Swimmer (2 page)

‘You saw the bushes move?'

‘That's right. I came running out of the house and the bushes were moving.'

‘Like what? Like the wind was blowing them?'

‘There wasn't any wind.'

‘But there could have been a gust. Come on, this is almost Santa Ana season.'

‘There wasn't any wind.'

Lieutenant Harris walked over to the oleanders and shaded his eyes to look between them. ‘A person couldn't hide here, right?'

‘No, not really.'

‘So if somebody
was
here, the chances are that you would have seen them, right?'

‘I couldn't have missed them. But there were all of these footprints.'

Lieutenant Harris circled around, peering at the bricks. ‘Well, sure, if you say so. But they're gone now, right? They've all dried up. They were circumstantial evidence at best; and now we don't even have that.'

Jennie said, ‘You don't really believe me, do you?'

Lieutenant Harris took a crumpled restaurant napkin out of his pocket and dabbed at his forehead with it. The day was so hot that it was almost deafening.

‘What can I say? Your son drowned and I'm really sorry. But there's no
prima facie
evidence here that anybody else was involved. Those footprints … well, they could have been yours, right?'

‘I never went over to that side of the pool.'

‘Well, you don't
recall
going over to that side of the pool. But, you know … when you're in shock, your memory can be pretty deceptive …'

‘Lieutenant, I never went over to that side of the pool. But there were footprints there. Grown-up-sized footprints. Somebody came into this yard and pushed Mike under the water and I'm sure of it.'

Lieutenant Harris covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, and looked down reflectively into the pool. Then he said, ‘I talked to Tracey, as you know.'

‘Sure. Tracey always tells the truth.'

‘Well, this time Tracey said that she didn't see anybody else in the yard, except for herself and Mike. She agreed that you were gone for only a matter of minutes. Two, maybe three at the most. But Mike went under and she couldn't do anything to save him. It's a tragedy that happens here in Los Angeles every day of the week. You have a pool, you have children, there's always a risk that they're going to drown. But what do you do? Have no pools? Or never have children?'

‘Mike could swim like a little fish. He never would've drowned.'

‘Well, let me tell you, I'm sorrier for what happened here than words can express. But I think this was a tragic accident, and we're just going to have to accept it as that. I'll leave it to the coroner, of course. It's his decision. But I don't seriously think that we're looking for anybody else.' He paused, and his rumpled brow was glistening with perspiration. ‘If you or your husband want to talk to anybody, Mrs Oppenheimer, we can put you in touch with specialist counselors.'

‘No,' said Jennie. ‘I think I know who I need to talk to.'

Jim was trying to fit a four-foot statue of Hanuman, the Nepalese ape-god, into a cardboard box measuring three feet by ten inches. Hanuman had six arms and six legs and the strained, anguished expression of a chronic constipation sufferer. After twenty minutes of struggling to pack him, Jim's expression was almost the same. He was being watched from the back of the couch by his cat, Tibbles Two, who repeatedly closed her eyes as if she were too exasperated to watch his efforts to achieve the impossible, or she couldn't understand why anybody would want to keep a four-foot statue of Hanuman in the first place.

‘Hanuman is lucky, okay?' Jim snapped at her. ‘And since I've had about as much luck as Wily Coyote lately, I feel the need to take him along.'

Tibbles Two said nothing, but closed her eyes completely and pretended that she was asleep. Jim was still slightly afraid of her. Since she had appeared in his life, and attached herself to him, he had increasingly felt that she was looking after him, instead of the other way around. He opened the cans of 9 Lives, that was for sure; but it was Tibbles Two who seemed to control his spiritual destiny.

Whenever she looked at him with those agate-yellow eyes he felt that she was waiting for him to take another step into the unknown – waiting for him to follow her to places that she had been but he never had. The unknown zone.

But he was packing up now to take up a new posting with the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and Tibbles Two would have to remain in this apartment block in Venice with his friend and self-appointed super, Mervyn Brookfeller. He knew that Mervyn woud take almost unnatural care of her: Mervyn took almost unnatural care of everybody and everything. Although he wasn't paid for it, he hoovered the hallways, he dug coffee spoons out of jammed Insinkerators, and he ran errands to Ralph's for the older residents. Jim had even stood at a half-open doorway once and watched Mervyn feeding old Mrs Kaufman with Cream of Wheat, doggedly and patiently, like a caring parent with a small child. Mrs Kaufman was wearing an old green flannel bathrobe and Mervyn was wearing a spangled emerald T-shirt and white stretch tights. It had almost been enough to bring tears to Jim's eyes.

At last Jim admitted defeat and pulled Hanuman and all of his grinning ape-attendants out of the split-open cardboard box. ‘You'd think they'd make their religious figures a standard size, for God's sake.'

Tibbles Two turned her head away.

At that moment, Jim's mobile phone rang, and he climbed over the couch and a stack of boxes to find it. Sometimes he really enjoyed TT's company, but most of the time he found her exasperating. She ate, she slept, she stared at him, but she never answered the phone and she never brought him a beer out of the icebox.

‘Mr Rook?'

‘Yes, it is. Jim Rook here. Who wants him?'

‘Well, I don't know whether you'll remember me. Jennie Oppenheimer. Well, Jennie Bauer when I was single. I was in your class in '91.'

‘Jennie Bauer … Jennie Bauer … Hey, yes! Of course I remember you! Sure! I remember all of my students, even the students I'd rather forget. Let me see now …
King Lear
… when Cordelia weeps over the dying king, and says, “Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them” – what did you say? “Does that mean he had dandruff?” Yes, Jennie. I remember you. I remember you
clearly
. Long blond hair. Very cute. Short span of attention, I'm afraid to say.'

‘My son's dead.'

Jim didn't know what to say. He very rarely heard from his students after they had left Special Class II at West Grove Community College. They always swore that they would write, and keep in touch, but he always knew they wouldn't. Those who had been saved by his remedial English class from a life of car-washing and dog-walking and other McJobs were always too busy to remember the scruffy teacher who had shown them the difference between Hamlet and ham-and-eggs, and who had brought them to the edge of tears with his recitation of poetry by John Frederick Nims: ‘
Inference of night wind, a rumor of rain
.'

‘I'm very sorry to hear that,' said Jim, thinking, Why is she telling me? I haven't heard from her since the leaving party after her final exams. ‘What happened? Was it an accident?'

‘He drowned. It happened yesterday morning. Mike and his sister were playing in the pool and I left them alone for only a moment, but he drowned.'

‘I'm so sorry. That's a tragedy. How old was he?'

‘Nine, and he was such a good swimmer.'

‘I don't know what to say, Jennie. My heart goes out to you. Was Mike your only boy?'

‘His father's devastated. We can't have any more children and he's blaming me.'

‘It's the shock, that's all,' Jim reassured her. ‘He'll get over it. An accident is an accident.'

‘But this is the point, Mr Rook. This is why I'm calling you.'

‘Hey, listen. I think you can call me Jim now. We're not in Special Class II any more.'

‘I know … But you do still have that ability, don't you?'

‘Ability?'

‘You can still see – well, you can still see ghosts and things like that?'

Jim didn't say anything, but he thought, Uh-oh, what's coming now? So many people who found out that he could see spirits and other supernatural presences wanted him to help them with all kinds of other-worldly problems. Either they wanted him to summon up their late Uncle Charlie to find out what he'd done with all of his rare Civil War coins, or else they wanted to discover if a chilly presence in their kitchen was the cause of all of their rotten luck. They never seemed to accept that supernatural manifestations walk among us all the time, with their own tragic problems and their own complicated agendas, and spirits are hardly ever interested either in contacting the still-living or helping them, and especially not in harming them. They were benign, most of them – benign and slightly stunned, like the victims of a bus crash.

But Jennie didn't say what he expected her to say. ‘Listen, Mr Rook, I came out of the house and I was sure that somebody had just pushed their way through the bushes. Then – when I was trying to save Mike – I saw wet footprints on the bricks around the side of the pool. They weren't a child's footprints – they weren't Mikey's or Tracey's – but there was nobody else there. Tracey tells me that she didn't see anybody, and by the time the police arrived the footprints had all dried up. The detective told me I was in shock. Well, I
was
in shock. Of course I was in shock. But I know what I saw.'

‘So … uh … what do you want
me
to do?'

‘I want you to find out who murdered Mike, Mr Rook. I want to find out who pushed him under the water, and why.' She was crying now, and she was so grief-stricken and exhausted that her voice acquired a deep throaty undertone, as if she were starting to sing an aria in a tragic opera.

‘Jennie, I'd love to be able to help you. But this sounds like police business to me.'

‘I told you. The police don't believe me. They're going to say it was an accident, or parental neglect, or whatever.'

Jim sat down on the arm of his couch. Outside the window, the sun was gradually sinking over Venice and the evening sky was the color of boysenberry jelly. ‘Jennie, I'm packing up to leave. I've been offered a job with the Department of Education in Washington, D.C.'

‘You're
leaving
? What about Special Class II?'

‘Well, we all have to move on. This is going to give me the chance to help students all over the country, not just LA.'

‘When are you going? Do you think we could meet?'

Jim looked toward Tibbles Two, but all she could do was yawn and dig her claws into the cushions. Either she was provoking him into making a decision, or else she was trying to tell him that he was wasting his time. She was only a cat, for sure, but he had seen what she could do before. Her nose was more finely tuned for fortune-telling cards than any of the so-called ‘psychic sensitives' that he had ever met.

The day before he had been offered his new job in Washington, she had scratched out of his Grimaud pack the eight of diamonds, signifying ‘delay', and the ace of diamonds, which represented ‘a wicked woman'. Then – haughtily – she had stalked back to the couch, curled herself up and sat there watching him to see what his reaction would be.

Jim said, ‘I'm packing now, as a matter of fact. I'm supposed to be flying out Wednesday morning.'

‘Mr Rook – I'm sorry, Jim – I know this is an imposition. But I know that Mike didn't drown by accident, and I don't have any other way of proving it.'

Jim raked his fingers through his tousled hair. In the mirror on the other side of his apartment, another Jim Rook, with his face back to front, did the same thing. The Jim Rook in the mirror was thinking, When you take on a student, when you teach her how to write and how to talk, and how to make her own impression on the world around her, when does your responsibility end? All of that poetry you taught her, all of those plays, all of those hours struggling with Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and Kenneth Patchen: ‘Have you wondered why all the windows in heaven were broken?'

The trouble was, he knew what the truth was; and the truth was that a teacher's responsibility never ends, any more than a parent's or a priest's.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Do you know the Café del Rey, on Admiralty Way? I can meet you there at – what, maybe eight o'clock?'

‘I'm sorry,' Jennie told him, and he could tell that she was crying. ‘I'm so frightened – I'm so scared – and I couldn't think of anybody else to turn to.'

After she had hung up, Jim sat on the edge of the couch with his head bowed. He had promised himself that he would never again answer an appeal for help from anybody who was troubled by supernatural events – or seemingly supernatural events, anyhow. He had nearly died from pneumonia at the age of nine, the same age as Mike, and ever since then he had seen faces and people and things that he didn't want to think of, ever again. Shadows, ghosts. Demons running through the streets, and screaming at him out of closets. Dead people, standing outside supermarkets. Sad and bewildered faces, reflected in windows, when there was nobody there.

He couldn't take any more of it. People didn't seem to understand that he found his psychic ability even more frightening than they did. He had no choice about what he saw. If he went to visit a friend, and his friend's dead grandfather was sitting in the corner of the room, and only Jim could see him, what could he do about it? What was he supposed to say?

As he sat there, Tibbles Two dropped off the couch on to the floor. She padded across to the coffee table, where Jim had stacked all his various decks of mystical cards. She stood up on her hind legs and tipped the Grimaud deck on to the floor, so that the cards were scattered out of their box.