The Last Good Guy

10

As the shivering tapered off, I felt better. Dried my tight pink skin, got on workout pants and a zippered hoodie, and arranged my hair above my crime-scene face. Then went back down to the patio, where Penelope Rideout paced heavily in the shade of the palapa.

“Why can’t I get you when I need you? I will not be ignored. I will not be — oh. Oh my God. Look at you.”

“Do I have to?”

“What can I... I mean, what should... just, what?”

“Sit and I’ll tell you.”

We faced each other across the big picnic table. I gave her the pond view. I started with Alchemy 101 and ended with my ice bath. She looked back and forth from me to the bathtub on the cinder blocks near the water. I kept my saga brief and to the point. Tried a cryogenic smile, but it hurt. She wore a yellow summer dress and white gladiator sandals and Jackie O sunglasses.

“I just raised your pay,” she said softly.

“Not necessary. Tell me about Daley’s call, everything.”

She gave me a more detailed version than she’d given Burt over the phone. Daley called just after three a.m. She was in San Clemente. She had gone to the beach at San Onofre earlier with friends. She was almost hysterical over what happened to Nick. Angry at her friends, who didn’t know anything about it except he was dead but they would protect her. She said the beach looked weird because there were armed guards everywhere. She refused to say which friends she was with. She’d split and hitched a ride to 7-Eleven with a creep. Daley was terse and vague.

“She leaps before she looks,” said Penelope. “I told her that I’d just been through forty-plus hours of worried hell over her, and she told me to come get her and make it snappy. Now she’s gone again. I was so close to getting her.”

“Who are Connor and Eric, and why is she with them?” I asked.

“I told you yesterday I don’t know them.”

“Do you know SNR Security?”

“I do not.”

“Adam Revell doesn’t ring a bell?”

Penelope stared at me from behind her dark glasses. I could see her eyes through the darkness. “I don’t like your tone of voice.”

“I don’t like getting jumped by six goons, following a lead I got from you.”

“You’re very suspicious.”

“Part of my charm.”

“I fail to see it.”

“Do you know this Cathedral by the Sea?”

A dismissive exhale. “I don’t approve of it.”

“Explain.”

“I read about it when they opened their doors. It’s in a funny-shaped building. Some of Daley’s friends go there.”

“Does Daley?”

“Yes, once. With two girlfriends. Just a few weeks ago, the last Sunday in August. He came at her aggressively.”

“‘He’?”

“The youth minister. I forget his name.”

“He came at her?”

“Recruited her for the youth group. For the Cathedral by the Sea rock band. For a cycling trip to Mammoth. After one visit from Daley, they had her booked up every weekend for a month. I had a bad feeling about him and the church.”

“Did Daley?”

“She thought the church ‘had promise.’ Her words. So I forbid her from attending again, and recommended St. Mary, Star of the Sea, in Oceanside.”

“Because—”

“It’s Catholic and I heard good things about it.”

“Were you raised Catholic?”

“I’ve never set foot in a Catholic church. Or any other, in recent memory.”

“Help me with your reasoning,” I said. “You attend no place of worship. You won’t let your sister go to one she’s interested in. So you send her to the Catholics, though you know little about them.”

She pulled off her sunglasses and set them on the table, her blue prying eyes locked onto mine. Eyes that told a story. A hard one. Beautiful but chilling.

“Only faith lasts,” she said. “It can’t be broken or taken away.”

I wasn’t sure of that, but my sureness wasn’t the point. “And Daley’s faith is supposed to conform to yours?”

“She’s fourteen years old, Mr. Ford. I’m not only her sister but her guardian. Every decision I’ve ever made has put Daley first. That’s my job on earth, and I take it seriously.”

I’d seen overparenting, so why not oversistering? Considering what had happened ten years ago on that stormy night outside of Eugene, Oregon, maybe it was understandable. Maybe commendable.

But more important to me than Penelope’s attempted management of her teenage sister was that Daley’s world had just grown larger. Nick. Alchemy 101. The Cathedral by the Sea. Paradise Date Farm. All linked by SNR Security. By Adam Revell, Connor, Eric, and the six helmeted warriors who had easily laid waste to Roland Ford, PI. Why had they done that? Because I was snooping after Daley Rideout? Maybe, but they had been in some control of her, chaperoned by Connor and Eric. What threat was I? A leap, but an easy one: the sign on the silver SUV that Scott Chan had failed to read was that of SNR Security. They had her. I’d suspected that much when I saw the SNR emblem on the ticket booth at Alchemy 101. The attack at Paradise Date Farm confirmed it. If my beating was not to keep me away from Daley, then what?

I looked at the tub of ice melting in the sun. “Mrs. Rideout—”

“Penelope, please.”

“Penelope, exactly what did Daley say about San Onofre?”

“Just that it was surreal and the old power plant looked like something from a science-fiction movie. Armed guards everywhere.”

I knew the San Onofre nuclear power plant well. Almost every Southern Californian did. I’d driven by it thousands of times, in and out of Orange County.

I felt stumped by Daley Rideout’s behavior. Wasn’t even sure how to describe it. Erratic? Careless? Reckless? Quite a wake of damage her actions had left in the last two days, from Nick Moreno to me.

“Has Daley gone to San Onofre before?” I asked.

“Not that I know.”

“For all your security efforts, there are sure a lot of things you don’t know about her.”

“You can ridicule me but not my efforts or intentions,” she said. “I do feel terrible about what they did to you. But I hope I can still count on you as an employee and an ally.”

Behind me, a cloud drifted across the sun. The daylight diminished and Penelope Rideout’s blue eyes turned gray. A breeze pushed some of her curls onto her forehead.

“There’s no Second Marine Aircraft Wing at Miramar,” I said. “No Colonel Richard Hauser at Miramar, either. Never has been.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty damned.”

“Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”

“Okay? Then who’s that in the picture on your refrigerator?”

Another catch of breath. Impatience or exasperation. She used both hands to put her sunglasses back on, wedding band and engagement ring glinting in the sun.

“Richard, of course. We divorced two years ago, before the move to Oceanside. Richard is a clinical psychologist. That’s him in the picture, though. We rented the flight suit from a costume shop. For fun. The picture was taken at the Flying Leatherneck Museum, not an actual runway. We all liked it so much. The three of us happy and together. I don’t have many pictures like that.”

“So you leave it out for visitors.”

“To document a failed marriage with a good memory. Get it?”

“Why wear the rings?”

“They simplify.”

My face hurt. I felt mentally off-balance. The warmer my body got, the worse everything felt. I wanted to be frozen again. I wondered if the concussion that should have come earlier was finally arriving. Decided that this pretty woman sitting in front of me was one of the least trustworthy people I’d ever met. Like a talking doll. You just pulled the string and she blabbed whatever was set to come out next. I entertained the idea of a refund, a washing of hands, a day or two in bed, and an easier, more satisfying case.

“Where is Richard now?” I asked, not sure I cared.

“He took a position in Eugene. With a healthcare chain.”

“Which one?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“The city where your parents died.”

“I met him there, actually. In Eugene. After Mom and Dad.”

“The number you gave me for him was bad.”

“He’s obviously changed it. I haven’t called that number in almost two years.”

“None of the search services I subscribe to have a record of your marriage to Richard Hauser, or to anyone else. They tend not to miss little things like that.”

“We eloped in Reno.”

“You’re beginning to exhaust me, Mrs. Rideout.”

“I do that to people.” She stood. Came around the long picnic table and sat down beside me. Set her sunglasses on the table again. The drift of time and scent. Leaned in and set both her hands over one of mine. Warm where the ice had been.

“Mr. Ford, please don’t give up on me and Daley. There’s darkness all around us. We need you. I know she’s fallen in with very bad people. I also know some of what you’ve done in your life, and gone through, and been made into. And I admire you very much. I may strike you as Little Miss Conduct, but I’m a good person. See?”

I saw her eyes from point blank then, the blue of the iris and the indigo spokes around the pupil. Kaleidoscopes of sunlight. A gathering, judgmental beauty in them. I didn’t look away. Hadn’t not looked away since I met Justine. Let this unsettling fact join the river of unsettling facts running through me at that moment.

We sat there, hand on hand for a while. A man beside a woman, a woman beside a man.

“I’ll walk myself to the car,” she said.

“I can manage that much.”

Slow going, across the patio and up the railroad ties to the circular driveway, where Penelope’s cheerful yellow Beetle sat in the shade of a central coast live oak. I saw Burt and Frank not-so-covertly watching us from the far shore of the pond, where they were fishing for bass in the cattails. I saw Justine gliding past them in the rowboat, wearing a swimsuit and the floppy white hat she always wore. Dick glanced at me from the porch of casita one, where he sat in his Adirondack chair, overcasually clipping his fingernails. And Liz, way down in front of casita six, happening to look my way as she laced her shoes, tennis bag beside her, racquets protruding. Violet studied me frankly from the front porch of casita four, talking on the phone.

“Apparently you get plenty of supervision around here,” said Penelope.

“Only when I need it.”

“Must be nice.”