by Dianne Emley
Jim reached for his son’s arm but was too late. “Cal, get back here and clean this up.”
“Good Lord,” Patsy said. “I’m going someplace quieter.” She left the room with her wineglass.
“Jim, it’s nothing.” Vining touched his hand. “Don’t make a fuss.”
He licked his lips, annoyed with his son, but wanting to mollify Vining. “I’ll have a chat with him later.” He tore off a paper towel and picked up the squashed chocolate.
“You need to get started on your creamed spinach.” Vining began taking the ingredients from the refrigerator and pantry.
Kissick looked them over. “And the nutmeg. I just add a dash.”
“Nutmeg?” Vining rubbed her chin. “Oops.” She’d forgotten the nutmeg.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Shoot. I’m sorry. I want it to be perfect.” She sighed. “These are the times I wish Emily drove.”
“James can make a run to the market. Speaking of James, where is he? He didn’t even come in to greet you.”
Vining followed Kissick from the kitchen. They found Em and seventeen-year-old James standing on the terrace. He’d seemed to have grown a foot since Vining had last seen him. He was a good-looking kid with his father’s height and sandy hair and his mother’s patrician nose and slightly cleft chin.
For a girl who claimed she didn’t like Jim’s boys, Em’s body language argued otherwise. They were leaning against the railing, standing close together and laughing.
Vining went over to them. “Hi, James.”
“Hello, Mrs. Vining.”
Vining noticed a dreamy look in Em’s eyes.
Kissick didn’t mince words. “What’s up with you coming into Mrs. Vining’s house and not saying hello?”
“I didn’t know where—”
“Don’t—”
Vining put her hand on Jim’s arm. “Jim, it’s fine. No big deal. The nutmeg?”
An hour later, everything was ready and on the table, the serving dishes covered with aluminum foil. Granny was dozing on the La-Z-Boy. Cal was engrossed in playing a game and texting his friends on his cell phone. Patsy was into another glass of wine, lost in thought as she stood on the terrace and looked at the view, having an uncharacteristic introspective moment.
Vining and Kissick were both in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, wondering where Em and James were.
“I’ll try him once more.” Kissick pulled out his cell phone. “He’s going to have hell to pay.”
They heard the front door open.
When Vining found them in the entryway, Emily was combing her hair with her fingers. Her lips looked especially rosy and her cheeks were flushed.
Kissick snatched the small plastic grocery bag that James handed him. “Where have you been?”
James shrugged in the way that only a teenager can. “At the market.”
“You’ve been gone for almost an hour.”
Em giggled. “Has it been that long?”
“You’re not exonerated either, young lady.”
The girl bristled at being reprimanded by Kissick.
Vining held out her arms, trying to usher them toward the dining room. “Let’s just sit down and have a nice dinner together.”
Platters were passed and plates and wineglasses were filled. Just before everyone was about to dig in, Kissick said, “Hold on. Let’s say grace.”
Cal said, “Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat.”
James and Emily snickered.
“Children should be seen and not heard,” Granny said.
“Cal,” Kissick said.
Patsy’s cell phone rang. “I have to get that.” She caught her foot on the chair as she got up, stumbling.
James and Em, sitting across the table from each other, chuckled.
“Let’s pass the food,” Vining said. “Jim, would you mind serving the lamb?”
He stood and picked up the platter. “Not at all. Granny, how do you like your lamb?”
“No pink on it,” Granny said.
Emily and James continued to giggle, both of them looking into their laps.
Kissick snapped, “Are you two texting each other? Stop it.”
Patsy returned to the table. “Thought it was my new guy.” She raised her wineglass to her lips. “He promised to call. Ha. Men are dogs. What else is new?”
Under her breath, Emily said, “The women in this family can’t hang on to men.”
“Emily,” Kissick snapped. “Don’t be disrespectful to your grandmother.”
Cal ate a spoonful of the corn casserole. “This is salty!”
“Don’t be rude, Cal,” Kissick said.
Patsy confronted her granddaughter. “Let me tell you something, little girl…”
The group erupted in argument.
Vining sat in her chair with her hands in her lap, seeing her vision for her new life evaporating. She began rapping a wineglass with a butter knife. The glass broke, splattering her and the linen tablecloth with red wine.
They all gaped at her.
She shouted, “I made this freaking dinner and we’re going to eat it. Happy Easter!”
She picked up her knife and fork, and began cutting into her perfectly cooked and seasoned leg of lamb.
Everyone followed, sitting in stony silence, eating to the sounds of silverware against china plates.
FOUR
The next morning, Vining drove Emily to school. The storm clouds in the sky had broken but the tension between mother and daughter had not.
Vining knew that time, the great haze-master, would blur the prickly edges of last night’s dinner disaster. It was precisely the type of event that, years hence, they’d all have a good laugh over. Today was not that day.
She inched her aging Jeep Cherokee forward in the queue of parents dropping off their children at the Coopersmith School. The public high school for the arts occupied several early-twentieth-century Craftsman-style buildings on a grassy knoll above the never-completed segment of the 710 freeway in Pasadena. The fast-moving clouds had gathered and the rain had started again. Southern Californian drivers would barrel right across anything less than a 6.0 earthquake but a rainstorm incited paralysis.
There was an electronic ping on Emily’s cell phone.
Emily detected the subtle change in her mother’s demeanor. “I’m not responding to it. No phone calls or texting for forty-eight hours. Except to you or Dad. For an emergency.”
Vining dipped her head in confirmation. Emily having cleaned up after the party and having issued a terse apology wasn’t sufficient. Vining had demanded meatier punishment.
Emily gave a dejected look out the passenger window and released a melodramatic sigh. “I hate the rain.”
This was something resembling conversation. Vining considered it a breakthrough. “We sure need it. They’re talking about rationing water this summer.”
“They’re always talking about rationing water. There’s never enough water. There’s never enough anything.”
Vining was tempted to say: There’s enough garbage…crime…negativity…Instead, she said, “Seems that way, sometimes.”
She finally made it inside the parking lot and stopped beneath a covered portico.
Em began waving madly at her three best girlfriends. She snatched her backpack and bounded from the car with a cheery, “Bye, Mom,” her sullen mood passing with the same fickleness as the rain clouds that had again parted, revealing blue sky.
“Bye, Sweet Pea,” Vining said as the car door slammed shut, adding, “Have a good day,” through the windshield. She watched Emily walk backward in front of her friends as she told a story with dramatic flair. The four friends were similarly dressed and wore variations of the same hairstyle.
Vining thought of her girlfriends from her school days. When she was Em’s age, they’d been everything to her. Time passed and they’d drifted, as people do, without a real effort to stay in touch. She was terrible about that. She rare
ly sent Christmas cards, only acknowledged the birthdays of close family, and was often late with that.
Her mother, on the other hand, had remained close with her three best friends from the all-girls Catholic high school they’d attended. Vining recalled Patsy gossiping and bitching about her friends after a recent get-together. They would follow each other through the gates of Hell, but they were still playing out their teenage rivalries.
Her cell phone rang. The display showed: “Jim Cell.”
She answered, “Good morning.”
“Good morning. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“I’m good. Did you sleep all right?” he asked.
“I’m fine. I just dropped Em off at school. What’s up?”
“Woman was found floating in a backyard pool in San Rafael. She’s the homeowner. A widow. Her live-in personal assistant returned from a weekend in Ventura and found her. I just got the warrant to search the contents of the home. I’m headed there now.”
“Why didn’t you call me when you first heard?”
“I can handle it.”
“Please don’t coddle me, Jim. That’s going to make me really angry. Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll see you there.” He gave her the address.
“I’ll change cars and meet you there.”
Within ten minutes, Vining had switched vehicles to a department-issued navy blue Crown Victoria and headed back in the direction from which she had just come. She drove across the Colorado Street Bridge, called “Suicide Bridge” by the locals. No one knew exactly how many had plunged to their deaths off the white lacy structure that traced a gentle S shape across the arroyo floor, but it was thought to be more than a hundred.
Today, the bridge provided a lighthearted view: a double rainbow over the Rose Bowl. The lower one was big and spectacular. The smaller second one was above it and off to one side, like an eyebrow. Vining wondered whether, if the bridge’s last suicide victim had seen these rainbows, he would have jumped or whether the hopefulness implicit in them would have only added to his psychic angst.
She exited the bridge, crossed over the freeway, and headed up San Rafael Avenue, which twisted past multimillion-dollar homes nestled into the hillsides, some facing the private Annandale Golf Club. Vining was familiar with this neighborhood. During her thirteen years on the force—four as a detective and most of the rest spent as a patrol officer—she’d learned every nook and cranny of Pasadena’s twenty-three square miles. She’d gotten to the point where she could hardly drive down a street and not recall a crime or a situation. Like all veteran cops, she’d come to believe that she’d seen it all and that nothing about human nature—from our sparkling better angels to the depths of depravity—could surprise her anymore. It was heartening that she hadn’t lost the ability to be elevated at the sight of a rainbow.
She rounded a curve and saw PPD black-and-white prowlers, white Forensic Services sedans, and Crown Vics crammed along the narrow street. Yellow barrier tape across the front of the large property marked the scene’s outer perimeter.
The house was not hidden behind gates like many in the neighborhood, but was unfenced on a hilltop. The lawn looked like apple-green velvet after the spring showers. Vining imagined Em tsk-tsking at the wastefulness of such a vast lawn in arid SoCal.
The house was a two-story Cape Cod painted white with black shutters and front door. There was no artful landscaping, fountains, color-of-the-moment house paint, fancy window treatments, or any type of designer stakes in the ground. The property quietly suggested money, a lot of it.
Flower beds were planted with local spring-blooming favorites: yellow-orange clivia, lilac irises, mounds of white iceberg roses, and purple pansies. They were the same bedding plants found in the yards of both the grand and modest homes in the area, as ordinary and comforting as a pair of old shoes and as welcome each spring as an annual visit from an old friend.
Vining rifled through her black nylon duty bag in the trunk for her box of Latex gloves and disposable booties. The ground was wet, and she didn’t want to leave footprints in the house. They’d assume that the woman had been murdered until they could prove otherwise.
The overnight storm had dumped more than an inch of rain. It wasn’t raining now, but dark clouds moved quickly across the sky. The air was crisp yet heavy with moisture, and had a bone-chilling dampness. Birds that had been hiding from the rain in a giant oak tree started singing at once.
The command post was set up out of the back of a Chevy Tahoe. Vining’s friend, Lieutenant Terrence Folke, was the Incident Commander—his first time, as he’d recently been promoted from sergeant. A large, fit, affable African American, he and Vining had been through tough situations together on the job.
After she’d checked in with him, she walked up a weathered brick path that was terraced as it ascended the hill. On the broad front porch, two white rocking chairs were set up to take in the western-facing view. Vining snatched a private moment before she entered the dead woman’s house, figuratively walked in her shoes, and immersed herself in whatever sad or just stupid circumstances had led her to end up dead and floating in her backyard pool. Soon, she’d become part of the woman’s story, and the woman would join Vining’s gallery of people who’d met an untimely end.
She looked at the panorama across downtown L.A. She had a hint of this view from her house but here it was unobstructed. The city sparkled after the rain, the colors pure and shimmering in the clean air. She could pick out Catalina Island, thirty miles offshore, looking like a humpback whale in the distance.
She deeply inhaled the fresh air and held it for a second, enjoying the present. She’d lived in the present a lot over the past two years, ever since the creep had stabbed her and left her for dead, but it often hadn’t been a good place to be. Now, she relished a different present, the one after the nightmare, the present she’d craved yet feared would never come. Returning to a place where she felt whole had been a struggle that she’d feared she’d lose. Now, she felt truly alive. She felt good and felt no need to justify it. It just was.
Last night’s dinner party came back to her. She chuckled. It was already starting to seem funny.
The front door was open. She steadied herself with a gloved hand on the door frame as she pulled the booties over her shoes. Frowning at the uncovered shoes of a uniformed officer who was leaving, she stepped inside the house onto a polished hardwood floor. The only furniture in the entry was a simple Windsor bench.
On the left was a small den with masculine furnishings—a sturdy desk, a wing-backed chair in forest-green leather, a small couch upholstered in a hunting scene print with spaniels and geese, and framed watercolors of ducks. Built-in bookcases were crammed full. Newspapers were stacked on a corner of the desk.
Past it was a staircase to the second floor. To the right was a wide opening into a formal living room. At the end of the hall, a sunporch was lined with open French doors leading to the backyard. She heard but didn’t see Kissick.
She entered the living room, which seemed little used. It had tasteful, traditional furnishings, apart from an antique couch with wood trim that was upholstered in a loud orange-and-green floral print. A baby grand piano was in a corner. There was a fireplace with a surround of weathered brick, similar to that in the outdoor walkway.
Drawn by the odor of a fire, she crossed a large Oriental carpet and maneuvered around furniture to check it out. Through a brass-framed screen, she saw ashes beneath the grate and curled fragments of partially burned white paper. There was a spattering of ashes on the brick hearth. The rest of the room was clean, with barely a hint of dust. The fireplace residue smelled fresh, not dank and musty after having sat in the damp air.
She moved the fireplace screen aside. Dropping to her knees, she grabbed the heavy iron grate and moved it to the hearth. Ashes and tendrils of burnt paper fell off. Taking a small shovel from a set of fireplace tools, she slid it beneath the ashes, lifted a mound o
f burnt material, and shook it. As ashes fell off, a corner of a paper was revealed. She picked it up with her gloved fingers and stretched behind her to set it on the coffee table. Shifting through the ashes again, she found another incompletely burned fragment.
The paper was off-white parchment. One piece was small, about four inches square, and burned all around. The other was about six by three inches and was not burned along the left edge. Both held strange symbols, like hieroglyphics—interconnected lines, small circles, and block letters—drawn by a fountain pen, one in black ink and the other in dark brown. The symbol on the smaller piece looked like this:
It looked as if there had been more to it, but the edges were burned.
Vining picked up Traditional Home from the magazines fanned across the coffee table. She placed one of the burnt fragments inside, turned a few pages, and slipped in the other.
Taking the magazine, she again stepped into the entry hall, her footsteps muffled in the booties. Past the stairway on the left was a television room with well-lived-in, slouchy furniture. On the right was a formal dining room with a table and chairs for ten.
At the end of the hall, she crossed the sunporch and went outside through one of the open French doors, passing beneath a redwood arbor with a wisteria vine. The backyard was big by L.A. standards, but smaller than one would expect for such a large house. The area’s older homes had once had acreage, often with fruit orchards, tennis courts, putting greens, small-gauge railroads, or different flights of homeowner fancy. As property values rose, the land had been cobbled away. The shiny leaves of dense ligustrum planted along a fence in back blocked the view of the newer house on the other side, at least up to the second-story windows.
A lemon tree covered in fragrant white blossoms was in one corner. A fruitless plum tree with burgundy leaves was in another. Hibiscus bushes covered with pink flowers hid an enclosure that housed the pool heater and filter.
The pool was an old-fashioned oval but had been resurfaced with material that looked like golden sand. It turned the water the muted blue of a Pacific wave washing across the shore. Four teak steamer chairs with striped cushions, bookended by small square tables, were lined along the side. One table held a silver wine bucket with an open bottle of champagne.
