Alone in the condo after they left, I kept checking the news, but there didn’t seem to be any developments. Around noon, I drove over to Wylie’s apartment, where the door was locked and no one answered my knocks. I wondered where Irina and Psyche were. Back at my mother’s, I called Worldwide Travel, and my mother told me that she and David were going out to a movie.
“You could come if you like,” she said. “Might be a good distraction.”
I decided I wasn’t desperate enough for distraction to be a third wheel on a date with the two of them, and declined.
On the five o’clock news, they showed bulldozers loading the debris from the barricades and reported that the tram would be back in service by the morning. I drank all the beer left in my mother’s fridge and ate microwave popcorn for dinner, then crawled into bed by nine.
A nightmare woke me sometime before dawn: I was being buried alive, underground, and though I knew Wylie and Angus and Berto and Stan were there, I couldn’t find them in the collapsing walls of dirt. I kept waking up every hour or so until early morning. When I finally got up, I was alone again in the condo, and on TV a different reporter was announcing that the Forest Service had taken suspects into custody. Back in the studio, the anchorman shook his head, smiled wryly, and moved on to the weather, which was hot and dry and lacking in surprises.
I drove to Wylie’s apartment, which was still empty, and then down to police headquarters.
At central booking two young clerks were busily chatting and ignoring my existence.
“So she’s all ‘What are you doing here?’” one said to the other, who was posed by a filing cabinet, holding a folder in her manicured hand.
“And I’m all ‘I was invited.’ And she’s all ‘By who?’ And I say, ‘Maybe you should ask your boyfriend.’”
“Excuse me,” I said.
“And she’s all ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’ And I’m all ‘That’s not what I heard.’”
“That’s totally what I would have said,” the other girl said.
“Excuse me,” I said again. “I’m looking for some friends of mine. I think they might be held here?”
Both girls stared at me as if I’d wandered by accident into their home.
“Wylie Fleming?” I said lamely. “Angus Beam?”
The storyteller broke into a vague smile and swiveled in her chair to her terminal, her long fingernails clicking loudly on the keys. “Not here,” she said, then spun away to continue her story.
“They were arrested up on Sandia Crest,” I said.
She glanced at me over her shoulder, surprised and a little annoyed that I was still there.
“Oh yeah, the stinkies,” the other girl said.
This made me bristle. “They’re just standing up for what they believe in.”
“They reek,” she said.
“I know,” I admitted. “Look, are they here?”
They looked at me skeptically, and I knew how Wylie and his friends must have felt all the time: indignant and moral and misunderstood. I stared back at them, waiting.
“One of them’s downstairs,” the first girl finally said. “Tall guy, in a tank top.”
“Can I see him?” I said.
While she went to check, I flipped through a worn, stained copy of People magazine that was sitting on the counter, an issue I remembered reading in Brooklyn, right after Michael invited me to Paris. Thinking of him now — his bracelet, his arms, the line of hair at the back of his neck — was like looking at something through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars: shrunken and small, as if seen from a great distance. Finally the clerk escorted me down a hallway and into a room filled with long tables. I sat down at one, and a guard brought Stan in. He was indeed wearing a tank top and did indeed reek. There were circles under his eyes and streaks of grime on his muscular arms, but he didn’t seem the slightest bit unhappy. He sat across from me with his hands folded, like an obedient student.
“Do you need a lawyer?” I asked him.
“No, we’ve got a court-appointed guy.”
“Who’s in here with you?”
“It’s me and Berto.”
“What about Wylie and Angus?”
“They got away. It was part of our agreement.”
“Kind of sucks for you,” I said.
He shrugged. “Next time it’ll be somebody else’s turn to take the fall.”
“Do you need anything?”
He looked at me. “They’ll probably take off for a while. Lay low. You’re not going to tell anybody anything, are you?”
I shook my head.
“I knew you were all right,” he said.
It seemed like the nicest thing anybody had said to me in a very long time.
Fifteen
When I got back to my mother’s the condo was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner and the muted cries of sun-dazed children playing in the yard next door. I went to my room and lay down on the bed, looking at Eva’s paintings. On the dresser was the junk my mother had removed from my grimy clothes, and I sighed and made to throw it away. Loose change, a bottle cap, a matchbook, scraps of paper: the negligible archaeology of my summer. One slip of paper turned out to be the flyer from Blue Butterfly Yoga. Harold was probably in class right now, breathing deeply. I glanced at the schedule, to see whether he might in fact be there, and only then did I notice that the name of the skinny, uptight instructor was Lincoln Kent.
I sat down on the bed and puzzled this through. I’d had the sense that Harold was hiding something, and while Kent wasn’t a particularly unusual name, the yoga instructor looked about the right age.
Moments later I was driving the now-familiar route to Santa Fe, the Shangri-la billboard still promising a lush green future, though a corner of it had begun to peel away, revealing the old ad beneath. I saw a car stopped on the shoulder, and a man peeing beside it, with nowhere to hide in the open landscape and no shyness about it, either.
Harold answered the door wearing a long linen tunic and matching beige pants. His eyes were bloodshot, and his red face was crisscrossed with wrinkles and broken capillaries.
“Advanced Ashtanga,” Harold said agreeably, and stepped aside. “Would you like to come in?”
Standing in his white living room, I wasn’t sure what to say next. A glass of white wine was sitting on the coffee table.
“Can I get you anything?” He didn’t seem at all disturbed that I’d just shown up, unannounced, at his house. “Maybe a drink?”
“Okay,” I said.
He rubbed his hands and nodded, looking pleased. Any drinking companion at all was probably fine by him. He went into the kitchen and came back with another glass of white wine. It was barely noon, but I shrugged and took a sip.
“Lincoln Kent,” I said. “He’s Eva’s son, isn’t he?”
“Well, aren’t you the detective,” Harold said.
I guessed he was being sarcastic, and chose to ignore it.
He sat down on the couch and gestured for me to do the same, giving me another up-and-down look. I had the distinct feeling that he approved of the sundress I was wearing. I rolled my eyes and sat down at the far end of the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “And pretend not to remember Eva in the first place?”
“Because it isn’t really any of your business,” he said. “You call my house, then show up asking all kinds of questions. Some people like their privacy, and I don’t know anything about you.”
“I’m not doing anything terrible,” I protested. “I’m just trying to learn something about an interesting painter. How bad can that be?”