Out at Night (10 page)

On a bulletin board hung a crowded wall of wanted posters. Her uncle scanned the faces, as if looking for someone in particular.

“One other thing. She’s pregnant.”

Grace felt her scalp prickle, right along the hairline.

He opened the gray door leading to the anteroom. “This is her fourth try.”

Grace put her hand on her face, as if to anchor it. The skin felt hot.

He let the door shut behind them. “She’s lost three others early on. She’s due in two weeks.”

He held the door to the hall open, and for a moment, his gruff mask dropped and she saw a flash of despair.

“I know you’re not a doctor anymore, Grace. But maybe you can talk some sense into her. If she loses this one, I think she’s gone for good.”

“I’m not a doctor. I can’t pretend I am.”

“I’m counting on you.”

“Don’t.”

Chapter 11

Grace drove down Civic Drive, past a gate with a silhouette of a German shepherd and the words K-9 on the arch, and parked in front of the memorial to two fallen policemen framed by a piece of sculpted, mangled car.

She was still angry. Her uncle was good at creating his own universe. Boxing people in. Making them cry uncle.

Only it wasn’t going to happen this time. Not with her.

Under the anger was fear. He couldn’t expect her to respond as a doctor. If she did, she’d go under.

The outside of the Palm Springs jail looked like a brown brick junior high school in Northern California that Grace had attended for a few months as a thirteen-year old—no visible windows and a sense of lost hope.

There was nobody behind the Plexiglas wall. Grace pressed the buzzer and a disembodied voice told her to speak. In the small waiting area, a man in his late thirties paced back and forth, anger rolling off him in palpable waves.

His face looked oily and pale, as if he’d been working hard in the bowels of a submarine boiler room and had only recently climbed into the light. Grace placed his age a few years older than Mac, late thirties. He was wearing a sky blue uniform with a decal of a windmill and a tag that said SODERBERG.

A correctional officer in gray short sleeves and pants trotted through a door on the other side of the Plexiglas window. She had curly hair she wore skinned back into a ponytail, and strands had come loose, creating a fuzzy halo around her face. She looked scrubbed, Mormon. She glanced nervously at the man and licked her lip.

Grace smacked the FBI ID against the Plexiglas wall a little too hard and CO jumped.

“Drop it in the slot, please.”

The CO’s fingers clicked as she entered Grace’s information off the ID tag and slid it back. “You’re here to see…” She waited, fingers poised.

Grace realized she hadn’t asked her uncle Vonda’s married name. She reclipped the ID badge to her collar. “Vonda,” she said with authority.

The jailer frowned, looking at the screen. “Last name?”

“Soderberg.” The man in the jumpsuit was at her elbow.

His eyes were a dark gray and he had thin sideburns the color of yellow ash. He stuck out his hand. His fingers were hot.

“Stu. I’m Vonda’s husband.”

“Grace Descanso. Vonda’s cousin.” She tried not to stare. He was older than she expected, and now that he was standing in front of her, better looking. His hair reminded her of Mac’s—styled, not something from a barber—and his eyes crackled with intelligence and smoldering rage.

His eyes slid to the ID. “FBI.” His tone changed, became guarded.

“It’s going to be a few minutes before we can take you back. Have a seat.” The corrections officer was talking to Grace, but her eyes were on Stuart.

His fist shot out and hit the glass. “Damn you. I thought she was getting out.”

The CO jumped backward. “Mr. Soderberg, I explained to you—”

“No, this is wrong. You’ve seen how pregnant she—”

“Outside.” Grace clamped a hand on his arm.

Stuart Soderberg jerked his arm free and banged through the door.

“Back in five.” She did the little pirouette and dip that people do when they’re embarrassed and backing out of a room, stopping just short of fanning her pants out in a curtsey.

Stuart Soderberg stood on the sidewalk facing the granite wall of Mount San Jacinto, visible past the busy traffic on Tahquitz Canyon Way. The sun was setting, turning a row of barrel cactus bright orange.

He shook a cigarette out of a pack, stuck it in his mouth, and scraped a match along a decorative boulder in a sandy garden, cupping his hands around the flame until the match caught. He still hadn’t looked at her. In profile, his shoulders looked big.

“Whose side are you on?” His voice was rough. He took a long drag of his cigarette and held it.

“Nobody’s, I guess,” Grace answered honestly.

Stuart blew the smoke out in a gust, inhaled again, and dropped the cigarette. He ground it under his boot and picked it up carefully, blowing off the dirt before he put it back in his shirt pocket.

“She promised me. She had no business getting involved in this stuff. None. Not with her history.” His voice was pained.

He was talking as if he knew her. Grace wondered why. “Have we met?”

“You’re the one who got away. Actually your dad. He broke the purity of the line when he ran off with Lottie.”

A mocking smile curled the edges of his mouth, so she’d know he was kidding. “Your father opened the door to indiscriminate mating.”

She smiled back. “That explains it.”

He snapped a look at her, his eyes suddenly wary.

“I expected somebody Portuguese, that’s all.”

“And maybe a decade younger.”

She was silent.

“On my first date with Vonda, she told me how Nana only wanted her to date Portuguese boys. She thought it was funny.” He grinned wistfully at the memory, and the angles in his face softened.

“Nana’s a pistol.” Grace had a sudden flash of her grandmother, sitting on a stuffed pillow at the embroidered dining room table, folded in, like an ancient predatory bird.

“The best,” he said loyally.

Grace wondered how hard it had been for him, facing Nana’s sharp tongue. Nana had made it clear to her as she was growing up that there was safety in being Portuguese; outside the fold was danger, and Grace had straddled both worlds, feeling safe in neither.

Stuart tilted his wrist and checked the time. He had an army watch with a cracked face and Grace wondered if he’d bought it at a secondhand store, or earned the damage in some desolate spot.

“When you see her, tell her I love her.” He dipped his head and studied the toe of his boot. “And that I’m sorry I yelled.”

He glanced sideways at her, eyes bright with pain and humiliation.

“You’re worried about her.”

“I have to go to work.” He walked away, toward the parking lot, his long legs churning.

“I could meet you.”

He stopped walking, considered it. “I’ve got a break at midnight. We could talk then.”

There was lonely pride in his voice, a man struggling with himself, and she wanted to tell him it wasn’t charity that was driving her, but selfishness. She wasn’t trying to help him, only get through the long night that lay ahead without Katie and Mac in it.

She rummaged through her bag, walking, and gave him a pen and the notebook, open to a blank page.

He scribbled out an address. “I’ll see you at midnight. We’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything I know. And a lot I only suspect.”

Chapter 12

Grace didn’t know how it was in other families, but in hers, Vonda had been prepping to wear the crown since she was a baby, and Grace had been trained to pull the wagon where the queen sat.

It had been one of her earliest memories, Vonda sitting in a sundress, rolls of baby fat cascading down her sturdy toddler body, teetering in a sitting position, waving at her brothers lined up to fling things at her, the harder the better. Grace had wanted to do the sitting and waving and have one of the boys pull the wagon, but Aunt Chel had insisted Vonda get in some early training.

And then Grace’s brother, Andy, had tripped her and she’d tilted the wagon and Vonda had gone flying. The only person who screamed was Aunt Chel.

“Again!” Vonda had cried.

She’d seemed impervious to danger. Grace wondered if that had changed. And if it hadn’t, what it meant.

All she knew was that Bartholomew was dead, he had Grace’s photo on his wall and Grace’s uncle feared his own daughter might have helped kill him.

Grace followed the corrections officer through the dark corridors that would lead her to answers.

___

Vonda was wearing a wilted orange pumpkin costume that stretched over her pregnant belly. Wadded tissues littered the gray floor. On her head tilted a green beanie with a felt stalk that curved up. She sat on a mattress in a holding cell with two women dressed as a banana and an apple. They looked like leftovers at a farmers’ market at the end of the day after prices had been slashed.

“Hey.” Grace smiled. Behind her, the corrections officer relocked the doors leading to the holding cell. They’d had to bend protocol, putting Grace in the cell with all three women, but Grace had wanted to meet the women in Vonda’s life who were important enough that Vonda was willing to lie to her husband to spend time with them.

The apple shifted on the mattress. Her eyes were a bright green, her hair a frizzy red that made her look strangely festive, like a Christmas ornament.

“Are you the lawyer?” Her voice was hopeful.

“That’s no lawyer. That’s my cousin Grace.”

Wide smile. Vonda flung open her arms. A woman’s face had been delicately inlaid over the teenager Grace remembered: hair a glossy black to the jawline, eyes a familiar dark brown, but the thing Grace remembered most, that still exuded from every pore, was her intense unpredictability.

It was as if a motor hummed deep inside that had somehow kicked a notch off center, everything vibrating, threatening to explode into hard disintegrating shards.

When Grace was a kid, it had made her feel helpless and alarmed and protective. After all these years, the same feeling welled up.

She sensed Vonda’s friends felt the same way. They pressed in on her, soldiers closing ranks, flinching when Grace leaned in to kiss her.

All three had colds, their noses chapped and raw, and Grace kissed the air next to Vonda’s cheek before stepping back. Vonda dabbed her nose with a tissue.

“What, no snacks?”

“The linguiça’s out in the car right next to the crown I stole.”

Vonda laughed. It had a hard edge to it. The banana looked confused.

“Last time I saw Vonda, she was queen of Festa do Espirito Santo. Major Portuguese festival in Point Loma—in San Diego— that’s where we were raised,” Grace said. “The same crown’s been used in Festa since 1910. Wearing the crown’s a very big deal.”

“Grace brought linguiça—this sausage—and forgot about it and left it out in the car.”

“I didn’t forget. Your mom put me to work in the kitchen. For six hours.”

Everybody pulled shifts at Festa, but Aunt Chel had seen to it that Grace’s lasted until the party was over. And then Aunt Chel had asked her to leave.

She had. She wondered now why she had let her aunt have such power, but at the time all she’d wanted was to run. She was the product of the union between her aunt’s first love, Grace’s dad, and the bleached-blond floozy warbler who had stolen his heart away. Being humiliated and banished had seemed a small price to pay for the sins of her parents.

Vonda’s gaze slid to the FBI badge clipped to Grace’s shirt. Her eyes dilated.

“Wow. A baby’s in there.”

“Sam.” Vonda was still looking at the badge.

There was no one in their family named Sam. “After Stu’s dad?”

“Mom. Samantha. I never met her. She died before Stu moved to Palm Springs. Grace, what are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“There were twelve of us crammed in here this morning. Two butterflies, three apples, the banana—Andrea—me—how many’s that?”

“Too many,” Andrea snapped. The heat had wilted her hair so that curls pasted against her scalp, making her look like a blond Kewpie doll.

Vonda frowned. “Did my dad send you?”

“Of course he sent her. Look at the badge, Vee.”

Grace shifted. “And you are?”

“Pissed,” Andrea spat. “I told you, Vee, your dad’s trying to pin Bartholomew’s murder on us—on me, I swear to God.”

“What makes you say that?” Grace kept her voice neutral.

“Besides sending you?” Andrea smiled. Her teeth were small and white. “Well, Mr. Bozo head was here for a long time—”

“I told you, Andrea, don’t call my husband that.”

“Well, he is. You’re a grown woman, Vee. Entitled to make your own choices. He has no right blasting in forbidding you to protest. It’s not a good match.”

“Andrea, shut up.” Vonda’s voice was tired.

Grace saw an opening and took it. “I’d love to meet the latest member of the family.” She smiled at Vonda. She wasn’t about to tell Vonda she’d already met Stu. “How about tomorrow I bring breakfast over.”

“You can’t, Vee!” Panic washed over Andrea’s face.

“I can’t?” Vonda stiffened.

“You need to rest.” Andrea’s eyes flicked to Grace, back to Vonda. “That’s all I meant. You don’t need visitors.”

“Seven?” Grace kept smiling. She could be a Miss America contender, that smile of hers.

Vonda shot Andrea a small defiant look. “Nine’s better. Stu comes home for a couple of hours then before he goes back to work.”

“Directions.” Grace pulled out a pen and the notepad and watched as Vonda scribbled the phone number and directions.

The apple reached out and touched Vonda, her eyes shifting. “Andrea didn’t mean any harm. She just means nobody understands like we do, Vee. That’s all.”

“And you are?”

“You don’t have to talk to her,” Andrea said.

“Who’s your other friend, Vonda?” Grace’s voice was easy.

“Sarah. Conroy,” Vonda said.

“Fuck you,” Sarah said.

“With an h?”

“She’s my cousin,” Vonda said. “She can come and have breakfast with me, for chrissake. It’s not like I’m under house arrest.”