Seattle Noir

BLOOD TIDEBY THOMAS P. HOPP

Duwamish

When we arrived at Herring’s House Park, the police were clearing off the yellow warning tape and packing their forensics bags and boxes, closing their case of an odd death in a parking lot and moving on. Kay Erwin, epidemiologist at Seattle Public Health Hospital, had declared it shellfish poisoning, and the cops had quickly lost interest. But Peyton McKean was of a different mind. He was getting the lay of what had happened two days before by interrogating a young cop, rapid fire, as the officer rolled up the crime scene tape.

“The body lay here?” McKean asked, drawing an imaginary oblong line around a spot in the middle of the damp gravel.

“Uh huh,” answered the officer, stashing tape in a black garbage bag.

“And the victim’s pickup, parked here?” said McKean, sawing a transect line from the parking bumpers out into the lot with his long-fingered hands.

“’At’s right,” said the officer, cinching the bag and pausing to gaze amusedly at McKean, who moved animatedly around the rain-drizzled lot quickly on long legs, marching off distances with his hands tucked behind his back like some intense, gangly schoolteacher. McKean was, I could tell, worried that he’d lack some detail of the circumstances surrounding Erik Torvald’s death, when the last cop who had actually seen Torvald lying facedown in the parking lot was gone and done with the case.

As the officer got in his squad car and prepared to close the door, McKean called somewhat desperately, “Anything else I should know?”

“Nuttin’,” said the cop, slamming his door and backing away, making a half-friendly wave at McKean as he left us alone in the lot.

“There’s more here than meets the eye, Fin Morton,” muttered McKean, lifting his olive-green canvas fedora and scratching in the dark hair of one temple.

“There’s nothing here that meets my eye,” I replied, zipping up my windbreaker against the drizzle that had begun as soon as we got out of my Mustang. I looked around the otherwise empty quadrangle of gravel, the alder woods that stretched down to the bank of the Duwamish River below the lot, and the mud-puddled gravel footpaths, without much hope of spotting a clue. The park was devoid of people on a wet Thursday afternoon. “Maybe the cops are right. Maybe he just had shellfish poisoning. Don’t you think that’s possible?”

“Answer: no,” said McKean in his pedagogical way. “The levels of red tide poison in him were without precedent, off the scale by any measure. To get the dose Kay Erwin found in his blood, he’d have to have eaten ten buckets of steamers, or a dozen geoducks”-he pronounced the word properly: gooey ducks. “And yet,” he continued, “my immunoassay tests for shellfish residues in his guts came up strictly negative. He hadn’t eaten a bit of shellfish. The police may be satisfied that he poisoned himself, but neither Kay nor I believe it. Foul play is at work here, Fin. Somebody killed him, and I’d like to know who.”

“Right now,” I said, moving to the door of my midnight-blue Ford Mustang, “I’d like to get out of this drizzle.”

McKean took one last look around the park as if wishing there were more to see than bare alder trees against a gloomy gray Seattle sky. Then he acquiesced, lapsing into thoughtful silence as I drove us out onto West Marginal Way and headed north past the Duwamish Tribal Office, an old gray house beside a construction site with a sign that read: Future Site of the Duwamish Longhouse.

“Muckleshoot Casino cash finally having an impact,” mumbled McKean absentmindedly as I headed for his labs on the downtown waterfront, where I had picked him up earlier. McKean suddenly cried, “Turn right, right here!”

I pulled the wheel hard and we bounded across some railroad tracks and onto a gravel drive that took us to another riverside parking lot, this one with a sign reading, Terminal 105 Salmon Habitat Restoration Site and Public Access Park.

“What’s here?” I asked, pulling up at a dismal postage stamp of greenery wedged between a scrap yard downriver and a defunct container terminal pier upriver, irked at how easily McKean had yanked my chain.

“It’s not what’s here,” he said, opening his door with a cerebral glow in his eyes, “but who’s here.”

At the end of a graveled path an observation platform overlooked the Duwamish River. McKean leaned his lanky frame on the rail and pointed a thin finger out across the expanse of muddy water to where several strings of Day-Glo-red plastic gillnet floats drifted on a slow upstream tide, overshadowed in the distance by the container cranes and skyscrapers of Seattle. A fisherman in a small dingy was at the nets, pulling a big sockeye salmon into his boat. He quickly disengaged the netting from its gills and returned the net to the water. A fine drizzle dappled the brown water and lent a sheen to the fisherman’s dark green raincoat and hood. It put a damp chill on the back of my neck.

“Unless I miss my guess,” said McKean, “that’s my old high school chum, Frank Squalco.”

“How can you be sure that’s him?”

“I recall Franky Squalco from art class at West Seattle High School,” said McKean. “Based on that fisherman’s humble stature and his rather square form, I guessed it might be Frank when I saw him as you drove. Furthermore, as you see, he’s gillnetting salmon, and only tribal people can use gillnets, so the odds improve. I’d like to get his take on this shellfish poisoning business.”

“Why would he know anything about it?”

“Because Erik Torvald was a geoduck fisherman, and Natives hold half the rights to geoduck licenses in this state, by law.”

As the fisherman drew in another salmon, our view of him was cut off when an outbound tug came down the shipping channel pulling an immense black barge piled with rusty cargo containers, so stupendously huge and near that it seemed for a dizzy moment that our viewing platform was moving past its black metallic hulk, rather than the other way around. When the barge passed downriver under the gray concrete rainbow of the West Seattle Freeway Bridge, the fisherman was already steering his dingy toward our shore. McKean waited, unaffected by the clammy air or the cold droplets that beaded his olive-green canvas field coat and were getting down the neck of my jogging shell. I knit my arms around myself for warmth and wondered why I never dressed sufficiently for the weather I inevitably encountered when I tagged along on these adventures.

The fisherman throttled the boat down and glided into a small inlet on our right, helloed up at us absentmindedly, and then paused to take a long second look as his dingy bumped the beach.

“Peyton McKean!” A grin of recognition spread across his broad, brown, forty-ish Northwest Native American face. “I haven’t seen you in a while. What you doin’ down here where us poor Indians fish?”

“We’re investigating a murder.”

Squalco’s face clouded as he stepped out of his boat and pulled it onto the muddy shore with a bowline, his black rubber rain boots slurping in the muck.

“Torvald?” he said. “Yeah. Too bad. Good geoduck man. But why they got you on the case? You’re not a cop. You’re a DNA man, so I heard. Pretty famous around here. When the Jihad Virus came, your vaccine saved a lot of lives, they say.”

McKean brushed the compliment aside. “Not DNA and not vaccines this time. I’m looking into a case of deliberate red tide poisoning.”

Squalco was transferring three big salmon from the bottom of his boat into a large plastic bucket on the shore. At McKean’s remark, he paused, the third salmon cradled in his arms, one boot in the boat and one in the mud, stooped over. The pause was just momentary, and then he put the salmon in the bucket and turned and faced us where we stood above him on the observation deck. He swallowed hard but said nothing.

“You know something?” McKean asked encouragingly.

Squalco’s eyes shot sideways. “Red tide? Sure,” he said. “Puts poison in the clams. State of Washington orders us not to dig ’em then. We usually do anyway. I never got more’n a little buzz or two from it. Maybe threw up once or twice-but that coulda been the booze, y’know.” He laughed thinly.

“I meant,” McKean persisted, “do you know something about red tide in the murder of Erik Torvald?” At 6'6", McKean had a way of looking imperiously down his long nose at people, and our height above Squalco on the deck amplified this effect until the man flinched. He cast his eyes aside again, and then bent and picked up the bucket with both gloved hands, grunting at its weight. He walked up the mud bank to a dented old blue pickup truck, where he huffed the bucket onto the waiting lowered tailgate, and then said to us, “Gotta go. Got plenty-a hungry mouths to feed.” He closed the tailgate, came back in a hurry, tied the boat’s bowline to the trunk of a small Douglas fir tree, and turned to go. As he reached his truck door, McKean called to him.

“Interesting case.”

Squalco paused before getting in. “Yeah?”

“Massive dose of red tide poison. Died quick. No trace of shellfish in his stomach contents. Any idea why?”

“No,” Squalco replied without conviction, his eyebrows high and mouth round.

“Red tide poison,” said McKean, “is one of the most toxic substances known; a paralytic toxin. First the tongue and lips tingle, then general paralysis sets in.”

“I gotta go,” said Squalco.

He got in and slammed his door and drove off spraying gravel. Watching him speed down the driveway and turn south on West Marginal Way, McKean shook his head.

“Oh, Frank,” he said with a note of regret. “What has my old pal got himself mixed up in?”

Earlier that morning, I had sat at my computer keyboard in my funky old Pioneer Square writing office, working on a boring piece of medical reporting about a new gene therapy for baldness, when I got the phone call from McKean that put me on this case.

He was at the Seattle Public Health Hospital on Pill Hill. “Kay Erwin’s got an interesting case for us,” he’d said. “A dead man with all the signs of red tide poisoning, but there are reasons to suspect foul play. Wanna follow this one?”

Like always, I’d said, “Sure,” and went to meet him. Writing about the exploits of the brilliant Dr. McKean is how I make my best money these days. I caught up with him at the hospital in epidemiologist Kay Erwin’s office.

Kay is another person of interest to me. She’s a small, cute, pageboy brunette, about forty-five, a bit too old for me to ask on a date, but she always has some piece of news for the medical journalist side of me. White lab-coated, she sat behind her office desk and motioned me into a guest chair with McKean in the other, then launched into a quick update.

“Torvald,” she explained, “was found lying comatose beside his pickup, scarcely breathing. The passerby who found him called for help and Torvald was rushed to our ER, where it became clear he had shellfish poisoning symptoms. They pumped his stomach, worked up a blood sample for toxins, and called me in on the case.”

“That’s when things got interesting,” said McKean.

“Yes,” agreed Erwin. “His stomach contents didn’t contain shellfish. In fact, they matched what was found in his car: the remnants of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, fries, and a Coke. But the symptoms and the lab analysis are consistent: a massive dose of saxitoxin.”

“Saxitoxin is about a thousand times more toxic than nerve gas,” said McKean.

“But the most anomalous thing,” said Kay, “is that this case doesn’t coincide with an actual red tide. The only red tide on Puget Sound this year was in August, and it’s now late October. Something fishy’s going on.”

“Or rather,” said McKean, “something clammy.”

After Frank Squalco left, I drove us back to McKean’s labs at Immune Corporation, feeling that a long-enough day had already transpired, but McKean was indefatigable. On the way, noting that it was only 4:15 p.m., he called his head technician, Janet Emerson, and barraged her with concepts for a new project. As I chauffeured him back across the West Seattle Bridge, he bubbled to her about red tide microbes and toxins, and ways and means to create a new treatment for paralytic shellfish poisoning.

“Get some saxitoxin and crosslink it to diphtheria toxoid and inject it into some mice and we’ll make a therapeutic monoclonal antitoxin. What say?” I couldn’t hear Janet’s reply, but knowing the two of them as I do, I had no doubt she was bravely shouldering the new burden of lab work. And I had little doubt that a creation of McKean’s brilliant scientific mind, even one conceived on a drizzly day while riding in my Mustang, would lead to a medicine of great potential. That’s just the way things tend to work out with Peyton McKean.

“I should have started this project long ago,” he explained after getting off the phone. “But shellfish poisoning is so rare, and so rarely fatal, that no big pharmaceutical company has an interest in developing the antitoxin. But I’ll bet Kay Erwin would gladly test my antibodies someday on a desperate patient.”

“Anti what?” I asked, my mind more on a road-raging tailgater than McKean’s conceptualizing.

“Antibodies,” said McKean. “The body’s own natural antitoxin molecules. I’ve just asked Janet to begin preparing some, by immunizing mice against saxitoxin. It’s all pretty straightforward.”

As I drove downtown, he did his best to explain how antibodies could bind saxitoxin molecules and remove them from a victim’s circulation. Eventually, I dropped him off at Immune Corporation’s waterfront headquarters and headed home to my apartment in Belltown with a head full of wonder at how quickly McKean could get involved in a new science project, and doubts as to how all this could solve the case at hand.

Nothing happened for a week or two, but then on a morning that dawned gray and cold, Peyton McKean summoned me to pick him up at his labs and drive to West Seattle to follow a new lead he was exploring. Back on West Marginal Way, McKean pointed me onto Puget Way, which branched off and snaked up the Puget Creek canyon, a damp, fern-bottomed, tree-choked gorge. Up canyon, McKean directed me onto a small moss-covered alleyway that led to a tree-shrouded homesite. The large old house had brick red-painted cedar shingles on its sides, a few of which had dropped loose, a mossy roof with a blue plastic tarp covering a patch where rain had breached the decaying shingles, and a chimney spewing a lazy stream of wood smoke. The hillside yard was home to a jumble of trash, including black plastic garbage bags tossed in the underbrush and overgrown with blackberry brambles. There was a car behind the house without wheels, held up on wooden blocks, and a chaotic pile of alder cordwood next to the porch.

We got out of my car and climbed the mossy concrete steps, but McKean held up a hand and paused to listen. From inside came a slow Native American drumbeat accompanying a male voice singing in a high pitch-a tremulous wail of indecipherable syllables punctuated now and then by unfamiliar consonants: a “tloo” here, a “t’say” there. McKean nodded in thoughtful recognition.

“Lushootseed,” he whispered.

“Lu-what?”

“The local dialect of the Salish language. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I listened a moment, thinking McKean’s definition of beautiful and mine might vary by a bit, but enjoying the song until it ended with three strong drumbeats.

McKean rapped three times on the weather-beaten door and soon we were greeted by an old, gray, short, and almost toothless lady whose round wrinkled face broke into a broad gummy grin at the sight of McKean.

“Ah!” she cried in a tiny but vibrant voice. “You! After so much time. Welcome!”

She ushered us into a dim, cluttered front room, where a dilapidated couch was occupied by two mongrel dogs that appeared too tired to lift their heads let alone bark and, leaning forward in an overstuffed chair whose arms were losing their stuffing, Frank Squalco, holding a round tambourine-like drum in one hand and a leather-headed mallet in the other.

“Hui!” he said, smiling up at my tall companion, who nodded a hello.

“Peyton McKean,” the old woman said. “I was teaching Franky a song to call the salmon home, and instead we called Franky’s old friend.”

She introduced herself to me as Clara Seaweed, then brought us Cokes on ice and offered McKean a comfortable rocking chair near the fireplace, relegating me to the only other seat available, a corner of the couch next to an almost hairless spotted mongrel. I sank into the mangy-smelling cushion with a set of rusty springs croaking.

“So,” said Frank, “what brings you here?”

“I came to discuss red tide poison,” replied McKean firmly.

“I know you did,” said Frank, his smile fading. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking nervously from McKean to Clara as if realizing the only words possible in this room were truthful ones. He started without prompting.

“Shamans used to make a kind of potion from red tide.”

“How was that done?” asked McKean, perking up like a dog on a scent.

“Don’t know.”

“But you know something. I could see it on your face the other day.”

Frank looked at the floor. “Yeah. I know something.” He looked up at McKean and said, “Henry George knows how to make the poison.”

“Perhaps he’s our murderer,” I said, to a resounding silence.

“Naw,” said Frank. “He’s a harmless old geezer, part Muckleshoot and part Suquamish.”

“And all crazy,” interjected Clara. “Stays with folks on charity. Been under this roof a few times.”

“But he’s a real shaman,” said Frank. “Knows the old ways. Told me once, when I was a kid, about making red tide poison. I don’t remember much except you skim the pink foam off the water, then you make it into poison.”

“Where can we find this Henry George?” asked McKean.

“He sometimes stays down along the river in our village.”

“Village?” I said. “I didn’t see any Indian village down there.”

“Our village is gone,” said Squalco. “White folks burned us out in the 1890s-nothin’ left standing. Used to be across the street from where they’re building the new longhouse.”

“Or,” said Clara, “try upriver at Terminal 107. Our village was all along there, for a mile or more by the Duwamish riverbanks. You look for Henry anywhere in there. A lot of bushes and trees and places to camp.”

We left to search for Henry George, but first went to The Spud at Alki Beach on the west side of West Seattle to get some fish and chips and Cokes to go. At Herring’s House Park we ate lunch in the car to avoid a drizzle and then got out to find George. After some searching along trails in the wet undergrowth that paralleled a meandering loop of the main channel, we checked a culvert through which Puget Creek trickled into the Duwamish River and found the old man camped in a lean-to made of blue tarps.

“Poison?” he said bitterly when McKean explained our interest. “I got white man’s poison in me right now. Alcohol. Tide’s running against Duwamish people these days. We had it running our way a few years ago when Clinton signed a piece of paper saying Duwamish was a recognized tribe. Then Bush came along and crossed out every order Clinton made. Just like that. Swept us out like trash. A’yahos knows why.”

“A’yahos?” I asked, getting out a pen and notepad. “Who’s that?”

“The two-headed serpent god, like the river slithering first this way, then that way, with the tide. He brings strong medicine from the sea, but he can take away stuff too, like people’s lives. He’s part of the balance of nature. In, out, back, forth, everything moves in time to the tides. Someday the white man’s tide will go out.”

McKean scowled, impatient to learn what we’d come to find out. “Can you tell us,” he said, stooping to look George in the eye, “how to make red tide poison?”

The old man stared at McKean for a moment, then picked up a stick and poked at a little smoldering fire. “You take two canoes out on a calm day, towing one behind the other. You find some big eddy lines of the pinkest foam on the water. Then you take your paddle and skim the foam and put it in the second canoe until it’s full to the gunnels. Then you paddle somewhere people can’t see, like over on Muddy Island, and you mix the foam with sea water and some pieces of whale blubber.”

“Who can get whale blubber?” I asked.

“Indian people can get lots of stuff,” he said, flashing a gap-toothed grin. “After you soak up enough poison to make the blubber blood-red all the way to the middle, then you put it in a pot and add firewood ashes and heat it till it melts. Then you skim off the grease, and the water’s all dark red now. Then you dry it. It’s a blackish-red powder. Don’t taste like nothing. Don’t smell like nothing. Just poisons folks real good. Lotta work, though. Takes all the foam you can get into a boat to make a few doses. Takes a lotta time.”

“Assuming you’re working alone,” said McKean.

“Shamans always work alone. You don’t ask your mother to help you gather poison. She’d tell everyone.”

McKean questioned George further, but there was little else to be gleaned, especially as the old man sipped wine from a pint flask until his eyelids drooped and he lay down and fell asleep next to his cold fire.

Heading back along the footpath to the parking lot, we found our way blocked by a young Indian man. He was dressed in a long black leather coat, had his black hair braided on each side, wore a scowl on his otherwise handsome dark face, and, ominously, carried a woodsman’s hatchet.

“What you white folks want with Henry George?”

McKean said, “We’re here about a poisoning. You know anything?”

“Wouldn’t tell you if I did. You leave the old man alone.”

McKean sized up the young man. “What’s your name?”

“Won’t tell you that either. Now, you’d best move along.” He stepped aside to let us pass, pointing the way with his hatchet. He tailed us back to the lot, keeping his distance.

Nervous about his intentions, I hurried into my car and quickly fired the engine while McKean got in. As I drove away, the young man stopped beside a shiny black Dodge Ram pickup that hadn’t been there before, conversing sullenly with its occupant, a tall man silhouetted through a tinted windshield. I turned onto West Marginal Way and headed for downtown, slugging down some Coke to sooth a fear-parched throat. “Now what?” I asked.

McKean tapped his own Coke against mine in a mock toast and took a long pull. “Leave nothing but footprints,” he said, “and take nothing but pictures.” He held his cell phone so I could see the image on its screen. He’d snapped a photo of the man beside the pickup. “We’ll ask Frank to tell us who that is. Oh, and a bonus,” he said. “I got their license plate in the shot.”

Peyton McKean is, among other things, the inventor of a couple dozen DNA forensic tests, so he is pretty well connected for a man who doesn’t carry a detective’s badge. As I drove, he called an acquaintance who owed him a favor: Vince Nagumo of the Seattle FBI office. Within minutes, Nagumo had identified the owner of the pickup as Craig Show-alter, age thirty, of White Center. McKean asked him to look into the man’s background and Nagumo promised to get on it right away. I had another sip of Coke and then set it down in its cup holder.

“Do your lips tingle?” I asked McKean.

“I was hoping it was just the chill air,” replied McKean thoughtfully.

Adrenaline ran through me like an electric shock and I pulled to the side of the road. “Have we just been poisoned?” I asked. Without comment, McKean opened his door, put a finger down his throat and vomited. I followed suit, splattering the pavement on my side as well.

“That may be too little prevention, too late,” said McKean. “Depending on the dose. Can you drive, Fin?”

“To the hospital?”

“No. Take us to my labs, quickly.”

I floored the gas and he got on his phone. “Janet, get all the mouse antiserum together. Get it ready for injection into two patients.”

“There’s not enough blood in a mouse-” I began, but McKean interrupted.

“You can dilute antisera vastly. A little may go a long way.”

Panicky minutes followed as my car roared and McKean described the very symptoms I was experiencing. “Depending upon the toxin dose, the sensation of tingling lips progresses to tingling of fingers and toes-” I felt my fingers tingle as I wrenched the steering wheel and skidded onto the ramp of the West Seattle Bridge; my toes tingled as I floored the accelerator and the tires screamed. “Next,” McKean continued as we streaked across the highrise span above the Duwamish River, “you may lose control of your arms and legs-” I struggled to keep in my lane as the Mustang rocketed northbound on the Alaskan Way Viaduct toward downtown. “Some victims experience a sense of floating or vertigo-” My head swam and my vision grew hazy while I fought to keep from driving through the railings and dropping us fifty feet onto the railroad tracks.

“How about going blind?” I gasped. “I’m having trouble seeing the road. It’s all going red.”

McKean thought a moment. “Blindness is not a part of this syndrome. But seeing red is common when people feel extreme rage or fear.”

“I’m feeling both right now.”

“Is your heart pounding?”

“Isn’t yours?”

“Seeing red occurs when blood pumps so rapidly it floods the retina of the eye until one can actually see it. I suggest you keep cool, Fin.”

“Keep-” I tried to protest but gagged on my pounding heartbeat.

My vision grew redder, my hearing roared, and McKean’s voice receded as he said, “Finally, the chest muscles become paralyzed and the victim stops breathing.”

Just two blocks from the lab, my vision went from red to black.

“Wake up, Fin.”

An angelic voice brought me back and I looked around groggily. “Wha-? Where?”

“You’re with me, Fin,” said Kay Erwin, her pretty face coming into focus above me. “You’re at Seattle Public Health Hospital. How do you feel?”

“Better than yesterday,” I said, noticing Peyton McKean leaning over her shoulder, observing me like I was a lab rat.

“Better than two days ago,” he corrected. “You’ve been comatose for forty-eight hours. Took one sip more than I did. The antibodies barely pulled you through.”

“But your vital signs are great this morning,” said Kay. “No permanent damage.”

“How’d I get here?” I asked, struggling to remember missing events.

“You managed to get us to the lab, Fin,” said McKean, “though it was close. Janet met us at the curbside and injected half the antibodies into each of us, then called an ambulance. Kay tended us through the crisis. We’re both well on the way to recovery. My antiserum worked!”

The next day, as Kay signed my release papers, McKean rushed into my room. “I hope you’re up for a drive, Fin. Vince Nagumo just called with news. The police are after Craig Showalter. They raided his home and found a methamphetamine lab. Two of his henchmen dead in a gun battle, but Showalter’s still on the loose. He hightailed it the evening before, according to his girlfriend.”

“So, what next?” I asked.

“Let’s go have a powwow.”

An hour later, sitting in Clara’s living room, McKean showed Frank and Clara his photo of the man by the pickup. Clara gasped, “That’s my nephew, Billy Seaweed. He’s a good kid.”

Frank shook his head. “Got some strange friends, though, like Erik Torvald. For a white guy, he was all right, but still a white man to the bone, because he was using Billy’s tribal rights to get geoduck licenses. Used power gear to siphon up half the sea bottom when he took ’em. Not like we used to do: dig ’em up with a stick and fill in the hole. Still, Torvald was a lot nicer than Billy’s new partner.”

“Craig Showalter?” asked McKean.

“How’d you know that?”

“I’ve got connections. Vince Nagumo, FBI.”

“Billy’s an Internet addict,” said Frank. “A kinda Indian Goth. Obsessed with darkness and apocalyptic stuff. But I don’t think Billy’s a killer.”

“Showalter’s a bad choice of friends,” said McKean. “According to Nagumo, he’s got quite a rap sheet: ex-con, home invasion robbery, drug dealer.”

The scruffy dog came to its place beside me and began nibbling a bare patch at the base of its tail. I withheld my dismay, but the dog abandoned itself to a frenzy of licking and nibbling, raising a stench that nauseated me. I got up, trying to look nonchalant by wandering to a back window while McKean continued his discussion with Frank and Clara. I gazed at the trees overarching the house but then spotted something on a back drive that sent a chill through me: a black Dodge Ram pickup exactly like the one at the park when we were poisoned. Immediately certain it was Craig Showalter’s, I made a small wave to catch McKean’s eye, then pointed out the window.

“What is it, Fin?” he asked without the faintest effort to keep my concern a secret. He came to the window, saw what I had seen, and turned to look expectantly at the people in the room. Clara flinched first.

“Oh dear,” she moaned, her eyes welling with tears. She fanned her throat, and then quit trying to hide the obvious.

“He’s here!” she sobbed. “Billy’s in the basement. He’s been staying here for a couple of days now.” She covered her eyes and wept. “Poor Billy!” she gushed between wet hands.

McKean went to her solicitously. “Don’t be so sure we’re here to get Billy in trouble, Clara. He’s unlikely to be the murderer.”

A voice came from a back doorway. “I’m just as much to blame as Craig Showalter. I made the poison he used.”

We all turned to see Billy Seaweed standing at the top of a stairway that came from the basement. “It’s all gonna come out pretty quick,” he said. “So why hide anymore?”

He stood in the doorway with one hand braced on the jamb, an odd, faraway look on his face, seeming not to hear anyone’s exclamations of concern or questions.

“I was just tryin’ out the old man’s recipe,” he said. “Internet guys were stoked. I thought we’d test it on somebody’s dog or something. But Craig talked me into giving him some. When Erik Torvald turned up dead, I knew I was in deep shit. Show-alter poisoned Torvald so he could take over his business.”

“I figured that,” said McKean.

“Showalter was looking for a way to get out of the meth business; go legitimate.”

“If you can call it legitimate,” I said, “to kill a man for a few geoducks.”

“Lotsa money in geoducks these days.”

“Was it him who tried to kill us at the park?” asked McKean.

Billy nodded. “We was here at Aunt Clara’s the first time you guys came by. We heard what you said to Frank, so we knew you were onto us. Craig jimmied your car door and poisoned your Cokes while I was in the woods yelling at you guys. I didn’t know it till later. I was tryin’ to protect the old man, but Craig was tryin’ to get rid of you for good.”

“We were on the right track,” said McKean, “but unfortunately you were a step ahead of us.”

Billy laughed in an odd, sad way. “I’m still one step ahead.”

McKean’s dark eyebrows knit. “How’s that?”

After a long moment, Billy turned robotically and said, to no one in particular, “C’mon. I’ve got something to show you.”

Frank, McKean, and I followed him down the stairs, leaving Clara weeping in the living room. In the basement day room a TV blared a sequence from Dancing with the Stars. At one end of the room was a door through which a sink and toilet could be seen. Through a second we glimpsed a disheveled bed. In a corner of the day room a man appeared to be sleeping in a reclining chair facing the TV, and my pulse shot up when I realized it must be Craig Showalter. McKean went to him and pressed his fingertips to a carotid artery, then straightened and looked from Frank to Billy to me, shaking his head in the negative.

“I killed him with the poison,” said Billy, “after we got high on some red wine, so he wouldn’t feel it coming on.”

“The police are gonna wanna talk to you,” said Frank.

Billy shook his head slowly. “No, they won’t.”

I said, “I don’t see how you can stop that.”

“I do,” said Billy. “I saved enough poison for me. Gettin’ a little woozy right now.” His eyelids drooped.

McKean called for an ambulance but Billy was nearly gone when it arrived, slumped on the bed in the basement bedroom.

He was on death’s door as Kay Erwin admitted him to Seattle Public Health Hospital, and although McKean had double-checked with Janet about antiserum while we followed the ambulance, Janet only confirmed that the antiserum had been consumed completely in saving him and me. With no other source of antiserum, Billy’s death was a foregone conclusion.

Several days later, McKean and I went to find the old shaman in his lean-to. He came out to the riverbank with us and we stood listening to a bald eagle crying from a snag tree on a little island. Two more flew overhead and the first flapped off to follow them toward the mouth of the Duwamish, under the gray arch of the freeway bridge.

“That’s a fledgling,” said Henry George. “Joining Mom and Dad for his first hunt. Going fishing along Alki Beach. Maybe Billy Seaweed’s spirit is in that eagle.”

“Too bad about Billy,” lamented McKean.

“Billy’s buried now,” said George, “in the white man way. Highpoint Cemetery. Should be over there on Muddy Island, left in a canoe until the birds pick his bones clean. Then you put ’im in a cedarwood box and maybe make a totem. Billy wasn’t famous enough for a totem, I suppose.”

We stood in silent contemplation until the old man said, “Look at Muddy Island over there. White men cut it in half, shrank it, polluted it, gave it a white man’s name, Kellogg Island. Treated it just like they treated the Duwamish people. We’re a little polluted island of Indians in a white man’s world nowadays. New things like freeway bridges and Microsoft computers and Boeing airplanes and Amazon books go right over our heads.”

“I’m sorry,” said McKean.

“Oh, don’t feel sorry,” replied George. “You see, the old ways aren’t all dead yet. The river still snakes past here like A’yahos, slithering this way and that with the tide. Billy proved A’yahos’s medicine is still strong. And President Bush, he took his pen and wiped us Duwamish people off the map, but we’re still here, and now there’s a new president. A’yahos knows better than presidents. The tide will turn again.”

PROMISED TULIPSBY BHARTI KIRCHNER

Wallingford

I am floating between dream and wakefulness in my cozy treehouse nestled high in the canopy of a misty rain forest when he murmurs, “You’re so beautiful with your hair over your face.”

I smile and bid him a Guten morgen. Ulrich-I like the full feel of that German name in my mouth, the melodious lilt, and I definitely appreciate the warm masculine body, its sculpted hardness visible beneath the sheets. He stretches an arm toward me, as if about to say or do something intimate, then closes his eyes and allows his arm to drop. I snuggle up against him, savoring the musky sweet skin, on a morning so different from others. Usually I rise at dawn, slip into my greenhouse, and appraise the overnight progress of the seedlings.

If my mother were to peek in at this instant, she would draw a corner of her sari over her mouth to stifle a scream.

“Sin!” she’d say. “My twenty-five-year-old unmarried girl is living in sin!”

Fortunately, she’s half a world away in India.

And I’m not in my treehouse, but rather in the bedroom of my bungalow in Wallingford, a.k.a. the Garden District of Seattle.

Next door the Labrador retriever barks. Never before have I invited a man home on the first encounter and I’m unnerved by my daring. If my friends could see me now, they’d exclaim in disbelief, A shy thing like you?

The silky, iris-patterned linen sheets are bunched up. He sleeps more messily than I, but for some reason I like the rumpled look. Last night’s coupling, with its wild tumbling and thrusting-I wouldn’t exactly call it lovemaking-has put me into deep communion with my body, and also taken me a bit out of my zone. My lips are dry and puffy from a surfeit of kissing.

The man beneath the blanket turns his blond head, nuzzles the pillow, regards me with his green eyes, then looks at the clock on the lamp stand. “Eight-thirty?” He throws the blanket aside and bolts from the bed. “Ach, I’m supposed to be at work by 7.”

An engineer by training, he works in construction, a choice he’s made to get away from “wallowing in my head.” So, he happily hammers nails all day, fixing roofs, patios, kitchens, and basements. Siegfried, his German shepherd, always goes along.

I point out the bathroom across the hallway. He scrambles in that direction, mumbling to himself in his native tongue. A sliver of sun is visible through a crack in the window draperies. I can tell from its position that the morning has passed its infancy, the galaxy has inched on to a new position, and I’ve already missed a thing or two.

I hoist myself up from my nest. My toes curl in protest at the first touch of the cold hardwood floor. I stoop to retrieve a pair of soft-soled wool slippers from under the nightstand.

Then I look for my clothes. The long-sleeved print dress I wore last evening-a tantrum of wildflowers-lies on the floor, all tangled up with my bra and panties and Ulrich’s charcoal jeans. Crossing the room, I rummage around in the closet, grab a pewter-gray bathrobe, and wrap it around me.

As I fluff the pillows, I hear the sounds of water splashing in the sink, and snatches of a German song. A peek through the draperies reveals a quick change of weather-a bruised, swollen April sky.

The jangling of the telephone startles me. Not fair, this intrusion. If it’s Kareena on the line, I’ll whisper: Met a cool Deutsche last night… We’re just out of bed. I know, I know, but this one is… Look, I’ll call you back later, okay?

Tangles of long hair drown my vision; I reach for the receiver. This is what a plant must feel like when it’s uprooted.

“Palette of Color. Mitra Basu speaking, how can I help you?” Plants are my refuge, my salvation and, fortuitously, my vocation.

“Veen here.” The downturn in her voice doesn’t escape me. Vivacious and well-connected, architect by profession, Veenati is an important part of my social circle. “Have you heard from Kareena recently?”

“Not in a week or so. Why? Has something happened to her?”

“She didn’t show up for coffee this morning. I called her home. Adi said she’s missing.”

“Missing? Since when?”

“Since the night before last. I was just checking to see if she’d contacted you. I’m late for work. Let’s talk in about an hour.”

“Wait-”

Click. Veen has hung up. This is like a dreadful preview of a hyperkinetic action flick. How could Kareena be missing? She’s a people person, well respected in our community for her work with abused women. Although we’re not related, Kareena is my only “family” in this area, not to mention the closest confidante I’ve had since leaving home. A word from my youth, shoee, friends of the heart, hums inside me. I’m badly in need of explanation to keep my imagination from roaring out of control.

A vase of dried eucalyptus sits on the accent table. Kareena had once admired that fragrant arrangement-she adores all objects of beauty. Now she, a beautiful soul, has been reported missing. Wish I’d pressed her to take the risks of her profession more seriously. Don’t use your last name. Take a different route home every day. Always let somebody know where you are.

Ulrich is back. “Everything okay?”

“A friend is missing.” I make the statement official-sounding, while glancing at the window, and hope he won’t probe further. I’m of the opinion that intimacy has its limits. In the cold clarity of the morning, it discomfits me that I, a private person, have already shared this much with him.

Standing so close to me that I can smell the sweat of the night on his skin, he dresses hurriedly. I linger on his muscles. His large fingers fumble with the buttons of his muted blue shirt and a thin lower lip pouts when he struggles to insert a recalcitrant button in its hole. He wiggles into his jeans and throws on his herringbone jacket. Then he draws me closer with an eager expression and cups my face in his hands. I grow as still as I’ve ever been. He gives me a short warm kiss which softens my entire midsection. The hum in the air is like static electricity crackling.

Will I ever see him again? Coming from nowhere, the morbid thought slaps me on the forehead, but I recover quickly and my attention stretches back to Kareena. She could have gone somewhere for a breather from the daily battles she fights on her clients’ behalf.

“I want to stay here with you,” Ulrich says, “but…”

Modulated by his accent, the word want, or vant, hints at delicious possibilities for another time. I look up at his pale-skinned round face, and I really do have to look up, for he’s a good nine inches taller. I struggle with words to convey my feelings, to put a lid on my concerns about Kareena, but stay mute.

“Catch you this evening,” he murmurs.

As we walk to the doorway, our arms around each other, a yen to entice him to stay steals into my consciousness. I smother the impulse. Self-mastery is a trait I’ve inherited from my mother. (She denies herself pleasure of all sorts, refusing chai on a long train journey, and even returns bonus coupons to stores.)

Ulrich gives me one last look followed by another kiss, sustaining the connection, that of a conjurer to a captive audience. As he descends the front steps, his face turns toward my budding tulip patch-an exuberant yellow salutation to the coming spring-and he holds it in sight till the last second. Yellow is Kareena’s color and I am growing these tulips for her. She’ll shout in pleasure when she sees how gorgeous they are.

A Siamese cat from down the block watches from its customary perch atop a low brick wall as Ulrich lopes toward a steel-gray Saab parked across the street.

I shut the door, pace back to the living room, open the draperies. Ulrich’s car is gone. Feeling a nip in the air, I cinch the belt of my bathrobe. Kareena and I bought identical robes at a Nordstrom sale. Despite different sizes-hers a misses medium and mine a petite small-we’re like twins or, at least, sisters.

As I look down at my slippers, they too remind me of Kareena. A domestic violence counselor, she’d bought this pair from the boutique of a client who was a victim of spousal abuse. While I function in a universe of color, bounty, growth, and optimism, Kareena deals with “family disturbances.” Hers is a world of purple bruises, bloodshot gazes, and shattered hearts huddling in a public shelter.

I look out at the long line of windows across the street. A blue-black Volvo SUV speeds by, marring the symmetry and reminding me of Kareena’s husband Adi; a real prize, he is.

I met both Adi (short for Aditya, pronounced Aditta) and Kareena for the first time at a party they hosted. Before long, we began discussing where we were each from. Kareena had been raised in Mumbai and New Delhi, whereas Adi, like me, hailed from the state of West Bengal in Eastern India. Even as I greeted him, “Parichay korte bhalo laglo” (“How nice to meet you,” in our shared Bengali tongue), Adi’s name somehow brought to mind another word, dhurta: crook. The two words sort of rhyme in Bengali. That little fact I suppressed, but I couldn’t ignore the insouciance with which he flicked on his gold cigarette lighter, the jaunty angle of the Marlboro between his lips, the disdainful way he regarded the other guests.

At just over six feet, he looked as out of place in that crowded room as a skyscraper in a valley of mud huts. He obviously believed that the shadow he cast was longer than anyone else’s. He informed me in the first ten minutes that his start-up, Guha Software Services, was in the black; that his ancestors had established major manufacturing plants in India; that he’d recently purchased a deluxe beach cottage on the Olympic Peninsula. Then he walked away without even giving me a chance to say what I did for a living.

A chill has hung between us ever since. “Two strong personalities,” Kareena has maintained over the years, but there’s more to it. I don’t know if Adi has a heart, and if he does, whether Kareena is in it. His smirk says he knows I think he’s not good enough for her, but that he could care less. And, to be honest, they have interests in common. Both have an abiding love for Indian ghazal songs; both excel in table tennis when they can manage the time; both detest green bell pepper in any form. They make what one might call a perfect married couple-young, handsome, successful, socially adept, and with cosmopolitan panache. They look happy together, or, rather, he does. His attention to her is total, as though she’s an objet d’art that has cost him no small sum. He professes to be “furiously, stormily, achingly” in love with her. Every millisecond, I dream of you and you only, he gushed in a birthday card I once saw pinned on a memo board in their kitchen.

Do the purplish contusions I saw on Kareena’s arm attest to Adi’s undying affection? I grit my teeth now as I did then.

Adi doesn’t answer my phone call. I think about ringing another friend, but a peek at the red-eyed digits of the mantle clock stops my hand. Better to postpone the call and shower instead. Better to gauge what actually happened before I get everybody upset.

My nerves are so scrambled that the shower is no more than a surface balm. I towel myself but don’t waste time blow-drying my shoulder-length hair.

In the mirror, my bushy eyebrows stand out against my olive skin. My nose is tiny, like an afterthought. Although I’m fit, healthy, and rosy-cheeked and my hair is long and lustrous, I’m not beautiful by either Indian or American standards. Friends say I have kind eyes. It has never occurred to me to hide the cut mark under my left eye caused by a childhood brush with a low-hanging tree branch. I don’t like to fuss with makeup.

Dressed in a blue terry knit jacket, matching pants, and sneakers, I drift into the kitchen. Breakfast consists of a tall cool glass of water from the filter tap. I slip into my greenhouse and inhale its forest fragrance. The sun sparkles through the barn-style roof and the glass-paneled walls. I hope the fear signals inside me are wrong.

The plants are screaming for moisture. I pick up a sprayer and mist the trays, dispensing life-giving moisture to the germinating seeds and fragile sprouts poking up through the soil. A honeybee hums over a seed flat.

All around me, the life force is triumphant: surely that’ll happen with Kareena too. Whatever the cause, her disappearance will be temporary, explainable, and reversible.

An hour later I call Veen. “According to Adi, Kareena was last seen with a stranger,” she says. “They were at Toute La Soirée around 11 a.m. on Friday. A waitress who’d seen them together reported so to the police. I find it odd that Adi sounded a little jealous but not terribly worried over the news about this strange man.”

I’ve been to that café many times. Kareena, who had no special fidelity to any one place, somehow took a fancy to rendezvousing there with me. Could that man have blindfolded Kareena, put a hand over her mouth, and dragged her into a car?

No, on second thought, that’s impossible. A spirited person like her couldn’t be held captive. Could she have run away with that man because of Adi’s abuse? That’s more likely. I ask Veen what the man looks like.

“Dark, average height, handsome, and well-dressed. He carried a jute bag on his shoulder.”

“Oh, a jhola.” In India some years back, jholas were the fashion among male intellectuals. My scrawny next-door neighbor, who considered himself a man of letters but was actually a film buff, toted books in his jhola. He could often be seen running for the bus with the hefty bag dangling from one shoulder and bumping against his hip. Tagore novels? Chekov’s story collection? Shelley’s poems? The only thing I ever saw him fishing out of the bag was a white box of colorful pastries when he thought no one was looking.

“But 11 is too early for lunch,” I say, “and Kareena never takes a mid-morning break. Why would she be there at such an hour?”

“Don’t know. And what do you make of this? I was passing by Umberto’s last night and spotted Adi with a blonde. They were drinking wine and talking.”

“He seems to be taking this awfully easy.” I remind Veen that Adi has the typical Asian man’s fixation on blond hair. According to Kareena, Adi’s assistant is a neatly put-together blonde stationed at a cubicle outside his office. Veen and I discuss if Adi might be having an affair, but don’t come to any conclusion.

As I hang up, my glance falls on my cell phone, the mute little accessory on the coffee table in front of the couch. Kareena and I get together most Fridays after work, and she often calls me at the last minute. No cause for concern, I assured myself when I left a message on Kareena’s voice mail a few days ago and didn’t hear back.

Silently, I replay my last face-to-face with Kareena at Toute La Soirée. On that afternoon two weeks ago, I was waiting for her at a corner table, perusing the Seattle Globe and reveling in the aromas of lime, ginger, and mint. It filled me with fury to read a half-page story about a woman in India blamed for her village’s crop failures and hunted down as a witch. I would have to share this story with Kareena.

Sensing a rustle in the atmosphere, I looked up. Standing just inside the door, Kareena peered out over the crowd, spotted me, and flashed a smile. She looked casually chic in a maroon pantsuit (maple foliage shade in my vocabulary, Bordeaux in hers) that we’d shopped for together at Nordstrom. Arms swaying long and loose, she weaved her way among the tables. Her left wrist sported a pearl-studded bracelet-cum-watch.

As she drew closer, a woman in chartreuse seated across the aisle from me called out to her. Kareena paused and they exchanged pleasantries. The woman glanced in my direction and asked, “Is that your sister?”

Kareena winked at me. We’d been subjected to the same question countless times, uttered in a similar tone of expectation. Did we really look alike, or had we picked up each other’s mannerisms from spending so much time together? At 5'1", I am shorter than her by three inches, and thinner. Our styles of dressing fall at opposite ends of the fashion spectrum. I glanced down at my powder-blue workaday jumper, a practical watch with a black resin band, and walking flats. My attire didn’t follow current fashion dictates, but it was low-key and comfy, just right for an outdoors person. Fortunately, Seattle accommodated both our styles.

“Kemon acho?” Kareena greeted me with a Bengali pleasantry I’d taught her. “Sorry I’m late. First, I had a gynecologist appointment, then a difficult DV case to wrap up.”

I pushed the newspaper to the far side of the table. DV-domestic violence-is an abbreviation that sounds to me more like a fearsome disease, less like a social thorn. Kareena likes to help women who are in abusive relationships and, as yet, unaware of their legal rights. She was named the top DV counselor in her office and has received recognition for her efforts.

“I really think you’re overworking.” I touched her hand. “Do you really need the money? Do you need to shop so much?”

She ran her fingers over her bracelet. “You don’t resent my spending, do you?”

I shook my head, then stopped to ruminate. Well, in truth, there have been times. She likes to shop at Nordstrom, Restoration Hardware, and Williams-Sonoma, places that are beyond my means, but she insists on having my company. I have an eye for quality and she values that.

I got back to the subject at hand. “Was today’s case one from our community, another hush-hush?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” She mimicked a British accent: “A ‘family matter, a kitchen accident.’” She paused. The waiter was hovering by her shoulder. We placed our orders.

Not for the first time, I agonized over the threats Kareena faces due to the nature of her job. Signs have been plentiful.

She is frequently called a man hater and, at least once in the last month, has been followed home from work. The spouse of one client even went so far as to publicly question her sexual orientation.

“You’re the only one I trust enough to talk about this case,” Kareena continued. “She’s an H-4 visa holder, so scared that she couldn’t even string together a few coherent sentences. I spoke a little Punjabi with her, which loosened her up. Still, it took awhile to draw out her story. Her husband beats her regularly.”

I appraised Kareena’s face. How she could absorb the despair of so many traumatized souls? Listen to songs that don’t finish playing? Lately, her lipstick color had gone from her standard safe pink to a risky red. Brown circles under her eyes spoke of fatigue or, perhaps, stress, and I suspected the brighter lip color was intended to redirect a viewer’s attention.

“Did you see bruises on her?” I asked and watched her carefully.

It was still so vivid in my mind, Kareena’s last cocktail party a few weeks before and the freshly swollen blue-black marks on her upper arm. In an unguarded moment, her paisley Kashmiri shawl had slid off her shoulders. Through the billowy sheer sleeves of her tan silk top, I glimpsed dark blue, almost black finger marks on an otherwise smooth arm. The swelling extended over a large area, causing me to nearly shriek. Adi must have attacked her. Upon realizing that I’d noticed, she glanced down and repositioned the shawl. Just then, a male friend approached, asked her to dance, took her arm, and they floated away.

“Yes, I did see bruises on her forehead,” now Kareena replied. “She’d be in worse trouble if her husband suspected she was out looking for help.”

“The law is on her side, isn’t it?” I allowed a pause. “You don’t have problems at home, by any chance, do you?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Well, I happened to notice bruises on your arm at your last party. Who was it?”

I noticed the mauve of shame spreading on her face. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Sorry to barge into your private matters, but if you ever feel like talking-”

Our orders came. Mine was a ginger iced tea and hers an elixir of coconut juice and almond milk. She raised her chin and lifted her glass to clink with mine, her way of accepting my apology.

I took a sip from my beverage; she drained hers with such hurried gulps that I doubted she fully appreciated the flavors. Typical Kareena; appearances must be maintained. Both of us looked out through the window and took in the sky-colored Ship Canal where a fishing vessel was working its way to the dry docks that lined the north shore of Lake Union. Sooner or later, I thought, I’d have to find out the truth about those bruises.

When the silver waves died down in the canal, Kareena spoke again: “But enough of this depressing stuff! How did things go for you today?”

I filled her in on the most interesting part of my day: consulting with a paraplegic homeowner. “Believe it or not,” I said, “the guy wants to do all the weeding and watering himself. It’ll be a challenge, but I’ll design a garden to suit his requirements.”

“You live such a sane life and you have such a healthy glow on your face. Just listening to you, I seem to siphon off some of it. ” She gave me a smile. “Come on, Mitra. Let me buy you another drink.”

She signaled the waiter. The room was emptier now, the sounds hushed, and a genial breeze blew through a half-open window. We ordered a second round.

“Before the alarm went off this morning,” she said after a while, “I got a call from my nephew in New Delhi. He’s seven.”

“Does he want you to visit him?”

She nodded and mashed her napkin into a ball. I guessed she was undergoing one of those periodic episodes of homesickness for India, the country we’d both left behind. I, too, experience the same longing to visit people missing from my life. Whereas she can afford to go back every year, I can’t.

I digressed from this aching topic to a lighter one by pointing out a cartoon clip peeking out from under the glass cover of our table. A tiny boy, craning his neck up, is saying to his glowering father, Do I dare ask you what day of the week it is before you’ve had your double tall skinny?

That got a spontaneous laugh from Kareena which, in turn, raised my spirits. I didn’t have a chance to discuss the newspaper story with her. Well, the next time.

I go back to my living room. The airy tranquility has been transformed into a murky emptiness, as though a huge piece of familiar furniture has been cleared out but not replaced. I have an urge to confide in someone, but who could that be? The only person I can think of is the one who’s gone away.

I wander into the kitchen, open and close the cupboard, rearrange items in the refrigerator, and fill the tea kettle with water. With a cup of Assam tea and a slice of multigrain toast, I sit at the round table. Bananas protrude from a sunny ceramic bowl within arm’s reach. I fiddle with my iPod.

The tea tempers to lukewarm, the toast becomes dense, and the bananas remain untouched. It’s difficult for me to stomach much food in the morning, and this news has squelched whatever hunger I might otherwise have. I stare at the Trees Are Not Trivial poster on the sea-blue wall. Even the cushioned chair doesn’t feel cozy. I itch all over.

Could someone have murdered her?

I peer out through the western window. The Olympic Mountains appear stable, blue, and timeless. Somehow I doubt that Kareena could be the victim of a lethal crime.

How can I help find her? My career focus in art and landscape design-the study of the physiology of new growth, awareness of color and light, and harmony of arrangements-hasn’t prepared me to deal with a situation like this.

I walk over to my side yard. Blue bells are pushing up from the winter-hardened ground. I notice a slug, pick it up with a leaf, and deposit it on a safe spot. Once again, spring season is in the balmy air. I look up to the sky, out of a gardener’s propensity to check the weather. It helps me see beyond the immediate.

Back to the living room, I sit at my desk, grab a notepad, and begin listing friends and acquaintances who I can call upon. The page fills speedily. The Indian population in the Puget Sound area, described recently by the Seattle Globe in a feature story as a “model” community, is some twenty-five thousand strong. The community’s academic and professional accomplishments are “as lofty as Mount Rainier,” the same article proclaimed. I’m troubled by such laudatory phrases, aware that we have our fair share of warts and blemishes. According to Kareena, the rate of domestic violence among our dignified doctors, elite engineers, and high-powered fund-raisers equals, perhaps even exceeds, the national average.

I consult my watch. It is 10 o’clock, an hour when everyone’s up and about, when the disappointments of the day haven’t dulled one’s spirits. This’ll be a good time to ring Adi and draw him out. He loves to talk about himself in his Oxford-accented, popcorn-popping speech, which will give me a chance to tease information out of him, however distasteful the process might be, however potentially dangerous. Kareena is my best friend. When we’re together, I’m fully present and my voice is at its freest. Day turns into twilight as we relax over drinks, gabbing, laughing, and trading opinions, oblivious to the time. We don’t parse our friendship. It just is. We scatter the gems of our hours freely, then retrieve them richer in value.

With the phone to my ear, I pace back and forth in front of my living room window. Adi, at the other end, is ignoring the ringing.

The Emperor comes to focus in my mind-an impeccable suit, sockless feet (part of his fashion statement), and eyes red-rimmed with exasperation at some luckless underling behind on a project or the changeable Seattle sky. Adi takes any potential irritant personally. He snatches a ringing phone from its cradle at the last possible moment. The world can wait. It always does for Adi Guha.

The stand-up calendar on the mantel nags me about tomorrow’s deadline for a newspaper gardening column. Yet, as I pace the cold floor once again, the phone glued to my ear, it becomes clear that such an assignment is no longer a high priority for me. My missing friend is my main focus now. All else has faded into the background.

Adi comes on the line, gasps when he recognizes my voice. I mention Veen’s call, then get straight to the point. “What time did you get home that night?”

“Your core competency is gardening, Mitra. I’m not saying it’s menial labor, but neither is it nuclear physics or private investigation. Go back to your garden and leave this situation in more competent hands, like mine.”

I ignore the insult. “Do the police have any clues? Did they come to the house?”

“I gave them a photo which they looked at, then began to pepper me with questions. They gave me a song and dance about how many people disappear daily from the city. They assigned a laid-back cop, the only one they could spare. It’s obvious they’re not interested unless it’s a blond heiress and television cameras are everywhere.”

“What about the stranger she met at Soirée?”

“I’m not worried about that. She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself.”

“Have you talked to her gynecologist?”

Adi mumbles a no.

“Do you think she needed a break and decided to sneak away for a few days? There have been times, like at your birthday party, when she looked like she could use a break.”

“Everything is fine between us, Mitra, just fine.”

Everything’s fine? What a laugh. About a year ago, Kareena and I were spending an evening at Soirée when a hugely pregnant woman waddled past our table. I shifted my chair to let her pass. Kareena put her fork down and gazed at the woman.

In a teasing tone I asked, “Could that be you?”

“Adi doesn’t want kids.” She returned to her voluptuous plum-almond tart.

Now I hear a staccato rumbling in the background, a car cruising. Adi has nerve telling me everything was fine with Kareena. Kareena’s everything and Adi’s everything are obviously not the same.

“Did you check her closet?” I now ask.

“Looks like her clothes are all there.”

Would he even recognize her alligator handbag, jeweled mules, flowing shawls she favored over the structured feel of a coat, or the new Camellia scarf? Would he be able to detect the nuance of her perfume? I believe he only remembers the superficial facts of her presence.

“Did you go to the safety deposit box to see if her passport is there?”

“No, yesterday I had to chair a three-hour offsite meeting. The market isn’t as calm as it was last year. We need to get our cash-burn rate under control. It may be necessary to dehire some people.”

I almost choke at the expression he uses for firing an employee. Then he begins to ramble on about market share, competitive disadvantage, and going public to raise new capital. In short order, his business-speak begins to grate on me.

I interrupt him by saying, “This is a life-and-death situation, Adi.”

“It sure is,” he replies. “This morning around 5 I got a call from the police. They asked me to go see a body at the morgue.”

My vision blurs. “What?”

“A woman’s body was found in Lake Washington. It wasn’t her.”

“Oh my God!” I shake my head. “Must have been difficult for you. I don’t know what I’d do if…” I get a grip on myself. “Could we meet this morning? Put our heads together? The earlier the better. We need to mobilize our community. I’ll be happy to drop by your office.”

“Hold on now, Mitra. I don’t want even my friends to get wind of this, never mind the whole community. You, of all people, should know how things get blown out of proportion when the rumor mill cranks up.”

I sag on the couch. Losing face with his Indian peers is more important to him than seeking help in finding his wife. In a way, I get it. Our community is small. We have at most two degrees of separation between people, instead of the hypothetical six nationwide. Word spreads quickly and rumor insinuates itself in every chit-chat. Still, how silly, how counterproductive Adi’s pride seems in this dark situation.

And that makes him more of a suspect.

There are times when I think Adi is still a misbehaving adolescent who needs his behind kicked. According to Ka-reena, he was an only son. Growing up, he had intelligence, if not good behavior, and bagged many academic honors. His mother spoiled him. Even on the day he punched a sickly classmate at school, she treated him to homemade besan laddoos.

Finally, Adi suggests meeting at Soirée at 7 p.m.

How empty the place will seem if I go back there without Kareena. But I don’t want to risk a change with Adi. It’ll give him an excuse to weasel out of our meeting.

I ponder why he’s so difficult. Rumor has it that his family in New Delhi disowned him when he married Kareena against their wishes. Not only that, his uncle sabotaged his effort to obtain a coveted position with an electronics firm by taking the job himself. Adi endured that type of humiliation for a year before giving up. Eight years ago, he and his new bride left India and flew to the opposite side of the world, as far away from his family as he could possibly go.

He landed in Seattle, where he found a plethora of opportunities and no one to thwart his monstrous ambitions. Before long, he formed his own software outfit. There was a price to be paid: long hours, constant travel, and a scarred heart. In spite of this, he persisted and ultimately succeeded. These days he flies frequently to India on business, and rings his family from his hotel room, but his mother will not take his call.

What is Adi doing to locate the woman on whose behalf he sacrificed the love of his family?

Would he really show up at Soirée this evening?

I walk over to my home office and dial Kareena’s office number. Once transferred to the private line of the agency director, I leave her a message to get back to me a.s.a.p.

Then I wander into the bedroom where I confront the unmade bed, sheets wavy like desire building to a crescendo. Herr Ulrich floats in my mind, a man who appears so strong and unyielding, but who turns out to be tender and pliant. Right now, his taut body is pushing, lifting, and stooping in the brown-gray jumble of a construction site, the angles of his face accentuated by the strain. Did he stop for a split second, stare out into the distance, and reexperience my lips, my skin, my being?

It’s a little too soon to get moony about a man, friends would surely advise me.

Just picturing Ulrich, however, warms my body. Not just the electric tingling of sex, but a kind of communion.

Muted piano music floats from the Tudor across the street. As I reach for the phone with an eager hand, my gaze falls on the bedside table. The pad of Post-it notes is undisturbed. Ulrich hasn’t jotted down his phone number or his last name. He promised he would, but he didn’t.

My dreamy interlude is sharply broken. With a drab taste in my mouth, I realize that a promise is an illusion and so is “next time.” It’s similar to hoping that your parents will never die, your friends will forever be around you, and your tulips will always sprout back the next year. This morning I’ve learned how untrue my assumptions can be.

These days I feel like I’m living in a ghost town. I don’t know where to go, who to see, what to do next, or even what to believe. The last five days have coalesced into an endless dreary road. I’ve reached an impasse in my search for Kareena. Adi cancelled our meeting at Soirée at the last minute. From my repeated phone calls to him, I’ve gathered that Kareena’s passport is missing, an indication she’s left deliberately. It strikes me as odd that Adi seems so blithe about her being gone for so long. He even had the nerve to joke about it.

“You know what? I think she’s flown somewhere for an impromptu vacation. She’s punishing me for not taking her to Acapulco last February. Don’t worry. She’ll get a big scolding from me when she gets back.”

Where might she have gone?

I’ve contacted the police and given them an account of the bruises I saw on Kareena’s arm. Detective Yoshihama assured me he’d do what was necessary and gave me his cell phone number. This morning, I buzz him again, but he doesn’t return my call. How high is this case on his priority list? To him, Kareena is no more than a computer profile of another lost soul, yet another Have you seen me? poster to be printed, whereas to me and our mutual friends she’s a person of importance.

I’m not ready to give up. I call the Washington State Patrol’s Missing Persons Unit, but am advised to wait thirty days.

I miss Ulrich too, even though he’s practically a stranger. Everywhere I go, I see his broad face, neat haircut, wary green eyes. He appeared in my life about the time Kareena went missing. I haven’t heard from him since he left my bed that fateful morning.

I have no choice but to get on with my life, except that the daily duties I took on happily before have become meaningless. I put off grocery shopping, misplace my car keys, and ignore e-mails from the library warning that three books are overdue.

Late this morning, I check the tulip patch. The buds are still closed and a trifle wan, despite the fact that the soil, sun, and temperature are just ideal for them to bloom, and there are still dewdrops hanging from them. Whatever the connection might be, I can’t help but think about Kareena. Why didn’t she confide in me?

What concerns me most is the nothingness, the no-answer bit, the feeling that the answer is beyond my reach.

I decide to make a trip to Toute La Soirée this evening. A voice inside has been nagging me to do just that, not to mention I have a taste for their kefir-berry cocktail. Kareena confided not long ago that she was saving the pricey Riesling for the next special occasion. Will her wish ever be fulfilled?

The café is located on busy 34th Street. To my surprise, I find a parking place only a block away. The air is humid as I walk up to the entrance. The stars are all out. I check my watch. Despite the popular spot’s catchy name-meaning “all evening”-it closes at 9 p.m., less than an hour from now.

Inside, the café pulses with upbeat, after-work chumminess. It is nearly full. A middle-aged man fixes me with an appraising look over a foamy pint of ale. I ignore him and survey the interior. The décor has changed since my last visit. The smart black walls sport a collection of hand fans. Made of lace and bamboo, they’re exquisitely pleated. The new ambience also includes a wooden rack glittering with slick magazines and jute bags of coffee beans propped against a wall. I don’t find this makeover comforting.

As I thread my way through, a speck of tension building inside me, I overhear snatches of a debate on human cloning. Ordinarily, I would slow down for a little free education, but right now my attention is focused on finding an empty seat.

The table Kareena and I usually try for is taken; how could it be otherwise at this prime hour? I was half hoping for a minor miracle, but finding a parking spot must have filled my evening quota. “Our” table is occupied by a couple whose heads are bent over an outsize slice of strawberry shortcake. Right now, I find even the thought of such sugary excess revolting. And the blood-red strawberry juice frightening.

Something about the couple nudges me and I give them a second look. Oh no, it’s Adi and a blonde. He looks slightly upset. The overhead light shines over his copper complexion. He’s dressed in a crewneck polo shirt in an unflattering rust shade-he doesn’t have Kareena’s color sense. The blonde wears crystal-accented chandelier earrings that graze her shoulders. I wouldn’t bear the weight of such long earrings except on a special occasion. Or is this a special occasion for them?

Their presence so rattles me that I decide to leave. Besides, Adi might notice me and complain I’m spying on him.

On the way to the door, I knock over a chair, which I put back in its place. Then I almost collide head-on with an Indian man who has just entered the shop. Although he’s young, dark, and devastatingly handsome, somehow I know he’s not my type. Clad smartly in a silver woolen vest, this prince heads straight for the take-out counter. His impressive carriage and smoldering eyes have caused a stir among women seated nearby. A redhead tries to catch his glance. He touches the jute bag, an Indian-style jhola, dangling from his shoulder. Even Adi stares at him.

I slip out the door, too drained to absorb anything further, pause on the sidewalk, and take several deep breaths to cleanse my head. Please, Goddess Durga, no more intrigues this evening.

It’s starting to drizzle, but the streets are mercifully clear. Within minutes, I pull into my garage and step out of my Honda. As I close the garage door, I flash on the enchanting prince from the café. Didn’t Veen mention that Kareena was last sighted with a jhola-carrier at that very place?

A jolt of adrenaline skips through my body. Why couldn’t I have been more alert? Stuck around longer to scrutinize another potential suspect and his belongings?

Should I drive back?

I check my watch: 9 p.m. Soirée has just closed.

Filled with nervous excitement, I enter my house. Neither a hot shower nor a mug of holy basil tea tempers the thought racing through my head: what really happened to Kareena?

In a need to restore my spirit, I retire early. As I lie in bed, I can’t help but run through the day’s events, foremost among them being Adi’s public appearance with a blonde. Suspicions about him blow in my mind like a pile of dry leaves in the wind. Eventually, the atmosphere settles; my mind clears.

I’m worrying too much about Kareena. Worry is a sand castle. It has no foundation.

Could my assumptions about Adi be wrong as well?

Assumptions, like appearances, can deceive, I tell myself. Adi’s cheerful façade and his lack of concern about his wife’s unexplained absence just might be more sand-castle building on my part. I’m reading the worst in what might be a perfectly plausible and innocent situation.

You’ve been acting silly, Mitra, pure silly. You have no reason to fret. Pull your covers snug and get yourself a restful sleep. All will be well. The morning will come, the sun will be out, and Kareena will return, her bright smile intact, as surely as the swing of seasons.

I awake refreshed and invigorated. Last night’s drizzle has evaporated, leaving behind a bright morning. The sun streams through a wide gap in the window draperies. A spider is building a nest outside the window, intricate but fragile.

I have the perfect task to usher in this new day. I shall tend to Kareena’s tulip patch. The plants will soon release their full yellow blossoms as emblems of beauty and renewal and she’ll cradle a bunch lovingly in her arm.

I don my gardening clothes-faded jeans and a worn black cardigan-gather my tools, and hurry outside. The morning light shines brilliantly on my front flower patch. An errant branch of camellia needs to be pruned. Its shadow falls over the tulips. I step in closer to inspect, an ache in my belly. All the tulip buds are shriveled and brown, as though singed by blight, their dried stalks drooping over to return to brown earth.

Why are they dying on me so soon? I fall to my knees and caress the tulip plants, lifting them up and squeezing their brittle stalks and wilted leaves. I roll each wizened bud between my fingers, but don’t find a single one with any hope.

Holding a broken stem in my grasp, I think of Kareena, so vibrant, so full of life, and brood about the promise of these tulips.

GOLDEN GARDENSBY SEPHAN MAGCOSTA

Ballard

Dolores leaned forward against the back of the taxi driver’s seat, eased her choke hold on the man’s throat, and pressed the gun barrel harder into the side of his head. “If it helps,” she said, “think of me as a messenger from God.” In the rearview mirror, she watched a tear trickle from the driver’s bruised and swollen right eye. “Tell me, Mister…” Dolores glanced at the Yellow Cab ID tag on the dash. “Farah, is it?”

“F-Farah.”

“Farah. Almost sounds Spanish. How do you say your first name?”

“Ab-Abdelaziz.”

“Well, that’s a mouthful.”

“It means-”

“What?”

“Servant of G-God.” He bit the inside of his mouth to stop stuttering. “It means Servant of God.”

“Really. Well, that’s why you’re here, Abdelaziz-serving God… God’s messenger, anyway.” Dolores appraised his raw head wound from the pistol-whipping she’d given him. “You’re still bleeding. Keep both hands on the wheel.” She let go of his throat for a moment and fished a tissue from her parka.

“I have to use restroom. My-”

“Shh.” She dabbed at the blood coagulating on his scalp. “It’ll be light soon; just have to wait now, enjoy the view. Look, you can see the Olympics out there.”

“Please-” Abdelaziz flinched, started to shake. “Take all money, I already say.”

“Money?” Dolores shook her head. “You think I’d be wandering the streets during Easter vigil looking for money? I was looking for you, my friend, a man with a turban.”

He turned, trying to look at her. “But-” She gave him a hard rap on the forehead with the butt of her pistol.

“I told you, quiet. Now you’re bleeding again. And I’m out of tissues.” She reapplied the choke hold on his throat. “You did a good job not getting stuck in the sand. I wasn’t sure we’d make it this far.” Dolores glanced over her shoulder. “Can’t see us from the parking lot. That’s good. You’re a great driver for such a small man; I almost thought a boy was driving when you pulled over to pick me up.” Her eyes drifted to the gun she held to his head-his blood trickling onto the barrel. “My son’s a good driver too… that’s what he did over there.” She looked away, cheeks swelling as if she was going to vomit.

Abdelaziz started coughing and sputtering. “Too strong-you squeeze too much.”

“You think I’m strong? That’s funny. I’m dying. And I wasn’t strong enough to protect…” She closed her eyes and ground the barrel deeper into the side of his head.

Abdelaziz whispered, “Please…”

Dolores cocked her head, listening; there-the approaching rumble of a southbound locomotive. “I forgot trains come through here,” she said. “We took the bus here once, just for the ride. I told Roberto we’d go someplace special for his fifth birthday, a place with so much sand that they call it Golden Gardens. He thought I meant Mexico and he’d get to meet his abuela. But I couldn’t afford that.” Her eyes began filling with tears. “So we packed lunch; he had his little blue truck. We walked right through here, right along the beach. Mamí, mamí, look at the train, he was so excited.” She gazed at a distant, moonlit embankment leading to the tracks.

“I have two child-”

She whipped the gun across his head. “I said QUIET! Now look, your turban’s all ruined.”

“Ku… faya.”

“What?”

“Not t-turban.” Abdelaziz thought his voice was broken-he hardly recognized it. “Kufaya. It is called kufaya.”

“Well, it looks like a turban.”

“But it is not-”

“It doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

“Why?” he asked.

“That’s what I want to know-why? He was so young! Ay, mi’jo. He was on foot, just walking across a street…”

Abdelaziz groaned and felt at the side of his head.

“Don’t even think about moving!” She squeezed his throat harder, her grip lifting his eyes to the rearview mirror.

“Look at me,” she said. “Does my face look strong?”

Abdelaziz stared into the mirror as Dolores pulled back the hood of her parka, gasping at the sight of her sunken, bloodshot eyes, faded teardrop tattoo, disheveled cinnamon hair curling across the ash smudged on her forehead. He blinked and envisioned a card from the special deck another driver had spread across the hood of his cab one night. The card showed a woman in white sitting up in bed, face buried in her hands, nine swords hanging on the wall. A greater sadness the world has never known. That’s what Abdelaziz remembered the driver saying; that the cards predict the future and he’d better drive safe, he could die behind the wheel. No, no, Abdelaziz had responded, they’re from Shaitan, the Great Deceiver.

Abdelaziz squirmed. He had to urinate so badly. He wanted to reach down, pinch his member, ease the discomfort, the shame, in front of this woman who overpowered him and dared to call herself a messenger from God! Mocking the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him). As if Allah would ever choose a woman as messenger!

A gull wheeled across the water, pale sliver against the gray marble Olympics. He thought of Mogadishu, endless golden sand, surf all the way from India, pounding the weary shoulder of East Africa. He thought of his mother and wept, tears falling on his captor’s hand and wrist.

The woman was mad, caring not that he was no Arab or Iraqi, or even from that part of the world. If only he could explain…

“Is that a prayer you’re mumbling?” asked Dolores. She had been lost in a waking dream, adrift above Baghdad on a magic carpet, searching for her son. But what she found was the glorious city of an age forgotten. The great Golden Gate Palace… an emerald dome… minaret voices across the Tigris, calling the faithful to morning prayer… a causeway with horsemen and their lances… dissolving into an American platoon on a potholed street two blocks from the Green Zone, Roberto’s desert camouflage boot descending onto the trigger of a homemade bomb. A blinding flash, bloody and terrible, quartering his body like God’s avenging sword.

“Are you praying, Abdelaziz?”

“I pray, yes.”

“That’s good,” she whispered. “Even to a different God.”

“But our God is the-oow!”

Dolores hit him again, then wiped the gun on his shoulder. “It’s good to pray,” she said softly. “That’s all I’ve been doing. Got out in December, eight years locked up in Purdy. The doctor said the malignancy’s too advanced, I have less than six months. I couldn’t bear to tell Roberto, I’m all he had. I was going to wait till June, he had leave then…”

Was she was possessed by a djinn, Abdelaziz wondered, or could she even be one herself, a creature of smokeless fire, created by Allah? If she was a djinn, could she not, then, be bound to an object, as Süleyman once did, binding a great djinn to an oil lamp? But bind her how, and to what?

He could feel wind through the back window she’d cracked open. He should have known that no woman would be alone on this night, vigil of the resurrection of the last prophet before Mohammed (peace and blessing be upon him). But business had been slow, and he’d thought little of the hooded emptiness in her eyes when she’d asked to be taken to Golden Gardens. It wasn’t far from where he’d picked her up, the restaurant whose name someone once told him meant The Way in the language of Mexico.

“You’re mumbling again,” Dolores said. “No matter, the sun’s rising, it’s time for you to choose. You understand?”

“N-no.”

“What I mean, Mr. Farah, is that you choose when to pull the trigger. And, yes, you will pull it, not me. Now do you understand?”

“No.”

“Give me your right hand… Ah-ah, slowly.”

Abdelaziz felt her fingers tighten on his throat as she placed the gun in his right hand, wrapping her hand around his. Her iron grip made him wonder if the teardrop tattoo conferred power from Shaitan, the Great Adversary. She moved their hands till the pistol pressed against his right temple.

“Yes, like that,” he heard her say. “Now, you choose when,” she said. “Just calm your thoughts. Relax, and when you’re ready, just slowly make a fist.”

“Suicide is s-sin,” he said. “Only Allah may t-take life. I will have to repeat this on Ju-Judgment Day. Please, no.”

“Don’t be afraid, this is God’s will. I’ll help you. We’ll do it together.”

“No.” Abdelaziz watched a discarded holiday balloon bounce along the beach in the gathering light, the Easter bunny cartwheeling across tendrils of seaweed. The blasphemy of suicide! But no, she forces me… doesn’t she? Did I not struggle? Was I not beaten senseless? And does not the Qur’an say that if we kill, unless it be for murder or a just… NO! She sees this as a just killing, for the death of her son!

“So-Somali,” he said.

“Shh. No more talk.”

“I-I am shamed, I have soiled…”

“It’s all right. Anyone can have an accident…”

“Will it hurt?”

“You’ll see light,” she said.

“Light?” He was floating high above the cab; looking down, he could see right through himself. The cards were right, he was going to die behind the wheel.

Then across golden sand, streaking through the pale dawn, a rainbow rush of flashing lights. Abdelaziz felt ushered to the Garden gates.

“Do you know the Bible?” Dolores whispered.

“I know that which was written before Jesus.”

“Then you understand an eye for an eye.”

“Yes-”

“And a vengeful God.”

“Please!”

Dolores saw red and blue lights strobe in the mirror. She heard a door opening, frantic shouts, footsteps stumbling in the sand as their hands closed, voices joining, blasted apart by the gunshot, “God forgive me.”

THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSEBY ROBERT LOPRESTI

Fremont

Let me do the talking, says Petey.

Who’s asking? says Fox.

Nobody yet. But they will. We gotta be ready.

No offense, dear boy, says Strabo. But you are the worst possible spokesperson. You’re like Cassandra, of ancient legend. He warned and warned, but no one believed a word he said.

Was he crazy too? asks Fox.

Shut up, says Petey. Just shut up.

It’s barely morning, the sun peeking from behind the clouds over Wallingford. Too early to be up, but the playground on Linden wasn’t all that cozy, especially when the mist turned to drizzle.

Besides, fresh memories made sleep impossible.

I was up all freaking night, says Fox. Waiting for the Gestapo to show up and drag us away.

I’m too old to dodge federales, says Strabo.

But nobody found us, says Petey. Now it’s an easy walk down the hill and out of enemy territory.

People were already leaving their houses and apartment buildings, getting into cars, or strolling toward the neighborhood center.

See all the worker ants, says Strabo. Starting their pleasant peasant days, serving their futile lords.

A bell jingles and Petey dodges as a bicyclist charges down the hill.

Bastard, says Fox. Don’t pedestrians have the right of way on the freaking sidewalk anymore?

He’s a wheeler-dealer, says Strabo. Hurrying to fuel himself on lattes and sushi before making his million-dollar deals. We, on the other hand, contribute nothing. We do not toil, neither do we sin. Society wouldn’t care if we were wiped off the face of the earth by our bicycling betters.

Don’t say that, says Petey, thinking of last night.

The biker parks his flashy white hybrid in front of a coffee shop.

See that? asks Fox.

Yeah, says Petey. Starbucks. Typical.

Get over that, will you? I meant Lance Armstrong there didn’t lock up.

I didn’t see that, says Petey.

You saw, lad, but you didn’t observe, says Strabo. The lock dangles helpless from the rear rack. The ship is unanchored, gentlemen. Shall we be pirates?

I dunno, says Petey.

I do, says Fox. I know a shop near Pioneer Square where they’d pay cash for that bike, no questions asked.

That’s the point, says Petey, shivering. We’re out of our territory.

Out of this city is where we need to be, says Strabo. With the sugar from Sugarman and the ransom from the bicycle we could journey to Everett or Tacoma. Stay incognito until this blows over.

It’s not gonna blow over, says Petey. That woman is dead. The cops won’t stop looking till they pin a tail on somebody.

There’s a cop by the Greek joint, says Fox. Let’s hang a left.

Thirty-Fifth Street is quieter.

Condos everywhere, says Fox. When did this neighborhood fill up with freaking condos?

Why can’t you swear like a normal person? asks Strabo.

Cause I was raised right.

Oh please, Foxy. You were raised by wolves, like Romulus and Rebus.

All these people going by, says Petey. They don’t even see us.

If they did, they’d call the fuzz.

And why not? asks Strabo. What purpose does the constabulary serve if not to protect good citizens from homeless riffraff?

They didn’t protect the girl last night, says Petey.

Something we have in common, dear boy.

We couldn’t stop them, says Petey. By the time we knew what was going on, it was too late.

You said they were up to no good, lad. You could have done something.

You didn’t either.

I’m not the hero, says Strabo. Just an old, old man.

You were scared, says Fox.

Damn right I was, says Petey. You saw Widmark’s face.

Widmark?

The blond one. He looked like Richard Widmark used to. And the dark one with the big puppy eyes looked like Sal Mineo.

You and your cinema worship, says Strabo. What a waste of brain cells.

Sounds like you’re queer for the shortie, says Fox.

I’m not… Damn! We gotta turn around. I’m not going under that bridge.

You’re a real head case, says Fox. Scared of cops, scared of bridges, scared of Starbucks.

I’m not scared of them. I just hate them.

A red PT Cruiser squeezes into a parking space, and a family of tourists pops out, covering their cameras with raincoats and umbrellas, all talking at once.

The daddy comes up, smiling.

Excuse me, is this where they keep the troll?

No, says Strabo. It’s where they keep the minotaur.

Shut up, mutters Petey. The troll’s under the black bridge over there.

That’s why he turned around, says Fox. Scared of the big bad troll.

The daddy frowns. I thought it was the Fremont troll. With a real Volkswagen in its hand?

That’s the one, says Petey.

But that’s the Aurora Bridge. Why isn’t it under the Fremont Bridge over there?

What do we look like, asks Fox, the freaking road department?

Daddy jerks back, as if he just got a better look-or smell. Let’s go, kids. The troll’s over here.

I hate this place, says Petey. What kind of sick mind would put a giant troll statue under a bridge?

Someone who doesn’t have much experience with monsters, says Strabo. There are enough real ones around without encouraging them with monuments.

Widmark and Mineo, says Petey. They were real ones.

Yeah, says Fox. You oughta tell the tourists what the movie stars did to their sister.

That girl was no tourist.

A deduction! How can you tell, maestro?

Fox picked up her address book, remember? All local names and numbers.

But she didn’t put her own name in it, says Fox. That was dumb.

I guess she knew where she lived.

Har har, says Fox. Petey the comic.

We should have helped her, says Strabo.

We couldn’t, says Petey.

In the long eye of the law, dear boy, silence breeds consent.

Now you’re a freaking attorney, says Fox. Oh crap. Look what’s around the corner.

Cops have gathered in force, surrounding the traffic island on 34th Street.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear, says Strabo. All the king’s prowl cars and all the king’s men.

They found her, says Petey.

She wasn’t exactly hidden, says Fox. Just lying behind the gray zombies.

Don’t be ignorant, says Strabo. That’s another of Fremont’s fine artworks. Waiting for the Interurban.

The six gray plaster figures are wearing T-shirts today. FREMONT MOISTURE FESTIVAL, reads one.

How did they get the shirts on with the cops around? asks Fox.

They couldn’t, says Petey. The shirts must have been there last night. But we were behind the statues and didn’t see them.

Another deduction, says Strabo.

Uniforms hustle around the statues and a small crowd has gathered on either side of 34th to stand in the drizzle and watch.

Are they looking at us? asks Petey.

It’s okay to watch the cops, says Fox. Everybody’s doing it.

A cat may look at a king, says Strabo. But curiosity kills them both. What killed Abby?

Nobody killed Abby, says Petey.

The young woman lying over there.

That’s not Abby, says Petey. You’re crazy.

I never met your dream girl, says Fox. But you said the chick last night looked like her. That’s why you had us chasing her all over Queen Anne.

Marching after her like a parade, agrees Strabo. But no one was there to help when the beasts attacked.

What are you looking at? Fox asks a sidewalk gawker. The show’s over there, jerk. Don’t look at me.

Now you’ve done it, says Petey. Let’s go.

Across the bridge of sighs?

Too visible, says Fox. Back up the avenue.

I want to get out of Fremont, mutters Petey. This is no place for us.

For Christ’s sake, don’t run, says Fox. In tourist land the three of us running is probable cause.

I used to live here, says Petey.

In the center of the universe, says Strabo. So says the sign, at any rate.

Hear the sirens? asks Fox. They’re taking her away. Finally.

Whoever she is, says Strabo, she’ll be a star now. Just like your cinematic friends.

Let’s get something to eat, suggests Fox. How about this bakery?

Look what’s in the window, says Petey.

Someone had put up photos from the Solstice Parade: giant puppets and naked bicyclists.

No wonder I went crazy. How could anybody stay sane in this place?

Abby did, says Strabo. That’s why she left.

All the food here is too goddamn healthy, says Fox. Let’s go to Starbucks.

Never, says Petey. I’m not giving those bastards one of my hard-earned dollars.

Hard-begged, says Strabo.

Same thing.

You’re not being rational, dear boy.

Har har.

You can’t blame a major corporation simply because your ex-wife married… What was he? A department head?

Coffee king, says Fox. Java general.

The bastard stole Abby from me, says Petey.

She married him-

Brew guru.

Hush. She married him after you went to bedlam, lad. Did you expect her to wait until you achieved compus mentus?

Stuff it.

So what do you want? asks Fox. Starbucks, this bakery, or starve to death? Your choice.

What else’ve you got? asks Petey.

Speaking of destinations, says Strabo, why were Bogart and De Niro-

Widmark and Mineo.

Why were they hanging around Queen Anne in the middle of the night?

To get to the other side, says Fox.

How would I know?

You were just playing detective, dear boy.

Petey sighs. Okay. They weren’t bums like us. Somewhere between yuppies and punks. Looking for drugs, maybe?

Bull, says Fox. They were looking for exactly what they found. A chick walking alone. Somebody to mess up. Two homeless broads got offed last year.

I didn’t know that, says Petey.

Neither one looked like Abby, says Strabo. So you didn’t notice.

They didn’t exactly make the front page.

I wish last night never happened, says Petey.

It wouldn’t have, if they hadn’t been so far off their turf. Usually they stayed near Pioneer Square, where nobody complained much about grubbies and crazies.

But the previous morning they had run into Sugarman, a contractor Petey knew in better days, and he was looking for cheap labor.

Anybody with a green card. You a citizen? Even better. Hop on the truck and you can spend the day digging a trench for bamboo in Queen Anne.

The crew of half a dozen came in under budget and ahead of schedule. Sugarman got a bonus and was so pleased he bought pizza and beer and treated everybody to a picnic in the park.

When the party broke up, close to midnight, Fox had said he’d lead the three of them to a bus stop where they could get back to home base. But then Petey saw the brunette on Nickerson and fell in love.

I’m not in love, he had told them. I just said she looks like Abby.

Every white filly south of fifty looks like your lost angel, said Fox.

She was well under fifty. Maybe twenty-five. Brunette hair pinned up in the back. Tight green dress. Wobbling a little on two-inch heels.

The angel is drunk, said Strabo.

Who isn’t? asked Petey.

You a stalker now?

I just want to make sure she gets home all right.

This isn’t home. She’s cutting through a parking lot.

If she saw us following her, said Strabo, she’d scream for help.

Why don’t you ask her to make you a double tall cappuccino? says Fox. That’s how you met the bitch, isn’t it?

Don’t call her that.

Whoa. Catch those two on the other side of the street. They’re watching her too. Six o’clock for your lady love.

What does that mean?

Behind her.

Two men, about the same age as the lady in green. The tall one had blond hair, was thin, almost gaunt, and vibrated with nervous energy. He wore a red jacket and blue jeans.

His friend was a head shorter and had dark hair. He walked with his shoulders hunched as if attacked by a wind only he could feel. Both of them were so busy watching the lady in green that they never noticed anyone behind them.

She’s headed onto Fourth, said Fox. Up into Petey’s no-go zone.

Petey stumbled to a stop.

Fine, said Strabo. Let’s round up a bus and ride home. Discretion is the bitter part of valor.

I’m following them. They’re up to no good.

What are you now, the freaking cavalry?

Our Petey is a man of chivalry, said Strabo. A white knight in vanished armor. That calls for a song!

Oh where are you going, said Milder to Moulder

Oh we may not tell you, said Festel to Fose

We’re hunting the wren, said John the Red Nose

Hunting the wren, said everyone…

For the love of God, shut up, said Petey. I can’t hear myself think.

The sounds of silence. Har har.

You Philistines! That’s a medieval classic. Part of your heritage.

Yeah, but do you want those creeps across the street to hear you?

Why are they following her? asked Petey.

They like to watch Abby’s ass, said Fox. Same as you.

She’s not Abby. And don’t talk like-Oh crap!

They were on the Fremont Bridge now and the drawbridge was going up.

Why the hell is a boat going by at this time of night? asked Petey.

Probably heading home, said Strabo. Like all sensible people.

They watched the city lights reflecting off the Ship Canal and the bright blue of the bridge.

Look over there, said Strabo.

Off to the right the Aurora Bridge stretched high above them.

Like a long black spider web, said Strabo.

Poetry sucks, said Fox.

Finally the drawbridge dropped into place. They made the long way across.

Where are they? asked Strabo.

Crap, said Fox. Take a look behind the zombies.

I don’t see anyone, said Petey.

Not the movie stars. Your Abby clone.

Slow down, said Strabo. Impatient youngsters!

The woman in green lay on her back behind the zombies, staring up at the sky.

A goner, said Fox.

Where are Lerner and Lowe? asked Strabo.

Who?

The thrill-killers. I don’t want them coming after me.

Gone, said Fox. We should be too.

The woman’s purse lay open on the pavement, leaking its contents, just as her throat had done.

I’m taking the cell phone, said Fox.

No! They can trace us with that, said Strabo. Did the scoundrels liberate her wallet?

Black leather lay in the shadows of a statue. Fox picked it up.

Address book.

Why are we still standing here? asked Petey.

Hell, you’re right. Let’s get up to the woods.

You’re the hero, dear boy, said Strabo. You should have saved her.

It’s them.

Who? asks Fox.

Whom, says Strabo.

Widmark and Mineo, goddamnit. Across Fremont, in front of the music store.

The two stand in front of Dusty Strings. The tall blond bounces to a beat unrelated to the harp music playing through the speakers. His partner’s hands are stuffed deep into his black raincoat.

You see them? asks Petey.

Yeah, yeah, says Fox. They’re real.

But highly improbable, says Strabo. Returning to the scene of the crime?

You called it for once, old man, says Fox. They’re thrill-killers and this is part of the freaking thrill. They were probably around the corner, watching the cops clean up their mess.

Screw it, says Petey, and starts across the street.

Get back here! Are you nuts?

Sure.

Petey strolls through traffic without even noticing it. Cars honk, but he ignores them.

He stops in front of the movie stars. Fox and Strabo are nowhere in sight. Big help, as usual.

You want something? asks Widmark.

Why’d you do it?

They stare at him. He looks back, poker-faced, though he feels like he’s gonna puke.

Mineo backs up to the wall. Widmark just frowns. Do what?

Kill that girl.

Jesus, says Mineo, wide-eyed.

Widmark grabs Petey by the sleeve and pulls him closer, making a face at the smell. What the hell are you talking about?

You cut her throat. I saw you.

Sweet mother of God, says Mineo, and now he looks like he’s gonna puke.

Listen, you freak, says Widmark. You can get in a lot of trouble making up stuff like that. People will think you’re nuts.

Just tell me why you did it, Richard.

Richard? He blinks. Who do you think I am?

Richard Widmark, says Petey. You were great in Kiss of Death. I hated the remake.

Sal Mineo laughs, high-pitched squeals.

Petey curses himself. He knows the blond guy isn’t the actor. But Fremont confuses him, tangles him in its fantasy world. He needs Fox and Strabo to tell him what’s real, and the cowards have turned tail.

You’re a whack job, says Mineo. No one will believe a word you say.

I’ve got her address book, says Petey.

That stops them for a moment.

So what? asks Widmark. That proves you killed her.

You thought it was her wallet, says Petey. You pulled it out of her purse and left it on the pavement. I’ll bet it’s got fingerprints.

The movie stars exchange a glance. I thought you had it, says Mineo.

Shut up, snaps Widmark. He looks around. The rain has given up and more people are on the street. He puts an arm lightly around Petey’s shoulders.

What’s your name?

Petey.

Okay, Petey. Let’s take a little walk and I’ll explain the whole thing.

He shrugs off the arm. I’m not going anywhere with you.

You’ve got us wrong, Petey. Whatever you think you saw-that woman had it coming. She was part of the problem.

Petey frowns. What do you mean?

Widmark chuckles. Think about it, Petey. Think of everything that’s gone wrong in your life. All the backstabbers, all the pointless crap that’s been dumped on you. You remember it?

I remember.

Well, she was the reason for it, Petey. Her and people like her. They’re the cause of all our troubles.

Widmark shrugs. But if you don’t want to know the truth…

Wait. Petey looks around but his friends are nowhere in sight. Damn it.

We can explain it all, but not in a crowd. Come with us, Petey.

Fox and Strabo would tell him to stay the hell away from these two, but they aren’t here, are they? Screw them.

Petey walks between the movie stars, while Widmark talks casually, easily, as if this were any old day. Nobody, nobody sane, has chatted with him like this, like friends, in a long, long time.

They turn right on 34th, heading away from the gray plaster zombies, the scene of the crime, and toward the paved path that runs beside the Ship Canal. All the time Petey looks over his shoulder for Fox and Strabo, but they are nowhere to be seen.

Okay, Petey, says Widmark, here’s the truth. That girl had to go because she was working for the bad guys.

What bad guys?

Widmark laughs. Come on, Petey. You’re a smart man. You already know who the troublemakers are, don’t you? Just say it.

Petey takes a deep breath. The movie stars are staring. He’s all alone, and suddenly terrified of giving the wrong answer.

Starbucks?

Mineo laughs again. He hides his face in his hands, shoulders jerking.

Shut up, says Widmark. This is serious. That’s exactly right, Petey. She was a spy for Starbucks.

Those bastards. They stole my wife.

Sounds just like them. But Petey, you have no idea what they’re really doing. He leans close, eyes narrow. They put drugs in their drinks to control us.

Yeah?

If only Fox and Strabo were here. They were never gonna believe this.

Do you drink their coffee, Petey?

I used to.

That’s what screwed your brain up, says Mineo. Java withdrawal.

Let me handle this, says Widmark. All the bad stuff that’s happened to you is Starbucks’ fault, Petey. All part of their plot.

He’s stunned. It makes sense at a level logic never seemed to reach before.

That girl knew their plans, Petey. We asked her to help us but the bitch was gonna turn us in. It was self-defense, you see?

I guess so. Petey looks around again. They are deep in the dripping green heart of the trail now, and haven’t seen anyone for almost a block.

Good man. The shame of it is, she wouldn’t tell us what she knew. And she had the names and addresses of everyone in on the plot.

Widmark shakes his head sadly. Damn it, Petey. If we had those names we could catch them all. We could stop them!

I got their names! Petey reaches into his jacket and pulls out the black address book.

Bingo, says Mineo.

That’s all we need, says Widmark, grinning. Give it to Jerry.

Who?

Me, says Mineo, and grabs it. Do it now. This is perfect.

Petey looks back at Widmark, who has pulled a knife out of his jacket.

It’s time, Petey.

Wait a minute.

You can go quietly like a man, or squealing like a little girl. What do you choose?

What else’ve you got? asks Petey.

There’s no one in sight. This piece of the trail is blocked off from the canal by bushes and trees, and blocked from the street by-

What the hell is that?

Mineo looks and laughs. That’s a topiary dinosaur. A full-size brontosaurus made of plants. It’s gonna eat you up, Petey!

You buffoon, says Strabo. It’s an apatosaurus!

Where the hell have you been? asks Petey.

Who? asks Widmark, coming closer.

Run now! yells Fox.

Widmark swings and Petey raises his left arm. The knife cuts through his jacket, slices into his forearm. It hurts like hell.

Grab him! shouts Widmark, but Mineo sees the blood and hesitates.

Swing the fruit! yells Fox, and Petey grabs one of Mineo’s skinny arms with both bloody hands and spins like a discus thrower. The movie stars collide and tumble to the pavement. The knife and address book go flying.

Run, boy!

Petey runs. He used to jog this trail, back when he lived in a funky apartment on Bowdoin, back before his mind betrayed him, when he had a job and a life.

You still got a life, says Fox, but not if they catch you. Step on it!

You need a bandage, lad. Use your coat.

Petey tears off his jacket and wraps it around his bleeding arm. That helps. He’s still on the trail, which heads down and finally under the bridge.

We need crowds, says Fox. Go left!

Petey turns up Evanston Avenue. The movie stars had stopped for the knife and the book, but he can hear them on his track now.

On the hunt, says Strabo, and sings again.

Oh how will you cut him, said Milder to Moulder

Oh we may not tell you, said Festel to Fose

With knives and with forks, said John the Red Nose

With knives and with forks, said everyone…

The movie stars are gasping. They haven’t run this hill route a thousand times like he has, before the world went to hell.

Petey’s laughing, because this is really happening. There was a goddamned dinosaur made of plants. There really is a giant rocket on top of that building on the corner.

I’m not insane. I’m just in goddamned Fremont.

He dodges a bus on 36th Street and staggers to a halt.

Keep going! yells Fox. What’s wrong with you?

A man stands in front of him, twenty feet tall. The familiar face scowls down from under his cap.

He’s crazy, says Lenin. That’s what’s wrong with him.

Petey can’t move, caught in the big man’s glare.

It’s just freaking Lenin! screams Fox. The statue they brought from Russia! You’ve seen it a thousand times!

Now hold on, says Strabo. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Why would anyone put up a monument to a dead Communist in the middle of this merchant kingdom? No, I’d say the lad is delusional.

Out of his capitalist mind, says Lenin, and somebody hits Petey from behind. He slams into the base of the statue and bangs his head.

He rolls over on the plaza tiles and Widmark lands on top of him. Petey sees the knife going up but his left hand is tangled in his jacket. He can’t stop the blade.

Freeze!

Widmark stops, looks up. He slides off and drops the knife.

Thank god you’re here, officer! This man just confessed to murder.

Get away from him, says the cop, who looks a little like Matt Damon.

It’s true, says Mineo. He told us he killed a woman near the bridge last night.

Damon’s eyes widen. He’s heard about the dead woman.

Is that true?

I didn’t kill anybody, says Petey. They did it. You saw them attack me.

We took the knife away from him, says Widmark.

Ask him why she died, says Mineo.

The cop is frowning, not sure where to point the gun. Why’d she die, sir?

Be silent, boy, says Strabo, but Petey can’t help himself.

She was a spy. For Starbucks.

See? says Mineo.

Petey shakes his head, trying to clear it. They attacked me by the dinosaurs. Then I came up here, past the rocket, and saw Lenin.

Damon nods. You were attacked by a dinosaur and came here by rocket. Was that after you killed the woman?

Dear, dear, says Strabo. The constable’s not from around here.

Damon has his handcuffs in one hand, gun in the other. Put your hands on your… What happened to your arm?

He’s afraid you’ll get his cuffs bloody. Har har.

Your honor, says Strabo, my client pleads not guilty by season of inanity.

Petey falls back on the tiles. He’s crying.

You’re under arrest, says Lenin.

The detective is Bill Cosby, except his hair is gray and he has a thin mustache. He is scowling and Petey figures it is because he’s only a TV star and the movie stars outrank him.

Mr. Gottesman, he says, you say you saw those two men following Ms. Mantello, but you didn’t do anything about it.

I was scared. Did you see him in Night and the City?

Who?

Petey explains about Richard Widmark. Cosby frowns more. Mr. Gottesman, where do you think you are right now?

Petey looks around. I’m sitting at a patio table in a Mexican-style plaza in the middle of Seattle. Dozens of tourists are watching me. I’m handcuffed to an umbrella, staring at Lenin’s giant butt, while a medic patches up my arm and a cop interrogates me. How much of that is real?

Cosby shrugs. All of it.

Petey repeats something Fox had said before disappearing again. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t two men chasing you with a knife.

The detective thinks that one over. He looks at the movie stars standing on the other side of the plaza by the taco shop, talking to Matt Damon.

You said Ms. Mantello was a spy for a coffee company.

They told me that.

Cosby sighs.

Okay. Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re still under arrest. We’re gonna take you to the hospital to get that arm looked at. Then I think a judge will order an examination-

No hospitals, says Fox. They wipe your freaking memory there. You know that.

Think, Petey, says Strabo. Make him see the truth and the truth will set us free!

Listen, Bill, says Petey, I followed that woman because she looked like Abby, my ex-wife. I didn’t go near those guys because they scared me. But I didn’t kill her, and when it happened I couldn’t get near them because of the drawbridge.

The drawbridge? She came from Queen Anne?

We all did. But the drawbridge went up-

You didn’t mention that.

Nobody asked, says Petey.

I’m asking now. Tell me the whole route.

Petey does. Cosby nods and stands up.

He calls for Officer Bestock and Damon hurries over.

There’s a bank on Nickerson Avenue and they’ve got a security camera out front. Tell ’em we need the tapes from last night. He looks at the movie stars and raises his voice. If that woman was over there, we’ll know. And if someone was following her, we’ll see who it was.

Mineo starts to cry. Widmark tells him to shut up, but it’s too late.

Cosby turns to Petey. How’d you know my name is Bill?

It’s in the credits.

Petey tells them he has no insurance, which usually saves him from medical care, but this time they insist he’s going to the hospital.

Cause you’re a hero, says Fox.

Indeed, says Strabo. A veritable Hercules or Adonis.

The paramedics strap him on a gurney and are ready to wheel him into the ambulance when another cop comes up, one who doesn’t look like anybody.

Jesus, Petey, is that you?

You know him? asks Cosby.

Yeah. I do security shifts at the clinic downtown. He used to be a regular. Remember me, Petey? Officer Lazenby.

He shakes his head.

You went off your meds, didn’t you, pal?

Had to. My friends didn’t like them.

What friends?

Fox and Strabo.

They aren’t your friends, pal. They’re just voices in your head. You don’t have any friends.

Thanks a lot.

I didn’t mean it like that, says Lazenby. Oh, Jesus.

Should we notify anybody? asks the ambulance guy.

About what?

Tell ’em you’ll be in the hospital.

No. There’s nobody.

What about your ex-wife? asks Cosby.

Ex-wife, Lazenby repeats.

He said her name was Abby.

Jesus. Lazenby shakes his head. Abby wasn’t his wife. She was just a nice barista who used to sneak free coffee to the homeless people. When she quit and moved away, Petey went on a one-man WTO against Starbucks. He got locked up for a while for throwing rocks through their windows. Didn’t you, pal?

They took her away from me.

Lazenby pats his arm, the one that isn’t cut. It’s gonna be okay, pal. The drugs keep improving. You just listen to the docs and pretty soon you’ll be back in the real world.

What else’ve you got? asks Petey.