Dark Water (8 page)

“I don’t know where he went,” my uncle told somebody. “I’ll send him to find you when he shows up, okay?” he said.

I earnestly hoped that might be the end of his search, but then I saw my uncle’s silhouette at the far end of the corridor that the parked cars formed on the grass and gravel. He would see me. He would see me crouched beside a car and he’d know whose car it was and what would I say? What if he came up and saw Robby in the front seat?

I popped up and started walking—sprinting, nearly—toward him, not daring to sneak a glance into the Avalon. “Hi, Uncle Hoyt,” I said. My voice sounded fake and wobbly, as a nervous, lying voice will. “I was just looking for something.”

“You find it?” He studied me with his usual acuteness. That was the thing that gave Uncle Hoyt real substance, the fact that he always looked like he was weighing your moral fitness and expecting the very best you could be, no lies or cowardice, and giving you the same. How could I have been wrong about him?

“Yeah, I found it,” I told him, sick at heart. I patted my purse as if the phantom lost thing were safely stowed. I sweated onto the tight batiste armholes of my new unfashionable dress.

“Let’s go back to the party, then, okay?” Hoyt said. “Have you seen Robby?”

I said I hadn’t lately, and I went with him to the plates of scallops and figs and strawberries and lamb, but I slipped away again from the quivering pool water and the sparkly lights as soon as I could. There in the Avalon was Robby, prone in the
dark seat of the car. When he saw me, he cautiously sat up. I opened the car door and discovered that Robby Wallace is not spy material and maybe not, as I thought at the start of the party, the master of his surfboard and the sea.

“Well?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. I haven’t moved since you left.”

“Get cracking, Tintin! I’ll be the lookout.”

He shook his head, so finally I just did it for him. I got in the car, opened the glove compartment, and rifled away. I told myself it was my father’s fault and my uncle’s, too, and that I used to be good and trustworthy.

The car was registered to someone named Arnold Farlow on Tumblecreek Lane. I memorized this information and stuffed the papers back into the plasticine folder filled with receipts. I was more than ready to declare this sufficient information when I noticed that there was a laminated tag on the floor of the car—one of those ID cards you have to wear now that people assassinate their co-workers all the time.
MARY BETH FARLOW
, this one said beneath her photograph, but the interior lights had winked out automatically, so I was trying to make out her face when Robby opened the car door and made all the light I needed. “Someone’s coming,” he hissed, crouching down on the grass beside the car. “Let’s go.”

When we returned to the party, my mother said, “I’ve been looking for you. Stay closer.”

Cake was presented, candles were lighted, candles were extinguished, cake was removed from the table by a white-jacketed waiter, and my aunt Agnès said a number of unspecific
things about her affection for Robby and Fallbrook and failed, afterward, to include my mother and me in the vast number of guests she invited to step forward and talk into the microphone about Robby. A horse trainer that Robby had always loathed (my aunt Agnès is a big one for horses, Robby not so much) was remembering Robby’s first (forced) participation in a dressage show when I looked up to thank the person who was handing me a plate of cake and ice cream and saw that it was Mary Beth Farlow.

She was pretty, of course. Smooth skin, round eyes, swept-up brown hair, a general neatness and smallness and confidence as she handed me a plate and then walked away in her black ballet shoes. I found my uncle in the crowd, but he was not looking at Mary Beth Farlow. I stared hard at Robby, and I waited for him to look back at me.
Her, her, her, her
, I was trying to tell him as the black skirt and white blouse and brown twist of hair weaved in and out of tables, retrieving another plate of cake and melting ice cream, the secret of her tie to the man who was paying for the party hers alone, she supposed, and that was why she glided so neatly everywhere.

“I thank you all for joining us tonight to celebrate
mon petit
Robby, not
petit
so longer,” Agnès was saying regretfully, and Robby stood up politely and smiled his gray-eyed smile, which finally landed on me. He read my lips well enough to know I either had something to say or was dying of anaphylactic shock, and after kissing the cheeks of what seemed like fifty guests, he made his way to where I stood like the Grim Reaper. The caterers were swiftly dismantling the bar and hustling the
trays of food into the house, and because they didn’t always come back out, I had lost track of Mary Beth Fowler.

“What the
le
hell, girl detective,” Robby said.

“She
is
here,” I hissed.

“Didn’t we already know that?”

“She served me a piece of your
le cake
,” I said, my eyes on the white shirts passing to and fro, none of them hers.

This made him turn and survey the men and women who were in such a hurry to go home.

“Which one?” he asked.

“She went in the house with a pile of napkins and she didn’t come back out.”

He strode quickly ahead of me into the house, then remembered he had to let me lead. The kitchen was one of those giant modern spaces composed of granite and steel, and none of the men and women in it stacking trays or washing glasses was Mary Beth. I didn’t see my uncle Hoyt, either, although some of his friends sat on oversized leather sofas watching basketball on an oversized television set. Sometimes walking into Robby’s house made me feel like I’d climbed a bean stalk into the giant’s castle.
Fe, fi, fo, fum. “And Kobe scores!
”

I shook my head to let Robby know I didn’t see her, and, worried that my mother would come looking for me, I started for the front door, weaving in and out of neighbors and strangers who turned to say goodbye to Robby. He got nabbed by a group of affectionate elderly women, and by the time I reached the farthest row of cars, there was a meaningful gap
where Mary Beth’s Avalon had been and a scab of mud where her tires had dug into wet grass.

Robby came up beside me and looked at the car hole. Stars shone above us, and the cold-water smell of the grove, a wet, rocky, pipe-clean odor, rose from the ground.

“What’re you going to do now?” Robby asked me, his voice glum. His shirt had come untucked, his tie was loose, and in the darkness I saw that if we were surfers, we were the ones who waited and waited for the right moment, afraid that in our ignorance we would not even know when the right wave was coming or when we should stand.

“I have to go home,” I said. “I’m grounded.”

“Why? Did your mom find out about Marcel Marceau?”

“There’s nothing to find out. I went off campus for lunch with Greenie and skipped the rest of the day.”

“Darn,” he said. “I was thinking about a swim.”

My mother might have let me swim in Robby’s pool, but I saw her coming toward us, looking fed up, and I said, “See you, Robby. Happy
le
birthday.”

“Yeah,” he said. “
Joyeux
good night.”

T
he next morning, the air was as cool as rain, the sky spreading its whiteness through the room like a bad headache. Robby woke me by shaking the box of Corn Pops over my head. “
Bonjour le
you. We’re going for a drive in my birthday present,” he said. “Corn Pops to go?”

“Someone
le
gave you a
car?
” I asked. I didn’t make it sound like a good thing. “Please tell me it isn’t red.”

“It isn’t red.”

I stood up and went to the window from which, in clear weather, you could glimpse parts of the driveway. I looked suspiciously through the trees.

“It’s red,” he admitted, looking over my shoulder. “I can’t drive it to school, though, until I’m a senior. What kind of sense does that make?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.

“So where’s your mom, anyway?” he asked.

I squinted at a note my mother had left on the coffeemaker:

“Why is there a hairy white egg over here?” Robby asked. He was studying the worm trays with his usual revulsion.

“It’s a
cocoon!
” I said in the same voice you might have used to say, “It’s a boy!” My mother and I had been waiting for this moment with an embarrassingly high level of anticipation. A few of the worms had reached their fifth instar, which was the last phase of caterpillar fatness, but instead of spinning one strand of silk one mile long into a perfect oval, as we’d been led to expect, they had turned a pale feverish yellow, then saffron, then mahogany brown, and then died feet up in a sad pool of oozing juices. I was surprised my mother hadn’t dragged me out of bed to behold the reversal of our fortunes.

I stared at the exquisite white cocoon with maternal pride until Robby said impatiently, “Ready?”

“You know,” I told him, “for an honor student you have a remarkable lack of scientific curiosity.”

“It’s not a lack of scientific curiosity,” he said, shaking his head and pouring my Corn Pops for me. “It’s an aversion to worms.”

I picked through a basket of clean, depressing clothes that no one had managed to fold. We lived basket to basket now
that we no longer had to spruce up for my dad. “Where are we going in your fancy red car, anyway?” Clearly, he had forgotten that I was grounded.

“Your favorite place.”

Paris?
I thought of saying, but the memory of my father’s invitation soured the joke.

“
Le
river,” Robby said, putting the cereal box away without folding down the liner or closing up the box, a carelessness that was too careless even for us. I resisted the urge to fix the box in front of him. “And one other place,” he added.

When I hid in the bathroom to change out of my pajamas and think about what would happen if I went to the river while I was grounded, I shouted out questions about where the other place might be, but he wouldn’t say.

“To see your pal Monsieur Ostrich?” I asked in a French accent.

“No.”

“To buy me donuts?”

“No.”

“So what kind of car is it? Have you named it yet?”

“I’m thinking of ‘the Fabricationist,’ ” he said. By now we were standing on the porch. In front of us was a paper sign my mother had taped to the screen door. It said,

“I forgot,” Robby said. “You can’t go.”

“We’ll just have to hurry,” I said, shoving open the door
and walking through fog and avocado leaves until I stood beside a bright red two-door Honda.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Let’s go,” I said.

As soon as we passed over the freeway and began to skim along the tight curves of Mission Road, I became even more reckless. “You know what,” I said. “I could show you a different part of the river. I found a new trail entrance the other day.”

“Okay,” he said, cheerful about his new car or his intentions or maybe both. He had a little crescent-shaped scar on his cheek that he believed was my fault, though I didn’t remember scratching him when I was five. It looked deeper in the foggy light. The road twisted in and out of half-seen oaks, and we spiraled slowly down to the riverbed among the crows and hawks and chittering ground squirrels, but we didn’t pass Amiel. We passed no humans at all, in fact. We parked at the place where I’d seen Amiel last, and I stared up at every house that might be his.

We began to hike past the dry meadow, waist high with fennel, and at the top of a hill, Robby stopped to read a Land Conservancy sign I hadn’t noticed before. “Agua Prieta Creek this way,” Robby said. “Is that where we’re headed? Dark Water Creek?”

“Yes,” I said, not really sure it was the right way until I saw the arch of oaks and sycamores that led, like a living tunnel, to the river itself. “Yeah, this is right,” I said. Just then we caught up to a man, a border collie, and a little boy.

“Look, Dad!” the boy said. “The hobos made a jump for
their bicycle!” and he pointed to a steep, well-packed bump in the trail.

For a while, we could hear him pointing out all the hobo improvements.

“Look! The hobos have a swing!” he said, and that one was obvious: vines hanging down from a cluster of trees. I didn’t know what he meant by a hobo pineapple tree until I saw a funny little palm tree, no taller than my knee, with a trunk that was shaped just like a pineapple.

“Hobo traps!” (Metal lockboxes someone dumped under a tree.)

“That’s where the hobos keep their alligators.” (A stagnant algae-green pond.)

“This is a hobo finder,” he announced before they took another path and headed out of our hearing. The boy picked up a forked stick that my mother would have called a water witcher. “They use it to find things,” the boy said.

Once we were alone, Robby started pointing to stuff like a tour guide and saying, “Hobo fish farm.” “Hobo bathtub.” “Hobo slide.”

“We should move out here,” I said. “The hobos are having all the fun.”

Every year on Halloween until I was about eleven, my mother sewed, glued, and/or papier-mâchéd me into some complicated, uncomfortable costume, and then if I complained that it was scratchy and I didn’t want to wear it, she would say, “Fine. You can just go as a hobo, like I always was.”

“What is a hobo, exactly?” Robby asked.

“What adults used to be for Halloween,” I said.

He frowned and took aim at a huge fennel plant, then whacked it with a branch he’d picked up along the way. The trees were green overhead now, and all the color was coming back into the world. “Unless they were French,” he said. “I don’t think my mother was ever a
le
hobo.”

“Why is it that no one ever says he’s going to be a homeless person for Halloween?” I asked. “Or an illegal alien?”

“Why can you be a pirate and not a Nazi?” Robby asked, using his branch as a tester for water depth. We were standing on the edge of a nice round virgin pool, green-rimmed and flecked with water skaters. A sun-bleached log formed a picturesque bridge, which Robby began to cross.