I could see his mind was already clicking.
“I’m going in with Celeste,” he said. “Just to make sure every-thing’s done right. I’ll call you when I’m finished with reports and we’ll argue some more about whether you should leave tonight or not.”
Even with Casey standing on the sidewalk behind me, making faces, I kissed Mike. “Write fast,” I said.
Grinning, he walked over to the black-and-white car, gave some instructions to the uniformed officers there, then climbed into the back seat beside Celeste. The car immediately pulled away and sped down Hill Street.
“Jeez, Mom,” Casey said, watching after the car. “First Dad, now you.
“I’m not getting married.”
“Well, you’re kissing him aren’t you? And probably other things, too.”
“How’d you get so wise? Or is that wiseass?”
I put my arm around her and we crossed the street back to Emily’s building. I don’t know whether Celeste had managed to somehow defuse the incendiary device that had been built into the coffee can, or whether it had been a dud to begin with. When it did its thing, there was a pop and a fizz and a spark big enough to char a hole through the old wool carpet runner under it. The bomb squad had come, caught up on gossip with the detachments of both police and firemen, and, eventually, carried away the remains of the can in a big lead box. For the kids waiting on the sidewalk, they had used lights and sirens when they drove away. As a source of pre-holiday excitement, the event had been as big a dud as the bomb.
Firemen had dragged the smoldering carpet out to the sidewalk and left it there for the trash haulers. A few lower floor tenants had snuck in behind the firemen to save a few precious pieces of furniture. The furniture now blocked the front steps and cluttered the hall inside. With the front door hanging open, an assortment of nosy neighborhood people had come inside for a better look at the burn mark on the floor upstairs. They still lingered about, finding the furniture more interesting than the damage.
“Think Ireland can be any more fun than this?” I asked Casey as we pushed aside a hand-carved, inlaid chest that stuck out into the landing.
“I hope so,” she said. “Poor Mrs. Lim.”
“I think she enjoyed the fuss.” We had left the door of Emily’s apartment standing open. “Shall we finish packing?” I said.
“I’m hungry, Mom. There’s nothing in the refrigerator to eat.”
“Let’s lock up and go out for a while. We’ll get something to eat, maybe see a movie. Something with more kissing than shooting, okay?”
“Gross,” she said. “I want my jacket. It’s cold.”
While Casey went to get her jacket from the chair in the sitting room where she had left it after breakfast, I waited in the little entry, trying to figure out how many boxes, and which ones, we would carry home on the plane.
“What do you want to eat?” I called. “Chinese, Mexican, burgers?”
Casey, white-faced, backed out of the sitting room and grabbed for me. “Mom.”
“What?” I went in to see what she had seen.
There was a man sitting on the sofa. He rose. At first, he was in front of the window, backlit by the glare so I couldn’t see his face. He wore jeans and loafers and a long wind-breaker. He was tall and straight. I knew I hadn’t seen him around the neighborhood.
“How did you get in?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The door was open. I hope it’s okay.”
He moved slowly toward me, away from the window. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “I got real worried when all the police came. Until you came out, I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been waiting for the right time to talk to you. I was thinking I might be too late. Again.”
“Again?” I asked.
“Like Emily,” he said.
He seemed nervous, but more expectant than worried. He had a nice, deep voice that sounded so familiar I didn’t want him to stop talking. I had listened to his voice on Emily’s answering machine tape for hours a few nights earlier. Even with-out the tape, I would have heard a familiar quality in his voice.
I could not ever have passed him on the street without recognizing that I had known him all my life, though he was no more than twenty-two years old. My father had passed to my sister and brother and I a distinctive long, narrow nose with a hump at the bridge. Casey had my father’s skinny nose, too. Caesar had recognized it when he saw Casey. And when he saw this young man.
I reached out for the young man with the skinny nose.
He took a deep breath and touched my outstretched hand. “Maggot?”
“Hello, Marc. This is Casey.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
When I looked up, we were somewhere past Riverside, just at the cusp between new tract house development and open desert. Mike drove, with Casey napping in the front seat beside him. I was in back with Marc, hearing the story of his life. You can learn a lot about a person in an hour. Marc seemed to have a very solid core.
Mike turned to me. “Want to find a telephone?”
“No,” I said. “Stopping would just take time. I know Jaime is fine.”
“You’re sure? We could call the sheriff.”
“No. I’m sure,” I said, touching Marc’s shoulder. “He’s with Aleda.”
Marc had been telling me the story of his life with his mother. I had filled in for him details about my family-his family-that his mother either didn’t know or had misremembered. It was spooky how much he knew about us. He had followed my career from the beginning. He had collected articles Emily had published in medical journals, and the occasional pieces about her and her adventures that showed up in the press. He played the flute, like my father.
Marc’s shadow life with his mother, moving frequently, changing his name between schools, leaving friends behind, had been populated by mythic characters-largely, my family. He was incredibly like his father, my brother, his namesake. I felt I had always known him.
“Why did you keep running?” I asked him. “The government wasn’t very interested in your mother after a while.”
He shook his head. This part of his story wasn’t clear to him. “At first, I think, Mom was afraid the Feds would take me from her, put her in prison. Then, when she sent out feelers to see whether it was safe to come in, someone threatened us and started looking for her. We hid. After a while, it was habit. I can’t explain it. It was just the way we lived.”
“Didn’t your mother know we would have helped her?”
“She was afraid you would be hurt. It was like you were all held hostage.” He pulled nervously at his ear. “It was true, too, wasn’t it? As soon as Mom and Aunt Emily made arrangements for Mom to surrender, look what happened.”
I did look. Emily shot, Rod immolated. To protect whom? From what?
When we drove into Jaime’s gravel driveway, Lupe was on the porch, sweeping. She went to the screen and yelled some-thing. Tires on the gravel made too much noise for us to hear what she said. The collie nosed open the screen and ambled down the steps, with Jaime and Aleda slowly following him. Two uniformed Riverside County sheriff deputies came outside behind them and waited on the porch with Lupe.
Aleda Weston had once been very beautiful, not so much because of her features, which were regular and refined, but because of the grace and confidence of her carriage. People would stop to watch her go by, or listen to what she had to say.
As she came down the steps, there was still something left of the old confidence, just a shadow you had to know to look for. I was looking for it very hard, the way I had looked for a spark of life in Emily’s eyes a few days before.
Aleda was painfully thin. Her thinness added emphasis to the beginnings of a dowager’s hump forming between her shoulder blades. The hump gave her posture a stoop, made her seem burdened. I suspect that anyone seeing her for the first time would see only a rather plain, middle-aged woman.