“Tiffany’s parents are staying in the barn.” Prue announced. “I don’t want them driving today.”
We nodded, not really paying attention. Lunch time came and went, but for Ben and me, the time was suspended. I didn’t have the courage or fortitude to even pick up my phone. I felt numb, but considerably happier now Ben was back. But I was overwhelmed with the thought of poor Tiffany. I could feel her parent’s pain radiate from them. I felt responsible, even thought I knew I wasn’t.
We watched CNN on the TV in the parlor, Ben didn’t fit on any of Prue’s tiny antique chairs but he manfully made an effort to balance on the pink tufted boudoir chair. He slowly sipped at a glass of water but refused food.
CNN reported that the Sierra foothill fire had flared up again – homes destroyed, people missing, but no specifics. Before the commercial break and the inevitable switch to celebrity news, my phone rang from the kitchen.
“I’ll get you more water.”
Ben obediently handed me his glass and I quickly headed for the kitchen.
It was Tony, the ignored home inspector.
“You know, for a tense, type A person you sure don’t pick up much.” He said accusingly. “It’s been a circus down here and you’re not even answering your phone.”
“I’m sorry, I‘ve been busy.”
“Well so have I.” He retorted.
Just by his tone, I knew I was in trouble. Or he was in trouble, or the deal fell through … shit.
I sat down at the kitchen table and gave Tony my full attention.
“I’m sorry Tony, I’ll pay you double, what did you find?”
“Debbie Bixby.” He said succinctly.
“I’m sorry?” I was worried about dry rot, unfinished pest I work, I don’t think I was expecting this. No one expects something like this.
“She was in the hot tub.” Tony said.
“Yes,” I said stupidly. “She goes in every night. She told me.”
“Well four nights ago, she didn’t get out.”
I closed my eyes. Ben padded into the kitchen, took his glass from me and filled it from the tap.
Oh, who cares if I make more money than him? He was wonderful. I should tell him that, as soon as I get off the phone.
“The police think the perpetrator loaded the tub up with chlorine on the morning of her death. The fumes knocked her out, at least enough for her not to struggle too much when she was sealed up under the vacuum sealed hot tub cover.”
I rubbed my head. The Aleve hadn’t kicked in to relieve the misadventure of the last two hours, it didn’t stand a chance against this new onslaught of bad news. “How did the Brown’s take it?”
“They are upset. You’re going to have to talk to them.”
“How’s the rest of the house?”
“Other than the dead woman? Oh just fine, Allison.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll take you up on doubling my fee.”
“Done.” The entire time the house was in escrow, no one thought to look in the hot tub. The hot tub came with the house, and everyone knows what a hot tub looks like, it’s big, it’s awkward and if you are not going in, the cover stays shut, sometimes for days on end.
I immediately called the Browns. They were not happy and seriously thinking about pulling out, which, of course they had every right to do. Instead, I talked them into staying with the house. I offered to pay to haul the offending hot tub away.
They said they’d think about it.
I paced from room to room on the main floor, allowing every glimpse of the green house to mock me for being such an idiot and not seeing what was growing in there sooner.
The Brown’s called back and demanded a new hot tub, paid for by the seller.
No problem, I promised.
I left a message with the Christophers.
I was finally hungry. Ben had wandered back into the living room to watch more news, but there wasn’t much else to report. It was two o’clock already. I created a couple of elaborate sandwiches, found the cookies and chips I had bought, so long ago, and a bottle of wine – cork puller and glasses as well. I loaded it all up in an elegant Safeway bag. With handles.
“Want to get out of here?” I asked Ben.
“Sure, I’m all yours,” he rose, steadied himself, and slowly followed me to my car.
Grandma smiled happily. “Take care of him.”
“I will.” I promised, looking askance at Ben.
He climbed into the passenger seat of my car and closed his eyes.
“What did they do to you?” I drove through town.
“You don’t want to know. Fortunately they aren’t terribly precise, your friends. They were worried about inspections and getting busted for their illegal homes. Danny? He was terrified that I was here to investigate the insulation of all the Lucky Masters homes and that Danny would be blamed. I didn’t have much to say after admitting I wasn’t really an inspector. But it doesn’t take a license to know that nothing in that house was to code.”
Down town was quiet again, very quiet. Once, Rosemary flew to Hawaii to see Kilauea erupt. The idea of tourists flocking to an out of control fire seemed odd, but that’s what Rosemary did, flock to danger. And some of us have danger thrust upon us. Not many people wanted to be caught in a conflagration. Unlike the teaming streets of Hilo, downtown Claim Jump was dead silent. Like Ash Wednesday in New Orleans.
I parked at the river parking lot and began to unload our supplies – Ben tried to help but I waved him away. It was my fault he was injured so I would do the heavy lifting.
I had just arranged the bags and towels when I was hailed – not by name, but by “Hey, it’s the lady from the grocery store!”
I turned and there was my pink-haired grocery clerk.
“Hello.” I greeted her.
She nodded, not returning my smile. “You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
There was so much to hear, I didn’t know if I could take any more information, but this cute little thing was going to tell me the news whether I needed to hear it or not. I could tell.
“You know those two guys you were talking with at the store?” She asked.
“Danny and Jimmy?” They qualified in the regular guy category more than Peter.
She sighed and looked up to the sky, blinking rapidly.
I felt my own heart contract. Shit between Tiffany, Ben and now Danny, my heart was getting far too much exercise.
“What?” I prodded her.
Another friend, blessedly clear of extraneous decorations rushed up and put her arms around the girl.
“Come on Katie, we’re here to forget everything.”
“No.” Katie pulled away from her well-meaning friend. “No, I want to tell her.”
“Oh wow, you haven’t heard?” She was about the same age as Katie, twelve. Why are these teenagers so young?
“Everyone is talking about it!” She informed me, her eyes huge in her face.
“What!” I was running out of patience, and I hadn’t left the house with much of a store of patience in the first place.
“Danny Timmons and Jimmy came downtown before the second fire started up. You know the one yesterday?”
Ben joined me and set down the paper bag. We both nodded. Despite the heat in the parking lot, he put his arm around me. I was grateful for the warmth of his skin.
“Someone saw them and asked about that girl. You know the one?”
“She comes here a lot, we see her, I’m sorry, how rude, my name is Sarah and you probably guessed this is Katie.” Sarah extended her hand.
“Her parents are artists and live up on the Ridge.” Katie said, as if that explained a great deal, and it did, actually.
“She does too much speed.” Sarah snorted.
“Quiet.” Katie looked at gave us a sidelong glance, as if they needed to keep unsavory realities like drug use away from the innocent grown-ups.
“Anyway, someone told Jimmy and Danny th
at they saw her going back up to Red Dog Road.”
“And someone else figured she may be heading back towards the fire.”
“That’s crazy.” Ben said.
I glanced up at him. Not, apparently, if you are a jilted lover.
“They rushed back.” Sarah said simply.
“Yeah, but no one’s seen them since. I heard they think they’ll find people pretty soon. Did you see the paper?”
“No.” I said faintly.
She rustled through her own Safeway bag and pulled out a copy of the paper. “Local Men Lose their Lives to Save Girl.” Ran the headline.
I snatched the paper from the girl’s hand, and skimmed the article, at least all that was on top of the fold.
Jimmy and Danny drove back up. I missed them because I was already at Mathew’s. Whether or not they reached Tiffany is a moot point. The paper portrayed them as heroes. Lucky Masters was quoted as saying they were fine workers, salt of the earth. Both men left a rather long list of ex-wives and children behind.
I sniffed and handed the paper back to Sarah’s friend.
“Keep it.” She offered. “We read the headlines already, we’re done.”
“Thank you.”
The girls said good-bye. I led Ben down the path to my favorite place. Now it seemed more appropriate than ever. This time I was not whacked with poison oak because Ben is far more courteous than the sniveling girls a few days ago. One of whom was most certainly dead.
I sniffed again as we moved down the dusty trail.
It was all the same – the trail, the sunlight, the heat from the rocks. But yet, wait for it, all different. Of course I’d come with something lame like that, but I was upset.
I may have wished to drop into a hole in the floor when I first saw Danny at the grocery store, and he may not have been the love of my life, in fact, he certainly was not the love of my life. But he didn’t deserve to die.
I followed Ben’s broad back as we walked along the dusty trail.
“Turn here.” I instructed.
“Does anyone pan for gold here?”
“All the time, there’s still gold in the mountain, it’s just too much effort to get it out.”
He nodded and helped me down the trail. There was no one at the little beach. We had it to ourselves.
“Did you love him?” Ben asked.
“No, but he was part of my history.”
Ben nodded and let me to mourn my own way. But not for long, which is probably good. He distracted me with those hands, that fabulously alive body. We stripped off our clothes and plunged into each other with an intensity that resembled desperation.
They say that death makes the living want to affirm more life, more and more life.
The heat on my skin, the roaring of the water in my ears, did, in fact, create the perfect moment. This was why I made love here when I was a teenager. And the sex was even better as an adult, along with fewer ramifications as long as that nice police officer didn’t catch us.
No, this was county property, it would be the sheriff and he was too busy today to bother patrolling the river.
“What would you do if you had a daughter by someone but she was married to another man, at the time?”
“Is this one of those, if I died and you remarried, then she died who would you want to be with in heaven kind of questions?” He asked warily.
“If you are cautious about questions like that, then you’ve been married before,” I said flippantly.
“You’re right, I have.”
“Bad?”
“Oh about as bad as anything. But you weren’t asking about that, were you?”
“No, I’m just curious.”
“I’d take care of the child in whatever way the mother wanted. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Would you want to share custody?”
He gazed past me at the rushing water, the bright sun made his eyes squint. “Sometimes that’s not the best thing for the child.”
“Maybe not, I just wonder how Tiffany would have turned out if my uncle had more influence.”
“Is he a good man?”
“I don’t know about that, but he is one hell of a negotiator.”
I snapped open the paper. Since I don’t smoke after sex, I often read.
Man Missing. The article was tucked in on the other side of the front page. I would have missed it, if I were reading the paper my usual way – a few headlines, the comics. But there were no other words lying around, so I read the whole paper.
My eyes traveled down the page. Matthew Fantle was missing, last seen downtown. The article linked the incident to his brother who drown at the river in 2002.
“So this the Mathew. The one who was kissing you,”
“Gay.” I said in disgust.
“You aren’t very good at detecting gay men are you?” Ben was mildly amused. (Oh, sure, now that he knows Matthew was gay, and Danny was – well – out of the picture, he had reason to be amused. I was not. Amused.)
“How was I to know?” I protested. “Turns out he had some grudge against my grandmother, he blamed her for his brother’s death. And he was living in an ex-supervisor’s house that is as illegal as Jimmy’s. And Raul said Matthew paid Raul to take pictures of us and post the on the Internet, and then the supervisor paid more money to have the pictures removed.”
“Is that why you were up there?”
“I had to get the computer or discs or whatever he had so he couldn’t do whatever he was planning to do. I don’t know.” I was frustrated by the Matthew situation. I didn’t understand what the subterfuge was all about, I didn’t understand why a gay man had to act straight and why that was so tragic. I understood nothing.
“Schmidt?” Ben asked.
“Yes.”
“He’s running for Supervisor down in the City, my mother knows him. He is one of the few moneyed gay candidates. Pictures of his lover with a woman will not help his campaign at all. It makes him look insincere at best, clueless at worst. And didn’t your grandmother say something about money?”
“Yes, there was a phase here in Claim Jump when no one trusted anyone else. So Prue helped take care of the business license fees from the merchants. Apparently she cashed the checks, and held onto the bills. Schmidt was on the council then. By the time my grandfather died, she lost interest in the City and turned the money back over to the council. That’s the end of her story.”
“But not Schmidt’s I bet he didn’t turn the cash back to the City. It’s probably parked in an off-shore account, that’s another problem.”
“Maybe it was something Matthew knows. It wasn’t much. Just $100,000.”
“That’s enough to get voters excited,” Ben pointed out. “How can we find that money?”
I shifted a bit, and reached for my shorts. I fished out the collection of yellow sticky notes. “Would these help?”
Ben grinned. “I have friends who are very good at hunting things down. The codes will be invaluable. How did you know to take them?”
“I keep all my passwords on sticky notes around my computer, how else am I suppose to remember them?”
We took our time getting back. It was almost dark as I drove into Prue’s driveway.
“Nice hit to on the fence.” Ben observed.
“You can fix it later.” I assured him.
I dragged the towels from the back of the car. And headed to the kitchen door, Ben trailing behind. “Hey Grandma.”
“In the parlor.” Grandma called back.
Dirty and happy, we shuffled through the hallway to the front room.
Pat, Mike and Peter greeted us from their tiny seats. Prue stood as we entered, as did a strange man. As if Peter, dressed in black shorts and a sequined Elton John tee shirt wasn’t strange enough.
Our stranger was older than me, taller than me, and would be quite good looking once he spends two weeks at a spa to relax his tense features and dark demeanor. He was dressed well, khaki slacks and light blue s
hirt.
“This is George Schmidt.” Grandma introduced us.
I hadn’t even washed my hands, but I shook anyway. George’s handshake was a bit limp, but I didn’t react by crushing it. He winced when Ben took his hand.
“Are you here about your house?” I asked him.
He sighed and sank back down in his chair, as if the polite exchange had taken all his energy and now he was exhausted.
“It’s gone.” He leaned back; the parlor chair creaked. He regarded his hands as if they were not longer attached to his body. “This time the fire caught it. It’s all gone.”
“And everything in it?” Grandma asked.
George looked at her, and she calmly gazed back at him.
“Both the girl and Matthew are dead.” He said heavily.
Grandma waited. George shifted. Well, well, maybe I wasn’t the only one who absorbed Uncle Steve’s lessons on negotiating with cannibals.
“The PCU is gone. The contents of my safe,” he trailed off.
“Is probably gone.” It’s one of the biggest ironies of the fireproof safe. The safe usually survives the fire just fine, but the contents inside become so hot, they burn to ash inside the safe.
“The money wasn’t in there was it?” Prue asked.
“The money is gone, Matthew had just moved it to a new account. I don’t know where.” George paused. “There were pictures of Mathew and,” he nodded in my direction, “you, posted on the Internet. I suppose the codes were in the PC.”
Grandma glanced at me. I kept my face completely impassive. Which she correctly took as a no.
“No.” She said to George, “the codes weren’t in the CPU, they may even be intact. Somewhere.” She was purposefully vague.
George nodded. “What can I help you with?”
At the end, Grandma had carte blanche to grow her medicine for friends and family plus George promised to help her run for City Council, no strings attached. Which means she would not be obligated to anyone, not even Lucky Masters. A coup. Damn, that woman was good. I hope to grow up and be just like her.
I heard my phone buzz in the kitchen. I snapped it up and answered without checking the number.
“Heather just quit.” Inez informed me with no preamble. “She said getting around the county was too difficult.”
Catharine Bramkamp - Real Estate Diva 02 - Time Is of the Essence Page 22
