Flame Out (14 page)

I
SCRUBBED HARD AT MY FACE, RUBBING MY CHEEKS VIGOROUSLY
with the cold water. I had escaped upstairs, ostensibly to “clean up after the funeral,” but really to get my head together. I felt ambushed.

I had to prepare for my mother at the best of times. She was always so impractical, “off with the leprechauns,” my dad used to say when she would talk about “setting intentions” or walk through the house with burning sage to clarify the energies.

My dad would sniff the air. “Smells like church,” he'd say, which infuriated her.

I heard the stairs creak, and figured my dad must be coming up to apologize, or at least to explain. My mother and I hadn't spoken since Kevin's funeral, and I had no interest in restarting the relationship. I'd given her too many extra chances for this lifetime. It was hard to see why Dad would have let my mother come, especially when things were crazy. There was a knock at the bathroom door.

“Come in,” I said.

It was my mother. She was wearing a loose shift in a golden sage color I guessed was Eileen Fisher, the embroidered cuff slipping to expose age-spotted hands.

“I have to change,” I said, trying to slide past. I always reverted to fourteen and pissed around her. She wouldn't give way.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said evenly, “that I came up because I thought Gordon might need support at this time.”

“Dad has support.”

“You don't think about supporting your father's emotional needs because you're his daughter. And your father, with his cop lifestyle, and his cop friends, and his cop daughter, he doesn't have anyone to talk to about what's really going on. In here.” She tapped her chest. “You can tell by how stiff his back is that he's not at peace.” She rolled her shoulders, as if to give my father relief from a distance. “And I figured he would need a friend.”

“You're his friend?” I said.

“I am. One of the few close ones he has.”

From below I could hear my father and Lucy banging around in the kitchen, Lucy offering to set the table.

“June, I don't know if you remember what it was like last time—”

“How could I forget?”

“He never slept, taking Elda's calls. You remember her? Luisa's mother?”

“Yes, I remember her. I visited her yesterday.”

“Or he'd be up through the night, pacing from room to room, practicing the arguments he was going to make to the judge to secure a warrant.”

“If only he'd had someone to support him back then,” I said meanly. “But you ran off with Larry.”

“Now, June, that's not true,” she said.

“Don't try to rewrite history.”

“June, your father and I, we stayed together all during the trial. Both of us knew the marriage was over. We'd been young kids when we met, and our love, it felt like a lightning strike. But those lightning strikes are usually bad news—the sickest part of you speaking to the sickest part of another person. And once you get past the heat
and power, you're left with two people who don't bring out the best in each other.”

As always, my mother couldn't stick to the facts—names and dates—and instead went for the grand metaphor.

“Let's make a deal, June,” she said. “I'll stay at the hotel, although I hope . . . it would be so nice . . . if you would let me back into your life.”

I was unmoved. She had spent so much time yelling at my dad back then. “Trying to get a reaction, any reaction,” she would shout. My dad would stop, tell her to pull herself together and leave, going for very long walks. One night I thought he wasn't coming back, and when I opened the door, I found him sitting on the chair on the front porch.

“Sorry, June,” he said. “Didn't mean to scare you.”

That was a bad time, and talking to my mother brought it all back. I wanted her gone, but my father hadn't thrown her out. Driving her back to the airport probably wasn't an option.

“Leave now,” I said. “I need a break, and I'm not up to negotiating with you right now.”

She nodded and, surprisingly, didn't say anything.

We went downstairs where Lucy was spinning around the living room, the feather from the dream catcher streaming behind her.

“I've had a very long day, Lucy,” my mother said as she put on her coat. “Plane trips take a lot out of me—so much unhealthy air! I need a shower and some meditation. Why don't we plan on meeting tomorrow after I get a good night's sleep?”

“You could stay,” my dad said from the doorway.

“No, no,” she said, meeting my eyes briefly before looking away. “I do need some sleep. Since we're both early risers, let's have breakfast. Is Marie's still there, and does she still make those sublime banana pancakes?”

“It's her daughter's place now, but she kept the recipes,” my dad said. “How about six?”

I wanted to protest, but it seemed unfair to remind him I needed him to get Lucy on the school bus at 7:30.

My mother walked over and kissed him on the cheek—he looked shocked, but recovered fast, returning the kiss, and walking her to her car.

The three of us ate dinner, ignoring the empty place next to Lucy. After dinner, Lucy and my father hung up her new dream catcher while I did the dishes, and he hauled the garbage to the curb while I read her a story.

I considered going to bed, but I could hear him in the dining room, flipping through papers, no doubt rereading the file, and knew we had to talk about my mother tonight—I wouldn't sleep otherwise. I made a cup of tea to fortify myself for the confrontation. As the water boiled, my phone rang. Hale.

“My techs scraped the VIN off the van and were able to track down the specific Carfast office where it was rented. Las Vegas.”

“Why would she rent it there? Vegas isn't New Mexico.”

“Well, it's closer to New Mexico than Schenectady is.”

I stayed silent. The longest longshot in the world slotted into place. “Can the place send us video?” I said.

“Sure can,” Hale said. “I have a local agent there picking it up for us. The only problem—and thankfully it's temporary—is that the owner recorded with videotape, not digital.”

“Videotape?” I said. Not only was it years out of date, it was expensive. Digital imaging was more or less free once you set up the system. “Is it recorded on Betamax?”

Hale laughed. “No, but close. As you might imagine, a franchise owner too cheap to install a new digital security system is also not going to be shelling out for new videotapes very often. We have the tapes, but they've been taped over and over and over so many times that the video of the person renting the van, such as it is, is difficult to make out.”

I groaned.

“Don't despair now, June,” Hale said. “You have an in at the FBI. Our agency has technology available to transfer the video to a digital format, and then pull clear images out of that digital file.”

“That's nice of you to expedite the transfer.”

“The faster we close these cases, the sooner you're on my team.”

“Hale. Seriously.”

“Give it a rest,” Hale said. “I got it, June.”

I hung up the phone and ran smack into my father.

“You're rejoining the Bureau?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, and then reconsidered. “The chances aren't zero, but they're close.”

“Why?” he said. “You're through . . . the crisis.” Dad still avoided mentioning Kevin's death. “And you liked the work. More than what you're doing now.”

“I might end up on the road.”

“But around here?”

The kettle whistled, and I walked over and poured my tea. “Between Vermont and Buffalo.”

“Overnights?”

I couldn't believe this. “It doesn't matter. Yes, there are overnights, and they're not an option. And neither are undercover operations. And the first time I did mob or gang work and they came hunting for me? Who do you think they would find? Lucy,” I said, furious at even the thought of it. “And you.”

My father didn't protest, and I thought the conversation was closed. I was wrong.

“Does no one in the Bureau have families?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “Some. Not all of them thrive.”

“You and Kevin did. Successfully, as I recall.”

“Kevin did cybercrime, following trails through the Internet, not across a desert or up a mountain. He covered home base.”

“You have me now.”

“I know, I know.” I pulled the teabag out of my cup and threw it away. “But Hale offered me a position as a consultant, anyway. It wouldn't be permanent.”

“Wouldn't that be a positive? Try it out, see how it goes?”

“And what if it fell through? Would you enjoy your
unemployed
daughter living with you?”

My father squinted at me. “You're afraid.”

He was talking about feelings. My mother
was
a bad influence on him. I decided to change the subject to something I wanted to argue about.

“So, Mom? Your new best friend?”

“The lady you were rude to? Yeah, we're friends.”

“I would have appreciated a little warning. I could have gone and done some overtime. Run some errands. Anything other than coming over to talk to that woman.”

He crossed his arms. “Twenty years, June. Let it go.”

“I did. I let the divorce go a long time ago. But at Kevin's funeral . . .”

“It wasn't so awful,” he said. “It wasn't silent-treatment awful. Forgive her.”

“For what she said at Kevin's funeral?”

“For that. And for the time in your twenties she invited you to a healing circle. And for when she let you ignore her. And when she left . . . left me, not you.” He paused. “Which was the right thing to do at the time.”

He stood up and walked past me, picking up my cup and loading it into the dishwasher. I listened to him shuffle toward the dining room and expected him to dig in for another night of research, but he flipped the light and returned, stopping to place a kiss on the top of my head, the way he did when I was younger and shorter.

The carpet muffled his steps as he went upstairs, but his tread was heavy, crossing between the bathroom and his bedroom. I waited until he was completely settled before walking upstairs myself, flipping off lights as I went. Sleep came fast.

NATE AND THEO OFFERED TO COME DOWN TO THE STATION TO
make a statement about their mother's probable abduction, but Nate had a request: he wanted to see where the fire happened. Doing the interview at the station made my life easier so I was happy to oblige;
Hale and I picked them up at the hospital. Darius stayed at Louann's bedside, and we planned to get his information when we returned the brothers to the hospital.

As Hale drove, Nate gave us the information they had.

“She and Darius own a nursery and landscaping business, and a neighbor planned to bring over a half-dead plant for mom to fix,” he said. “Mom can grow
anything
.”

We were close to Hopewell Falls, but I decided to let Nate keep talking. Theo added nothing, staring out the window at the river.

“So the neighbor called Mom, let Mom know she was running late. Mom didn't pick up, and the neighbor arrived to find the garage wide open, and the door to the house unlocked. The house was normal except for a bowl of persimmons smashed all over the hallway.”

“So she answered the door for a neighbor and . . .”

“And someone grabbed her.” Nate was getting agitated and spoke faster and faster. “We're celebrities, sort of, and someone probably took her, thinking they would get rich. She always told me and Theo that being in the public eye was a bad idea. She was right.” Nate closed his eyes, and his voice wavered. “I wanted the money.”

I expected some sort of reaction from Theo, at least some comforting words for his brother. Nothing. I stepped in.

“Nate, you can't possibly know the motive for this crime. It may very well have had nothing to do with you or the TV show.”

“She was a
landscaper
,” Nate said. “What, she put in an ugly rock garden and someone decides to knock her off?”

I put a “no” next to that question. We were a few blocks from the station, and I'd be through my list by the time we arrived. “Did you get any threats—”

“Hold up a second,” Theo said. “Stop here!”

Hale pulled to the curb and put the car in park. Theo shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a memory, and I was hoping we'd finally get some useful information out of him. He pointed out the window.

“Did there used to be a store there?” We had stopped in front of
a closed department store, a nondescript black marble box with bolts marking where it had been stripped bare of the space-age silver letters. “A Jupiter's?”

I faced Theo directly, my shoulder jammed into the headrest. “Yes . . . but it's been closed for more than a decade. Do you want to get out and take a look?”

Theo shook his head “no,” and Hale began driving. We made it half a block before Theo again called for us to stop, this time asking for us to turn left.

“I'm having a weird case of déjà vu,” Theo said. Hale raised one eyebrow at me, but we continued.

“Cannon,” Theo said as we passed the old armory, the weapon out front an iron replica. “Hey, is there a bridge nearby?”

“The one to the Island,” I said. I tapped Hale's arm and he turned.

No one spoke as the car rumbled over the bridge. Nate shot worried glances at his brother, who twisted in his seat, first left, than right, tugging at his seat belt so he didn't miss a thing.

“Was there a bakery around here?” Theo asked.

“It's been gone for a while, but it stood right”—we passed an empty lot—“there.”