"Ms. Landreth?"
Her nod reminded me of a squirrel frantically shelling peanuts. "How did you find me?"
"Through your aunt."
"Harriet?" Her eyes moistened. "You saw Harriet?"
"I did. Look, I understand why you're scared-"
"I'm not scared. Why should I be scared?"
"You've moved around a lot. You're hard to find."
"What are you, the Census Bureau?" She glanced behind me, checking for others. "What do you want?"
"I want to know about Jane and Gracie Everett. Do you remember them?"
"Of course I remember." Her hands found a tuft of hair and pulled it around to her temple. She started searching out and breaking off split ends, a repetitive, simian tic. Her hair wasn't long enough for her to see easily, and her pupils were strained so hard to the side it looked painful. The soft flesh of her arms jiggled with the motion. I wondered if she was on speed. "It was an awful thing. The kind of thing you don't forget."
I studied the face, looking to recapture that flash of familiarity, but it was gone. One of my friends from night school in Oregon had a baby whom she brought into lecture the next month to show off. I recall how the baby burbled and took on his mother's features for an instant before they vanished back into generic babyness. I found myself straining now to reclaim that same type of satisfying deja vu.
"You saw the bodies being dumped?" I asked.
"Yeah. I was walking my dog. They pulled over up the street. Didn't see me. It was a dirt lot. I saw two guys. They looked Mexican. Central American, maybe. Anyway, I went home and called the cops."
It sounded rehearsed-all the requisite beats, well ordered, as if she'd been running over them in her head for years.
"And you saw Jane out by some trailers several months before?"
But she wasn't biting. "A month or so before." Her eyes ticked to me, then back to her hair. It was as though she was afraid to look directly at me. "Look, who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Can I see a badge or something?"
"I don't have a badge."
"Well, then," she said, and shut the door.
I heard the beads rustle, and a moment later I sensed a slight swivel of the closed Venetian blinds in the window to my right. I could not afford to wait around and have her call someone. Seeing no other choice, I started down the walk, the hot breeze lofting the smell of tar into my face. I could feel her stare penetrating my back.
Halfway down the walk, it hit me. Her startled reaction, the creases at the eyes, her high-pitched nervousness and reluctance to look me in the face-she'd recognized me right away. And was terrified I'd recognize her.
Isabel McBride. Bob's Big Boy. Off shift at 1:00 A.M.
My head bowed, just slightly, and I took a half step to my right, firming my balance. Seventeen years of assumptions, unraveling. Still, I could feel the eyes behind me, hidden by those Venetian blinds, boring into my back.
I turned. The blinds swiveled again, forming an impenetrable sheet, a child covering his eyes to hide. I rang the bell. There was no answer, just a dread-filled wait, augmented with continued talk-show broiling. I rang again. Waited. Rang again.
Finally the door opened. Jerkily.
"Isabel," I said.
Despite the deadening heat, she was shaking. "Nick."
I said, "Please talk to me."
Tears sprang up out of nowhere. Just two, spilling over the brinks of her eyes, sliding in straight tracks down her ruddy face. She jerked her head in a nod.
I followed her into the grease-tinged air, through the chattering rainbow-bead curtain. On the squawking TV, Jerry Springer reclaimed his microphone from an overzealous audience member. Across the bottom of the screen, today's caption: ARE YOU MY BABY'S DADDY? Isabel-or Tris- struck the power button as she passed, and we sat on unmatched couches shoved together to form a makeshift sectional. The post-Springer silence seemed so daunting as to be majestic. Through a doorway I could see a suitcase open on the bedroom floor, the clothes she'd started to throw inside.
I said, "Are you Isabel or Tris?"
"Tris. I'm Tris. Patricia." She was back to her hair, eyes crammed to the side, snapping off dry split ends and flicking them to the floor.
I'd rehearsed the tainted fantasy so often in my head since that night. Who knows how many times I'd reinvented Isabel McBride? Added an extra inch or three to her bust, imagined some trick of the tongue, conflated the firm hump of her ass with that of a model, a fling, some woman on the street? Everything possible to make her attractive enough to justify my slipping out that night and leaving Frank open.
She seemed to sense my thoughts. "Gravity takes over," she said defensively. "You lie down, your tits are in your armpits. You'll see. Wait till you hit forty, fifty. Men hide it better, but it's no prettier."
"It's dangerous right now."
She nodded jerkily. "I figured it might get that way. I've been careful." She snorted, nodded at me. "Not careful enough, I see."
"Will you tell me what happened?" I asked. "The real story?"
She looked away, her chin trembling. "You don't want the real story."
We sat in the silence a moment, and then I said, "You were hired to seduce me? To lure me out of the house?"
"I didn't know that was what it was for. I didn't know why. Money was tight, and I had a girl to raise. You weren't half bad-looking, so I said what the hell. Paid better than waitressing. They had me do things. I didn't know."
"You didn't ask."
"At first I figured it was some weird rite-of-passage kind of thing. Maybe your dad's friends or something." A mournful pause. "No, I didn't ask."
Every now and then I'd catch glimpses of her old self-the perfect line of teeth, a nuanced movement of her hand, a cord rising in her neck-but they'd vanish almost instantly. It reminded me of those magic childhood stickers that changed images when you tilted them. Now it's Superman, now it's Clark Kent again.
"How'd you know I'd go to Bob's Big Boy that night?" I asked.
"I didn't know anything. They knew you went there every weekend. So they helped get me a job there. You came in my first shift."
"Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know." She was still shaking. Her nails went back to that patch of dry skin and worked it in a circular motion. White dust fell like dandruff to the carpet. "I never saw the guy who hired me. He found me through my cousin. My cousin knows people who know people. Everyone has a cousin like that, right? The guy wanted a sexy woman. Experienced, but not a pro. I was. Sexy. Then."
"You were," I said, before realizing what a backhanded compliment that was. "How'd you guys talk?"
"It was all cloak and dagger. I drove to a fire road on Runyon Canyon-"
"At night," I said. "You were told to park, turn off the car, the lights, angle the mirrors away, and keep the doors unlocked. He was late. He slid into the backseat. He told you what to do. Where to find me, what I looked like, how to handle me, where to take me. You never saw his face."
"Yes," she said, bewildered. "I guess you've heard the story before."
"That part."
"I've been waiting. Seventeen years I've been waiting. For someone to knock on that door. You. Him. And I don't even know who he is."
"You never learned?"
"Do you have any idea what that's like? Never settling in. Keeping an ear to the ground. Waiting for God knows who. Do you have any idea what that does to a person?"
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
Her fingers fussed at her shiny scalp, her hair, trembling. She squeezed them hard with her other hand, lowered them into her lap. She spoke again, with a quiet sort of horror. "I will never forgive myself."
"For what you did to me? To Frank Durant?"
"That was the least of it." Her voice was hoarse. "The least of it."