Alicia nodded in a tired way that suggested a whole lot of people thought they were odd, and told them so.
“Why would they suspect me?” Luke continued. “I’d have to be insane to point out a crime I’d committed years ago. A crime I’d gotten away with.”
“Probably a drifter,” Gary said. “They’ll never find him.”
“Him! Him! Always assuming everything was done by a man,” Alicia said, making it clear she wasn’t serious. “What if it was a woman—many women, a girl gang, female muggers? Don’t make assumptions.”
Toto pounded on the table for emphasis. “And I say equality for murderers!”
“Was it creepy?” Kathryn whispered in her nightclub voice. She wrote PR for a man who managed singers and considered herself in showbiz. “Finding it, I mean? Those tiny bones and all.”
Luke looked at Penny as if he was waiting for something, and as if he, too, was annoyed, but why should he be pissed with her? She wasn’t doing anything but standing there.
She realized she was clutching the gold chain that held her heart-amulet. Maybe that’s what annoyed him—her standing there looking like a nun saying her beads. Her bead.
Luke still frowned.
She should never have come to this place, never believed she could change her life, never believed in Luke. But he’d encouraged her. It wasn’t fair, wasn’t fair at all.
“I mean,” Kathryn went on in her sleepy, throaty voice, “most people would have left them. The bones, I mean. Not recognized them for what they were. I certainly wouldn’t have!” Her tiny cute-girl laugh put Penny’s teeth on edge.
They didn’t want her, didn’t count her as a person with a mind and opinions. She was tired of acid scalding her midsection, sick of fighting back tears.
She’d show them. “I’m the one who found the bones,” she said. Luke and Kathryn looked startled, and Alicia and Toto craned their necks around to look at her. As if they’d absolutely forgotten she was there. “If you don’t believe me,” Penny said, glaring, “ask Luke.”
Gary pursed his lips. Wrong name again, but she didn’t care.
“I was the one who knew that was the skeleton of a hand. Luke thought the bones were the roots of something. They were very small and brown, you see, from the earth. Not all connected.” She pulled out an extra chair and sat down on it and folded her arms over her chest. Now. A little respect.
Having heard this person they treated like a doorstop speak their language made them mute with shock. Even Luke. Especially Luke, who took a deep breath, tilted his chair back, stared at the kitchen ceiling, then righted himself and looked at her again and sighed.
“What?” she finally asked. “What did I do?” She regretted the question as soon as it was out her mouth—it sounded so babyish, so like Wesley.
“It appears you’ve changed your mind. Decided not to keep your involvement a secret anymore,” Luke said.
He sounded like he was accusing her of something. “My ‘involvement’?”
Maybe he was using that heavy solemn language as a joke, a setup. Maybe he was finally about to pull her into the group. Her only involvement was him.
“Given that you’ve gone public,” he said, waving his hands to the “public” seated at the table, “the logical next step is to go to the police about your necklace.”
He’d spoken in a too-calm voice, as if dealing with a child, a wild beast, or an insane person. When he was around them, he was just like the rest of them. And he acted like he didn’t remember who she was and didn’t know why she couldn’t do what he wanted.
“You mean the heart?” she asked, grasping it with one hand.
He nodded. “Now that they’ve found another body—or what’s left of it. A grown-up this time. A woman. A logical person to have owned that heart. Now, I feel like…I feel just as much to blame—it wasn’t all your fault, but we should have said something then.”
Blame. Fault. Wasn’t all your fault, like a big chunk of it—of something—definitely was. The words spun in her head. She could barely see straight. Everything was wrong and upside down. “Why?” she asked.
Toto emptied a small bag of corn chips into his hand. “That’s what you’re talking about? That thing on your chain?”
“Penny found it near the child’s skeleton. The heart, not the chain. We were looking to see if there was more jewelry there when we found the bones,” Luke said.
“Maybe a relative could identify the dead woman by that heart,” Alicia said.
“Or identify the killer.” Kathryn’s cheeks looked like they’d been stained with beet juice. Crime turned her on. “Like Alicia said before, what if the murderer was a woman, and she lost that charm in the struggle?”
“It isn’t yours to keep,” Alicia said without a smile.
Penny had released the charm and now stopped her hand from automatically returning to it. Her amulet. Luke hadn’t treated her this way before she moved in with him. It was because of the others, and how he wanted to look big to them. “You don’t know everything,” Penny said, clenching both hands at her side. “You don’t know anything about me.” She flashed a hard glance at Luke. “It’s more complicated than you could possibly know,” she said.
Now everybody stared at Penny like she was a convict or contagious. “It was there, on the grass,” she said. “All by itself. It has nothing to do with those bodies. It was a joke, poking around for more. Looking for Drake’s treasure. I wish we hadn’t, but Luke kept—”
“That isn’t his name,” Alicia said sternly. “Not here.”
Penny shrugged. “That’s how we found the bones. The heart wasn’t attached to anything, just sitting on the grass.”
“Yeah, but it was probably near that other body,” Toto said.
“No. Because where we dug was right near the baby,” Penny said. Why wasn’t Luke helping her?
“Skeleton,” Alicia corrected her. “It sounds disgusting to call it a baby.”
“All the same,” Gary began. “Pushed up by the storms, the mud. It probably had migrated. Maybe.”
“I need it!” It was all she had in the way of hope—didn’t anybody understand that? It was an amulet, no matter what its real worth. She realized too late, saw by their annoyed expressions that she’d shout-screamed her words, her voice loud, high and sharp. Like her mother, like her mother when she was unbearably crazy.
And really, if only they’d talk to her directly, act like she had a brain, she could explain. The amulet had been found on the one pure and perfect day in a stormy season when there was magic in a cow pasture, and the found thing, full of meaning, signified possibility instead of a dead end. A new life, a new start.
It hadn’t happened that way. This rambly house wouldn’t let her be anything but herself. Only difference was that now she had no place else to run. She had nothing, except the necklace, and now they wanted that, too.
*
She hadn’t seemed particularly childish when he met her or he never would have spent time with her. The five-year difference in their ages hadn’t felt like a generation’s worth. He couldn’t figure what had happened since the day she’d raced out of her house and, as if he’d broken a spell she’d been under, dissolved into a pouty, irrational little girl.
And she was wreaking havoc. Nobody would be put out by his sharing his room with somebody normal. Not that he’d meant for her to live with him. He’d told her so a dozen times, but she didn’t want to hear it.
All he’d done was feel sorry for her and said she could crash at his place as long as she needed, till she found out what to do next. She was so unhappy, so trapped between caring about her own life and future—and whether she was abandoning her younger brother. Probably all hyperinflated teenage junk, but he’d remembered how it felt to be an alien in your own family. She shouldn’t have to make such big decisions at that age. What he was doing had seemed the right, the chivalrous thing.
A Penny saved, he’d told himself, and thought it sounded ju
st right.
But even so, he regretted the “as long as you need,” because she had deliberately misinterpreted the whole thing as an invitation to live with him. He thought she was cute, entertaining, bright, a little wild yet still vulnerable. She was good company, precocious for a high-school kid. Now she acted like such an infant he felt like he’d kidnapped her.
She expected the world to stop for her, make her the sun the planets circled. Which naturally infuriated everybody else. He felt caught between his housemates and this changeling he’d somehow adopted. He didn’t want to hurt Penny. He’d thought of himself as her protector, and she needed one.
But he didn’t want to lose his friends or this sanctuary. He was the newest tenant, the least tested, and, if this kept up, they were going to ask him to leave. He could feel it building to that, soon, because everything was cracking and fissuring under her pressure. And then where would he go, where he could afford the rent and they’d accept his falcon and dead mice? Where nobody shouted at him from out on the street, nobody stared into his windows, followed him, knew the address or phone number?
Introducing Penny to this house had been as deadly as introducing poison into a well.
And she’d only been there three days.
A perfect example was right now. He’d been watching the little drama with the back door. Because nobody had said, “Penny, please join us for this grubby and completely informal moment around the kitchen table,” she sulked and acted as if they’d banished her to a foreign land.
And she was insanely, irrationally jealous, acting as if he were cheating on her—as if Kathryn and he were having a secret tryst.
As if Penny and he were. Although he dreaded the tantrum he was sure it would provoke, he was also going to have to tell her that so that she finally heard. What he felt—or had felt—was more affection than sex. A few kisses and hugs. A closeness, a caring, that was all. They’d talked so much about everything; she’d seemed older than her years then, before she moved in.
A kiss or two would have been as far as it went if she hadn’t— He’d thought she would sleep on the sofa downstairs, but she hadn’t. She wouldn’t, so there’d been that time, the first night, when she came into his bed. His fault, too, sure, but afterward he’d said it had to stop, couldn’t happen again. They weren’t to be that way. He’d been kind about it, but the more he said, the more she cried and the more determined she became to make them be the way she’d decided they were.
He hadn’t meant to be cruel. He’d wanted to help her out of a jam, offer her friendship. He wanted to honor his own ideals, not to make this girl his life partner, or whatever she imagined.
He realized that since her outburst, nobody had said anything. Alicia was pushing chip crumbs around the table, forming them into little o’s and lines. Gary had gone back to reading his book, and Toto looked ceilingward, whistling “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a nervous habit that had given him his nickname. Kathryn had gotten up to turn on lights. It had grown dark without their noticing it. But what they were all saying, silently and in their way, was that he’d better do something about the situation.
The silence was broken by Penny, who leaned forward, reached out and put her hand on his arm. “Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. The thing is, there’s no point acting like this heart was something special, except to me—like it’s an object that could identify somebody. The police would laugh at us.”
He pulled his arm away from her “us.” He didn’t want people to think of them as a couple.
“There are a zillion charms like this. It’s not even solid gold, it’s plate. You can see where some is worn off, see?” She pulled the chain and charm off her neck and offered it out. Kathryn was the first to accept it.
“I mean girls got them as favors at dances, as bridesmaids, or as Sweet Sixteen gifts.”
“How do you know all this?” he asked. Where had this fund of knowledge come from?
“One—no, two—women I baby-sit told me. They both said they once had things that were just like it. When they were younger. We aren’t talking Cartier’s. Or original crafted jewelry. We’re talking teen-aged souvenirs.” She suddenly looked uncomfortable, embarrassed. “They were love tokens. That’s what the woman—those women—told me. Somebody gave you his heart. Or maybe just your parents, you know? It was just…a thing. You couldn’t track ownership or sales records, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, who knows?” Luke asked. “Maybe your baby-sitting clients would remember where they got them. Maybe it’d be significant. You could at least ask.”
“One’s my neighbor, she’d know me, my voice. They are so Brady-bunch they’d get hung up on why I’m not home, why I left. They’d trace the call or get me to say something I didn’t mean to. No.”
She folded her arms across her breast like an angry teacher, and the hope that had surfaced in him took a nosedive.
What he couldn’t stand was her bullheaded stubborn streak. She was like that about everything. No logic, just stubbornness. “How about the other one?” he asked patiently. “Would the other one be safe to talk to?”
She looked at him blankly.
“The other person you baby-sit for who had one of those hearts. You said there were two.”
“Oh. Right.” Her gaze fluttered up the wall, and she puckered her mouth. “I think…I think she said she got it as a ‘secret Santa’ gift at her office. And it doesn’t matter, see? All I’m saying is that this kind of heart was as common as houseflies. You couldn’t identify a skeleton through it. It would be like, like trying to trace the baby through its diapers, or a plastic rattle if they’d found one.” She looked down at the amulet. “It has symbolic value. To me. Why can’t you understand?”
“It looks like the design—it looks like a word,” Toto said. “See? VUX.” He passed it around and everyone nodded and Luke, who’d only glanced at the cleaned heart once or twice, realized that the delicate tracings did seem to spell those letters. “But what could VUX mean?” he asked. “It sounds like a detergent. Or a vacuum cleaner.”
“It isn’t Vux! There’s no such word, and it just looks almost like that,” Penny said. “It’s just a design, that’s all.”
“Vux,” Gary said. “Vux.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like anything—not even like a foreign language. Vux. Uh-uh.”
“I hope that means you understand, now,” Penny said.
Luke took two deep breaths. “It could be the name of an organization,” he said. “Something that could help the police. The ‘X’ could be for ten. The Tenth Anniversary or something. Bet if you looked on the net under Vux there’d be something—we don’t know all the possible—”
Penny grabbed the chain and charm from his hand. Her skin, always fair, looked drained. “Listen,” she said, her voice rough. “I’m sick of having my things taken away for no good reason. I’m sick of—there is no reason for me to turn this over to the cops. They’ll keep it forever, don’t you understand? And nothing will come of it, nothing can. Get real—think about it. Two bodies are found five years after they’re buried. Nobody saw a car there back then, nobody filed a missing persons report back then, nobody’s been hunting for them since then. So why, suddenly, could they be identified?
“What happened? A woman decides to pick up a hitchhiker, or her car breaks down in West Marin where there’s nothing except grazing land for miles and some stranger decides to kill her and the baby and take the car. I’m sure it was something insane like that. No reason, no clues. No family waiting, missing her. The two of them are just gone. And the killer—what would he do? Hang around for five years? He’s gone, too. Way gone and there isn’t a single clue or a chance in hell—”
“But that charm, the Vux—”
Penny put the necklace back on and shook her head. “You just want to do something—anything—especially if it’s about something of mine. How are they going to find somebody that nobody thinks is lost? Where would they even start? An
d meanwhile, they’ll go to my parents and—” She shook her head again. “Remember the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That enormous, enormous storage room where things disappear forever? That’s what will come of it. They’ll stick it away and forget it.” She sighed. “You do understand now, don’t you?”
Nobody said anything. Penny smiled expectantly at him, at the others at the table. She was so relaxed all of a sudden, so comfortable, that the tension level dropped by a thousand percent. He thought his roomies had almost accepted her, forgiven him his trespasser, but on the other hand, they weren’t saying a thing. Waiting for him, for the next move.
And much as he hated to mess with the calm that now reigned, something was still out of kilter. “I see your point,” he said, “and I’m sure you’re right, but all the same, that’s for the police to decide. We’re talking a probable double homicide, a serious thing. No matter how cheap or common the heart might be, the cops won’t laugh at you—they’ll call you a good citizen, commend you, even.”
Her mouth dropped open and the goodwill that had been softening her face dried up and disappeared.
“It’s about honesty,” he said. “It’s the most basic ideal any of us have, to live honestly, be honest. That matters maybe more than anything.”
Kathryn and Gary nodded in his direction, as if he’d passed a test. Then they looked back at Penny.
“Don’t you see?” he asked. “It isn’t about a little gold—”
“Gold plated.”
“—heart. It’s about doing the right thing, so you can sleep easy.”
She stood up so abruptly her chair wobbled, and would have fallen to the floor had not Gary reached out a long arm and steadied it. The sunshine in her was so completely gone that her skin seemed darker.
Maybe she was mentally ill. He’d never considered that before, but it wouldn’t be the first time he had been naive or stupid and willfully manipulated by a crazy girl. “What?” he asked.
“I can’t go to the police.” Her voice was so low and strained her neck grew hollow-centered and veins stood out on it. “And I won’t. For starters, I’m a runaway.”
Time and Trouble Page 6
