Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month (7 page)

“Of course it is.” His face seemed to lose some of the strain now as he smiled, and I felt bad for having turned him down before.

“Let’s do it then. What else?”

“My chess book, or isn’t it here yet?”

“Sorry, you need to choose a less esoteric title if you want it to be in stock. This one’s been hard to find.”

“That’s okay. I don’t really have time for it right now anyway. I’ll call you. Meanwhile, if you’d just tell people that the reunion—”

Harley’s expression changed from friendly to guarded the moment he saw the beefy man barrel through the still-open door. This place was Grand Central Station tonight.

“Is my son here, Jane?” Kurt Wendorf’s eyes were wide and his face red, as though he’d been running.

“Well, no, I haven’t—”

“Tyler then?”

“Upstairs. I don’t think he’s seen Max this afternoon, Kurt. Is something wrong?”

Kurt’s expression darkened as he finally registered Harley’s presence. He pointed a thick finger in his direction. “Now don’t you go running to Gil, making something out of nothing, Harley. Max is probably home, but—”

“But what, Kurt?” Harley asked. “Is there some problem … again?”

“There wouldn’t have been one in the first place, if people’d kept their heads and—”

“And ignored the fact that Max tried to burn down a school?”

“No!” Kurt thundered. “And let kids be kids!”

“A bomb isn’t kid stuff,” Harley countered. “What’d you expect? Gil’s the district attorney. He did his best, but—”

“His best? God, you never were a kid, were you, Harley? Ah, forget it—” Kurt made a dismissive motion and turned back to me. “Jane, if you see Max … ”

“I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

“Thanks.” He lumbered back out the door.

Harley said, “That’s one classmate I don’t think will make it to the reunion. Kurt never was famous for his brains, but this has really brought out the Neanderthal in him.”

“The urge to protect your child doesn’t always square with reason,” I said, thinking about my own situation with Bianca.

“I guess,” Harley said. “Well, I’d better get back and run interference for Gil, in case Kurt decides to pay him a visit. Want me to close the door?”

“Just leave it. We can use the breeze. Tell Gil … well, you know what to say.”

After Harley left, I turned to the mundane business of counting the money in the register, sighing at the meager total for the day.

“Long day?” The voice came from the shadows.

I jerked upright, momentarily disoriented. “Nick! I’d forgotten all about you.”

“Obviously.” He tossed two books onto the counter, along with a Visa card. “Am I too late to buy these?”

“No, of course not.” I started ringing them up. “I hadn’t finished closing out yet and every little bit helps. Interesting combination you have here,
Reptiles of the Northwest
and
Lincoln’s Greatest Speech
.”
Nick shrugged. “I like to read. Not that it’s any of my business, but were you sighing over business, your friends’ argument, or your date for the class reunion? Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. This place isn’t that big.”

“At least you’re honest about the eavesdropping. I guess the answer is yes to all of the above. It’s just been a really bad day.”

“I’m a good listener.”

I ticked off the topics on my fingers. “Well, the problem with business can be summed up in two words: Megabooks Plus! No surprise there. It’s the classic big impersonal store versus the friendly little one.”

“Don’t worry. There are plenty of people like me who want to talk to real people in a friendly little bookstore.”

“I just hope there are enough of you.”

“If there aren’t, I’ll buy more books. Problem solved. Next?”

“Have you been reading the local papers? Do you know what Harley and Kurt were talking about?”

“Harley’s the stuffed shirt and Kurt’s the hothead with the delinquent son?”

“Right, at Juniper High School. And the indictment just came out, so Kurt’s got a lot on his mind right now. He’s usually a very nice guy.”

“And the district attorney, the one who prosecuted the kid, he’s the one whose wife fell off the cliff today?”

“Right. They all went to Juniper High—Gil, Vanessa, Harley, and Kurt. They were even in the same class, which seemed to make Kurt particularly mad at the indictment.”

“So I gathered. He thinks the D.A. was too hard on his son?”

“Max did set off a bomb in the school.”

“A smoke bomb. There’s a difference.”

“But people can’t just go around setting off bombs. You’re an officer of the court, aren’t you? You must agree with that.”

“I was also a boy once, and I have a couple of rambunctious sons. Maybe I’d like to hear the defense’s side of things before I decide whether to hang this kid out to dry.”

“The case was supposed to be pretty clear-cut.”

“I didn’t think anything relating to kids was clear-cut,” he countered.

“Spoken like a true parent,” I acknowledged. With everything that had been going on since the book club meeting, I’d been able to put Bianca out of my mind, but now she was back.

“That’s two down,” Nick said. “Now, what’s the problem with your date for the reunion, other than that he’s a stuffed shirt?”

“Would you quit saying that? Harley is a very nice man. Anyway, I think I can handle dating questions without your help.”

The phone on the wall behind me rang, and Nick waved a hand in farewell as I turned to answer it. The hollow, crackling line told me immediately that Emily was weighing in from Peru.

“Mom? Mom? What’s all this about Bianca?”

Early the next morning I drove toward the dilapidated trailer Bianca called home, rehearsing my pledge not to confront her. If I failed to remain calm, she wouldn’t hear a word I said. Raymond Morris’s Rule Number One would be my mantra:
Make each conversation a positive experience
. Usually by the time I heard Bianca’s first three words, my resolve to be conciliatory had disappeared like apple pie at a potluck. Today though, I vowed to pry open the gates of communication and hold them wide until I could get my message across.

This time I wasn’t talking about something as simple as her recent stunt of lying down in the road to hold up traffic in protest of the shortage of “duck crossing” signs at Drake Park in nearby Bend. Raymond Morris said such actions merely proved that Bianca was testing her own values as she learned to separate from her childhood home. I understood the concept, but couldn’t she test with green hair or something?

I soon covered the ten miles east of Juniper on Highway 28 and bumped my way down the track to Bianca’s trailer. A cloud of dust enveloped my tan Volvo as it bounced to a stop. It was an old car but, thanks to Tony’s care over the years, still dependable. I grabbed a dirty envelope from the floor on the passenger side and wrote, “Tune-up?” Now that Tony was no longer here to take care of such things, I wrote many such notes to myself. How often did cars need tune-ups anyway? It had already been over a year.

I squinted through the now grimy windshield, trying to make out whether Bianca was home. Of course there was no car parked out front, as Bianca had informed me recently that a bicycle was the most acceptable mode of private transportation if one were serious about wanting to avoid polluting the environment. Too bad she hadn’t taken that attitude in high school when she and her friends spent most of their time racing off to the Juniper Park Mall in our car.

Watching our sunny, scatterbrained daughter grow up, Tony and I had at times suspected that we had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital at birth. When Bianca announced her plan to embark on a photographic tour of the United States after her high school graduation, we concluded that our suspicions had been right. We didn’t want her wandering across the United States by herself, and we were still arguing with her about it when Tony died.

Under the circumstances, I’d hoped she’d forget the trip, and she actually did start a summer job at the cozy Sagebrush Café, where unforgettable home cooking and the eccentricity of the owner, Dot Jannings, went hand in hand. Dot valued Bianca’s adventurous spirit, and Bianca loved working for someone who appreciated her, but Bianca didn’t want to stay in Juniper and Dot knew it. A few weeks after Tony’s funeral, with Dot’s full support, Bianca hung up her apron and set off toward Idaho on a Greyhound bus, with only a vague notion of where she was going and when she’d return.

After Dot died this past spring I found out just how much she’d thought of my daughter. Without a word beforehand, Dot had deeded over her old trailer to Bianca. When I told Bianca about this in one of our infrequent phone calls, she was saddened by her friend’s death, but thrilled that Dot had left her the trailer. Impulsively, she made immediate plans to come home and take up residence in it. Her first decision as an owner was to move the trailer from the Sunny Trails Trailer Park out of town to where she could see the stars.

As I stepped out of the car, I saw her bicycle lying beside the trailer. Looking past it, I caught a glimpse of bright color on the gentle slope beyond and realized that Bianca was probably meditating. This was the daily routine she had adopted after discovering Bhatami Rhami’s book,
One With The Earth
, discarded on a park bench in Taos six months before. According to her, she’d picked it up casually, but had immediately become engrossed in its message, so much so that by the time the day—and the book—ended, Rhami had a convert. Our conversations about his teachings had been conspicuously lacking in agreement, mostly because they sounded like total claptrap to me.

“A part I just love, Mom,” she had once explained, “is when I face in the direction of the approaching sunrise, close my eyes, and meditate until I feel the warmth of the sun on my face.”

“A Central Oregon sunrise doesn’t have all that much warmth,” I’d answered. “I hope wearing a sweater figures prominently in his instructions.”

“It’s easy to mock, but you haven’t even tried it. If you’d just allow yourself to absorb the sun’s energy, you’d start the day in harmony with the rhythm of the earth instead of having to put on a sweater to keep yourself warm.”

“Give pneumonia a chance, is that it?”

“Look, I’m not asking you to do anything your inner spirit doesn’t command, but really, the rest of your day would flow so much more naturally if you’d give this a try. If you don’t ever try anything new, how will you know whether it works?”

After I told her that my inner spirit often commanded sweaters, the conversation started to deteriorate, and it clanked to a complete halt when I suggested that it probably wasn’t an accident that Rhami had developed his philosophy in the warmth of sunny Bombay, India, rather than in Fairbanks, Alaska. Before removing herself from my unredeemable presence, Bianca had informed me that Rhami had followers everywhere, and he had addressed this very issue in the foreword to the second edition of the book. Those unfortunate people who couldn’t see a sunrise—due to smog or tall buildings or igloos—should meditate until they could visualize the sun’s rays. It was mind over matter. However, Bianca had little need for this backup method, since Juniper had few igloos, little smog, and hardly any buildings over three stories high, except for the eight-story High Desert Community Hospital.

Remembering my vow not to antagonize her this morning, I waited until she sauntered toward me before raising my arm in a tentative wave. She waved back enthusiastically and I relaxed a notch. Never one to hold a grudge, Bianca appeared to have rebounded from last night’s rebuffs at book club. She’d probably concluded, as usual, that we weren’t bad people, merely unenlightened. She had encountered the same resistance to her attempted reformation of our eating habits, reading preferences, and of course, politics, but as she had once confided, “I’m willing to cut some people a little slack. After all, Minnie is sixty, and that’s … eighteen years older than you are.” The incredulity in her tone at my advanced age of forty-two would normally have sparked a response, but I kept quiet, waiting to hear why the elderly Minnie was allowed so much latitude. “Minnie can’t be blamed for being slow to pick up new ideas. She’s probably thinking about varicose veins or cholesterol, though if she’d eat more flax and raw vegetables, she wouldn’t have to worry so much.”

“Hi,” she said now as she came near enough to talk. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

Was that good or bad? “Me, too,” I answered. “How are you this morning?”

“I’m fine,” she said absently before moving on to what was apparently on her mind. “Did you notice that Ty, the youngest person in the group, was the only one willing to listen to me last night?”

Ah, so we were back to last night. “Tyler would listen to you read the ingredients on a can of soup,” I said. Raising a hand to forestall her probable next comment, I added, “Though of course you would never eat a can of soup.”

“And you wouldn’t either, if you read the ingredients—”