“Nothing.”
“Okay... well, did you get a good pageant seat?”
“In the back but good.”
“I get a cast discount if you want to come again.”
Matt’s thoughts skitter through his brain. Taking up Laurel on her discount offer and seeing her again would be a date! He feels excited and addled right now, this close to Laurel, in public but alone at the same time. His practical side takes over.
“Are you in the phone book?” he asks.
“Call if you want another ticket.”
“Definitely.”
“Good. Well, okay then, Matt...”
He catches her drift, doesn’t want to lose her. “Can I walk with you some more?”
“Alright. I live on Brooks.”
“Far out.” Of course he knows this. Sometimes he takes a less direct way home on his paper route just to see her house. Not that he’d admit that to anybody, especially her. Red with white trim and roses out front. A white Volvo and a blue Volvo. The Kalinas do not subscribe to the Register. They are probably Los Angeles Times people because both mister and missus Kalina are UC Irvine professors and almost certainly liberals. Conservatives prefer the Register.
They cut through downtown to walk Pacific Coast Highway south toward Brooks. It’s busy on this Saturday night, Coast Highway with plenty of cars and the sidewalks like escalators, moving people. A convertible Mustang with the top down glides by, the passenger yelling foxy lady! at Laurel. Laurel is a slow walker and when she talks to Matt she focuses her attention on him and is sometimes bumped by the oncoming pedestrians.
Her thick long hair glistens in the streetlights. She’s in a summer writing workshop at UC Irvine, “totally arranged by mom.” It’s harder than it sounds, she says, lots of exercises and assignments.
“They won’t let you just space out and stream your consciousness,” she says. “They want a piece of writing to be hard and dimensional as a concrete block.”
“Don’t drop it on your toe!”
Matt cringes when he hears himself say this but Laurel smiles and stares at him a little sideways. For that second she looks like she did back in the Pageant tableau — focused and optimistic, maybe a little amused at her own thoughts.
“What do you think about when you’re onstage?” he asks.
“I try to understand my character. What she wants and what she’s feeling. She is hope. The woman behind her is suspicion. Historians say the painting foretells the loss of paradise and the inevitable slaughter of innocents.”
“I thought it was about a girl who’s thinking about getting married,” says Matt. He’s leafed through enough of the art books at Mystic Arts World to know that he almost never sees what the critics see. He’s more literal, simpler.
“I remember Mrs. Herron showing the class your drawing of Johnny Tremain being chased by the British redcoats,” says Laurel. “And her saying how good it was. And it was.”
Matt is immensely proud to have one of his artworks remembered fondly by his longtime, secret crush.
“I remember her reading your scary Halloween story.”
“Scary how bad it was!” she says.
“The witch with the St. Bernard’s face and the monkey’s tail,” says Matt.
Laurel covers her ears and shakes her head, smiling.
Then a heavy silence as they stop at Thalia and look down where Bonnie Stratmeyer was found. Matt tells Laurel what he saw and about his conversation with Furlong. Just as Miranda Zahara and Art Rios had wanted to know how Bonnie Stratmeyer looked, so does Laurel. Matt describes Bonnie as accurately as he can but he can’t keep his emotions away, and his ears roar as if waves are breaking inside. His first dead person. Bonnie. A girl he’s seen hundreds of times. Her hair tangled with seaweed. The paleness of her body and the brightness of the yellow swimsuit.
“Let’s keep moving,” says Laurel.
Matt glances up at the cliffside beach house from which the potbellied Joint-and-Martini Man propositioned him the night before.
They head south. “I don’t know if I should say this, Laurel, but Mom and me filed a missing-person report on Jasmine today. She hasn’t come home two nights in a row. Tonight would be three.”
Laurel stops and grabs his sleeve. Her grip is strong and her eyes are big with fright. “No! I just saw her a few days ago, down at Thousand Steps. She was doing some kind of modeling.”
“Modeling?”
Laurel lets go and Matt pushes his bike along beside her. She tells him she saw Jazz at Thousand Steps on Tuesday, which Matt calculates to be two days before she didn’t come home from the Sandpiper. Laurel says that Jazz and “a whole circus” of other young people were being photographed. There was a man with cameras strapped all over him, some kind of equipment guy carrying duffel bags, and an older, huge, Charles Atlas — type muscleman posing with Jazz and the others. The girls were in bikinis and the boys in Jams. She recognized some locals. The muscleman wore one of those gross-out water polo swimsuits that show just about everything. The equipment guy was moving around these big silver reflector umbrellas that kept tipping over in the wind. Jasmine looked a little bummed by the whole scene. You know, bummed out but above it all, like she is.
Matt sees all this in his mind, the young locals being captured by exotic artists. Sees Jazz posed with a muscleman in boulder-holders. Gauguin and the natives. Slaughter of the innocents. He wonders why his mind finds such dark paths, here in sunny Laguna, a land of beauty and pleasure.
“What time of day?” he asks.
“It was early evening. I’d seen the photography crew at different beaches before. Here at Brooks, and Main Beach too. Always in the evening. Shooting young people like that. But I only saw Jasmine that one time.”
They stop at the Sunshine Inn for ice cream and Matt heroically offers to pay. This is not a Thrifty Drugs five-cent-cone kind of place. It’s not soft-serve either, but heavy, dense hardballs of frozen cream, sugar, and chocolate. Two sundaes cost him one of his last three bucks. They look through the windows of the Stoke Sixty-Six surf shop, Matt keen on the twin-fins — smaller, quicker boards perfect for Laguna’s waves. He likes to surf but not as much as fish. You can’t eat waves. He says nothing. He’s lost to thoughts of Jazz and her adventures as a model with a muscleman.
They walk the long gentle slope up Brooks to the red house with the white trim and the blue Volvo in the driveway. The lights are on inside and there’s a warm glow to it that reminds Matt not one bit of his drafty clapboard bungalow in the shade of the phone company building.
“Thanks for letting me walk with you.”
“I’m sorry if I bummed you out about Jazz.”
“Not at all. I just need to find her.”
“I’ll make some calls. We have a some of the same friends.”
“Ever been to one of Cavore’s parties in Sapphire Cove?”
“No way. Creepy from what I hear. Why?”
He shrugs.
“I liked tonight, Matt. It’s nice to talk to someone you’ve known forever but hardly said a word to.”
He smiles, feels the blush on his face, thinks of his zits, doesn’t care.
“You’re not interested in going to one of those Sapphire Cove parties, are you, Matt? It’s by invitation. All older guys.”
“No way.”
He hops on the Heavy-Duti and pushes off.
Circles back, flashes Laurel a peace sign, and wheelies down the hill for Pacific Coast Highway and the long haul to Sapphire Cove.
10
Where, of course, the guard sits within his guardhouse as Matt covertly watches from behind a low mandevilla-covered wall. It’s almost midnight, according to his Timex Skindiver, bought cheap at King’s Pawn. The guard seems to be reading. He sips from a cup. Matt’s only fifty feet from the lowered gate arm but there’s no way he can get past the guard without a distraction.