The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  I exchanged glances with Beto, who said, “He’s on his way, Papa.”

  “Good, good,” Bart said. “Every year he brings white roses for my Tina.”

  “Papa,” Beto said, “this time, an old friend of Mom’s sent the flowers.”

  “Yeah?” His head seemed heavy. “Who’s that?”

  Beto turned to me. “What was the name?”

  “Khanh Duc,” I said, looking for a flicker of recognition from Bart. “He used to spend a lot of time with Dad in the yard. Maybe you met him?”

  But Bart didn’t seem to hear. His eyes were glassy, his skin an alarming shade of gray. Probably exhausted by party preparations, I thought, and the noisy mass of people underfoot. Beto took him by the elbow and turned him toward the living room.

  “Let’s go sit down, Papa. Take a load off.” Bart did not protest. Over his shoulder, Beto said to us, “Go eat, for God’s sake. Papa’s been cooking for two days. So have Zaida and her mom and Auntie Quynh.”

  Bart, his back to us as he shuffled out, raised a hand and waved. “Try my ravioli aragosta. But hurry up before it’s all gone.”

  Jean-Paul and I stood for a moment in the quiet of the entry hall, sipping the very good chianti. Looking at me over the top of his plastic glass, he said, “Your father is expected?”

  “The spirits of the dead are here, remember?”

  “However...”

  “Bart’s having some memory issues,” I said. “He seems to think Mom is dead. And Dad isn’t.”

  “I see, yes. A man of a certain age, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Oui.” I took his arm. “Let’s eat. The food will be an Italian-­Mexican-Vietnamese fusion, and the head chef recommends the lobster pasta.”

  The partiers outside seemed to have grown noisier during the short time we were in the house with Beto; the Bartolinis were as generous with drink as they were with food. I heard Lacy’s high-pitched laugh above the din as we headed toward the buffet tables.

  The side gate opened and Kevin blasted through like a sudden squall. He nodded curt greetings to various people but kept moving on a straight trajectory toward his wife. When he reached Lacy, he took her by the upper arms, nearly lifting her off her feet. I heard him say, “What were you thinking?” as he fast-walked her toward the gate with Dorrie following in their wake. When he passed us, there was the merest hesitation when he noticed me. I thought he wanted to say something, but he just shook his head and kept going.

  A general tittering followed their exit, but it soon died away. Apparently, that scene, or some version of it, had played a few times before.

  Gracie Nussbaum sidled up next to me. All she said about the drama was “Oh, my.” And that just about summed it up.

  Jean-Paul and I filled plates at the long buffet table and ate standing up, talking to old friends and neighbors. Jean-Paul, always charming and self-effacing, seemed to be having a good time. Certainly he was more relaxed, I thought, than he had been at the more formal museum party the night before. He went back to the table for seconds of Beto’s mother-in-law’s little carne asada tacos and the ravioli aragosta tossed in garlic and olive oil. Then he mediated the ongoing but good-natured little competition between Beto’s wife, Zaida, and his Aunt Quynh over the former’s ceviche and the latter’s Vietnamese-style shrimp rolls. Jean-Paul engaged the cooks in a conversation about the ingredients while he sampled both dishes. Both women preened for him. Charm the man had, as well as a good appetite and, apparently, an iron stomach.

  Trips came by offering wine refills. “Uncle Kevin asked me to tell you he’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Too bad he couldn’t stay,” I said.

  “Lacy needed to go home,” Trips said, doing a pretty good imitation of a drunk slurring his words. I tried not to laugh. He leaned in and said, “If you ever want to talk to Lacy, you need to catch her pretty early in the day. Otherwise—” He waved the bottle, and walked off to serve other guests.

  Just as Jean-Paul headed toward the dessert table, I heard someone call my name. When I turned to see who it was, I nearly bowled over Lacy’s sister, Dorrie.

  “Dorrie!” I grabbed her by the shoulder to steady her. “So sorry.”

  “So, you remember my name?” She seemed surprised.

  “Of course I do. I thought you left with your sister.”

  She laughed, but there was nothing happy in the sound. “Kevin extracted Lacy. I wasn’t about to get into a car with the two of them, not when you’re in town and she’s had a few.”

  “When I’m in town? What’s that have to do—”

  She held up her hand to forestall the question. “Maggie, you don’t know what it’s like for her. All through high school, she had the biggest crush on Kevin, but he was with you and wouldn’t even look at her. Now, every time one of your shows comes on TV, it just stirs up all those old feelings again because everyone in town, including Kevin, watches you. Then for a couple of days afterward, that’s all anybody talks about. Whether they agree with what you said on the show or not, it’s all Maggie, Maggie, Maggie everywhere Lacy goes, especially if she’s with Kevin. For a woman like Lacy, the attention you get around here is painful.”

  “What do you mean, a woman like Lacy?” I asked.

  “Well, hell, think about it,” Dorrie said, as if I missed the obvious. “Lacy always thought she should be both the soprano and the conductor in her own opera, if you know what I mean. But she peaked in high school. Head cheerleader, then has-been. And look at what you’ve accomplished.”

  “Jesus, Dorrie, there are eight or nine Nobelists in Berkeley. For Lacy to compare herself to me, a face on TV, that’s just—”

  “Normal,” she said firmly. “It’s bad enough for her when Kevin sees you on the tube, but when she heard that you’re in town and he’s hanging out at your house, well, she just can’t handle it.”

  “Hardly hanging out,” I said. “He came over once, on police business.”

  “That isn’t the way Lacy heard it.”

  “Heard it from whom?”

  “That damn Mrs. Loper. I think she gets off on stirring things up between people.”

  I nodded; it was true.

  Jean-Paul edged his way back to me, trying to keep slippery homemade flan from sliding off his slick plastic plate. He offered me his spoon. “Try this.”

  I did; it was wonderful. “Jean-Paul, this is an old friend, Dorrie Riley.”

  “Dorrie Riley Ross,” she said, glowing a bit as she offered her hand to Jean-Paul. Dorrie wasn’t unattractive, and I have to admit that when Jean-Paul turned his attention toward her, just being polite, I slipped a few inches closer to him, making it clear that he was not available. And did not admire myself for doing so.

  I said, “Please reassure Lacy that she has no reason to concern herself with me.”

  “But she does, you know,” Dorrie said, giving my hand a quick squeeze. “She does.”

  Dorrie moved off into the crowd. I saw her speak to Beto before she slipped out the side gate.

  There were dark circles under Jean-Paul’s eyes. I said, “Had enough fun for one day?”

  “Enough for several.” He patted his flat belly. “And more than enough to eat.”

  It was time to say our good-byes. We found Beto tidying the buffet table.

  “Thank you,” I said, walking into his hug.

  “So happy you came,” he said. He offered his hand to Jean-Paul. “Hope you can join us again next year.”

  When I asked where we could find his father, he said, “He knocked himself out getting things ready; you saw how he was. Sometimes when he’s tired, he gets, I don’t know, combative. So, I put him to bed to keep him from getting into trouble.”

  “Tell him we had a wonderful time.”

  Beto was grinning when he asked, “Did your dad have a good time, too?”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said.

  We left by the side gate.

  “So?” Jean-Paul wrapped an arm around my shoul
ders and pulled me close as we walked down the driveway past the garage. “See any ghosts tonight?”

  “Many.” My eyes trailed to the vase of white roses dumped atop a very full trash barrel. “Many.”

  Chapter 12

  “I can think of only two places in this house where Dad might hide a gun,” I said. “One is his desk, but I have already emptied it. The other is his workbench in the garage.”

  Jean-Paul threw his head back and laughed, something I had rarely seen him do. I looked over at him as I slipped off my jeans. “Sir?”

  “My dear.” He pulled me against him and laid us back on the bed. “I am doing my very best impression of the romantic Frenchman, but, alas, apparently to no effect.”

  I rolled on top and straddled him. “You’re doing a fabulous job of it, Monsieur. Top drawer. A-number-one. Le dernier cri.”

  “But?”

  “Your target, moi, is just too damn scattered at the moment to focus fully on the program.”

  “Et donc?”

  “So, give me ten minutes for a quick look, and I promise that when I return I will give all my attention in mind as well as body to your fine efforts.”

  “A look in the garage?”

  “A quick one.” I kissed him.

  His wheels were turning, thinking. After a moment, he lifted me off him and said, “D’accord.”

  I pulled my jeans back on, found my flip-flops, and hurried down the stairs through the quiet house and out through the butler’s pantry to the garage. Roy and Lyle had taken Uncle Max with them to Yoshi’s, a jazz club in San Francisco. Max’s note said he would stay overnight and take BART back in the morning. He’d left us the keys to his rented car in case we needed wheels in the meantime.

  Lyle had finished sorting through most of the drawers and bins in and around Dad’s workbench before George Loper flamed out and progress halted. I rummaged through the remaining jumble, finding nothing more interesting than a book about constructing martin houses, a project Dad apparently never got around to, possibly because mosquitoes are not a big problem in Berkeley. I tossed the book into a trash bag and kept searching. Surely Dad wouldn’t hide a firearm where anyone might happen upon it. So, then, where? Unless he had disposed of it.

  I had a wrench in one hand and a rubber mallet in the other, standing beside the workbench, looking around for inspiration, when the door to the side yard opened.

  “Larry?” I raised the wrench as a reflex when he came through the door.

  “Whoa.” Larry held up both hands. “Don’t throw that thing at me, okay?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I saw you.” He gestured toward the window in the side door. “And I saw you were alone, so I thought, No time like the present.”

  “That door was locked; I checked it.”

  “Yeah, well.” Sheepishly, he held up a key. “I know where your dad hid it.”

  “Have you been coming in here all along?”

  “Shit, yeah,” he said, sounding almost angry. “I told you that.”

  “No, you did not.”

  “I told you I was looking after the garden, didn’t I?” he said, as if speaking to an idiot as he aimed a thumb toward the rack of garden tools. “How the hell did you think I could do that without, oh, I don’t know, maybe a rake and a hoe?”

  I put down the wrench and held out my hand for the key, which he gave me. The key was old, rusty where it attached to a small metal ring, but shiny, recently oiled where it fit into the lock.

  “How long have you known about the key?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Just about always, I guess.”

  For a long time, the same key could open all three of the small garage doors: one to the side yard, one to the backyard, and one into the house; my parents used the garage more as a workshop and garden shed than as a place to park cars. Somewhere along the way, when I was nine or ten, Dad had installed a new lock and a deadbolt on the door into the house. Max told me that Isabelle had been found in my room one night, watching me sleep. Any parent would have changed the lock after that.

  “Did you tell Isabelle Martin where to find the key?”

  “Mighta,” he tossed off as if giving her access to the house—to me—were of no consequence.

  “You went into the house, too, didn’t you?”

  “Just one time,” he said. “I thought there was no one home, but then I heard someone running the vacuum cleaner and I got the hell out.”

  “No,” I said. “More recently, like night before last.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone broke into the house Thursday night.”

  “Oh sure.” He slapped the end of the workbench that separated us. “Anything happens, just blame old Larry, the town delinquent.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you said you were in the house.”

  “Yeah,” he said, very matter-of-fact about it, like wasn’t everybody walking into the house? “But that was a whole long time ago. And it was just that one time. I mean, I tried to, but the next time the key didn’t work.”

  I nodded; it had been before Dad changed the lock. I asked him, “What were you looking for?”

  A shoulder rose and fell. “Like I said, just to see what the house was like.”

  “Why us?”

  “That’s the thing I wanted to tell you about.” He looked around, moved a step closer to speak in a soft, confiding voice. “I sorta looked in a lot of houses.”

  “Just to see what they were like?” I asked.

  “Yeah. And what people were doing,” he said. “I saw a lot of things.”

  “Private things,” I said, suddenly feeling cold.

  He nodded, his old cockiness coming back. “What I said to Beto that day, it was the truth. I saw it for myself.”

  “You called his mother a Saigon whore.”

  He smirked, head bobbing up and down to affirm that I had hit on the answer. “She was. A great big whore.”

  The door into the house opened quietly and Jean-Paul, barefoot, came down the two steps into the garage; he held a gun in his hand. To distract Larry from turning around and seeing him, and possibly running off again, I made a lot of noise pulling Dad’s stool out from under the workbench. I sat so that, to talk to me, his back was completely to the door where Jean-Paul stood.

  “That’s a disgusting thing to say, Larry.”

  “Okay, but what I saw her and the guy doing was pretty damn disgusting, too,” he said. “Old Bart would be at the store and Beto was at school and this guy would come over and, jeez, like you said, ­disgusting.”

  “But not so disgusting that you turned away.”

  “Boys will be boys,” he said, flashing his snaggletoothed grin.

  “Shouldn’t you have been in school?”

  “The thing is, I used to ditch a lot. Then they’d suspend me for ditching.” He sneered: “Assholes.”

  “Who was the man?” I asked.

  A phone rang inside the house, making Larry turn toward the sound. He spotted Jean-Paul.

  “Maggie, ça va?” Jean-Paul asked without venturing further into the garage.

  “We’re okay,” I said.

  Larry turned back and wagged a scolding finger at me. “I said, just you.”

  “Hey, Larry, you broke into my house late at night,” I snapped. “What did you expect? That Jean-Paul wouldn’t come out and check on me?”

  He seemed to think that was reasonable, and did not question that Jean-Paul had brought a gun with him.

  “Who was the man?” I asked again.

  He shrugged. “We were never introduced, if you know what I mean.”

  “But you saw him. Can you describe him?”

  His gaze slid toward Jean-Paul. “Maybe I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

  “Is there something that might help you remember?”

  “Could be. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

  He headed toward the door. Bu
t he stopped with his hand around the doorknob and looked over his shoulder at me. “Do you remember what you said to me on that day?”

  “I do. And I’m sorry that what I said hurt you so much.”

  “The thing is,” he said, turning his face away from me. “What you said, it was true, too. I was pissed off at Beto, hell, I was pissed off at all of you guys and your perfect lives. I thought that if I told him what his mom really was, it would put the stupid little prick in his place.” He fell silent for a moment, sighed, before he said, “But you were right. Bringing him down wouldn’t make people like me.”

  With that, he turned and left, shutting the door behind him.

  After he was gone, I opened a drawer in the workbench where I had seen a package of steel hasp locks and a pair of padlocks. I handed them to Jean-Paul, took out the can of screws and the electric screwdriver, and together we installed the locks on the inside of both the garage doors to the backyard and to the side yard, the door Larry said he had been using the key to open. With that same key, Isabelle had been able to access my bedroom, until Dad put a deadbolt on the door into the house.

  “I’ll call a locksmith in the morning,” I said.

  “Probably wise.”

  He picked up the gun he had been carrying when he came out to the garage.

  “Where’d you find that?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you.”

  We went into Dad’s den and over to his desk. The desk I so carefully emptied.

  “After you went downstairs, I began to think,” Jean-Paul said as he pulled out the bottom drawer, the same drawer where I had found the strongbox with the movies and the crime scene photo of Mrs. B. “Where would a man hide a gun so that his wife and child, and ­certainly the cleaning woman, would not happen upon it, even if they looked for it? Perhaps the underside of a drawer?”

  He put his hand against the inside of the drawer and turned it over to show me the bottom. The wood was too pristine to have had something affixed there for a couple of decades.

  “So, where did you find the gun?” I asked.

  “Voilà.” He removed his hand and a wood panel fell out. Dad had made a false bottom, creating a fitted compartment for the gun and a box of ammo and a cleaning kit, and a top to hide them.