We Know

Chapter 44

The phone number sourced to a ground-floor apartment in San Fernando that backed on a French-dip stand and a mechanic's shop with grease puddles and weeds overtaking its cracked-up asphalt. The stale air made my shirt itch, no small feat since I was wearing one of Alejandro's comfortable Dri-FITs, excavated from Induma's coat closet. The heat of the pavement came up through the soles of my sneakers, and a street crew's mess up the block wafted over tar-bitter air.

The numbers had long fallen off the door, but their echo remained in the less-faded paint beneath where they'd been nailed. An air conditioner, hung out the window, dripped water and banged away like a jalopy. Competing for dominance, a TV blared-some scripted argument between talk-show participants, their voices fuzzed with static at the edges. I knocked.

A voice, less irritated than run-down, bellowed, "I'm coming, I'm coming."

A squat woman in her fifties opened the door, drying her hands on a stained apron, cinched unflatteringly between the bulges of her midsection. She wasn't obese, but thick, spreading with age. Her unwieldy breasts had descended to rest against her stomach. She glanced up at my face and stiffened, her hands freezing in the swirl of fabric.

She flung one of them up to shove ineffectively at her bangs, pasted to her sweaty forehead. Her hair was thinning, so I could see a shine of scalp at her crown. Behind her a dirty skillet sat on a stovetop, and the place reeked of bacon grease. A rainbow-bead curtain, still undulating from her movement, blocked a doorway to her right.

"Oh, sorry," she said. "I was expecting someone else." A patch of eczema had claimed her elbow and made headway up the back of her forearm. She scratched at the white, flaking skin, her nails giving off a sound that made my spine arch.

"Sorry to startle you."

"I wasn't startled." She emitted a nervous laugh. There was something familiar in her eyes-not their shape but the way they creased with her forced, semiaggressive grin.

"Ms. Landreth?"

Her nod reminded me of a squirrel frantically shelling peanuts. "How did you find me?"

"Through your aunt."

"Harriet?" Her eyes moistened. "You saw Harriet?"

"I did. Look, I understand why you're scared-"

"I'm not scared. Why should I be scared?"

"You've moved around a lot. You're hard to find."

"What are you, the Census Bureau?" She glanced behind me, checking for others. "What do you want?"

"I want to know about Jane and Gracie Everett. Do you remember them?"

"Of course I remember." Her hands found a tuft of hair and pulled it around to her temple. She started searching out and breaking off split ends, a repetitive, simian tic. Her hair wasn't long enough for her to see easily, and her pupils were strained so hard to the side it looked painful. The soft flesh of her arms jiggled with the motion. I wondered if she was on speed. "It was an awful thing. The kind of thing you don't forget."

I studied the face, looking to recapture that flash of familiarity, but it was gone. One of my friends from night school in Oregon had a baby whom she brought into lecture the next month to show off. I recall how the baby burbled and took on his mother's features for an instant before they vanished back into generic babyness. I found myself straining now to reclaim that same type of satisfying deja vu.

"You saw the bodies being dumped?" I asked.

"Yeah. I was walking my dog. They pulled over up the street. Didn't see me. It was a dirt lot. I saw two guys. They looked Mexican. Central American, maybe. Anyway, I went home and called the cops."

It sounded rehearsed-all the requisite beats, well ordered, as if she'd been running over them in her head for years.

"And you saw Jane out by some trailers several months before?"

But she wasn't biting. "A month or so before." Her eyes ticked to me, then back to her hair. It was as though she was afraid to look directly at me. "Look, who are you? Why are you asking me questions? Can I see a badge or something?"

"I don't have a badge."

"Well, then," she said, and shut the door.

I heard the beads rustle, and a moment later I sensed a slight swivel of the closed Venetian blinds in the window to my right. I could not afford to wait around and have her call someone. Seeing no other choice, I started down the walk, the hot breeze lofting the smell of tar into my face. I could feel her stare penetrating my back.

Halfway down the walk, it hit me. Her startled reaction, the creases at the eyes, her high-pitched nervousness and reluctance to look me in the face-she'd recognized me right away. And was terrified I'd recognize her.

Isabel McBride. Bob's Big Boy. Off shift at 1:00 A.M.

My head bowed, just slightly, and I took a half step to my right, firming my balance. Seventeen years of assumptions, unraveling. Still, I could feel the eyes behind me, hidden by those Venetian blinds, boring into my back.

I turned. The blinds swiveled again, forming an impenetrable sheet, a child covering his eyes to hide. I rang the bell. There was no answer, just a dread-filled wait, augmented with continued talk-show broiling. I rang again. Waited. Rang again.

Finally the door opened. Jerkily.

"Isabel," I said.

Despite the deadening heat, she was shaking. "Nick."

I said, "Please talk to me."

Tears sprang up out of nowhere. Just two, spilling over the brinks of her eyes, sliding in straight tracks down her ruddy face. She jerked her head in a nod.

I followed her into the grease-tinged air, through the chattering rainbow-bead curtain. On the squawking TV, Jerry Springer reclaimed his microphone from an overzealous audience member. Across the bottom of the screen, today's caption: ARE YOU MY BABY'S DADDY? Isabel-or Tris- struck the power button as she passed, and we sat on unmatched couches shoved together to form a makeshift sectional. The post-Springer silence seemed so daunting as to be majestic. Through a doorway I could see a suitcase open on the bedroom floor, the clothes she'd started to throw inside.

I said, "Are you Isabel or Tris?"

"Tris. I'm Tris. Patricia." She was back to her hair, eyes crammed to the side, snapping off dry split ends and flicking them to the floor.

I'd rehearsed the tainted fantasy so often in my head since that night. Who knows how many times I'd reinvented Isabel McBride? Added an extra inch or three to her bust, imagined some trick of the tongue, conflated the firm hump of her ass with that of a model, a fling, some woman on the street? Everything possible to make her attractive enough to justify my slipping out that night and leaving Frank open.

She seemed to sense my thoughts. "Gravity takes over," she said defensively. "You lie down, your tits are in your armpits. You'll see. Wait till you hit forty, fifty. Men hide it better, but it's no prettier."

"It's dangerous right now."

She nodded jerkily. "I figured it might get that way. I've been careful." She snorted, nodded at me. "Not careful enough, I see."

"Will you tell me what happened?" I asked. "The real story?"

She looked away, her chin trembling. "You don't want the real story."

We sat in the silence a moment, and then I said, "You were hired to seduce me? To lure me out of the house?"

"I didn't know that was what it was for. I didn't know why. Money was tight, and I had a girl to raise. You weren't half bad-looking, so I said what the hell. Paid better than waitressing. They had me do things. I didn't know."

"You didn't ask."

"At first I figured it was some weird rite-of-passage kind of thing. Maybe your dad's friends or something." A mournful pause. "No, I didn't ask."

Every now and then I'd catch glimpses of her old self-the perfect line of teeth, a nuanced movement of her hand, a cord rising in her neck-but they'd vanish almost instantly. It reminded me of those magic childhood stickers that changed images when you tilted them. Now it's Superman, now it's Clark Kent again.

"How'd you know I'd go to Bob's Big Boy that night?" I asked.

"I didn't know anything. They knew you went there every weekend. So they helped get me a job there. You came in my first shift."

"Who's 'they'?"

"I don't know." She was still shaking. Her nails went back to that patch of dry skin and worked it in a circular motion. White dust fell like dandruff to the carpet. "I never saw the guy who hired me. He found me through my cousin. My cousin knows people who know people. Everyone has a cousin like that, right? The guy wanted a sexy woman. Experienced, but not a pro. I was. Sexy. Then."

"You were," I said, before realizing what a backhanded compliment that was. "How'd you guys talk?"

"It was all cloak and dagger. I drove to a fire road on Runyon Canyon-"

"At night," I said. "You were told to park, turn off the car, the lights, angle the mirrors away, and keep the doors unlocked. He was late. He slid into the backseat. He told you what to do. Where to find me, what I looked like, how to handle me, where to take me. You never saw his face."

"Yes," she said, bewildered. "I guess you've heard the story before."

"That part."

"I've been waiting. Seventeen years I've been waiting. For someone to knock on that door. You. Him. And I don't even know who he is."

"You never learned?"

"Do you have any idea what that's like? Never settling in. Keeping an ear to the ground. Waiting for God knows who. Do you have any idea what that does to a person?"

"Yeah," I said. "I do."

Her fingers fussed at her shiny scalp, her hair, trembling. She squeezed them hard with her other hand, lowered them into her lap. She spoke again, with a quiet sort of horror. "I will never forgive myself."

"For what you did to me? To Frank Durant?"

"That was the least of it." Her voice was hoarse. "The least of it."

"What else?"

"There were two others. Hired thugs. Tall and dark. Eastern European accents, like bad guys in a movie. Didn't talk much. A week or so after I saw you, they came and said they were sent by him. I was shaken. I saw the thing in the paper about the Secret Service man, and your name. Your mom's. We were just a few years apart, me and your mom." She leaned forward. "I swear to God had I known-"

I wanted to keep her on course. "The hired thugs."

"They said I had to find someone to take care of my daughter for a few days. They said they'd be back that night, that I'd be paid a lot of money. They said if I wasn't there, they'd find me. I didn't have a choice. I had a little girl to raise."

Her body continued to shake, almost violently now, as if it were coming apart. But she kept talking. "They brought me to a house somewhere. I didn't know where I was. Empty, no furniture. The floors were still just poured concrete. There was a woman there, with a newborn. She was still healing. They kept her in a back room, on a bare mattress. I took care of her. Fed her. Washed her. Helped her to the bathroom. She wouldn't let me touch the baby."

"Grace," I said. "Grade Everett."

"Right. Grade." Her eyes were instantly moist again. A dreadful calm came over her, and she stopped trembling, and when she spoke again, her voice was even. "I slept there in the room with them. And early the next morning, the men came in and took the baby. The woman screamed and screamed. Hormones on fire. You can't imagine how that is. I thought she'd never stop. She screamed for four hours. I was sobbing, pleading with her. Anything for her to stop. Just to stop."

Her breathing was shallow, and it made her words breathy. "They brought the baby back- Grade. They brought Gracie back. And Jane held her and rocked her and said she'd never let them take her away again. Her voice was screamed out. But the men got more and more agitated. I heard them talking on the phone when I came back from getting groceries. They'd taken the baby for another DNA test. I guess there was an earlier one, but they wanted to be sure. They were hyperparanoid. I guess one of the copies of the first test went missing before. It was a big deal. Something with the Secret Service."

"How do you know that?"

"I heard one of them say they'd dealt with a leak inside the Service. At first I thought military. But then I remembered the Secret Service guy-sorry, your stepfather-got killed the night I took you out. So you didn't have to be Einstein to do the math."

I struggled to keep up with it. Frank was the leak. To whom? Or did they mean he was a threat to go public? I wanted to keep her talking. "And then what happened?"

Tris hugged her stomach and rocked herself a little on the couch. She let out a low wail, which sounded weird since she was no longer crying or shaking.

I wanted to loathe her, but I couldn't. She'd signed on for her own fate, sure, but she'd been crushed by the machinery of this thing as much as I had been, one compromised choice at a time.

I said softly, "What happened next?"

Her voice was quiet, preternaturally calm. "Those guys were on edge waiting for the DNA results. They took the baby away from her. Kept her in the other room. Jane was too weak to get up, but I tried to plead with them. One of the guys even hit me. They thought she'd be more… docile without her baby." She whispered roughly, her face glazed. "They kept the baby away from her. Two days. I had to go in and feed her, Gracie, hold her when they got tired of her crying. But I couldn't get her to stop. The pressure to get her to stop, it was awful. Then they kept her alone in a crib. I spent most of my time with Jane, listening to her weep. Just weeping. We could hear the baby crying through the walls. That baby was crying and crying, and Jane's breasts were leaking milk through her shirt. It went on and on. There was nothing I could do. She pleaded with me, but there was nothing I could do. Her breasts got engorged, and they were leaking, and they were crying in different rooms, both of them, all the time. It was the most horrible thing I've ever experienced."

Her eyes grew glassy, and she stopped rocking herself.

I was surprised at how weak my voice sounded. "Go on. Please."

Tris held herself perfectly still. When she blinked, more tears fell down her cheeks. "One night the men came in. The DNA test. Whatever it was, it came back bad news. They took Jane. And they helped her up-she was so weak-and they helped her to the door, then outside. I looked through the curtains. I saw them put her in a dark car. They talked to someone, but I couldn't see who because the windows were tinted. The baby was crying in the other room. Then they came back in, and I sat across the room, like I hadn't been watching. They went into the other room. And then the baby stopped crying. They went back outside, and I saw them put something in the trunk of the dark car, and the dark car drove off. I ran into the other room, and the crib was empty. It was empty. I sat down on the floor. I heard them come in behind me. I thought they were going to kill me. But they told me to go home and not to tell anyone. That someone would be in contact with me. And sure enough, my cousin called me the next day. And it was the same meeting, up Runyon Canyon. I was so scared, but I went because they knew who I was and I had a little girl to raise. And that man got in the back of my car, and I thought he was going to shoot me, but instead he said I had to tell the story to the press, about the bodies being dumped. And if I did, and if I stuck to that story with the cops and the press, that nothing would happen to me or my little girl. And I did. I never told anyone otherwise. Until right now."

'They're coming after you," I said. "As we speak."

Her look held the same comprehensive defeat I saw in Homer's face once he was a few drinks in. But also a glimmer of something else. Relief, maybe. "Let 'em catch me. I don't care anymore."

"How about your daughter?"

"My daughter hasn't talked to me in seven years. Last I heard, she was in Costa Rica."

"Did they pay you?"

She looked at the blank TV screen for a long time, then nodded, a jerk of her head that looked like a shudder. Her nails went again to her eczema, that same horrible rasping. "I don't believe in heaven or hell. But I'm scared of what's waiting for me."

"Then do something."

"I've forgotten how. You get touched by something like this, it goes into you. You can never get back to normal. I wouldn't even know where to start."

She'd spoken my darkest fear. I could barely bring myself to face her. "Get in touch with the man who hired you." I needed her to do it not just for me but for herself, for what it meant about keeping something safe, deep buried where it couldn't be rooted out and ground into dust. "He and his men are looking for you. It can't be hard to get the word out to them."

"No," she said. "No way."

I couldn't find my voice. I just looked at her.

She hugged herself and rocked a bit more. "I could call my cousin. Maybe he still has a contact who knows someone who has a phone number on the guy. He's good like that, my cousin. But even if I reach this guy. What am I supposed to say?"

"Tell him someone contacted you. Someone who already knew the whole story. You need to meet him. To talk, figure out a plan. He's the one who told you to meet me at the pitcher's mound, right?"

"Yeah. He said you were a baseball player and that I should take you there."

"So tell him to meet you where he told you to take me that night. But don't say it's the pitcher's mound-if it's the right guy, he'll remember. Tonight at midnight."

"What are you going to do?"

"Watch from a distance. See who he is."

"Then what?"

"Then I'll know."

"Will knowing help?"

"Probably not. But I can put the information in the hands of someone who knows how to use it."

"These are dangerous men."

"I'll disappear."

"You won't know how hard that wears on you until it's too late."

Her eyes filled again, but she blinked her way back from the edge. She grabbed a lock of hair and started breaking off split ends again, then threw it aside. "Okay. I'll call my cousin, send out the pigeon. Tonight at midnight, meet at the place he told me to bring you. Who knows if the guy'11 get the message, but I'll try. That it?"

"You'll need to move again. Out of town this time. I'll pay for-"

"No. No. I won't have you pay for anything. But with my aunt… How long do I have to stay gone?"

"Follow the news. You'll know if it's safe to come back."

I got up and walked to the door. She followed close behind. "I didn't know. I didn't know what any of it would lead to. You think I'm awful. You think I'm horrible."

"No," I said.

She grasped my elbow at the door, gently, as if afraid of setting me off. She was a woman accustomed to men with tempers. She said, "I just needed to make a little extra money. I had no idea where it would go. And then I didn't have a choice. I was terrified. They threatened me. I had a little girl to raise."

I thought, So did Jane Everett.

I gave her a little nod, and she stayed in the doorway, watching me leave.