The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  That somnolent, semi-coherent state they were in is the way I remember Bart after his wife died. It would have been as pointless for the police to interview him then as it would have been to ask Mom to recite the Gettysburg Address after Mark died.

  “Maggie?” Susan rubbed my hand. “I’m sorry. Talking about Emily made you sad.”

  “No.” I sat up straight and took a deep breath. “I’m just very ready to be finished here.”

  The four book club friends arrived in a flurry of excited conversation. All those female voices brought Max inside.

  It took a few minutes to sort Ann from Angie and Jean from Maureen:

  “The baby in the seat behind me cried through the entire flight.”

  “I love this house. It reminds me of my grandmother’s.”

  “Is that a Stickley chair?”

  “It was so humid when we left home, and it is so lovely here. What a relief.”

  Max, ever the charmer, was in his element. “We have the advantage of that great big offshore air-conditioner,” he said, responding to the comment about the weather. “What you need in Minnesota is an ocean.”

  They laughed, and he loved hearing it. They were all, like Susan, smart, attractive career women. They had met many years earlier, when they worked in the marketing department of the company that made sticky notes, and stayed friends. Two of them, Jean and Maureen, still worked there, though the other three had moved on. As a group, they felt right at home when they saw all the furniture festooned with little pastel paper squares.

  “I’m tempted to call my boss and offer him a new marketing angle for the product,” Maureen said when Susan explained my labeling system. “If he goes for it, Maggie, you’ll get a finder’s fee.”

  “I wouldn’t turn it down,” I said. She was kidding, I wasn’t.

  Ann and Angie, who dealt in antiques, declared Dad’s chair-side table to be too valuable to leave behind. Who knew what abuse the tenants might heap upon it? I had already decided to take it with me, but hadn’t pulled off its blue note. I was taking the chair and its mate, and it had occurred to me when Susan brought my attention to it that the table belonged with them; I would somehow make space for the three pieces in my home workroom.

  There was a discussion about a rocking chair in the sun porch that Mom said her great-grandfather had made. The experts agreed that the rocker was very old, quite plain, worth little, and absolutely charming. It was labeled for transport to Minneapolis.

  During the upstairs foray, the dragonfly brooch caused some excitement and a lively debate about its age and market value. I heard the front doorbell, gave the brooch a last fond glance, and went down to see who was there.

  Gracie Nussbaum greeted me by pinching her nostrils together. “What is in that Dumpster, dear? Something you found in the back of the freezer?”

  “It does smell ripe,” I said, ushering her inside. “The refuse people promised they would pick it up today.”

  She pressed her cheek against mine. “How’s it coming over here?”

  “We’re almost to the end, Gracie,” I said. “We’re just waiting for the trucks to come and haul away Susan’s things and Mom’s piano. I know, I think, what’s going home with me. When all that’s cleared away, we’re ready for the cleaning crew and then University Housing’s walk-through.”

  “What a relief it will be for you to have it done.” She turned toward the stairs when she heard the women’s laughter. “Is Susan upstairs?”

  “She is.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, dear, I’ll just go up and say hello.” On her way up the stairs, she glanced back at me. “You should call your mother.”

  I heard a truck out front and opened the door to see who it was. I called up the stairs to Susan. Her hauler had arrived.

  Despite the advice offered by five women executives, the hauling crew made short work of strapping protective quilted pads around Susan’s pieces and loading them all onto a pallet that was set on the truck’s hydraulic back gate. When everything was arranged on the pallet, the load was tightly cocooned inside heavy plastic wrap. Susan signed the bill of lading, and watched to make sure that her pallet was correctly and securely labeled. Before they closed the truck’s big door, she slipped the crew chief some cash and offered an admonition about her expectations for a safe delivery.

  After a few near misses with the Dumpster and the flower borders, the truck was on its way down the street. There was a collective sigh and a moment of silence.

  “Mission accomplished,” Jean offered with a grin.

  “Thank you for everything, cousin.” Susan wrapped an arm around me. “We’ll collect our bags and get out of your hair now.”

  “Stay for lunch?” I asked.

  “Thanks, but we really should get on the road,” Maureen said. She turned to Gracie. “Where do you live?”

  “Just a couple of blocks over,” Gracie said. “My bag is all packed and ready to go.”

  I laughed. “Have you signed on as tour guide, Gracie?”

  “No dear, I’m just a hitchhiker. Your mother is driving up to San Simeon this afternoon to meet us. She wanted to visit with Susan. The change in plans made that much easier for her. And she didn’t need to talk very hard to persuade me to come along.”

  “Oh” was all I could think to say. Mom didn’t need to clear her plans with me, but I admit that I felt quite left out of the loop. I was tired. A few days on the coast would have been a welcome break. Not today, though. But soon, very soon. I managed what I hoped was a smile. “Have fun.”

  Gracie took my arm as we all walked back into the house. “Your mother would have called, dear. But you know how you dig, Maggie. She simply does not want you to delve further into Tina Bartolini’s private life. And it is private, you know. After all these years, can we let her memory rest in peace?”

  “You sounded like Mom just then, Gracie.”

  “I tried my best to.” She wagged her finger at me. “Why do you dig so, Maggie, dear?”

  “I’ve given that some thought, Gracie. I think it’s because I always knew that people were keeping secrets from me. And on some level, I knew the secrets were about me.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’d have to be deaf and blind not to.”

  Apparently that was a good enough answer for her. She smiled up into my face and patted my cheek. “Promise me two things, dear?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Promise me you will call your mother right away. And promise me that this time you won’t grill her about events she feels are best left buried.”

  As I watched Susan go upstairs for her bag, I thought about something she had said earlier. Some secrets are too big to be kept forever. I thought it was also possible that some secrets were too big to be revealed.

  “Maggie?” Gracie gave my arm a squeeze to get my attention.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Max carried Susan’s bag to the six-person van they had rented for the trip. A “mommy van” Angie called it.

  “I wish I could be of more help to you,” Susan said, taking my arm as we walked toward the van. “This is such a big job. But I think I can be most useful now by just getting out of your way.”

  “You’ve helped more than you know,” I said. “I enjoyed the little time we’ve had. Now, go have a wonderful time.”

  “You will try to join us by the end of the week?”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  Max handed her into the van. After we waved good-bye, Max, with a heavy sigh, said, “God, would I love to be in that van.”

  “Call Susan. They’ll turn around and come back for you.” I told him Mom and Gracie were joining the party and he might as well.

  “Nope.” He draped an arm over my shoulders and pulled me against him. “I promised Jean-Paul I won’t let you out of my sight until he gets back tonight.”

  “He’ll be here soon enough. If you want to go, then go.”

  He shook his head. “Even if he hadn�
�t asked, I’d be staying. You and Casey are all the family I have left, kiddo. Nothing happens to you on my watch. Besides, we have work to do.”

  I pulled away enough to look up at him. “You’re not going to start sleeping on my bedroom floor again, are you?”

  The question took him aback. “You remember that?”

  “I do,” I said. “Something Susan said this morning reminded me. Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” he said with a little shrug, releasing me. We walked back inside, away from the smelly Dumpster. “It was probably more for my sake than yours. After Mark died, I didn’t want you to wake up in the night feeling sad and alone. I wanted to be there if you needed me.”

  “Uncle Max, Susan asked me why you’re so much younger than Dad. It occurred to me that when you lost your parents, you were about the same age my friend Beto was when his mother died.”

  He thought for a moment before he nodded. “Pretty close, yeah.”

  “I don’t know very much about what happened to your parents.”

  He knuckled my head. “You weren’t around yet, squirt.”

  “Max, after they died, did you sometimes wake up feeling sad and alone?”

  “That was some conversation you and Susan had,” he said, trying to pull off a scowl but failing. “But, yes, sometimes I did. I thought I had plenty to be sad about. You know, strange room, new town, new school, Mom and Dad gone, living with my big brother. But Al and Betsy just folded me into their household like I was one of their own. Mark and Emily were little pains in the ass and I fell in love with them. It all felt very normal very soon.”

  “I suppose I should thank you for softening the ground around here so that when Dad got me away from Isabelle and brought me home, Mom didn’t toss me out on my ear.”

  “Yep, you were exactly what Betsy needed all right, one more little pain in the ass to bring up.”

  The piano mover came. The three-man crew locked Mom’s beautiful instrument onto a triangular steel-frame dolly, wheeled it out the front door and lowered it off the porch on a portable hydraulic lift. I asked the crew boss, a giant of a man named Hong, if I could pay him to also shift some furniture out to the garage for me.

  “Sure,” he said when I showed him what I needed moved. “That’s nice stuff. You just going to leave it out in the garage?”

  “Eventually it’s going to my house.”

  “Where’s that?”

  I told him, up in Malibu Canyon, not far from where he was taking the piano.

  “When I take the piano down, I won’t have a full load,” he said. “I can haul your stuff at the same time for you. We have a concert hall job for the next couple of days so we won’t head south until Friday. If that’s okay with you.”

  I told him that was just fine, and it certainly was. One less thing for me to contend with. We negotiated a price, shook hands, and I went out to sweep the garage floor while Hong’s crew loaded Dad’s chairs, the pretty marquetry table, a few other pieces of furniture and about two dozen boxes of random stuff, much of it to be sorted later, when I had time.

  Before Hong got into his truck, he scooped a collection of fast-food wrappers out of the truck’s cab and took them to the Dumpster.

  “Pee-yoo,” he declared after lifting the Dumpster lid enough to drop in his trash. “Haven’t smelled anything that rank since some guy ran over the neighbor’s dog and dumped it in my trashcan. Like to never got the stink outta the can.”

  “It does smell,” I said, looking up from sweeping. “The Dumpster is supposed to go away today.”

  Still carrying the broom, I went out front and directed Hong’s wheels away from the flower borders as he pulled out onto the street. After I waved the movers good-bye, I went over to the Dumpster and lifted the lid to see what was causing the horrible stench. Had someone dumped in some domestic roadkill? A Fluffy or a Rover who strayed into the street at the wrong moment? Whatever was in there did smell dead.

  The stench hit me like a hot, viscous wave. I turned my head to fill my lungs, then holding my breath, with the end of the broom handle I started pushing aside refuse to see if I could find the source. Under a pile of old kitchen gadgets, Dad’s outdated professional journals, and various junk cleaned out of bathroom cupboards, there was an opened-up sleeping bag that I did not recognize. I reached in and lifted a corner of the bag.

  I don’t know how I got there, but next thing I knew, I was on my butt, on the driveway, back against the Dumpster, vision blurred, ears ringing, bowels threatening to let go. Anoxia, maybe? I tried to stand but seemed to have left my legs somewhere else.

  Max was beside me somehow.

  “Jesus Christ.” He slammed down the Dumpster lid before he grabbed me under the arms and half dragged, half carried me across the driveway to the patch of front lawn. I saw Karen Loper hobbling down her front steps and summoned enough presence of mind to raise an arm, point at her and croak, “Go away,” loud enough for her to hear. Reluctantly, she went.

  I lay back on the cool grass and tried to breathe.

  “I heard you scream,” Max said. “What the hell happened?”

  “Call 911.”

  “Maggie, honey.” Worry clouding his face, he looked me all over, checked the back of my head for blood, felt my limbs. I reached into his pocket and took out his phone. I was connected to the 911 dispatcher before he finished his examination.

  “What is your emergency?” the dispatcher asked.

  “It isn’t exactly an emergency,” I said. “Not anymore. But could you please ask the police to get over here, right now?”

  “What is your emergency, ma’am?”

  “A man is dead.”

  Chapter 15

  I handed the phone to Max and tried to sit up. That horrible smell coated the inside of my mouth and nose and seemed to prevent new air from getting into my lungs. I lay back down, looked up at the clouds, and tried to breathe.

  From somewhere in the distance, I heard Max talking to the emergency dispatcher on his phone. Next I heard the squeal of the Dumpster lid rising, heard him utter, “Holy Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” and then the lid slammed back down. Sirens approached almost immediately. And the refuse haulers arrived to pick up the Dumpster.

  The sirens stopped and there was some shouting before the refuse haulers went away again. I just pulled up my knees, spread out my arms on the grass and looked up at the sky. Was I supposed to have intuited when George Loper said the Dumpster stank and I heard that Larry Nordquist was MIA that the missing church cook, childhood bully, and adult felon was taking his eternal nap among my family’s castoffs in that big green iron box on the driveway? It seemed that he wanted to be brought inside our family circle, but, man, had he chosen the wrong way to do it.

  I felt tired. Psychically, physically tired. Too many people coming and going, too many people hovering. Too many family relics to deal with. Too much good-bye. I knew that Mom was right when she said that some bodies need to be left as they are, where they are. Except that Larry, after sweltering in that box in my front yard for a while, did need to be removed. Soon.

  Dark blue-uniformed Berkeley cops came pouring out of black-and-white cars and Max went to meet them. More arrived on bicycles, others ran up the steep street. They all converged around Larry Nordquist’s less than auspicious catafalque. I intended to stay as far away from the activity as I could.

  I don’t know how long I lay there, quietly working things through. Sooner or later one of those badge-wearing people was bound to come over and yank me back into the here and now, so I savored my moments of solitude.

  Kevin lay down on the grass next to me and rested his head on his hands. “Looking for the Big Dipper?”

  “Too early for that,” I said, watching the shapes I conjured out of the few sparse stratocumulus clouds above me morph into new shapes, change again.

  “You want me to call Father John?” he asked.

  “Not for me,” I said. “And it’s a little late for
Larry. Besides, Father John is busy making soup. I thought you might be helping him.”

  “He called,” Kevin said. “But unlike some people, on Monday mornings I have to go to work. My daughter went over with a couple of her friends to help out. I thought she could use a little time with the padre.”

  “She okay?”

  He bobbed his head, maybe yes, maybe no. “Any idea how Larry ended up where he is? And when?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Can we talk about it later?”

  “Take your time.”

  I sat up, stayed still for a moment until my head adjusted to the new altitude. The driveway looked like a police convention.

  “I hope at least one of your guys stayed behind at the cop house to turn out the lights and lock the door.” I looked over at Kevin. “When was the last time you had a murder in Berkeley?”

  “It happens, even here,” he said. “You think Larry was murdered?”

  “Did you get a look at him?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you know.”

  Probably because nothing else was happening in Berkeley on that beautiful Monday in summer, a fire department paramedic truck pulled up. With nowhere else to park, it stopped in the middle of the street. Two excruciatingly young men got out. One ran toward the Dumpster, the other ran to me. As I sat on the lawn next to Kevin, the medic took my vitals, shone a flashlight into my eyes and asked me what day it was.

  “Monday,” I said. Uncle Max came over when he saw the ministering paramedic. “I don’t remember having lunch, so it must not be noon yet.”

  “Everything check out?” Max asked as the paramedic rolled up his blood pressure cuff.

  “A little shocky, but she’s okay.”

  “Then excuse us, please.” Max took me by the hand and helped me to my feet. “Anyone who wants a word with my niece will just have to wait.”

  Max walked me inside through the front door, giving the Dumpster a wide berth. In the kitchen, he reheated the leftover tomato bisque that Roy had made two days earlier. I retched when I saw the color of the soup he set in front of me. I pushed the bowl away, folded my arms on the table and rested my head on them. I kept seeing the seeping red canyon cleaved between Larry’s staring, pale gray eyes.