W i l l i a m c a l l e d her in the late afternoon, when he knew she'd be up. She was sitting on the front steps smoking a cigarette.
"Did you go to the meeting this morning?" he asked.
"I did," she said. "It was a good idea. Thanks for making me go."
"You sound tense."
"I'm fine." What could she possibly tell him? William understood gambling. He understood what it felt like to slip away from yourself and to move beyond your own control, to turn into someone you never meant to become who did things you never wanted to do, but he didn't know that her sister had stolen over a hundred thousand dollars from a drug dealer. She'd been sitting on the front steps for an hour, because she couldn't bear to be alone inside.
"I've known you for a while now," he said. "I don't believe you."
"Just family problems. No gambling."
"Okay," he said, and this was one of the things she liked best about him, the way he let things drop so easily. "Hope it all works out. You going to our regular meeting later?"
"I think I'll go tomorrow."
After the phone call she stayed on the steps for a while longer looking out at the twilight, restless and utterly alone. There were kids playing basketball in a driveway across the street. She waved when one of them looked at her, but he didn't wave back. There were hours to go before she had to leave for work but she didn't want to stay here anymore. She went back inside for her handbag and a clean uniform, draped the uniform carefully across the backseat of her car so it wouldn't get wrinkled, and left the neighborhood. She was as alone in the car as she'd been in the house, but at least the car didn't echo with anyone else's absence.
Sa s h a p a r k e d at the end of a beach access road and walked down to the water. There were two new scratch-and-win tickets in her pocket from when she'd stopped to get gas. Two was a manageable number. Two wasn't the end of the world. She wouldn't dive into the ocean tonight but it was nice to think that she could. The lights of a yacht shone over the water but other than that there was nothing, only the sea and the sand and the bright stars and Sasha, the tickets stiff and sharp-edged in the pocket of her jeans.
Twenty-Two
The thing about private investigators, Gavin had read somewhere— Raymond Chandler? A dim memory of an essay with heavy underlining among his abandoned papers in New York, no doubt dragged out to the curb by his landlord and turning to mush in a landfill now— was that they wore trench coats. It sounds trivial but it isn't, because the profession exploded in the 1920s. These were men who'd been through trench warfare and emerged hard and half-broken into the glitter and commotion of the between-wars world; men out of time, out of place, hanging on by the threads of their uneven souls. The detectives were honorable but they'd seen too much to be good. The hardest among them had seen too much to be frightened. The mean streets were nothing compared to the trenches of Europe. Some of them had lost everything and all of them had lost something, and consequently most of them drank too much.
He'd been shot but he felt more tired now than hard-bitten. At his desk in the rec room of Eilo's house he stared at the flicker of the computer screen and thought of the motel room, the man's voice in the shadows and the soft carpet under his face. His fedora had been lost at the Draker Motel. It was too hot here for a trench coat.
"I brought you some lemonade," Eilo said. Ice cubes clinked softly as she set the glass on his desk. "It's cold."
" Thank you," he said. He was unexpectedly moved. "That's exactly what I wanted." Wounded private detective Gavin Sasaki is reduced to tears by lemonade.
"It's a hot day," she said. "There's a pitcher in the kitchen if you want more."
He had been doing desk work for a few days now, typing up descriptions of properties and uploading photographs, updating the website as new properties came in or were sold. Quiet, undemanding work and he didn't mind it, he liked not having to go out into the heat. But he was aware at all times of a story unfolding just beyond the edges of his vision, some terrible drama involving Anna and his lost daughter and Liam Deval and a gun, a transaction whose details remained dangerous and vague.
Th a t n i g h t Gavin took a taxi back to the diner and sat by the window again until Sasha came to him.
"You're so pale," she said, when she gave him his coffee.
"I haven't been out much since I hurt my arm." And then, experimentally, "have you spoken with Daniel?"
She smiled. "He told me he has the money," she said. Her voice trembled a little, with fear or relief. "His inheritance came through. It's happening tomorrow night."
"It'll be nice when it's over with."
"It will be like it never happened," Sasha said, and he saw how desperately she wanted this. "We'll pay back the debt and he'll disappear. Are you ordering food?"
"Two hard-poached eggs and multigrain toast," he said.
She nodded and turned away from him. He watched her recede across the restaurant, wondering why, if this whole thing was simply a matter of paying off a debt, Liam Deval was in Florida with a gun.
W h e n G a v i n went back to the diner the following night, Sasha was at a banquette with a girl. His breath caught, but she wasn't his daughter. She was older than the girl in the photograph. He realized as he crossed the room that he'd seen her before, leaning on the door frame of a house where everyone was sleeping, her eyes closed.
"May I join you?" he asked. Sasha had watched his approach. She shrugged, so he sank into the booth across from them. The girl was sitting by the window with Sasha beside her, and it seemed to Gavin that she was dressed oddly. The last time he'd seen her she'd been wearing cut-off shorts and a dirty t-shirt, but now she wore a cheap-looking white-and-pink dress with scratchy-looking lace and bows on the sleeves. She looked like a thirteen-year-old playing at being nine. Her hair was darker than he remembered.
"Hello, Grace," he said.
"You two know each other?"
"I've seen her around."
The girl only watched him. He couldn't read her expression. She was perfectly still.
"She doesn't talk much," Sasha said.
"Probably wise." The girl's silence made Gavin uneasy. "Only gets you in trouble." It occurred to him that she was probably always in trouble anyway. "You dyed your hair," he said. He realized that he had absolutely no idea how to speak to a thirteen-year-old, and he seemed to have said the wrong thing. Grace winced.
"She's being a good sport," Sasha said. "Aren't you, Grace?"
"A good sport?" A plan unfolding all around him while he only grasped at its hanging threads. "What do you mean?"