Nadja's house door opened and Frank came out, pushing Joey in a wheelchair with a string of patients tagging behind him down the sidewalk like a bunch of baby ducks. Melody followed, squeezing herself into the blue van and driving away.
Hippo said. "This isn't really about James, is it?"
I shook my head slowly. Then light dawned. "Wait. My Dad's in there with just one caregiver." I got out and headed for Nadja's front door.
Hippo followed. "You're just gonna walk in and rescue Daddy?"
"No sarcasm, please."
"Jesus. At least go around back. Surprise attack."
"Why do you care? You don't even like my dad."
"He's irritating, but he's way better than my three stepfathers, all alcoholics. One was a pedophile." She led me through the back gate. "Who ended up with one less ball after he tried to mess with me."
"What about the bout?" I said. "Don't you need to go skate?"
"What about James? You'll never get him this way."
"Screw him. I'll never get my book back, either," I said. "But Dad is retrievable."
She grinned.
We entered the back yard and found the sliding door open, the family room empty. We stepped inside. As I started for the hall, Greta came around the corner. Quickly, Hippo grabbed her and put a hand over her mouth.
"We're taking Gerald Hamilton," Hippo said.
"Harold," I said, running toward the bedrooms. But they were all empty. I ran back. "Where is he?"
"Yeah. Tell us, or we'll flood the kitchen." Hippo squeezed Greta's ribs.
“Careful!” I barked.
Greta squeaked, "The other house. He was breaking everything. Don't blame me. He knocked me down, but I didn't move him!"
"Where?" Hippo held Greta's hand and pushed back on her long red fingernails.
Greta squirmed. "Somewhere in Ladrona. I don't know. They didn't tell me.”
Push, push. Greta's fingers bent way back.
"Stop that." I poked Hippo.
"What street?" Hippo growled.
"I don't know. Cactus? Yarrow?" Greta whined. Then two fingernails fell off and we all watched the bright red plastic ovals dancing on the tile floor.
"You're gonna pay for that," Greta said.
I got an idea. "Did James leave a laptop here?" I headed upstairs.
Greta, still in Hippo's iron grip, squeaked.
Hippo said, "Come on, Rhonda. Let's go whack some heads in Ladrona.”
"Wait." I hurried upstairs and looked around the bedrooms for my laptop, or any computer that might have incriminating evidence pointing at James as my book thief. I snagged the only laptop I found and we headed out, leaving Greta glowering at us.
Hippo drove us in her car and I called Cathy to say we'd be late. I asked her what the closest street name to Yarrow or Cactus Drive was in Ladrona. She didn't know.
I slumped. "I don't have any idea where we're going.”
Then bless her heart, Hippo pulled a Thomas Guide out from under her driver's seat. While I thumbed it, I said, "I don't get it. James stole that girl's manuscript and mine, too. So either he or his ex-brother-in-law must be Reynard Jackson. So why's he messing with Dad? Dad's way too much for this place to handle. Why not let me have him back?"
Hippo shrugged. "Maybe James doesn't know what these caregivers are doing.”
We looked at each other and chorused, "Not.”
I said, "It's so weird. I helped him write what I thought was his book, but wasn’t even his, for months. Then when he finally he asked me out, our first date was like a damned commercial for the six-bed place you just saw."
"Asshole." Hippo drove like a maniac, cutting drivers off and squeezing the fifteen-foot car into twelve-foot spaces. She and Harley must have had the same driving teacher.
"The Thomas Guide shows a Yerba Buena Drive and a Yucca Street. Let’s try those," I said. We went through a scrubby canyon on highway 133 toward the beach. "And the capper: while James was paying me all this attention, he married Yvette."
"Do you have any brains at all?" Hippo shook her head.
"He said nothing about it! And yet he acted so concerned about me and Dad. Like Nadja's would be the best place for him. Later, I found out he talked it up to my mother, too, and convinced her to commit Dad." I looked at Hippo. "It's like he planned the whole thing just to get Dad in there. But why?"
My cell phone rang. "Rhonda?"
My heart did a dance. "Dal? Where are you?" His voice was the best thing I'd heard all week, but it was cutting in and out in this stupid canyon.
I caught the words, "East Coast," "agency," and "bogus." Then: "Cell phone number in James's name. That Bjorn guy must have found their pension check and planted it in my pocket to get me out of there." Then I heard only, "pocket smells," and "bacon."
"Dal, I called the bank," I yelled. "Monica changed the folks' pension check over to direct deposit before she left, and forgot to tell them. The check Bing found was a fake.”
But before I could say how glad I was to hear his voice, we got cut off. I tried calling back, but got no reception. At Pacific Coast Highway, we turned north toward Ladrona, where Yerba Buena Drive paralleled the beach. It was all hotels and tiny homes, but we were looking for a big house. So we turned and drove up the recently burned hills above Ladrona Beach to a neighborhood which I recognized from TV as the site of some of the worst recent mudslides. Yucca Street and Cactus Flower Lane were both there.
Except Cactus Flower Lane was just a tiny street, with only eight houses on it, all too small to be used for a six-bed board and care home. However, Yucca Street's multi-million-dollar homes with their amazing ocean views were large enough. But we were stopped at a road barrier at the mouth of the street, beyond which most of the gorgeous homes had been blackened by recent wildfires, their lush landscaping just a charred memory.
Hippo said. "Forget this. It's a ghost town."
"Wait." I said. We parked and ran toward the barrier, and wolf whistles commenced on all sides. Perched on the closest scorched roofs and chimneys were a flock of orange-helmeted, leather-skinned workmen with scruffy boots and vulture-like attitudes.
A burly workman walked up to us and crossed his arms. "Can't pass. Too dangerous."
"But there's a car going down that street." I pointed to a spot where, pulling up to the curb was a dark blue van. Nadja's van.
"Owners." The workmen laughed like hyenas and waved us off.
Hippo licked her chops. She drove a block away and parked on Jewel Street, which paralleled Yucca, but had less damage. Both streets dead-ended at a giant, scorched hill at the end.
"Got skates?" Hippo reached for her duffel and threw me an inline pair. A size too big and really beat up. Cool.
"Why?"
"'Cause I think better with them on. And you have to keep up with me."
"What's the use?" I said. "There's no way to get from this street to that one except past that barrier.”
"More than one way to skin a plagiarist," she said.
We skated to the middle of Jewel Street, where we ducked into a carport and scaled a wooden backyard fence, with the goal of getting back to Yucca through the yards. Climbing in skates was a skill Hippo and I mastered rather quickly, using our toe stops for friction. We landed in the yard and dusted off our butts. Easy. Then a giant schnauzer bounded up, teeth bared, roaring like a freight train. It was amazing how fast we could backtrack vertically with giant dog teeth tearing at our pants.
The next house was busy with people, but two doors down, we were able to get through a quiet Jewel Street back yard to its neighbor on Yucca. Then we peered over that yard's front fence toward Yucca Street and the parked blue van. The whole sooty block was eerily devoid of regular neighborhood noises and vegetation, and rang only with hammer hits and workman grunts. Our view of the area was limited, so we crept out the gate and spied the blue van in front of number 4673, a slate-gray bungalow with little fire dam
age.
But the gate squeaked behind us as we shut it, and an orange helmet working next door saw us and hollered. Damn. We took off down the block, away from the barking workers and 4673.
"But this is another dead end," I said.
Hippo grunted and led me up the burned hill, quite a trick in our skates. Then she veered left behind the blackened fence of the fire-damaged end house and hopped over it into a big back yard with ocean views all the way to Japan. Unfortunately, all that was left of the garden's once-verdant splendor after the wildfire was a few bare, black tree sticks and a fancy metal barbecue.
In Mr. Pfeiffer's ninth grade Earth Science class, I'd learned the Southern California refrain: High Wind + High Heat = Brushfire. Well, this October's Santa Ana winds and brushfires had left this mess. We hopped another backyard fence, making our perilous way back down Yucca Street toward 4673. But this yard stopped short where a recent mudslide had taken away quite a bit of real estate. Its back fence now dangled like a piece of old cardboard, zigzagging down the steep slope beyond the new cliff. Mr. Pfeiffer had also made us read John McPhee, who’d said: Steep Mountains + Brushfire + Rain = Mudslide. When wildfires burned brush off the steep local hills, the thin topsoil became unstable. With the next hard rain, cliff-dwellers' homes could take the ultimate E-ticket mud-surfing ride toward their downhill neighbors.
At the next house, half the back yard and the whole fence had dropped fifty feet down the hill. The going got rougher and rougher as the yards got more fore-shortened, with increasingly collapsed or completely missing back fences. We had to stay close to the houses. After edging along the oddly sloped patio of number 4677, we stopped short at its broken fence, our jaws slack.
Wow. The back yard to our destination, 4673 Yucca, was gone. It had slumped into a brown morass of mud and debris far below—one big-ass mud pit, which would have delighted some of the roller queens in its sheer messiness. But the house itself seemed to be clinging to the frigging cliff, expecting a strong wind to blow it down there, as well.
"Damn!" I said.
Hippo just gaped.
There was still a side yard by 4673 and a big, enclosed sunroom attached to its backside. The home had been skirted by a three-foot ribbon of patio, which now flapped in the breeze. A handrail for the old folks was anchored to the side and back walls of the house. Only a couple of tall support stilts underneath kept the whole thing from pitching over the slimy edge of the hill and slaloming fifty feet down the raw hillside into the fresh pile of mud being bull-dozed out of the poor neighbor's yard below. Disneyland had nothing on hilltop dwelling in Southern California.
My hands and feet tingled. I stepped back. "Nobody's in that house. They can't be."
Hippo clambered over 4677's burned gate and crept into the side yard of 4673. "The blinds are all closed. Hey. There's a railing in back." Her eyes were wild. "Yes.”
"No! You'll fall to your—"
But Hippo was already edging around 4673 on remnants of that slim concrete apron toward its back patio, hanging onto the white wrought-iron hand railing running around the sunroom. Watching from the neighboring yard, I could have sworn that 4673 lurched down a few inches just from her added weight.
Then my heart stopped as she stumbled on the buckled concrete and dangled in the breeze, hanging on by her fingernails, it seemed. My God. She was laughing. Then somehow, she pulled herself up, opened the sunroom door, and disappeared inside.
I was hyperventilating. Falling had never really been my thing, and this was beyond the pale. I made for 4677's safe front porch and was dialing Cathy for advice and comfort when a hairy, steely arm came around my waist and another one circled my neck. Screaming and kicking, I was dragged over the lawns into number 4673 Yucca Street. But my captor didn't figure on my skates, which I swung hard at his legs several times.
"Ouch!"
Hairy Arms tripped over the door sill and dropped me onto a chair in the front hall, then sat on me. "Frank, throw me the rope! I got the other one!"
Inside, the warped and leaning house looked like an Escher drawing and smelled of leaking natural gas. Frank was tying a snarling, biting Hippo to a chair in the mildly tilted living room on the front of the house. This room was piled willy-nilly with furniture, which I assumed had come from the empty rooms toward the back of the house. I scanned the empty family room and topsy-turvy kitchen. The slant on everything had a dizzying effect. Then I looked down the hall and glimpsed something through a bedroom door that made my stomach sink: That drooping leonine head in the wheelchair had to be Dad's.
He wasn't moving.
Frank finished binding up Hippo and went into Dad's room. The fully open door revealed strips of white material binding Dad's torso to a wheelchair with big wheels like the one I'd seen at Nadja's place.
"What are you doing with my dad?" I yelled into Hairy Arms's fat, sweaty, smelly shoulder as he bound my chest painfully to the chair.
He took off his shoe.
I ducked. "Why's he bound to the chair? Let him go!"
He stuffed a sock in my mouth. Fresh off his foot. I gagged. Soon, I got blindfolded, and then all I heard was people whispering, big feet shuffling, and large furniture being scraped across the floor, back towards the ill-fated sunroom. Suddenly, a mighty rumble shook the whole house from underneath and the whole building hove queasily toward the abyss.
CHAPTER 40
My heart stuck in my throat.
The movement underneath me only lasted a few seconds, but I'd been in enough Southern California earthquakes for it to paralyze me with fear. Oh, yippee. We were going on the monster slide ride down a big hill. Now. And I guessed the house would collapse and flatten us on its way down.
Footsteps came in from the garage. "S'go!" It was James. "Get out now. One more tiny push on the stilts with the dozer, and hello, insurance payment!"
And good-bye us.
"I can hear you shitheads." Hippo said. "Did you borrow the dozer or steal it?"
"Shut up. What do we say about them?" Frank asked.
James said, "Oh, they must have broken in. Looters."
"Aw, come on." Frank said. "That one's cute. Isn't she semi-famous?"
James growled, "I've saved her life twice. I'm tired of her chasing me around."
I wanted to call him an asshatdipshitfuckwad, but my tongue was tied.
Somebody shoved me and Hippo, chairs and all, into the sunroom and took off our blindfolds to reveal a crazy, harrowing view of the big brown mud pile below. Huge, awesome, slimy, and revolting. A brown stew of death.
Then all went black. For a few seconds. They didn't do a very good job of knocking me out in their hurry to leave. But Hippo was out cold on the sofa next to me. Our bonds and gags were gone, the better for James to cry intruder with, so I slapped Hippo. No response.
I heard a motor start up outside. Off they went. Cuh-rap. With the rumblings of earth I could hear from below, the combined weight of the sofa and two really healthy women on the porch might just tip the whole place off its precarious perch.
I went into action, crawling up the now horribly slanted sunroom floor in my skates to try the back door of the house. No surprise. The French doors were locked. Below, the picture windows of the sunroom now gave onto the big, brown mud bath. No escape there.
I tried to throw myself at the French door, but my skates gave me no traction on the tilted floor. I started undoing the laces, then heard Hippo's voice.
"Huh?"
The house swayed in the breeze, rocking us like proverbial babes.
Frantic, I yelled, "Get up! We need out of here five minutes ago."
She scratched her tousled head and slowly crawled up to the door, dazed and deliberate. I could smell the mud below and hear the house creak as she dug in her pocket and came up with Kleenex, money, and lollipops.
Then she found a lock pick and took an hour (well, ten seconds) to get the lock undone. "Learned that in juvie," she mumbled.
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We scrambled through the pitching house, climbing over shifting furniture, dodging swaying lamps, and hit the living room's jumble just in time to hear the second big, deep CRACK that made the entire house fall a good foot and sway even more precariously.
My stomach about leaped out of my mouth. "Is Dad still here?" I scrambled toward the hall over some sofas stacked with upturned chairs and lamps. Skates still on, I rolled down the hall to the room he'd been in.
Hippo yelled after me, "Are you nuts?"
But all the bedrooms were empty. As were the closets. "Dad, where are you?"
Another big, groaning shift, and I lost my balance in the hallway and slid right down the hall to the bathroom at the end. God, I hated the taste of carpet. But upright movement was no longer possible at this angle. Why was I wearing skates again? They were now a real disadvantage, but there was no time to take them off. Where was Dad? Adrenaline surged through me. Pushing off from the toilet bowl and tub, I used my toe stops, knees, hands, elbows, and even my chin and teeth to claw my way foot by harrowing foot back up the crazyass slanted hall, using every doorway, plug and carpet nub along the way. It seemed to take forever and a day, but really took about three minutes.
"Rhonda?" Hippo yelled. "He's not in the garage! They took him!"
Finally, I attained the swaying living room again and rocketed (well, more like oozed) across the shifting sands of topsy-turvy piled furniture toward freedom. As the floor beneath me billowed, my elbows, shins, and knees caught every sharp edge of every shifting upturned chair leg, lamp shade, and picture frame. Until my left toe stop and front wheels got caught in a tight little crevice between a heavy chair and a massive table leg. Craaaaaaack. Things sank another foot. Yikes. The floor undulated like hula hands. I gingerly sank onto the wooden chair legs currently trying to gouge out my guts and tried yanking my foot out. Not happening. I tried again, from a different angle, but it wouldn't budge. My stomach balled up as I imagined the headlines: Reynard Jackson Lacks Guts to Continue Sham Career.
Which was when Hippo appeared on the other side of my furniture heap and grabbed the heavy chair with all that was piled atop it and tugged, shifting it as easily as a cup of coffee. I was free. Then we both swam over more mounds of Levitz's and IKEA's finest, ending up at the front door sill, gasping with terror.
Roll with the Punches Page 34
