Death Gets a Time-Out (33 page)

Suddenly, she pounded her fist on the counter. I jumped. “Who I am to say this?” she said bitterly. “Who I am to say Eduardo Cordoba he is a bad man?”

I frowned, not understanding what she was saying.

“Where I get the money for this
tienda
? Thirty years ago, Señor Artie gives me money when he goes away. He says for all my help. He gives me two thousand dollars. This very much money here in Mexico. I open this
tienda
, and I have very nice life. From his money, I have very good life.”

The same could be said, I thought, for a number of other people.

P
ETER
was disappointed when I insisted that we catch an earlier flight home, but he understood my sense of urgency. Beverly and Raymond’s presence in Mexico at the time of Trudy-Ann’s murder changed everything. I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but I needed to get home and find out.

I called my mother from Dallas, when we changed planes, and she agreed to meet us at the airport in L.A. She sounded thrilled at the prospect of our premature return.

What does it say about me that I didn’t start missing my kids until we were on the last leg of our return flight? I had barely thought about them for the two days we were in Mexico. I’d been too distracted by the case to worry about the children—even Isaac, who had never before been without his mother for longer than an afternoon. It was probably feelings of guilt over my maternal negligence, but by the time the plane taxied into the gate at LAX, I was bouncing up and down in my seat.

I ignored the flight attendants’ warnings and unbuckled my seat belt long before we had come to a complete stop at
the gate. By the time the hatch was opened, I had our flight bags slung over my shoulders and had poked and prodded Peter into the aisle. Unfortunately, an unacceptably slow woman in the row in front of us was impeding our progress out of the plane. I groaned in frustration and whispered in Peter’s ear, “Just pass her, for heaven’s sake. She’ll move over.”

“Juliet, the woman is on crutches. Will you chill out?”

I rolled my eyes and fidgeted from one foot to the other. When we finally made it through the hatch, I grabbed Peter’s hand and dragged him past the woman with the crutches—it was taking her forever to lower herself into her wheelchair. We raced down the gangway and out into the terminal. We were, of course, at the very farthest gate, so it took us what felt like hours to make it to the exit, and by the end I was flat out running. Standing in the very middle of the exit ramp, right in everyone’s way, pushing and shoving each other into the people who passed by, were my kids. I shouted their names at the top of my lungs. They looked up from their squabbling, saw me running toward them, and burst through the crowd, tearing past the signs warning them not to dare enter on pain of prosecution. Alarms began blaring and National Guardsman with guns came running toward us. Ruby and Isaac flung themselves into my arms, and I buried my face in their soft, damp necks, inhaling deeply. They smelled like they always did. Like warm, wet puppies. Like my babies.

“I missed you so much!” I said. And it was true. For the last few hours, I
had
missed them terribly. So much that it was almost unbearable.

Isaac put both hands on either side of my face, kissed me gently on the lips, and then, in a voice dripping with love and longing, said, “Mama?”

I smiled at my sweet little boy. “Yes, my darling?”

“What did you bring me?”

A
S
desperate as I was to get to Lilly, to tell her what I’d found out in Mexico and to confront her parents, I couldn’t leave my children that day. They spent the rest of the afternoon and evening pressed up against me, as if they couldn’t bear not to be touching me. They immediately put on their Mexican finery and looked like a couple of grandees from the days when Alta California was just another Mexican territory. It took us hours to get them to bed, and we succeeded only by promising that neither of them would have to go to school the next day. It was an easy promise. The next day was Sunday.

Despite the hour, I called Al and filled him in on my trip. “She didn’t do it,” I said to him, gripping the phone under my chin as I pulled clothes out of my bag, checked for obvious stains, and hung them in the closet.

“But she
remembers
doing it,” he said.

“Have you not been listening to me? False memories! The memories were all implanted!”

“Okay. Okay, I’ll buy that. So who did? The reverend? The father?”

“Or the stepmother.”

“Maybe,” he said, his voice betraying his doubt.

“Why not her?” I said, sniffing the armpits of a shirt I couldn’t remember if I’d worn. I winced and threw it in the hamper.

“Shooting. It’s a man’s crime.”

I didn’t even argue with him. The man’s sexism was irritatingly ingrained, but neither did I feel like defending a woman’s right to shoot. “Do you want to come with me to talk to Lilly?” I asked.

“Better not,” he said. “But don’t you go confronting Polaris without me. Or the parents. I don’t want you taking any risks, in your condition.”

I sighed, but didn’t bother arguing with him. I hung up the phone and shoved my now empty suitcase into the closet.

“How’s Al doing?” my mother asked. She was stretched out on my bed, propped up on one bony elbow, watching me unpack. My mother is one of those tiny, rail-thin women who get more and more minuscule as they age. By the time she hits her nineties, she’ll probably be visible only with an electron microscope. This trait causes me no small amount of resentment. I’ve been putting on and taking off the same ten or fifteen pounds my entire life, and my mother has to carry Hershey bars in her purse to help keep her weight up. I’ve always believed that she burned calories through sheer busyness. The word “multitasking” was invented to describe my mother. When I was a kid, she used to cook dinner, vacuum the house, take dictation on the phone from her boss, and give me the third degree about where I’d been the night before, all at the same time. This might, in fact, have been the first time I’d ever seen her immobile in my entire life. The kids had definitely been harder on her than she’d been willing to admit.

“He’s okay. He’d be happier if we had more paying work,” I said.

“Do you want me to change my flight and go home early?”

“What? Of course not. Stay. I love having you here.” I wasn’t lying. For all that my mother and I can barely make it through a single conversation without it devolving into a bickering match, I always miss her terribly. I’d never imagined that I’d spend my life three thousand miles from my parents. And I know she hates being so far from her grandchildren.

“I organized your desk while you were gone.”

“You what?”

“It was a mess.”

“Mom! Those are my private files! You can’t just go digging around in my stuff.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I took care of your computer, too.”

“What?”
I shrieked.

“Your desktop was a disaster. I cleaned it up. And then I archived all your E-mails into subfolders.”

I stared at her dumbly. “You read my E-mails?”

“Only enough to figure out what subfolder to put them in.”

“I can’t believe you. Did you go poking around Peter’s office, too?”

“Of course not. Although, I did look over that contract he left out on the dining room table. You might want to take a glance at it yourself. I think he’s getting a raw deal on the merchandising agreement.”

My mouth dropped open.

“What?” she said. “I’ve been a legal secretary for forty years. You think I don’t know my way around a contract?”

“You are so damn nosy, Mom.”

She peered at me over the top of her glasses. “Where do you think you get it, darling?”

T
HE
next morning, when I told the kids that I had to go out, Isaac’s lip began to tremble. With a howl of anguish, he leapt across the breakfast table, wrapped himself around my waist, and clung like a baby lemur.

“It’ll just be for a little while, honey. I’ll be back by lunchtime,” I said, crossing my fingers and hoping that I wasn’t lying.

Muffled sobs and trembling shoulders were his only reply.

“You’ve still got me, little man,” Peter said. “How about I take you and Ruby to the Santa Monica Pier!”

Nothing.

I looked at Peter. He shrugged.

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” my mother said. “The way you indulge these children.” She walked over to me and pried Isaac loose. “Enough of this silliness, Isaac. Your mother has to work.”

“Mama’s always working!” he wailed and clung to me all the more furiously. “She went away to work, and she doesn’t even want to be with me now!”

I knew he was being manipulative. I knew that compared to mothers with real jobs, I spent
vast
quantities of time with my children. I knew that he didn’t really believe that I loved my job more than I loved him. And I also knew that I was going to cave.

“All right, Isaac. You can come with me. You can play with Amber and Jade while I talk to their mother.”

Ruby looked up from the cereal she was pushing around her bowl. “You’re going to Amber and Jade’s house? I want to come!”

“Hey, just a minute here,” Peter said. “Doesn’t anyone want to play with me?”

My mother, disgusted with our pathetic weakness in the face of our children’s demands, stomped off, muttering something about children who rule the roost and parents who come to regret it. By dint of a series of bribes that began with the Santa Monica Pier and ended with a trip to the mall complete with promises of clothing purchases, Peter managed to convince Ruby to stay with him.

When we’d negotiated the gate and pulled up the long driveway to Lilly’s house, Isaac and I found Amber and Jade riding scooters under the supervision of not one but two nannies. I left Isaac in their care, admonishing him to put on a helmet before he got within spitting distance of anything with wheels. Both my children have inherited my natural athletic grace, and by Isaac’s third birthday we had already dealt with a fractured arm, two broken toes, and a split chin. I wasn’t up to another trip to the emergency room.

I let myself in the front door of the house and called out Lilly’s name.

“She’s in the back, by the pool,” a voice called back. I thanked the mystery servant and walked through the house and out the back door. Lilly was lying, wrapped in a Pashmina shawl, on a lounge chair by the pool. Steam rose from the heated water and shrouded her in wisps of fog. I steeled myself for the conversation to come, and made my way along the path of tiny, pale blue stones to the water’s edge.

“Juliet!” she said when she saw me. “You’re back? Did you
find out anything? What happened? Tell me!”

I sat down on the edge of the chaise next to hers and took her hand. “I found out a lot, Lilly. I found Juana, the woman who took care of you when you were a little girl.”

“Juana,” Lilly said softly, and her eyes clouded over. “I remember her, I think. She used to braid my hair with scraps of ribbon. And she had really rough hands, red and chapped.”

“She told me about the day your mother died.”

Lilly looked into my eyes with an expression at once eager and fearful. “What happened? Did she say what happened?”

“She didn’t see the shooting,”

“Oh,” Lilly said, her voice stretched thin with disappointment.

“But she heard everything. She was on the roof, doing wash, and she could hear you and Jupiter playing in the fountain. She could hear you when she heard the sound of the shot. You were still in the courtyard, playing with the water.”

Lilly stared at me. “I was playing in the fountain.” It wasn’t a question.

“Juana ran down to your mother’s room, but you got there before she did. She found you there, with Polaris. You’d run to your mother and tried to wake her up. That’s how you got her blood on you. You shook her or grabbed her or something like that. Juana found Polaris trying to pull you away from your mother.”

“Polaris? Did he do it? Did he kill my mother?” Lilly’s breath came in ragged gulps.

I kept talking. “That’s not all I found out, Lilly. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. Raymond and Beverly were there. They were in the room when Juana got there.”

Her face crumpled with incomprehension. “What? What? They were in San Miguel? In my mother’s room?”

“Yes,” a voice said over my shoulder. I spun around and looked up into Beverly’s face. She stood, water streaming down her body, steam rising from her skin. Her voice was firm, but her legs were trembling. She took a towel from a pile at the end of the chaise lounge on which I was sitting
and wrapped it around her body. She covered her head with another and draped a third over her shoulders. Only then did she continue. “Yes, it’s true that we were there. We were in San Miguel when Trudy-Ann was killed.” Beverly sat down on the end of Lilly’s seat and put her hand on her leg. Lilly flinched and her stepmother lifted her hand back into her own lap. “Let me go get Raymond,” she said. “And we’ll tell you everything.” She got up and walked to the house. Lilly closed her eyes and raised her hands to her face.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and then I thought of Beverly, in the house, finding Raymond, and coordinating her story with his. “I’ll be right back,” I said, and ran. I tore through the kitchen, making a beeline for the backstairs, and I almost tumbled over Isaac. He was sitting on the bottom step, crying while one of the nannies dabbed at his knee with hydrogen peroxide.

“Mama,” he wailed. “I got hurt!”

I stared at him for a moment, desperate to follow Beverly up the stairs, to catch her before she got to Raymond. Then, with an inward groan, I sat down next to him on the step. “Let’s see your boo-boo, sweetie.”

“He skinned it pretty bad,” the nanny said.

“You sure did.” I took the cotton ball from her and finished cleaning the scrape. I carefully covered the wound with two of the Power Puff Girl Band-Aids she handed me. Then I kissed him on the cheek. “Are you going to be okay? Are you ready to go back out and play with the twins?”