I felt the heat rush up the back of my neck and into my face. I looked down at the carpeting.
After a moment, she cleared her throat and sat back down in the chair.
“You saw it all, Noah,” she said, an angry edge to her voice. “Every penny. I may have screwed up a lot of other things around here, but that money was meant for you and I did nothing other than feed and clothe you with it. It bought you a surfboard on your sixteenth birthday, and it was the spending money that magically filled your pockets in high school.”
The silence gobbled up the room for a few minutes before I was able to look at her.
On cue, she picked up the tumbler from the table and held it to her lips, her eyes piercing me as she drank. Some sort of defiant message meant to make me feel like a jerk.
It worked.
“Did you ever get any sense of what he was into?” I asked, choosing to coward out of an apology.
She took a deep breath and shook her head. “Not really. Like I said, I don’t think he would have answered even if I had asked. He would disappear for days at a time, and as time went on, before he left, it became more difficult for me to find the courage to ask what he was doing.”
“When he disappeared. Do you know where he went?”
“I know he went to Las Vegas a lot,” she said, her eyes flickering. “He would bring back matchbooks from the hotels. Other than that, I don’t know.”
It struck me as more than coincidental that casinos kept coming up when I asked about Russell Simington. I stood up. “I gotta go.”
She walked me to the door, and we stood there awkwardly for a few moments.
“Will they really kill him?” she asked, staring past me out the screen door.
“Seems like it. From what little I know, there’s no reason not to.” She nodded slowly, her eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. Maybe the past.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That you had to learn about him like this. And that he turned out like he has.”
I opened the screen door. “It’s not your fault. He is who he is.” I paused. “You were right to keep him away from us.”
Her eyes moved from whatever she had been looking at to me. It was probably the first time I had ever complimented anything resembling her parenting skills. She looked as surprised to hear it as I felt for having said it.
“Be careful, Noah,” she said, reaching out and touching my elbow. “You’ve managed this long without him. There was very little good in his life, and I can’t imagine anything has changed.” Her eyes were sharp, clear. “Don’t let him hurt you now.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I stopped for a sandwich at a deli on Grand before venturing back to Mission Beach to see if I could get back into my house.
As I navigated the streets, I listened to Jason Mraz croon on the radio and thought about what Carolina had told me. Most of what she’d said hadn’t been a surprise. Meeting in a bar, lives that didn’t mesh, those were things that I expected.
Sending money every month was a shock, though. To learn that someone who I had never considered part of my life had indeed been a very large part was unsettling. On one hand, it was a kind gesture that probably helped us out more than I’d ever know. But on the other hand, the one that hit me like a fist, why had Simington chosen to participate from a distance if he truly had an interest in my life?
I wrestled with that as I drove down Mission Boulevard. I turned onto Jamaica and found the alley clogged with midday traffic. I had to park two blocks away and walk up the boardwalk. The crime scene tape was gone from the perimeter, but a familiar face greeted me from my patio.
Miranda was sitting in one of the lounge chairs, a backpack next to her. She was wearing the same outfit of death she had on when I met her, black on black, with gigantic black sunglasses shading her face.
She saw me and sat up. “Where have you been?” I stepped over the wall onto the patio. “What?” “I told you I was coming.”
“I know.”
She sighed, disgusted by my inability to comprehend.
“You didn’t say when, and I wouldn’t have waited around anyway.” I sat at the table next to the chairs and unwrapped the sandwich. “You want half? It’s roast beef and turkey.”
She looked at it and made a face. “I don’t eat meat.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
She twisted around, looking inside my place. “They found Darcy here?”
“Yeah,” I said. In between bites, I told her what I knew.
Miranda adjusted the glasses on her stark white face. “She was really good to me.”
I nodded slowly and worked on the sandwich. The sun was sparkling across the ocean, the white water looking like snow atop clear blue waves. Most days, I could have sat there and watched it for hours, letting everything else wait and fall away.
“You’re sure she wasn’t meeting with anyone else here?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said, finally pulling her eyes off the glass door. She glanced up at the sun like it had crapped on her shoulder. “Jesus, it’s hot.”
I finished the sandwich and balled up the foil it had come in. “Wanna go inside?”
She glanced at the sliding door again, then looked at me. “No.”
I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t looking forward to going inside either. A lot of things had happened in my place in the years I’d lived there, but this was the first time it had housed a dead person.
“I brought the files,” Miranda said. “Everything I could find.”
“Great,” I said. “Darcy have any family?”
“I don’t think she was conceived immaculately,” she said. “But I never met them.”
Good to see Miranda hadn’t lost her edge. “So what are you going to do?” she asked. “I don’t know yet.” “Yet? What are you waiting for?”
I knew Miranda was probably having a tough time of it. Her friend and boss had been killed. She’d flown down at a moment’s notice with no plan.
But I didn’t need her shit.
“Miranda, let’s get something straight,” I said, staring at her.
She returned the stare, the giant oversized sunglasses making her look like a bumblebee.
“If you think you’re gonna hang out here and run the show, you can forget it. Darcy brought a bunch of crap into my life that I’m still trying to get in order, and I’m not sure how long that’s gonna take. And I’m sorry about what’s happened to her, and if I can help the cops figure it out, I will.” I reached over and pulled the sunglasses down her nose so I could see her eyes. “But if you give me a single second of shit over any of this, I’ll stuff you in the coffin you arrived in and float you out to Hawaii.” I pushed the glasses back into place.
I turned away from her and settled into my chair, closing my eyes and letting the sun warm my face.
After a moment, Miranda said, “Fine.”
I opened an eye and saw her lay back in the lounge chair. “Yep.
It is.”
“But Darcy was right about one thing,” she said. I shut the eye again and went back to feeling the sun. “What was that?”
“You really are kind of a dick.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“What do you know about the two men Simington killed?” I asked.
“Not much,” Miranda answered, tilting her head in my direction. “They were Mexican nationals, probably with fake working papers.”
The papers weren’t hard to get and neither was work. If you were willing to take money under the table and endure the risk, anyone coming over the border illegally could find employment.
“Were their families ever interviewed?” I asked.
Miranda thought about that, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure that they were in the States. Most of the information about them came from your father in his confession.”