'I don't believe in intelligent design.'
'Sure you do.' She waved a hand at the book spines in all their eye-catching glory.
It took a moment for me to catch her meaning. 'I believe in narrative. But I don't believe there's a reason for everything and that matters work themselves out for the better.'
Tell it to Lloyd and the wedding picture hanging in that dark hall.
Tell it to the Broaches, sorting through Kasey's half-used toiletries and frozen dinners and white barrettes.
Tell it to me, waking up in that goddamned hospital bed with Genevieve's blood dried under my nails.
Caroline was looking at me, studying my face, so I continued. 'I don't deny design, no, but I believe you have to craft your own and it's hard work and there are no guardrails.'
'So what happens when you veer off course?'
'You wind up with wasted years or a shitty first draft. Neither of which is particularly consequential.'
'It's not the randomness of life that holds meaning, Drew. It's our response to it. Say your wife gets hit by a bus. You could spend the rest of your life bewailing an unfair world, or you could decide to start an orphanage.'
'Or a home for people paralyzed by incompetent bus drivers.'
'If you choose to start your merry home for impaired and guilt-crippled bus drivers, then you've given a senseless event meaning. You've given it its place in a story. No merry home, no story. No story, no meaning.'
'No meaning, no growth.'
'People don't change much, not as adults, but this thing, maybe it gave you a shot.' She licked her lips. 'I was forced to change.'
'For the better?'
'I don't know. I'm smarter, I think, but also maybe worse off.'
'According to you, it depends on where you go from here.'
'Exactly. But am I up to it?'
'Inquiring minds want to know.'
'I don't know. I don't know if I'm up to it.' She was trembling, arms crossed, fingers nervously working a thread that had come loose in the stitching of her shirt. For a moment I thought she might be cold, but then she said, 'You drew back the first time you saw me. On the playground at Hope House. I disgusted you. It's the only pure response you'll have. You don't get another true reaction to my face.'
'I wasn't disgusted. I was surprised.'
'Great. Romantic.'
I reached gently for her shoulders, and she let me take them, and then I pulled her to me. The indented scar split her lips at the edge, the flesh soft and warm. I drew back, and for an instant she kept her eyes closed, her head tilted, mouth slightly ajar.
She opened her eyes, pale green flecked with rust.
'Surprised?' I asked.
'Surprised.'
'Disgusted?'
She shook her head. A few lines raised on her forehead. 'I can't stay with you. I'd like to, but I can't.'
'Can I walk you to your car?'
As we crossed the front step, she took my hand in a bird bite of a grip. A tentative hold, didn't last three strides. The air was wet, sweet with night-blooming jasmine. We were awkward at her car which side the head goes on for the embrace, me holding the door for her, not sure if I should lean in to kiss her again. I tried, but she pulled the door closed and I stepped back quickly. Her face had darkened with concern, and she fiddled with the stick shift, then said, 'That was the nicest time I've had in a while,' as if that were something extremely troubling.
'Me, too.'
'See you around, Drew.'
She pulled out. On cue, the neighbor kid started his brass serenade.
Out OF the TREE of LIFE, I just picked me a PLUM.
Whistling along, I went upstairs and freed Xena from the master bathroom. There was no upholstery for her to masticate, but she'd gotten into the bath mat pretty good and, for good measure, overturned her bowl of water.
She followed me to my office. I pulled my notepad from my back pocket and set it on the desk to the left of my keyboard. The loaded. 22 I placed beside it. Tools of the trade.
How times had changed.
I fell into my chair, elbowed out the armrests, slid a Bic behind my left ear. Eighty pounds of Doberman- rottweiler curled on my feet. The house was quiet, the windows black rectangles pinpricked by the lights of the Valley below. A small plane blinked its way from Van Nuys Airport off into the night. My fingertips found the raised bump of my surgical scar and then the shallow indentations of the keyboard letters.
Right now Kaden and Delveckio could have Morton Frankel under the hot light. Maybe answers were being spilled what had been done to Genevieve, to Kasey Broach.
To all of us.
Or maybe it wouldn't be so easy. Maybe the interrogation would yield more questions, more vagaries, more dead ends and broken trails. Maybe Morton Frankel was really just a nice guy with a dented Volvo who didn't appreciate being treated like a plot device.
I faced the blank page. Waiting, like me, for chaos to be forced into order.
Chapter 32
The voice came at an inappropriate volume through my cell-phone headset. 'We're at your house. Where the hell are you?'
'Kaden?'
'And what's wrong with your home line?'
'I'm waiting for Pac Bell to deliver excellent service.'
In the backseat Xena belched. Junior giggled yet another break in the glumness he'd been attempting to convey since I'd picked him up to bring his dog to the new home he claimed to have lined up. He was way too talkative to sulk effectively.
'Where's the gun?' Kaden asked.
'Upstairs on my desk.'
'Where are you?'
'Returning a dog.'
'Smart, dipshit.'
'I figured you wouldn't want me to leave a. 22 in a manila envelope on my porch.'
'We want you to be home to give us the damn gun.'
'It's noon. You told me you were coming by in the morning.'
It had been hard for me to shake a sense of dread at dawn. I'd been out of jail a week to the day and still woke up panicked that I was encased by cinder blocks. In hopes of lightening my mood, I'd set out a breakfast bowl of pistachios on the deck for Gus, but he hadn't shown, tied up, no doubt, in a coyote's digestive tract. Stranded like a tramp in a Beckett play, I'd returned to my computer and pounded wrathfully on my loud keyboard, a clackety holdover I'd preserved for precisely such moods.
Chic had called before I'd left, saying word had come back from the cheap seats that Morton Frankel wasn't known as a thug-for-hire. Merely as a vicious criminal. I felt better about talking openly with Kaden and Delveckio and worse about being me.
'We were busy,' Kaden said.
'With Frankel?'
'No interviewing the kid who found the gun. We questioned Frankel last night.'
