A Fistful of Rain (21 page)

CHAPTER 30

It was Sheila Larkin’s business, and she ran it out of her home eight blocks south of the Reed campus. I drove past the grounds and its falling leaves, onto the slender streets with the slightly upscale housing dedicated to the campus faculty. Pumpkins perched on porches and walks, waiting to be lit up as soon as night fell, and a couple of the homes had more prominent Halloween decorations, paper skeletons hanging from awnings. One home had an elm in its front yard with half of a broomstick jutting from its trunk on the one side, a witch splayed against the tree on the other, as if she’d crashed her flight.

The decorations at Cuddle Group Daycare were bright and nothing as sinister, construction-paper pumpkins of orange and black smiling brightly from where they’d been taped to the windows. There were eleven kids under care, and three other providers aside from Sheila, all of them women her age or younger. The kids ranged from a towheaded toddler who careened around the playroom, head-butting all of the adults in their legs, to a four-month-old little girl, who sobbed hysterically in one woman’s lap.

Sheila Larkin looked nothing like I remembered, and when she answered the door, I didn’t recognize her at all. She seemed to have stopped growing upward shortly after I’d come out from beneath her parents’ roof, then made up for the lack of progress by expanding horizontally, instead. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail, and it made her seem shorter and fatter.

She smiled at me, though, and offered me her hand, and I followed her into the din of children. We negotiated the playroom, stepping over toys and tots. The other women were all careful to not look at me, or at least, to not look at me when they thought I could see them doing it, and I wondered what Sheila had told them. There were small gates up in every doorway, and Sheila had to open and close three of them before we were done. The kitchen was clean, but cluttered, and smelled of last night’s fried chicken and baby poop. Sheila offered me a seat at the table and a glass of something to drink, and I took the seat and passed on the glass, and after some more mild fussing about, she joined me.

“I was surprised to hear from you,” Sheila said. “I didn’t think you’d even remember us.”

“I wish I could say I’m surprised that you remembered me,” I said. “But I think I made a lasting impression.”

Sheila smiled, and seemed to relax a little. “You know, it was Donny who told us first, that you were a big rock star, now. We were all so impressed, I had to call Daddy and tell him, and he sounded so happy that you had grown up well. He said that all those prayers we were making for you, some of them must have gotten through.”

“I guess some of them did.”

Her face fell. “I’m so sorry about your brother. I barely remembered him, but then I saw it on the news last week, and all I could think was that it didn’t seem fair at all. And they say your daddy did it?”

“He’s a suspect,” I said. “But they don’t know who did it.”

Sheila adjusted herself in her seat. “I don’t expect this is why you called, though, is it? To talk about that?”

“No. I’m actually wondering if you can tell me about your family. After Mikel’s funeral, I started thinking about all the people who had taken us into their homes, and about how . . . how rotten I was, at least. And I wanted to say I was sorry. I was hoping to start with you, sort of work my way through the tree, so to speak.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessary. You had been through some awful things, we all understood.” Sheila looked embarrassingly touched, for a moment.

“It doesn’t really excuse the behavior.”

“Well, if it matters, I forgave you long ago. I know my parents did, too.”

“How about your brothers?”

Sheila grinned. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about them.”

“No? They’re well?”

She laughed. “They’re crazy, that’s what they are! Moved up to Alaska about two years ago, the lot of them. Donny’s teaching Eskimo boys and girls out in the bush, I think that’s the word for it, and William, Ben, and Bobby, they’re entrepreneurs. They’ve got a couple planes, they all learned how to fly, you see, and they sell tours.”

Scratch the Larkin boys, I thought, and she saw disappointment on my face and misread it as something else.

“Oh, I know,” Sheila said. “I think it’s crazy, too, but they love it. Only problem they’re having, according to what Mom says, is that they can’t find any women. Not enough single girls in Alaska, I guess.”

I made a sympathetic noise, and asked her a few more questions, mostly to round out the conversation. She told me that she’d been married for six years, now, and that she had three kids of her own, only one of them part of the quorum in the next room. Her husband was an investor-broker for Prudential here in town, and they were very happy. Before she’d had her first child, she didn’t know what it was she wanted to do with her life. But when the first baby was born, she had discovered that she had a knack for child care, and she’d gone to school to get certified, and opened the business on her own. She said the work fulfilled her.

“That must be what making music is like for you,” Sheila said.

I started feeling the foreboding as soon as I was back behind the wheel of the Jeep. The Larkins had been a long shot in the sea of long shots, and if I’d been honest with myself, I wouldn’t have gone with them first.

The Quicks should have been number one.

My dashboard clock said it was coming up on noon, and it adjusted my priorities.

I had to get over to Graham’s before he left town, to pick up the cash.

The guard in the lobby was the same one from the day before, and he grinned at me when I came in, saying, “Hey there, Miss Bracca.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name yesterday.”

He looked almost embarrassed. “Oh, yeah. I’m Lee.”

“Nice to meet you, Lee. I’m Mim.” I shook his hand.

He laughed. “You can go on up, Mim.”

Graham answered his door within seconds of my knocking. He was dressed in his travel suit, which was one of the nicest he owned. I’d asked him once why he always wore a three-piece for an airplane, and he’d hemmed and hawed, then admitted that he was scared to death of flying. When I’d said that wasn’t really an answer, he’d gone into a lengthy explanation about how many rock stars die in plane crashes, and the reason for that being that musicians travel a lot, always going from gig to gig, and with odds like that, he figured he should be ready.

“It’s my good-luck charm,” he’d said. “I figure the one day I don’t bother to get dressed up, that’ll be the day the plane goes down.”

He had all but one of the three pieces in place, the jacket draped over the arm of the couch, and he ushered me in and then presented me with the bag of cash as if he was introducing a deb at a ball. The duffel was bright yellow, with black trim, and had a Nike swoosh on the side. He pulled open the top flap, and revealed a mass of bills, hundreds, strapped together in bunches with paper bands.

“Got Van’s donation to the fund this morning. You want to count it?” Graham asked, leaning over my shoulder and nudging me. “Make sure it’s all there, huh?”

“That is a fucking lot of money,” I said.

“That is, indeed, a fucking lot of money. It has its own smell; you smell that?” He took a deep and audible inhale through his nose. “Paper and ink and something else, you know what I mean? You got to get it out of here, it’s making me horny as hell, and I’ve got a strict hands-off policy with the talent.”

I zipped the duffel shut and hoisted it onto my shoulder, and was surprised at how much it weighed. Not as much as my Tele, but close, and I wondered what another six hundred thousand dollars would do to the weight.

“Off to Glasgow?” I asked.

“Yeah, flight’s in just over three hours. I’ve got to hustle. I’ll walk down with you.”

He pulled on his jacket and got his travel bag from where it was waiting by the door, and we rode the elevator together. Lee wished us both a safe and good trip, and I didn’t challenge his assumption that I was back to gigging. I suppose it was the duffel on my shoulder that did it, made him think that I was hitting the road again.

“Can I drop you anywhere?” I asked Graham.

“You can put me on the MAX line, if you would, that’d be nice,” he told me.

“No cab?”

“Hey, I can get out to the airport hassle free for a buck fifty, why should I pay for a cab?”

“Because Van hires a limo.”

“Van’s the star. I’m management.”

We climbed into the Jeep, and I dropped him at one of the many MAX stops on Yamhill, so he could catch the train. I wished him a safe trip.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked as he was climbing out.

“Nothing.”

“Mim, your knuckles are all bashed up. That’s not good, that’ll screw your playing.”

“I’ll get it checked out.”

“You had damn well better. I never did take out that policy from Lloyds.”

“Did Van get her shrine?”

“Still working on that, too.”

I grinned and kept it in place until he’d slammed the door and turned away, and then I popped into gear, and headed for the main branch of the Multnomah County Library.

He’d never been anyone but “Mr. Quick” to me, so the first thing I looked for was his Christian name. The government employee listings did the trick, though I had to search back three years before finding Gareth Quick, in the Office of the State Treasurer. Either he’d retired or been laid off or quit, but he hadn’t appeared to have died, because there was a listing in the Salem White Pages for a Gareth and Anne Quick, and the address given rang true in my memory, and I figured it was the same place, the same house. There were no listings for either Chris or Brian Quick, though, so I’d have to talk to the parents to find them.

It was late afternoon when I was finished, and I was getting anxious to get back to my house and get the money out of my car. Lugging it around in the library had made me feel odd, and I’d kept expecting someone to ask me to open the bag. Even though the money itself wasn’t illegally acquired, the thought of having to explain it made me nervous.

Trick-or-treaters were already out and moving along the sidewalks, jack-o’-lanterns on every residential block glowing a warm orange. I didn’t have anything to give any visitors who might stop by, so I stopped at the Safeway near my house on the way home and dumped forty dollars on bags of assorted sweets.

Inside, I made sure the porch and all of my front lights were off, then took the duffel bag down to the basement. I supposed there were safer places to store the money, but I hadn’t been able to think of anything. In the end, I folded the bag up as small as I could get it, and then stuck it in the hollow back of my Fender blues amp, then pushed the amp so its back was against the wall. As long as I didn’t switch the thing on, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I filled a big bowl with candy, positioned it and a chair just inside my front door, then turned on the lights, trying to make the house as welcoming as possible. It was probably silly, but Halloween was the way I remembered my mother, because she always loved it. No matter what else was going on in my life right now, if I was going to have to wait until morning before I went to see the Quicks, I’d damn well honor her memory tonight.

While I was waiting for the first trick-or-treater to arrive, I checked my messages. There were five of them, and only four from people I didn’t want to talk to. A guy calling himself Peter Bergman who said he was from
Rolling Stone
had called, wanting to talk about my brother for the story he was writing, and he left a callback number; two of the local television outlets and one radio had called, asking if I’d be willing to do an interview; and Click, who chastised me for ditching him the night before, and wished me well, and said that he’d call to check in from the road.

The doorbell rang just after I’d finished, and I went to answer it, ready with the bowl of candy.

It was Joan, bundled in the same old coat she’d worn every winter for the last decade, carrying a pizza box.

She saw the look on my face and said, “You didn’t think I’d forget?”

“I almost forgot myself,” I admitted. I let her get the box on the kitchen counter and herself out of her coat before giving her a hug. “You are too nice to me.”

“If it’s true, then you shouldn’t be pointing it out.”

I got down plates and cans of soda, and we pulled slices of pizza and sat in the front hall, making small talk and eating. She told me about her day, about the trouble with the music program, the ever-present budget cuts.

She waited until I was done eating and had taken our plates to the kitchen before she asked me what happened to my forehead.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Accident-prone.”

“It looks painful.”

“It’s not too bad. Only hurts when I think.” I furrowed my brow, to prove the point.

There was a brief, but very awkward pause, and her eyes seemed to get a little dimmer. She tried to hide it, but I knew what she’d concluded, that she had gone to my lie without needing any direction, because it was the logical place to go. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I hadn’t been drunk, that I hadn’t been drunk since before the funeral, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me.

We were spared by the doorbell, a group of two Harry Potters, a Hermione, and a very traditional bedsheet ghost. One of the Harrys was actually a girl, and after they’d stated their demands, I went after her.

“So what’s the trick?” I asked.

She didn’t miss a beat. “Turn you into a newt.”

“That’s a good one; think I better pay up.” To Harry Number Two, I asked, “And you?”

“Newt?”

“Taken.”

He adjusted his plastic glasses. “I’ll give you warts. Warts all over your face, they’ll be totally gross and stuff.”

“Ew. All right, a handful, that’ll keep my skin clear?”

“For now.”

“Oh, a tough guy. Okay. Next?”

The ghost told me he’d haunt me until I was so scared I’d wet my pants. Both of the Harrys and the Hermione thought that was funny, and giggled. Joan, listening in the hall behind me, nearly bust a gut. The ghost got a really big handful.