The Decoding of Lana Morris (19 page)

Lana feels color rise in her cheeks, but when he smooths his hand along her bare arm, she turns cold from a mix of fear and guilt. She pulls her arm quickly away and glances at the upstairs window.

Whit keeps smiling. “She’s gone. Off with Dr. Gooch to get her physical therapy lined up.”

“He took her himself?”

“Yep. He thinks she’s an extraordinary case.”

Whit seems oddly proud of this, and Lana wonders if he ought to know that just before Dr. Gooch’s visit yesterday, Veronica cleared the house and put on an X-rated nightgown, but before she can say anything, Whit says, “This Gooch fella’s a genius when it comes to insurance. He got all our deductible paid for us, and he’s got a plasma TV and state-of-the-art DVR coming to the house today or tomorrow and it’s not costing us a penny; it goes down as rehab expense or something. So I can’t complain about Dr. Gooch taking an interest.”

Something has changed in Whit while he’s been speaking these words, something that at first Lana can’t identify, and then she can. The Inside Whit is gone, swallowed up again by his life.

“Well,” he says. “If you don’t mind taking over, I better get over to the job site.”

Lana nods. A plug’s been pulled; she feels suddenly empty. “The Victorian over in Fawnskin?”

He nods. He’s searching his pockets for keys.

“How long’re you going to be on that house?” she says.

He pulls the keys from a pocket. “A while yet. It’s a big ol’ thing, and the widow who owns it is going with five different colors and”—he winks—“she keeps changing her mind which five they’re going to be. The crew gets a little antsy, but you know what I tell them? I say, ‘Fellas, this ain’t a house, it’s a cash cow!’ ”

Lana gives a little courtesy laugh. “I’d like to see that house sometime,” she says, and a funny expression passes across his face for just an instant and then is gone, replaced by his everyday grin.

“When it’s finished, I’ll take you for a ride so you can see it.” Mischief shines in his eyes. “Just you and me. We’ll make an occasion of it.”

Lana can again feel the color rising in her cheeks and he laughs and heads off toward his truck. As he passes the Snicks he says, “Teamwork, Maniacs, and remember, how you practice is how you’ll play.”

As Lana settles into her duties, she does what she always does: she takes a head count, but she’s short one, and she quickly realizes who it is. She runs over and stops Whit as he’s backing out the driveway.

“Where’s Garth?”

Whit nods toward a trio of lilacs in the corner of the yard. Garth is sitting on a piece of cardboard in the center of the three shrubs. Several superhero figurines are positioned around him.

Lana looks back to Whit. “And his mother hasn’t shown yet?”

Whit shrugs. “She called. She’s feeling punk, but she said she’d be here as soon as she could.”

“H
i, Garth-man,” Lana says, peering into Garth’s little room among the lilacs. He hears her, she knows, but he doesn’t look up at her. He just keeps looking out through a gap in the shrubs. He’s wearing his Incredible Hulk T-shirt that’s a little too small for him—the sleeves ride up on his skinny white arms.

“Can I come in?” she says.

He doesn’t look up or speak, but he does move his Popeye doll so there’s room for Lana to sit on the cardboard.

“This is nice,” she says once she’s seated, and it
is
nice. The density of the lilac shrubs makes it private and their shade makes it cool. It reminds Lana of a closet where she used to hide from her mother and a particularly mean boyfriend. While she hid she would play house, making rooms and furniture out of shoes and scarves and, as she remembers it now, putting the baby in her slipper crib for a nap. “You worried about your mother coming?” Lana says.

Garth’s jaw thrusts slightly forward, a signal he could cry.

“She’s coming, Garth. She’s right here in town. She could be on her way right now. She’s probably just having trouble with her allergies.”

Garth doesn’t say anything, but he looks slightly less likely to cry.

“If she’s not here by lunchtime, I’ll call and find out how she’s feeling,” Lana says.

Garth stares into the gap between the lilacs, and Lana realizes that, through this gap, he has a clear view of the street.

“Want to play house?” Lana suddenly asks. Garth doesn’t respond, but she starts anyway, snapping twigs from dead branches, laying out rooms, arranging tables and beds.

“This is the living room,” she says, “and this is the kitchen,” and pretty soon Garth is breaking twigs, too. “ ’Opeye’s ’oom,” he says, pointing to a marked area in the dirt, and then, lining out a triangular room with three twigs, “ ’Ider-Man’s ’oom.”

Lana and Garth play this game for Lana doesn’t know how long, adding rooms and then furniture to the rooms and then stick people to use the furniture. It’s quiet in the little lilac room, and they are busy. It’s as if they’ve entered a perfect and wordless world.

“Anybody home?”

Lana turns and sees Chet grinning down. Her skin begins to burn. She expects him to make fun of her, ask something like who’s the mommy and who’s the daddy, but he doesn’t. He just stares quietly in for a few seconds and then says, “Sanctuary.”

“What?”

“Sanctuary. That’s what your little place looks like there. A place where you can be safe. Where no law enforcement can follow.”

“I’d say that’s taking it pretty far,” Lana says, but the
truth is, she likes Chet’s way of looking at it. Garth, moving one of his stick figures through the dirt, says, “ ’Opeye ’o to ’ath’oom.”

Lana gives a little laugh and says, “Make sure he washes his hands afterward.”

A few seconds pass, and Chet says, “Did you hear about K.C. and Trina?”

She cocks her head. “Hear what?”

“They got busted. Spink and Lido, too. First-degree burglary. They’re in some sort of place for underage housebreakers.”

“Wow,” Lana says. “That was fast.” She’d only sketched them on the Elsewhere train the day before.

Chet looks at her. “What was fast?”

Lana fumbles for an answer. “Well, yesterday they were kind of on top of the world, and now …” He’s staring at her and his expression is quizzical. She decides to shift the focus. “So how’d they get caught?”

A quick laugh escapes from Chet. “That Lido guy was supposed to do our former job—hang out and watch for the cops—but he got excited and wanted to go in. A neighbor saw what was going on and tipped the folks at the sheriff’s office.” He smiles. “Griff Terwilliger’s actually catching a lawbreaker is pretty big news.”

After a second or two, Lana says, “So what happened with you and K.C. and Trina and them anyhow?”

His eyes slide away. “I told you. Things change.”

Just then, Garth sees something through his gap in the hedge. He steps through the lilacs and begins to walk slowly toward the house. Lana suspects his mother has just shown up.

“Do you see your mom?” Lana calls, but Garth doesn’t
turn. He just keeps walking. She notices he’s left behind his figurines. “You want Popeye?” she calls, but Garth doesn’t answer that either.

Chet, she notices, is grinning. “Guess Garth didn’t want you to cry if he took all the toys and went home.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who goes public with a wish for L-O-V-E,
love
.”

A blank look from Chet. “What’re you talking about?”

“The Chetness writing out his big wish. Two vowels, two consonants, beginning with the twelfth letter of the alphabet.”

“Oh,” he says, and then his look slowly turns serious. He says, “Maybe the Chetness, whoever he is, had another word in mind.”

“Such as?”

The seriousness is still there for a moment and then it is gone, and he says,
“Like.”

Like
instead of
love
? It would be just like the Chetness to do something minimum like that, but it’s oddly disappointing. “Maybe,” she says. “But it’s not exactly reaching for the stars.”

Chet’s silent for a few seconds and then something decisive seems to come into his expression, but when he opens his mouth to speak, someone else’s voice carries across the yard.

“Lana?”

It’s Tilly, calling from the back stoop, but Lana keeps looking up at Chet. “What?” she says. “What were you going to say?”

Chet looks at her and shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says.

“Lana!”
Tilly yells, louder now, and after a last look at
Chet, Lana stands and looks out over the lilacs. She feels like a giant poking through the roof. “Over here!” she calls.

Tilly turns her way. “Somebody’s come!” she yells.

“Who?”

Tilly throws out her arms as a show of wonderment. “Somebody new!”

T
he woman standing in the kitchen with a clipboard is of blocky proportions, short and wide, and her black hair is cut in the style of the comic-strip Prince Valiant, so it crosses Lana’s mind that this is a new Snick, but when the woman turns toward Lana, Lana sees she couldn’t have been more wrong. This is somebody official, and she’s all business. She wears the expression of a cop at a crime scene. “Are you Lana?” she says.

Lana nods and looks around. The woman seems to be alone. “Who are you?” Lana says.

“Inspector Stiller from Protective Services.” She presents a laminated badge identifying herself as such. “I just need to ask you a few questions.”

Lana’s head is swimming. Inspector Stiller? Protective Services? Why is this woman here? And why isn’t Veronica or Whit here to handle it? “Sure,” she says. “I can try to answer your questions.”

The woman snaps on a small tape recorder, takes up her pencil, and looks at the form on her clipboard. “Full name?” she says, and, just like that, they have begun. After a few preliminary questions, Inspector Stiller says, “Where at this moment to your knowledge is Veronica Winters?”

“She’s doing her physical therapy treatments.”

“When will she be back?”

“Anytime now.”

“When precisely did she tell you she would be back?”

Lana wants to lie but doesn’t know in what direction she ought to be sending the inspector. “I’m not sure,” she says.

Inspector Stiller scribbles for a few seconds, then, “Where at this moment to your knowledge is Lucian Winters?”

“Painting a house.”

“Where?”

“In Fawnskin.”

“When will he return?”

“Tonight after work.”

More scribbling, then, “Who is in charge of the foster facility at this moment?”

“I guess I am.”

The woman looks up from her clipboard. Her eyes light for a moment on Lana, then drift to the mess in the room.

Lana says, “It’s usually neater than this. It’s just that I overslept. I couldn’t sleep all night, then around dawn I fell asleep and …” Her voice trails away. Each new thing she says makes matters worse. “I should’ve set my alarm,” she says.

The woman is writing again, her hand flowing across the page. It reminds Lana of drawing on her sketch paper, and she has the bad feeling that this woman’s scribbling has its own power to change things.

“Why are you here?” Lana says, but the blocky woman doesn’t look up from her writing.

“Did somebody complain about us?”

The woman keeps writing.

“Was it Mrs. Harbaugh across the street?”

The inspector stills her pen. She raises her eyes to Lana. “There’s been a complaint, yes, but the agency never discusses the source of a complaint.” Her eyes drift past Lana. “Now, if I can just take a quick look at all the rooms,” she says, and without waiting for permission, she heads for the living room.

It’s strange following the woman around because it makes the house seem different—it’s as if Lana can now see it only as Inspector Stiller sees it. Everything in disorder. Nothing clean. When Inspector Stiller stops in the living room, Lana follows her gaze to a smear of strawberry jam on the glass-topped coffee table and then to several nibbled bread crusts on the carpet. The blocky woman stops for a moment to make a note of it and stops again when she spies a thick network of cobwebs in a corner of the ceiling. After visiting the downstairs bathroom, Inspector Stiller says, “Somebody should flush that toilet.”

While this inspection is going on, Carlito and Tilly follow a little behind Lana, and Lana notices that Garth has retrieved his Popeye from the lilac room and now sits with it near the front door, waiting for his mother. That leaves Alfred unaccounted for, Alfred who will put almost anything into his mouth, who needs supervision more than anybody, but Lana can’t let on to Inspector Stiller that anyone’s missing, and she can’t ask Tilly where he is, because she’ll blurt out whatever she does or doesn’t know on the spot. When the woman goes into the pantry, Lana peers out the window into the backyard. No Alfred.

“That’s it downstairs, correct?” the woman says when she comes out of the pantry.

Lana nods, and she follows the woman up the stairs, Tilly sticking close behind. Alfred will just have to wait.

Lana has left the upstairs bathroom a mess, of course, and the bedroom that Carlito, Garth, and Alfred share is even worse.

Inspector Stiller doesn’t spend much time in the boys’ room, but when she gets to Veronica and Whit’s room, she becomes much more attentive. She observes the piles of clothes and moves slowly from point to point in the room.

Lana goes to the window in which she’d seen Veronica staring down at her and Whit. She looks out as Veronica had looked out and is relieved to see that, from this viewpoint, she couldn’t have seen into the garage, where they’d stood kissing.

When she turns back, Inspector Stiller is bending close to the stacks of magazines piled on top of Veronica’s bedside table.

“Mrs. Winters spends a lot of time in her room?” the woman asks, and while Lana is composing an answer, Tilly says, “Yes, her does. Her watches TV, you bet.”

Inspector Stiller looks at Tilly and nods.

“It’s just during her recuperation,” Lana says. “Actually, the doctor thinks she’s coming back really fast.”

The woman doesn’t even look at Lana when she says this. She goes back to the stack of magazines, bending close to them. A few seconds later, she sets her clipboard down on the bed, pries up most of the stack, and pulls free one of the magazines on the bottom. Lana sees there’s a buff bare-chested guy on the cover, but she can’t read the name of the magazine. Inspector Stiller slides it under her notepad on the clipboard and makes some kind of note on her report.