Had she been right to trust him? After all, she hadn’t seen him in more than twenty years and they’d hardly had what you’d call a relationship. Why was he so eager to help her, anyway? And why was she so ready to trust a virtual stranger when she couldn’t trust her own mother, whose prayer beads she’d found in her father’s office? Or her brother, who’d never admitted that he was responsible for the accident that crippled her and who seemed to have a vested interest in burying her father’s secrets? Even Sy made her feel apprehensive, though she couldn’t put her finger on why.
Any of them could have purchased a shovel and used it to bash her father in the head during his midnight swim. Even if Arthur had seen one of them in the yard, he’d never have expected to be attacked. Any of them could have arranged for a mythical Israeli artist and a no-show news reporter to ensure that Deirdre didn’t have an alibi.
“Sorry, Deirdre,” Tyler said, “but I have to ask. Does this have anything to do with the fire?” It was a fair question, and he sounded like a real person asking it. She relaxed a notch.
“The stain is old. Really old. From twenty years ago. So I can’t imagine how it could be connected to the fire,” she said with a twinge of guilt. Because it was just possible that the fire had been set in order to destroy items in Arthur’s office, that dress among them.
“Okay then. Sure. It’s not complicated. I’ll bring over my own test kit and you can do the test yourself.”
“That would be great,” Deirdre said, feeling as if a heavy weight had lifted.
“How about later this morning? I could come to your house—”
“No,” Deirdre said, louder than she’d intended. She heard the dogs stirring in Henry’s bedroom. “Sorry. My family is already stressed out, and I’d rather they not know about this.”
“Then how about I meet you somewhere and we can do it right now?”
“Now? Really?”
“Sure. I’m awake.” He yawned again.
“Sorry.”
“No need to apologize. I’m glad you called. Where do you want to meet?”
Where? She hadn’t gotten that far. Somewhere nearby. “You know the fountain on the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire, across from Trader Vic’s? Will that work?”
“We should be able to find a spot there that’s dark enough to see the reaction. Assuming you don’t mind crawling around a bit under some bushes.”
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d crawled around under those bushes. She and Henry used to play hide-and-seek in that park, but never at five in the morning.
“Meet you there in thirty minutes,” Tyler said.
“Thirty minutes.” Deirdre couldn’t believe how easy this was turning out to be. “Thank you so much.”
“If you want to thank me, let me take you out to breakfast after.”
He was being so nice it scared her. “Okay. But my treat.”
“We can argue about that later.”
Deirdre rummaged through the dresser in her room and found a white T-shirt to wear with her leggings. She ran a brush through her hair, and scrawled a note for Henry and her mother in case they got up and found her missing. Carefully she folded the dress around the knife again and tucked them in her messenger bag. At the last minute, she stuffed the folder with her father’s manuscript in the bag, too.
When she drove off, it was still dark. It took only ten minutes to drive to the little park that was home to the fountain. She parked around the corner and made her way across the hard-packed dirt path leading to the tiled piazza. The moon was a substantial crescent that hung right over the head of the kneeling Indian on the plinth in the center of the circular fountain. As always, his head was bent and he held his hands out in front of him as if to capture the water playing around him. Or perhaps he was offering thanks to the gods for finding him, among all his compatriots, such a cushy permanent home.
Even at this odd hour the plaza wasn’t deserted. A young couple was entwined, necking on one of the benches. Deirdre picked a spot upwind from the fountain’s spray, feeling first to be sure the bench was dry. The parade of colored lights in the fountain was still going, but as the sky was starting to lighten, the jets of water looked pale rather than vibrant—powder blue, then seafoam green, then pink, cycling through color after color until the grand finale, all the colors at once. When she was little, her father would occasionally bring her there after getting ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. Even as they faded, the lights still seemed magical.
Traffic was sparse in the usually busy intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire. Deirdre remembered when there’d been a vast empty field across the street where the Hilton Hotel now stood. Trader Vic’s, attached to the hotel’s near end, stuck its palm-tree-lined, Tiki-bedecked entrance into the intersection. More and more, Los Angeles and Disneyland were merging into a single entity with reality at a far remove.
Tyler loped across the plaza in jeans and a black T-shirt that showed off a muscular chest and powerful shoulders and upper arms. “Hey, sorry. I got held up,” he said. He held a black backpack with white letters stenciled on: ARSON.
“It’s been ages since I was down here when the lights were going,” Deirdre said. “I forgot how cool it is.”
“Me too. I feel personally responsible for that,” Tyler said, pointing to a sign that read NO SKATEBOARDING ALLOWED. “We used to come down here when they were doing repairs and the fountain was empty. We’d race around in circles inside the fountain. Jump in and out. Popped more than a few tiles, I’m ashamed to say.”
Deirdre said, “My brother claimed he and some friends put a box of Tide in the fountain once. Supposedly the suds spread all the way out onto the street and stopped traffic. He was very proud of that accomplishment.”
“Adolescent boys are all idiots.” Tyler sat next to her on the bench. Deirdre could smell his aftershave. “So what you want tested is in there?” He indicated the bag in her lap. “Let’s have a look, see what you’ve got.”
“It’s a dress,” Deirdre said, opening the bag. “It’s probably nothing.” Leaving the knife in the bag, she pulled out the dress and handed it to him.
Tyler turned his back to the fountain and took the dress from her, holding it gingerly away from him. “Like I said, we need to take this somewhere dark enough to see the reaction.” Just then the lights in the fountain went out and the fountain’s jets turned off. Deirdre looked back at Wilshire. The streetlights had gone off, too.
“We should do this now, before it gets much lighter. Behind there.” He pointed to the tall wall that formed the back of a long bench at the rear of the plaza.
Deirdre followed him out and around to where tall bushes lined the back of the wall. It smelled just like it had years and years ago when she’d hunkered down, waiting for Henry to find her. Pee and rotten eggs.
Tyler turned on a penlight, crouched in the shadow between the bushes, and crept in closer to the wall. Taking shallow breaths and steadying herself with her hands, Deirdre followed him, frog walking in close to the base of the wall where it was darkest.
Tyler waited until she was right there in position, too. Then he opened his pack and pulled out a plastic spray bottle. “Okay. You ready?”
“Ready.” She hoped she really was.
“Let’s see what we have here.” Tyler turned off the flashlight and waited. In moments, Deirdre’s eyes adjusted to the dark. Tyler held the dress in front of them and gave her the spray bottle. “Just give it a spritz or two.” Deirdre aimed the nozzle and gave it two squeezes. An instant later, bluish-green puddles of light glowed on the underskirt and the netting lit up like a star-sprinkled fisherman’s net.
“Probably blood,” Tyler said.
Chapter 33
After the blue glow faded, Deirdre returned with Tyler to the park. The air felt laden with moisture even though the fountain was off. The sky had turned pale gray and traffic was coming to life.
“Why probably blood?” Deirdre asked.