have much to do with real life. She felt sorry for the children who’d been dragged into it, but apart from that it was like the drug cartels or the Mafia. Let them kill each other off as much as they wanted. It just saved the taxpayers money.
Kristine raised her eyes from the paper. Someone else had said that to her recently. Of course, it was Dick Rice, talking about the shoot-out in Atlanta. Well, it was cynical, no doubt, not the kind of thing you could admit to in public, but nonetheless true. Ideally criminals should be brought to trial and sentenced according to the law, but in practice the police were overextended, the jails bursting and the streets unsafe. Despite Paul Merlowitz’s Talmudic wisdom, anything that helped even the score was welcome as far as she was concerned.
She returned to the story. Two women who had escaped from the blazing building were said to be cooperating with the authorities. The police didn’t seem to be giving much away at this stage, beyond saying that the killings had been the result of a power struggle for control of the cult. One other survivor, a man, had initially been detained but then released pending further inquiries. Forensic work was continuing, but was hampered by the fact that none of the victims had as yet been identified. It wasn’t even clear how many people had been living on the island in the first place, let alone who they were.
Kristine Kjarstad folded the paper up and stuffed it back into her beach bag. It was time to forget all about stuff like this and just veg out. She should make it a rule not to read the paper or watch the news, maybe not even answer the phone once they got home. The good weather was supposed to hold up through the next week. She would just lounge around the yard, maybe do a little gardening, bask in the sun and try to forget all about the violence that her work brought her into daily contact with. She needed to put things in perspective, to get centered again. And when her vacation time was up, she would go back healed and strong, ready to tackle the cases that came her way one by one, not obsessing about any of them, no longer feeling that it was her business to solve the problems of the world singlehanded.
She checked her watch and called Thomas, who turned, eyeing her warily.
“
“Whaaaat?”
“It’s time for lunch, darling.”
“Aw, Mom!”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“But we’re just killing these guys!”
“All right, five minutes.”
Shrieking their delight, Thomas and his new friend got to work with the seaweed whips again. Their delirium reminded Kristine of her confrontation with Eric when she picked up Thomas on her return from Atlanta. Her ex- husband had objected to two aspects of his son’s life. The first was an “apparently uncontrolled amount of time spent playing video games,” in excess of the norms laid down in a parents’ guide to the subject he had bought and insisted on her reading too. The second concerned Thomas’s current “obsession” with toy guns.
Eric had brought up all the usual arguments on this subject, from the need to teach children not to see violence as the solution to their problems, to the undesirability of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In theory, Kristine agreed with all this. The trouble was that her mother had bought the gun in question for Thomas’s birthday after taking him to Toys ‘R’ Us and hashing out at some length exactly what he wanted. It was an air-driven model which fired a brightly colored foam dart, and he and Brent had had endless fun chasing each other around the backyard with it.
It was all very well for Eric to remind her that the Parenting Plan in their divorce decree included a stipulation that toys would be chosen by both parents in consultation. He didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day business of looking after Thomas, and for that matter didn’t want to. What he wanted, and what he thought he’d found, was a way to extend his control over areas of Kristine’s life which he was no longer able to influence directly but could continue to manipulate through their son.
She got to her feet, shook the sand out of her towel and put it in her bag.
“Thomas!”
Seeing her poised for departure, he contorted his face into a pathetic mask. Kristine almost gave in, then decided that it was time for her to demonstrate some control too. Taking her son by the hand, she led him over to the red Jeep. The other child’s parents had come back from their run and were now relaxing over a power snack of carrot juice and tofu. For a moment Kristine found herself sympathizing with the author of that yuppie-bashing reader board in Hoquiam, but she would gladly have kissed up to the biggest nerd in the world if Thomas got on with his kids.
In fact the couple turned out to be perfectly pleasant, for Californians. Kristine quickly firmed up an arrangement which would leave her two hours of blissful solitude that afternoon. As she led Thomas up the flights of wooden steps from the beach to the lodge on the cliffs behind, she felt her familiar old Pollyanna self reemerging. It had been a good idea to leave Seattle, but she was always glad to get back. She would just laze around the house and let the rest of the world look after itself. Maybe Eric’s lingering influence had been partly responsible for her crisis. She should take a tip from Paul Merlowitz, and stop worrying about things she couldn’t control.
About the time that Kristine Kjarstad and her son left the beach to have lunch, a man walked into the office of a motel on Aurora Avenue North in Seattle. This was very different from the one at Ocean Shores. Aurora had once been a bustling thoroughfare, part of Highway 99 linking British Columbia and Mexico. Now all the through traffic used the interstate, and Aurora was a run-down strip of discarded dreams and broken promises. The motels which had survived were mostly on the brink of Chapter Eleven, while some of the sleazier ones functioned as business locations for the prostitutes who worked the avenue.
The one the man had chosen was on a long narrow lot between a gun shop and an auto-wrecking yard. A massive neon display on a stand sunk in a brick planter read Tuk-Inn Motor Lodge. The office was a fake log cabin with access lanes on either side leading to the rooms. It smelled of mold and cheap air freshener. There were dirty lace curtains over the windows, sad plants in pots, wallpaper with a photograph of mountain scenery repeated over and over, and a plastic sign in mock embroidery stitch that said IF YOU WANT A PLACE IN THE SUN, YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH A FEW BLISTERS.
As the man approached the desk, an electronic bleep sounded in the back room. He dropped the black tubular bag he had carried six blocks from the stop where the Greyhound bus had set him down. A woman in Lurex hot pants and a tight-fitting sweater drifted in through the open doorway. Her nails were elaborately painted, her feet bare.
“How are you today?” she said.
“You got a room?” the man asked. “Yeah, I guess you got a room.”
The woman made a show of consulting a large ring binder with handwritten entries.
“How long you staying?”
The man shrugged.
“Maybe a few days.”
“Forty bucks gets you a suite with a kitchenette.”
“Whatever.”
He handed over two crisp twenty-dollar bills. The woman examined them carefully, then glanced at the man and flashed a smile, as though apologizing for her caution.
“First time out for these babies, looks like.”
She caught the look in the man’s eyes and her smile vanished.
“Third on the left-hand side,” she said in a hard voice, plucking a key from one of the hooks on the wall. “Check-out is at ten. You want to keep the room, it’s another forty.”
The man picked up his bag and walked down the driveway to the sunken parking lot. The cabins were built of brick patched with sheets of metal. The matt beige paint was flaking off like diseased skin to reveal a drab green. He unlocked the door corresponding to his key number and went in. There was a bed, a table, a sofa, a television, a toilet and shower. The one small window had the same lace curtains as the reception area. It did not open. The air was stuffy, with a sickly scent of mildew. The man set down his heavy bag, locked the door and lay on the bed, staring up at the scabrous rows of ceiling tiles.
How long would he be staying? As long as it took. He was in no hurry. From now on, everything must be
