by Lora Roberts
“What theory?” Dinah yelled the question at him, but Nelson didn’t seem to hear. He pulled a bike out of the shrubbery on the far side of the excavation and pedaled off, his pudgy legs really moving.
“He’s too much of an idiot to have a theory,” Dinah muttered, going toward the fence.
I stepped in front of her. “Good idea. Let’s just fasten this up again, shall we? I’ll let Drake know, and he’ll probably post an officer here so it doesn’t happen again.”
Dinah threw me a disgruntled look. “I should just—”
“Best to leave it.” I pulled the gap in the fence together and turned to face her. “The police know how they left it this morning. if something’s different now, it’s on Nelson’s head, not yours.”
Dinah looked thoughtful. “That’s true.” She hugged her elbows, tapping her fingers impatiently on her arms. “This is all a horror show. Why should that mouthy little jerk be here, messing around? Why should Richard be damaged like this? I’m just—finding it all very difficult.” Her voice broke.
I was sorry for her, but I wanted her to leave, so I could start my appointed rounds. “Why don’t you try to get some rest? Sounds like you’re going to be busy.”
Her shoulders straightened. “Right. Thanks.” She offered me a tentative smile, the first directed wholly at me. “I appreciate it.”
Nevertheless, she lingered a moment more, staring through the chain-link, and I knew if I hadn’t been standing there she would have opened the fence to find out what Nelson had been doing.
As it was, she got into her car and drove away, and I went into the house to call Drake. For once he was in his office.
“Don’t talk to the reporters,” he said when he heard my voice. “Say, ‘No comment.’ That’s the only safe thing.”
“They’re not here anymore. But Nelson was.” I described the little scene I’d just witnessed.
“Nothing in this case is uncontaminated,” he snarled through the phone line. “Now I’ll have to pull Rucker off of questioning the neighbors and looking for your odoriferous buddy to go and stand by the fence doing nothing.” His voice turned speculative. “Don’t suppose you could—”
“I’ve got to go haul a million children around. And you told me to stay out of it, if you’ll recall.”
“Obviously I didn’t know what I was saying.” Drake sighed. “Can you stick around until the uniform gets there?”
“Not really.” I looked at the clock. School would be out in three minutes. “I have to get moving.”
“Well, thanks for telling me. I guess.” Drake sighed again.
“Why don’t you just haul everything out of there, anyway? Then we wouldn’t have to have a chain-link fence bringing down the tone of our neighborhood.”
“I’m working on it.” He sounded harassed. “We’re still understaffed here.”
“Too bad. I have to go.”
“Thanks for nothing. I’ll see you this evening. What are you having for dinner?”
“Whatever I can find.” I hung up before he could deafen me with his sighs.
Barker jumped into the Suburban and settled into the front seat. I revved up the big engine, backed carefully down the drive, and inched through the maze of heavy machinery, thunking over the plates they used to cover their trenches. Stewart waved as if he wanted me to pull over, but I pretended it was social and waved back cheerily before accelerating. I had no time for all this complicated human nature. I just wanted to keep Bridget’s children safe for a few more days before crawling back to my own peaceful existence.
Chapter 20
I parked the Suburban in Melanie’s driveway and helped my charges down. Corky didn’t want to go in, but Susana, a ruffled, dimpled dictator, insisted.
Melanie answered the door with a finger to her lips. “Moira is still asleep,” she said, shooing the children toward the family room. “She’s having a nice nap.”
Melanie’s house was the antithesis of Bridget’s. The living mom was sleek, dusted, undisturbed by signs of human life. In the kitchen, vast expanses of granite countertops glistened, punctuated here and there by glass jars and wooden bowls of oranges and lemons. The family room adjoined it, with French doors standing open onto a patio. The boys immediately commandeered a fleet of vehicles sized for riding on—scooters, cars, even a small bulldozer—and began driving around the room, out the doors, around the patio, back in the room.
Melanie leaned against the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the family room. “You want something to drink? Moira will wake up soon.”
“I could just take her now.” I shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable in that beautiful, sunlight-flooded room. In spite of the children’s drawings posted on the refrigerator and an Oscar the Grouch sticker on one of the cabinets, it wasn’t the kind of kitchen that invited lingering.
“You can’t wake her from her nap yet.” Melanie sounded shocked. “She’ll be cranky all afternoon. Moira is one of those children who need their full sleep.”
Perhaps that was what was wrong between Moira and myself. Perhaps both of us just needed more sleep. I perched uneasily on one of the tall chairs pushed up to the breakfast bar.
“I was just looking at my old albums.” Melanie turned back to the breakfast bar, indicating a stack of leather-bound scrapbooks I had thought were some kind of decorator accent. “We all look so young—so stupid,” she added bitterly.
“Are these from when you knew Richard before?”
“Yes. From my other life.” Melanie sighed over the pages of photos.
“Have you heard how he is today? I know he was still unconscious this morning.” At least, he had been according to Dinah Blakely.
Melanie pulled a tissue out of her pocket and pressed it to her eyes. “He’s holding his own,” she said, sounding muffled. “That’s all they’ll say when I call the hospital. Holding his own.”
“Well, that’s good. At least he’s not worse.” I inched a little closer to the edge of my tall stool. I wanted to look at those pictures. “So many people have been telling me about Palo Alto in the sixties and seventies. Was it so different?”
“I don’t know if it was, really.” For once Melanie spoke without the sharp tone she usually employs around me. “That’s what I was wondering about. It’s why I got out the albums. Maybe we were just so different from how we are now.”
Corky uttered a cry of victory as he gained control of the bulldozer from Sam, who dove for the scooter. Melanie glanced into the family room, but if she didn’t think it was worth interrupting the traffic free-for-all, I certainly wouldn’t.
“You were going to Stanford, right? That doesn’t sound stupid.”
She shrugged. “We were stupid about life, anyway. But we did have a lot of good times.” She turned a page in one of the albums and pushed it toward me. “See?”
I looked at the enlargement that took up most of the page. A motley collection of young people stood on the steps of a house, grinning into the camera. They wore scruffy jeans and, for the girls, long skirts; most of them had long hair and, for the guys, beards. A few of them looked familiar.
“Hey, that’s Bridget’s house!” I recognized the pillars on either side of the steps. “But the front steps aren’t so cracked as they are now.”
“Right. Bridget’s house. It was a group house then, owned by the parents of one of my friends. We got reduced rent because of that.” Melanie shook her head. “When I think of what we did to that place! We had Day-Glo paint on the walls and ceiling, stripes and paisley. SueAnne, the girl whose parents owned it, even painted all the wood trim different colors—purple in the living room, orange in the bedroom.”
“You mean she painted over the wood trim?”
“Yes, if you can believe it.” Melanie giggled. “Her mom was furious. We almost got kicked out over that. That window seat in the dining room—she had painted all the panels different colors and even put op art patterns on a couple of them.” She sobered. “Of c
ourse, it was a sacrilege—all that nice fir trim and paneling. SueAnne was tripping at the time.”
“You mean—”
“You know what I mean.” The sharp tone was back. “Don’t act so goody-goody, Liz. You must have seen your share of drugs on the street.”
“I saw them, yes.”
“But you were too pure to do any, no doubt.” Melanie caught herself up short. “I’m not myself today, truly. That was inexcusably rude.” She threw me a look, half apology, half resentment. “I don’t know why you rub me the wrong way, Liz. You’re a nice person, I’m sure, and Bridget likes you. You can’t help it that you just set my teeth on edge.”
“Do I really?” I had to smile. “Well, you do the same thing to me, so maybe we can just agree to dislike each other.”
“Okay,” she said. “That sounds doable.”
We looked at each other for a moment, then both of us started laughing.
Melanie was the first to stop. “Well, I mustn’t get hysterical. God knows it wouldn’t take much.”
“Richard means a lot to you.”
“You could say that.” She rubbed the crease between her eyebrows. “He’s my ex-husband, after all.”
I stared at her, unable to think of anything to say. She looked defiant. “Your policeman, Drake, will probably tell you anyway. I told Bruno Morales, and he probably passed it along to everybody. Richard and I were married at Tahoe three months before I graduated from Stanford. He was going off on a dig with a bunch of other people from the anthropology department, and I was afraid of losing him to this woman—Aimee DiCarlo. Justly, as it turned out.” She looked down at the picture again, putting her finger on the face of one of the men. The jutting chin and pale, straight hair marked out Richard Grolen.
“He had a hot affair with her during the dig,” she said, speaking as if to the picture, “and when they got back, she just moved in with us. He slept with her in the spare room, although they hinted they would like the queen-sized bed in our bedroom. I ignored that. I tried to ignore it all. I was gone all day, working in the City, and they were together. He told me I wasn’t open enough.” Her lips trembled. “After a month of that, I just left. Divorced him. Tried to forget I’d ever made such a mistake.”
By this time I’d picked Melanie out in the group on the steps. “That’s you, right? With the granny sunglasses and the print dress?”
She laughed. There was no amusement in it. “We all seemed to play dress-up back then. I was into long skirts and all that stuff. But let me tell you, after I graduated, after I left Richard, I left those frumpy granny dresses behind with no regrets. The guys liked us to wear all that old-fashioned stuff—made us look submissive or something. When I put on my first business suit, I felt the power of it. I realized what we’d been lying down for.”
Somehow I couldn’t picture Melanie as a crusader for the women’s movement. Inadvertently I glanced around at the honey-colored maple cabinets, at the lovely daughters surrounded by every comfort.
Melanie caught my glance. “Does this look like selling out to you?” She, too, looked around the room. “Not really. My mom did the fifties’ equivalent of this, of course. But the difference is, I chose it. I chose Hugh and I chose to come back to Palo Alto and give my children the good life I’d had. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. That’s the difference between my mom and me. She did what was open to her, and it wasn’t enough. I know what’s out there, and I chose this.”
Nice work if you can get it, I wanted to say. But even though we’d agreed to dislike each other, I couldn’t say it to Melanie. And besides, if she were going to be so talkative, I thought she might as well talk in the right direction.
“So you and Richard were living in that house—Bridget’s house?”
“Oh, no.” She looked surprised. “We rented our own little bungalow in Menlo Park. Rents were much cheaper then. We both had student assistantships. We got along financially. Ran around with our friends on weekends. We lived together like that for several months before we got married.” She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes for a moment. “We should never have gotten married. It was my idea—I pressured him into it one weekend when we were at Tahoe. He only did it to oblige me, not because of any commitment to me.” She spoke eagerly, as if to acquit Richard of wrongdoing.
“But you still hung out with people living in Bridget’s house?” I looked at the picture again. Everyone in it looked young, unmarked. I felt I knew more of them than just Melanie and Richard.
“In the group house. Yes.” She looked back down at the picture. “That’s why I knew about Nado—the guy who disappeared. The one that nice Bruno Morales thinks might be the skeleton under the sidewalk. Nado wasn’t around at the end of that final quarter. We thought he was in trouble and hiding, actually. Rumor had it that he’d been seen in Mexico, that he was still dealing from a P.O. box. That kind of thing. It never occurred to any of us that he could be dead.”
“Maybe it did occur to one of you.”
“Maybe.” She rubbed that crease between her eyebrows again. “This is all so painful, so upsetting. I thought I’d put Richard behind me. That he was just a guy in my past, nothing to me.” She got a fresh tissue. “Of course, it helped that he left Palo Alto before Hugh and I came back to live, and I didn’t see him. Now I realize—”
“You never got over him.”
“A cliché not worthy of either of us, Liz.” Melanie slumped a little. Her face was pale, and I realized what was different about her appearance—she wore no makeup. “But yes, that’s it. It’s not that I’m still in love with him, but I’m just—not finished with him, somehow.” She threw me a look. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this stuff. It must be because Biddy’s out of town. You messed up your marriage, right?”
“You could say that. I tried to kill my husband.”
Once again, our eyes met and we laughed. “Somebody else finally finished him off for you last month, right? Isn’t that what Biddy said? That cute niece of yours, Amy, was mixed up in it.”
“It’s over now, anyway.”
“I don’t want Richard to die.” Melanie’s face crumpled. She turned away from the family room, so the kids wouldn’t see her tears. “I want a chance to clear it all away.”
“Is that what you were doing Sunday, in the driveway? When I was getting Moira out of the Suburban?”
“So you did listen.” She got up and went to the cabinet with the Oscar the Grouch sticker on it. It pulled out to reveal a trash can, into which she tossed her soggy wad of tissues. “Don’t blame you, I guess. And of course you told it all to the police. I would have, too, in your case.” She glared at me. “But I would have been up front about overhearing, too.”
“Not me.” I stood up, ready to get Moira and go, nap or no nap. “I’ve learned to duck when it comes to confrontation.”
“So you’re leaving now?” She laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I won’t push the issue, and since Richard got attacked it’s moot anyway. Yeah, he wouldn’t talk to me at all. Like we’d never been lovers, never married. Obviously he was hitting on that Blakely woman. And she had no problem with it.” Melanie scowled. “That made me kind of mad—that he would flirt with her right in my face.”
“But you’re not married now, for what—fifteen years? I mean, you’re married to someone else.”
“I know that.” Melanie closed her eyes. “It’s just so hard to believe—that someone I’ve loved could be attacked like that.”
“Believe it.” My ears caught the sound I’d been waiting for—a faint cry. “There’s Moira.”
“So you can get away, finally.” This time Melanie’s smile seemed genuine. “You’re not so bad, Liz. Next time, you spill your guts, and I’ll listen and offer self-righteous comments.”
“Not on your life.”
She laughed and slid off her stool. “I’ll get Moira. You round up the boys.”
That took some doing, since the boys were now relu
ctant to leave. Mick had been methodically building walls of huge cardboard bricks and then demolishing them. He didn’t want to put the bricks back on their shelf. Corky was in love with riding the little bulldozer and protested loudly about dismounting. Sam wanted a turn on the bulldozer and was equally loud about that.
I herded them into their car seats and was buckling Mick’s seat belt when Melanie came out carrying Moira.
“Did you hear the phone?” Her voice was tremulous. “That was Bruno Morales. He wanted to let me know that Richard regained consciousness briefly. He’s been upgraded from critical.”
“That’s good news.”
“It is. I know that.” She handed Moira over, and I began the insertion process, getting her to sit in the car seat, buckling, strapping, finding the right toys to mitigate the whole experience. Melanie was so preoccupied with Richard’s health that she didn’t even offer to do it better than I.
“If he recovers—if he really recovers—”
“Is there some doubt of that?”
“In any head injury there’s doubt. You know that.” She slung the diaper bag into the car. “Probably Dinah Blakely’s sitting next to his bed every moment. If she’s not over at Stanford plotting to take over his job.”
This echoed what Nelson had said earlier, and I remembered something that had occurred to me then. “I thought Dinah said Richard was a visiting professor. How could she get his job?”
Melanie pushed the hair out of her eyes. “He told me that was the story the department wanted to put around. But they’re considering him for an anthropology chair. He was keen to get it, too. Said he wanted to move back to the Bay Area because the sailboarding was better here than in Massachusetts.” She choked up again, but then rushed on, leaning closer. “Now maybe Dinah Blakely’s in the running for that job. There’s a motive for your detective. Make sure you tell him that.”
“You can tell him if you want.” I didn’t care for the vindictive glitter in her eyes. Melanie really had it in for the younger woman. “And he’s not my detective.”
