Hold of the Bone (12 page)

“Pete and Mike did?”

“Oh, yes. They heard about Mrs. Saladino and went to the hospital to find the girls, but they'd taken off already. The boys went after them.”

“And how do you know this?”

“Everybody knew. Pete took his father's truck and was grounded for a week. The whole school was buzzing about it. The girls didn't come back to school and the principal—that would have been Principal Clark back then—was thinking of suspending them. The only reason
he didn't was because of the extenuating circumstances. That the girls' mother had died. They chalked it up to that and let them come back.”

“When did Mike and Pete get back from LA?”

“Oh, right away. They only cut the one day, and Principal Clark let their parents deal with them.”

“What did they say about their trip?”

“Nothing specific that I remember. As I recall, they were pretty hangdog about the whole thing.”

“How so?”

“Well, the girls took it hard, being parent-less and all, and I think their beaux took it hard, too. Everyone was upset, not knowing what was going to happen to poor Sal and Cass.”

“And what did happen?”

“Like I said, they were allowed to come back to school. They were both just a few months shy of eighteen. They'd have been legal adults before the paperwork could have gone through to make them wards of the state, so the Mazettis let them stay on at the ranch and they graduated with their class.”

“Did you ever see the father around after he disappeared?”

“No, never. No one ever saw him again. Poor fellow. What a tragedy.”

“It is.” Frank plays to the woman's sentimentality. “The least I can do is try to figure out who murdered him.”

“Oh, my. Oh dear. I had no idea. Whe—”

Frank preempts a spate of prurient questions. “I understand the girls had plenty of suitors, besides Mike and Pete.”

“Oh, yes. They were quite the pair. Beautiful girls, both of them. Like peas in a pod on the outside, but inside they were night and day. Sal was always very quiet and thoughtful. Introspective, I guess you'd call it, but Cass—my Lord—she was a hell-raiser, if you'll forgive my saying so.”

“What kind of hell? If you'll forgive my asking.”

“Drinking, partying, carrying on with boys. Cass had any number dangling on a string at one time.”

Frank asks for names and Snelling reels off a half-dozen. When
she asks about Saladino's relatives and friends, Snelling confirms the contacts Gomez gave her and adds three more.

“How well do you remember Domenic Saladino?”

“Very well, unfortunately. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Mr. Saladino was the town drunk, in jail more weekends than not.”

“That must have been embarrassing for the girls.”

“Oh, it must have been mortifying. I think Sal suffered for it, but you wouldn't know it by looking at Cass.”

“What about girlfriends? Who'd Cass and Sal hang around with?”

“Cass didn't have many girlfriends. Girls that hog all the boys tend not to be too popular with other girls. Then there was poor Sal.” Snelling's voice lowers. “She and Leslie Ferrer were best friends, inseparable, always huddled in a corner of the library, noses crammed in a book. The kids made fun of them, and called them names.”

Frank has guessed but asks, “Like what?”

“Oh, you know how awful kids can be. Because they were together all the time, well, you know, there were rumors.”

“That they were lesbians?”

“Well, yes.”

Snelling sounds uncomfortable and Frank pushes: “Were they?”

“Oh, who knows? Probably not. Leslie went on to marry Mike Davies and Sal married Mike Thompson. Funny they both married Mikes.”

“Does Sal ever come to reunions?”

“No. She explained to me once that high school wasn't the best time for her. I can understand that.”

“Why's that?”

“Well, as if it wasn't bad enough that their father was the town drunk, both of the Saladino girls were a little, well,
odd
.”

Frank has been wondering if Snelling would get around to that. “In what way?”

Snelling struggles to explain. “Now, don't think I'm crazy, because everybody knew this about the girls. They had what you might call a gift. Well, what some people would call a gift. Me, I'm not so sure. It was the funniest thing, but you could give the girls something, say a
ring or a book, and they could tell you where it had been. Rattle off a whole history of the darned thing. It was uncanny, but frankly, I found it creepy. It smacked of bad religion.”

Letting the comment pass, Frank asks about Sal's purported healing abilities.

“Oh, I know people swear by it, but if you ask me it's all quackery.”

“But you said the girls could see things, that they had—”

Snelling cuts her short. “I really don't know anything about it. I never trucked with any of that.”

Glancing at the wall clock, Frank disengages gracefully from the conversation and hangs up. She slings her suit jacket over her shoulder and palms the light switch. For a moment she stands in the dark. She thinks about Sal and what she might be doing, maybe standing in the yard with dogs all around and the shadow arm of the mountains curling around the cabin.

Then Frank is leaning against the wall. From high above, she circles over the darkening mountains and an ocean made red by the sinking sun. She swirls in a silence complete but for the wind. Below, coppery fires dot the dusky canyons.

Frank comes to against the wall. She leans against its unyielding solidity, trying to reason out the visions, but Marguerite and the fortune-teller both warned that reason and logic wouldn't be any help. She pulls her phone out and hits a speed dial.

From his breathless answer and the splashing in the background, she knows Darcy is giving Destiny her bath. “Bad time?”

“No, I'll put you on speaker. What's up?”

“Don't do that. Rather Dez not hear.”

“Hear what?”

“I don't know, man. Just some funny shit going on.” She tells him about Marguerite and the tarot lady, all the visions. When she stops talking, she hears the splashing has stopped. His end of the line is quiet. “You there?”

“Yeah, I'm here.”

“What do you think?”

He takes a long time to answer. “What did Marguerite say about them?”

“I haven't told her yet. But she said that whatever was going on with me was gonna manifest soon, so I'm thinking this is part of it.”

“Sure sounds like it could be.”

“That's it? ‘Sounds like it could be'?”

“What do you want from me?”

A deep breath produces the honest answer. “Look. You warned me about Mother Love and I laughed at you. I'm not laughing now. I just want to know what you think this is. And I'd really like for one of you psychic types to tell me that whatever it is, it isn't gonna be as bad as it was with Mother Love.”

“I'm not picking up anything bad. I think I'd know if you were going through that again.”

“Even from two thousand miles away?”

“Distance doesn't matter. You should read about entanglement theory.”

“What the hell's that?”

“It's a quantum physics theory that one object can affect another despite a lack of proximity. Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.'”

“Is that what you're saying this is?”

“All I'm saying is, it doesn't matter how far away I am from you. If there was something bad going on, I'm pretty sure I'd feel it, like I did last time.”

Frank shudders. The last time, she was strung up by her heels about to become a Mother Love sacrifice—and would have been if he hadn't responded to nagging visions of her dangling in The Mother's old abattoir.

“So do you feel
anything
?”

There's a long pause. Destiny babbles faintly. “I know you're stressing about this, but all I'm really picking up is a . . . a kind of quiet, a sense of peacefulness.”

She confesses her boredom of late, admitting, “At least the visions are interesting.”

Darcy chuckles. “Then don't worry about them.”

“Easy for you to say. You been seeing shit since you were little. This is terra incognita for me.”

“Weren't the Mother Love visions more about you than her?”

“Mostly, yeah.”

“So maybe what you're seeing now is, too. If this is an ongoing thing with you, like Marguerite says, throughout lifetimes, then you will have been someone different in each lifetime. More than just the soldier you saw with Mother Love.” He pauses. “You with me so far?”

“If I suspend a rational disbelief in reincarnation.” She winces, remembering all the advice about thinking with her heart instead of her head. “Go on,” she says reluctantly.

“I'm just saying don't be so goddamned judgmental. I don't know what these are and you don't either. Just let 'em be.”

“Trust them?”

“Absolutely. They're there for a reason, Frank. Something's trying to get through your thick skull.”

“No doubt one of my many guides.”

“Maybe so. In which case you should be more grateful and less afraid.”

“Do you know what a pain in the ass you are?”

“Yeah. That's why I can't ever get my women to stay.”

“You said it, man. Look.” Frank rubs at her brows. “Promise you'll let me know if . . . if you feel anything weird.”

Dropping his voice, he tells her, “Even this far away, I promise I won't let anything bad happen to you.”

It's an impossible covenant, but Frank is touched nonetheless.

“Thanks, man.” She clears her throat. “Not letting your daughter drown, are ya?”

“Nah, she's playing with her Little Mermaid.”

“She still wearing that bone necklace?”

“Not in the tub, but yeah. Speaking of which, any luck on that body you dug up?”

She tells him about her trip to Soledad and the branches on the Saladino case. She realizes Caroline's probably waiting for her but is reluctant to hang up. The splashing has resumed, and she can hear Destiny talking to Ariel. Frank smiles. Darcy is a good man, a good father, and she has never regretted bearing him their child. The hormones kicked in after Destiny was born and it was hard giving her daughter
up after the short maternity leave. She wonders momentarily if she made a mistake letting them go, but knows in her heart she was never meant to be a mother or a man's wife.

She asks questions until Darcy has to get Destiny ready for bed. She keeps the phone to her ear until she is told to please hang up and try again. She slips the cell in her pocket just as a text from Caroline comes in.
Running late should be there soon xxoo

10-4
, she writes back.

Darcy hasn't explained what's going on with her, but she is more relaxed as she drives to the condo. She picks dinner up at Trader Joe's and while waiting for Caroline she opens Google Earth on her desktop. She arrows west of Soledad, finds what she thinks is Wildcat Canyon Road, and follows it to the end. She squints at the highest resolution she can get, thinking the terrain looks like the canyon that ends at Celadores. A thin dirt road continues past the gray block that is probably the store, but she loses it in the maze of hills and canyons.

“Hi!”

Frank jerks the arrow up to the close button. The screen fades just as Caroline puts her arms around Frank's neck.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.” She swivels in Caroline's very expensive deck chair and kisses her. “Just fooling around.”

Caroline straddles her lap. “It looked like a map. You going somewhere?'

“Nah, just trying to get the lay of the land in Soledad.” Unwilling to share her dark mountains, Frank says, “Tell me about your day.”

“It was okay. The usual.” She nods at the monitor. “Do you have to go back up there?”

“Yeah, I'm not finished.”

“I thought this was Lewis' case?”

“It's ours. I told you. I'm helping her.”

“Right, but why are you the one that has to keep going up there?”

Frank hasn't a simple answer. She shrugs and wriggles out from under Caroline. “It's not a big deal. I don't mind.”

Caroline doesn't answer but becomes appreciably cooler. Frank
guides her to the kitchen. “Come on. I bought you a Chinese chicken salad.” Spooning their dinner onto plates, she explains, “It's hard for Lewis right now. She's got almost a full caseload on top of her morning sickness. You know how it is. Besides, none of us can just run up there in the middle of the week, and I started the questioning, so I may as well see it through.”