Shamus In The Green Room (8 page)

wasn’t actually surfing weather. Rafe had explained it the other

day. It was the northern swells that made the surf so special

here at Lunada Bay. They rolled in unspoiled by bottom drag

and then tumbled over the reefs. November to March. Those

were the months. Storm season.

I cut the motor and got out of the car. I saw Rafe and the

others gathered on a broad patch of dirt, just beyond a wire-

mesh fence shooting up from an overgrown spill of ice plant.

“Cece,” Rafe called. “Over here.”

After a quick peck on the cheek, he introduced me around.

There was Kat, Will’s personal assistant, a blonde wearing tie-

dyed capris; Kat’s boyfriend, Riley, also in tie-dye; Rafe’s per-

sonal assistant, Fredericka, an African-American woman in

blue jeans; and Fredericka’s girlfriend, Lana, the only one

dressed for the occasion, at least by L.A. standards, in a black

Juicy Couture sweat suit and a white tank top, no bra.

“There’s Will,” said Fredericka. I turned and watched him

get out of a black Range Rover. We’d never met, Will and I,

only spoken on the phone. His appearance surprised me. He was

Rafe’s age but moved like he was years older. He had the swollen

build of the high school athlete gone to seed. His face was soft,

too, all jowls and puffs and bags. But maybe that was today. I

tried not to stare at the granite urn in his hands. It was smaller

than I’d expected.

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“Let’s go down closer to the water. Come on,” Rafe said,

throwing an arm around Will’s shoulders.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Will nodded in acknowledgment,

then started down the steep hillside.

I cursed my heels as I tried not to slip on the loose dirt and

tiny rocks strewn across the makeshift path. We stopped on a

large outcropping just above the narrow, rocky shore. It was

shielded from the road by a clump of foliage.

No one spoke.

Everyone watched Will for a sign.

After a few minutes, Rafe turned to him and whispered,

“Shall we begin?”

Will looked up toward the road.

“Are you waiting for someone else?” Kat asked solicitously.

“Because we can wait as long as you need.”

“Guess not.” He handed the urn to Rafe, who looked non-

plussed. Will shook out his hands and flexed his thick fingers,

then interlaced them. “Thank you all for coming today. Maren

and I don’t have any family left, so this means a lot. To Rafe,

too. We both loved her so much.” His voice started to break.

“Sorry,” he said, smiling. “I’m going to make this brief. Maren

wouldn’t have wanted us to waste a beautiful morning talking

about somebody who was dead.”

Fredericka and her girlfriend exchanged glances. Kat put

her hair up in a ponytail. The wind was blowing like crazy.

“Life is for the living, that’s what Maren would have said.

Am I right, Rafe?”

Rafe nodded.

“She was spectacular, my sister. Full of surprises. You

couldn’t always see them coming. Sometimes they’d throw you

for a loop. But she was more exciting, more alive, than anybody

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else you could ever know. That’s the Maren I want to remem-

ber. I want to remember the girl who broke her arm surfing,

and as soon as she got her cast off, broke my arm wrestling me

to the ground because I’d borrowed her board without asking.”

Everybody laughed.

“Anybody else want to say anything?” He looked at Rafe,

who promptly handed me the urn. To my surprise, I realized it

was plastic, not granite.

Rafe walked up to the front of the group and brushed some

dried weeds out of the way with his shoe.

“I met Maren the day I started high school,” he began. “I

was new to the area, didn’t know anybody. I was sitting by my-

self at lunch, feeling like I was the sorriest soul on the planet,

when this girl sat down beside me. She was beautiful.” He

smiled, taking his time. “Long blond hair, impish grin, devil-

may-care attitude—I could see that right away. ‘Meet me by

the bike rack after school,’ she whispered in my ear. And then

she was gone. You didn’t say no to Maren, so I was there, as

soon as the bell rang, waiting. I waited for an hour, cussing

myself out the whole time, because, of course, she didn’t show.

So I went home.”

I glanced over at Will, whose head was down. The others

were spellbound.

“The next day,” Rafe continued, “I saw her first thing in the

morning, laughing with her friends on the auditorium steps,

but I didn’t dare go up to her. I didn’t want her to know I

could give a shit. But at lunch there she was again. ‘Meet me in

the bleachers after school,’ she whispered in my ear, and before

I could protest, she was gone. All day long I wrestled with it.

Would I go? Should I go? Yes. No.” His brow was furrowed,

like it was that day all over again, like he was fourteen years

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old, and had no idea what to do, what to say, who to be. “Of

course, I did go. This time, though, I only waited thirty min-

utes before riding my bike home. When I got to my front door,

she was sitting there waiting for me. She said I’d passed the

test. I never did get around to asking her exactly what the test

had been. Had I proved how stupid I was? Or how loyal? Or

how crazy about her I already was?”

A car alarm went off in the distance. Rafe stopped, dis-

tracted by the noise. When it was quiet again, he seemed to

have lost his bearings. Fredericka smiled at him, encouraging

him to go on.

“It didn’t matter to me then,” he said finally, “and it doesn’t

matter to me now.”

He came over and took the urn out of my hands. He held it

for a moment, then passed it to Will. Will removed the lid and

walked close to the water’s edge, so close the waves lapped at

his brown dress shoes. He shook the ashes out over the surf. A

gust of wind picked them up. They seemed to hover in the

same spot for a few seconds. I held my breath. And then, just

like that, they were gone.

People started to go back up the path, but I stood there for

I don’t know how long. I watched the waves roll in and out.

In and out.

In and out.

My father and I are at the Jersey shore. He’s talking about

the moon. The moon controls the tide, like the puppeteer con-

trols the puppet. Gravitational attraction. Sir Isaac Newton.

My eyes glaze over. My father gives up. I’m just a girl. I should

do what girls do. I write my name in the wet sand. I hunt for

seashells. I build a castle.

I gave a start as the car alarm went off again. It took me a

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moment to remember where I was. It was time to go. I was the

only one left. But then I noticed a woman standing on the

slope of the hillside, silhouetted against a lacy pepper tree. I

smiled at her without really looking at her.

Then I looked at her.

Her blond hair was short and cut close to her head. No ear-

rings. The years had taken their toll on her skin, but she was

striking. She had on a narrow, sleeveless dress, black, with a

cowl neckline. She took off her dark glasses and, squinting

against the sun, walked toward me.

It couldn’t be.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

I backed away and felt the water slosh around my ankles.

Her voice was soft, liquid. “You think you’re seeing a

ghost.”

My voice felt like brambles in my throat. “Ghosts are dead.

You’re alive.”

“I’m not who you think I am.”

“Maren?” I could barely say it.

“We used to look so much alike,” she said. “Everybody got

us mixed up.”

I was confused until I remembered Rafe’s comments of the

other day.

Nobody could touch us. It was always the four of us.

I struggled for her name. “Lisa?”

“That’s right, I’m Lisa. Lisa Lapelt. And you are?”

“Cece Caruso.” I extended my hand. She had a strong

handshake. “You’re the Lisa? Will’s girlfriend?”

She smiled. “A lifetime ago. I haven’t seen Will or Rafe, or

Maren for that matter, in years. We all went our separate ways

after high school.” She started to fiddle with a diamond ring on

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her left hand. “We were so close then. We shouldn’t have

drifted so far apart.”

“People change.”

“They do,” she said, nodding. “Were you close to Maren?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I was with Rafe when he identified

her body, so—”

“I see,” she said, closing her eyes. “It’s so horrible.” She gave

a small shiver.

“Suicide is a terrible thing.”

“Suicide?” Her eyes popped open. They were dark brown,

so dark you couldn’t see where the pupils began or ended.

“What are you saying? Maren didn’t kill herself.”

“According to the coroner’s office, she did.”

“Maren was the last person on earth who’d ever kill herself!

Not in a million years. People don’t change that much.”

“The coroner’s office released her body to Will after ruling

her death a suicide,” I said, feeling defensive for god knows

what reason.

She shook her head violently. “I’d know. I’d know if she’d

been that desperate.”

“But you said you hadn’t spoken to her in years.”

“We were connected,” Lisa said, impatient with me now.

“We looked alike, but that was just the start of it. We were

alike.” She pulled back the neckline of her dress, revealing a

delicate tattoo of a green-and-red hourglass. The yellow grains

of sand had almost run out.

“When we were seventeen years old, we got the same tattoo

in the exact same spot. Young and stupid, right?”

I stared at Lisa’s tattoo.

Green, and red, and yellow.

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My mind was reeling now. I thought back to the body un-

der the white sheets.

White, and white, and white.

All I’d seen that morning was white.

Who was this woman?

Who was that woman?

CHAPTER

NINE

Isat in my car for a long time.

I’d woken up this morning convinced that the body I’d

seen at the coroner’s office wasn’t Maren’s. But I’d talked my-

self out of it. I’d been rational. I’d resisted my natural impulse

to complicate matters when they were already complicated

enough.

Tans fade, I’d said to myself.

But not tattoos.

Tattoos don’t just fade away.

Of course, Maren could have had her tattoo removed. It

was possible, happened every day. But it didn’t seem likely.

The process was painful and expensive. What’s more, yellow

and green were the most difficult colors to get rid of, virtually

guaranteed to leave fragments of pigment, and probably scars.

I knew because Bridget had considered having her ankle tattoo

removed last year, but had ultimately decided against it.

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A person, she’d said, should learn to live with her mistakes.

Maybe there had never been any matching tattoos. Who

got matching tattoos, anyway? I’d never heard of such a thing.

It was absurd, just like the woman’s insistence that she’d have

known if Maren were planning to kill herself. I believe two

people can have a psychic bond, but why should I put stock in

anything she had to say? A complete stranger? How did I even

know she was Lisa? I hadn’t seen her talking to Will or Rafe,

or anyone else for that matter. She’d materialized out of thin

air when everyone else had long gone. Like a figment of my

imagination.

No.

She was real, flesh and blood.

Which meant someone was lying.

I just didn’t want that person to be Rafe.

t

P a l o s V e r d e s i s c l o s e t o S a n P e d r o .

San Pedro is a port town.

Sailors get tattoos.

If it were the late seventies, and you were a couple of surfer

girls from the Peninsula trying not to get caught, San Pedro is

where you’d go.

It was as logical as a mathematical proof. The fact that I’m

bad at math didn’t so much as cross my mind.

I devised a plan. The Thomas Guide was a crucial part of

this plan. By some miracle, the pages I needed (822 to 823)

weren’t missing. I studied them closely, tracing my route, in

pencil, of course: you sully your Thomas Guide at your peril.

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Yes, according to my calculations, Palos Verdes Drive South

would lead me pretty much straight into San Pedro.

I headed down the hill, but traffic slowed to a crawl before

I’d made much progress. Then it stopped entirely. Maybe it

was a sign. Go home. Mind your own business. People were

leaning out of their windows and yelling at anybody who’d lis-

ten. I turned on the radio—classic rock—and cranked up the

volume to drown out the honking horns.

The Eagles were singing about a girl in a doorway and the

ringing of a mission bell, which to me sounded not the least bit

like hell. But it did rhyme.

Hell, as everybody knew, was being stuck behind a big rig

with no passing lane.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel.

Biggest big rig I’d ever seen.