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Chapter 27

aisy St. Patience only started Spitefield Park because her parents died. If it softens the blow, please know that they died in their sleep. Simply drifted away …sorry, Mom, sorry, Dad. The culprit was a faulty pilot light on their furnace. The first cold night of October, and the batteries in their smoke detector had long before preceded them in death. Nobody felt any pain except for Daisy, who knew exactly what words she wanted carved on their tombstone, but no cemetery would allow it. The inscription wasn’t even the worst message that sprang to mind. Go shopping for tombstones, and you, too, will be impressed by the limited selection.

Lady Daisy realized she wasn’t the only one of anything. Other like-minded bereaved must have had money to spend with mixed feelings. The land was cheap, and she was a gal with half a face for the sympathy vote. Daisy St. Patience, her least favorite movie was where Judy Garland does all of that full-color singing and dancing just to end up back in dreary black-and-white. Her dog is the only person who shows any gumption. Before the story even starts, he bites Margaret Hamilton off-screen. The dog rescues Jack Haley and draws the green curtain aside to expose the shenanigans of Frank Morgan. MGM spent a fortune. Yet after weeping buckets of glycerin and being clutched by winged monkeys Judy Garland is happy to wake up in a dirty bed surrounded by men. Nuh-uh. No way. To Daisy that didn’t read as enlightenment.

Daisy St. Patience fixed the pilot light. She sold her parents’ house and put the money toward a good surveyor to eyeball the plot lines. The long-term truth is that people’s hearts change across time. Not just the hearts of the wildly vindictive. Even the widower whose wife was laid to rest beneath a granite marker that said:

I couldn’t be bothered to shave my legs

A year later, even he phoned back to sheepishly inquire about the cost of a new stone.

Again, as Harriet Beecher Stowe asked, “Dude, why can’t you do both?” Why can’t a novel do this? You’re not dead until you’re dead.

What never failed to boggle Daisy was how Judy Garland had only just arrived in this glorious colorful place and she immediately wanted to run back to some boring pig farm. The fact that everyone else loved that film …what did that say about people? It says that most people can tolerate being over the rainbow for only about thirty seconds. Regret, Daisy knew, was the only confirmation of a well-lived life. If you didn’t occasionally go too far, you weren’t going anywhere. It was the dog—smart dog! good boy!—who chased the Siamese cat and baited Judy Garland to leave that dumb hot-air balloon which was taking her home. Time and time again, that dog did everything in its power to give Judy a better life.

In the alternate version of that movie, the way Daisy remembered it, when Judy awoke in Kansas, all giddy to be home in that tiresome dust and dirt, in the Daisy St. Patience Preferred Text Director’s Cut, that little dog bit Judy Garland. It jumped into that windblown bed and sank its teeth right in her ingrate ass.

Now, Please, Jump to Chapter Nine

Chapter 28

o this is life in the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.

In Santa Barbara, Manus who was Denver taught us how to get drugs. The three of us were squeezed into that Fiat Spider from Portland to Santa Barbara, and Brandy just wanted to die. All the time, holding both hands pressed on her lower back, Brandy kept saying, “Stop the car. I got to stretch. I am spaz-am-ing. We have to stop.”

It took us two days to drive from Oregon to California, and the two states are right next door to each other. Manus being all the time looking at Brandy, listening to her, in love with her so obviously I only wanted to kill them in worse and more painful ways.

In Santa Barbara, we’re just into town when Brandy wants to get out and walk a little. Trouble is, this is a really good neighborhood in California. Right up in the hills over Santa Barbara. You walk around up here, the police or some private security patrol cruises you and wants to know who you are and see some ID, please.

Still, Brandy, she’s spasming again, and the hysterical princess has one leg over the door, half climbed out of the Spider before Denver Omelet will even stop. What Brandy wants are the Tylox capsules she left in Suite 15-G at the Congress Hotel.

“You can’t be beautiful,” Brandy says about a thousand times, “until you feel beautiful.”

Up here in the hills, we pull up curbside to an OPEN HOUSE sign. The house looking down on us is a big hacienda, Spanish enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandolier.

“Here,” Denver says to her. “Get yourselves pretty, and I’ll show you how we can scam some prescription painkillers.”

Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver’s apartment until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she’s cooked up some new plan. Before she goes under the knife she’s decided to find her sister.

The me who wants to dance on her grave.

“A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever,” she says. “It can wait while I figure some things out.”

She’s decided to find her sister and tell her everything, about the gonorrhea, about why Shane’s not dead, what happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably she’d be surprised how much her sister already knows.

I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won’t come with us, I’ll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson, of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.

To Brandy, I write:

let’s drive around some. see what happens. chill.

This seems a little labor-intensive, but we’ve all got something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in the world. So Brandy thinks we’re on tour to find her sister, and Denver’s come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie’s sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie’s in Cancún, maybe.

The letter to Evie says:

To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,

Manus says he shot me and you helped him ’cuz of your filthy relationship. In order for you to stay out of PRISON, please seek an insurance settlement for the damage to your home and personal property as soon as possible. Convert this entire settlement into United States funds, tens and twenties, and mail them to me care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. I am the person you are responsible for being without a fiancé, your former best friend, no matter what lies you tell yourself. Send the money and I will consider the matter dealt with and will not go to the police and have you arrested and sent to PRISON, where you will have to fight day and night for your dignity and life but no doubt lose them both. Yes, and I’ve had major reconstructive surgery, so I look even better than myself, and I have Manus Kelley with me and he still loves me and says he hates you and will testify against you in court that you’re a bitch.

Signed, Me

Jump to above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, parked curbside at the Spanish hacienda OPEN HOUSE. Denver tells Brandy and me how to go upstairs while he keeps the realtor busy. The master bedroom will have the best view, that’s how to find it. The master bathroom will have the best drugs.

Sure, Manus used to be a police vice detective, if you consider wagging your butt around the bushes in Washington Park wearing a Speedo bikini a size too small and hoping some lonely sex hound will whip his dick out, if that’s detective work, then, sure, Manus was a detective.

Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power. And Manus with his square-jawed, cheekboned good looks could be a Nazi recruiting poster.