by Sara Gran
I stood in my room with the envelope in my hands. It was a nine-by-twelve envelope with a string-and-tab closure. But the paper was heavy and felt like silk. My name was hand-written on the front in curvy script.
My hands shook as I opened it.
Inside the envelope was a note on a white note card in unfamiliar script.
The path is often lonely and frightening, but many are on your side. Welcome, and know that even in the darkest hour, you are never forgotten.
We’re rooting for you, Claire.
In the envelope with the note was a license for private investigation issued to Claire DeWitt from the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services.
Expiration date: never.
“Good news?” Billy said.
“Yes,” I said, shivering. “Good news.”
* * *
That night I couldn’t sleep and as the night tilted toward the next day I walked out to Fisherman’s Wharf. I stopped at the only crab stand that was open. I asked the man working there if I could see some crabs in a barrel. He was a big fat man who spoke with a Portuguese accent. He looked pretty happy. Fishmongers in general seemed to be pretty happy. I made a mental note to look into the suicide rate among fishermen and fishmongers. Maybe it was all an act.
I had to repeat it a few times before he understood, but finally he led me around to the back of the market to have a look. There was a big oil-drum-type barrel half-full of crabs. It looked like one of Ann’s Beehives.
I watched the crabs for a long time. All together like that they looked a bit like insects, something sordid, with a hive mind. But that’s what most things look like if there’s too many of them in one place, people included. We’re all better with a little breathing room and a pretense of some individuality, fake and prideful as it may be. Or maybe there was something better to find, something you could only find naked and alone.
Just as Linda Hill had described, if one crab tried to escape, the others would grab it with their little claws and pull it back in. Maybe, like Linda said, the ones doing the pulling knew something the other crab didn’t. Or maybe it was just what living things were like. Scared of the unknown. Scared of dying and scared of living. And when we loved something, we were scared for them, and would pull them back in to that tiny little part of the world we understood, for no reason better than that we could understand it.
But sometimes, a crab did get out. Change was possible. At least for crabs. Maybe for me. I saw one escape from the barrel, sidle all the way across the pier, clicking his claws on the wood all the way, and jump back into the giant, dark, mysterious ocean, where life was harder, but the rewards, on some dim foggy mornings, at least for a few minutes, at least sometimes, were worth it.
The Mystery of the CBSIS was solved.
CHAPTER 22
THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP
* * *
Las Vegas, 2011
We were driving back to San Francisco in Claude’s Toyota. It was night. Claude was silent. The quiet felt good, like a balm. Life felt tangible, material, as it always did when you came close to losing it. It would pass.
It was pitch-black out. The road back to California was unfathomable, and seemingly infinite.
What if Jay killed Tracy that night in 1986, and she’d been dead all these years, and all our searching had been for nothing?
What if Jay had saved Tracy that night in 1986, taken her away from her alcoholic father, given her a good life, and she’d been alive this whole time? What if all our searching was for nothing because she was never missing at all, just didn’t want us anymore?
But the biggest question of all was how, for forty years, I had ignored the clues right in front of my face.
“The client already knows the solution to his mystery,” Jacques Silette wrote. “But he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can’t be solved.
“This applies equally, of course, to the detective herself.”
“So what are we calling it?” Claude asked.
“Calling what?” I asked.
“The case,” Claude said.
Silette also wrote, “The road to the truth is crooked and disreputable. But the detective’s devotion must be absolutely plumb straight, as sure and fast as an American highway.”
I looked out the window. The long black road looked like it would go on forever, any destination always out of reach, the moment at hand always wasted, happiness always further down the road, never now. But for a quick moment that wasn’t true: the sharp smell of the desert air and the light on the blacktop and Claude beside me and knowing Billy and Nick would be waiting for me at home and feeling like I’d saved my own life and knowing I’d done a good job of it and knowing that the solution to the biggest mystery I’d ever had was coming toward me—I could feel the solution and almost taste it, reaching to me across the ether like a bullet or an evil eye, as close as my own heartbeat—and it all fell into place and now happiness wasn’t there, at the end of the road. It was here, on the blacktop, right now. I knew it wouldn’t be long before I chased it away, but for the moment I felt light, and like maybe beauty was possible, even—especially—under the bright light of the truth.
“We’re calling it,” I said, “the Case of the Infinite Blacktop.”
“Good,” Claude said, and we drove down the long dark road toward home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sara Gran is a novelist, screenwriter, and occasional essayist who lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of five previous novels, including Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead and Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway.
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NOVELS BY SARA GRAN
Saturn’s Return to New York (2001)
Come Closer (2003)
Dope (2006)
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011)
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (2013)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Sara Gran
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First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2018
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Interior design by Dana Sloan
Jacket design by Alex Merto
Jacket photograph by biglin
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Author photograph by Eliza Gran
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gran, Sara, author.
Title: The Infinite blacktop : a novel / Sara Gran.
Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018026234 (print) | LCCN 2018030598 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501165733 (eBook) | ISBN 9781501165719 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Women private investigators—Fiction. |
Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.R362 (ebook) | LCC PS3607.R362 I54 2018 (print) |
DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026234
ISBN 978-1-5011-6571-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-6573-3 (ebook)
