“She might have been with Austin Overton,” Matt says, trying to prompt the big man’s memory.
Of course, Matt knows that his sister and the singer could have simply gotten into his car — or Julie’s battered van, parked right there on PCH across from the Sandpiper — and driven anywhere in the city or beyond. He’s heard that Overton lives with other musicians in the big yellow house on Bluebird Canyon, a few blocks beyond his paper route. There’re always music and parties. Everybody just calls it Big Yellow.
Matt jay-cycles to the Hotel Laguna, where nobody in the restaurant or bar has seen his sister or even recognizes the girl in his drawing. The bartender orders him out.
He walks his bike around to the back door of the restaurant kitchen, where one of his friends, Ernie Rios, washes dishes and takes out the trash. And gives him food. Matt prizes Ernie for more than just the table scraps. He’s goofy and open about his dead-end crushes and fruitless romantic blunders. He can laugh at himself.
Looking through the heavy screen door, Matt sees wiry Ernie in big rubber boots, rinsing a plate with a big commercial sprayer hose, water pouring down into a huge metal sink. Matt bangs on the screen and Ernie comes clomping to the screen, a white dish towel in his hands. “Can you believe about Bonnie Stratmeyer?”
“No. I saw her dead.”
Ernie twists the dead bolt and opens the door. Matt follows him through the big fragrant kitchen, his stomach grumbling, explaining what he saw that morning. Ernie wants to know what Bonnie looked like and Matt endures that memory for what feels like the thousandth time.
“Have you seen Jazz?” asks Matt.
“Not tonight.”
“Last night?”
“It’s been a week or two. You hungry?”
“I’m starved.”
Matt takes his usual place in the corner, on a folding chair pretty much hidden from the rest of the kitchen by stainless steel shelves laden with foodstuffs, and the walk-in freezer. It’s where Ernie eats when he’s off the clock. Matt feels the humid kitchen warmth and smells the miracle of cooking food and thinks again how cool it would be to have his own restaurant. Ernie has offered to get him on washing dishes here but the weekly take-home is about the same as his route and the hours way longer. His mom’s income, his newspaper money, and the Food Exchange are keeping the Anthony family fed. Barely. Although you can’t eat newspapers and rubber bands, he thinks.
Ernie brings him a foraged plate with a lightly eaten T-bone steak, half a mound of mashed potatoes, and two uncracked crab legs. Clean utensils, a crab cracker, and a cloth napkin.
“So Jazz didn’t come home last night?” Ernie asks.
Matt answers Ernie’s questions between bites. Tells him about Austin Overton. Ernie is concerned about Jasmine because he’s in awe of her and she’s always been nice to him in her own subtle, superior way.
“Maybe she’ll be home later tonight,” says Ernie.
“I hope so.”
But silence creeps into Matt’s audible lack of hope, and Matt knows what Ernie is going to say before he says it, because Ernie has long had a crush on Bonnie Stratmeyer.
“That’s a bummer about Bonnie,” Ernie says. “Tonight the mayor and two of the Laguna councilmen were in, and they told Janet on station four, who told Deke the bartender, who told me, that the cops are not ruling out foul play. Because of some bruising that doesn’t match up with drowning. On her ankles and the top of her head. They also said she could have just fallen over the stairway railing. The autopsy is tomorrow.”
Another uneasy silence.
Matt rides south to Thalia. It’s not midnight yet but a thick marine layer stands like a gray wall not far offshore.
He straddles his bike at the head of the stairway where he was this morning. A streetlamp beams down mistily. Matt looks at the faintly visible beach where Bonnie Stratmeyer ended up. Feels a fresh jab from the dark dread that hasn’t left him since seeing her here.
The lights are on in one of the oceanfront homes and Matt sees someone standing on its deck, looking down at the water. It’s a wooden, ramshackle house, weather-beaten and weirdly out of kilter from Matt’s point of view.
The guy turns to Matt and gives him a long look. He’s a potbellied older man, forty probably, a joint in one hand and what looks like a martini glass in the other.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asks gruffly.
“Looking where they found Bonnie.”
“Did you know her?”
“No.”
“Last night I saw a hippie van pull up right about where you’re standing. About this time, in fact. I wish I’d have waited up, seen what they were doing at two in the morning. I knew I should have, and I didn’t.”
“They?”
“Two people sitting up front. Not moving. Pretty dark, and the streetlight reflecting off the glass. Hardly make them out.”
“Did you tell the cops?”
“This morning, hell yes.”
“What color was it, the hippie van?”
“The two-tone green and white. A newer one. They’re all over Laguna now. Curtains with some kind of pattern, but I couldn’t see what.”
Matt tries to find the rock that Bonnie Stratmeyer had washed up on or perhaps landed on, or was maybe even dragged to. Not ruling out foul play. But the fog has advanced over the beach and swallowed the homes around him and Matt now stands in a thick white cloud.
“They’ll get to the bottom of this, if there is a bottom,” the man calls down. “In the meantime, how about you come up for a drink and a smoke? This sinsemilla from Mexico will blow your mind.”
“No, thank you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Matt pedals for home in the fog but by the time he gets to Mystic Arts World the fog is so thick it’s better to push the bike than ride it.
At Forest he catches the red light and walks his bike across the empty little intersection, having to veer around two girls who have decided to wait for the walk sign across Pacific Coast Highway.
With a jump of heart, Matt recognizes the Kalina sisters, Laurel and Rose. Laurel is his age and he’s had a crush on her since fourth grade. He’s gone to school with her all his life. Rose goes to college but Matt doesn’t know where. Laurel told him once that they are part Hawaiian and part German-English. They’re olive-skinned and dark-haired and to Matt, thrilling. One of his first fourth-grade cursive sentences he wrote on the lined training paper was, She’s beautiful! which he tore off and wadded up and put in his pocket the second he’d written it.
Now, suddenly, just seeing Laurel Kalina makes Matt feel like a different person. A more confident person. All of the worry in his heart lies down, and something like joy stands up. So, he carves his bike to a stop with one hand, in a sweeping matador’s veronica. He hopes the light stays red.
“Hi Laurel! Hi Rose!”
They greet him and Matt watches them checking the crosswalk light. Laurel tells him how awful about Bonnie, and Rose says she knew her pretty well and she was a spiritual and sensitive person, not material at all.
Laurel tells him they both have roles in Laguna’s popular Pageant of the Masters. Matt’s seen it only once — human actors staged in famous works of art. Tableaux vivants, according to his English teacher, Miss Benson. It’s a big deal — lavish costumes and makeup and lighting, thunderous music and narration. Hundreds of spectators pack the big Irvine Bowl amphitheater. To Matt, it’s expensive and mostly for tourists.
But Laurel insists he come: she and Rose star in a totally boss Gauguin tableau, she says, the best painting in the whole show.
Matt sees the walk light turn green and tells them he’ll do that, come to the Pageant and see them in the Gauguin. Pageant tickets are way more money than he can afford but he keeps that to himself.