Casebook (35 page)

“Could you please explain who Ben Orion is,” the Mims said.

My eyes and Hector’s found each other. “What is this, the Inquisition? How do you know his name? No, Mom. I really want to hear where you got that.”

“Is he someone from FLAG?” Philip asked, never having attached the
BTU
.

“Did you meet on the Internet?” the Mims asked. The pedophile fear! Now she’d infected Philip. I looked around as if my father might jump out from behind a chair.

“He’s not a pedophile, Mom. He’s just a friend of ours.”

“He’s a man in his thirties, Miles. That’s not a normal age for a friend of yours to be.”

“How do you know this person?” Philip asked.

We looked down. Neither of us broke. Then Philip asked Hector to walk around the block with him. Watching them go, I noticed how Hector put his left hand in a back pocket, just like his dad. They had exactly the same gait. Hector was close to his father. I knew that. I didn’t envy it exactly. It was more complicated than that. I loved Philip, but I knew, without even forming the thought, that for me, I would always pick my dad.

“Ben Orion is a perfectly decent guy, Mom. You want to meet him? I’ll call him right now and ask him to come over.”

“Please do that, Miles.”

Ugh. I hadn’t expected her to say yes. She stood there while I
began to dial. I hoped he wouldn’t answer. The last few times we’d called we’d gotten his machine. He was still mad at us from the day with Tomcat, when the VW ran out of gas. He’d never thanked us for our Bundt cake. Then again, we hadn’t put a tag on it. He might not have known it was from us. Please, please don’t answer, I thought.
Be gone
.

“You know this thirty-nine-year-old man’s number by heart!” my mom said.

How did she know his exact age? We didn’t even know that.

“Ben Orion here,” he answered.

“Oh, hey, Ben? Yeah. It’s Miles,” I said. I explained that my mom wanted to meet him. It was okay if he couldn’t make it. I mean, I knew it was last-minute, I said.

But he offered to drive right over.

Philip returned with Hector shambling behind. “Let’s let the boys do their homework,” he said.

“In other words, you want to talk about us.” That was all right. I needed Hector alone anyway. “She made me call Ben!” I hissed when he closed my door. “And he’s coming!”

But Hector wouldn’t look at me. All of a sudden, I understood: he’d caved.

Why? My face dropped into my hands. We had been working on this mystery together a long time; Hector was so close; he didn’t feel like a completely other person. It was nearly as if I’d been doing it all alone. We’d moved in complete secrecy, almost as if we were playing a make-believe game in our own heads. Now our mutual figments were being lifted out of the water into air for everyone to see.

“The pill thing,” Hector said. “That night I snuck out and we went to Rite Aid, I got in big trouble coming back. And I was scared. I thought the Mims might get addicted or start drinking or something.
^*1
That seemed more important than a secret.”

“Did you tell about soup selling, too, then?” I felt ashamed all of a sudden. I’d thought we were in this together. Maybe everyone felt sorry for our family.

He swore that he’d only told his dad about my mom being depressed that one night in December, and now he told him that we’d researched Eli and transferred pets.
Two separate things
. He hadn’t told him we brought the creatures to
Eli’s house
. Philip was going to make us give the money to my sister’s animal club.

“Ohww. Not even to FLAGBTU?”

“He’s a homophobe,” Hector mumbled. “They all are.” The doorbell rang. Hound barked as if the enemy had landed.

It was Ben Orion. Standing in the kitchen, he seemed cut from a glossy magazine next to our pale parents, who belonged on thin comic-book paper. Wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a blazer, he looked literally sharp, his colors more saturated, his hair a true black, his teeth whiter. I wondered if he actually did resemble a pedophile. “I thought I’d seen you before,” he was saying to my mom. “I guess it was somebody else.” So he
hadn’t
seen her. I thought he had a crush on the Mims as a damsel in distress. But she turned out not to be the damsel he’d seen. Perhaps distress, by itself, wouldn’t cut it. It shocked me again: maybe my mother was plain. From Eli I’d learned where to look to find her symmetries. Maybe no one else could. Maybe we really were pitiable, I was just beginning to understand.

“I’m a private investigator,” Ben said, “and once upon a time these two found me in the yellow pages.” He took out his reserve police badge, which wasn’t actually a badge at all but a card in his wallet, with a drawing of a badge. “And I’m familiar with Cottonwoods kids, because I lived with Zoe Fisher, the art teacher there, and her son, Ez. When these two first came to me, I couldn’t decide what to think.”

I realized he was going to tell the story of us.

“I thought they were probably imagining things that weren’t there or that the adults already knew about. I tried to talk them out
of it. But then I slowly got the sense that they were beyond their depth—”

Philip interrupted. “Guys.” He looked to my mom, who was nodding in agreement with him. She unhooked the dog’s leash from the peg. “Walk him to the beach and back,” Philip said.

As we passed through the living room where Boop One and Jules were choreographing a dance, I shouted back, “Why do
they
get to stay?”

“Because
we’re
very good,” Boop One said, a leg diagonal in the air. “And you’re in trouble!” Then she folded herself around the dog. Boop One annoyed me, though I could see her same shapes in Ella, and
she
didn’t annoy me at all. These girls—I suppose you’d call them the girly girls—had bodies that could fold and unfold again. Smoothly. Boop One slid down from standing to the splits. “She’s more of a leaps girl than a turns girl,” I heard as we left. “I’m a turns girl.”

I actually didn’t mind being banished. A wind from the ocean cuffed our faces. Maybe for the first time in our lives Hector and I didn’t have much to say to each other. I was mortified that he’d been talking about us to his father. I’d taken it for granted that we were partners. Hector was probably the most important person in my life. I loved Ella; that was a sharp, narrow, painful feeling. But Hector was way more central. In my life then, someone could be insufficiently imaginary, like Maude, and someone else, Ella, insufficiently real. Hector was the only person who was right.

But maybe it wasn’t the same for him.
^*2

We let the dog lead us. Philip had said to go to the beach, but when we came to the street where we’d turn for Ben Orion’s house, Hound pulled in that direction. Like a Ouija, maybe he felt our prompting. We followed. Ben had left lights on inside, so the windows glowed. The Mims always yelled after us to turn off our lights.

“I wonder if we’ll ever come here anymore,” I said.

“I kind of doubt it.” Then we were quiet. “Kat got a job,” Hector finally said.

“You mean, besides working for Sare?”

“Yeah. Some people hired her to make their kitchen.”

“Oh, she can do that really well.” Kat had had a breakfast restaurant once, called Jams. After all the times Hector had referred to her as Charlie’s mom’s gopher and Sare’s slave, good news sounded odd coming from him, but of course I knew that all kids really love their mothers. “They tore out a picture from a magazine and said they wanted it to look like that. She told them, ‘Fine, it’ll look like that if you let me take the pictures.’ ”

We fell quiet again. “How’s your aunt?” I asked, trying to make conversation. We’d never had to do that before. “Is the married guy still being all nice? Or was that just right after the holidays?”

“You know how she doesn’t have kids to spend money on? Well, my dad told her she didn’t have to pay our tuitions anymore, and she had a meltdown. It turned out she
liked
being necessary. She says her life is going to have to change.”

“So wait a minute, why
isn’t
she necessary? Because of your mom’s new job?”

“I guess that and my dad teaching and with Marge.”

“What do you mean, with Marge? Are your dad and Marge getting together?” I hadn’t meant to say that the way it came out, kind of shrill, but I’d never thought of Philip with Marge. The Mims and Philip had talked on the porch so much this terrible year, I’d hoped—I didn’t know what I’d hoped. I’d started to wish they would decide they liked each other, but then I worried that Hector would have to move into my tiny room and we already had too many girls. Now I wanted that option back.

“I
think
so. She bought a frying pan.”

“For your house?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Then it sounds like they are.” My organs sank. We still stared at Ben’s windows. What now? I thought.

“But my aunt, though?” Hector said. “She gave her boss an ultimatum to tell his wife. He said his wife
knew
, she knew and she didn’t know, she knew as much as she wanted to know. But Terry said she had to be able to call him at home. ’Cause the way it was, if he was in the hospital, she couldn’t even go see him.”

“And
did
his wife really know?”

“Well, she does now, and she wants a divorce.”

“That’s good, right? Is Terry happy?”

“I guess.” He said that a way that made the word disyllabic.

We finally shuffled into the house as if handcuffed. My sisters skated around the table in socks, slapping down napkins. It looked as if we were going to get dinner.

The Mims poured pasta into a colander, then mixed it with garlic and parsley. She stared down at the food.

“They did research and deduction,” Ben Orion said. “They were
obsessed
. They’d make good cops.”

My mom’s half smile fell a millimeter. Boop One called out, What side do the knives go on again?

I couldn’t settle down at the table. My fingers and toes jumped. Hector and I had kept this to ourselves for so long.

“Miles said you didn’t know he was married,” Ben said. “I didn’t believe him at first.”

“I’m an idiot,” the Mims said.

I never stopped watching her face. I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying. I wondered what Ben Orion had told them.

“We thought there was some madwoman sending that stuff about Eli from her attic,” Philip said. “And all along it was you guys.” For Philip this was effervescence.

I was amazed that they weren’t furious. Maybe they would be furious later. Still, it was exhilarating for them to understand what we’d done and have it be all right. I’d joked about coming out as gay to my father, but this was a truer confession. I felt an urge to lead
them downstairs on a field trip and show them the wires and the phone from Hector’s garage we’d rigged with Silly Putty, but I kept scanning my mom’s face, and I could see she didn’t want to learn more. She seemed fragile and embarrassed, as if she could barely hold the new information she’d gained and stay herself. I just then remembered she didn’t know about me calling Eli. No one did.

“Did
you
think the guy was lying?” Ben Orion asked her. I wished he hadn’t, but her face didn’t avalanche. He had a nice voice. He was sitting next to her. His hand touched her elbow.

“No. But …” She stopped with a laugh through her nose. “But one time he talked to me about his eighth-grade teacher. She was the one who told him to read a book a day. Eli read a book every day. I loved that about him.”

“If it was even true,” Ben said.

“I think
that
was.” She was doing it, too. She believed everything Eli said except what we knew for sure were lies. Eli didn’t really read a book every day, I bet. How many people did? Hardly any. Not even teachers.

“She had him over to her house after school,” the Mims went on. “She gave him cake. He said that once the teacher’s husband came home, and she rushed him out the side door. He said nothing ever happened, but I thought he was trying to tell me something. That same year, he moved down to the basement, away from his mother and brother.”

“I thought they lived in an apartment!” I called from the refrigerator, where I was getting milk.

“I guess it had a basement,” she said. Our basement and the one beneath Dr. Bach’s office had dirt floors. You couldn’t really
move
there, like with a bed. My dad’s house didn’t even have a basement. Holland had told me a lot of California houses didn’t.

“So, what, you think he lost his virginity with his eighth-grade teacher?” I said to her in the kitchen. I’d brought in plates.

“He’d told me it happened at that age with an older girl. He said it was strange.”

“Doesn’t sound so strange to me,” I said.

She hit me with a dish towel. A flash of the old, real her.

Hector shook his head. “What Eli did was worse than just ordinary lying. Remember how he flew around all the time? Where did he get the money for that?”

“Maybe he was just in Pasadena.”

“I think Ben Orion should run a criminal check,” he said.

I remembered that little sketch Hector had made of Eli that we’d shown to the librarian. We’d put it in
Our Psychopath
,
WANTED
printed above the picture, like a mug shot in the post office or the Doors album Philip kept. But wanted for what? For breaking a promise to love? That happened seventeen times a day in just our class at school. That wasn’t criminal enough for Hector. He felt unsatisfied. It seemed too small. He’d thought we were missing our high school life to do something big and important, to chase down evil.

Eli had promised us money, though. And a future. I still thought he was terrible, even if that was all.

I wanted everyone to leave. It was a school night. But the grown-ups stood talking on the porch. Hector and I lurked around the bushes on the side of the house. I still felt weird with him. He’d told his dad, and all this time I hadn’t known.