Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  The fruitless search was exhausting Billie’s small fund of optimism. Even when and if they found Penny, nothing would be improved, given that her mother didn’t want her back. What was the point of all this? If, in fact, the girl was safer away from home, then her runaway instincts were correct and self preserving. Why beat the bushes for her?

  And how could her mother jeopardize both her children—give Penny up and remain in an environment that endangered her skinny-necked little boy?

  It was chilly in the car and she wasn’t dressed for it. Out at the side of the road, near the chrome-yellow tow truck, which huffed and heaved as it tried to raise the fallen car, Emma talked to a tall, potbellied man, showing more animation than Billie had ever seen from her. Hands pointing toward the tow truck, nods, head-shakes and finally, after what seemed an eternity, a handshake and return to the car. She looked straight ahead, through the windshield and her voice was tight. “Very bad news.”

  “The driver’s dead?” It was and wasn’t a question. If they had recovered the body and there was any sign of life at all, there would be paramedics working frantically and the ambulance would not be idling. “I didn’t realize they had reached the car yet.”

  “It’s just off the road. Didn’t fall far at all. Climbers were able to get down to it, to the body.”

  Billie swallowed hard and shook her head. What was there to say of the waste of life? It happened too often and too easily—too many drinks, too much velocity, too little belief in the laws of physics. Stupid and sad.

  The tow truck inched forward. Billie couldn’t imagine how, with the limited space in front of it, it could haul up an entire car.

  Emma cleared her throat and turned so that she was almost looking at Billie, as if she’d intended to, but couldn’t at the last moment. “The driver was murdered.”

  Billie stared at her in the dark. The pupils of her eyes caught some of the white of the lights outside, made Emma look feral. But also very sad. Very human.

  “Beaten around the head with something hard, like a baseball bat. The killer obviously expected the car to fall all the way down, maybe to burn, and in either case, the head wounds would be written off to the crash. But a gigantic tree stopped the fall, caught and held the car. It’s immediately off the road, nose-down.” She grew silent, but Billie knew it was only a pause.

  She didn’t want to hear the rest. She already felt it aching in her marrow. No need for the finality of words, the confirmation. He was so vividly alive in her mind.

  The yellow truck heaved and grunted and exhaled steam and the back of the fallen car slowly rose until it was visible over the road’s edge. It looked like no normal car. There was no softly curved bulge of trunk under a rear window.

  A hearse the color of sunshine. A horribly apt choice for Stephen Tassio’s last ride.

  Twenty-Five

  They sat in silence for what felt a long time, watching the continued efforts of men and vehicles to rescue the car and restore the road, even if they could perform neither service for the driver.

  Emma sat lost in thoughts of the sudden curves from life to death. She never thought about any young man’s death without putting her own son’s face on the victim. The habit was a ridiculous form of self-important hysteria. But she was never without a sore awareness in her solar plexus of her son’s vulnerability. Maybe every mother was. She’d never asked anybody else. She glanced over at Billie, then decided against starting now, and thought instead about Stephen Tassio.

  Who was he that someone should waylay him, as seemed the case, murder him and disappear? It had to have been done within seconds. The road wasn’t busy this evening, but it was nonetheless one of only a handful of arteries from the ocean side of Marin, and never deserted for long. Precisely how long before she and Billie arrived at the bar had he left? Were the two phone calls related to this?

  They’d had the right impulse, she and Billie, but their good intentions had only paved the road to hell. They hadn’t found or stopped Yvonne, and now Stephen Tassio was dead and she couldn’t help but wonder whether that was cause-and-effect.

  Who had Stephen Tassio been besides a ticket away from home for Penny Redmond?

  And, most of all, what was the point? It was a question she asked more and more often, and she was still waiting for the smallest whisper of an answer. It wasn’t as if she confronted senseless death on any regular basis. Aside from half of Nathaniel’s world in the plague years. But what was the point of any of it, of the sweat and time and brainpower to supposedly “solve” things? The effort put food on Emma’s table, but what good did it ultimately do? What had she or the lawyers she worked with, or the police or anybody ever truly “solved”?

  The scene outside the car was alien and disorienting. Shadows cast by the white-hot lights were misplaced, as if a small sun had fallen to earth, textures unnaturally combined—misty swirls and fronds and bark against the chromed and lacquered surfaces of equipment, the deep silence of the mountain broken by low voices and the metal-on-metal cries of the machinery.

  She heard her own jagged sigh with surprise. As did Billie, obviously. The girl, whose profile had been still as sculpture, turned sharply, her mouth slightly open.

  She is surprised that I have human feelings. The thought produced a bristling pang at the base of Emma’s skull. Neither the sensation, the resultant pain, nor the accusation behind it was new. It had been cultivated and maintained by Caroline’s nonstop insistence that she was Emma’s victim, the daughter of a woman lacking normal emotions.

  And all because Emma was not the hugging, kissing, pat-on-the-back kind. She was the pay the bills and put-shoes-on-the-feet kind, but that didn’t suffice, and just because she didn’t constantly announce to the world the inner workings of her psyche…

  She realized how far into the muck of self-pity she’d sunk. “Up to my neck in dreck,” her friend Janine used to say, and although it wasn’t Emma’s lingo, she’d understood it immediately.

  Emma yanked her attention and thoughts back to present reality. Billie was beside her, not Caroline. Billie was the one who’d been surprised that Emma had feelings, or, at least, had the same she herself had. Annoying, but not impossible to understand.

  Emma had to get it through her skull that Billie also had a set of feelings. She had to see her without the lens of baseless resentment—because she was young, because she was beautiful, because she merely had to exist in order to produce smiles of welcome, because she was not nearly as tired as Emma was.

  And she had probably never before had a close encounter with violent death.

  She moved her hand six inches to the right so that it covered, softly, Billie’s. The younger woman’s mouth half opened again, but she didn’t pull her hand back.

  “It’s rough. Every time.” Emma patted Billie’s perfect, unlined and un-sunspotted, patrician hand. She would work at getting over those flares of rage at nature.

  “He…” Billie breathed in and out, shook her head.

  Goddamn, she’s going to want to talk about it, Emma thought. Why do people say that actions speak louder than words if they then go on to insist on tons and tons of words. Inside other people, unsaid words apparently piled up, festered and inflicted pain. But why dump them on decent people?

  Outside, the yellow tow truck moved into reverse with steel screams and warning beeps and the hearse, looking like a wounded behemoth, heaved back on the roadbed. People applauded and two drivers honked their horns either in a salute to the skilled rescue efforts or in impatience to get on with their commutes.

  Billie sat still, her mouth tense. Damn. Emma knew how to get people to talk, pull out their feelings. She just didn’t like to use the techniques outside of billable hours. “Poor guy,” Emma said, and that pretty much covered it.

  Unless you were Billie. “Nobody had a bad word to say about him,” she began. “He sounded generous, kind. Almost as if the person I made up for the ILM receptionist was who he really was. She wasn’t surpri
sed that he’d have given me money and a place to sleep. Maybe in person I’d think he was nerdy. All that computer stuff, I don’t know. But I bet he was interesting. So young, too. And his fantasy life, that other world he was a part of. A nice Middle Ages, a world with codes of honor.”

  Eulogy for a stranger, Emma thought, but this wasn’t information she wanted. She didn’t want to know who Stephen Tassio had been, didn’t want to hear how Billie’s pain would shape her description and her tone. Didn’t want Stephen, who was irretrievably dead, becoming three-dimensional now.

  “The only negative words were his mother’s, about the quality of his associates. He didn’t check Dun and Bradstreet before he showed affection. Played at being a falconer, loved the world that almost was, the ideal world of six hundred years ago. The people who should have sheltered him, loved him unconditionally, or even conditionally… It doesn’t seem surprising that he was attracted to a dream world of sorts, to a new family of other dreamers. People entirely unlike those …his….” She shook her head again, tendrils of hair like blonde fog in the light of the distant lamps. “I don’t get it, how people treat their children.… I wonder what his mother will feel when the police come to her house. Grief? Irreparable loss? Or—since she’d written him off as an embarrassment already—relief?”

  Again there was silence, but this silence was soft-edged, wrapped around them, not sitting between them.

  “And who would have—could have—done that to him? How? Didn’t anybody see the attack?”

  “It wouldn’t take long,” Emma said. “If he was the kind of person you said, he’d have stopped if somebody seemed in trouble. And then what? A minute?—two? He’d be taken completely by surprise.” She sighed. “Yvonne,” she said softly.

  “It’s horrible that everything special about a human being can be killed that quickly. That finally,” Billie whispered. “We’re designed badly, aren’t we? We’d take a machine back to the store if it were that fragile.” Then she looked at Emma as if seeing her clearly for the first time in a long while. “I’m sorry. I sound like a fool. Unprofessional. No detachment. I’m sorry.”

  Emma felt her hand muscles contract, willed her palm and fingers to stay in place, to not go crazy and overdo it, for Christ’s sake, but she was overruled and once again she softly patted Billie’s hand. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. There were probably other touchy-feely words a goddamned role model might say, but enough was enough.

  “I had changed my mind, but maybe we should make that other stop, after all. Lighten up. Remember that life goes on.” Not that Miriam was precisely comic relief, or even Emma’s definition of “life.” She was another variation of the theme of loss, another tragedy, but this one orchestrated by nature, whose cruelties were not considered criminal outrages. Not even considered aberrations, more was the pity. To Emma, violent death had come to seem less frightening than the nonviolent, piece-by-piece variety.

  Billie’s smile was tremulous. “The case of the bloody trash can?”

  “Unless— It is later than we’d expected. Did you have plans?”

  “Jesse’s asleep by now, so no, I don’t.” Billie looked out the windshield again. “It’s frustrating to watch this and do nothing. I know there’s nothing to do—the police are in charge. They’ll notify, and clean up messy ends and look for the person with the baseball bat or tree limb or whatever it was.”

  “And PIs are not allowed to be involved in an active, ongoing homicide investigation,” Emma said. “Except in the movies and on TV.”

  Billie nodded. “I read the book you gave me.”

  “I told them about Yvonne,” Emma said. “The phone calls. The woman who hung up. The man he talked to.”

  Billie nodded again, but this time, with reluctance, as if begrudging the words she was about to say. “I hate to say this, but I was thinking about Penny Redmond, too. It could have been… He came out here alone. If she was with him, but they were having problems… Of course, we don’t know if she was ever with him. If he was the guy driving the car when she left. Or somebody who borrowed it that day.”

  “I mentioned Penny as well. The situation. Had to explain why we knew about the dead boy, little as it is we know.”

  “Maybe it was somebody else altogether, somebody who had nothing to do with his romantic life, or Penny’s running away. That other message. And even Arthur Redmond. He’s such an angry man, if he knew who the boy who took Penny away was… But of course, he didn’t. Neither did I. I didn’t know Stephen. I have nothing to offer.”

  She was getting a taste of the futility. The “What’s the point?” would gnaw at her, but not for a while yet. “What the hell,” Emma said. “Let’s go solve a mystery.”

  *

  Miriam lived on the flats of Mill Valley, or at least on the semi-rounded, on the gentle slopes approaching Mount Tam; and unlike her neighbors farther up the road who often as not were cantilevered, half-perched on stilts that clutched the steep mountainside, she had a level yard edged by what appeared to be a wall of ivy. Even in the dark, the love expended on the plot of ground was obvious as she toured her visitors through her garden en route to the “scene of the crime.”

  Miriam waved toward the vertical ivy. “I would show you where I saw the blood next door, but we’ll have to go around because of that thing. I hate it, hate having a fence. I try to cover it with vines, but it still looms like a prison wall. But at least the deer can’t get in, and I can have my roses. They just love roses. And this… It’s a…this…this, um…thing? Before the fence, I thought it was a bush because it never had the chance to grow!”

  Miriam was diminutive and dimpled. Her dark eyes were lively, although now and then, as when she’d tried to remember the word “tree,” her conversation halted and her eyes turned puzzled and worried. Two seconds later, they were again as bright and intense as ever. Emma listened to Miriam intently explain each bit of flora. She wanted to punish—or hide from—nature whenever she saw Miriam, which is why she tried to avoid seeing her. Coming here had been a decision to be brave, which was easier with somebody else

  Emma’s own yard was an unkempt mess, and had been forever. Back when she had small children and toys littering ground hard-packed from ball games and the pressure of sand boxes, she’d incorrectly believed she’d become a gardener someday. Back then and through till now, her only garden knowledge was to warn her children not to go near the shiny green-and-scarlet poison oak and not to eat the blossoming pink-and-white oleanders, a deadly plant even the deer didn’t touch. Emma’s total botanical knowledge.

  Her children had made it to adulthood, which meant they were at least as smart and self-protective as the dim-witted deer.

  Miriam waved her flashlight to a new spot, passing over without comment a bulky green trash can on wheels. “See this flower?” she asked, the beam revealing blue petals, closed against the night. “One of my favorites, a… It’s a…oh…”

  Miriam had been trained as a botanist, that was who she was under all the layers of roles: housewife, mother, and widow. It was unbearable watching her core shred like worn silk.

  We don’t get to keep a thing, Emma thought. And if we do, we surely don’t get to choose what it should be. “Is that the trash can?” She pointed in the direction of the enormous green plastic tub she’d seen.

  “What? Oh, no.” Miriam chuckled, as if the idea were laughable. “That’s for prunings and clippings, for the green collection. They compost the stuff. So do I, but not the bigger limbs.”

  “Then where is your trashcan, Mir?”

  “Where it should be. Outside the fence, in the enclosure dear Charlie built us. Why?”

  Emma smiled to hide the fear Miriam’s degeneration caused her. “You asked me—”

  “I’m glad you reminded me because tomorrow’s trash day and I would have forgotten. I have to clean the cat’s box.”

  “Maybe we should take a look at it,” Emma said.

  “The cat box? Why on earth?”
r />   Emma wished she could shake her, rattle things back into place. “The trash can,” she said gently. “The one you called me about.”

  Miriam nodded. The flat dark look fluttered over her face, a split second of acknowledgment and mourning. “Yes. Good. Although I’ve washed it down, of course.”

  “Of course,” Emma said.

  “It would have smelled. Attracted rodents.”

  “Lovely garden, and thanks for showing it to us,” Billie said.

  She’d been silent except for politenesses since they arrived. She hadn’t yet let go of the scene on the mountain, Emma realized. But some instinct pulled Billie back when etiquette was required. She wore white gloves in her soul and probably sent thank-you notes to everyone she interviewed.

  Emma remembered that she wasn’t going to think those stupidly resentful thoughts anymore. Except, of course, when she forgot to remember.

  The trash can sat inside its latticed enclosure, the doors of which were slightly open. “I leave them that way. It’s easier for the trash men,” Miriam explained. “They work so hard, poor dears. Besides, Charlie was a craftsman, do you see? I don’t want them bumping his woodworking here.”

  “Anything unusual in it this time?” Emma asked her old friend.

  “I didn’t look. I took out the trash an hour or so ago, and it was already dark. It was in the morning that I saw the blood that time.” She looked near tears. “Do you think I’m a cracked old lady?”

  “Of course not,” Emma said. “Why would we both be here otherwise? I might visit, but my associate wouldn’t. We’re here investigating for you, dear.”

  “Because you see, all I could think was what if something horrible is going on and nobody makes a fuss?”

  “Of course.” Emma felt as if she might drown under a tsunami of exhaustion. Coming here had not been the best of ideas this particular evening. She was too tired to be tolerant of what was happening to Miriam. Too tired to check whether it was gaining on her as well.