Murder in the Marketplace (3 page)

My place is in north Palo Alto, a few miles from the scene of my census humiliations. It’s on a flag lot, so called because it’s tucked behind another house; the driveway is like a flagpole, and my lot is the flag. At one time my cottage was an adjunct of the larger house in front, but when I’d inherited the two houses, I could only afford to tend one. Paul Drake, a detective with the Palo Alto police department, was buying the one in front. His payments were a nice regular income, since my own house needed incredible amounts of deferred maintenance. I also tried to make regular contributions to an IRA. I didn’t want to be dependent in my old age.

When I turned into the drive, Drake’s car was parked in the graveled area between his backyard and my front yard. Every weekend we planned to plant a hedge beside the parking area; every week something got in the way of doing it.

Drake had probably come home for lunch. His meals were of great importance to him. Sometimes he invited me for dinner, and I enjoyed the fancy cooking he did as a hobby.

I stopped the bus in front of the garage, which I’d retained as part of my territory. Just beyond it was my cottage. It looked, to me, like the cozy home the fisherman’s wife had extorted from the Magic Fish, before she got greedy. When I was a child, that story had seemed to imply that everyone deserves this much in life—a little home with some modest but important conveniences. Having it made me feel, as the fisherman must have felt, an incredulous sense of thankfulness to whatever magic exists in our cruelly unimaginative world.

I lavished it with attention—Drake called it the pride-of-ownership trap. I had given it fresh slate gray paint, French blue shutters, a new, expensive green roof when my own reshingling hadn’t quite done the trick. A little matter of flashing had been my downfall the winter before—seems I’d neglected to use it in the right places. The roof had been replaced after leaks warped the hardwood floor in my living room. I was sanding that down, a little at a time.

Drake was standing in my front yard, which was unusual. Even more unusual was the girl who sat on my front porch. She had hair of many colors, chopped off raggedly on one side and shaved above her ear on the other side. Her lips were black, her eyebrows were black, and her face was dead white. What clothes she wore were skimpy, though her attributes were not. Being cursed with a large bosom myself, I could have sympathized, but her boobs were obviously on display, spilling out of a black tank top tucked into torn black shorts. Droopy black socks and black Doc Martens completed her getup. Something about her brown eyes was familiar; I wondered if they reminded me of Jenifer’s puppy.

I also wondered why Drake had brought her to me, but his bemused expression when I jumped out of the bus told its own story. She had turned her back to him. When I appeared she got up, dragging an immense black leather pouch or backpack behind her.

“Hi, Drake.” I reached into the, bus for the horrid shoes and shut the door. The girl had approached a few feet, then stopped, staring at me with unnerving intensity. I stared back. “Hi.”

She cleared her throat. “Hello, Aunt Liz.”

I looked at her blankly, then at Drake. His air of bemusement had deepened. He was gazing at my new roof, obviously disassociating himself.

“You’re—” I couldn’t dredge up any names. I had been estranged from my family for almost fifteen years. This could be the little niece born just before my disastrous marriage cut me off from them, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember her name. Or figure out why she’d turned up on my doorstep.

“Amy Sullivan. I’ve come to stay with you for a while, if you don’t mind.”

Chapter 3

"So where did you dig her up?” I was in the kitchen whispering to Drake while I got Amy the drink she’d requested. She wandered around the living room; I could see her rooster-colored hair flashing near the bookcase.

Drake leaned against the counter, holding back a smile. “I didn’t,” he said, moving aside so I could get some ice cubes. “She was sitting on your doorstep when I came home for lunch. I thought it was only neighborly to inquire who she was and what she was doing there.” He added plaintively, “She doesn’t seem to like me.”

“Did you tell her you’re a cop?” I took a big tub of plain yogurt out of the refrigerator. After some hesitation, I also got a little dish of raspberries I’d culled from my small patch. I had planned to eat them all myself in solitary gluttony, but it didn’t look as if I was going to be solitary.

“I might have.” Drake looked hungrily at the raspberries. “Where did you get these lovely things?” He picked one out of the dish and inspected it with reverence before popping it into his mouth.

“My community garden plot.” I slapped his hand away when it came back for more. “Don’t you have your own lunch at home?”

“You want me to go.” He straightened to his full five-foot-eight and edged away. "Okay. I’ll leave you here with your long-lost relative. If she tries to drink your blood, yell. I might hear.”

He got as far as the kitchen door, then turned back.

“Bridget called and asked me to remind you about her party this evening.”

“Thanks—I had forgotten.” Bridget Montrose is a local writer. I’d met her a few years ago, when I was new in the area and she only had two children. Now she had four, and had graduated from poetry to prose; her first novel was coming out soon. “What time?”

“Fiveish. Mixed, she said.”

Bridget had these parties every couple of months—not cocktail parties, she was careful to say, because that implied a hostess who would supply fancy drinks and hors d’oeuvres, instead of jug wine and cheese and crackers. Mixed meant that her husband Emery was also using the occasion to further Tech Ware, his little software business. Besides the usual complement of writers and poets, drinking, arguing, and devouring every crumb, there would be computer nerds and entrepreneurs.

“Hackers and hacks.” I mumbled it to myself, but Drake picked up on it. He sometimes goes to the poetry readings, though he hasn’t been persuaded to admit that he writes poetry.

“I’ll have to remember that. Hackers and hacks.” He laughed.

“So I’d have time afterward to get back to the census work.” I was talking to myself, a bad habit. Drake heard me.

“Look, axe the census stuff.” He spoke gruffly. “You shouldn’t be knocking on doors after dark.”

“Can it be that one of Palo Alto’s finest thinks the streets aren’t safe?” I put one hand to my forehead melodramatically. “Alas, if someone should mug me for my stylish government briefcase.”

Drake was not amused. “I know the streets aren’t safe despite what we can do. Cruising around in the dark is just asking for trouble.”

“I can take care of myself.” His concern was touching, but I had, after all, a closer acquaintance with the streets than he would ever get from a patrol car. I gave him a big, sticky-sweet smile. “Thanks for sharing that, though.”

He smiled reluctantly in return. “I’m leaving before you start getting in touch with your inner child.” He sauntered out, exchanging a few words with Amy as he left. I put the yogurt and berries on the rickety kitchen table, added ice water and a couple of bowls and, as an afterthought, a box of whole wheat crackers. Teenagers, I’d heard, eat heartily.

When I looked up, Amy was standing in the kitchen door, her black-edged eyes bright with interest. “Is this your whole house? Just that one teeny bedroom? Where will I sleep?”

I tried not to cringe. My privacy, my space, were precious. I didn’t want to relinquish them. “We can talk about that later.” I gestured to the table. “Want some lunch?”

She bounced into a chair, which, as rickety as the table, groaned under the assault. “Okay. Where is it?”

I opened the yogurt and spooned some into my bowl, topping it with some of the raspberries, which I suspected would be as so many pearls before her youthful swinishness. “Right here,” I said, stirring. “Help yourself.”

There was a moment of silence. I didn’t look at her.

“Cool,” she said finally. “You’re, like, dieting. It’s fresh.”

“The berries are fresh,” I said with modest pride. “I picked them myself early this morning.”

“No, no.” She put a small spoonful of yogurt into her bowl, and then added most of the remaining berries. “It’s fresh that you’re working on your body. I mean, I can respect that. I’ll diet, too.”

I laid down my spoon. “Amy,” I said, watching the dainty way she conveyed the tiniest possible amount of yogurt into her black-rimmed mouth. “What are you doing here?”

“We could talk about that later, too,” Amy suggested, digging into the cracker box.

“Let’s talk about it now. Does Andy know you’re here?”

She sniffed. “Daddy barely knows he’s alive. He’s, like, totally away from real life, from the street. I didn’t even know you existed, Aunt Liz. When Gramma got your letter and everyone started talking about you and what a disgrace you were to your upbringing . . ." She smiled at me sunnily. "I thought you might be a good relative. I mean, not like Uncle Dan or Aunt Molly.”

It was strange to hear my sister and brothers spoken about this way, portrayed as rigid adults. What I mostly remembered, growing up the youngest in a loud Irish household, were the incredible arguments that would last for days, with people changing sides right and left.

About some things, however, there was no argument possible. I had been given the opportunity of a college education. My older siblings had spurned such time-wasting foolishness, but that didn’t stop them from complaining about the unfairness of it. My brothers, when they could spare time from their construction jobs and the drinking and brawling that went with them, thought my parents’ money could have been better spent setting them up in business for themselves. And they were right, it seemed.

I had put all these people and their various disappointments in me out of my mind for quite a while. To hear them spoken of so dismissively, to hear the negative things I’d always felt about my family verbalized, stirred a strange mixture of recognition and regret. It took away the good moments, too, the times when I’d felt loved and nurtured, before everything I did began to be wrong.

Despite her black lips, I empathized with Amy. “You’re sixteen?”

“Seventeen,” she said, tossing that iridescent hair. “Almost.”

“And you just lit out, without telling anyone?”

“I copied the return address on your letter, and then I left,” she said scrupulously. “Is there any soda?”

My budget doesn’t allow for soda, when water comes right out of the faucet. I said as much, and she seemed concerned.

“Are you poor, Aunt Liz?” She looked around the kitchen, at the worn Formica countertops and the small, ancient refrigerator, the elderly gas stove and the scuffed wood floor. “I didn’t think—I mean, I just figured you must have made good or you wouldn’t have written Gramma."

“I did make good,” I said dryly. Writing that letter had been spontaneous; I’d been cut off for so long from my family that the need to communicate had welled up and spilled over one day. And the Palo Alto address, no matter how shabby the house, meant something. I hadn’t told my mother that it was the first time in years I’d had a street address. I guess what I really wanted was something besides junk mail.

What I’d gotten was Amy. My mother had never answered my letter. I hadn’t even been sure she’d received it. So much for being the prodigal daughter.

Amy looked confused, but I didn’t bother to explain that the move from VW bus to house had definitely been upward mobility. Thinking about the bus, I remembered that funny noise. “I’ve got to change, Amy. Would you put away the lunch stuff?”

“Sure, Aunt Liz.” She jumped to her feet. At least she didn’t mind pitching in. I went into my teeny bedroom, hung up my skirt and blouse in my teeny closet, and pulled on jeans. I would have to wear those irritating “work” clothes again after Bridget’s party, when I went back to try and fill in my Census register with reluctant names. The panty hose did not come off unscathed; a run slithered down my leg when I brushed against the bed frame. My next thrift-store trip would involve pants, not skirts.

Amy trailed me out to the garage, chattering about her friends in Denver and how much my brother and his wife had hated them, and how she’d wanted to move in with her friend Lisa but Lisa’s mom had called her mom and her dad had dragged her home and forbidden her to hang out with her friends and how she’d just decided to leave and caught the bus three days ago and how she’d been riding it ever since. She didn’t sound at all concerned that she was now out of money and throwing herself on the mercy of a person her family had declared to be lost to all family feeling.

It gave me a cold chill to listen to her. I am no stranger to the street, and a lot of the young people who live on it started out the way Amy had—leaving home, cutting ties, failing to find that succor they’d looked for, gradually reduced to selling drugs, selling their bodies, losing their souls.

While I tightened belts and recapped spark plugs and tested connections, I listened to Amy’s artless prattle and knew I couldn’t boot her out or send her back—not yet, anyway. She wasn’t ready to go back. But I wasn’t ready to be responsible for a sixteen-year-old.

She was silent for a little while. I crawled out from under the bus to find her looking as pensive as a person with black, raccoonlike circles under her eyes could look.

“Amy,” I said, cleaning the oil off my hands with a rag, “you have to let your folks know where you are.”

Her lower lip stuck out. “They won’t care.”

“They will, and you know it.” I watched her for a moment, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Did you leave a note?”

She shook her head, turning away a little.

“So they’re probably frantic by now:” I hesitated, trying to conceal my reluctance. “You can tell them you’ll stay with me for a while. It’s summer—you won’t miss school.”

She turned back, beaming. “Aunt Liz—”

“Wait a minute.” I held up one hand. "There are rules. I am, as you noticed, poor. I don’t have extra money. It’s a struggle for me to get by, let alone support a teenager. You’ll have to get a job and contribute to the living expenses, plus take care of anything you need. Jobs aren’t easy to get around here. If you can’t find work, you’ll have to go home. I can help you with a bus ticket, but that’s all the spare cash I have."