Lightning (15 page)

To afford the rent, she shared her off-campus apartment in Irvine with two juniors at the university, Meg Falcone and Julie Ishimina, and at first she thought perhaps one of them had sent the toad. They seemed unlikely candidates, for Laura was not close to either of them. They were busy with studies and interests of their own; and they had lived with her only since the previous September. They claimed to have no knowledge of the toad, and their denials seemed sincere.

She wondered if Dr. Matlin, the faculty adviser to the literary magazine at UCI, might have sent the figurine. Since her sophomore year, when she had taken Matlin’s course in creative writing, he had encouraged her to pursue her talent and polish her craftsmanship. He had been particularly fond of “Amphibian Epics,” so maybe he had sent the toad to say “well done.” But why no return address, no card? Why the secrecy? No, that was out of character for Harry Matlin.

She had a few casual friends at the university, but she was not truly close to anyone because she had little time to make and sustain deep friendships. Between her studies, her job, and her writing, she used up all the hours of the day not devoted to sleeping or eating. She could think of no one who would have gone out of his way to buy the toad, package it, and mail it anonymously.

A mystery.

The following day her first class was at eight o’clock and her last at two. She returned to her nine-year-old Chevy in the campus parking lot at a quarter till four, unlocked the door, got behind the wheel—and was startled to see another toad on the dashboard.

It was two inches high and four inches long. This one was also ceramic, emerald green, reclining with one arm bent and its head propped on its hand. It was smiling dreamily.

She was sure she had left the car locked, and in fact it had been locked when she returned from class. The enigmatic giver of toads had evidently gone to considerable trouble to open the Chevy without a key—a loid of some kind or a coathanger worked through the top of the window to the lock button—and leave the toad in a dramatic fashion.

Later she put the reclining toad on her nightstand where the top hat-and-cane fellow already stood. She spent the evening in bed, reading. From time to time her attention drifted away from the page to the ceramic figures.

The next morning when she left the apartment, she found a small box on her doorstep. Inside was another meticulously wrapped toad. It was cast in pewter, sitting upon a log, holding a banjo.

The mystery deepened.

In the summer she put in a full shift as a waitress at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, but during the school year her course load was so heavy that she could work only three evenings a week. The Hamlet was an upscale hamburger restaurant providing good food for reasonable prices in a moderately plush ambience—crossbeam ceiling, lots of wood paneling, hugely comfortable armchairs—so the customers were usually happier than those in other places where she had waited tables.

Even if the atmosphere had been seedy and the customers surly, she would have kept the job; she needed the money. On her eighteenth birthday, four years ago, she learned that her father had established a trust fund, consisting of the assets liquidated upon his death, and that the trust could not be touched by the state to pay for her care at McIlroy Home and Caswell Hall. At that time the funds had become hers to spend, and she had applied them toward living and college expenses. Her father hadn’t been rich; there was only twelve thousand dollars even after six years of accrued interest, not nearly enough for four years of rent, food, clothing, and tuition, so she depended upon her income as a waitress to make up the difference.

On Sunday evening, January 16, she was halfway through her shift at the Hamlet when the host escorted an older couple, about sixty, to one of the booths in Laura’s station. They asked for two Michelobs while they studied the menu. A few minutes later, when she returned from the bar with the beers and two frosted mugs on a tray, she saw a ceramic toad on their table. She nearly dropped the tray in surprise. She looked at the man, at the woman, and they were grinning at her, but they weren’t
saying
anything, so she said,
“You’ve
been giving me toads? But I don’t even know you—do I?”

The man said, “Oh, you’ve gotten more of these, have you?”

“This is the fourth. You didn’t bring this for me, did you? But it wasn’t here a few minutes ago. Who put it on the table?”

He winked at his wife, and she said to Laura, “You’ve got a secret admirer, dear.”

“Who?”

“Young fella was sitting at that table over there,” the man said, pointing across the room to a station served by a waitress named Amy Heppleman. The table was now empty; the busboy had just finished clearing away the dirty dishes. “Soon as you left to get our beers, he comes over and asks if he can leave this here for you.”

It was a Christmas toad in a Santa suit, without a beard, a sack of toys over its shoulder.

The woman said, “You don’t really know who he is?”

“No. What’d he look like?”

“Tall,” the man said. “Quite tall and husky. Brown hair.”

“Brown eyes too,” his wife said. “Soft-spoken.”

Holding the toad, staring at it, Laura said, “There’s something about this... something that makes me uneasy.”

“Uneasy?” the woman said. “But it’s just a young man who’s smitten with you, dear.”

“Is it?” she wondered.

Laura found Amy Heppleman at the salad preparation counter and sought a better description of the toad-giver.

“He had a mushroom omelet, whole-wheat toast, and a Coke,” Amy said, using a pair of stainless-steel tongs to fill two bowls with salad greens. “Didn’t you see him sitting there?”

“I didn’t notice him, no.”

“Biggish guy. Jeans. A blue-checkered shirt. His hair was cut too short, but he was kinda cute if you like the moose type. Didn’t talk much. Seemed kinda shy.”

“Did he pay with a credit card?”

“No. Cash.”

“Damn,” Laura said.

She took the Santa toad home and put it with the other figurines.

The following morning, Monday, as she left the apartment, she found yet another plain white box on the doorstep. She opened it reluctantly. It contained a clear glass toad.

When Laura returned from the UCI campus that same afternoon, Julie Ishimina was sitting at the dinette table, reading the daily paper and drinking a cup of coffee. “You got another one,” she said, pointing to a box on the kitchen counter. “Came in the mail.”

Laura tore open the elaborately wrapped package. The sixth toad was actually a pair of toads—salt and pepper shakers.

She put the shakers with the other figurines on her nightstand, and for a long while she sat on the edge of her bed, frowning at that growing collection.

At five o’clock that afternoon she called Thelma Ackerson in Los Angeles and told her about the toads.

Lacking a trust fund of any size, Thelma had not even considered college, but as she said, that was no tragedy because she was not interested in academics. Upon completing high school, she had gone straight from Caswell Hall to Los Angeles, intent upon breaking into show business as a stand-up comic.

Nearly every night, from about six o’clock until two in the morning, she hung around the comedy clubs—the Improv, the Comedy Store, and all their imitators—angling for a six-minute, unpaid shot on the stage, making contacts (or hoping to make them), competing with a horde of young comics for the coveted exposure.

She worked days to pay the rent, moving from job to job, some of them decidedly peculiar. Among other things she had worn a chicken suit and sung songs and waited tables in a weird “theme” pizza parlor, and she’d been a picket-line stand-in for a few Writers Guild West members who were required by their union to participate in a strike action but who preferred to pay someone a hundred bucks a day to carry a placard for them and sign their names on the duty roster.

Though they lived just ninety minutes apart, Laura and Thelma got together only two or three times a year, usually just for a long lunch or dinner, because they led busy lives. But regardless of the time between visits, they were instantly comfortable with each other and quick to share their most intimate thoughts and experiences. “The McIlroy-Caswell bond,” Thelma once said, “is stronger than being blood brothers, stronger than the Mafia covenant, stronger than the bond between Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, and those two are
close.”

Now, after she listened to Laura’s story, Thelma said, “So what’s your problem, Shane? Sounds to me like some big, shy hunk of a guy has a crush on you. Lots of women would swoon over this.”

“Is that what it is, though? An innocent crush?”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. But it ... makes me uneasy.”

“Uneasy? These toads are all cute little things, aren’t they? None of them is a snarling toad? None of them is holding a bloody little butcher knife? Or a little ceramic chainsaw?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t sent you any
beheaded
toads, has he?”

“No, but—”

“Shane, the last few years have been calm, though of course you’ve had a pretty eventful life. It’s understandable that you’d expect this guy to be Charles Manson’s brother. But it’s almost a sure bet he’s just what he appears to be—a guy who admires you from afar, is maybe a little shy, and has a streak of romance in him about eighteen inches wide. How’s your sex life?”

“I don’t have any,” Laura said.

“Why not? You’re not a virgin. There was that guy last year—”

“Well, you know that didn’t work out.”

“Nobody since?”

“No. What do you think—I’m promiscuous?”

“Sheesh! Kiddo, two lovers in twenty-two years would not make you promiscuous even by the pope’s definition. Unbend a little. Relax. Stop being a worrier. Flow with this, see where it goes. He might just turn out to be Prince Charming.”

“Well... maybe I will. I guess you’re right.”

“But, Shane?”

“Yeah?”

“Just for luck, from now on you better carry a .357 Magnum.”

“Very funny.”

“Funny is my business.”

During the following three days Laura received two more toads, and by Saturday morning, the twenty-second, she was equally confused, angry, and afraid. Surely no secret admirer would string the game out so long. Each new toad seemed to be mocking rather than honoring her. There was a quality of obsession in the giver’s relentlessness.

She spent much of Friday night in a chair by the big living-room window, sitting in the dark. Through the half-open drapes, she had a view of the apartment building’s covered veranda and the area in front of her own door. If he came during the night, she intended to confront him in the act. By three-thirty in the morning he had not arrived, and she dozed off. When she woke in the morning, no package was on the doorstep.

After she showered and ate a quick breakfast, she went down the outside stairs and around to the back of the building where she kept her car in the covered stall assigned to her. She intended to go to the library to do some research work, and it looked like a good day for being indoors. The winter sky was gray and low, and the air had a prestorm heaviness that filled her with foreboding—a feeling that intensified when she found another box on the dashboard of her locked Chevy. She wanted to scream in frustration.

Instead she sat behind the wheel and opened the package. The other figurines had been inexpensive, no more than ten or fifteen dollars each, some probably as cheap as three bucks, but the newest was an exquisite miniature porcelain that surely cost at least fifty dollars. However she was less interested in the toad than in the box in which it had come. It was not plain, as before, but imprinted with the name of a gift shop—Collectibles—in the South Coast Plaza shopping mall.

Laura drove directly to the mall, arrived fifteen minutes before Collectibles opened, waited on a bench in the promenade, and was first through the shop’s door when it was unlocked. The store’s owner and manager was a petite, gray-haired woman named Eugenia Farvor. “Yes, we handle this line,” she said after listening to Laura’s succinct explanation and examining the porcelain toad, “and in fact I sold it myself just yesterday to the young man.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“What did he look like?”

“I remember him well because of his size. Very tall. Six five, I’d say. And very broad in the shoulders. He was quite well dressed. A gray pinstripe suit, blue and gray striped tie. I admired the suit, in fact, and he said it wasn’t easy finding clothes to fit him.”

“Did he pay cash?”

“Mmmmm ... no, I believe he used a credit card.”

“Would you still have the charge slip?”

“Oh, yes, we usually run a day or two behind in organizing them and transferring them to the master ticket for deposit.” Mrs. Farvor led Laura past glass display cases filled with porcelains, Lalique and Waterford crystal, Wedgwood plates, Hummel figurines, and other expensive items, to the cramped office at the back of the store. Then she suddenly had second thoughts about sharing her customer’s identity. “If his intentions are innocent, if he’s just an admirer of yours-and I must say there seemed no harm in him; he seemed quite nice—then I’ll be spoiling everything for him. He’ll want to be revealing himself to you according to his own plan.”

Laura tried hard to charm the woman and win her sympathy. She could not recall ever having spoken more eloquently or with such feeling; usually she was not as good at vocalizing her feelings as she was at putting them down in print. Genuine tears sprang to her assistance, surprising her even more than they did Eugenia Farvor.

From the MasterCard charge slip, she obtained his name—Daniel Packard—and his telephone number. She went directly from the gift shop to a public telephone in the mall and looked him up. There were two Daniel Packards in the book, but the one with that number lived on Newport Avenue in Tustin.