Crosscut (13 page)

“Didn’t he have contacts in all the labs at the base? Couldn’t he—”

“She was doing top-secret research.” Her voice sharpened. “She was beyond the chain of command. He hit a dead end.”

We were drilling close to an old fight. I felt a hard nut in my stomach.

“You believed him, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. This involved you. But I . . .” She turned her back and stared out the kitchen window. “I wanted him to keep pressing. He thought he couldn’t.”

“You thought he had plenty of access to information about her project because . . .”

Tommy Chang’s innuendo came flooding back, and Jax Rivera’s pointed hints, and my boyfriend’s jokes about secret lives. I groaned mentally, thinking: Jesse Blackburn, do you have to be right every stinking time?

“Was Dad in covert intelligence?”

“Probably.”

For a few seconds she leaned against the sink. Finally she turned around. Her gaze had lengthened.

“He used to empty the change from his pockets into a bowl on the dresser. One day I found Turkish coins there.” She looked reflective. “He’d told me he was going to D.C.”

“Oh.”

“And he kept a Canadian passport locked in his desk.”

I felt strangely detached. I reached for my glass of iced tea but it was empty. I went to the fridge for a refill.

“He never told you?” I said.

“No. And I never asked. He was NAVAIR now and forever, and any intelligence work he did was related to that.” She shrugged and began slicing cherry tomatoes on the cutting board.

All at once I felt sad. I disliked being shown a wall within their marriage.

“So we never found out anything more about South Star. The parents, I mean. We pressed everywhere we could apply pressure. With the school. With the navy. With every doctor in town. Especially Dr. Cantwell—you remember him?”

“Dr. C, yeah. I saw him at the reunion.”

She nodded and gave a little Huh-what-do-you-know look. Quiet pervaded the kitchen. Around us, postcards smiled and waved. I felt a slow welling, a shift, as if a beast were rousing itself from hibernation.

“Kelly Colfax and Ceci Lezak were on the field trip, weren’t they?” I said.

A knowing look came my way. “Yes.”

I got my backpack and pulled out the
Dog Days Update
. Flipping it open to the obituaries, I set it on the counter in front of her.

“Help me remember,” I said.

The light was turning outside, the hot day cooling to a soft evening. She flipped a page, looking at photos of my dead classmates.

She ran her hand over a name. “Teddy Horowitz.”

Aircraft accident aboard the USS
Nimitz.

She turned the page. Shannon Gruber, pneumonia following a long illness. She shook her head.

“Aggressive breast cancer ran in her family.”

She turned the page. “Linda Garcia.”

I put my hand on the book. “Long illness. What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

I tried to picture Linda back in school, recalling a torrent of brown hair, heavy makeup, heavier thighs. The sunlight coming through the window felt weirdly cold. Mom turned the page and we looked at the photo of Sharlayne Jackson.

“She was on the field trip,” I said. “I remember.”

Complications of childbirth.

She shook her head. “So many tragedies. But none of them connect, do they?” She flipped again. “Phoebe Chadwick.” She let out a hard noise. “ ‘Died suddenly.’ What a ridiculous euphemism. Who came up with this book?”

“Kelly Colfax and Ceci Lezak.”

“Crap.” She put both hands on the kitchen counter. “What did Phoebe Chadwick die from?”

“Southern Comfort. With a barbiturate chaser.”

“Was China Lake really such a bad place to grow up?”

She was shaking her head. She flipped past several more photos. When she came to Marcy Yakulski, she stopped. “Auto accident?”

I recalled the newspaper headline on the board at the reunion. Four Die in Fiery Crash.

“Marcy was on the field trip,” she said. “Her folks made a stink about the waivers.”

There was one name left. “Dana West?”

She read the entry. Registered nurse, died in a hospital fire. She ran her fingers across her forehead.

“Mom. How many people do you think went on the field trip that day?”

She was pensive. “You kids, your teacher . . . maybe twenty-five, twenty-six.”

I closed the book. We looked at each other, adding up names mentally. The hammer pounded a leaden rhythm inside my head.

“I count eight,” she said. “Including Kelly and Ceci.”

So did I. A cold sweat broke out across my face and palms.

Almost a third of the people who went with me to Renegade Canyon were dead. My gag reflex kicked in. I ran for the bathroom and retched.

Parked at the far edge of the lot, Coyote watched the woman schlub her way out through the doors of the community center. The evening was hot, typical for Riverside. Dust, sage, and agricultural fertilizer hinted on the wind. How curious that some members of the class would leave China Lake but cling to the desert lifestyle. Like Becky O’Keefe.

She clumped across the parking lot, stout, clumsy, and all too content, in love with the world of arts and crafts and homemaking. The hideous twinkly shirt and vacuous smile and rolls of fat on her upper arms testified to that. Taking Becky at the reunion had proved impossible. But tonight would be different. Tonight nobody would suspect and nobody would see.

Tonight Coyote was Soccer Mom, queen slut of the suburbs.

Soccer Mom’s black wig was drawn back into a ponytail, under a cap that said,
Walk for the Cure
. Workout pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt hid her musculature. The shirt bore the photo of a little girl clutching a daisy. She had found it in the back of the van she stole in Pasadena, with the
My kid is an honor student at El Rancho School
bumper sticker. The photo was a vomitous sentimentality but excellent camouflage. Soccer Mom, Princess Frigidity, she flaunted proof of her coitus via a photo on her chest.

Coyote lifted the tailgate of the van and opened the sports bag, looking toward the community center. It was a big place, well funded. It had aerobics classes and day care and Crafts for Beginners, which, according to the
Dog Days Update
, was taught by Becky O’Keefe.

Coyote ran lipstick across dry lips. It felt repellent, this womaning process, weakening oneself with cosmetics. Even in the service of the hunt, it stained the spirit. Legend told of Coyote and Woman dueling to outsmart each other. But she had not yet met Woman. Only women.

The lipstick slid across Soccer Mom’s lips. That’s it, write with it like a hard slash. Draw your target and bring success to the hunt. Draw a woman, even if it’s on your own face. Draw Becky O’Keefe right over here.

Soccer Mom threw the lipstick into the sports bag and put on a pair of weight-lifting gloves. The flame tickled the edge of her vision and, from within the bag, a rough red towel unfurled and curled out like a six-foot tongue. It raised itself erect and swayed, a charmed snake, cool and lascivious. She heard it licking the air, a wet sound though the towel was dry. And it flicked out, searching for her.

Keys jangled. Next to the van, a car door opened.

Coyote snapped back. Becky O’Keefe stood by the Volvo station wagon, dumping crafts supplies into the back.

“Okeydoke, pea pod,” she said. “Time to load you in.” The toddler was on her hip. About two years old, the age when heads were abnormally large and they defied their parents by screaming. A green river of snot ran out of its nose.

Now there was no tongue lapping at Soccer Mom from the sports bag. There was only this horselike woman next to her, shoveling her offspring into its car seat.

A glitch, now—this wouldn’t stand. This could have jeopardized the mission. A sound began gathering deep in her throat. She forced it to stop. With supreme effort, she softened her voice to a womanly lilt.

“Excuse me.”

Becky turned with an unguarded look. Unprepared. Unaware of the most basic self-defense measures. Stupid, worthless, unworthy woman.

“Hi,” Becky said.

She was infuriating. Dumb, like . . .

Red vision flared, ready to erupt. Coyote pulled back.

Becky just stood there smiling. The sound rolled in Coyote’s throat. Even now Becky failed to sense danger. She had every chance in the world and she didn’t take it.

She deserved everything that was coming.

Coyote shoved her hands into the gym bag and frowned with genuine frustration. “I took off my glasses and now I can’t find them. I’m blind as a bat without them, not even legal to drive. Could you help me look for them?”

 
Dead on the left, living on the right: Mom and I wrote down every name we could recall. Using my yearbook and the
Dog Days Update
, we cobbled together a list of two dozen kids who went on the petroglyph field trip. Then I sat out back under a red sunset and read it to Tommy Chang on the phone.

He took it stoically.

“You’re getting sidetracked, Evan. Chad Reynolds OD’ed out in the desert. That’s not spooky; it’s sordid. And Billy D’Amato fell asleep at the wheel driving back from Lone Pine. He wasn’t forced off the road, and his truck didn’t have some catastrophic breakdown. I know that because his wife made a huge stink, claiming it wasn’t his fault. Problem was, his blood alcohol was point-two-zero. He was drunk off his ass and rolled his pickup on the rim road. Period.”

“What about the rest of them?”

His voice edged uncharacteristically toward annoyance. “Ted Horowitz. Yeah. Propeller hypnosis killed him.”

My throat tightened. “Oh.”

“He was a deck crewman on a carrier. A plane handler, and he forgot Runway Safety 101.” His voice sharpened. “It was a closed-casket funeral.”

Propellers spin so fast that eventually you stop seeing them. My skin shrank as though flinching away from slicing blades.

“Tommy, I don’t know what’s going on. But something went wrong that day, and our classmates are dying because of it.”

“You want me to believe this killer is after kids who stumbled into some botched China Lake exercise, twenty years after the fact. You know how that sounds?”

“You have a better idea? Anyplace else to start hunting this guy?”

“I’m just looking for some reason why this would make any sense.”

“You’re asking me to figure out the reasoning of a psychopath. I can’t. But I’m telling you there’s a connection.”

In the background I heard men talking. And noises, exhalations.

“Are you smoking?” I said.

“No. Sticking on a new patch.”

“You sure about that?”

“Well, no. I glommed the patches into a ball and stuck it in my cheek like a wad of chew.”

I wish he could have seen me smile, wan though that smile was. “For dessert you could wrap a patch around a Tic Tac. Get that minty nicotine taste.”

He laughed. The sound quickly died. I gazed at the fading sky.

“Tommy, we need to warn people.”

Long silence. I think it was what they call a pregnant pause.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me the names again.”

Relief ran across my skin. I read the list to him.

I heard him tapping his pen against his desk. “You left a couple off.”

“Don’t make me say them out loud.”

“Yeah. Bad joss.”

His pen scritched. I knew he was adding the last two names: his and mine.

“Keep your eyes open, Rocky.”

“You too.”

The oaks stood black against red twilight. Inside the house, under light warmed by the kaleidoscope kitchen, Mom was setting the table. I went in and started writing an e-mail to Valerie Skinner. Halfway through, I paused.

Both something and somebody were eliminating my class. And Valerie was moving closer to eradication every day. How could I broach the topic without sounding ghoulish, nosy, or plain lunatic? Finally, I just said it.

 
I hit
send
.

“Ev, it’s food.” Mom waved me to the table.

“Great. One sec.” I took my phone into the living room and called Abbie. She took what I told her with atypical silence.

“I know this sounds off-the-wall,” I said.

“Yeah. But I don’t think it is.”

“You okay?”

“Shit, no.” She was speaking quietly. “There’s some things you should know. About Ceci. Stuff Wally saw at the office and the police confirmed.”

Her voice quavered.

“When the police found the body, they . . . God. The murderer—Evan, after he killed her, he X-rayed her. The machine was positioned next to her head, and film was missing.” Her voice broke. “He took a snapshot of the damage he inflicted inside her skull. As a souvenir.”

My throat was dry. “Do you own a gun?”

“No. The kids.”

“Have you thought about taking the kids and getting out of town?”

“You sound scared. That’s bad.”

“I’m not scared. I’m goddamned terrified.”

My class wasn’t unlucky. We were prey.

Becky O’Keefe hesitated, standing at the open door of the Volvo wagon with the two-year-old fussing in its car seat. Her beige stretch pants accentuated her haunches and paunchy stomach.

Coyote hid revulsion. To think of this woman thwarting the mission was intolerable, but Becky had become guarded, not buying the story of the lost glasses.

She had to buy it. The kid changed everything. The kid meant Coyote had to run the full op, here in the parking lot if necessary.