubled me still, that I did not remember.

  I touched a finger to the topmost necklace, a heart-shaped locket on a cheap chain wound around his neck, then closed the box. On the way through the bedroom, I paused to take down the only lingering presence of Patricia Martinelli in my daily life: a small watercolor painting of a flowering orchard that lived on the wall.

  I carried the shoebox and painting downstairs, taking them to my office so Nora wouldn’t spot them before she’d finished her homework. But as I did so, a thought worked its way to the surface.

  Wasn’t there some offensive image or idea in those letters? Something I shouldn’t put into Nora’s hands? I couldn’t remember any specifics, just an impression strong enough to make me lift the lid and frown at the contents.

  I pulled out the meager collection of snapshots, leafing through nine moments from my past. There was one of me when I was about eight, which would make Patty five. We were on a beach somewhere, arms around each other, laughing madly. Her dark brown hair gleamed in the sun, a strand blowing across her face. My grin had a gap between the front teeth. Happy girls on the sand, and I had no memory of the day at all. No idea who could have taken it in the first place, with Mother’s camera.

  Below the pictures lay Patty’s letters, and my sense of distaste grew a fraction stronger. Something inappropriate in there? I ought to take them to work with me, to skim through over lunch, just to be sure.

  I ended up reading the letters far more closely than I’d intended. They had been written roughly each month, beginning with my first week in Berkeley and ending a short time before she died. It felt like visiting an old friend on her deathbed, both painful and fond. Patty’s words stirred up all kinds of memories that I hadn’t thought about in years—things I was astonished to remember at all. A passing mention of smoking at school brought a vivid flash of the striped shadows under the bleachers. Her furious, obscenity-laced description of a school enemy who’d “accidentally” spilled her Coke all over Patty in the Village Bakery carried with it the jangle of a bell and the fragrance of baking yeast.

  The next letter gloated over her revenge against the girl: detailed, subtle, and far more painful than the spilled drink had been, which ended up with Patty’s enemy banned for a month from the bakery that was the social center of the town’s high school students. As a cop and a mother, I was more than a little appalled; as an older sister, I was both proud and entertained.

  And in her very last letter, sent in early January, I found the thing that had been nagging at me: a rude Polaroid folded inside a postscript page about a boyfriend, stuck in behind the main letter. As I read Patty’s free-form scrawl, it occurred to me that the note—even without the accompanying picture—was designed to shock a staid and absent older sister. I became aware of a grudging smile on my face. Did I have any idea, when I was twenty, just how much of a mother I’d been to her?

  All I remembered was the relief I felt, every time I ended a trip home and set off again to my Berkeley refuge.

  The small collection of Patty memorabilia lay on the table when Nora and I sat down for our talk that night—along with a printout of the newspaper article she’d Googled, which I’d found when I went hunting. The one with the unnecessarily provocative headline that read, “Accident Puzzler”.

  Naturally, the first thing she saw was Thed, a formless brown blob nearly invisible beneath several garments, a dozen or more cheap necklaces over a crudely sewn neck-tie, and a plastic crown that didn’t quite hide his pink mohawk haircut. His extremities all ended with tiny blobs of red nail polish.

  “What is that ?”

  The weight of all those necklaces made it impossible to sit him upright on his own. I extricated him from the wedge of books and gave his disgusting fur an affectionate pat. Somewhere under several ounces of chains was a small unicorn I’d given Patty for a birthday present, the bear’s first venture into the transsexual world.

  “This is Thed. A very old and much-loved toy my sister and I shared.”

  Nora gave me a look and reached for the snapshots.

  “That’s your aunt Patty,” I told her. “I put the dates on the back, as close as I could figure them out. And those are letters she wrote to me—which you’re welcome to read, although they’re mostly about people you don’t know and bands you’ve never heard of.”

  “What’s the painting got to do with her?”

  “She did that.”

  “Really? Wow.” Nora picked up Patty’s watercolor, which had hung on our wall her whole life, and studied the flowering trees as if she’d never seen it before. “She was good. For a kid.”

  “I know. She could even do portraits, which are really tough.”

  “Why don’t you have any of those?”

  Damn. Why had I thought this was a good idea? Oh, that’s right: I hadn’t.

  “Our mother burned them. Along with Patty’s diaries, books, clothes. Everything, really, except what I had in my room.”

  Nora stared at me. “Why would she do that?”

  “My mother…” My mother what? Was sick? Was evil? Was why, when Lee and I decided to have a baby, Lee had been the one to carry the fetus despite the risks of spinal complications? “…had problems. Mental problems.”

  “Really? I knew you didn’t get along with her, but burning your daughter’s clothes? That’s just… weird.”

  “Like I say, she had issues. And I guess that’s part of why I don’t talk about Patty much. It hurts. Not just the loss of a sister, and not just the waste of a young life. It’s… I was ashamed. I probably still am, to some degree. Because I got away, and Patty didn’t. She would have left in another year or so, even if she didn’t go to college, but when I went off to Berkeley, she was alone in the house with a… woman like our mother. Not that Mother was physically abusive, I don’t mean that.” No broken bones, at any rate. “Just, I suppose the word is unrelenting . When Mother was young, she’d wanted to be a nun, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She ended up marrying my father instead, and had us. Then he died of cancer, not long after Patty was born, and after that, it always seemed like Mother blamed Patty and me for her unhappiness.”

  “That’s just stupid.”

  I had to laugh. “I know. And if Patty hadn’t been in that accident, she would have flown the coop and found her freedom, and my sister and I would be sitting here with gray hair, grossing out our kids with tales of our awful childhood.”

  My daughter looked down at the beach snapshot of the carefree sisters. “What do you think happened? In the accident, I mean?”

  “Like I said, it could have been ice, or something ran across the road and she swerved to miss it. Probably a deer. It’s a rural area, and she wasn’t a very experienced driver—she’d only had her permit for a while.” It never hurt to reinforce the dangers of driving, to someone who was already dreaming about her license.

  “Wasn’t she wearing her seat belt? They did have seat belts, then, right?”

  “Of course,”
I said. “Well, maybe not the older cars.”

  “Was hers old?”

  “Patty didn’t own a car. Like I say, she didn’t even have her license.”

  “Was it your Mom’s car?”

  “Good God, no. I would remember that.” If Patty had ruined Mother’s car, the complaints would still be ringing in my ears.

  “Then whose was it?”

  “Must have belonged to a friend. In which case it might well have been an ancient clunker with no seat belts and bad steering and brakes, since she’d started hanging out with the kind of kids she knew would drive Mother nuts.”

  Naturally, that led to questions about what Patty was like, and why she was getting into trouble, and so on. But although Nora was both a snarky teenager and innately curious, she remained at base a remarkably nice person. And because of that, she kept her questions shallow, to do with the what, when, and who rather than the more difficult matters of why .

  Not that we were finished with questions regarding Patricia Martinelli. I knew the dynamics of my family well enough to see into the future: Nora would go away tonight, to all appearances fully satisfied. After a day or two, she would get Lee into a conversation and find out her other-mother’s take on matters. Then she’d come back to me with follow-up questions and a theory of what had happened to my sister, and why, and very possibly, how.

  Nora put the photos into the shoebox, clearly intending to study them for clues and revelations about me. When she hesitated over the letters, I suggested that she take them, too.

  “Is that okay? I mean, they’re private letters.”

  “No, there’s nothing too shocking in them.” Not now, at any rate. “And I think you’ll enjoy them. She was a lot of fun.”

  “Okay.” She added them to the box and put on its top.

  “What, you don’t want Thed Bear?” Nora shot the object such a dubious look that I had to laugh. “Yeah, he’s a bit scruffy.”

  Before she went upstairs, she gave me a hug that was longer and more emphatic than usual. I looked at Thed, and decided he’d spent enough of his life in the back of a closet, so I propped him upright on a shelf in my office—where only I would have to look at him—and told myself that I’d handled things well. That it was good to get a family secret out of its crevice and into the air, and that now we could move on, our little family just that bit more bonded than it had been before my slip of the tongue.

  And yet, as I lay there in the dark that night, under one roof with the two people I loved most in the world, a faint mental itch kept me from dropping off to sleep.

  After Patty died, after my mother had followed her, I shoved my regrets and guilt and rage and everything to do with Diamond Lake into a closed safe, and did my best to forget the combination. One final trip of house-clearing and paperwork and bills, then I had turned my back on it all. Weeks would go by—months, even—without my thinking once of life before the age of twenty.

  Now, however, with Thed on the shelf and the letters in Nora’s hands, I could feel the first stirrings of relief. All these years later, mourning Patty might be a sadness instead of a punch to the gut, but it was nonetheless real. And now, it was out in the open. Maybe I’d begin at last to move on—in a good way, one that did not make me shy away from the memories. Okay, Nora was sure to have more questions. But I would answer her as best I could, without avoidance, even if she noticed the snide subtext of that little news article her Google search had turned up. If she did, I would deal with it. I would reassure her.

  So why was I lying there with my eyes wide open?

  It was that damned article. There would have been an earlier one that Nora and I had both missed, since this was clearly a week-later follow-up. And it wasn’t so much the article itself as its headline that troubled me, suggesting things that weren’t in the few lines of text. The headline was probably meant as a teaser, slapped on by some too-clever editor. If he’d led with something less coy—“Girl’s Funeral” or “Lab Results from Crash” or something—would I be lying here, staring at the ceiling?

  Instead, with “Accident Puzzler” followed by phrases like does not appear to have been and usually and could indicate , the piece damned by inferring what it could not openly say.

  I was pretty certain that “Accident Puzzler” was going to be Nora’s lead, too, when she came back to me. And it wouldn’t help much to explain the business of selling local papers and headlines as eye-catchers, or to point out that car accidents happened, and people died, and there wasn’t always an explanation for the idiotic calamities that fell out of the blue.

  IV

  I went looking for the earlier article the next day. As I had expected, there’d been one right after her death. I found it in the Diamond Lake Clarion on Saturday, January 22. The reporter gave her the full benefit of the doubt, less only the sad and foolish touch of not wearing her seat belt:

  Fatal Crash Kills Local Girl

  A seventeen year old girl died in an apparent one-car accident on Pipeline Road late last night. Police identified her as Patricia Martinelli, a student at Diamond Lake High School, and said that she apparently swerved to avoid something on the road and lost control of the car, going into a tree. She was alone in the car, and may not have been wearing a seat belt. Police are investigating the cause of the accident. Martinelli is survived by her mother and sister.

  The later article, the one with the suggestive title that first Nora and then I had found, came out six days later. This one, factual on the surface, bore a very different message between its lines:

  Accident Puzzler

  A one-car accident last Friday on Pipeline Road that killed a local girl does not appear to have been the result of alcohol or drugs, according to the Diamond Lake Police Department. “Usually when we see a single car go into a tree late at night, we look for intoxication, but it doesn’t look like that is the case here. An examination of the site did show swerve marks, but that could indicate the driver was trying to avoid something on the road.” A private funeral for Patricia Martinelli will be held tomorrow at St. Vincent’s Church.

  All weekend, the itch grew—the one that had kept me awake. All the time I was setting up for, staying awake during, and cleaning up after Nora’s birthday sleepover of six noisy fifteen-year-olds with vigorous appetites, the itch was there. The same itch that chewed at me to find the missing elements of all the stories I built around my homicide cases.

  It wasn’t that I’d never turned my cop’s mind to my sister’s accident before. Several times over the years, I’d gone so far as to pick up the phone to see if I could track down her accident report in the storage vaults of Diamond Lake’s police department. But I always set down the phone again, because I knew what that report would contain.

  I’ve worked accident scenes. I’ve taken photographs, interviewed witnesses, compiled reports. Did I really want my memories of Patty overlaid by the brutal words and gruesome images of the last thing that happened to her? Have my fun, smart-mouthed, maddening sister turned into an object on a mortuary slab? I did not.

  And yet…

  When Nora came back, armed with the next set of questions, I wanted to be able to look her in the eye and say yes, I was absolutely satisfied that this was a sad but purely random accident. Surely it wouldn’t take much time to clear away the nagging doubts introduced by that damnable, deliberately tantalizing headline? The only “puzzle” about the accident was why a small-town paper would bring a note of cruel uncertainty into its report.

  You see, I’d grown up in Diamond Lake. I knew the language of its unspoken, understood gossip.

  In that town—rural, conservative, and heavily Italian—sober driver plus Catholic funeral were code for suicide.

  * *

  Of course, if things had been busy, I might’ve let it go, at least for a while. But the weather was cool and clear enough to keep San Francisco’s population from each other’s throats, and I hadn’t caught a new case in a while. That Monday there was nothing t
o keep me from picking up the phone and talking to the Diamond Lake Police Department about their accident records.

  First, though, the computer. Were the roads icy? No: temperatures that night had been above freezing. And not even slick, since it hadn’t rained for days. I had only a faint memory of Pipeline Road, but the maps I called up showed a three-mile long, dead-end road passing through farmland. In that area, there could have been anything from deer to dogs to a flock of wild turkeys that caused her to swerve.

  I did have to wonder why she was there, since I couldn’t see that Pipeline went anywhere. Maybe the dead-end wasn’t as closed as the map showed? Could there have been some kind of private drive that, thirty years ago, made for a short-cut—the kind of road used by local kids who’d had a couple beers, trusting that no patrol car went down it?

  (And yes, that is experience speaking. A lot of us cops weren’t exactly lily-white innocents as teenagers.)

  I shut down my browser, looked at the telephone, then turned instead to the paperwork I was paid to do. But either the world had a message for me, or my eyes were attuned to anything related to Patty’s death, because there on my desk was a printout with a list of witnesses in need of interviewing. One address was a town in San Joaquin County. A town I knew was maybe a dozen miles from Diamond Lake.

  These were not my witnesses. It wasn’t my case. No reason to volunteer… but I did. And considering the boring drive, freeways into farmland, my offer was quickly snatched up. I called the number for the witness. Would this afternoon be convenient?

  Some things only get done if you don’t stop to think about them.

  Two hours later, I was driving past a thing I hadn’t laid eyes on in more than twenty years. The sign that read:

  WELCOME TO DIAMOND LAKE

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