Yesterday, in a small desert town called Apple Valley, ol’ Boonie was finally put to rest amid much fanfare. Jones T. Jones was there. He even shed a tear, which may or may not have been legit. Anyway, I thought he was going to miss his mummy. They had gotten along so well together.
I was still drinking too much, but that was not insurmountable. That was fixable, and someday, when I had put my own mother’s murder to rest, I would put my drinking to rest, too. And then I would ask a certain someone to marry me.
But first things first.
A door to my right opened and a bespectacled young man with no chin poked his head out. He was dressed in a white lab coat. “It’s ready, Mr. Knighthorse.”
“ How did it turn out?”
“ Great, I think. You can thank the marvels of modern technology.”
So, I followed him in. Took a seat next to a flat-screen computer monitor that was turned away from me.
“ Here you go,” he said. And turned the monitor toward me. “Twenty years, just like you asked.”
On the screen before me was the headshot of a white Caucasian male of about forty. I leaned a little closer, aware that my beating heart had increased in tempo, thudding dully in my skull. The man on the screen had not aged well. His face was weathered from too many years in the sun and surf. His blond hair was turning a dirty blond, almost gray. Blue eyes and white teeth.
It’s called age-progression technology, and it’s used to identify runaways and kidnap victims. The man on the screen before me was the eighteen-year-old kid from the pier, the kid who had taken an interest in my mother. Except in the age-progression photograph, he wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a man. An older man who clearly loved to surf and still lived in Huntington Beach. An older man with three adorable kids who loved their grandfather. An older man who was the son of the homicide detective who investigated my mother’s murder.
“ I hope this helps,” said the technician.
I was finding breathing difficult.
“ Are you okay?” asked the technician.
The room was turning slowly. From somewhere very far away, I heard the technician ask again if I was okay.
I felt sick and stumbled out of the small room and found the nearest bathroom and threw up my lunch and breakfast. I flushed the toilet and sat on the seat and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and tried to control my breathing.
I sat like that for a very long time.