I summoned another smile. “No worries. Stay under the radar and protect your son. Better get that backpack from your mother.”
He nodded. “I’ll get it next time my step-dad is away. You going to tell anyone about us?”
I shook my head. “I won’t, but someone else might figure it out. And the detective on your son’s case looked smart. But I think you’re safe for now.”
He waved at his son who returned to fighting invisible foes. “If you have contacts, would you know if they’re coming after me?”
I slid off the boulder and kneaded the tiger scar while I studied him. “I could make it my business to know.”
He glanced towards his trailer, and I followed his gaze. Kirsten’s Mini Cooper gleamed bright red in the summer glare, but Nick’s gaze lingered on his home, not the car. “If I have a couple of hours notice, we can disappear again.”
He didn’t ask, but I answered anyway. “If I hear anything, I’ll give you a call.” He nodded and gave me his phone number. Knowing that Dante would insist on a code, I mixed my favorite pirate and a little Humphrey Bogart. “I’ll say I’m Jack Sparrow, and it’s time to play it again.”
He released a shaky breath as I put away my cell after entering his number. “Why are you doing this?”
I didn’t think he’d understand about my need to solve the mystery of my accident or the brain damage that craved risky behavior or the boredom that drove me to solve cold cases. I kept it simple. “I’m a teacher. I protect kids, too.”
He nodded, mumbled something that sounded like “thanks,” and headed for his son. I called after him, “What happened to the dog?”
He paused. “Jackson told you about him? He died around Easter. Old age. We were going to get another dog, but Jax isn’t ready yet.” He nodded again. When he reached his son, he ruffled the kid’s hair, and then collected the pole and tackle resting against the bench.
I flicked off the recorder; Ivy and I would listen to it tonight. When I lost sight of father and son, I leaned cautiously over the bridge and stared down the stream to where it curved out of sight. The dog had disappeared but I saw the old man, who I’d mistaken for the dog, fishing cans from cattails and his heavy steps splashing in water. Had the dog collar in the child’s backpack triggered my delusion? When we listened to the recorder later, Ivy would not hear a dog barking. Only a grieving boy and I still heard the echoes of Flash.
Walking back to the car, I checked my messages. Charlie had talked to a colleague in Colorado and arranged a search in the caves of Mesa Verde for the bones of a ten-year-old boy. Charlie had asked how I knew they’d be there when the shoes had been found by the river. I remembered Tracy saying how much her brother loved caves, and I knew Simon had easily lured him there. Even if none of his other victims were found, this one would convict Simon. For the sake of her baby girl, I hoped it would also free Tracy from his power over her.
I found Kirsten sitting on the porch swing of a tan double-wide trailer. She was eating my salmon jerky.
“This is the Jacksons’ address,” she said unnecessarily. “I scoped it out. Truck on the side. No one home.” Never mind that I’d told her to wait in the car.
“That was them by the bridge,” I said. “Father and son. They’ve gone fishing.”
She yawned. “You done here?”
“Just about.” I headed down the driveway and found a faded blue Ford pickup with a trailer hitch on the back. Just as Raggedy Ann had described the gardener’s truck.
The doors were locked. Something felt familiar about the truck, something that had nothing to do with the police reports or Jackson’s abduction.
Circling it, I studied the tires and noted that the license plate had been replaced. I checked the bed. Except for dirt and leaves, it was empty.
I almost missed it. A bumper sticker on the left side. I crouched for a closer look. A peewee baseball team banner for the Tustin Tigers.
I touched my left thigh. Even through the jeans, I no longer felt the scar. Like Jo and Ivy said, it had never existed.
So what did that mean? There had been no scratches? Had I seen this truck the day of my accident? Had I seen another bumper sticker for the Tustin Tigers and then somehow connected it with the television reports about Jackson’s kidnapping?
My head started to throb but not in a “getting close to the solution” way. More in a “not finding a solution yet, but maybe I was a step closer to discovering the truth” way. After 17 months, I counted it as monumental progress.
Kirsten appeared in the driveway behind me, the sun glinting on her yellow-green eye shadow and red satin dress. She scowled. “You done now, Ms Graff? Some of us have a life, you know.”
Stifling a grin, I stood and stretched. “Then let’s get to it.”
Available Now
Sinking Ships
An Abishag’s First Mystery
An Excerpt from Sinking Ships in the Abishag Mystery Series
Until I agreed to marry an 83-year-old brain-dead man, I’d never been on the second floor of the Abishag agency.
“You can change your mind, you know.”
Parked in front of the Westwood office building on a quiet, palm-lined street off Wilshire, I stared at the second floor overlooking the courtyard. Uncomfortable in my contract-signing clothes and hearing Jen’s words, I squirmed. Before she spoke, I’d only been thinking about not moving into Thomas’s Palos Verdes Peninsula home till tomorrow night and felt glad of the reprieve. I thought she at least would be on my side.
I inhaled the scent of sage from the courtyard and warm leather seats in her Audi convertible. “I can’t back out now. I signed a contract.”
“That one doesn’t count.” She sighed and rifled through my purse. Digging past the final notice telephone bill, she extracted a hair pick. “Let’s fix your hair.”
I plucked off the scarf and dropped it onto the dashboard, its silken folds shimmering. It also belonged to Jen.
“I get a finder’s fee when you marry the old geezer.” She fussed with my bangs. “I should be telling you that one day this could be all yours.” She waved my hair pick in a wide sweep across the windshield.
I blinked. “You’re giving me your car?”
“What? No.” She laughed. “Took me four Abishag husbands to get the car. Not to mention the loft in Malibu and college fees paid through grad school. I’m not giving that up—even for my best friend.”
Best friend? Jen had been my dorm-mate first quarter of our freshman year, but we rarely saw each other after she took her first husband and I moved into a West LA rental with seven other students. I never thought of us being close and definitely not best friends.
She responded to my surprised look with a wry one. “Only friend, I should say. Since I turned Abishag, I’ve lost all my old ones and can’t make any new. And don’t get me started on dating between husbands. The good ones won’t date me, and I won’t date the scum that will.”
I’d waked with a frisson of nerves, thinking that by day’s end everything would be different. Jen’s words made my stomach churn. Marrying Thomas would solve my money problems, but I hadn’t heard that it could ruin my dating life.
Not that I had one.
Weeks earlier, I’d called Jen because I’d run out of options. I couldn’t keep a job, was a month behind with my share of the rent, and unless I took out another student loan, I’d no way of paying school fees this Fall. She’d done everything she could to discourage me from applying to the agency, but after doing her own assessment of my finances, she reluctantly coached me through the interviews, recommended me to the director, and helped me study for the licensing exams.
I tried to puzzle through her logic. “What does being an Abishag have to do with friendship?”
Her eyes suddenly welled with tears. Feeling the discomfort of something entirely different, the awkwardness of dealing with crying, I fumbled for the door handle. Jen stayed me with a perfectly manicured hand. “Les, I can count on you
being rational. So what if being an Abishag wife is kind of sordid? That doesn’t make me bad friend material, right?”
I chewed my lip. “Who says being an Abishag is sordid? For all the stupid reasons people get married, seems like caring for the dying is the kindest.”
Laughing, she blew her nose and some of the butterflies abated seeing her return to her usual cynical pragmatism. “Yes, Leslie Greene, you are delightfully rational, with a perfectly daft view of relationships. It’s like you were made to be an Abishag wife. I bet you’ve already memorized the 89 rules.”
Ignoring the comment about memorizing the 89 rules (which I had), I managed a wobbly grin. “A perfect Abishag as long as I keep my mouth shut?”
Laughing again, she returned the hair pick to my purse. “Always a good policy with the tact-challenged. Rule 48.”
I tried to pick up my purse, but her hand rested on it, her gaze fixed again on the second floor of the Abishag agency. “The rich are guilted into contracting an Abishag wife, you know. Can’t have their loved ones passing into the Great Unknown without the ultimate companion, all the peace of mind you can buy in one short, blonde package…”
“Hey, I’m not…”
She stared at the bougainvillea winding around the building’s windows, not hearing me. “Really, in the end, it’s not the geezers or the families or even the Abishag wives who profit. It’s the lawyers.”
Of course they did. We lived in a capitalist society—thank God, as my political father would say. If there were no rich, there would be nothing like Abishag wives—and no way for me to return to the university in the fall.
I knew Jen worried about me being happy, so I didn’t talk about economics. When she coached me, she went on forever about how an Abishag wife was not part of the family, to remember that I would only be a hospice worker with a title, and when I didn’t know what to say, say nothing.
But I’d met Thomas’s daughter so I could assure her, “The family will be wonderful, Thomas will pass surrounded by love, and the summer will be over before I know it.”
“Spare me your fairy tales,” Jen said, but she released my purse, started the car and said as she often did, “If Cinderella were an Abishag, she’d get the glass slipper but no prince. Remember, Les, you’re being paid to attend the dying. You’re not being adopted into his family.”
I got out of the car in a twirl of Jen’s second signing ceremony dress, also a loaner. I read the worry in her grip on the steering wheel, and suddenly I felt calm. “It’s okay, Jen. Portuguese Cove’s a nice place, and the doctors say Thomas won’t last more than a month. Me being there means he won’t die alone, and I can go to school in the fall. It’s win-win.”
She nodded although her anxious smile slipped. “Call me, okay?”
I shut the door firmly. “Dinner when it’s over. My treat.”
I heard the purr of the retreating Audi as I crossed the brick-lined sidewalk to the agency’s red door.
The Westwood Abishag agency filled two floors in a Spanish hacienda-style building. The front half of the ground floor faced the courtyard and was used exclusively for the family of its elderly, comatose clients. Facing the alley, the back half was for interviewing Abishag candidates.
California boasted fourteen Abishag agencies, but the Westwood office had the state’s third largest clientele and drew wife candidates largely from UCLA, USC and six other public and private universities between Bakersfield and the Mexican border. On the second floor, the Westwood legal offices created the contracts (and provided the occasional litigation and even rarer criminal case support) 24/7. As it supported satellite agencies in Palm Springs and La Jolla, the Westwood office had more lawyers than any other Abishag agency in the United States.
Moments after I entered the front door, an assistant whisked me upstairs to a conference room overlooking the courtyard. Florence Harcourt had told us candidates the room was used in all the signing ceremonies.
Except for a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the conference table, it looked ordinary. A notary sat near the door, opening and shutting her inkpad in a bored manner, while Florence Harcourt’s assistant circled, whispering into her headset. I stood near the window, trying not to wrinkle Jen’s dress, trying not to sweat, wishing I could take off the pink sweater loaned to hide the mustard stained sleeve, wishing my new, strappy, white sandals didn’t pinch my toes.
“It should be just another few minutes, Leslie.” Florence Harcourt’s assistant squinted, re-pinning a white rose corsage to the pink sweater. It was the fourth time she’d tried to straighten it, and I almost bit through my lip trying not to tell her that she should have used two pins to stabilize it.
Jen told me to say as little as possible to the client’s family—actually to interact verbally as little as possible with anyone connected to the Abishag agency—so I gritted my teeth.
“Miss Crowder is running late because of traffic on the 405,” the assistant told me. “She’s keeping Mrs. Harcourt apprised of her ETA.”
Although my housemates were virulent in their opinions about Abishags, I thought I’d make a good one. Before I’d been fired from hospital volunteer work for mouthing off to a patient’s family, I liked working with the patients, especially the comatose ones. They never complained about anything I said.
A few minutes later, Florence Harcourt breezed in with a harried-looking Tina Crowder and a senior lawyer carrying a thick stack of papers, contracts I assumed. When we met a week earlier, Tina had made me nervous. She was older than my parents, large boned, with short black hair. She cried every time she talked about her father.
When I visited Thomas in his home the week before I agreed to be his Abishag wife, Tina had told me that she thought me “cute.”
Florence Harcourt had explained that overly protective daughters usually wanted short, waif-like candidates for their fathers, and that would work in my favor. Short, yes, a feathery blond with enormous kewpie-doll eyes, but I never had thought of myself “waif-like.” Still, I had chosen Thomas because he didn’t frighten me as some of the other brain-dead clients had, so I was glad when Tina hired me.
Tina dropped her Fossil purse on the table with a thud and sat. The lawyer slid a tall stack of pages toward her as the assistant set a glass of water near her.
Tina shot me a perfunctory smile.
Suddenly nervous, thinking I should speak, but remembering Jen’s strictures about staying silent, I bit my lip again.
“Did you have any questions?” the lawyer asked Tina.
Tina shook her head. “My dad’s lawyer reviewed the advance, and he’s fine with it.”
My contract with the agency was only a page long, a standard employer/employee agreement. The Abishag contract didn’t have to be drawn up each time she took a husband, so I was there to sign only one piece of paper.
My sandals still pinching, I shifted slightly. Florence Harcourt frowned, and I froze. What had I done wrong?
“It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing for your father, Miss Crowder,” she said warmly. “A sweet and loving way to say good-bye.”
Really? Signing a contract is sweet and loving? But Jen had reminded me that Abishag wives fade into the background. Rule 43. I practiced fading.
The room went silent, and I realized everyone was staring at me. The lawyer exhaled impatiently. “I’m sorry…” I stuttered.
Tina patted the chair next to her. “It’s time to sign the marriage certificate, Leslie.” Her eyes welling with tears, she fumbled in her purse. “I’ve signed for Dad.”
I eased into the chair next to her, uncomfortable with her quiet sniffing. Florence Harcourt squeezed Tina’s shoulder gently.
Hand quivering, I signed the certificate just above her signature—Tina Crowder for Thomas Crowder.
She stood, wiping her eyes, gathering her purse while I remained seated.
I consider myself a Romantic Rationalist, believer of fairy tales but not in happy endings, dreaming of a soul mate but knowing noth
ing lasts.
Even so, I couldn’t stop staring at my husband’s name.
* * *
Standing at the door of the Crowder mansion the next day a few hours after finishing my linear algebra final, the briny sea air swirled around me, cool and damp. I looked over my shoulder, down the long driveway to the locked gate, across the highway to where I could hear the waves crash in inky darkness. My husband lived (or lay dying) near Portuguese Cove, at the north end of Palos Verdes Peninsula.
Shifting the gate key to my purse and dropping the duffel, I rang the doorbell again. No answer.
In the packet of information I’d been given by Florence Harcourt was contact information for my husband’s day nurse, Hillary Lattimer. Although it was almost 8 p.m., Hillary was to be on duty when I arrived and show me around the house, go over schedules and answer any questions.
I tried Hillary’s cell, heard its faint ringing inside the house before it went to voice mail.
I had met Hillary on my visit to view Thomas. She was somehow related to the family, but I hadn’t paid much attention to her, my eyes only on him.
I tried the door, my damp hand jerking back when it easily opened. I felt like little Red Riding Hood, creeping into a house, a ravenous wolf waiting inside.
“Hillary?”
From upstairs I heard the faint beeps and clicks of medical equipment till I tiptoed through the dining room. Silence thickened outside the kitchen door.
“Hillary?” I whispered, a cheek pressed against the icy door. I inched open the door, smelling something metallic and earthy. Heart hammering, I felt blindly for the light switch, unable to move my rooted feet.
Tina had told me that her father had had the kitchen remodeled a few months before his first stroke—chrome appliances, black marble countertops, pale gray walls—very modern.
Someone had left the back door open. It creaked on its hinges as I widened the kitchen door. The light from the dining room arrowed into the room, and lit the space between the two doors.
Jack Fell Down: Deluded Detective Book One (Deluded Detective Series 1) Page 7
