“Mom, hi, Mom. I have something I need to ask you.” Jack’s face was flushed, her words coming out in an urgent jumble.
“Hey, honey. Just give me a sec.” Beth stepped around her daughter and into the kitchen, dumping her bag on the counter. She headed to the fridge and waved a box of frozen waffles at Jack, who shook her head.
“We already ate dinner.”
Beth moved methodically from freezer to toaster to sofa, while Jack circled her double-time, chewing her nails and doing her best impression of a volcano about to erupt. Lana watched from the table, where she nursed a Diet Coke and a small pile of oyster crackers.
“I need to talk to you,” Jack said.
“Did the detectives come back?”
“No. Not that.”
Beth closed her eyes. Maybe the sheriffs had found another suspect to harass. Or maybe they were busy gathering evidence against Jack, conjuring up a story that she was an unreliable teenager who let a tourist die on her watch. Beth wondered what they might dig up. Would someone at the Kayak Shack talk about the time Jack marooned a group of tourists in the flood zone at king tide? Or would they find out she lied about meeting Ricardo? When Beth opened her eyes again, Jack was right up in her face.
“Mom, listen. They’re going to open the slough tomorrow. I want to go out there. In the morning, before school. Is that okay? I mean, they haven’t figured out yet what happened, but it must be safe if they’re opening it, right?”
Beth looked at her daughter, a 105-pound tangle of nerves and hair. “Honey, those detectives still have questions about you. Our priority has to be keeping you safe. What if something else happens?”
“Like what if someone else dies?”
The toaster dinged, and Beth flinched. She’d been so focused on her fears about the detectives that she hadn’t even considered the possibility the murderer could still be out there. Hearing it out loud made it an even scarier prospect.
“I just want you far from trouble,” she said, retrieving her waffles and returning to the sofa.
“Why am I being punished if I didn’t do anything?”
“I know you didn’t. But they don’t.” Beth wondered if her mother had made any headway yet on finding them a good lawyer.
“Mom, don’t I look even more guilty if I stop going out there? Isn’t it, like, a sign? If I change my routine?”
“The only thing it’s a sign of is that you listen to your mother.”
Jack’s eyes went dark. “It’s not like I’m some scared bunny rabbit.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know how to take care of myself.”
“Honey, I’m not saying you don’t. But this is serious. Can we just take this one step at a time?”
“Please, Mom. I need to get back in the water. Remember when I fell off my bike and you told me to get on it again? And the first time it was weird, but then after six times it felt totally normal? I think that’s what I need to do now or—”
Jack’s voice broke, and she collapsed into her mother’s shoulder. “Every time I close my eyes, I see him. I see the mud and the pickleweed and his red life jacket. It’s like the slough isn’t my place anymore.”
Beth stroked her daughter’s hair. Jack’s head rose and fell with Beth’s even breaths. “It’s awful when someone dies. Even someone you didn’t know very well.”
“I only met him once.” Jack’s voice was muffled against Beth’s sweater.
Then, the girl looked up. “How do you deal with it? Seeing death every day?”
“It isn’t every day. And it usually isn’t shocking, like what happened to that young man.” In a soft voice, Beth told her daughter about the patient who had passed away the night before. A gentle rancher who’d lived across the slough with his cows and his vegetable garden, a man who was pleased to hear about Jack going out to paddle every day. A man who lived long and died without pain. Beth’s words formed a monotone lullaby, softening death into something both far away and ordinary, with no hard edges, no surprises.
*
Lana sat at the table, stone-faced and silent. She couldn’t buy the fairy tale Beth was spinning. Every ragged breath she took reminded her of the tumors attacking her lungs, death rattling its alarm clock against her rib cage. Half of her wished she could escape to Los Angeles, to toast a real estate deal with cut crystal in a restaurant that would never dream of serving waffles for dinner. The other half of her wished she could slide onto the couch, join the embrace, maybe even offer something heartfelt to her girls.
But heartfelt wasn’t going to make this go away. Beth was right. The detectives were going to come back, and Lana wanted to be prepared. Nicoletti’s dismissive words still rattled in her ears, most of all that horrible, nasal ma’am, flattening her into something used up and worthless.
Lana hated being invisible. It was only slightly less terrifying than being dead.
She wasn’t going to just sit there waiting for the detectives to move along. She might be sick, but she wasn’t incapable. She was going to find a way to clear Jack.
She just needed to figure out how.
Chapter Twelve
Lana’s first day as an amateur detective began with a whimper. She woke up late. Groggy. After a coughing fit that left her heaving over the bathroom sink, she pulled on her robe, dumped honey into her tea, took her morning pills, and got back into bed.
But Lana was a woman who had renegotiated a contract during her daughter’s bat mitzvah. If she knew how to do anything, it was how to work. She downed her tea, got back up, and hauled out her neglected boxes of files and office supplies from under the bed. She wiped the dust off her chamber of commerce award for “fearless real estate mogul” and put it on the desk, alongside a stack of favorite books that used to line the shelves of her office. Then she pulled out a pen and a legal pad to take notes. She resisted the impulse to write a header across the top announcing her intention to find the true murderer and clear Jack’s name. She settled for neatly inking the date into the corner.
Lana wrote down what she knew. It wasn’t much. Ricardo Cruz was murdered. He died sometime between Friday evening, when he made a kayak tour booking for Saturday, and Sunday midday, when Jack found his body in the slough.
She racked her brain for more. There was the strange man with the wheelbarrow. Lana heard the detective’s voice in her head telling her she was a day early and a mile off. But she didn’t care. She’d seen him on the north bank of the slough, the same side where Ricardo was found. It was something to write down.
She looked at the legal pad in frustration. Half of what she’d written down was common knowledge, and the other half probably wasn’t relevant. She turned to a fresh page and made a list of important questions. Murder questions. The detective had said there was more than one way for someone to die in the slough. If Ricardo hadn’t drowned, how was he killed? Was there a weapon involved? Who exactly was Ricardo Cruz? Was his death related to the water sample testing he’d been doing a couple months ago? How did he get to the slough the day he died? Was his car still nearby? Had he been out with a girlfriend or a wife or a buddy who killed him?
By mid-afternoon, Lana’s page was full of questions and her head was cooperating. She got a fresh Diet Coke and, as she’d promised Beth, called a criminal defense attorney, an ex of hers who had retired in San Francisco. He offered to put her in touch with a good lawyer in Monterey. Lana ignored the follow-up texts he sent, providing names, numbers, and an awkward string of winking and kissy-face emojis. She could deal with all of that later. She had other calls to make.