W ell before she would ordinarily leave for work on Thursday morning, at six-thirty, Kat hit the road, leaving her dreams behind her and wondering about her reluctance to invite Zak over after all. True, it would have made a short night, but he was smart, funny, handsome, and in general exceeded her usual requirements by a mile. But after their conversation, she had found herself unaccountably-vulnerable, even shy, at the thought.
She called her office, and Gowecki, the only one ever in at such an ungodly hour, unfortunately answered. She explained that she needed to reassess a house in Pico Rivera, that she’d lost some paperwork, which was why she was driving there so very, very early.
Then she apologized a few more times for goofing up, then she drove to Whittier instead.
As Ray Jackson had said, the Hubbels still lived on Franklin Street in their white mansion with the red tile roof and the palm trees. Their home looked as wonderful as it had in her childhood. Across the street, her old house looked about the same, a ramshackle two-story with white wood siding.
The friendly old wooden fence that had sat at the top of the driveway of her old home had been replaced by a mean-looking chain-link. A Rhodesian ridgeback’s nose poked past the metal as he watched her nervously, although silently. There had been a couple of owners since their mother, and the place today would be worth maybe fifty times what her grandfather had paid. He had owned the place before leaving it to Ma. He had paid twenty grand. Too bad Ma had sold it and burned through the profits far too fast at a nursing home.
Kat climbed the steps to the oversized plank door of Leigh’s childhood home and saw the wrought-iron peephole where Leigh’s mother always checked first. Now, an educated adult, she recognized that this house had been built in the thirties. They had paid it off long ago, no doubt. She thought that today it would be worth maybe a million five, more if they had ever put a pool into the backyard, but she hadn’t looked at comps for the area, so she could be off. And of course, some depended on whether they had upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms.
“Why, Kat!” Rebecca Hubbel appeared surprised and delighted to see her.
“Hi. I was in the neighborhood.” She was pulled in, kicking off her sandals at the threshold. The Hubbels had been watching the Nature Channel from behind TV trays full of eggs and steaming mugs. Rebecca Hubbel wore a sleeveless blouse and walking shorts. There were a lot of veins in her legs Kat didn’t remember, but otherwise she looked just the same, glasses, untidy hair, sweet face.
Leigh’s father, James Hubbel, sat back down in his red leather chair. The TV was a plasma screen hung above the massive fireplace, which Kat had never seen producing a fire. Lit by windows flooding with morning sun that showed the sheen of the polished wood floor and its silk area rugs, the double-height room with its formal staircase had lost none of its beauty. Leigh’s father muted the sound but let the sharks on the screen roam free. He had gotten very paunchy in the six years since Tom’s funeral, but he still had the long arms and barrel chest she remembered.
Kat was invited to sit down in a Queen Anne recliner covered in soft green chenille upholstery with curved legs and a doily protecting the headrest. She remembered the chair. What was it like, living with the same chair-partner-for so many years you finished each other’s sentences and corrected each other without getting mad?
Surprised at her sudden reappearance in their lives after so many years of silence, the Hubbels traded a few cautious pleasantries. Rebecca Hubbel said she was still feeling weak after a bout of diverticulitis. The people who lived in the Tinsleys’ old house were Hurricane Katrina survivors who had given up on New Orleans. Kat told them about Jacki’s marriage and pregnancy. They offered her coffee. When she refused it, a cold Snapple appeared in her hand.
“I’m looking for Leigh,” Kat said.
They deflated like bad inner tubes. “Then you don’t know where she is, either?” said James. “I guess when we saw you, we thought maybe…”
“I went to her home and her husband told me she’s taking some time away. But it’s been days since anyone saw her-”
“Six days!” Rebecca interjected.
“-and she hasn’t been in touch at her office either.”
“Or with us.” They spoke together.
Leigh’s father said, “I put some LAPD buddies on it-they’ve got a missing persons unit-but to tell you the truth, Topanga’s not their jurisdiction; it’s the sheriff’s. They have more limited resources. With an adult, they have to be convinced something’s wrong: she’s disabled, in danger, sick, a crime victim, impaired…We can’t prove anything. The sheriff says not to panic. Wait a few more days, a week at the outside. If we don’t hear from her by then, everybody gets involved.”
“You think that her husband-”
“What can we think? You don’t go off like that, take an overnight bag, leaving everything without a damn good reason, and she didn’t have any reason. If she had a fight with Ray she knew she had her room upstairs, and we could have kept Ray away if she wanted. Why not come home to the room she left years ago, that we’ve kept for her, or for her children-”
“How often would you talk before she, uh, went away?”
“Every day, almost,” said Rebecca. “I just don’t understand. Ray seems like such a good young man. We were so happy when they decided to get married. And he encouraged her to do exactly what she always wanted to do. Helped her set up a business. She’s very successful, you know.”
“I have heard that.”
“We missed you at the wedding. She missed you,” Hubbel said.
“Yes, well, I was still getting over Tom’s death and I-”
“I wish she had stayed with your brother, now,” Hubbel interrupted, focused on his own problems. “Maybe she would be here with us.”
Rebecca Hubbel had teared up. Her husband handed her a clean handkerchief, and she dabbed at her eyes. “Did you know Leigh saw a counselor for almost a year after the-incident?”
Maybe if Kat had seen a counselor, she wouldn’t be sitting in this house on Franklin Street again, getting singed by burning memories. “No,” she said. “Did it help?”
“Some. But she could have used a friend.”
“Don’t make Kat feel bad, Jim,” Rebecca said.
“It’s all right,” Kat muttered. She remembered playing dolls in this room with Leigh, how they had turned that painted cabinet in the corner into a miniature house with curtains, windows painted on with markers, even adding a patio alongside on the coffee table. Leigh’s father, young then, had helped enthusiastically. Her mother bought toy furniture for the project.
What would they think, if they had known the stories she and Leigh dreamed up? In their fantasies, men played a peripheral role. Male dolls were so ugly. Their doll world featured Junoesque women who bore and raised children alone, with men as fleeting presences, available only when required.
She wondered at her memories, how they influenced the present. Did she want a man literally to come and go?
Had Leigh?
They swung side by side in the swings in the old swing set in Kat’s backyard. Fifth grade. “I wish I had your parents,” Kat said, kicking hard to get up higher.
“Are you crazy?” Leigh asked. Her legs dangled lazily, and she pushed off each time on only one foot. “I think you must be.”
“They do a lot for you! Barbies are expensive. You have five of them.”
“No,” Leigh had said. “They buy me stuff but they pay way too much attention. My dad follows me around warning me about bogeymen on every corner. He goes bananas if I’m ten minutes late home.”
“He’s a cop, right? That’s his job.”
“You guys have so much fun.”
“Oh, yeah, my great family. We’re broke. They take us to Vegas to blow their money and then we don’t get any new clothes for school. They yell at each other.”
“Hey, at least it’s not all quiet at night with two people breathing down your neck about whether you did your homework and on you about whether you brushed your teeth and warning you that too much television rots your brain. You and Tommy and Jacki watch all the television you want.”
Kat pumped hard so that she was flying and out of breath. Leigh had a big house and tons of money and parents who were always home. She felt jealous. Things came too easily to Leigh, so easily that she didn’t care if she dropped something and broke it, or just lost it along the way.
Leigh’s parents were looking at her as if she might have some solution for them, and she saw how troubled they were, which made her really worried. “Will you call me if you hear from her?” Kat asked, getting up, handing Leigh’s mother her business card at the door.
“The worst is not knowing. If she’s all right-how could she let us suffer like this? Doesn’t she realize,” Rebecca said, placing the card carefully in her pocket, “how very much we love her?”
Leigh’s father walked Kat out to her car. “You do remember to lock all your car doors when you’re driving around, don’t you?”
She drove a block, pulled over, and called Ray. He wasn’t in at the office yet, and didn’t answer at home. She called her office, and to her relief, got Gowecki’s voicemail. She left an abject message, saying she’d be in sometime in the afternoon, and drove to Ray’s house in Topanga.
Wilshire Associates had the all-important meeting with Achilles Antoniou this afternoon, but Ray could barely drag himself out of bed at eight-thirty. To make up for his old-man eyes and the cut on his face and the bandage wrapped around his right hand where the cut was really hurting today, he dressed carefully. He considered a tie, but he had never seen Antoniou wearing one, so he settled on a comfortable cross between casual and formal, a blue Armani shirt over blue jeans, more like their client.
As he dressed and drank his coffee, the police visit replayed in his mind. He went down to his workshop to pick up a few things, but found himself staring at the models. The two houses with tapes, Norwalk and Downey -Esmé and he had fled those homes in the dead of night, running like grunion in the darkness. Sometimes, he now figured, Esmé left things behind because they ran too fast.
He studied the models. He had not taken the time to revise them, and now he saw all their flaws, all the flaws in his own memory. They had left those two houses in the dark, and in those places he had found tapes. Other places-Ojai, San Diego -he didn’t seem to care as much about them, which was a good thing since they were a lot farther away. Maybe the reason he didn’t have models for them, didn’t have this feeling of urgency, was because they had left in daylight, with time to say good-bye to the houses and the neighborhoods.
His eyes stopped moving on the Bright Street model. He couldn’t remember the move from Bright Street at all.
Bright Street. Uptown Whittier. Age eleven. He should remember. Why didn’t he remember? Bright Street with its fruit cellar, the old trees, and the cracked sidewalk.
Opening the Nesbit book, looking at the list, he felt overtaken again by some destructive looming force.
There it was, the number on Bright Street. His keys still sat in the cabinet where he had hung the ring. He consulted his watch. Ten already. There were two messages from Denise on his voicemail.
Kat arrived just in time to see Ray Jackson’s Porsche pulling out of his driveway. She honked a few times to catch his attention, but he either ignored her or didn’t notice. Well, she decided, staying as close as she could without rear-ending his fancy car, she would follow him to work if necessary.
The Hubbels’ suspicions about him had a contagious quality. She was now sick with it.
Predictably, Jackson took Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Pacific Coast Highway. Then he surprised her, driving right past Wilshire Boulevard and veering onto an on-ramp to the Santa Monica freeway.
What was he up to? He didn’t seem to know she was following.
As they continued on, the route became familiar. Ray was taking just the route she had traveled from Whittier, only in reverse. She felt foolishly unbalanced, but continued to follow him.
Maybe he was visiting his mother? On a workday morning?
On the way, driving down Whittier Boulevard with its car dealerships and fast food joints, Ray called Denise and asked her to tell everyone he wouldn’t be in for a while longer. She wanted to know how long and when he couldn’t tell her, reminded him about Antoniou at two o’clock and a later meeting with Carl to work out details on the museum contract.
“Right,” Ray said, dodging a weaving SUV. “What have you put together?”
Denise said, “I’m concerned. I’m freaked, in fact. We should be going over our presentation for Antoniou. You haven’t seen half my work. What are you doing that’s so important?”
“I have personal business. I trust you.”
Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Ray, the police just left. They talked to Martin and me and Suzanne. Ray?”
“I’m here.”
“They asked about Leigh.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. But Suzanne is furious with Martin right now. You probably know why. Anyway, she took the cops into your office-your office, Ray! You ought to fire her! And when she came out she had a smile on her face that was as big as revenge can get. I’m sure she talked about that argument you and Martin had.”
So the police knew about Martin and Leigh. Then they knew Ray had lied to them.
Ray wondered how much time he had.
“I won’t have to fire her,” he said. “Martin will.”
“True,” Denise said. “Probably today. And then she’ll file a complaint of sex discrimination or whistle-blowing or something because of Martin. And the legal merry-go-round will start up.”
There was a silence, phones ringing back at the office, a fragment of conversation as someone passed by. “I’m so sorry,” he told Denise.
“It’s just-Leigh’s okay, isn’t she?”
“She’s taking time off, that’s all. Tell everybody I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“When will you really be in?” Denise said, bluntly fixed on her own concerns.
“As soon as I can.”
“Because I can still cancel this meeting.”
“No, you can’t. I’ll be there.”
He walked up to the house on Bright Street he thought might have been their cottage, again shocked by time’s changes. The block he remembered bicycling up and down now held new apartments where once old houses had led fading lives.
Dogs barked.
Still a few doors down from the house he thought had been his, he approached warily. He recalled the sidewalk, buckled from the eternally shifting California earth, because he remembered leapfrogging the bad spots on his skates. He walked toward the ramshackle cottage, glad to see it, remembering the monster movies, his fears, and the neighbor next door, who yelled when he or any kid happened to stumble into his dichondra.
He hoped the people who lived in the house worked. This, after all, was a working-class street. But a woman came out onto the porch with a tablecloth, shook it vigorously, and reentered the house. He would have to wait. The woman stood in his mother’s kitchen. He went back to his car and rolled down the windows, let his head drop back, closed his eyes, and entered his memories.
He recalled this house vividly. A twenties bungalow, it hid a fruit cellar beneath the kitchen, the only one he could remember from all his years of moving. Shelves below had harbored ancient jelly jars, jars of unidentifiable vegetables and fruits. They hadn’t lived there long enough for his mother to get around to cleaning them out. Dank dirt surrounded the shelves and webs curled around the old jars.
After one initial exploration of the cellar, Esmé had never again opened the trapdoor, to his knowledge. But she had said, and he had remembered, “These were places where people could hide. Maybe they built it to hide from burglars.”
Ray, then only eleven years old, knew the cellar mainly kept food cool in the days before people had refrigerators, and even then marveled at his mother’s paranoia. The fruit cellar, so unusual in his world, so hidden and inaccessible, lured him, and he spent hours down there on hot days in the darkness lying on the damp earth, digging, looking at the jars and the rusted tools. He thought of the place as a refuge. A refuge from what?
He had enjoyed those months in uptown Whittier, with its big city library and a fountain in front where kids like him could cool off on hot days. He admired the old-fashioned downtown. On Saturday afternoons, while his mother did the grocery shopping, Ray paid a pathetically small amount of money to attend horror movies at the Whittier Village theaters on Greenleaf Avenue. His dreams were full of flesh-eaters, bats with human faces who flew at him, toxic liquid beings that seeped under doors. At this house, his bedroom had been a closed-in porch with windows on three sides that offered perfect entrances for monsters. He never told his mother how much the movies scared him and how they sabotaged his sleep at night.
His mother had talked about settling down and found a good job at a hardware store. They lived quietly, occasionally visiting his ailing grandmother in Montebello for hurried, always brief visits. Esmé stayed close to her kitchen and collected cookbooks. She experimented on Ray, making muffins with pecans and oranges, pancakes with maple chips, omelets with zucchini. In self-defense, he stopped eating anything except cereal until she relented and got back to serving him plainer fare.
Looking back, it was as though they really were starting a new life. Then one night in August, yes, another August night, she had presumably moved them. He woke up one morning in a new place, with no memory of leaving.
That made this house promising.
The summer sun played over the sidewalk, heating the stone wall he sat upon. The front door to the cottage opened, and the woman stepped out. She held an expandable leash. The big yellow Labrador walked politely to heel as they disappeared up the street.
She might not be gone long, although a dog that size really needed a good long walk. He got out of his car, sauntered up the porch steps, and knocked. No answer. He pulled out his family of keys. Before trying a single one, he played a game with himself. Which one might fit? He picked through them lovingly, but in truth had no idea, so after a few moments, he simply tried them methodically. Not this one, not that one. This one was too old-fashioned, and the next one, too shiny for one from so many years ago.
Twist. Turn.