House of Smoke (21 page)

“Dorothy,” Laura calls out, “is that you sitting there?”

“Yes, it’s me,” Dorothy answers.

Laura walks barefoot across the broad expanse of lawn, her sandals in one hand, canvas briefcase in the other. She flops into a chair next to her grandmother’s. “I’m beat,” she tells Dorothy. “I should go to bed.”

Laura lives here with her grandmother, in the guesthouse, which is situated on the far side of the compound from Dorothy’s. It’s a good arrangement—neither bothers the other, but both are there to be a sympathetic and understanding ear when needed. Laura can tell Dorothy things—secrets, fears, and dreams—that she can’t say to her mother. Her grandmother knew she and Frank were lovers long before anyone else did, and never said a word.

“Where have you been?” Dorothy asks solicitously. “Out with some friends?” She likes Laura’s friends, the wilder ones, not the spoiled rich kids. She wishes Laura was wilder more often.

“I had dinner with some friends. Then I took a walk, by myself.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time by yourself recently. Which isn’t like you.”

“I’ve been thinking about Frank. I can’t get him out of my mind.”

“In what way?”

“His suicide.”

Dorothy shifts uncomfortably in her chair. “I don’t know if dwelling on what happened to Frank is the best thing for you to be doing, Laura,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I know you want to remember him, but you have to go on with your life, too.”

“I know that, Gram, but there are too many things about the way Frank died, and what happened after, that seem weird to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Everyone jumping to such a quick conclusion that it was a suicide, for one thing.”

“I see.” Dorothy picks up her drink. “You don’t think it could be anything else, do you?”

“Couldn’t it be? Is Frank taking his own life the only possible answer?”

“Unless someone else did, which the police have said didn’t happen.”

“Maybe they’re wrong.”

“You think the police are wrong?” Dorothy asks, the worry coming through in her voice.

“I think it’s possible, and that maybe they should be looking at it harder—at other possibilities.”

“Have you talked to anyone about this? Besides me? Your mother?”

Laura hesitates. Should she tell her grandmother she’s hired Kate? She needs to share this secret with somebody, it’s hard being alone with something like this.

“I hired a private detective.”

“Do you think that was a good idea?” Dorothy asks calmly.

“Why not?” Laura asks.

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Frank Bascomb disgraced our family,” Dorothy tells her. “
Your
family. He could have hurt us, he could have caused us an awful damage.”

“Like what?”

“Like casting doubts on our good name, which is the most important thing anyone can have. Our money is less important than our reputation, Laura. And Frank sullied that.”

“How can finding out how he really died, if it wasn’t suicide, sully our good name?”

“I don’t know. But merely keeping this episode alive, the notoriety of it, can cause damage, can’t you see that?”

“Covering it up could cause worse damage.”

“But what good is hiring a detective going to do? Especially
you
hiring him. You were there, Laura, and Frank worked for us. People will think you know something, that maybe you were involved and that you’re holding information back. This could be very serious and harmful, don’t you see that?”

“I don’t think anyone will think that,” Laura answers. “I’m
not
covering anything up, that’s the point.”

“At the risk of sounding like a pedantic old lady, maybe you should rethink this.” Dorothy shakes her head. “Your mother’s going to go through the roof.”

“I can’t help that,” Laura responds, stubbornly.

“That’s another thing to rethink.”

“I don’t need her permission.”

“That’s a thoughtless remark, Laura. It’s not about asking anyone’s permission, it’s about common decency towards your parents.”

“But that’s exactly the point, Grandma, don’t you see? If I have to check with Mom before doing something that might be controversial, then I
do
need her permission. I’m sick of that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’m sick of having to ask my parents’ permission to live my life.”

Dorothy steeples her fingers. “Sleep on this,” she counsels Laura. “Let us both think about this action, a day or so. If you still want to keep your detective on hire after that, I’ll go along with it. But don’t do something rash you could regret later.”

Laura bites her lip. “All right. I’ll sleep on it.”

“Thank you.”

“But I don’t think it’s going to change my mind. And Grandma,” she adds hastily, “you have to promise me something in return.”

“What?” Dorothy asks warily.

“Don’t tell Mom. Not till I do.”

Dorothy finishes her drink. She’ll need another to help her fall asleep tonight.

“All right. I won’t tell your mother,” Dorothy promises her. “That would be betraying a confidence, which I would never do. But if you continue along this line of action she’ll find out, sooner or later, and when she does—well, you know your mother.”

“That’s why I don’t want her to know.” Laura stands up, stretches. “I’m beat. I’m going to bed.” She gathers up her stuff, kisses Dorothy on the forehead. “Good night.”

“Once you let the genie out of the bottle it’s not so easy to get him back in,” Dorothy counsels her. “Think about that.”

“I want to know what it is everyone’s so afraid of,” Laura responds. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

“Is this where you make the wine?” Kate asks Cecil.

They’re in the large wine-holding room at his ranch, surrounded by dozens of sixty-gallon oak wine barrels. Even now, in the middle of summer, the room is cool and dark, the concrete floor exuding a musty moistness.

“Where you make the wine is in the field, working the soil and the grapevines,” he says. “What happens in here is refinement.”

“Come on, there must be more to it than that. Otherwise anyone could do it. I know I couldn’t do it.”

“You have to have the feel,” he tells her. “Like hitting a curveball or blowing jazz tenor.”

“I can’t do those, either.” Looking around some more, she asks, “What kind of wines do you make?”

“Sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir. What grows well here. What kind of wine do you like?”

“I like chardonnay.”

“Want to try some?”

“Sure.”

He leads her down a row, stopping at a barrel that has a silicone bung in it. He takes a tasting-room wineglass off a wooden overhead shelf, picks up a glass wine thief, siphons some wine from the barrel into the wineglass, hands it to her.

“We’ll bottle this in the fall.”

She sips. “Um, good.” She takes a deeper drink. “This is
really
good. This is better than the wine we drank at dinner.”

“This’ll be a reserve bottling. It’s our best stuff.” She can hear the pride in his voice. “I’m glad you like it.”

“How much will it cost?” she asks.

“About twenty-five a bottle in the store,” he says.

“Oh.” She looks at the glass. “I shouldn’t be drinking this so fast. My speed’s the six-dollar category at Long’s.”

“I’ll give you some.”

What he just said to her, that was a commitment. She’s a woman who doesn’t believe in commitments anymore.

“Thank you.” She feels shy, suddenly.

They stand on the floor, kissing. He leans her back against a barrel. It’s cool to the touch. “I don’t have protection on me,” he says. “I didn’t last time, either,” he admits.

“How come last time you didn’t say anything?”

“It was our first time. I didn’t think anything would happen.”

That figures. He’s the kind of man who thinks nice women don’t fuck on the first date. That wasn’t even a date, it was a pickup. She almost let him, anyway. What he’s saying is, he wouldn’t have even if it had been okay with her.

Old-fashioned. That’s new and different.

“I’m on the pill.” Which is a lie, but she doesn’t want them to stop this time. “From when I was married, I never quit. It gets to be a habit, like brushing your teeth,” she rambles like it’s no big deal, wanting him not to read too much into it. “Are you clean?”

“Yes.”

“You know for sure?”

“I’ve only been with one woman for the last three years, and we tested, so I guess I am.” Leaving the decision to her, an out if she wants one.

She’s been with more than one man, and she’s always made them use a rubber. Usually she has one with her; tonight she doesn’t, but she wouldn’t pull it out anyway. She doesn’t want this man to know she’s the kind of woman who carries a contraceptive in her purse.

“We’ll be all right,” she assures him.

They make love in his bedroom. Nice, gentle, unhurried. As he begins to enter her, his blocky muscular body poised on top of hers, the hair on his chest tantalizing her nipples, her hand guides his erection as it finds the fit between her legs and she flashes for a moment on a memory of an image she recalls having seen, of whales copulating in the ocean, roiling the water as they plunge and dive, the male whale’s penis gliding in and out of the female like an underwater muscle-sword finding the soft sensual scabbard.

If she could will it he wouldn’t come until dawn, they would fuck all night long. She wants him in her, the orgasm is almost irrelevant.

Without warning, Juan Herrera flashes into her mind, staring at her breasts through her wet shirt, her arms around him, her mouth eating his.

She can feel her body tightening. Keep the rhythm going, don’t lose this, people’s minds wander during sex, it’s natural, this
is
where she wants to be, she opens her eyes and looks up at Cecil, whose eyes are closed, the way she wishes hers were, he’s not thinking of any other woman,
this
is where she wants to be, trying to bring herself back to being with him again.

She would have fucked Juan Herrera—a married man, a policeman—if the phone hadn’t rung at that precise moment. What kind of woman are you? she thinks. How easy are you, anyway? What was Cecil really thinking as he entered this woman he barely knows, who gives herself to him so eagerly, so willingly?

Shame courses through her body like a river of mercury, she feels on fire, burning to ash, all that will be left of her will be a thin plume of smoke that will drift out the window, into nothingness.

She wants this man. And all her instincts tell her she shouldn’t have him, because it’s too clean.

Let it be, she pleads with herself. Give yourself permission, to believe that you deserve it.

He must feel what she’s thinking, that connection she wants so bad, because he is in her a long time.

She wills herself to be back with Cecil, in the present; her orgasms begin, wave after wave, each stronger than the one before.

“How are you doing?” he asks her.

Where does this sweetness come from, she wonders, in such a rough package? “I’ve come a million times,” she breathes into his ear. “I’m going to pass out.”

“Good,” he says, and then he explodes, and she feels yet another orgasm building, coming on top of his.

They doze for a couple of hours, waking up at the same time, about one in the morning.

“Are you tired?” he asks her.

“I should be, but I’m not.”

“Me neither.” He sits up out of bed, pulls her up. “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

They stand at the top of his property in the middle of rows of grapevines, his old ranch pickup truck parked off in the dirt. She is in her light dress, nothing on underneath, and he’s wearing a beat-up pair of shorts. Both are barefoot, they threw on whatever was handy. It’s hot and the wind is beginning to pick up, foreshadowing a Santa Ana.

He kneels down and plucks a handful of ripe rose-colored grapes off a vine, holds them out to her. “These are Pinot grapes we’ll be picking next month.”

She takes a couple from his palm, pops them into her mouth.

“Delicious,” she tells him, juice running out the corner of her mouth.

Far down below them a set of headlights comes bouncing along a gravel road, heading for a small, dark house that’s set back under a grove of eucalyptus trees. The car parks in front of the small house. A man gets out, the moon casting his shadow like a spotlight.

“Hmmm.” Cecil grunts.

“Do you know him?”

“I don’t think so,” he answers cautiously.

The front door of the house opens. A woman comes out onto the porch. The eaves shadow her face.

“I know her, though,” Cecil says.

The man walks up to the porch. He and the woman exchange a hurried kiss, say a few words to each other, go inside.

“You didn’t recognize her?” Cecil asks Kate, his eyes fixed on the dark house.

“Should I?”

“You just met her.” A moment’s pause. “That was Miranda Sparks.”

“It is?” Talk about weird coincidences. “People tell me this county is one small town. Now I know what they mean.”

He nods. “My property line ends there,” he says, pointing to a low two-strand barbwire fence about forty yards off. “On the other side is the Sparks ranch, one of the biggest in the county. You stand up here in daytime, you couldn’t see to the end of it.”

“You’re neighbors,” Kate says, starting to get the picture.

“I’m just a little old winemaker, Kate. Our property line is the only thing we have in common.”

“I wonder who that man was?” she says. “It wasn’t the man she was having dinner with, I could tell that from here. Could that be her husband?” she queries, casting a line. Cecil should certainly know Miranda Sparks’s husband.

“No. Even without seeing his face I could see that man is younger than Frederick.”

So now I’ve met the daughter and the mother, Kate thinks to herself. I wonder what the husband is like—Laura’s father.

And who’s this midnight caller? her mind continues on. From the way Miranda Sparks greeted him his visit wasn’t unexpected. It’s none of her business, as far as her business goes, but the detective in her is intrigued.