Elsinore Canyon (23 page)

The four people in the van maintained a stony silence. Rosie and Gale watched unperturbed while Dana hastily changed her clothes, wiped herself down with towelettes, and stuffed everything into a plastic bag. She rustled it at the back of Oscar’s head. “What are we going to do with this?”

“Toss it up here. I’ll throw it out on the way back.”

Dana hesitated. “Let’s throw it out on the way down.”

“You could take it with you if you want. Get rid of it in some Maldivean grotto.”

Dana watched the freeways, buildings, and lights of Los Angeles fly before her eyes. Without ceremony, she unclasped her seat belt, climbed into the front with Oscar, and shut the sliding window that separated the front seat from the back, leaving a grim Rosie and Gale on the other side of the yellowed pane.

“Why am I going to the Maldives?” she demanded.

Oscar took a breath. He didn’t know why anyone was going. “It’s the best I could do in a pinch.”

“Why not Costa Rica?”

“I thought you didn’t like Costa Rica.”

“Since when does anyone care what I like?”

“The Maldives is halfway around the world and it doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.”

“Extradition treaty? I didn’t commit a crime.”

“All right.”

“What am I supposed to do, spend the rest of my life in a palm-frond shack?”

“At least you’ll be free.”

“This is bullshit. Why are Rosie and Gale coming?”

“It would look a lot worse if you were the only one who took off for a foreign country tonight.”

Dana wrestled up her phone and started tapping.

Oscar reached a hand over. “You’re not contacting your father.”

“Why not?”

“The police may be collecting hard drives and electronic devices. What are you going to say if some guy in uniform answers your father’s phone?”

Dana sighed hard and dropped her phone to her lap, then picked it back up. “I’m sending some texts to Horst and Phil.”

I’m sorry. I love you.

The other message was for me.

Polly was shot. Please help Phil.

I read Dana’s text in Santa Barbara and called Marcellus. He gave me the news. Mr. Hamlet had pumped five bullets at a picture of himself that was hanging on his closet door and accidentally hit Polly, hidden within, with two of them. Deputies were talking with Mr. Hamlet in his room and the drive to the house was taped off. Polly had been air-lifted to St. John’s, Miguel was driving Phil down to be with him, Laurie was on her way in from Anchorage, Oscar was at LAX with the three girls, Perla and Marcellus were sitting watch with a pot of coffee, and Dr. Claudia could not be roused. It had been a full hour of frenzy and the deputies were not too happy that a couple of potential witnesses had made off before the echo of the gunshots had died down. But Mr. Hamlet was telling a firm, plausible story, which the evidence supported.

“By the way,” Marcellus asked me, “what do you know about tonight? I mean what happened before.”

I hesitated. “I knew about the DVD.”

“It sure upset Dr. Claudia.”

“It wasn’t meant to. We just wanted to see how she would react.”

“That was an interesting scene,” he mused.

“We never imagined she would react like that.”

“I mean the scene on the screen, McQueen. Who’s Dana listening to these days?”

“Well, the ghost. It—she—told Dana something. Mrs. Hamlet’s spirit.”

“Is that what you’re calling it?”

“I think so.”

I could hear him slowly letting air out through his teeth on the other end. “So that’s what’s in charge now.”

Oscar poured a shot of Richard Hennessy into his coffee and eased back against the satin chaise. The girls were on the plane, the plane was headed for Malé, and Claudia was getting her much-needed sleep. When she awoke—to the new chaos—he would be able to tell her that despite it all, the most important thing had gone right. The wheels turned back several notches in his head. No matter how many ways he tried, he could not fit the shooting and the flight into one grand plan. It must have been a genuine coincidence and the shooting a genuine accident. Otherwise, that sucker Polly would be dead.

The aluminum tube had lifted off a few minutes before eleven at a heading of 333 degrees northwest. It was now twelve minutes after midnight, and it was moving with its passengers, cutting across lines of longitude at a speed of 520 land miles per hour.

Dana groaned with sheer excess of emotion. The day’s crust of grease, sweat, and blood was soaked away. She bent her knees up to her damp, bare chest, and climbed out of a tub onto a fluffy towel. It caught the droplets that zig-zagged down her legs and drank up the water between her toes. She was in flight. Oh lord, if only the plane could stay aloft forever. Floating, drifting. The earth was too solid, the world too crowded with guns and ghosts and laws. Her father, God damn him—her tears flowed again. He actually loved that murdering bitch. Daddy, how could you say that to me, sitting on your bed? She closed her eyes and saw her mother. That silent rebuke. Her eyes holding all the horror and grief of someone who had been tortured and betrayed. Dana pressed a towel over her mouth. She was on this plane, and her revenge, whatever form it must take, was still unmade. She looked down at her body. Pink, scrubbed, and moist. Oh, the undeserved luxury of life itself.

She leaned into a mirror over a polished wood cabinet. It was small, but still—a hot bath on a plane. In all her life, all the money her father had, he had never been this extravagant with her. The trip would take about twenty-four hours and they were traveling light on the spur of the moment, so they had had all the luggage loaded into the cabin instead of the cargo bay. She could sleep in a fresh nightgown on a bed tonight if she wanted. Italian sateen cotton sheets. She laughed wolfishly at her reflection. This was your life after you shot the family servant. She dried off and dressed in head-to-toe chocolate cashmere. Then, she carefully extracted the actual laptop from the pillow Horst slept on, and padded out to the lounge area with it. A uniformed stewardess was stocking a refrigerator. Rosie and Gale were playing with their phones.

For once, she was glad for their easy amorality. Not a word had they uttered about the media room melee. Not a word about Polly. Did they know? “Are we allowed to smoke on this plane?” she said.

“Don’t see why not,” came the answer. “Want one?”

“Not now.” She must take a step back. Her father had gripped her shoulders, touched the end of his nose to the end of her nose, and said: “Do not think about this for the next twenty-four hours.” His admonitions came back to her like Chinese cookie fortunes.
Events will come to you. Don’t anticipate guilt. Nothing is in your control.
She had chewed through it all until her skull ached anyway. Her father would go to jail. She would be questioned. She would be caught lying.
She
would go to jail. Polly would live and he would contradict the whole story. Polly would die—and then all her other fears would be a thousand times worse. And that was just the silly stuff. Down further were the things that were melting her core. The universe was divided into people who had not shot two bullets into Polly, and she who had. She must step back.

There were ways of looking at this. The voyeuristic lardball had been shot by accident while he was spying on Dana and her father from the vantage point of her father’s own personal closet. He had been sitting in there. On a
chair.
Pulled up a seat and made himself comfortable as he got the whole ultra-private conversation on camera. Fuck, she had to erase this. Stop thinking. The most she would ever have to say was that she was in Aunt Claudia’s room trying to wake her up so she could talk to her, when suddenly she heard five shots in the bedroom, ran in, and saw her father standing by the bed and Polly falling out of the closet spurting blood. She might not even have to say that much, depending on how things went with Daddy and the deputies. She had nothing to hide about the other events of the evening—as if she could. She had heard five shots, seen nothing. Pound down everything else. How long would she have to keep the secrets, from the police, from her friends—from Phil? How many months, years, decades? And she hadn’t even killed Claudia yet.

Step back. There were more ways to look at this. She was safe. She was getting away with something. She had done horrible things and she was privy to others. She could actually enjoy the warm swell of acid in her stomach as she casually opened her victim’s laptop. A piece of paper glided out and she caught it mid-air. A password and some step-by-step instructions for something, written by Horst—one of the people in the half of the universe that had not shot Polly. She turned the computer on. It booted into a password prompt.

[email protected]

She was in. Was there wi-fi on the plane? Yes, of course all amenities were provided now that she’d shot a family servant. She followed the handwritten steps through the snitchware. Launch. Choose Directory. Oh yes. It was beyond anything. Polly had been spying on them all. There was enough on his hard drive to keep her busy for the whole bloody two-week trip—if she had the taste for that crap. Good lord. The bastard was crooked, the amount of time—he must have spent most of his work hours spying and scheming. Did he actually
manage
anything for real? Definitely enough here for the next—what was it now?—seventeen or eighteen hours left of the flight. Downloads scheduled for every night at midnight—which meant it ought to be synching right now. Yup, here came a couple of files, downloading at that moment. Lord, tons were coming down from Claudia. The last was an e-mail to Rosie and Gale that had been sent on the stroke of midnight. Stroke of midnight? Dana’s heart sped up. They were keeping on top of their phones, they must have already gotten it. She clicked on the message. Unbelievable, this spying.

Rosie, Gale—

I am preparing this message for transmission at midnight, when I will be asleep.

Some time after your last refueling, the two of you, Dana, and the airline will receive an e-mail from Oscar’s account to inform you that the flight has been rerouted to Bangkok due to a legal issue that has arisen back here in California and that you’ll be getting to the Maldives in a day or two. Follow the instructions in that e-mail as to your accommodations and return flight, and proceed in Bangkok no matter what. Dana will not be accompanying you into the city. Do not wait for her, do not ask questions.

Under no circumstances allow Dana to transfer any items from her luggage to yours. Do not touch her luggage for any reason.

First-class tickets will be available for your return. Come back when you please, but contact me from overseas at your earliest convenience, and send me a note from the plane to indicate that you received this message.

—Claudia H

Dana smoothed her brow as she read it again. Bangkok? And why shouldn’t anyone touch her luggage? She hadn’t packed anything dangerous. And why wasn’t there an e-mail for her, especially since she wasn’t going to get out of the Bangkok airport? She tried to unravel it as she read it again. The message was composed before the shooting. Before, which meant the trip had been arranged beforehand, too. Of course it was. Cripes, was she even supposed to be on this plane? Some plan had been made, then the shooting happened, and maybe because Claudia didn’t know about the shooting, the plan was still rolling on. Was that right? And really, considering Oscar’s lame explanation, why not Costa Rica? Back up to the shooting. The shooting could have nothing to do with it. This had all happened, hard as it was to imagine,
outside
the shooting—but after the screening. Oh yes. Set it aside and rethink.