Liar

Well, hell.

I went to bed, pulled Frank’s pillow close before Cody could claim it. I was tired, but I didn’t sleep.

I wondered if Margot got lucky. I wondered who the guy was. I was ticked off at her for interfering, but at least she might be able to tell me his name.

I wondered if Travis would call.

I kept thinking about Frank.

The phone rang. I’ll own up to a perverse wish that my husband had been having trouble sleeping, too, and was the caller. But the caller was Rachel.

“Did I wake you up?” she asked.

“No.”

“You, too? First night Pete’s away is always a bitch. And I missed his call tonight-I was out at the store.”

I couldn’t tell her that her disappointment sounded wonderful to me. “I missed Frank’s call, too. Do you have di

“No. Want to get together? That’s exactly what I was calling to suggest.”

“Why don’t you come over here tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

We talked of inconsequential things for a few more minutes, then hung up. I was drowsy by then, and managed about an hour’s worth of fitful sleep before the phone rang again.

“Did I wake you up?” my husband’s voice asked.

“No,” I said.

“Liar.”

“Okay, so I am, but talk to me anyway.”

He did. He couldn’t sleep, had gone for a walk, finally decided to call. We had a long conversation, not about anything special, but one we were reluctant to end. “I should let you get some sleep,” he’d say every so often, and we’d keep talking, remembering something else that had happened that day, or discussing some plan to do something together when he returned, or recalling something we’d meant to ask about.

“Don’t bother with that leaky faucet in the kitchen,” he said at one point. “I’ll fix it when I get home.” He knew I could fix it if I wanted to, I knew he wasn’t trying to tell me not to fix it myself. There was only one phrase in all of it that mattered: “when I get home.”

The reassurance of the mundane, wearing down our troubles.

I didn’t make much progress in my efforts to find Travis on Wednesday. At work, two vague leads suddenly turned into hot but demanding stories that had nothing to do with one another; trying to do justice to both stories, I was too harried to try to locate my cousin-and was forced to cancel my di

In the long run it was worth it, though. Between the time I had spent on the obit on Sunday and his pleasure with the stories I turned in on Thursday, Morey agreed to give me Friday off.

Late Thursday afternoon, by driving like a demon and begging a favor from a clerk I knew in the county records office, I did manage to get a look at Arthur Spa

As the holy card from his funeral had said, Arthur Anthony Spa

I glanced at the bottom half of the certificate and learned that the cause of death was bone cancer; I was a little startled to see that he had died at St. A

The clerk reminded me that it was closing time and so I hurriedly turned my attention to the top of the form, “Decedent Personal Data.”

Arthur’s father was listed as Unknown Spa

Arthur had not served in the military, and his years of education completed were listed as six-a surprise to me, since I remembered him as a man who could converse easily on all sorts of subjects. I wondered if this was a typographical error. Then again, he had married into lots of money when he was very young, so perhaps he was self-educated.

I wrote down the Las Piernas address listed in the “Usual Residence” section and tried to picture its general location. Downtown; perhaps one of the new lofts or condos. Not really as snooty an address as I would have guessed, especially supposing he had inherited the big bucks after Gwendolyn DeMont’s death. Maybe it was a case of easy come, easy go. Arthur might have blown that fortune in the first few years after her murder.

There was one other surprise on the form. In space number fourteen, “Marital Status,” the word “Married” was typed in; and in space number fifteen, “Name of Surviving Spouse; If Wife, Enter Maiden Name,” was “Briana Maguire.”

“You liar!” I said aloud, causing the clerk to look up at me. I calmed down. Why should I be surprised that Arthur was still occasionally faking people out about his marriage to my aunt? Grudgingly, I also had to admit the possibility that if Travis spent much time around him, he might have been trying to hide his son’s illegitimacy. But why not say they were divorced?

The clerk finally lost all patience and all but snatched the form back from me. When I asked if I could make a copy, she said, “You should have thought of that option four and a half minutes ago. Come back tomorrow.”

A friendly, helpful clerk in county records is an asset in my line of work, and not someone you want to piss off, so I apologized profusely, and told her I owed her big time.

She laughed and said, “Honey, I hear that every day from one person or another, and I ain’t seen no ‘big time’ yet.”

Rachel called on Thursday night to say she hadn’t been able to find anything on Travis, but had some luck locating the DeMonts. I told her I had Friday off, and we decided to meet in the morning.

“You hear anything more from Jimmy Mac?” she asked.

I told her I hadn’t been contacted again by McCain and was begi

“See you tomorrow morning,” she said, once again shying away from any discussion about her past co

But our Friday plans were changed about ten minutes later, when Sophia Longworth called from the Mission Viejo Library.

“I think I know where you can meet up with your cousin,” she said.

“Great!” I said, not realizing that all hell was about to break loose.