Her concentration was broken by a buzz on her phone. A response from Ramirez:
Where is Hanley now?
Now? Lana hadn’t expected the detective to get back to her so quickly. The truck was good, but she needed more evidence. Lana weighed her options. She really didn’t want to lie to a sheriff’s deputy. Not again. At least, not in text.
She took a deep breath and dialed.
Ramirez picked up right away. The sound quality was terrible, making it seem like the woman was yelling at her. Or maybe she was yelling.
“WELL?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know what Paul Hanley’s doing at the moment.” Lana had some ideas. The possibilities were limited. But technically, she couldn’t be sure. “But I know he’ll be here at eight.”
The detective went into a long speech about the consequences of lying to a sworn officer, wasting government resources, harboring dangerous criminals, and so on. Lana pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the time: 6:38. She had to get back into the house.
“Reception here is terrible,” Lana shouted into the phone. “I can’t hear you. I’ll see you at eight.”
And then, despite her misgivings, Lana hung up.
The front door to the house opened, and Lana hopped sideways, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and the Maserati without it being too obvious. She dropped to the ground, pretending to adjust a nonexistent strap on her high heel. At the same time, she turned the phone in her hand, trying to fashion it into a blunt weapon.
Lana slowly raised her eyes, trying her best to look like a tired, foolish woman who needed her medication.
“Ma, you okay?” Beth asked.
Lana straightened up at the sound of her daughter’s voice and gave her a smile. She looked down. Her hand was buzzing with a stream of all-caps texts from the detective. She slid the phone to silent, pocketed it, and followed Beth inside.
Back in the dining room, Martin was eating the last of his pizza wafer. Diana had pushed aside the plates, making room for a sheaf of papers she pulled out of a slim leather folio.
“Ready?” she asked crisply.
“Almost,” Lana said. She held up the pill dispenser. Diana frowned and rocked backward, as if lung cancer might be contagious. “I’ll just need a few minutes in the restroom.”
Martin stood. “Di, I wonder if we might start this conversation privately. It’s clear Lana needs some time to take care of herself. Perhaps we could go into Dad’s study?”
Lana looked up. Private was good. Private meant she could search the house. Diana reluctantly stood and walked toward her brother with her stack of paper.
“We’ll be out shortly,” she said. “To talk through the financials. And the comps we discussed. I sincerely hope you’ll be able to participate by then.” She raised a hand to Lana, dismissing her, and followed her brother down the hall. A door swung shut beyond the den.
“Well, that was pleasant,” Lana said. “Where’s Jack?”
“She went exploring,” Beth said. “Outside.”
Lana nodded.
“Ma, what exactly are you up to?”
“Stay here. Give me a shout if that door opens.”
After a quick glance at the closed door of the study, Lana headed up the stairs and along a hallway she hoped led to the bedrooms. And a bathroom, where she could say she wanted privacy if someone came looking for her.
The first door she came to must have been Martin’s room. There was a double bed with a dark blue wool coverlet, a scratched-up desk, and a bulky dark-wood bureau with a line of tiny Star Wars figurines marching across it. The walls were adorned with San Francisco 49ers posters, M.C. Escher prints, and an MIT pennant. Despite the personal touches, the room was cleaned out. There were no papers on the desk, no trash in the wastebasket on the floor. The aroma of watered-down bleach hung in the air. Lana took a quick pull at the top drawer of the bureau. Nothing. Not even a dust bunny.
She proceeded to the next door. This room was smaller, more worn. There was a twin bed, a simple dresser, and an antique, heavy-looking crib, the kind someone had probably carried in a wagon over the plains to California generations ago. The closet was stuffed with coats and faded quilts. But it didn’t seem to be a storeroom for old furniture. There were small clumps of dried dirt on the floor, and Lana could smell the faint scents of sage and moss on the bed. Someone had stayed here recently, their presence not yet swept away.
Lana crossed the hallway and opened another door. Finally. Diana’s room. This one had a more lived-in feel. Diana clearly wasn’t rushing home to her husband the instant the land negotiations were over. The queen bed was hastily made, the bureau littered in perfume bottles and creams, plus a wineglass that had yet to make it down to the dishwasher. Lana ran her hand across the silky duvet cover, which had a delicate pattern of roses and thorns around the edge.
Lana moved to Diana’s bureau. It was about half-full of clothes, including an entire drawer of lingerie. Lana carefully lifted the flimsy nightgowns in search of something incriminating but found only silk and lace.
In the bedside table, though, she made a discovery. A stack of red envelopes, each sliced open at the top, in the top drawer. Lana didn’t have time to paw through months of tawdry love letters. But she couldn’t resist a quick peek.
The letters were not the smutfests she expected. They were cards. Generic, store-bought holiday cards with “Merry Christmas” swirling across the front. The stack started in 2000 and went forward from there. Inside each one, someone had written a simple message.
2001 said: “Dear Mr. Rhoads and Miss Diana, thank you for the gift of your friendship.”
2005: “Congratulations to Miss Diana on your engagement. May you be as happy as I was with my Alejandro.”
2015: “We hold your kindness in our hearts.”
The writing in the earlier cards wasn’t familiar to Lana. But in the later ones, she recognized the same blocky print from the handwritten note she’d found at the land trust.
As Lana sifted through the cards, a photograph fell out of one dated 2008. It was a snapshot of a tired-looking woman with long black hair, holding hands with a tall young man. They were standing outside an apartment building on a dusty street, somewhere inland maybe, one of those hard, dry towns that swallowed up work and spat out debt. The boy looked twelve or thirteen. His face was spotty, his limbs too big for his thin frame. But his wide smile and bright eyes were unmistakable. It was Ricardo Cruz.
Lana heard her daughter calling her name from the bottom of the stairs. She filed the cards back into their stack and shoved them into the drawer.
“Coming,” she called down.
Lana descended the stairs, churning through what she’d found. She knew the Cruz family had worked on the ranch at one point. But she doubted many ranch hands sent heartfelt Christmas cards to their bosses for years after their employment had ended. There was something more there. A relationship with Ricardo and his mother, one that was important to Diana. And try as she might, picturing it now as something sexual felt like a stretch.
“It got quiet. I thought they were coming out.” Beth nodded her head down the hall. “But now I’m not so sure.”
“Hear anything good?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘good.’”
Lana listened to the muffled voices. She could make out Martin yelling about how he needed this and Diana lashing back that it was her turn now, that he never took responsibility for anything. It sounded like their dispute was genuine. If not, they were trying to win an Oscar with their performance.
“There is one thing I wanted to show you.” Beth gathered up a stack of plates, and Lana followed her to the kitchen.