Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  “Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbors didn’t do anything,” Miriam went on. “And look what happened there! All those dead boys!”

  “You’re right.” Each word was an effort. She couldn’t remember being this tired before in her entire life. She put her hand on the lid, for what reason, she couldn’t have said. There was nothing there, if there ever had been, but this looked as if she cared, as if she were behaving professionally. Or as if she were performing a faith healing for a trash can. Emma lifted the lid.

  Miriam’s attention wandered, and she waved to a man in a gray sweatsuit at the end of the street. “My neighbor,” she said. “Man never sits still.”

  “Is he hiking now with that backpack? It’s dark.” Emma inspected the underside of the trash-can lid. Nothing.

  “A perpetual-motion machine,” Miriam said. “He hikes and bikes and runs or swims laps in his pool—well, swims in summer—or goes camping, and his wife’s just as bad. Exhausts me to watch, and makes me angry, too. They don’t use a single one of those muscles on their garden, which is a disgrace. I don’t know why people like that want a house. They’re never in it, except to watch TV too loudly, and they don’t care about it.”

  “Want to flash that light this way?” Emma asked Miriam, who obliged.

  Nothing except two bags of trash, one in paper and the other in a tied-shut white plastic bag with a Safeway logo, the sort the market used for potentially leaky or sweaty goods. Miriam disapproved of all excess packaging. She carried string bags to the market and used them as much as possible.

  “If I’m stuck with plastic things,” Miriam once had said, “I use them for the cat’s poop. Can’t put poop in the compost, you know.” That part of Miriam was still intact. She always had the least-used trash can Emma had ever seen, and discussed it, because it galled her to have to pay the same collection fee as “the trashmakers,” she called them. She was as hyperclean about her natural environment as she was about her garden and her dwelling. Recycling, buying without excess wrappers—the proof was in the can. Emma had done her share of pawing through people’s trash, looking for receipts, bills, and bank statements. Had she needed to investigate Miriam, she’d have come up with zilch. Miriam used the backs of mail for memo paper. She reused aluminum foil, used the curbside recycling for cans and bottles and newspapers. She used fabric napkins and towels, and composted all vegetable matter the city didn’t collect in the green cans. The obsession with world-cleanliness was so ingrained, it was going to take a very long time for the forces erasing her mind to reach that portion.

  “Kitty,” Miriam said. “Have to clean her litter.”

  “I think you already did, dear,” Emma said, pointing at the Safeway bag.

  Miriam looked into the can and sighed. Then her attention turned again to her neighbor, now at the far corner. “What’s he doing?” she asked.

  Down the street the man in sweats stood with a trash-can lid in his hand. “Cheating the system,” Emma said. “You pay for pickups, don’t you?”

  Miriam nodded.

  “I bet he doesn’t. He uses other people’s cans, and he left some meat in yours.”

  “They are wasteful people,” Miriam acknowledged. “And meat-eaters.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Emma said. “I’m chilly.”

  “But the stain on their deck,” Billie said softly. “Should we…?”

  “They dropped something and didn’t clean up after it,” Emma whispered. “We aren’t a housecleaning service. Dirtiness is none of our business.”

  Miriam stood in place, looking as if there were something she wanted to remember, but couldn’t.

  “Weren’t we going to have tea?” Emma asked.

  “Was that what I was forgetting?”

  Billie still gazed at the horizon. “I think…” she murmured.

  “—that we should go inside, drink a cup of tea and get on the road.” Emma enunciated each word. She was dealing with two brain-numbed women.

  Miriam turned toward the house, paused, shrugged, and then took a step or two.

  The neighbor appeared, waved and nodded at them before entering his house.

  “I remember. There was a stain on his deck,” Miriam said.

  “We’d be trespassing,” Emma said. “Besides, it’s dark. We couldn’t see. I’ll stop by again.”

  She walked Miriam to the door, which is when she realized that Billie, still in her trance, hadn’t budged. “Billie?”

  “Two minutes,” she said. “I want to check something.”

  Emma shrugged and went into Miriam’s fussy but immaculate living room. She and her old friend sipped tea and reminisced about long-gone husbands and departed friends. Miriam was losing the present, but still had a hold on the past. The conversation didn’t lift Emma’s mood. She needed to be home with a beer, a bad TV show, and a nearby bed. An empty one. No energy for even a quiet night with George. She remembered—he had his meeting. Good. She was ready to make her farewells, but where the hell was Billie?

  As if on cue, the apprentice appeared. “I have something of an update,” Billie said. “On the case.”

  “What case?” Emma asked.

  “The one we came here to solve.”

  “But we did already.” Well, they hadn’t done squat. Billie had stood there in cloud-cuckoo land and Emma had done the deducing, but why split hairs and look bad to Miriam?

  “Except,” Billie said, “I was bothered by the shot Miriam heard and the stains—in your can, Miriam, and the neighbor’s deck. And his backpack tonight. So first I walked around the front of his house. He does have trash collection. His can is pulled out of the enclosure, waiting for pickup, so there went that theory.”

  “Maybe he only pays for one and needs two,” Emma said.

  “They are so wasteful,” Miriam said.

  “Perhaps,” Billie murmured. “But I had this different idea, so I went across the street, now that he was home, and checked out the can we’d seen him at.”

  The girl was milking this for all it was worth. Emma should have never hired a prima donna. “And?”

  “And…I found a…a body part in plastic wrap.”

  Miriam put her hand on her heart. “Oh, my—”

  “A head,” Billie said.

  “Oh my god!” Miriam looked about to pass out.

  Sweet Jesus—she finds a head and nonchalantly—a head!

  “But not a human head. A deer’s. A young buck.”

  Emma stared at her, then at Miriam, then back at Billie. Then she laughed. “You have a criminal next door,” she told Miriam. “A Marin criminal.”

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You know it’s illegal to kill deer in Marin, don’t you? Even during hunting season. Pretty much every inch of this county is off limits. Basically, it’s an absolute, total no-no. Frowned upon the way, say, grand larceny or embezzlement is not frowned upon.”

  “And that young man, you think he—”

  “I do indeed. I think one too many deer visited him—”

  “But he never planted anything. He had no garden to ruin. Not a single flower.”

  “I think I saw remnants of weed,” Billie said.

  “That’s what I meant. Just weeds!”

  “Marijuana,” Billie said. “Deer love it.”

  “Venison is tasty,” Emma added. “And there it was, a visiting venison on the hoof. That was the shot you heard, and then he must have panicked. Good venison—but what to do about it? Is his pool drained by any chance?”

  “I don’t know. The cover was on. That stretchy kind that hooks over metal things.”

  “Bet it is. Bet that’s where he did his butchering. Now his freezer’s full, but he still has the problem of disposing of the inedible parts without going to jail. So he doesn’t do it all at once, and he surely doesn’t do it in his own trash can. Each week, he leaves a souvenir in a different can, or maybe a few cans after people put them out for collection. For all we know, he d
oes this all year round, finding new neighborhoods for the body parts each time.”

  “What should I do?” Miriam asked. “It’s a crime.”

  Who really cared? Didn’t want him to do it again because shooting a gun in a residential neighborhood is insane, but who really cared if this man or the next speeding car on the freeway thinned the herd? The wildcats, their natural predators, were all but gone. So Miriam’s neighbor got to eat venison instead of the turkey vultures. Was it worth jail time?

  “You should ask him when he’s going to have you over for dinner,” Emma said. “For venison. Ask with a smile. That’d let him know that you’re not hostile or a threat, but that you know, so he’d better not do it again.”

  “I can’t do that,” Miriam said.

  “All right, but why?” She was afraid of forgetting what she was to do, Emma thought.

  “I don’t eat meat,” Miriam said.

  Emma and Billie merely nodded.

  The Last of the Mohicans does Marin. Emma envisioned his wife nagging Deerslayer because Bambi’s head and antlers took up too much room in their freezer. No space left for the frozen yogurt and vodka.

  They left Miriam debating what course of action she wanted to take. It was good, Emma thought, to be reminded that the ludicrous was also part of the big picture.

  Billie sat silently in the car, her hands crossed on her lap. Ever that proper miss, Emma thought, but she looked like perfect hell, hair gone straggly and face as lined as one that young could be.

  “Penny Redmond,” she murmured. “All this and we still don’t… The police. They’ll be able to get his address, right? To notify… Oh, God. I should—”

  “It’s an open homicide now,” Emma said. “You’d be interfering, or seeming to. Instead, go home and get a night’s sleep, why don’t you? Leave it till morning.”

  Billie looked over with naked gratitude. And something else. The damned girl was always waiting. Expecting. “Good work about the deer.” Emma’s voice sounded rusty. She cleared her throat. “Very clever.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s something on the desk might be fun for you,” Emma said. “Sexual-harassment case. You’d be perfect for it. Soon as we find Penny or give it up.”

  Billie smiled and nodded.

  I’m not stroking her, or whatever they call it, Emma reassured herself.

  “Miriam’s was fun,” Billie said. “Figuring it out, I mean.”

  Emma’s turn to nod. It had been. Small antidote for a dead end and a dead young man, but small didn’t mean nonexistent. You took what you could get. Maybe that was the point.

  Twenty-Six

  The honks made Penny realize she had done it again—slowed to a near stop on Sir Francis Drake during the morning rush hour. All those people hurrying toward the City, the ferry stop, the bus depot.

  Another honk. All those people angry at her, but her foot was too tired to press any harder. Last time people honked because she was speeding or weaving—something. She couldn’t help whatever it was.

  He was dead. She couldn’t believe it.

  No. She could. She had been afraid of that. She had seen that somebody was following them, warned him, and he had made fun of her.

  But all the same, dead? Murdered?

  The policeman said “suspicion of foul play,” not an accident. He’d been looking for Alicia because the phone number Stephen had given the police was listed as Alicia Malone’s. Penny explained that she lived there, too. Gave her name. It was hard saying even that because as soon as she saw the cop, she knew it was something bad—her brain exploded. Maybe she nodded. Anyway, the policeman took that as a yes.

  The policeman said…

  More honks. She pulled into the slowest lane and tried to concentrate but it was too hard, too noisy inside and outside. She couldn’t attach, move with them. She was no longer connected to anything—not to people, if Stephen was gone. Not to gravity or inertia. Her car—Alicia’s car—would do whatever it wanted. She wasn’t connected to it, either.

  And when she had calmed down enough to speak to the cop, all she could think of was Yvonne, and she told him about her but she didn’t know her last name. Didn’t know where she worked, what she did.

  She felt bad now that she’d said it because after a while she knew it hadn’t been Yvonne. She wanted him back, so why would she kill him? Besides, Stephen wouldn’t have stopped his car—not even Stephen—if he saw Yvonne’s car or Yvonne.

  She thought Gary had slept through the whole cop thing, but then he came down and said he’d heard. He was more rumpled and wild-haired than ever, and he looked as if he’d been crying, but said it was his cold. Later she heard him snoring. Asleep and snoring as if nothing had happened while she paced and cried and couldn’t even close her eyes so that they got gritty and hurt, but still stayed open and all the while she felt scissors snip the air around her, till she hovered above earth—thin, two-dimensional, arms out, holding nothing.

  Near dawn, from her point in space, she’d been able, finally, to connect the scraps and see what must have happened. And what she saw wasn’t Yvonne at all.

  She saw Arthur. Stephen had visited him. Until then, Arthur hadn’t known who Stephen was, not for sure, probably not at all. And because of Yvonne, nobody could have found Stephen unless he showed his face on purpose, said his name, let Arthur Redmond know him and about him. She’d warned him about her stepfather’s temper, which was worse than ever now that he was afraid of her—afraid because she knew about his other woman. He was going to lose his slave-wife and slave-kids because of Penny.

  Arthur had expected her to be in that car with Stephen. She was supposed to be dead, too, now. It all made shudderingly-clear sense.

  That’s what this was about, that was its meaning. Penny had to set things right, make it up to Stephen. Tell the world the truth. There was always a reason why things happened and now she saw this one clearly. As clear as the picture that would be worth the thousand words nobody listened to or believed. Stephen was dead and she might as well be, unless she made things right. If it was dangerous, then it was still right that she face that danger.

  Stephen had died for her, because of her, because of their connection. She had to be worthy of him. In his world of knights and ladies, ladies fought too, and all lived by the code of honor. She could, too.

  She packed Stephen’s camera, a notebook. Everything. She didn’t have much, but what was the point of leaving it here, with only Morgana left to care, if birds cared about anything. Maybe she’d come back and maybe not. This way, she had her freedom, her choices to make. She’d get Alicia’s car back to her somehow, or leave a message about where Alicia could pick it up. So what if she’d be angry about the car’s being somewhere else. So what?

  She heard a long honk, like a scream, saw the wide-eyed horror on the face of the driver of a car veering away from her. She clutched the wheel of Alicia’s car and tried to remember about not pressing too hard on the pedal, but she couldn’t concentrate on things like that when so much else was on her mind. So much that was so much more important.

  *

  Billie could have used five more hours’ sleep. Could have used a night in which Jesse did not have a bad dream—that brought her son to her bedside. His thumb was in his mouth as he stared her into opening her eyes. This was serious. He’d almost completely given up the thumb. “What?” she’d whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  By then he was beside her on the bed. “Do I have a skeleton inside me?” he asked.

  Two A.M. and her son was into Human Anatomy. It would be amusing, maybe, if she weren’t exhausted. “Yes,” she said. “It holds you up and mine holds me up.” She yawned. Wasn’t going to ask why and hear the long, digressive explanation. Was not.

  He stared at her, his thumb back in his mouth.

  She gave up. “Why do you want to know that in the middle of the night?” she whispered.

  He looked down, then at her. “How would it get outside me, li
ke that baby’s?”

  “What ba—” Oh. The skeletons in the cow pasture. “Well, when you…” No. That wasn’t going to set his mind at ease. Couldn’t do the “When you grow very, very old” routine with a baby involved.

  “His mommy, too,” Jesse said mournfully. “Hers was on the outside, too.”

  “And it frightened you, didn’t it?” She’d told Ivan about limiting and monitoring Jesse’s TV. The news, pumped and primed only for the worst of humanity, was definitely off-limits. She lifted her son and carried him back to his room where she sat on the side of his bed while he neared sleep again. As if she’d answered anything, except by existing. By being there for him, evasive as she’d been.

  “But Mom?” he murmured a few seconds after she thought he was asleep. “Ivan said it was because they were dead. That’s how their skeletons got on the outside because the outside they had disappeared. Is that true?”

  She might evade, but she’d taken a vow long ago to never lie to him. “Yes,” she whispered back. “There was a terrible accident a very, very long time ago, before you were even born.” Not exactly a lie. Maybe it had been an accident. At least, an accidental meeting with the wrong person.

  Another silent spell and she was sure he was asleep, and then his eyelashes fluttered. “But Mom?” His voice was hollowly urgent. “What if it happened to us?”

  No theology, no metaphysics, no philosophy was going to work here. Vow or not, major lie was called for. The lie of saying you were in control of anything important. She stroked his dark honey hair. “It won’t, Jesse love,” she crooned. “It simply won’t. That’s a promise. No bad accidents for us. No bad things. I will keep us safe. That’s my job. Yours is to rest now so you’ll grow big and strong.”

  Night Fears put aside, he slept. Billie stayed wide-eyed till dawn.

  In the morning, he was all activity and smiles and they were back to trivial household concerns—he had no idea where his shoes were, or how the Cheerios box got under the sofa pillows.

  Meanwhile, Ivan was making ominous murmurs about his mother’s health, about how worried he was, which was nothing compared to how worried Billie was going to be if he intended any long-term relocation to his mom’s north-country bedside. Billie couldn’t bring herself to ask him about it out loud, to sound as hardhearted and selfish as she knew her priorities were. In theory, she had the backup student-sitters, but the idea of the phone calls and arrangements, the juggling of their schedules—semesters had changed and who knew if they were all compatible anymore?—gave her a case of the vapors, whatever they might be.