I pulled into the drive and rolled down the window. She turned around and gave me a dazzling smile. “Can I help you?” I asked.
“Oh, you live here,” she said. “I saw you around the corner. If I had known, I could have given you this box back there.”
“What’s in the box?” I asked.
“Something for Frank. From Xander. Not to be opened before Frank’s birthday. Xander didn’t want to send it through the mail.”
Frank was leaning out the window now with his arms outstretched.
“Sit down, Frank,” I said. I told the girl, “You’d better give that to me.”
“Sure thing.” She handed it over, then turned and held her hand out to the little boy. “Come on, Alec,” she said. “We don’t want to miss our bus.”
I had never seen a picture of Xander as a child, but after seeing that kid’s face, I didn’t need to.
( 21 )
I MADE SURE Frank was asleep before I crept out to the Dream House with Xander’s box under my arm. Mimi still set the burglar alarm every night at dusk even though Xander had never gotten around to reconnecting it after he replaced the sliding glass door. Once I started opening my bathroom window before I went to bed I stopped reminding him to do it because the night air smelled like heaven. It was the one thing I’d imagined about California that was actually true. If I ever create my own fragrance, I will call that fragrance “Nuit de Bel Air.”
I knew by then the main house was no place to hide anything from Frank. I found that out when I asked him where the zoot suit came from. “From a box under my mother’s bed,” he said. “Given the antic paper the box was wrapped in, I suspect she got it for my birthday. But I’m growing so fast now that I decided I should wear it while the wearing was good. I was very careful loosening the tape so I can slip the suit box back inside the wrapping. As long as she doesn’t see me in it, my mother will be none the wiser.”
Inside his antic wrapping, sometimes Frank could be like any other kid. “What were you doing looking under your mother’s bed?” I asked.
“Trying to ascertain where she’s sleeping these days,” he said. “When she forgot to lock her office door, I found her asleep in there. As you know.”
“That’s when you took your grandfather’s letter opener.”
“Indeedy.”
Did I mention what Xander thought was an appropriate birthday present for a ten-year-old boy? Roman candles. As in fireworks. Small handheld ones named “Silent but Deadly.” How thoughtful! Xander had taken into consideration Frank’s aversion to loud noises when he picked a bouquet of explosives for the birthday boy.
Xander was also kind enough to include a package of non-Roman birthday candles, the joke kind with magnesium-laced wicks you can’t blow out.
I thought about putting the box straight in the trash, but given the incendiary nature of the package and inquisitive raccoons and the grocery-cart-pushing deposit reapers who dug through the cans in the wee hours I thought that might not end well, either. Instead, I hid Xander’s gift in the Dream House fridge. I figured the only person who would find it there was Xander. If he ever came back.
While I was there I dropped in at Frank’s gallery to check out the photo of the girl in front of the mural. Bingo. Tattoo Girl. Using the magnifying glass to examine the photo, I noticed now in the corner of the frame a small foot that at first seemed to belong to an abandoned doll. But with my new information plus a shadow cast by a childish head full of ringlets, I guessed that foot belonged to Alec.
“WHAT DO YOU want for your birthday, Frank?” I asked the next morning. I was folding one of his detested T-shirts into a cardboard box we kept on the backseat of the wagon for his quick-change cache. Frank had just wriggled into his Teddy Roosevelt trousers and puttees, which he wore today with a plain white shirt and his pith helmet. The look was more safari than San Juan Hill.
“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” I said when I saw what he was wearing.
“Dr. Livingstone died without realizing his dream of locating the source of the Nile,” Frank said as he climbed into the backseat and strapped himself in. “When the British government asked for his body to be sent home, the tribe he had been living with cut his heart out and buried it under a tree because they believed his heart belonged in Africa. For my birthday I would like to have a bow and arrows.”
“No way,” I said.
“It’s true,” Frank said. “Dr. Livingstone was born in Scotland but had been living in Africa for a very long time.”
“I believe that,” I said. “But I’m not getting you a bow and arrows. You could put somebody’s eye out with an arrow.”
“I want the arrows fitted with suction cups in place of arrowheads.”
“Oh. Those. Okay then.”
“I would also like an outfit like the one Robin Hood wore, circa Errol Flynn.”