Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.
When Life Hands You a Lemon, Squeeze It and Make Lemonade.
If It’s Not Broken, Don’t Fix It.
Your Glass Isn’t Half Empty — It’s Half Full.
Upbeat sentiments for an abused wife. There to normalize her situation.
Nothing could normalize it now, though.
The door to the den was closed. Rho hesitated, nerving herself, then pushed it open.
Wayne was there in his faux-leather recliner chair. Dressed in his uniform for his final day on the job. Shoes shined. Fresh creases in his trousers. Badge polished.
And blood all over everything. Scattered fragments of bone and brain matter too.
Even though she’d expected this, Rho stood transfixed. Heard an animal-like moan, and realized it was hers.
“Jesus, Wayne, why? Why?”
She moved closer, flesh creeping, bile rising. Saw the gun whose kick had knocked itself from his dead hand. Saw the tape cassettes on the table beside him.
Two cassettes, neatly labeled. One for Janie and one for her.
Two forty. Still twenty minutes before Oriana Harrison — née Wynne — was due to call. Guy nibbled at the prepackaged sandwich he’d bought at the supermarket. Egg salad, probably yesterday’s, and with his luck he’d get food poisoning. After another bite, he rewrapped it and tossed it into the wastebasket.
He switched on a couple of lamps against the gloom and went to the window. The sky had turned dark, and angry-looking clouds hovered offshore. There was a small TV on the bureau opposite the bed; he switched it on and surfed till he found the Weather Channel. Small-craft warnings. Possibility of dangerous wave action along the beaches. Heavy rain.
The room had grown chilly and there was no wood or kindling for the fireplace, let alone matches. Why had he earlier entertained negative thoughts about the gas log in his loft? It would amuse his friends back home to know he was freezing his ass off in sunny California!
Of course “sunny California” was a term descriptive only of the southern portion of the state, a place he’d found sociologically interesting but unappealing during the several months he’d lived there while consulting on film adaptations of his books. Northern California, at least the coastal area, was a land of unpredictable extremes. And, as he was finding out, unpredictable people—
A knock at the door. He shouted for the party to enter. Becca Campos, her arms full of sheets and towels.
“So you decided to come to work after all,” he said testily.
She blinked at his sharp tone and wordlessly began stripping his rumpled bed.
After a moment her silence shamed him. “I’m sorry I snapped at you, Becca. I guess you were upset about the story in the San Francisco paper.”
“Yeah. Seeing it all rehashed on the thirteenth anniversary... Well, it made me so nervous I just holed up at home.”
“But you’re here now. What changed that?”
She was tucking the sheet around the mattress, but she looked up and smiled shyly. “I’m getting outta Signal Port.”
“Really. How’d this come about?”
“Well, my boyfriend came over. Clay. You met him. And when he saw how upset I was, he went, ‘Honey, let’s split tonight, drive to Reno and get married.’ At first I couldn’t say anything, I was so surprised. But when I realized he meant it, I couldn’t turn him down.”
“Congratulations, Becca. But I thought you said Clay was going back to his old life.”
“That’s right. And now I’ll be going with him — as Mrs. Clay Lawrence.” She finished making the bed and fluffed the pillows. “But don’t you worry about being taken good care of, Mr. Newberry. I already got a girlfriend to take over here for me. Now I better get going. I got a million things to do — pack and tell the landlord I’m giving up the place; have the utilities turned off and close out my checking and savings accounts. And I gotta get my car serviced, because Clay’s truck is dead, so we’ll just have to leave it...”
In spite of her hurry, Becca prattled on and on, but Guy barely responded. She was happy, and he didn’t want to spoil it for her. He feared Clay Lawrence would do that soon enough. After he’d married her, run through her money, driven her car into the ground, and left her.
Rho sat, her head bowed, numbed with grief, as she and Ned Grossman listened to Wayne’s final rambling message to her.
It all started with Claudia. That surprise you, Rho? That I could ever be serious about a woman? Really love her? Well, I did. It started six months before. May seventeen. She’d gone into Santa Carla, was coming back late and had a flat down by Quinley’s. I stopped to help her. Had a bottle in the truck, and we shared it. For a couple of years I’d been taking women to this place I’d fixed up in the back of the old burger stand, so that’s where we went. I thought she’d be like the rest of them.
But she wasn’t. I’d never known anybody like her before. She was smart, she had class, and she said if we got out of this place we could make something of ourselves. I was gonna leave Janie and the kids; she was gonna leave Mitch and her kid. But then on October eight she tells me she’s decided to stick with her husband. They were leaving the canyon because things had gotten too weird there. Going back to southern California. Her dad was sick and they could patch things up with him and start living like normal people.
As if her and me couldn’t live like normal people. As if I wasn’t normal.
You sure as hell know how mad I’ve been ever since then. I had something beautiful right there in my hands and all of a sudden it was gone. Really gone. She was gone. Forever. From then on, I’ve felt like I was drowning. Sink, push myself up, tread water for a while, sink, do the whole thing over again. And then that girl showed up. Jude and Leo Ackerman’s daughter. I don’t know why, but I suspected who she was as soon as I saw her body. Maybe something about her face. Anyway, there was her, and that asshole Newberry with his questions. And it all started weighing too heavy on me.
It’s been too damn much and I’m too damn tired. I hate the man I am today. I’ve done terrible things. I’ve hurt my whole family. And you. I’m sorry I used you to cover up for losing those blood samples. Maybe if I hadn’t you wouldn’t’ve suffered so much after the murders. Or maybe you would’ve. I don’t know.
I know I shouldn’t be asking anything of you, but here’s one last thing I want you to do. Go over all the old evidence and think about what those missing samples might’ve told us. I always felt they could’ve broken the case, but maybe that’s just on account of guilt for being so careless. God knows I got my share of guilt — and then some. I wish I’d made Claudia tell me what kind of weirdness was going down in the canyon. She never liked to talk about her life there, but maybe if I’d insisted they wouldn’t’ve got killed. Shoulda’s and coulda’s, huh? But please, Rho, go over the evidence again. Talk to Newberry. He’s an asshole, but he’s smart, and he might be able to help you put it together.
Funny. I’m doing this on the anniversary of the murders. Of Claudia’s murder. Bad-luck thirteen.
Not funny, huh?
I’m sorry you’re gonna be the one to walk in on this mess, but I don’t want Janie or Cindy or Beth to find me. I know you can tough it out. I been watching you ever since that night in the canyon. You fell apart for a while there, but in the end you got through. Like I got through, in my own way. You’re just gonna get through a lot better, for a lot longer...