Death Gets a Time-Out

by Ayelet Waldman

  There was, of course, only one reason why Polaris would have blamed Lilly for Trudy-Ann’s death: to deflect suspicion away from himself.

  Lilly straightened up and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. I smoothed the short, tangled curls away from her forehead. “As terrifying as it is to imagine that you’ve spent your life living this lie, isn’t it worse to continue to believe it if it isn’t true?” I said gently.

  She inhaled deeply and then, with a movement so small as to be almost unnoticeable, she nodded.

  “I think we need to find out what really happened in Mexico,” I said.

  “But how?”

  Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. “What if I went down there? I could check the police records, track down anyone who might have information. I could talk to the detectives who investigated the death, to anybody who might have worked in the house. You know, maids, gardeners, whatever.”

  She looked at me, her eyes wet with tears. “You’d do that for me?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And you don’t have any suspicions . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  I kicked sand over her feet. “No, I don’t.”

  “You don’t think I killed Chloe?”

  I shook my head. “No. I know you didn’t.” I was naïve, and I was loyal, and I didn’t believe my friend was a murderer.

  Twenty-six

  IT was surprisingly easy to tell my husband that I’d be abandoning him with the kids, the carpools, and the playdates, and heading to Mexico for a few days. The only problem was that he decided to join me.

  “Who’s paying for this trip?”

  “Um. We are. I can’t take money from Lilly. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

  He nodded. “When’s the last time we had a vacation together without the children?” he said.

  “Never,” I replied.

  We were lying together on the couch, having gotten the kids to bed early for once. A day at the beach always makes them sun-stunned and tractable. Isaac had actually fallen asleep at the dinner table, his face pressed into his plate of plain, buttered spaghetti. I’d wiped him clean and tucked him into bed, kissing the grooves the noodles had left in his plump cheeks. And after protesting mightily that she wasn’t in the least bit tired, Ruby had fallen asleep by six-thirty.

  “Exactly!” he said. “Never. And it’s not like it’s going to get any easier when this one comes along.” He lay his hand against the bulge of my belly, feeling for the kicks that wouldn’t be apparent for another few weeks. “Hell, if I’m paying for it, I’m coming. It’ll be great. Just the two of us. Off on our own. Think how romantic it will be!”

  I wrinkled my brow dubiously. “I’m not going on vacation, Peter. I’m going to be looking through police archives, talking to witnesses. That kind of thing. I won’t have time for romance.”

  He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips. “There’s always time for romance,” he said.

  Having a husband who finds pregnant women intensely attractive is wonderful, except for the fact that in the first few months of pregnancy the absolute last thing I’m ever in the mood for is sex. I seemed, finally, to have survived the morning sickness part of my pregnancy, and I no longer felt like napping at the drop of a hat, but I hadn’t quite begun to experience the renewed surge of energy and libido that heralded the second, more enjoyable trimester. And anyway, I had to work.

  I sighed. “I’ll call my mom. Maybe she’ll be willing to fly out and take care of the kids.”

  And she was, although it was touch and go for a couple of days. She had tickets to a lecture on the history of Yiddish theater at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, and it took her a little while to decide what she’d rather do, see her only grandchildren or listen to a panel full of ancient Jewish thespians reminisce about the good old days on Second Avenue. We won, but only because she managed to browbeat the box office into letting her trade her tickets in for a lecture the following month on Third Wave Jewish Feminism.

  A week after my conversation on the beach with Lilly, Peter and I were standing in the courtyard of Casa Luna, an inn in the heart of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

  “I told you it would be romantic,” Peter said.

  The walls around the stone courtyard were draped with tumbling purple bougainvillea. Brightly painted pots of even more resplendent flowers flanked the wrought iron doors to our room, where we’d dumped our bags on a four-poster bed hung with white gauze. The innkeeper, a smiling American woman named Diane who’d come to San Miguel on vacation twenty years before and never left, had greeted us with chilled margaritas and a basket of homemade tortilla chips accompanied by a vivid green salsa so hot it made the inside of my mouth feel like it had undergone a chemical peel. A furry dog lolled next to the stone bench on which we were sitting, its wagging tail thumping rhythmically against the little table that held our late-afternoon snack.

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “But remember, we’re not here to enjoy ourselves. We’re here to work.”

  Peter heaped salsa on a chip and popped it in his mouth. His eyes began watering and he gulped at his frozen drink. Once he recovered he said, “We’re not going to be able to accomplish anything tonight. It’s almost dark. Let’s relax, wander around the city, find someplace nice for dinner. I promise you we’ll stop having fun first thing tomorrow morning.”

  I reluctantly agreed, and armed with a map and guidebook supplied by our cheerful host, we set out to explore.

  San Miguel is a Colonial city that looks much like it must have a hundred years ago, if you ignore the streets clogged with cars, the tangles of telephone and electrical wires hammered directly into the walls of the stone houses, and the cell phones pressed against the ears of the passing crowds. We walked along the high, narrow sidewalks flanking the cobblestone streets, passing by houses concealed behind high walls and elaborately carved wooden doors. The only sign of life in those old houses was the barking of the occasional dog.

  At the corner of a busy street, we stopped and waited for a break in the traffic. An ancient man in a red embroidered vest walked by, leading a donkey that was pulling a rickety wooden cart. He was followed by a brightly painted bus festooned with lights and garlands of tinsel. A Chevy Suburban with Texas license plates ground to a halt in front of us, allowing us to jog quickly across the street. I waved my thanks at the blond woman driving the truck, and saw that the rear seats of her car were full of towheaded children, none of whom seemed to be buckled into their seat belts, let alone into car seats.

  The light was fading, and the stone walls along the streets glowed pink and orange as the sunset turned the sky into a watercolor. It was ridiculously pretty, like a postcard or a painting on the wall of a shopping mall art gallery.

  We found ourselves standing in a large square, the Jardin, around which Diane had promised us we’d find any number of restaurants. We sat down on a bench next to the gazebo in the heart of the square, and watched the people passing by. Venders hawked their wares—newspapers, sodas, balloons, and odd little metal toys that looked to be cut out of Coke cans. A small grimy boy dragging a wooden case offered Peter a shoe shine. I pointed out my husband’s sneakers, but handed the boy a coin. When he smiled his thanks, I caught a glimpse of blackened teeth. There was a sudden clanging, and Peter and I looked across the square at the huge imposing stone church. The church bells bonged and jangled for a moment or two, and then tolled six o’clock.

  I leaned my head against Peter’s shoulder.

  “It’s easy to see why they came,” he replied.

  We looked at the passing crowd, many of whom were older North Americans wearing tennis shoes and carrying English newspapers and novels. There were a couple of ponytailed men and women in gauze skirts who looked like they might have been holdovers from San Miguel’s incarnation as a hippie destination. Most of the gringos, however, looked like they would have been more at home in Leisure World than at Woodstock.

  We ate enchiladas and dra
nk beer in a cozy little restaurant, and wandered back to our hotel in the dark. It had grown cold, and once we got to our room, we got right into bed and burrowed under the pile of down comforters. We slept tangled in each other’s arms and legs, oblivious to the peals of church bells that interrupted the otherwise still night. The crowing of a rooster woke us up at dawn.

  The groggy night watchman informed us that Diane wasn’t serving breakfast for a good three hours, so we decided to head over to the cemetery, where I had decided to begin my investigation. We walked through the dusty streets in the half-light of the dawn, marveling at the silence. The dogs that had howled and barked throughout the night seemed to have exhausted themselves. The streets were empty of cars, and the heavy smog that had thickened the air with the smell of exhaust and made us wrinkle our noses and cough the evening before was gone, blown away by the cool, crisp breeze. Every once in a while we had to step carefully around someone huddled under a bright, woven blanket in a doorway. As we passed what appeared to be the cable TV store, my eye was caught by a small, brown face peeping out of a bundle of blankets. I bent down and two eyes as big and round as chocolate coins stared up at me. The baby was lying tucked up against the sleeping forms of his parents. His cheeks were red and chapped from the cold and air, and his small mouth was pursed and pouched, as though he was pretending to nurse. He was wide awake, but completely silent. I had a sudden, irrational desire to slip the tiny bundle out of his mother’s grasp and take him with me, away from this beautiful Colonial city where Indians, gaunt with hunger and exhaustion, spent their nights sleeping in the streets and their days hawking hand-sewn dolls to wealthy American tourists. Peter bent down and tucked a thick wad of bills into the fold of blankets under the baby’s chin. The child mewed softly, and a woman’s arm reached out from the roll of blankets and tucked him deeper into the nest. He closed his eyes, and we continued on our way.

  We walked through the white arches of the cemetery and stood in the entry, staring at the tumble of crosses, angels, crypts, graves, and markers that lay like a crazy quilt as far as we could see. There was no grass to speak of. Rows upon rows of graves lay jammed tightly against one another. Many had simple crosses for markers, but others were decorated with tall angels, obelisks, and elaborately carved tombs. Some looked almost like little houses, with box-like tombstones and neat wrought iron fences.

  “We’re never going to find her grave,” Peter said.

  I didn’t answer, just set off down the long path leading from the entry gates deep into the heart of the cemetery. We walked silently for a while, reading the names off the graves as we passed them. Suddenly, I was brought up short. Propped carefully in front of a cross, lying inside a grave surrounded by a white metal fence, was a plastic skull with wilted carnations poked through each eye socket.

  “What the heck . . .” I murmured as I leaned closer to see.

  “What?” Peter said. I pointed to the skull.

  “Wow.” He bent down and read from the marker. “‘Descansa en Paz, Lucia Mendiola.’ She was nineteen. And look. Here’s her baby.”

  I wiped the tears from my eyes, and we continued down the row until we reached a wall of what looked like the cubbies in Isaac’s preschool classroom. Except instead of Teletubby lunchboxes, extra underwear, and hardened, cracked paintings labeled MY MOM AND ME and A T-REX EATING A STEGOSAURUS, this bank of cubbies held little piles of dried, twig-like bones.

  I cringed at what seemed, to my American sensibilities, to be nothing short of gruesome, but then remembered what Hyades had told me about the tradition of celebration of death and the dead in Mexico. If death was not the end, but merely another step in the cycle of life, then skulls and bones and other reminders were not macabre symbols of horror, but simply fragments of the corporeal life, left behind by loved ones who no longer needed them.

  We wandered for close to two hours, and finally, just when we were about to give up, we came upon a portion of the cemetery back near the entry that was walled off from the rest and closed behind a locked gate. Over the wall we could see a much more orderly graveyard. The markers were less elaborate than their native fellows. There were crosses, and even a few stars of David, but there were fewer weeping angels, and no statues of Christ with beseeching arms spread wide. Peering at a small square tombstone close to the wall, we could just make out the name IRVING SILVERMAN. Mr. Silverman had begun his life in Poland on July 18, 1914, and ended it here, in San Miguel, in the winter of 1977.

  Peter and I looked at each other, and then, without a word, he made a stirrup with his hands. I put my foot into it, and he hoisted me up and over the wall. He clambered over after me, and we continued our wanderings through what was clearly the gringo section of the cemetery.

  We found what we were looking for almost immediately.

  Trudy-Ann’s tombstone was simple and spare. A block of stone, roughened by the passage of time, it was etched with her name and the dates of her life. The stone was soft, and the words had begun to blur. There was no fence demarcating her grave, nor was there any decoration. It looked like what it was—the forgotten grave of a woman whose husband and child had left her long ago.

  We stared at the marker for a few moments, without speaking. Then I crouched down and scrabbled through the dusty earth until I found a smooth, round stone. I brushed it clean against the side of my pants, and placed it carefully on top of the gravestone. I closed my eyes and dredged my memory for the words of the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. I recited them silently, skipping the parts I couldn’t remember. Then we climbed back over the wall, leaving the remains of Lilly’s mother alone again.

  After breakfast, Peter and I made our way to the police station across the square from the church. The officer guarding the front door looked like he couldn’t possibly be any older than twelve. He was too busy struggling to stay upright under the weight of a rifle almost as long as he was tall to ask us our business or block our entrance. There was a long counter against one wall of the entry hall, with just a single person behind it—a surly policewoman with purple lipstick and a mole on her cheek in a rather alarmingly similar shade.

  In my best Spanish, rolling my R’s and coughing my J’s, I explained my business. I’d spent two months in an intensive Spanish language program in Guatemala before I’d gone to law school. My vocabulary of the names of baked goods was particularly excellent, since my tutor and I had spent every afternoon in a local café, eating cake and conjugating verbs. I was fluent enough to say that I was a private investigator from the United States and was seeking information about the death of an American woman in San Miguel thirty years before. The clerk stared at me balefully and wordlessly. Suddenly, she grunted, turned around, and walked through a doorway behind the counter. I turned to Peter and raised my eyebrows.

  “Helpful,” he said.

  “Very.”

  “Now what?”

  “God only knows.”

  We waited for a while, and finally, just when I was about to give up and tell Peter we could spend the rest of the day eating tacos and visiting churches and art galleries, the policewoman came back through the door, accompanied by a uniformed man who was about twenty years older and six inches shorter than she was. He sported a bushy mustache and a scowl. He turned to Peter, and in perfectly grammatical, if heavily accented English, he said, “I am the captain of this station house. I understand that you are a private detective working on a case. How may I be of assistance to you?”

  I interrupted. “I’m afraid I’m the one who is the private investigator.” I stuck out my hand for him to shake. “Juliet Appelbaum. And this is my husband, Peter Wyeth. He’s assisting me.”

  The captain’s eyes widened, but I ignored his aghast expression and explained once again that I was investigating a murder in Los Angeles, and had reason to believe that there might be a connection to an accidental death that had occurred in San Miguel in 1972. I refrained from mentioning that I no longer had a client, and when I’d had, he
’d been the accused murderer. I was pretty sure that in Mexico, as in the United States, police officers had little time to spare for criminal defendants and their representatives. To my relief, the officer didn’t ask who I was representing.

  “Ah,” he said. “Nineteen seventy-two. That is unfortunate.”

  “Excuse me? Unfortunate?” I said.

  “Yes. Because of the fire.”

  “The fire,” I repeated, my hopes sinking.

  “The fire in this station. In 1979. Everything was destroyed. Files. Papers. All our records. Nothing remains.”

  “Nothing?” I said plaintively.

  “Alas, nothing.”

  “Perhaps you remember the incident?” I asked. “A young North American woman was shot in her home?”

  “Yes, of course. I was a young man. A very young man. New to the department. But I remember when the gring . . . the North American woman was shot by her own daughter. It was a tragedy. A great tragedy. But of course, it was not surprising.”

  “Not surprising?” I was beginning to sound like a parrot.

  “Of course not. Those oppies. They were capable of anything. Anything at all. We were not at all surprised that they gave their children weapons.”

  “Oppies?” I said.

  Peter murmured in my ear. “He means hippies.”

  “Oh, right. Hippies.”

  “That is what I said,” the captain bristled. “Ippies. North American, drug-using ippies.”

  “Do you by any chance remember who was the investigating officer on the case?”

  “Of course.”

  I waited.

  He said nothing.

  “Do you mind telling me?” I said.

  He blew a puff of air through his mustache and the stiff hairs waggled for an instant. Then he said, “What do you intend to do with this information?”