Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  That night I skimmed The Lost Heart, Rashmi’s novel. It was a nostalgic and sentimental weeper set back before the devils disappeared all the men. Young Brigit Bird was searching for her father, a famous architect who had been kidnapped by Colombian drug lords. If I was just a fluff doing a fantasy job in the pretend economy, then old Noreen would have crowned Rashmi Jones queen of fluffs.

  I’d started day two back at the Joneses’ home. The mom watched as I went through Rashmi’s room. I think she was as worried about what I might find as she was that I would find nothing. Rashmi listened to the Creeps, had three different pairs of Kat sandals, owned everything Denise Pepper had ever written, preferred underwire bras and subscribed to News for the Confused. She had kicked about a week’s worth of dirty clothes under her bed. Her wallpaper mix cycled through koalas, the World’s Greatest Beaches, ruined castles, and Playgirl Centerfolds 2000–2010. She’d kept a handwritten diary starting in the sixth grade and ending in the eighth in which she often complained that her mother was strict and that school was boring. The only thing I found that rattled the mom was a Christer Bible tucked into the back of the bottom drawer of the nightstand. When I pulled it out, she flushed and stalked out of the room.

  I found my lead on the Joneses’ home network. Rashmi was not particularly diligent about backing up her sidekick files, and the last one I found was almost six months old, which was just about when she’d gotten religion. She’d used simple encryption, which wouldn’t withstand a serious hack, but which would discourage the mom from snooping. I doglegged a key and opened the file. She had multiple calls. Her mother had been trying her at Rashmi@Ashbury.03284. But she also had an alternate: Brigitbird@Vincent.03284. I did a reverse lookup and that turned an address: The Church of Christ the Man, 348 Vincent Avenue. I wasn’t keen for a personal visit to the church, so I tried her call.

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  “Is this Rashmi Jones?”

  The voice hesitated. “My name is Brigit. Leave me alone.”

  “Your mother is worried about you, Rashmi. She hired me to find you.”

  “I don’t want to be found.”

  “I’m reading your novel, Rashmi.” It was just something to say; I wanted to keep her on the line. “I was wondering, does she find her father at the end?”

  “No.” I could hear her breath caressing the microphone. “The devils come. That’s the whole point.”

  Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. “That’s sad, Rashmi. But I guess that’s the way it had to be.”

  Then she hung up.

  The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I’d found the girl: case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I’d try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I’d attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle’s Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.

  And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.

  3.

  Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick facade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls—our hope for the future.

  There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn’t take me to schools very often; I couldn’t remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers’ lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.

  Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,

  Down in the valley where the green grass grows, there sits Stacy pretty as a rose! She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,

  Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!

  Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,

  How many kisses does she get?

  One, two, three, four, five . . .

  The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.

  “Hey you, behind the tree.” She shaded her eyes with a hand.“You hiding?”

  I stepped into the open. “No.”

  “This is our school, you know.” The girl set one foot behind the other and then spun a hundred and eighty degrees to point at the door to the school. “You supposed to sign in at the office.”

  “I’d better take care of that then.”

  As I passed through the gate into the playground, a few of the girls stopped playing and stared. This was all the audience Ponytail needed.

  “You someone’s mom?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you have a job?” She fell into step beside me.

  “I do.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  She dashed ahead to block my path. “Probably because it’s a pretend job.”

  Two of her sisters in green-striped shirtwaists scrambled to back her up.

  “When we grow up,” one of them announced, “we’re going to have real jobs.”

  “Like a doctor,” the other said. “Or a lion tamer.”

  Other girls were joining us. “I want to drive a truck,” said a tommy. “Big, big truck.” She specified the size of her rig with outstretched arms.

  “That’s not a real job. Any bot could do that.”

  “I want to be a teacher,” said the dark-haired sister who had been jumping rope.

  “Chantall loves school,” said a furry. “She’d marry school if she could.” Apparently this passed for brilliant wit in the third grade; some girls laughed so hard they had to cover their mouths with the backs of their hands. Me, I was flummoxed. Give me a spurned lover or a mean drunk or a hardcase cop and I could figure out some play, but just then I was trapped by this giggling mob of children.

  “So why you here?” Ponytail put her fists on her hips.

  A jane in khakis and a baggy plum sweater emerged from behind a blue tunnel that looked like a centipede. She pinned me with that penetrating but not unkind stare that teachers are born with, and began to trudge across the playground toward me. “I’ve come to see Ms. Jones,” I said.

  “Oh.” A shadow passed over Ponytail’s face and she rubbed her hands against the sides of her legs. “You better go then.”


  Someone called, “Are you the undertaker?”

  A voice that squeaked with innocence asked, “What’s an undertaker?”

  I didn’t hear the answer. The teacher in the plum sweater rescued me and we passed through the crowd.

  I didn’t understand why Najma Jones had come to school. She was either the most dedicated teacher on the planet or she was too numb to accept her daughter’s death. I couldn’t tell which. She had been reserved when we met the first time; now she was locked down and welded shut. She was a bird of a woman with a narrow face and thin lips. Her gray hair had a few lingering strands of black. She wore a long-sleeved white kameez tunic over shalwar trousers. I leaned against the door of her classroom and told her everything I had done the day before. She sat listening at her desk with a sandwich that she wasn’t going to eat and a carton of milk that she wasn’t going to drink and a napkin that she didn’t need.

  When I had finished, she asked me about cyanide inhalers.

  “Hydrogen cyanide isn’t hard to get in bulk,” I said. “They use it for making plastic, engraving, tempering steel. The inhaler came from one of the underground suicide groups, probably Our Choice. The cops could tell you for sure.”

  She unfolded the napkin and spread it out on top of her desk. “I’ve heard it’s a painful death.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “They used to use hydrogen cyanide gas to execute criminals, back in the bad old days. It all depends on the first breath. Get it deep into your lungs and you’re unconscious before you hit the floor. Dead in less than a minute.”

  “And if you don’t get a large enough dose?”

  “Ms. Jones . . .”

  She cut me off hard. “If you don’t?”

  “Then it takes longer, but you still die. There are convulsions. The skin flushes and turns purple. Eyes bulge. They say it’s something like having a heart attack.”

  “Rashmi?” She laid her daughter’s name down gently, as if she were tucking it into bed. “How did she die?”

  Had the cops shown her the crime scene pictures? I decided they hadn’t. “I don’t think she suffered,” I said.

  She tore a long strip off the napkin. “You don’t think I’m a very good mother, do you?”

  I don’t know exactly what I expected her to say, but this wasn’t it. “Ms. Jones, I don’t know much about you and your daughter. But I do know that you cared enough about her to hire me. I’m sorry I let you down.”

  She shook her head wearily, as if I had just flunked the pop quiz. One third does not equal .033 and Los Angeles has never been the capital of California. “Is there anything else I should know?” she said.

  “There is.” I had to tell her what I’d found out that morning, but I wasn’t going to tell her that I was working for a devil. “You mentioned before that Rashmi had a friend named Kate.”

  “The Christer?” She tore another strip off the napkin.

  I nodded. “Her name is Kate Vermeil. I don’t know this for sure yet, but there’s reason to believe that Rashmi and Kate were married yesterday. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Maybe yesterday it might have.” Her voice was flat. “It doesn’t anymore.”

  I could hear stirring in the next classroom. Chairs scraped against linoleum. Girls were jabbering at each other.

  “I know Rashmi became a Christer,” she said. “It’s a broken religion. But then everything is broken, isn’t it? My daughter and I . . . I don’t think we ever understood each other. We were strangers at the end.” The napkin was in shreds. “How old were you when it happened?”

  “I wasn’t born yet.” She didn’t have to explain what it was. “I’m not as old as I look.”

  “I was nineteen. I remember men, my father, my uncles. And the boys. I actually slept with one.” She gave me a bleak smile. “Does that shock you, Ms. Hardaway?”

  I hated it when grannies talked about having sex, but I just shook my head.

  “I didn’t love Sunil, but I said I’d marry him just so I could get out of my mother’s house. Maybe that was what was happening with Rashmi and this Kate person?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  The school bell rang.

  “I’m wearing white today, Ms. Hardaway, to honor my darling daughter.” She gathered up the strips of napkin and the sandwich and the carton of milk and dropped them in the trashcan. “White is the Hindu color of mourning. But it’s also the color of knowledge. The goddess of learning, Saraswati, is always shown wearing a white dress, sitting on a white lotus. There is something here I must learn.” She fingered the gold embroidery at the neckline of her kameez. “But it’s time for recess.”

  We walked to the door. “What will you do now?” She opened it. The fifth grade swarmed the hall, girls rummaging through their lockers.

  “Find Kate Vermeil,” I said.

  She nodded. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

  4.

  I tried Kate’s call again, but when all I got was the sidekick I biked across town to 44 East Washington Avenue. The Poison Society turned out to be a jump joint; the sign said it opened at nine P.M. There was no bell on the front door, but I knocked hard enough to wake Marilyn Monroe. No answer. I went around to the back and tried again. If Kate was in there, she wasn’t entertaining visitors.

  A sidekick search turned up an open McDonald’s on Wallingford, a ten-minute ride. The only other customers were a couple of twists with bound breasts and identical acid-green vinyl masks. One of them crouched on the floor beside the other, begging for chicken nuggets. A bot took my order for the twenty-nine-cent combo meal—it was all bots behind the counter. By law, there was supposed to be a human running the place, but if she was on the premises, she was nowhere to be seen. I thought about calling City Hall to complain, but the egg rolls arrived crispy and the McLatte was nicely scalded. Besides, I didn’t need to watch the cops haul the poor jane in charge out of whatever hole she had fallen into.

  A couple of hardcase tommys in army surplus fatigues had strutted in just after me. They ate with their heads bowed over their plastic trays so the fries didn’t have too far to travel. Their collapsible titanium nightsticks lay on the table in plain sight. One of them was not quite as wide as a bus. The other was nothing special, except that when I glanced up from my sidekick, she was giving me a freeze-dried stare. I waggled my shiny fingernails at her and screwed my cutest smile onto my face. She scowled, said something to her partner and went back to the trough.

  My sidekick chirped. It was my pal Julie Epstein, who worked Self-Endangerment /Missing Persons out of the second precinct.

  “You busy, Fay?”

  “Yeah, the Queen of Cleveland just lost her glass slipper and I’m on the case.”

  “Well, I’m about to roll through your neighborhood. Want to do lunch?”

  I aimed the sidekick at the empties on my table. “Just finishing.”

  “Where are you?”

  “McD’s on Wallingford.”

  “Yeah? How are the ribs?”

  “Couldn’t say. But the egg rolls are triple dee.”

  “That the place where the owner is a junkliner? We’ve had complaints. Bots run everything?”

  “No, I can see her now. She’s shortchanging some beat cop.”

  She gave me the laugh. “Got the coroner’s on the Rashmi Jones. Cyanide-induced hypoxia.”

  “You didn’t by any chance show the mom pix of the scene?”

  “Hell no. Talk about cruel and unusual.” She frowned. “Why?”

  “I was just with her. She seemed like maybe she suspected her kid wrestled with the reaper.”

  “We didn’t tell her. By the way, we don’t really care if you call your client, but next time how about trying us first?”

  “That’s cop law. Me, I follow PI law.”

  “Where did you steal that line from, Chinatown?”

  “It’s got better dialogue than Dragnet.” I swirled the last of my latte in the cup. “You calling a motive on the Ra
shmi Jones?”

  “Not yet. What do you like?” She ticked off the fingers of her left hand. “Family? School? Money? Broke a fingernail? Cloudy day?”

  “Pregnancy? Just a hunch.”

  “You think she was seeded? We’ll check that. But that’s no reason to kill yourself.”

  “They’ve all got reasons. Only none of them makes sense.”

  She frowned. “Hey, don’t get all invested on me here.”

  “Tell me, Julie, do you think I’m doing a pretend job?”

  “Whoa, Fay.” Her chuckle had a sharp edge. “Maybe it’s time you and Sharifa took a vacation.”

  “Yeah.” I let that pass. “It’s just that some granny called me a fluff.”

  “Grannies.” She snorted in disgust. “Well, you’re no cop, that’s for sure. But we do appreciate the help. Yeah, I’d say what you do is real. As real as anything in this cocked world.”

  “Thanks, flatfoot. Now that you’ve made things all better, I’ll just click off. My latte is getting cold and you’re missing so damn many persons.”

  “Think about that vacation, shamus. Bye.”

  As I put my sidekick away, I realized that the tommys were waiting for me. They’d been rattling ice in their cups and folding McWrappers for the past ten minutes. I probably didn’t need their brand of trouble. The smart move would be to bolt for the door and leave my bike for now; I could lose them on foot. But then I hadn’t made a smart move since April. The big one was talking into her sidekick when I sauntered over to them.