Elsinore Canyon (27 page)

“She had a very strange way of expressing her attraction. And some strange ways of wanting him to prove his love for her. All this sick fantasy about death and dying and getting revenge. Punishing her father for marrying me. Punishing God for taking her mother. It was supposed to be a pact.” Her eyes fell on a picture hanging on the wall: Dana and Laurie as little girls, playing on the beach. “I used to know her, too. From the time she was a baby. I don’t know how or when she got like that.”

Laurie followed Dr. Claudia’s eyes to the picture and her face filled with rage. She marched over to it and ripped it off the wall. “She killed him! He was the perfect brother.” She pulled the frame apart and ripped the picture up savagely. “The fucking bitch took the sweetest, most wonderful boy in the world from me! He was all I had!” The pieces fluttered to the floor around her and she bent her face over her hands.

Dr. Claudia waited. “And you’re the only one left to act for him now—for him and your father. Have you ever wondered what you would you do if you knew for a certainty that you could pay someone back and get away with it?”

Laurie was sobbing.

“I won’t go into details—to keep you safe—but we can do it. It’ll happen right before everyone’s eyes. Even her father won’t suspect a thing.”

“About what?”

“We can do something on Labor Day.” In Elsinore Canyon, Dana’s birthday, which fell in the first week of September, was always celebrated on Labor Day. “We won’t have a celebration this year. We’ll do something small. We’ll dedicate it to Phil. We can make an underwater memorial for him. Dana will come. All you have to do is go along with one little thing I tell you. No questions, it’s better that you don’t know. Just one little thing.”

“What do I have to do?”

Dr. Claudia looked into the girl’s streaked face. “Let me ask you something first. People get upset and say things when they’re…”

Laurie held her sobs, expectant.

“Labor Day is still a few days off. Are you sure you’re willing to do something about what’s happened to your father and brother? Not just die of grief over it?”

“For God’s sake, if you’ve got a plan, tell me!”

“All right. There will be scuba equipment. Use only the pieces I point out to you. That’s all.”

Laurie stared at Dr. Claudia for an interminable moment. “Don’t you dare put me through this and have it fail.”

Dr. Claudia bit her knuckles and smiled. “A backup plan. I’m so glad I talked to you, Laurie.”

Mr. Hamlet lifted Dr. Claudia’s hair off the back of her neck and kissed her. “How did the talk with Laurie go?”

“Not easy. I got her a little calmed down, but we’ll see.” She pressed herself against him. The torment of the next three days she would have to endure alone. Channeling Laurie’s rage was not enough. She was now certain that Dana was the one who had Polly’s laptop.

I picked Dana up at the airport in Santa Barbara after getting a long-awaited e-mail—my first word in five days from or about anyone in Elsinore Canyon. She looked whipped; she’d been traveling coach for over twenty-seven hours. After we dropped off the package for Dr. Claudia at the courier, I drove her to my uncle’s ranch since she wanted to rest before greeting “her highness Queen Claudia.” She slept in my car all the way, curled in my passenger seat with her golden arms folded in front of her and her thick lashes shading her face, and then for a few hours more after we arrived.

The melancholy notion came over me that sheltering her like this—with her trust so complete and the other cares of our lives so distant—was happiness that would never be equaled for me. What did that mean? That from now I would begin, irreversibly, the sadder half of my life, that over the years to come I would look back on this moment knowing that nothing would ever fill my heart with the joy I felt now?

With those questions for company, I was nubbing my wheels back and forth over the boards of a redwood deck and watching the horizon, when a door shut behind me. Dana shrank back against the wall and held Polly’s laptop against her chest. She was looking at me in a way I understood well.

“Dana?” I rolled an inch towards her; she took a deep breath. “Are you full of another confession?”

“I’m going to tell you everything about the last week.” She sat down on a loveseat. “When I’m done, you’ll turn away and go through that door and never touch me or smile at me again.”

“Then I’d better touch you now.” I rolled closer and put her hand on my numb knee. She told me everything: about Dr. Claudia’s confession, the shooting in the bedroom, her father’s lie, the ghost, the flight to Bangkok with its terrifying discoveries—the messages on Polly’s laptop, the bottles, her shallow sleep for the rest of the flight—and finally the face-forward, heart-stopping walk off the tarmac at Bangkok FBO all by herself. Dana had stayed at a hostel so she could live off her cash. She had also stayed off her phone and computer to make the lightest possible electronic noise, as I was well aware.

“For five days,” she said, “I was eating off outdoor carts and bumming around in parks. Lying low. I kept expecting to hear about Rosie and Gale, but it didn’t make the news. I wondered if they’d gotten home. Horst,” she said intensely, “I left the customs office in Bangkok and didn’t look back. And I didn’t have to do that. I could have washed the coke down the drain and smashed the bottles and flushed the shards. No one had to suffer—but I
did it
to Rosie and Gale. I don’t know how things are going to turn out for them, but I put them on a train to hell. Polly was an accident, but not them. It’s true, the things you do are a part of who you are—that’s how it feels to me. So how do you like me now?”

My blood boiled up.
“Alive
—that’s how I like you. What the hell is Claudia missing? She wanted you dead, or gone forever! As if your dad would just get on with things? Just live happily ever after?”

“He’s doing it now, with my mom gone.”

“But Jesus, what are the limits? You escaped a murder attempt. Death by judge.”

“Well, she’s going to be the one to get it—death by truth. I’m showing my dad all this stuff.” She opened Polly’s laptop. “It’s all here, the whole plot. There hasn’t been anything sexy between Oscar and Claudia since that night—they must be talking in person—but I’ve got enough.”

She and I were puzzled that Polly’s snitchware had gotten Dr. Claudia’s messages; the account he had set up for her wasn’t working when I had last seen his laptop. We reconstructed that fateful evening and looked at the timestamps, and concluded that Polly, bless his heart, had tapped Dr. Claudia’s hard drive as his second-last failure of conscience.

We copied all the files from Polly’s laptop onto mine, and stashed his machine back in Dana’s suitcase. I caught Dana looking at me in a funny way. “What is it?” I said.

She answered me with a sad smile. “Will you remember me, Horst?”

“Remember you?”

“I had a dream while I was sleeping just now. You and I were back at the cemetery at Saint Maroveus. You remember those times when the two of us would go out there?”

“When you’d push me up the hill, and you’d rake the weeds and I’d hold that big bag open for you?”

“You do.”

“That was funny. You and I were the only ones who wanted that duty—everyone else thought it was creepy.”

“But it let us get away by ourselves, didn’t it? In my dream we were back there, on this perfect afternoon, just the two of us, happy—and we found a skull by one of the graves. We were making up theories and joking about whose it was. Like maybe it had been a nasty teacher, and we could put the skull in detention. Or maybe it was a lawyer who had sued people out of their entire fortune for playing with bones. Or maybe it was one of those mean doctors who acts like his patients are bodies without heads. See? And then a gardener or janitor came to us and said it was Clyde Dewey’s skull. He was an actual person. You didn’t know him, did you? He was a sort of comic, a retired professor who wrote nonsense poems. He was at our house all the time when I was a kid, especially when we had parties. Always joking, always playing games and making up rhymes and imitating people and making them laugh. He would throw me in the air and sing this song called ‘Pony Girl.’ It made me squeal like mad no matter how many times he did it, and I always said ‘Do it again!’—even after a dozen times, but he would keep going until someone rescued the poor guy from me. And there I was in the cemetery in my dream, all those years later, holding his dead, dusty skull. I haven’t thought of him in ages.”

Her phone buzzed. The courier service had a confirmation with Dr. Claudia’s signature. Dana took it as a cue to get home. She meant to keep ahead of the game, and show up in Elsinore Canyon on her own terms, not be found out like a rat in a wall.

I thought it was dangerous for her to get anywhere near Dr. Claudia. “Meet with your dad somewhere else first,” I said. “Think things through.”

“It’s Claudia’s turn to ‘think.’ I’ve done enough. I’ve got my mother’s breath on my back.”

With grave reservations, which I conveyed with frowns and finger-shakings and cloudy threats, I drove her back down south late the next morning. I instantly agreed when she asked me to pack a bag myself, just in case. “It does seem,” she admitted, “like there’s always a case.” We wondered at what we would find. She still hadn’t picked up any of her messages, and I—well, I had stopped keeping up with my school friends and the local news—what I now loftily considered my old life. Oh yes, I was above it all, elevated by my feelings for Dana and my mission to find a miracle cure for my disability. And so I missed the news that changed everything.

We pulled onto the tiny road that led to the Hamlets’ house. The main gate was closed and locked, something that almost never happened. “They must be holding off the villagers,” said Dana. I punched in the code that opened it and drove in. “What’s that?” she said. A small, plain sign had been stuck in the ground at the fork that led down to the cottage. We got closer and read the words: “POLONIUS BURIAL.”

Dana leaned across me, her eyes glued to the sign.

“Polonius what?” I said.

“Unbelievable.”

“The bastard died. Fuck. You could have known this if I’d kept my ears open. For you.”

“It’s not your duty. You’re not my Oscar.”

“Christ. What do we do now? Do you want to go?”

“Yes. We just go.”

I drove us down towards the cottage, inching the car along. The dunes and bushes and cactus, the topiary garden, the desiccated golf course. As we topped the last little hill, the vista opened up. Golden air over a powder-blue ocean. A few cars were parked around the cottage, and a knot of mourners was gathered on a small rise. I turned off my ignition and rolled up quietly. Perla and Miguel, Marcellus, Mr. Hamlet and Dr. Claudia, Oscar, and a few others stood around Laurie. A Eucharistic minister from a local parish was officiating. Laurie clutched a small box in her arms while friends held her steady. We knew one of them, a girl named Rennie.

“Your dad and Laurie?” I said. “Both there at the same time? How’d that happen?”

“Where’s Phil?”

“They’ve seen us. We ought to get out there.”

A few people turned, saying nothing, as Dana and I got out of my car and made our way over to within a few feet of the group. We went softly up behind them. People appeared to be praying, only the sounds of their grief making up the ceremony.

Finally, Rennie spoke to Laurie softly. “It’s time.”

Laurie huddled over the box. She pled in a tight voice. “Please, someone else, say something.”

Rennie hugged Laurie’s shoulders. “We’ve all spoken our heartfelt thoughts about him. We loved him, and we love you, Laurie. We’ll stay with you as long as you want, and we’ll talk. All the rest of the day, all night, tomorrow. But it’s time.”

Laurie twisted away from Rennie. “It’s not
his
time. Just because
your
prayers are over.” She sank to her knees, staring at the box. “The brightest light,” she whispered. “Beautiful Phil. My sweet, sweet brother.” She bumped the lid off the box. Ashes. She let out a high, lingering wail. “It’s not him!” She screamed as tears ran down her face. “It’s not him!” Her friends pulled at her elbows while she sobbed and screamed over and over. “It’s not Phil!” She clung to the box, firm hands pushed and pulled her this way and that. “His bones. His beautiful bones! Ashes—it should be trash that was burned, it should be useless filth! Oh lord, not his arms, his eyes!” She sobbed wildly. Mr. Hamlet tried to step through, but stopped, aghast, as she plunged her fingers into the box and scooped out the grey dust and raked it through her sweat-soaked hair. “No no nooo!” she wailed. “You’ll always be mine, you’ll always be part of me, Phil! I won’t let you go!” She rubbed ashes over her bare arms, her neck, and stared at the grit under her nails. “I won’t let you go, I won’t let you go, I’ll never let you go!”