Elsinore Canyon (19 page)

“Thank you. We can talk later.”

“Good.” An insinuating smile, cat-like, spread beneath his nose. Dr. Claudia had to shut her eyes—she was starting to picture little triangular ears and a set of whiskers.

She turned away, then turned back. He was still smiling after her. Was it a smile? In her eyes, his image doubled and flickered. She focused. He was one again. “Polly, you said, ‘issues’?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, can you actually remember them all? Danielle passed away a while ago.”

“I have notes. I have some items from her own hand.”

“Oh,” she barely said. “Would you like to wait for me in my office? I’m just going to check on something for Rosie and Gale. I can join you in about ten minutes.”

“Yes, I’d like that. I’ll see you in ten minutes. In your office.”

She forced herself to turn away from him and walk. One foot in front of the other, heel-toe heel-toe, his eyes burning holes in her back at every step, to the stairs and up.

The door to her private room was ten feet ahead. Polly’s dull, determined eyes were still on her, she realized. Behind her, closing. Suddenly, a hand shot around her mouth and she screamed—the hand melted away and she was free. It hadn’t happened. She was alone in the hall, leaning against the door to her room, trying to keep herself vertical on jellied knees. Christ, where was reality? She opened the door, shut it behind her. She was going to have to do something about him. On a thought, she left the lights off. She could work in the dark. She felt her way to the place where she kept the things she sought. Her fingertips moved over seams and fastenings. Precious time dribbling away as she undid them by touch. Her fingers on small, smooth items, paper labels. One, two, a delicate
clink
in her pockets as she turned away. Wait. Clean up? No, leave it all, she was losing time, she would remember to come back before the night was out and—no. Methodical or dead. She worked quickly. Dana and her father might start roaming the house. Was that treacherous Polly out there?
Keep—control.
There was no hand, there was no hand. But it would be just like him to plant himself in the hallway, the big, bobbly incubus. She peeked out.

Empty. She walked swiftly towards the stairs, pausing on the way to listen at the door to her husband’s room. Silent. Was Dana in there yet or not? Should she wait? No, later would be as bad as now. As she pressed the call button for the elevator she caught a fluttering movement in a mirror. Polly. This time she really saw him. He disappeared into a nook at the end of the hall. He had seen every move she made.

I didn’t know if Polly had a laptop. And if he did, I didn’t know where it would be. But Dana was jubilant about the idea of getting it, so my hot hands were going to grab it if it existed. It might be locked, bolted down, passworded, hot-wired, booby-trapped with pepper spray, or mined, I was going to get it. Dana had gone ahead of me by two minutes, and I didn’t see anyone else in the halls. I was one door away from Polly’s office when I heard thick footsteps running sloppily down the stairs. I wheeled back around a corner, held my breath, and listened. Door open. Footsteps in. Movement. Footsteps out. Door not closed? I can’t peer around corners in my wheelchair—the wheels precede my face by half a foot—but I can slip out of my chair and get on my belly and slither. So slither I did. My eyes down at floor level, I saw Polly at the end of the hall, scurrying back up the stairs like a giant rat. Yes, and I was a giant snake. I didn’t care; Dana would laugh when I told her.

I got back into my chair and rolled into his office. There it was! Polly’s laptop, perfect score, sitting right on his desk. I snatched it along with a wireless mouse and a power cord, stashed it all behind my back, and wheeled back around the corner. Polly’s laptop on the top of my lap, the tables turned. I didn’t want to waste time wheeling somewhere supposedly safe, so I sat there in the hall and powered it on. It would all come out on the surveillance tapes anyway, but that would be another explanation for another day. Hell, no one had a good excuse for anything tonight. Fucking slow system boot. Damn it, I knew it, a password prompt. I could take the machine back to my room and use my own laptop to download a crack. Or surely that obsessive snoop Polly had one in his office. I crammed the machine behind my back again and rolled back into his office. Let the bastard walk in, I barely cared now. I pulled all his desk drawers.
Chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk
—all locked. The flat, top one slid open. Office stuff—pens, CD envelopes, labels, staples, paper clips, business cards. I turned over all the papers, flipped through notepads. Nothing I could make sense of. I slid my hands to the back and felt something stiff. I pulled it out. A stack of photos. Polly’s dear departed ex-wife. Some of them with Polly. She’d been dead for a year and they’d been divorced for around ten years before that, so the pictures were at least that old. His wife smiling in bed under the sheets, wife lying on the bed naked, wife on her hands and knees looking over her shoulder, Polly on wife on bed on hands and knees, wife in nothing but boots, tight shot of wife, tight shot of two people fucking, tight shots, Polly and wife again, just Polly. She was gorgeous, he was younger and just as ugly. The pictures were tattered and scratched with handling—were they sticky, too? Fuck, I shoved them back, grabbed a pen and paper, and sped on my wheels out of the office, down the hall, more halls, elevators, more halls, into the room I called mine.

Door closed, all alone. I opened the laptop and took notes as I typed at the prompt.

• esmeralda
  
• 3smeralda
  
• 3sm3ralda
  
• 3sm3r@lda
  
• 3sm3r@!da
  
• 3sm3r@1da
  
• 3sm3r@!d@
  
• 3sm3r@1d@
  

No shut-out after eight failures, but there were seven hundred twenty permutations even without case sensitivity, which Windows passwords had, which pushed the number into the millions, and I still might be barking completely up the wrong tree. I’d give it five minutes and then look for a crack online. I pecked and scribbled away for three and a half minutes.

3smer@lda

Welcome to Polly’s cyberworld. Space-agey gradient wallpaper, dozens of shortcuts to documents, games, apps. Total mess, multiple shortcuts for the same program that auto-launched anyway, didn’t he know how to organize a stupid desktop? Now I wanted to look around—somehow I hadn’t expected to be so curious. Concentrate. I found the snitchware and launched it. He had accounts for everyone: Dana, Phil, Laurie, Mrs. Hamlet, Mr. Hamlet, Oscar, Perla and Miguel. I clicked on Laurie’s directory. There it all was, e-mails, URLs, avatars, downloaded right to his hard drive. I clicked through her files. Not much to see after all. Well, come to think of it, of course not. What did Polly uncover besides love notes and jokes and news links and purchase confirmations and business matters that he was probably copied on anyway? Tedious crap. Maybe he left the good stuff online.
Scheduler.
Automatic downloads at midnight, server purged afterwards. So most of it was right there on his box. Holy God, an account for Dr. Claudia. “Not yet activated on the local system.” Damn. He hadn’t gotten to her actual box yet, the one download I could have used—Dana could have used.

I fiddled with the program and made some notes for Dana. She was savvy enough to figure it out herself, but I’d save her the time. I wrote down the password, laid the paper on the keyboard, closed the lid, and shoved the laptop inside my pillow case. I packed my stuff and rolled out. I wanted like hell to put the box right in Dana’s hands, but she and I had figured it was better for me to go. I didn’t see a soul. Anyone riding the surveillance cameras could undo it all in five minutes. Please, no one search my room. Before I drove off at eight-oh-eight, I texted Dana:
where we said.

In the bathroom adjoining Oscar’s office, Dr. Claudia wiped her shoes on a mat and shook ice cubes into two zip-loc bags. “Did you get a nap this afternoon?” she called in a frail voice.

At his desk, Oscar answered in his assuring, neutral tone. “I’m tanned, rested, and ready. For anything you need.”

Dr. Claudia shuffled out to him. “If only I could have you everywhere at once.” She put her arms around his shoulders and pressed one of the bags of ice to his forehead. Her breasts cuddled his neck as she rocked him.

“Nice,” he said.

“I need to sleep. I need to try.”

“I’ll sing you a lullaby.”

“Later, definitely.” She straightened up. “The Maldives.”

“They can take off at eleven.”

“What a wonder. How long is the flight?”

“Nearly twenty-four hours.”

“Good lord. The world could end by then. Well, it’ll actually be a little shorter. What’s the flight number?”

Oscar pointed to his tablet. Claudia typed the five characters into her phone, next to another number she had found a few minutes before, in a mere two clicks on the internet.

“A few more things. Get Rosie and Gale a few nights at the Sofitel or the Peninsula in Bangkok for—I guess it will be tomorrow.”

“Bangkok.”

“And money, whatever they need. And two first-class tickets back to L.A. in their names, open date. And, it seems like there’s something else.”

“The charter is still going to the Maldives?”

“Yes, yes. It was something else.”

“And these Bangkok arrangements are just for Rosie and Gale.”

“Yes. Something I was supposed to—oh dear lord. Polly. I told him to wait for me in my office.”

“I’ll take care of him.”

“You’re an angel. I need to go work on my husband. He’s the only one who’ll be able to get Dana on the plane.”

At seven fifty-six, Dr. Claudia shuffled into the master bedroom. No one could see her now, not in here. No need to pretend she was anything but gone. Shuffle. The drugs were fighting in her. Wait, stop shuffling, be careful—she was stumbling, she could break a bone. Garth wasn’t in the room, not surprising but still sad. She balanced on her feet, curled her spine and lowered her head like a willow tree slowly over her sternum, and tried to feel him—his arms around her, her head on his chest. How good it would be, how comforting, a prelude to sweet oblivion. He was with Dana now, wasn’t he? Was this how it would always be? When would he come to her and stay? She hated waiting for him in there. Lonely woman in a bedroom. The worst possibilities came crowding to her mind, the stuff of nightmares—he wouldn’t come, she would have to spend the night alone in the bed, he would enter in no mood for sex, this would no longer be a place of love.
Nightmares.
She could not live without his love.

She dragged through the connecting door into her own room and turned on all the lights. The room flushed gold. Ah! Such beauty. Sharing it with a wonderful person was the best way to live. Dizzifying beauty and luxury. Ridiculous, insane. Mind-glutting. She could weep. She swam through beautiful things—massy paintings, intricate vases, a satin chaise, a white marble vanity, a towel warmer, fresh flowers, fresh fruit, a fireplace, a big-screen television. Which to go to first? Crystal, china, lacquer, carved mahogany shining and smoothed by years of caressing hands, jade, silk, beveled glass. There was also a sober way to love this if she could grasp it. Yes: Garth wanted her to have this. It was good, it made life convenient, it made one feel confident. It reduced the strife and toil that took the magic out of marriages. She wanted Garth.