The sound of her shifting, and then she was sitting upright. She said, "Nick," and I heard it in her tone and felt my insides crumble. My mouth was dry, and I thought I might need to sit down, but I couldn't, so I stood there on the cold floorboards to take what was coming next.
She said, "I'll always love you, Nick, but I'm not where I was. Life doesn't wait. You don't just get to pick up where you left off."
Far away, in one of the neighboring houses, I could hear canned laughter from a too-loud TV. My voice was hoarse. "No, but maybe sometimes you get a second chance."
"Look, I know you're raw right now, and that you believe everything you're saying, but how do I know this is where you'll stay? How do you know? You've got so much to put back together, Nick."
I half turned, pushed that jewelry box into my pocket. Breathed. "How do I do that? Put it back together?"
"You show up," she said. "Day after day."
My face felt heavy, tugging my gaze to the floor. "I want you to know," I said. "You were worth it. You were worth everything. I just couldn't figure out how to do it right."
Emotion flickered across her face--sadness, but something else there, too, something she'd been waiting to feel.
I took a moment to soak in the bedroom I'd once felt at home in. The three-wick candle, taller than the nightstand. The facing bathroom's burnt-caramel walls, matching the towels thrown over the lip of the claw-foot tub we used to dip into before succumbing to an exhausted, entangled slumber.
And then I turned and walked out, my steps heavy down the stairs. In the bathroom off the entry, I shoveled cold water over my face, tried to catch my breath.
Through the wall I heard the creak of the front door.
Quietly I unbuckled my belt and slid it free, wrapping either end around my fists.
Muted footsteps. Approaching.
I put my back to the wall behind the bathroom door. The handle dipped, and the door opened. I was about to lunge when I saw Alejandro's reflection in the mirror.
I stepped out, lowering my hands. "What are you doing here?"
"Shouldn't I ask you that?" He paused to acknowledge my makeshift garrote, then started digging through the medicine cabinet. "Nice advice you give me. On the date. It's a joke to you, but now we fighting."
"Handro, listen. You can't--you shouldn't have seen me. You can't tell anyone that I was here. It could be really dangerous."
"You Ethan Hunt now, eh?" He started humming the theme from Mission Impossible.
I said, "I'm not fucking around. This could wind up getting us killed."
His smile vanished, replaced by something like a scowl, and I was surprised by the steel in his dark gaze. "Nick, I grew up in Boyaca. When I was a kid, Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. Cartel, DEA--it was ugly time. People point the fingers. People disappear. You heard about the necktie, no?" He made a cutting gesture beneath his chin and mimed pulling his tongue through the slit. "Usually they don't bother with this. They just machete off the head."
"Okay," I said. "I get it."
"On my way to school, I pass trucks and workers. I keep my eyes straight ahead. I careful not to see anything." He was looking through the drawers under the sink, a bit anxiously, not finding whatever he was searching for. "I got to school every day. Some of my friends didn't. Some nights I have to help look for them. Sometime we find a body. Sometime we find a head." He finished with the last drawer and stood, exasperated.
"What are you looking for?" I asked.
"My pills."
I reached for the towel I'd just used to dry my
face. There was an orange bottle beneath it. I made out the pharmacy lettering--IN E VENT OF PANIC ATTACK--just before Alejandro grabbed the bottle and jammed it into a pocket. Again I saw something in his face I'd never seen before, and I thought about his happy-go-lucky demeanor and wondered how hard he'd had to fight to get comfortable in the world.
Alejandro shoved his lank hair from his eyes, grabbed the edge of the door. "I been through this mierda Third World-style. So don't you question how / stand by a friend just because you don't know how to act like one."
His footsteps padded out, and then the front door opened and closed quietly.
I stared at myself in the mirror, didn't much like what I saw.
I made sure Alejandro had locked the front door behind him, then returned to the couch. Resting my feet on the coffee table, I watched the windows. They had lever locks, simple throw-and-clicks with a catch that made them immune to jimmying. Good locks.
Seized by an impulse, I sprang up and threw those levers, one after the other, elbowing each window open on a slight tilt. Back on the couch, I listened to my heart thudding its disapproval. But I didn't get up.
I stared at those locks, breathing the fresh breeze, for what must have been hours. It's amazing what
you can hear through a screen at night. I could sense the canal. Dragonflies buzzing, cicadas singing, the mossy reek of standing water. I could see the fluttering shadows of the Tibetan prayer flags nailed to the eaves.
With great effort I averted my gaze from the windows, slid down on the couch, closed my eyes. The locks called to me, jealous for my attention, but I ignored them. The pleas rose to demands, a great, angry clamoring in my head, but still I didn't answer.
Security matters. But maybe comfort matters, too.
A thousand small decisions.
Sometime around morning I fell asleep.
Chapter 42
When she opened the door, I was struck by the lack of resemblance. Maybe it was the years that had passed, or maybe it had always been that way, but Lydia Flores looked nothing like her sister. At least nothing like how Jane Everett had looked at thirty-two. I stuffed the Polaroid of Jane and Bilton back in my pocket and smiled in greeting.
Lydia studied me through the screen, mottled by the morning light. "Can I help you?"
"I hope so. I'm Nick Horrigan. I'm sorry to intrude on your morning, but I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your sister."
She unlatched the screen and pushed it open.
She'd be sixty now, but she looked older, with that timeless grandmotherly bearing. She wore a housedress, and her hair was neatly done up in a bun. Her face was soft and round, made rounder by oversize glasses. Makeup--nothing excessive, but she was of the generation that really used it. Stockings and sling-back shoes, sensible but certainly not comfortable for hanging around at home alone. Somehow I knew that she'd been widowed--a sixth sense had emerged from an unknown part of my brain to make the diagnosis.
She said, "Are you with the press? Every few years someone comes knocking. A retrospective or whatever they call it. Last year I got contacted by someone doing a psychology study about grief."
"No," I said, "I'm not a reporter."
But that didn't seem to deter her. She didn't even bother to ask who I was with. She led me back in through a narrow hall to a living room. The house was clean, but every surface was cluttered. A side table crowded with antique Limoges boxes. Porcelain cats on a doily. Plants everywhere, sprouting from decorative watering cans and hanging from crocheted slings, lending the air a musty quality. Framed pictures rising like feathers from the lid and key cover of a small upright piano. Lydia at the altar, Jane in the maid-of-honor spot, though she couldn't have been more than thirteen. It was impossible not to recognize Jane Everett's lips. Lydia's husband, a kindly-looking
Hispanic man, appeared to be at least a decade older than his bride. He aged with dignity across the piano. The last shot, a close-up of him in a yellow sweater holding a tennis racket, was years old, bleached like the others from the facing window. He reclined at a club table, sipping iced tea, and his hair was silver, his teeth pronounced against a nice retirement tan.
I sat on a plastic-slipcovered couch. The seat was slightly warm, and beside me was a crossword-puzzle book, folded back to a pencil-indented page. I'd taken Lydia's spot, though she'd been too polite to say anything. Acr
oss, on a flat-screen that looked anachronistic contrasted with the other furnishings, two soap stars were mashing their faces against each other in a way that looked distinctly uncomfortable.
When I realized that Lydia was watching me, some prudish impulse made me turn my gaze away. The unplayed piano was too depressing, so I looked out the window beside it. A short, square garden met its end five feet out at the neighbor's aggressively tall slat fence.
Lydia followed my stare and said, "The young couple added that fence when they moved in. It's at the property line, so there was nothing we could do."
"Bad zoning laws."
She slid sideways into an armchair, a graceful, feminine movement. "Their house isn't even close. It sits a half acre back, but they wanted that fence
there. They took it right up to code. My husband was furious. I lost him three years ago May. Ernesto. Heart attack."
She said his name with a slight accent. A WASP woman marrying an Hispanic man wasn't so common back when they wed. I thought of those Hispanic males who'd reportedly dumped Jane's body, how neatly Bilton's team had taken advantage of people's prejudices. I felt like an intruder here in Lydia's cluttered little house, my eye to the peephole of a private life.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I find myself thinking about Janie more. With him gone."
I realized that Lydia didn't care if I was with The L.A. Times or the CIA or Brownie Troop 9882. She just wanted to talk.
"It's a hard thing to forget."
She firmed her mouth, looked up at the corner of the room. "It was a long time ago."
"Yes," I said. "It was."
Her eyes lingered on the ceiling for a while. Then she angled her head and spoke from the side of her mouth though we were across the room from each other. Confiding in me. "I loved Ernesto dearly, as you can imagine. Thirty-eight years of marriage. And there are still mornings where I. . . where I . . ." Her voice trailed off. "But the violence of Janie's death. It doesn't sit. It never sat."
"No," I said. "There's nowhere to put it."
"They talk about closure all the time. Putting it behind you. Coming to grips."
"Who does?"
"The TV. 'Closure.' Like it's a thing. An actual thing that you can achieve. That you can hold in the palm of your hand."
Her fingers fussed in her lap, taking up a fold of fabric. Her candor caught me off guard. Her loneliness. How deeply the loss still touched her.
"You never get there," I said. "I guess you just keep trying."
"But these things damage you-- I'm sorry, what'd you say your name was?"
"Nick."
"They damage you, Nick. My niece ..." Her fingers trembled, and then she fished a tissue out of a sleeve and held it in a fist. "Ernesto and I never had children. I took care of Janie growing up. Eleven years older. That's a lot. So I suppose I wanted ... I don't know. Ernesto and I enjoyed our time so much. Janie was like my daughter. My niece would have been like . . . like another daughter, you see? Janie liked 'Grace,' but I was the one who started calling her 'Grade.' That part was . . . that part was mine. And after they died . . ."
"I understand."
"Do you?" Her tone wasn't accusatory. It was deeply, intensely curious. Needy, even.
"Yes. I think I do."
"You give something up, maybe. Like a penance.
A part of your life. To honor what was lost. To not replace it."
"I understand that, too."
We sat in silence, not looking at each other. Another picture on the piano caught Jane in close-up, working some campaign event, election ticker tape and confetti frozen in a red and white blur in the background.
"What was she like?" I asked.
"She was sweet" She shook her head slowly with the last word. "You know how some people just have that heart? And quiet. Had a laugh that'd catch you by surprise. She made some choices that, well ..." The tissue rose halfway to her face, but then her knuckles whitened and she lowered it. She would not cry. "She didn't know how long the future can be. How long it can be."
I said, carefully, "The father--"
Her lips tensed. "I never knew who the father was." She shook her head, quickly this time, as if fighting off a bad taste. "She never breathed a word. Not even to me." But her face couldn't hide the truth. I knew she was lying, and she knew I knew.
The soap actors had pulled apart, the woman resisting in that no-means-yes way, and then, like a horrible joke, there was Bilton. His sweater-and-khakis spot, the business-casual commander in chief surrounded by his progeny on the spotless Oval Office rug. Mr. Morals, a sharp contrast to his twice-married challenger.
Lydia dug in her armrest pouch for the remote. I watched Bilton's well-shaven face. "Senator Caruthers says he doesn't 'understand family values.' Do you really want someone in the White House who's proud to make that claim?" Dignified cursive across the screen announced, Paid for by Andrew Bilton for President.
Lydia finally fought the remote free and shut off the TV. We sat in the awkward silence for a moment, and then she said, bitterly, "Janie deserved more from this life. And Gracie. She would have been loved. She was a person, too, and she would have had a family." Lydia stared at the dark TV with disgust. Her eyes finally lifted to me. "You said you were with the press?"
My throat was husky with emotion. I said, "Yeah, I'm with the press."
She rose and smoothed her dress in the back with a practiced sweep of her flat hand. "Please write about her kindly. There was some innuendo around her when she died."
I said, "I'm going to do everything I can for
her."
Chapter 43
One more name on the rumpled piece of paper. Tris Landreth, the witness to the dumping of the bodies. The most recent address Steve had found under her name, from a cell-phone account, belonged to a run-down house in Van Nuys. The bell was broken, so I knocked, and a moment later a heavyset woman in a plush bathrobe tugged the screen open.
I said, "Tris Landreth?"
She scowled, waved a hand at me dismissively. "I look like some Tris to you, son?"
"I'm sorry. I'm just--"
"She cleared out the guesthouse six months back in the middla the night. Give us no notice. And it ain't like she paid no security deposit we could cash in on neither."
"Six months ago."
"Yeah. And now everything 'Tris Tris Tris' again alia sudden. She a quiet lady. Why all these folks be up in here after her?"
My pulse quickened. "Other people were asking for her?"
"The Five-0 is who, son. Shit, worse. The secret-handshake guys. You know the ones."
"When?"
"Last week. Dunno. Wednesday, Thursday. Shit, I ain't no calendar."
I struggled to keep my head clear. "Did she pack up her stuff? When she left?"
"What little she had, yeah. She was here almost a year, but she never really moved in, know what I'm sayin'? Had a suitcase for a dresser. Like she was just waitin' to pick up and go again." A gruff voice called out from the back of the house, and
she yelled back, "I be there in a minute, baby," and trudged off.
I stood at the door a few minutes before realizing she wasn't coming back.
I crossed the dead lawn and sat on the curb for a while, watching the kids play soccer in the street and the low-riders cruise by, vibrating with bass. Whatever Tris Landreth knew, I needed to know, too. Just waitin' to pick up and go. She'd been living a life I was all too familiar with. I thought about how isolated I'd felt up in Ketchikan, that soul-numbing loneliness that came from being cut off from those I loved, the semiannual cards I used to send through the remailing service to Callie, the freezing sleepless nights I spent waiting to hear if those cards had bounced back, if my mom had moved or gotten sick or died. I wondered, given that Tris Landreth had been too nervous to unpack her bags for a year, what had been keeping her in the area.
The liquor store at the corner had a pay phone in the back. I called the cell I'd given Induma, and it rang an
d rang before she picked up. I'd left early this morning to avoid awkwardness, and with her voice came a pang of embarrassment. And something heavier. Longing.
I said, "Sorry about last night."
"You've got nothing to apologize for."
"Then I can impose on you for another favor?"
"That's what friends are for."
"Rub it in."
She laughed.
I said, "Tris Landreth. The witness? She split."
"And you want me to use the databases to locate her."
"Steve already checked the databases. I need you to find out if she has any sick kids or elderly parents in the area."
When we got off, I bought a Coke, went outside, and sat on the curb for another while. A young Hispanic couple was leaning against a truck in the parking lot and making out. Dark bands of eye shadow stood out on her closed lids, and his hands were at her face. Effortless. I thought about how cold those floorboards had felt beneath my bare feet last night when Induma had told me that life doesn't wait.
The pay phone inside rang.
The shopkeeper gave me an odd look as I jogged back.
Induma said, "No sick kids and no elderly parents, but looks like Landreth was raised by an aunt who's not doing too hot. The aunt lives in Northridge."
I had a pen at the ready. "You got an address?"
I entered the well-kept complex and knocked on the appropriate door. After a lengthy wait and prolonged shuffling, an ancient woman answered. The apartment smelled of talcum powder and cats.
"Hi," I said. "I'm looking for Harriet Landreth. It's about her niece, Tris."
"Tris," she repeated, with impressive derision. She was severely hunched and had to crane her head to look up at me.
"Are you Harriet?"
"No, I'm Glenda, her older sister. I'm taking care of her."
"Has Tris visited lately?"
"Tris? Visited lately?"
I might as well have asked if Peter O'Toole had swung by for a gimlet.
She regarded me warily. "What is this?"
"I'm trying to find her. It's really important."
We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008) Page 25
