“You hear about the high school girl dead on the beach?” Tommy asks.
Matt feels so bad about Bonnie he can’t put her into words. “No.”
“Bonnie Stratmeyer,” says Tommy. “This morning the cops said she probably got caught in a riptide and drowned. Then washed up. Later they said she didn’t have any history of taking early morning swims in a cold ocean so they weren’t ruling out a fall from the cliff above where they found her. No witnesses. She’d been an official missing person for two months. The autopsy will give them a lot more to go on.”
Tommy stands and slips his knife back into his pocket then wraps the cut twine around one hand. “I got another call from Mrs. Coiner,” he says. “Try to keep the paper out of her sprinklers.”
Matt powers his Register-burdened Heavy-Duti south on Glenneyre, hitting his targets like a quarterback — the Raiders’ Daryle Lamonica maybe, his favorite — throwing four quick completions to the Heun, Parlett, Cabang, and Rigby houses before heading up Legion, around the high school, and onto Los Robles with four more completions, one of them a bomb to the very tough Murrel house, hidden behind a defensive front line of blooming bougainvillea.
Between throws he’s off the seat, zig-zagging and grinding up the hills, wiping his sweaty forehead on the shoulders of the canvas delivery bag that holds the papers. He breathes hard, his skinny legs strong as pistons from doing this for 850 straight days. Eight completions so far, forty more to go.
At the dreaded Coiner home he skids to a stop, kickstands the bike and hand-carries the paper all the way to their porch, the sprinklers watering his legs and their poodle Gigi barking furiously at him through the screen door. Then runs heavy legged back to his bike.
He works his way uphill and takes a break at his highest house on Bluebird Canyon Drive. Pants and rubs his face with a shop rag from the carrier. Heart thumping like a marching drum. Far below, the Pacific is a spangled silver mirror in this afternoon light. A distant barge and small sailboats look like toys on glass. He’d like to get that in a painting. Painting is difficult and expensive. His paintings are all ugly and he’s never actually finished one. Paints them over until he has to stop. He uses discarded house paint they save for him at Coast Hardware, ghastly colors not found in nature.
By the time he gets to Miranda Zahara’s house she’s outside washing her red VW Beetle. Brown bikini, brown skin. He stops behind the car, one foot on the ground and one on the pedal. His T-shirt is soaked through and the nearly empty canvas carrier feels like a sopping hot jacket.
She gives him a gloomy look then continues spraying the hose water along the rounded Beetle roof. “Did you hear about Bonnie?” she asks.
Matt nods, lobs the Zahara’s paper almost to the porch. “I saw her on the beach this morning.”
Miranda looks at him, the hose water sparkling into the air. “What... how did she... look?”
“Well, she was lying on one of those big rocks down off Thalia. She had a cop’s jacket over her and her hair had seaweed in it and she was dead.”
Matt feels important giving Miranda this terrible news. He doesn’t know why.
“She was cool,” says Miranda, redirecting the water to the roof. “Not stuck-up at all. I think it’s very suspicious that she would be at the beach that early, swimming. After running away from home, or whatever she did.”
“It weirds me out, too.”
“Want a drink?”
He brings the hose to his mouth at an angle, feels the cool water rushing in, gulps it down and hands the hose back.
“Where did you and Jazz go last night?” he asks.
“The ’Piper, to see Austin Overton.”
“Good show?”
“Far out. New songs. He’s such a god.”
Matt had snuck into an Austin Overton set at the Sandpiper a few months ago. Didn’t like his music and didn’t like him, but the girls in the audience sure did.
“Where’d you go after?”
“I left early and met some friends at Diver’s Cove. Jazz wanted to stay. My mom said your mom called and Jazz didn’t come home last night.”
Matt nods, wondering if one of the Sandpiper owners — brothers Chip or Chuck — might have seen Jazz leave. And if so, seen whether she was alone or with somebody.
Miranda gives Matt the hose again and he takes another long drink before handing it back. She watches him drink. “You know, that Phisohex soap works good on zits.”
He averts his eyes. Dr. Bill Anderson has recently recommended the same expensive acne cleanser. And reassured Matt that his long-aching joints are only growing pains.
“Thanks, Miranda.”
“I mean, you hardly have any, but—”
“Yeah, right on.”
Miranda folds the hose over and holds it with both hands, pinching off the flow. “Sorry. Look, Matt, we were just groovin’ to Austin Overton last night. We had a couple of beers is all. Whatever she did after, I’m sure was cool. Maybe she went down to Thousand Steps with the gang. If so, she’s probably back home by now.”
“I hope you’re right. But it’s the first time she’s not come home.”
“You’re worried.”
“Seeing Bonnie made me worried.”
“It would me, too.”
4
The Sandpiper on Coast Highway is dead at five when Matt pushes open the heavy, decal-plastered front door. Chuck says Matt can only stay a minute, being way under twenty-one. Says Furlong could bust him for this. The club is small and dark, no windows, and it smells of cigarettes, beer, and bleach. The stage is stacked with amps and the walls are crookedly tacked with carpet remnants for better acoustics, giving the room a teetering, ship’s-hold kind of feeling.
Chuck wants to talk about Bonnie Stratmeyer but Matt does not, so he pretends he hasn’t heard. Chuck fills him in: Bonnie was found naked and possibly murdered below the Diamond Street stairway to the beach and she was probably a federal informant and that the cops were covering it all up. She’d been missing for nearly six months, says Chuck.
Of course, almost everything Chuck says about Bonnie is wrong. Matt thinks it’s funny how quickly the under-thirty Lagunatics like Chuck blame the cops, the government, and the very right-wing John Birch Society for whatever goes wrong in their town. And how the cops, the government, and the John Birch Society think the young are all drug addicts, draft dodgers, sex fiends, and communists. Matt wants to side with the young and free, of course, but he’s not sure how. Smoke pot? Wear that lame tie-dye hippie stuff?
However, Chuck did in fact see Jasmine last night, had served her and Miranda soft drinks and allowed them to hear Austin Overton. Why? Because Chuck had heard a “confirmed rumor” at Mystic Arts World that Sgt. Bill Furlong and most of the LBPD would be conducting another Dodge City raid last night, rather than busting underage drinkers around town. Jasmine had left after the last set, sober and apparently happy. Chuck gives Matt a conspiratorial look.