Basket Case (24 page)

"Are you job hunting?" she asks me closely.

"Slow down. It's that white house with the blue trim."

"Jack, tell me!"

She wheels into Janet Thrush's driveway, stomps on the brake and whips off her sunglasses. There's nothing for me to do but kiss her, very briefly, on the lips. No retaliatory punch is thrown.

"Come on," I say, stepping out of the car, "let's go commit some journalism."

Janet's banged-up Miata is parked out front but she's not answering my knock. Emma says we ought to bag it and come back later, but I've got a bad feeling—there's a fresh pry mark on the doorjamb. Cautiously I twist the knob, which falls off in my hand.

"What're you doing?" Emma says.

"What does it look like?"

Stepping inside, I break into a sickly sweat. The place has been looted. Half a dozen times I call Janet's name.

"Let's go, Jack." Emma tugs anxiously at my shirt. This isn't as safe as boarding Jimmy Stoma's boat. This time the cops haven't been here ahead of us; only the bad guys.

Janet's makeshift TV studio has been demolished. The tripod racks are down, lightbulbs shattered on the floor. A couch is overturned, the ticking slit open with a knife. Her computer operation—keyboard, monitor, CPU, video camera—is gone.

I expect the rest of the house to be in shambles, but it's not. Emma stays on my heels as we move wordlessly down the hall; at each doorway I pause to gather a breath, in case Janet is lying lifeless on the other side. Oddly, nothing in the kitchen, the bedrooms or the closets appears disturbed. A light is on in a bathroom and cold water runs from a faucet in the sink. I turn it off.

"Maybe she wasn't here when they did this. Maybe she's okay," Emma whispers.

"Let's hope." But I fear that even if Janet Thrush is alive, she's not all right. Her Miata shouldn't be parked in the driveway, and the intruders should have gotten farther than the living room. Something worse than a burglary happened here.

"Jack, we'd better go."

"Wait a second. Let's think this through."

We're sitting side by side on the end of Janet's queen-sized bed. Somewhere in another room a phone is ringing and ringing—Ronnie from Riverside, maybe, or Larry from Fairbanks. Doesn't matter because the computer line is disconnected, and Janet's gone. Emma says, "You know why I think she's okay? Because we haven't found a purse. She must have taken it with her, which means she's probably just fine."

I'm not persuaded. Why would a woman returning to a ransacked house flee with her handbag but leave the car?

Emma follows me out the front door. When we arrived I didn't look closely in Janet's convertible, but now I see why she didn't drive it away. The glove box is ajar, the carpeting over the floorboard is ripped back and both bucket seats have been wrested off their mounts. Whoever broke into the house started first with the Miata.

Which means Janet most likely was at home, inside, when they came through the front door.

"Shit." I kick another dent in the car.

"You think it's the hard drive they were after?" Emma's voice is shaky.

"That'd be my guess."

"You ever had this happen before—a source disappearing like… ?"

"No, ma'am." The wise move is to call the cops anonymously from Janet's phone, pretending to be a concerned neighbor, then depart swiftly. There's no point trying to explain our presence here to detectives Hill and Goldman. Emma agrees, not eager to involve herself, or the Union-Register, in a possible kidnapping investigation. We're hurrying up the steps toward the house when she suddenly stops, pointing into a flower bed. Carefully I reach through thorny bougainvilleas and pick it up—Janet's toy Mi6, the prop for her SWAT-Cam costume. I hold it up for Emma's inspection, saying "Don't worry, it's not real."

"Is this hers?"

"Yup."

"What in the world does she use it for?"

"She performs on television," I say, "sort of."

Before we re-enter the house I take out a handkerchief and wipe my prints off the doorknob; likewise the faucet in the bathroom. In the kitchen I Saran-Wrap my right hand before using the wall phone to dial the sheriff's office, Emma pacing in the living room. No sooner have I hung up than I hear her twice cry out my name.

She's rigid when I reach her side. "What is that?" she says hoarsely.

A dark stain on the carpet, recognizable to anybody who has covered a homicide. I hear myself saying, "Oh no."

"Jack?"

I grab Emma's arm and lead her outside and place her in the passenger seat of the Camry. She assents numbly when I tell her I'll do the driving. I take it real easy down the interstate, checking the rearview every nine seconds like some kind of paranoid coke mule. Emma's clenched left hand, as pink as a baby's, is on my knee.

"Who was she?" she asks finally, in a broken voice.

"Jimmy Stoma's sister."

Standing on the pier watching the horizon bleed away with the last of the sunlight, I'm thinking about the only time I got engaged. Her name was Alicia and she was, I later discovered, mad as a hatter. I met her on a newspaper assignment, a feature story about a beer promotion disguised as a balloon race from St. Augustine to Daytona. Some guy left his boogie board on the beach and I accidentally demolished it with a rental car, distracted at that moment by Alicia in an electric-blue bikini. The guy who owned the boogie board turned out to be her boyfriend, whom she dumped five days later to move in with me. We were both twenty-four. The decision to become engaged was strictly hormonal, which isn't always foolish, but in this case the lust began to ebb long before the diamond ring was paid off. Among Alicia's multiple symptoms were aversions to sleep, employment, punctuality, sobriety and monogamy. On the positive side, she volunteered weekends at an animal shelter.

Soon my apartment filled with ailing mutts that Alicia had saved from euthanasia while secretly consorting with one of the staff veterinarians, who (she later complained) took unfair advantage of her weakness for ketamine and nitrous oxide. Our breakup was a spiteful and messy business, mostly because of the loose dogs, yet I'm amused to recall that I presented myself as heartbroken at the time. Within weeks I was again pursuing waitresses, emergency-room nurses and secretaries, an agreeable social orbit that accepted newspaper reporters without disdain. This carried me along until I met Anne, who worked in a bookstore. During our first conversation she managed to eviscerate Jane Austen with such aplomb that I was smitten on the spot. What she saw in me, I couldn't say.

Anne and I didn't fade out or implode like most of my other relationships. Back and forth we went—together, then apart, then together again—as if caught on a wild spring tide. What finally ended our romance was my crushing demotion to the obituary beat and the morbid preoccupations that came with it. Anne didn't want to hear about people our age dying—whether it was F. Scott Fitzgerald or the friend of mine in Colorado who keeled over while reeling in a ten-inch brook trout. Nor did she care to listen to morose, middle-of-the-night speculations about the demise of my long-gone father, though she was too gentle to interrupt. One morning she simply said goodbye and moved out. That time I knew she wasn't coming back because she took her favorite Nabokov novel, which she'd always "forgotten" before, and a leather-bound volume of sonnets by John Donne (composed at the ripe old age of twenty-five).

Such details make it all the more excruciating to know she has pledged herself to a hack writer of espionage novels. From The Falconer's Mistress:

The woman slipped her hands inside Duquesne's fur-lined overcoat but drew away when she felt the ominous bulge of the holster.

"Now you know who I am," he said, pulling her face close to his. She gazed into his gray eyes with a mixture of dread and excitement. "I'll leave, if you wish," he said.

She shook her head. "It's cold outside," she whispered.

He smiled. "It's Prague, isn't it? It's always cold in Prague." Then he kissed her.

Sweet Christ Almighty, what is there to do but kill him? No jury in the world would convict me. I've bookmarked that page as Exhibit A, and the novel accompanies me now to Anne's house. I believe it will simplify matters for the homicide crew.

Yet the moment Anne answers the door, all thoughts of murdering her fiancé dissolve. She looks fabulous and happy. Carla was right.

Anne invites me inside and, before I can ask, lets on that Derek is at the county library, reading up on Soviet nuclear submarines. "Oh. In Jane's," I say smugly.

"Pardon?"

"Jane's. You can look up any ship in the world in Jane's. A sixth grader could do it."

Anne's sigh is tinged with resignation. "Carla warned me you were taking the news badly. What've you got there?" She nods at Derek's book, which I'm clutching like a hot casserole. "Jack, if you came here to lecture me, you're wasting your time."

"Fine. But his writing is unforgivably wretched. Surely you're aware." This is not my finest hour. Anne would do well to boot me from the premises. Instead she brings me a perfect vodka tonic and tells me to sit down and listen up for once.

"In the first place," she says, "all my favorite novelists are dead, so they're not available to marry. In the second place, Derek is a good guy. He's fun, he's affectionate, he doesn't take life so damn seriously… "

"You've just described a beagle, not a husband," I say. "And, for the record, it's death I take seriously. Not life."

"Knock it off, Jack. Please."

"Tell me you didn't meet him at a book signing. Tell me you met him at a Starbucks or a Yanni concert. That I could almost live with."

"He did a reading at our store," Anne says.

"Aloud? He's got balls, I'll say that."

"Enough!"

"You know his real name is not Derek Grenoble? It's—"

"Of course I know."

"And you're telling me you've actually slogged through… this?" I hold up The Falconer's Mistress.

Anne laughs. "Yes, it's truly awful. But I love him, anyway. Like crazy."

"He isn't forty-four. Did he tell you he was?"

"No," she says, "but I told Carla to tell you that."

"Cute. How old is he then?"

"I don't know and I don't care."

"Well, I know. I looked him up."

"Then keep it to yourself," Anne says sharply. "Didn't you hear anything I said? He makes me feel good. Know what else? He'll be the first to admit he got lucky with those silly spy books. He doesn't pretend to be John le Carre."

"Wise of him," I say.

Anne, who has been pacing, sits down beside me. She's wearing a Stetson University tank top over white jogging shorts. Her legs look astounding, as always, and she smells of jasmine. Taking my hand, she says, "I'm sorry about one thing, hotshot. I completely forgot that Saturday's your birthday. Derek set the wedding date and I said yes and later it hit me. By then it was too late to change the arrangements."

"Right. He's off to Ireland."

"I'm really sorry. I feel lousy about it."

So far, none of this is as devastating as I'd anticipated. Naturally I want to pull Anne to the floor and gnaw off her clothes, but that urge is unlikely to abate in my lifetime. The dolorous tug at my heart, however, seems surprisingly mild and manageable. For this I credit the twin distractions of Emma, hugging my neck when we got to my apartment, and the latest twist to the Jimmy Stoma story. His sister's disappearance is so troubling that it's impossible for me to focus on the task of winning back a lost love.

Yet I take an unmannered gulp of my vodka and give it a shot.

"May I please make a case for myself? I've gotten so much better, Anne, I swear. I don't dwell on all that dark stuff. And forty-six hasn't exactly been a cakewalk, what with JFK and Elvis and, as you so helpfully noted, Oscar Wilde—"

"That was thoughtless of me," she concedes.

"Point is, I've had a pretty strong twelve months, all things considered. And I'm ending on a very positive note, working on a big story—a seriously heavy story that could spring me off obits and turn my career in a whole new direction. Up, hopefully."

Anne gives me the sort of pitiful smile I used to see on the faces of visitors to the animal shelter where Alicia worked; the smile for the doomed mutts who weren't quite cute and cuddly enough to make the cut.

"Your mother called me, Jack. She's concerned."

"Beautiful."

"Don't be angry," says Anne.

"I guess she's only got two things left in the world to worry about—me, and Dave's colon."

"How is Dave's colon?"

"Seriously, don't you think I seem better?"

"Yes, honey, for now. But it'll start all over again, like always. The obsessing, the dreams, the midnight monologues… "

She's kind enough not to mention the actuarial charts I once taped to the medicine cabinet.

"I hope I'm wrong," she says, "but I'm afraid it'll kick in like gang-busters on Saturday when you turn forty-seven. This year was Elvis and Kennedy, next year it's bound to be someone else."