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The Hubbels’ suspicions about him had a contagious quality. She was now sick with it.
Predictably, Jackson took Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Pacific Coast Highway. Then he surprised her, driving right past Wilshire Boulevard and veering onto an on-ramp to the Santa Monica freeway.
What was he up to? He didn’t seem to know she was following.
As they continued on, the route became familiar. Ray was taking just the route she had traveled from Whittier, only in reverse. She felt foolishly unbalanced, but continued to follow him.
Maybe he was visiting his mother? On a workday morning?
On the way, driving down Whittier Boulevard with its car dealerships and fast food joints, Ray called Denise and asked her to tell everyone he wouldn’t be in for a while longer. She wanted to know how long and when he couldn’t tell her, reminded him about Antoniou at two o’clock and a later meeting with Carl to work out details on the museum contract.
“Right,” Ray said, dodging a weaving SUV. “What have you put together?”
Denise said, “I’m concerned. I’m freaked, in fact. We should be going over our presentation for Antoniou. You haven’t seen half my work. What are you doing that’s so important?”
“I have personal business. I trust you.”
Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Ray, the police just left. They talked to Martin and me and Suza
“I’m here.”
“They asked about Leigh.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. But Suza
So the police knew about Martin and Leigh. Then they knew Ray had lied to them.
Ray wondered how much time he had.
“I won’t have to fire her,” he said. “Martin will.”
“True,” Denise said. “Probably today. And then she’ll file a complaint of sex discrimination or whistle-blowing or something because of Martin. And the legal merry-go-round will start up.”
There was a silence, phones ringing back at the office, a fragment of conversation as someone passed by. “I’m so sorry,” he told Denise.
“It’s just-Leigh’s okay, isn’t she?”
“She’s taking time off, that’s all. Tell everybody I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“When will you really be in?” Denise said, bluntly fixed on her own concerns.
“As soon as I can.”
“Because I can still cancel this meeting.”
“No, you can’t. I’ll be there.”
He walked up to the house on Bright Street he thought might have been their cottage, again shocked by time’s changes. The block he remembered bicycling up and down now held new apartments where once old houses had led fading lives.
Dogs barked.
Still a few doors down from the house he thought had been his, he approached warily. He recalled the sidewalk, buckled from the eternally shifting California earth, because he remembered leapfrogging the bad spots on his skates. He walked toward the ramshackle cottage, glad to see it, remembering the monster movies, his fears, and the neighbor next door, who yelled when he or any kid happened to stumble into his dichondra.
He hoped the people who lived in the house worked. This, after all, was a working-class street. But a woman came out onto the porch with a tablecloth, shook it vigorously, and reentered the house. He would have to wait. The woman stood in his mother’s kitchen. He went back to his car and rolled down the windows, let his head drop back, closed his eyes, and entered his memories.
He recalled this house vividly. A twenties bungalow, it hid a fruit cellar beneath the kitchen, the only one he could remember from all his years of moving. Shelves below had harbored ancient jelly jars, jars of unidentifiable vegetables and fruits. They hadn’t lived there long enough for his mother to get around to cleaning them out. Dank dirt surrounded the shelves and webs curled around the old jars.
After one initial exploration of the cellar, Esmé had never again opened the trapdoor, to his knowledge. But she had said, and he had remembered, “These were places where people could hide. Maybe they built it to hide from burglars.”
Ray, then only eleven years old, knew the cellar mainly kept food cool in the days before people had refrigerators, and even then marveled at his mother’s paranoia. The fruit cellar, so unusual in his world, so hidden and inaccessible, lured him, and he spent hours down there on hot days in the darkness lying on the damp earth, digging, looking at the jars and the rusted tools. He thought of the place as a refuge. A refuge from what?
He had enjoyed those months in uptown Whittier, with its big city library and a fountain in front where kids like him could cool off on hot days. He admired the old-fashioned downtown. On Saturday afternoons, while his mother did the grocery shopping, Ray paid a pathetically small amount of money to attend horror movies at the Whittier Village theaters on Greenleaf Avenue. His dreams were full of flesh-eaters, bats with human faces who flew at him, toxic liquid beings that seeped under doors. At this house, his bedroom had been a closed-in porch with windows on three sides that offered perfect entrances for monsters. He never told his mother how much the movies scared him and how they sabotaged his sleep at night.
His mother had talked about settling down and found a good job at a hardware store. They lived quietly, occasionally visiting his ailing grandmother in Montebello for hurried, always brief visits. Esmé stayed close to her kitchen and collected cookbooks. She experimented on Ray, making muffins with pecans and oranges, pancakes with maple chips, omelets with zucchini. In self-defense, he stopped eating anything except cereal until she relented and got back to serving him plainer fare.
Looking back, it was as though they really were starting a new life. Then one night in August, yes, another August night, she had presumably moved them. He woke up one morning in a new place, with no memory of leaving.
That made this house promising.
The summer sun played over the sidewalk, heating the stone wall he sat upon. The front door to the cottage opened, and the woman stepped out. She held an expandable leash. The big yellow Labrador walked politely to heel as they disappeared up the street.
She might not be gone long, although a dog that size really needed a good long walk. He got out of his car, sauntered up the porch steps, and knocked. No answer. He pulled out his family of keys. Before trying a single one, he played a game with himself. Which one might fit? He picked through them lovingly, but in truth had no idea, so after a few moments, he simply tried them methodically. Not this one, not that one. This one was too old-fashioned, and the next one, too shiny for one from so many years ago.
Twist. Turn.