Vanishing Act jw-1 Read online

  20

  As the plane turned to come in over the Santa Barbara airport, Jane looked down and tried to imagine Harry living here. She had been here once before, when she had left a client in Los Angeles and wanted to spend a few days out of sight. It was a beautiful, quiet place, but there was something about it that had never seemed quite right to her—like a graveyard with flowers that grew in too lush and luxuriant not to be a sign of a haunting.

  It was a place where lots of people had died for no reason at all. Father Junipero Serra stopped here in the 1780s and founded a mission for the Chumash Indians. The Chumash had lived along the coast and done a little fishing in the kelp beds and a lot of gathering in the tidal pools, and hunted in the hills that ran along the coast a couple of miles inland. It had been an easy, unchanging life, and they hadn’t prepared themselves for the arrival of the Europeans by generations of fighting as the Iroquois had. They were easily enslaved, and forced to build stone buildings and aqueducts and work in the fields for the priests. She had seen virtually all that was left of the Chumash years ago: a cave in the hills painted with mystical figures and a few intricate baskets behind glass in the little museum up the road from the mission. The coast of California was a sad place for Indians: Chumash, Gabrieleno, Cupeno, Tataviam, Luiseno, Costanoan, Miwok, Ipa, Salinan, Esselen—all either exterminated by 1900 or down to 1 percent of the 300,000 people the priests had counted when they took their first inventory of souls.

  Jane had brought Harry to Lew Feng, walked out of the shop, and taken the next flight out of Vancouver. She had insisted that she never be told where Lew Feng sent him. She had not wanted to have that piece of information in her mind, waiting to come out as soon as somebody inflicted enough pain. But Santa Barbara should have been a shrewd place for Lew Feng to put Harry. If she had known, she would have agreed with it. There were lots of people in their fifties and sixties wandering around town doing nothing. They played golf, walked on the beaches, and sauntered around State Street looking in store windows. It was the sort of town where all you needed was the money to pay the rent and a dull, plausible story that would explain why you had chosen to pay it there. To the sort of people who were looking for Harry, Santa Barbara would have been invisible, just another cluster of exits on the freeway up the coast.

  Jake noticed the change in Jane as they walked to the car-rental desk at the airport. Until now she had been held in a rigid immobility by the simple fact that airplanes traveled faster than girls did, but now she was eager, ready to move. She was very good at standing there, the young woman waiting for old grandpops to rent the car, but her eyes were always in motion, never settling on anything for more than a second or two.

  As soon as he had the keys, she picked up her bag and set off. She took the keys out of his hand without speaking and got in on the driver’s side. She maneuvered the car along Sandspit Road to the freeway and took it through the town to the Salinas Street exit, then swung up the first street. "Why is it called Ocean View?" Jake asked. All he could see was tall apartment buildings and long, skinny palm trees.

  "It’s California real estate language," she said. "If it’s called a view or vista of something, it means it’s not near it."

  "But view means you can see it. I can’t see it."

  "You could if you were eighty feet tall. They’re not responsible for your shortcomings. Ninety-two. That must be it up there. The big white building on the left."

  "What do we do?"

  "I go in, you stay inconspicuous and watch."

  "What am I watching for? Your friend?"

  "John isn’t likely to come in daylight. If you do see him, whatever you do, don’t let him get away. Talk to him. Ask directions or something. And remember, he’s got a lot to be scared of. Until he sees me, he’s as dangerous as the others."

  She closed the door, slipped her shoulder into her purse strap, and walked across the street to the apartment buildings. Jake couldn’t see anybody to watch, so he watched the buildings. He had considered coming to a place like this to wait out his last few years. It was pretty, a lot of palm trees and stucco buildings you couldn’t see the ocean from, but it was just the front door of a nursing home, really, and those weren’t much different anywhere. At least in Deganawida there was a chance that somebody might visit.

  Jane came back smiling and sat in the driver’s seat. "We’re in luck. I rented the apartment next door to Harry’s. We move in before dark."

  "It just happened to be vacant?"

  "There was a murder. People always move out in droves. But next door is better than I had hoped."

  Jake wondered how a person came to know things like that, but she seemed to know a lot of them. She started the car and drove back down the street, turned right, then left, and went down a long, straight residential street with houses that looked like cottages.

  "Where are we going?"

  Jane seemed to be pulled back reluctantly from whatever she had been thinking. "There are homicide detectives in there right now. They never work nights except the first one, when the body’s on the ground and they still have some hope of catching somebody. The fact that they’re still in there after a couple of days is great news."

  "It is?"

  "It means they still have it sealed, and John probably hasn’t come in yet."

  "Are you sure that’s what he’ll do?"

  "No," she said. "I’m guessing. But he’ll feel the way I do, which is that we killed Harry. He and I did. He might not find anything by looking at the apartment, but he has nothing else to look at. And if he’s thinking like a cop, then seeing what the other cops looked at might tell him a lot."

  "So where are we going now?"

  "You’re going to drop me off downtown. Then you’re going to pick up a few essentials."

  "Such as?"

  "Food that we can eat without a lot of cooking. There’s a refrigerator in there, so get whatever you want. Two shotguns, short-barrel-something like a Winchester Defender or a Remington 840. One box of double-ought buckshot—make that the little boxes that hold five each. Get six. Two blankets, a pillow if you need one. An electric baby monitor. There are lots of kinds, but Fisher-Price makes a good one. No, two of those, and batteries for them. And a roll of electrical tape."

  "What are you going to be doing?"

  "I’m going to the library to see if there was anything in the local papers that the wire services didn’t pick up. Then to the police station to see if John is hanging around trying to strike up a conversation. That kind of thing."

  She pulled over on Figueroa Street. "Can you remember all that stuff?"

  "Sure," he said. "When do you want me to pick you up?"

  "I don’t. See you later."

  The supplies didn’t take much thought. It seemed to Jake that the differences between places had virtually disappeared during his lifetime. If you blindfolded somebody, put him on a plane, and set him loose on the main drag of any decent-size town in the country, he would be hard-pressed to say where he was. If there were palm trees or snow, all he’d really know was a list of places where he wasn’t. The supermarkets just had different names.

  The shotguns took some thought. He kept himself from ruminating on the implications of them by concentrating on composing some small talk that would carry him through if there was some custom out here that required him to answer any questions. He decided he had no choice but to be Jake, the retired codger from Deganawida, since he suspected you couldn’t make this kind of transaction without showing somebody some identification. He decided that buying double-ought in May was highly suspicious, since as far as he knew, deer season anywhere on earth had to be in the fall, to give the does and fawns a fighting chance. He finally hit on the idea that he was buying the guns as a gift for a friend who had a ranch up near—he studied the map—New Cuyama. He suspected the peculiarity of buying two at once was actually an advantage, since nobody who needed a shotgun to commit suicide or rob somebody would need two.

  W
hen he went into the store, he was almost disappointed that he didn’t need to say anything to the clerk except that he was paying cash. He supposed that having a story to tell had made him look self-assured. He bought a cleaning kit while he was at it because they always test-fired the damn things at the factory and left them dirty.

  The sun was getting low by the time he finished. He took a turn and drove toward the sunset for a few blocks. He figured he should at least see the Pacific if he was this close to it. The street came out on a winding road through a kind of suburb, but still the ocean didn’t turn up. Finally, he accepted his failure and checked the map. Sure enough, around here the coastline wasn’t to the west at all but to the south, which was damned inconvenient for visitors who were accustomed to thinking of the relationship of the sun and the continent and the ocean as pretty well stabilized.

  He turned left, found the ocean immediately, and was glad. He stood on a broad lawn under some fifty-foot palm trees and stared past the white sand at the endless blue that extended out past the slow rolling waves, and across the world. It made the air smell different and dropped the temperature ten degrees. What he was looking at seemed as infinite as the sky. The word infinite was full of frustration; it was just another word for "so far you can’t see it." There was something that made him want to see beyond the horizon.

  As he walked back to the car, Jake tried to formulate his complaint. If seeing was detecting light, and light could curve, then under certain circumstances a person ought to be able to follow the surface of the ocean past the horizon, around the whole world. Then he realized that what he would see at the end of it was himself, from behind. If infinity was looking at his own ass, he supposed he could pass it up. He felt satisfied with his decision not to give up on the Pacific, and relieved that he hadn’t been unable to find the biggest thing on earth.

  When he made it back to the apartment building again, Jane was there to help him unload. When they had everything inside, she closed the door and locked it, and he set about unboxing the two shotguns on the kitchen table. She picked one up and sighted it, then pumped the action and clicked the trigger a couple of times and looked into the chamber. After that she let Jake sit at the table to clean and oil them while she went into the bedroom with the baby monitors.

  Jane watched the street through the bedroom window as she put the batteries into the monitors and put tape over the little glowing ON lights. It was dark before she saw the last of the police cars drive off. She went out the door, walked around the side of the building, put one of the baby-monitor transmitters into an empty flowerpot, and set it in the bushes beside the building. Then she walked until she found the bathroom window. She had noticed that the bathroom window in the apartment she had rented had louvered slats that could be cranked open. She examined the bathroom window of Harry’s apartment, found that it was the same and that the glass slats didn’t fit any better than hers did. She was able to push one of them up out of its holder just enough to fit the second transmitter in and set it on the sink. Then she went back to her own apartment, set the two receivers on the kitchen counter, and turned them on.

  When Jake was satisfied that neither shotgun would blow up in his face if he had occasion to pull the trigger, he put them inside the hall closet. He saw that Jane had made the only bed and put the other blanket on the couch. She came out of the kitchen, picked up the shotguns, and pushed four shells into each one. He approved of her not putting a shell in the chamber. She also had enough sense to lay them flat on the floor by the door instead of propping them up. Then she went back into the kitchen to cook two frozen dinners of steaks and mashed potatoes and broccoli, and he approved of this even more, so he left her alone. By now Jane had virtually disappeared; she was living entirely inside her head.

  After dinner they washed the two dishes he had bought, and Jake sat on the couch. He had expected Jane to sit down with him, but she brought the two little baby monitors into the living room, got down on the floor, and started doing stretching exercises like dancers did while she listened to the static. As he watched her, he thought about how odd it was to watch children grow up. Miraculously, the little seven-pound animals that looked like hairless monkeys changed into something that looked like this, and what was in their heads at the end of the process seemed to get farther and farther away from what you would expect.

  He couldn’t keep silent any longer. "I had a funny thing happen today," he said. "I couldn’t find the Pacific Ocean."

  "Remind me not to let you navigate." He could see her move her lips, returning to her counting.

  "I found it eventually, through sheer persistence. But it reminded me of the Herndons. Did any Herndons come up with you?"

  "There were two. Betty was my age—valedictorian of my class, I think—and she had an older brother. He had a streak of gray when he was about fifteen, and everybody thought he was handsome and mysterious. Actually, I guess he looked like a skunk."

  "Paul, that was. He’s an engineer or something way out west. Maybe around here."

  "Is, that why the Pacific Ocean reminded you of the Herndons?"

  "No. The part about being mysterious did. The one I was thinking of would be Paul’s grandfather’s sister. Amanda was her name. People always said the money came from some Herndon who invented something in the 1800s, but you’d never hear it from them. There used to be rumors about them when I was a kid."

  "What kind of rumors?"

  "Well, there was never a dumb Herndon. Some people used to say that the good Lord chose to have every Herndon born with a complete knowledge of the principles He uses to make the universe work."

  "Come on," said Jane. She stopped doing push-ups and looked at him.

  "The secret would have been safe with them. They were, every last one of them, too inert to do anything about it and too secretive to tell anybody who wasn’t another Herndon."

  Jane sat up, laughing. "You know, that’s true."

  "Of course it is. And things always seemed to go just fine. They bought railroad stock, and the railroads went up. They were the sort of people who would have their lawn infested by sables."

  "I still don’t see what this has to do with the ocean."

  "I was talking about Amanda. She was a grown woman by the time I remember her. But when she was little, maybe two years old, she was swinging on a swing in the front yard. The sun was right in her eyes, and one of the neighbors heard her say, ’Daddy! Move the sun!’ And he smiled at her and stood there and stared up at the sun for a long time, and that was that."

  "That was what?"

  "Well, you have to think about it. What was he doing?"

  "What was he doing?"

  "People said later that he did it. He moved the sun about an hour forward. They say the city people didn’t seem to notice it, since the position of the sun didn’t mean much to them. That evening they just looked at their watches one extra time to be sure the hand was on the number that said, ’Go to bed,’ and that was that. The story goes that the scientists with their equipment sure did, but they hushed it up because they couldn’t explain it. The farm folks talked about it for some time, but there wasn’t much they could do about it except add Herndons to the list of things they couldn’t control, like rain and frost."

  "That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard."

  "Well, you know how these things get going. Little Amanda also told several reliable and veracious children that there were two moons, not one. But people remained divided on that issue since it could have been her idea of a joke, and she never said it again after she reached the age of discretion."

  "You made all that up, didn’t you?" she asked. "Admit it."

  "Not at all. Myself, I’ve always thought the story had to do with daylight savings time. Once you reached the point when the president of the United States could tell you what time it was, as though the sun, the moon, and the rotation of the earth were mere distractions, people realized that anything could happen. There was no limit, or an
y reason to have one."

  She smiled. "Do you really think that’s what it’s about?"

  "Maybe," Jake said. "But maybe it’s only about love."

  "And maybe it’s about talk." Now she began to do her sit-ups.

  "Well, I’m at the stage of life where I’m examining the things I’ve picked up along the way and trying to distribute them where they’ll do some good. This is how I got them, so I talk."

  "You always talked too much," she said. "You can’t pull that deathbed-legacy stuff on me."

  "I didn’t say the story was going to change your life," he said. "But we live by picking up the belongings of the dead as they fall. The first few things you learn tend to be the most important—the mental equivalent of a pocket full of money or a serviceable revolver. After you’re a little older—"

  She said, "Wait ..." She picked up one of the monitors and listened, then put it down and held the other near her ear. "Did you hear that?"

  21

  Jane slipped out the door of the laundry room, stepped along the side of the apartment building quietly, then sat down beside a bush against the corner of the building. The scent of the yellow night-blooming wisteria and jasmine and what else—the jacaranda trees, probably—was overpowering. She had seen the petals falling on the ground like purple snow. It must be the jacaranda because the bright explosions of cerise and orange bougainvillea climbing up the walls didn’t smell at all.

  She made herself small, hugging her knees and keeping her head down to listen. There was a faint noise of slow, careful footsteps beside the building. It sounded like the walk of a man who was in good shape—he held his body in tension, then eased to the next foot, but he wasn’t very good at this. She kept listening, but she didn’t hear another set of feet. It could be John.

  She let the man reach the window of Harry’s apartment and listened to his breathing. He was taking in breaths through his open mouth and blowing them out quietly to keep himself calm. She judged the level, and felt the disappointment. He was only about six feet, a little taller than she was. Not John, then.