A Date You Can't Refuse (21 page)

I described to my nearest dining companions, Zeffie, Felix, and Nadja, the peculiar thing I'd seen on the hike before being distracted by Crispin's corpse—team members crashing through the brush. All three looked at me with the same opaque expression. As this was also the look of people listening to a language other than their own, I couldn't tell if it was a suspicious reaction or not. Nell, across the table, also scrutinized me in silence. She hadn't been on the hike. Nor had Uncle Vanya. In fact, I hadn't seen him since driving him home from Hamburger Hamlet. I asked Nell about him, but the question seemed to distress her, and she simply shook her head. “Gone.”

I was curious too to know who was responsible for
Poprobuji 31 Aromat, tebe legko budet osmotretsya—Udachi
, but couldn't figure out how to casually inquire whether anyone had written on my bathroom mirror in lip pencil the color of Grusha's borscht. As I pondered this, the police showed up.

Their arrival was presaged by the doorbell, followed by Grusha entering
from the kitchen to whisper to Yuri, who was in the middle of a lecture on dressing for
Good Morning America
as opposed to the
Late Show with David Letterman
.

Yuri stood. “Excuse me. Representatives from the sheriff's office have arrived.”

A stream of Russian erupted from Parashie, which Yuri managed to stem by walking behind her chair and putting his hands on her shoulders and massaging. “I will meet with them in the library,” he said. “Continue dining. Parashie, they may want to speak with you later, but I'll be there with you. Finish your dinner and start your homework. If we need you, I'll come get you. All right?” Yuri looked at her, waited for her answering nod, and then smiled at us all. He was quite relaxed, a lecturer giving tips on how to handle a sheriff's interview as opposed to a
Tonight Show
interview.

I waited until he'd left the room before I stood up, mindful of Joey's warning to avoid the cops at all costs. “Excuse me,” I mumbled to Felix. “I'm just going to—”

Felix stood too. “I am feeling a little tiredness. I will lie down.”

There was a general scraping of chairs, suggesting that half the team shared Felix's Sudden Fatigue Syndrome. My big fear was that Grusha would take this as an affront to her cooking, as the entrée had not yet arrived. I would make my escape now, before she discovered the defection.

“Not that way, Wollie,” Nadja said as I headed out. “You will run right into them.”

I turned to her, startled, and saw Stasik shake his head at her.

“I mean—nothing.” She looked confused.

I was confused myself. How had Nadja known I was avoiding the cops?

Oh. Because everyone else was avoiding the cops.

“Thanks,” I said to Nadja. “I'm just going to use the ladies' room. I forgot where it is; you're right, it's this way. Bye. I mean, see you in a minute. For dessert. Probably.” I was chattering, not wanting her or Stasik to think I noticed anything amiss in her comment.

I was actually grateful for the directional help, being still fuzzy on
how things were laid out in the Big House. I left the great room and turned right, toward a tiny half bath.

I locked myself in and took stock of the situation. Maybe I was being paranoid, but it certainly seemed that there was some big secret that everyone but me was in on, and that Nadja had momentarily forgotten I was not privy to. And it had to do with avoiding the police. I knew why
I
was avoiding the cops, but why were they? They couldn't all be undercover agents, confidential informants for the FBI.

Well, just one more unanswered question to add to my bulging mental file. I might as well hop into the Suburban and go early to Yogi Yogurt. I had a sudden yearning to be in public, surrounded by normal people.

I opened the door a crack, just in time to hear Nadja's voice in the hallway, speaking in Russian, until Stasik cut her off. “English,” he said. “It's bloody irritating, but it's what you're here for. And stop freaking. She's the stupid girl, not you. She didn't notice a thing.”

Great. Stasik thought I was stupid.

I shouldn't care, I told myself. I could use it to my advantage, their underestimation of me. That would actually be smart. But my feelings were hurt and I felt left out. What power did these people have over me that I would actually long to be part of the inner circle, to be a valued member of Team Felony?
Get a grip!
I yelled at myself, and for emphasis actually grabbed onto the pink granite powder room sink.
You're an undercover agent, damn it. You don't need feelings, you need instincts. And guts. And maybe some superpowers
.

I splashed cold water on my face for further emphasis, came out of the bathroom, saw that the coast was clear, and followed the hallway to its end, a door that led outside.

I'd never been out here before, in the backyard. I was about to head right, toward the House of Blue, when I heard voices coming from that direction. I went left. I didn't want to encounter any more team members just now.

A flash of yellow rubbed against me, knocking against my legs with a wagging tail, then sashayed off. Olive Oyl. I followed her. She was company, she liked me, and she didn't think I was dumb.

She led me to the next house over, Green House, the one I hadn't yet
been in. She went straight to a small door almost below ground level as the hill sloped down. A storage area, I guessed. Olive Oyl scratched at it, wanting in, then turned to whine at me.

“No,” I whispered. “I'm not going in there. I'm sure there are mice. Or worse, rats.”

Olive Oyl barked again, suggesting that mice and rats were what she had in mind. “Ssh,” I said. “It's probably locked.”

But it wasn't. The knob turned, and before I could stop her, the dog barreled her way in. I heard a movement in the brush, and after a moment of indecision, I went in too.

There were no visible rats, but I did imagine rat droppings. Too dark to tell, until I found a flashlight hanging on the wall near the door. I turned it on. The room was damp and cool and smelled of dirt. Paradise for a dog, probably, but not me. I suspected snakes, too, and worms, and whatever else lived in dank surroundings. Slugs. Mushrooms. There was a lot of junk stored there, gardening supplies and a lawn mower. Olive Oyl went farther into the room, whining and barking some more until I went to investigate. She then knocked over some kind of weed-whacking equipment, which in turn knocked over a bunch of other stuff, revealing a wall. Olive Oyl, on a mission, barked at it.

It wasn't a solid wall, but a panel set into a wall, one of a series of panels. Olive Oyl didn't care about the others; she liked this one. I began to push experimentally all around the edges and, sure enough, on the bottom right section there was some give and then the panel swung toward me. “Ha,” I whispered. “How stupid do I look now, Stasik?”

Olive Oyl went through the hole in the wall.

After a look over my shoulder, I went too.

L
ight.

The overhead fluorescents must 've been activated by a motion sensor. If I'd hoped to find the editing room Bennett Graham had told me to look for, this wasn't it. But it was clean, well constructed, and well lit, a far cry from the anteroom that preceded it.

I couldn't figure out the purpose of the room, but it had an industrial look to it, long and skinny with brick walls painted white. The floor was concrete. Black beams traversed the length of the ceiling, some kind of pulley system, reminding me of cable cars. Glass partitions at one end of the room, six of them side by side, split the room into sections, like a bowling alley. Six black boxes were mounted on the ceiling above the partitions, with a green computer screen next to each, just above head height. There were metal clamps attached to the side of the glass partitions like giant paper clips.

At the far end of the room, away from the glass partitions, the wall slanted. I walked over to check it out and found it was made of metal. Above it was some sort of huge filtering system, making a fanlike noise. The noise had started up along with the lights.

There were big storage lockers along one wall, shut with combination locks.

What was this place?

Olive Oyl, now that she was here, wanted to be gone. My guess was that whoever she'd thought would be here wasn't, and that the room itself held no food, mice, or soft doggie bed on the concrete floor and therefore no further interest.

Inside a wastebasket was a single torn sheet of paper. I pulled it out. One side was blank and on the other was a stylized image of a man's head, no more than a black rectangle with the suggestion of ears. He appeared to be wearing a backpack, and the paper was torn at his rib cage. I pulled a pen from my pocket and, sitting on the floor, made a detailed sketch of the room. Olive Oyl nudged me with her cold nose. I wanted to be gone too, I realized. I'm not overly sensitive to ambience, but I found this room cold, hard, and prisonlike.

“Fine with me,” I said, taking a last look around. “Let's go.”

We retraced our steps, leaving the industrial room, and put the gardening tools back in place in the dirt foyer. I made it back to my bedroom for my keys, purse, and a sketchbook and pens—my artistic emergency kit, in case I got stuck somewhere—and left a note on my bedroom door saying I'd gone for a walk. This was true. The walk was to the garage. My own car was now nowhere in sight, probably getting a new transmission, but the Suburban was there. I started it up and, when no one came running out to stop me, took off.

I couldn't stop thinking about the room and I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd stumbled onto a key piece of evidence—but evidence of what? If Crispin and Chai were any indication, it was dangerous to know too much. It had to be even more dangerous to know and not to know what it was I knew.

I kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if I was being followed, but all I saw was blackness.

I
pulled into the parking lot, turned off the Suburban, and sat. I was early. The night was gorgeous and the moon was full. I expected to feel liberated, but in fact, I had a strange, untethered feeling. I wondered what everyone was doing back at MediasRex, and it wasn't professional secret-agent curiosity, it was personal. Having lived alone so much of my life, to suddenly have people cook for me, overhear a conversation, maybe notice my absence, held a certain charm. If only I'd gone to college and lived in a dorm—or even summer camp, a quick hospital stay, prison—this wouldn't seem so exotic.

But it was more than that. Against my will, and despite their alleged illegal activities, I was growing attached to these people. Never mind that one of them was almost certainly a killer. Was this normal? Did it happen to Simon? Was there any research done on the subject, the emotional drawbacks of spying?

The silence around me broke into my reverie and I sat up. No, it wasn't my imagination. The mall looked closed. Yogi Yogurt, at the far end, was definitely dark.

Anxiety clutched at me.

There were a few parked cars, but no real signs of life. What kind of place was Calabasas, where malls shut down at nine-thirty p.m.? Where
were the teenagers avoiding homework, working on their gang skills, loitering? Where was Starbucks?

It always amazes me how a place that's nonthreatening by day can be so sinister at night. I locked myself into the Suburban and drove across the parking lot. Yes, Yogi Yogurt was closed. Now what? I called Joey both at home and on her cell and left messages, saying where I was and what was going on; in case anything happened to me, I wanted people to worry. And in case nothing happened, I told her where to meet me, if possible, in an hour.

Did I have to get out of the car to make contact? Probably. My instructions had been shockingly vague. Did they expect me to somehow just know how it was done? What if I was being set up? By whom, I couldn't imagine, but I had a free-floating feeling of terror. I reached for my purse, as per Joey's advice. This was the moment to pretend to have a gun.

Okay, I'd get out of the car, but should I leave it running so I could jump back in and take off fast? Or would that encourage some lurker to jump into it himself and drive away? I went with option one, and ran to the door of the yogurt store with my hand in my purse, which was neither efficient, graceful, nor threatening. And yes, on the door were the store hours. Yogi Yogurt closed at nine each night. Probably the whole mall did. I knocked anyway.

“Miss Shelley?”

I whipped around and pulled my hand out of my purse, clutching a tube of hand cream. I stopped just short of aiming it at him. “You scared me.”

The man stepped out of the shadows. He wore a sports coat; at the very least, not a gang member. “Let's take your car, okay?”

I put my hand cream away. “Let's see some ID, okay?”

He handed me a leather badge. It was exactly like the one Simon carried. His name was Lendall Mains, and the photo on the card was of a man visually unremarkable in every way except for one distinguishing feature, ears that stuck straight out. I looked at the man in front of me. Yup. Same ears. I handed the card back.

“Okeydokey” I said and held up my keys. “Wanna drive?”

“Better if you do.”

Lendall was not a big man, and I had the satisfaction of seeing him
open the Suburban's passenger-side door only after a first unsuccessful try. “Whoa,” he said.

“Yeah, why are the doors so heavy?” I asked.

“They're reinforced,” he said.

“How come?”

“Let's talk in the car,” he said.

He directed me back to Mulholland Highway, toward Calabasas High School, and I asked again about the reinforced doors.

“Bulletproofing.”

I pulled over to the shoulder, parked, turned off the engine, and faced him. “Look, Lendall—or do I have to call you Mr. Mains?”

“Lendall's fine.”

“Good. Lendall, where's Bennett Graham?”

“At this moment? I don't know. But I report to him. He's my super visor.”

“Can you get him on the phone? Because I thought I'd be seeing him tonight, and I need to. “