The Cake House (34 page)

“Me. You have me.” Her hand closed around mine. “And you’re still married to him,” I said. “He’ll be free one day.”

“Maybe,” she said, already falling asleep.

I wondered if Claude and my father had been right—was it better to be rich than poor? Better to have and take than to lose, because otherwise you’re left with nothing. But my father and Claude had gone about it all wrong. Maybe I could find the right way; maybe I could figure out why they failed.

THE LOCAL NEWS CARRIED THE
story. I sat in my pajamas in the dark of the living room with a bowl of cereal, watching the television set.

Claude was forty-five years old. Born in a small town in Northern California called Anderson. His mother died when he was twenty-five and his father died when he was thirty. He had two younger sisters, both married: one lived in Anderson and the other had moved to Memphis for college and stayed there after graduation.

After his mother’s death, he enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, and majored in economics. He
worked for the school newspaper as a reporter and photographer. He’d graduated in the middle of his class, without distinction, without merit, but fellow classmates remembered who he was. He’d been popular; he helped his friends out of difficulties. He made it seem like it meant something to be his friend, that you were something special.

Claude’s first job out of college had been with a small Los Angeles–based investment firm called Krantz Investment Securities, LLC, sometimes referred to as K.I.S., LLC. Krantz Investment Securities was still active as a valid corporation with the California secretary of state. Its address was a post office box. Paul Krantz, the legal contact for the company, couldn’t be located. Krantz Investment Securities was owned by ElsieTrading. ElsieTrading also didn’t appear to exist.

Krantz Investment Securities reportedly specialized in long-term wealth management, except no one could locate a single individual who had ever invested with them. No one knew if there was a real Paul Krantz or not. It had been in operation for a few years before quietly folding. Some analysts thought it a sham, that Krantz Investment Securities was the beginning of Claude’s long, slow dance with the devil. What was known was that during his employment at Krantz Investment Securities, Claude reported income on his taxes anywhere between ninety thousand and two hundred thousand dollars.

A year after Krantz Investment Securities ceased to operate, Claude started Global Securities. Apparently, Global Securities began life as a legitimate business, taking investments from individuals, creating financial portfolios, trust funds, annuities, and so forth, but it didn’t last long. Within a year, Claude began depositing his clients’
money into special accounts, using one client’s money to pay another.

If there was one thing Claude was good at, it was finding those vulnerable persons and convincing them to part with their money. He was good with soon-to-be retirees nervous about their future and wanting some security, good with restless families wanting to do something with their nest egg.

They called him a crook. They claimed he defrauded hundreds of investors, with thirty percent of Claude’s victims being local to the Santa Clarita area, several families having older children attending Canyon High. They called it “affinity crimes.” Claude’s victims lost everything: their money, their retirement funds; they were in danger of losing their homes; their children couldn’t go to college anymore. At the end of the news segment, they featured some of Claude’s victims. The first photograph was of a family of three, and I nearly threw up my cereal when I recognized Tina with her parents, the three of them smiling during a happier time, followed by an image of the kid who had died in the car accident, standing with his mother, also smiling. Both of Claude’s sisters invested with their brother. A couple of his old school chums invested with Global Securities.

Sweat broke out along my forehead. The montage of photographs continued, families with teenagers who went to my high school.

Deputy Mike smiled when I opened the front door. “Rosie,” he said, and I tightened my grip on the door handle. Rosie was Claude’s name for me. It shouldn’t be used by anyone else.

“I’ve come to see your mother. Can you get her for me?” he asked.

My feelings for Deputy Mike had changed since that day he drove up beside me when I had chanced to run away. I no longer wanted him to rescue me. I had lost my father and I thought I had lost my mother, but I hadn’t lost her. She was still here, still with me.

My mother came down the stairs, dressed in a suit and carrying her purse. “Will this take long?” she asked Deputy Mike. “I have an appointment.”

“Not long,” he said. He placed his hat down on the table, seeming uncertain whether he should take a seat or not. “He’s asking to see you.”

She placed her purse next to Deputy Mike’s hat. “I’m not sure I’m ready.”

“It doesn’t have to be today.”

An awkward silence followed, with Deputy Mike watching my mother while she fiddled with the strap of her purse.

“Do you have any questions?” he asked.

She shook her head but then rubbed at her forehead, partially dislodging the clip holding her hair back. If her posture and her composure showed nothing of her state of mind, her voice was ragged and harsh and lacking sound.

“How much has been recovered?” she asked.

“Two hundred thousand, two-fifty maybe. Not enough,” said Deputy Mike.

I thought of all that cash found in the various secret places around the house. In my simplicity, in my imperfect understanding, I had thought that was all the money Claude had stolen. It had seemed like a lot to me, piles of it, and so tightly bound. Of course it was nowhere near the total he had stolen.

Deputy Mike seemed to know what I was thinking, because he said, “Even with the value of the house it won’t be enough.” He paused, then spoke again. “Mr. Fisk isn’t speaking. He keeps asking for his son, but Alex won’t talk to him. And now he’s asking for you.”

I thought of Alex, still out there somewhere. I wondered if he and his mother had remained in California or if they had left for her home, wherever that was. I bit my lip to stop from asking.

“The truth is, there might not be any more recovered. Certainly not all of it.”

Deputy Mike kept his gaze on my mother.

She picked up her purse, and I could tell she didn’t want to speak about it anymore. That she didn’t want to speak with Claude at all.

“Can I think about it?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “You have a couple weeks before he’s transferred.”

Deputy Mike escorted her to her car, and I watched through the curtains in the front room as they paused to speak, and he held the door open for her. He followed her blue Honda in his black-and-white cop car, down the hill.

It was strange to be alone in the house. I recalled the first time I had been left alone, the day Claude had taken my mother and Alex to a luncheon meeting without me, and now I knew why that luncheon had been important and why I hadn’t been allowed to go. What had Claude asked Alex to do at that luncheon? Make friends with the rich kids? Scope out their wealthy parents?

Walking through the first floor, I trailed my hand across the bare walls. The art pieces Claude collected had been removed. Inside the darkroom, it looked as though a tornado had passed through. Men in uniforms had removed the resalable equipment, including the camera Claude had bought for Christmas. They had dismantled the drafting table and boxed up any supplies that hadn’t already been opened. But I didn’t let that stop me.

My photographs were scattered throughout the room. They’d gone through all of them, but except for the two photographs Claude had hidden away in the rolltop desk, they hadn’t found anything of interest. I sorted them by subject: a box of Alexes, a box of Dahlias, a box of Claudes.

I turned the pages of
Photo Development: The Art of Image Manipulation
until I reached the section at the back
titled “Kitchen Sink Photography.” How to create without a camera, without a proper darkroom, with what you had lying around, with what was left over when everything was taken away.

IT TOOK A WEEK BEFORE
Deputy Mike called to arrange the visit with Claude. During that week, I worked in the darkroom without telling my mother what I was doing.

On the chosen day, I stood in a splash of sunlight in her bedroom, brushing my mother’s hair until it gleamed, like she used to do for me. She sat in front of her vanity mirror, her head jerking back each time I brushed from the scalp. Her hair flowed fine through my fingers into waves. She watched me through the mirror, an unlit cigarette in her hand. Once again, she had no fire to light it with.

“Maybe I should quit,” she said, toying with it.

I twisted her hair up, a little clumsy, my fingers fumbling over the hairpins, but the twist stayed put. When I finished she leaned forward, turning her head from side to side, reaching for her face powder and makeup brushes.

“You don’t think I can take care of us without Claude, do you?” she continued, spreading concealer across her cheekbones, down her nose, like an artist priming her canvas. I had a sudden memory of that day in the car when we ran away from our old life, and how much makeup she’d worn over her skin. I hadn’t wanted to see the bruises underneath. She had no bruises now, none on the surface. “You’ve barely spoken since the arrest,” she said. “You spend all of your time in that darkroom.”

I went to her closet and picked through her dresses the same way I picked through what words to use. “I’ve been
working on something,” I said, choosing a blue dress that I liked because the fabric was soft and shimmery. “Do you want to see it?”

She took the dress, then nodded. I went down to the darkroom and retrieved the collage I’d finished that morning using parts of her notebook, photograms made with exposed photographic paper, and photographs developed with a cardboard box enlarger. When I returned, she had dressed and was inserting a bluebell earring into each ear. I set the collage in front of her.

“Let’s get in your car, pack it up the same way you did that day we ran away, and just go,” I said as she put down her makeup brush and picked up my creation. “We don’t have to tell anyone. Just get in the car and go. We can get an apartment, someplace small but with lots of windows for the sun to shine through, for the moon to find us during the night. I’ll go to school while you work, and sometimes you’ll draw and sometimes I’ll take pictures.”

I could see this future reflecting back at me through her reflection in the mirror, expanding ever backward.

“Am I the woman in this story?” she asked, touching a picture of herself used in the center of the collage.

“Only if you want to be.”

She set the collage down, then took my hands, turning them over to expose each palm as if she could read the lines there, the length of my life, the loves I would have, the heartbreaks.

When she stood, she asked, “How do I look?”

“Perfect.” I zipped up the back, careful not to catch her skin.

She slipped her feet into high-heeled shoes, then gathered
her handbag and made her way down the lonely stairs.

I navigated the streets for her, a map open on my lap and an address scribbled on a sheet of paper with Deputy Mike’s handwriting. We drove the Honda, the Mercedes having been taken away along with everything else.

She put the car in park in front of the Santa Clarita Sheriff’s Station. It looked exactly the same as it had that morning when Deputy Mike had brought me there. Claude was inside, held until his arraignment. With her lips pressed to a thin line, she looked at the flat, brown bricks, the tree overhanging with its spring-green leaves blooming in the breeze, folded her hands on her lap. We hadn’t had time to polish her nails.

“Ready?” she asked.

Letting go of a held breath, I nodded.

The cool breeze scurried dried leaves past our feet. I trailed behind as she maneuvered through the other cars parked in the visitors’ lot, singular and alone in the shade of the trees that towered over her. She walked toward the building, pausing at the front door before entering.

The “Wanted” poster of Audra Rose, with the long scar down the side of her face, still hung on the wall of the sheriff’s station’s wall. Maybe no one had caught her yet. Or maybe they had simply never taken down the poster. In my previous visit, I hadn’t noticed the recessed fluorescent lighting that buzzed just within the range of human hearing.

It took a few minutes for Deputy Mike to be summoned. He stopped when he saw me standing next to my mother and beckoned her over.

“Are you sure about her going with you?” he asked, indicating me.

“He’ll want to see her,” she said. “I thought—” She swallowed. “He cares for her.”

A muscle at the side of Deputy Mike’s jaw twitched. He seemed to weigh the different options, uncertain which choice to make.

“He’s not the same man you knew,” said Deputy Mike. “Not even the same man from just a week ago.”

I could tell she wasn’t entirely certain about my joining her either. “I want to go with you,” I begged.

“Maybe you should wait out here.”

“No, I don’t have to see him, but don’t leave me out here.” I didn’t want to wait in the lobby with only Audra Rose’s poster for company.

“Can she wait with you?” my mother asked Deputy Mike.

He nodded. “Rosie, wait here, and I’ll come get you.”

They left me in the reception area. I didn’t want to sit, didn’t want to go outside, so I stood with my hands drawn into fists, listening to the clicking of a keyboard from the reception desk and the murmurings of the radio dispatch.

The door that my mother and Deputy Mike went through had a window in its upper half. I could see into the larger room, where officers and plainclothes individuals crossed back and forth. At the other end of the room, I saw my mother behind a glass window, sitting at a table. She was touching her mouth in that way of hers, staring straight ahead. She wanted a cigarette. She wasn’t alone. Across from her sat Claude.