The Home Place: A Novel Read online

  “Of course. We’ll work it out,” Jayne promises. When the cocoa is gone, Chance walks Alma outside. Stopping at her car door, she turns to him with an urge to give him back his own honesty.

  “Listen, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I’m with someone back in Seattle and I shouldn’t—” she begins.

  “I’m seeing someone too,” Chance tells her before she can finish. “Let’s just call it one for old times’ sake and forget about it, what do you say?”

  “Sure,” Alma agrees with less certainty than she felt a moment ago. “But you said yesterday—” She cuts herself off, struck by how jealous she sounds. Of all the foolish things to say, she chides herself, after she just reminded him about Jean-Marc.

  “Shoot, Alma, I said I wasn’t married anymore. I didn’t say I was a monk.” Chance’s face goes red before her eyes and she feels hers respond.

  “Right. Of course. I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.” Alma hurries into the car, now thinking only of her getaway. “I have to head into town,” she explains, “see Pete again, get some things for the house.”

  “Go on then.” Chance nods, backing away. “We’ll be here.”

  CHAPTER 12

  TUESDAY, 9 A.M. MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  Alma heads for the interstate. As soon as she has reception she calls Amanda, who answers as if she’s been waiting for days and reels off a list of frantic messages from colleagues, a few from clients. “Alma, you’ve got to get back here. Every time I turn around Duncan’s trying to get into your office or go through your files. I’m pretending I don’t have a key. Louis is about to hand over the deal to him. You’ve done the hard part and they’re going to let him take the credit.” Amanda’s voice is oddly muffled, suggesting that she’s cupped a hand over her mouthpiece and is trying not to be heard by others in the office. Alma can barely hear her.

  “I’ll do what I can. Tanaka knows who’s running this deal. There’s more going on that I haven’t told you yet. We have an ace left. If Duncan tries to take over now, he’ll just look like an idiot. More than usual, anyway.” The only saving grace with Duncan is his fundamental laziness. Alma has always believed that it’s only a matter of time until she traps him in such grievous negligence that it will finish him, but the stakes are getting higher. She’d better hurry.

  “I’m not working for him. He’s an asshole. If you leave, you have to take me with you.”

  “Who said anything about leaving?” This is more worrying than Amanda’s panic about Duncan.

  “Guess who. Duncan thinks you’re a threat to him and Louis has always been scared of you. Watch your back.”

  “Thanks, Amanda. I will. Thanks for watching out for me. But you watch out for yourself too, you hear? Even if they somehow manage to roll me, there’s no reason for you to lose your job.”

  “I wouldn’t work here without you. The rest of them are undead. Just get back here!”

  Alma reassures Amanda as best she can, then hangs up and dials Jean-Marc. He had a late work dinner the night before and is cranky and terse this early, so she just gives him the funeral details and apologizes—for calling, for taking so long to call, for being gone, for everything—and gets off the line. She is always apologizing to him. If it isn’t for the hours and missing some important dinner or party or vacation, it’s for her bad habit of delegating the most personal details of their relationship. A few months ago they had a huge fight when Jean-Marc realized that Amanda had planned every particular of his birthday weekend and handed Alma an itinerary as she left the office. He blew up and refused to drive down the coast with her to the bed-and-breakfast.

  “Is there anything about our relationship that isn’t . . .” He chose, as always when his emotions were aroused, the French word: “arranged by your assistant? I’ve never met the woman and yet I feel like she’s an old-world matchmaker who will tell us one day that we’re getting married and when to arrive for the ceremony. Does she tell you which nights we should make love? Does she print out instructions on positions? How rude of me, I’ve never sent her a thank-you.”

  “You’re overreacting,” Alma had said, shifting her knees toward the door. “I just didn’t have time. Amanda’s good at this sort of thing. Why shouldn’t I ask her to do it? Would you rather wind up at a Comfort Inn at the airport because I forgot to make reservations?” No previous boyfriend had complained. Greg called Amanda their concierge and tipped her handsomely at the holidays.

  “Alma, I want to be in this relationship with you, not Amanda. If I wanted to know about her tastes, I would date her.” Jean-Marc threw up his hands and glared at the steering wheel. “What am I saying? I do know her tastes. She buys our opera and theater tickets. She makes our dinner reservations. She chooses gifts for me. She sends me flowers. She plans our vacations. We’re like actors who come in to read our lines at the appointed time!”

  “You want me to spend my time picking out presents for you and planning our vacations?” Alma attempted, nonplussed.

  Jean-Marc shook his head and waved his hands in another gesture she didn’t understand. “I want you to . . . want to, once in a while. I would like to believe that you think about me from time to time, when we’re not together.”

  She was torn between the pinch of conscience and the wish that he’d start the car and get moving before the traffic got any worse. “It’s not like I’m spending time with someone else. When we’re not together, I’m working. So are you. You don’t spend your days picking out the perfect flowers for me.” As soon as the words came out, she knew this was the wrong example.

  They were parked at the curb on Madison Street, looking out through layered evening blues descending over the sound. Jean-Marc tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. His smooth leather driving gloves made a soothing staccato, like tabla drumming. “You remember the orchid I sent you a few months ago, when you closed that big deal in San Francisco?” He didn’t look at Alma as he asked.

  “Yes—of course, it was gorgeous.” The plant had arrived in her hotel room. It was a ridiculous nuisance to get it back to Seattle—she had to carry it on her lap on the late commuter flight home—but it was a generous, thoughtful, beautiful gift.

  “I ordered it specially. I got a book on orchids and chose the most beautiful one, in your favorite color. No one in town had it. It had to be shipped directly from Costa Rica.” She never knew this. She never asked when she thanked him in the middle of a breezy rundown of her triumphant week’s work.

  “You didn’t tell me.” His words should have warmed her toward him, made her cherish his genuine thoughtfulness, but all she felt was the cold vacuum of space in one more disconnect between them.

  “You were too excited. Everyone was celebrating. Where is the orchid now, Alma?” His voice was too calm. Then he looked over at her, waiting for an answer he must already know. Jean-Marc should have been a litigator. He was a master of the trick of never asking a question without knowing the answer.

  Alma hesitated. After that late flight from SFO, she’d gone straight to the office to leave urgent documents for Amanda and a paralegal to start on first thing in the morning. The orchid went on her desk that night, and over the course of the coming days was relegated to a chair, a shelf, and finally Amanda’s desk, where it had some hope of being watered but little access to sun. There it sat until the day when a partner from down the hall wandered by and expressed concern. He loved orchids, he said. Could he help her with it? Without a second thought she’d handed it to him and scooted him out of the office so she could prepare for a call. One thing less to worry about.

  “It’s at work,” she said, with a confidence she didn’t feel. “It’s doing fine.” The fight had gone out of her side of the argument. She sank back in her leather seat and sighed. “All right, Jean-Marc. You win. I’m a shit, I don’t deserve you. Let’s go ahead and drive down to the inn, and when we get back I’ll go to an actual brick-and-mortar store and buy you an honest-to-God present that I picked
out, from me to you. Okay?”

  Probably to keep the peace, Jean-Marc agreed. The weekend passed cozily enough, but now Alma can’t remember if she ever bought the promised birthday present. Probably she forgot altogether, and so did he. Jean-Marc stages these sentimental protests once in a while about the speed and superficiality of their lives, but he loves it as much as she does, she’s sure of it. If anything, he works longer hours than she does. After hanging up, she realizes that she doesn’t know what his big dinner was about or what he’s working on these days. These aren’t things they talk about, not part of the script. She might like to know, but it’s too late, Jean-Marc is busy, and she’ll let it pass, like a hundred moments in the past when she wanted to reach out to him and drew back because it would be too much work to know, to care. There is never enough time.

  Alma takes the Twenty-Seventh Street exit and heads into the south side. The neighborhood looks like 1940s Billings, untouched for seventy years except by the destructive hand of time. The houses lean at architecturally unlikely angles. The walks are unshoveled and broken, the hedges and trees untrimmed and taking over. The snow gives bad and nonexistent lawns a smooth, even appearance that improves matters somewhat, but slats are still missing from fences and porch rails. Windows are boarded up. Some houses and fences bear graffiti that is itself faded. Cars and the occasional large appliance sit in yards or on blocks, masquerading under snow as a giant modern art exhibit. Alma pulls up in front of the place where police have marked a big patch of windblown ice with a faint red stain at one end. The tape is coming loose and waves in the breeze.

  Alma gets out of the car and goes around to stand on the unshoveled sidewalk. She recalls a Northern Cheyenne story she once heard, of an epidemic that took a number of babies, and the mothers walking single file down a trail to the burial place, each holding a dead infant. In her imagination the mothers are silent, wrapped up in the last moments with their precious babes before the time comes to place them—cradle boards, tiny beaded moccasins, and all—under big rocks near the river, safe from animals, as was tradition. Alma breathes in the quietness of those mothers, their anguish beyond words and cries, the strength drawn from the other mothers before and behind, walking the same path, carrying the same backbreaking burden of grief. Quite unintentionally, her arms come up in the age-old gesture of a mother holding an infant. She looks down. Feels foolish. Drops her arms. Shivers. Sighs. Snaps herself away from the sight.

  Neighbors, paramedics, police, kids on their way to and from school have trampled the snow up and down the street—it’s impossible to say whether anyone was near Vicky when she fell. What might it have been? A fight over money, drugs, land—or just an unexpected sort of bad luck? What made Brittany call Walt? They aren’t close. Back when they were still talking, Vicky told Alma that Walt and Helen cut her off like a stranger when she failed out of college the first time and didn’t repay the tuition they’d covered. Alma doubts the story—it seems like such an overreaction that it must be another of Vicky’s embroideries, something she said out of a sort of misguided tact, to cover up the ugly stain of truth. Alma needs to talk to Walt again, as unpleasant as that can be.

  Driving down to Kozinsky’s house—that’s how Pete referred to him, just “Kozinsky”—to fetch Brittany’s things, Alma dials Ray Curtis and gets voice mail. If that clue about the wool fibers is real, not just some sick coincidence, then the killer must have suffocated Vicky with something that can be found, marked with her blood. And there must be more evidence, if she or Ray can just ask the right question, look in the right place. She leaves a message wondering if the keys and Vicky’s nails have been swabbed for DNA evidence and how the search warrants are going. She feels a sudden frustrated impulse to go to City Hall, pull a chair up beside Ray’s, and start reading over his shoulder. Whatever he’s seeing, whatever he knows, she wants to know too.

  Kozinsky is watching recorded basketball. From the top of the narrow, poured cement steps, Alma can see the big screen dominating the room.

  “Come on in,” he shouts when she knocks, after trying the broken doorbell. The hydraulic hinge on the storm door is broken and the glass in the bottom half has shattered from the force of the wind slamming the door against the house. The glass is half buried in snow beside the steps, only a few shards now visible. Alma steps over the threshold into the herbal aroma of the house. Kozinsky looks up from the Timberwolves long enough to see who it is.

  “Who’re you?” he asks the screen.

  “I’m Alma. Vicky’s sister.” She steps up to the chair far enough to hit his peripheral vision. “I came for Brittany’s things.”

  “I thought the cops cleared out all her stuff,” Kozinsky says, trailing off as a player begins a drive down the court. The layup fails and Kozinsky swears. “But go ahead and look. Back there.” He waves her toward the back porch and she willingly distances herself.

  The living room is warm enough, but back here the temperature must be thirty degrees lower. Cracked windows meet the frames indifferently, missing most of the glazing. The old family house on Lewis had the same kind of maintenance challenges, Alma recalls, but her mother and father were up to it. After apprenticing at her parents’ shoulders, she can spackle, grout, seal, glaze, and rewire anything. The rest of Brittany’s clothes are where she said they’d be, in a torn suitcase under the open sofa bed. Alma pokes around the corners for anything else, but the porch is nearly bare. Even the overhead light fixture is missing from its dusty metal bracket and the bulb burned out.

  Alma zips the suitcase and heads back to the front door. Kozinsky pauses the game and spins the chair to face her, taking a long swig on a fresh PBR from a half-full twelve-pack, in spite of the early hour. Mousy brown hair hangs around his face and the collar of his plaid flannel shirt. “Find what you came for?” He eyes the suitcase, unsmiling.

  “You’re welcome to search it if you’re worried I’m trying to steal something,” Alma retorts. As angry as she is after seeing where Brittany slept, she’d love to have a good reason to tell off Kozinsky. Shouting, angry words rise and fall within her. He’s not worth it. Kozinsky might have been athletic once—he’s got the height and build, hidden under at least fifty pounds he doesn’t need. He might have had good hair, though what’s left hangs limply around the growing bald patch on his crown. And he’s clever enough to have a roof over his head and the cable turned on. But Alma doesn’t believe he was ever kind, not with a face like that. He’s just attractive enough to lure a woman in and shatter every illusion she has left. Alma could mention the funeral, could invite him. Then she thinks of the unheated porch and Vicky’s body lying on the ice through that long, cold night, to be found by a stranger the next morning.

  “So what do the police say?” Kozinsky ignores her provocation. “Did somebody kill her?”

  “Do you think somebody killed her?” Alma throws back the question, moving toward the front door.

  “I don’t see how. Nobody but her left the house until morning. It wasn’t exactly a night she was going to run into someone in the street.”

  Something about that sentence makes Alma pause. He’s right. The only way someone who wasn’t at Kozinsky’s would have known that Vicky was wandering alone across the south side that night was if they got a call about it. “They arrested Murray,” she tells him, just to see what he’ll say.

  Kozinsky snorts, which causes an unattractive rumbling of his belly fat. “If that guy were Indian, his name would be Outstanding Warrant. He was passed out right there”—he indicates a patch of stained carpet near the couch—“until somebody shouted police the next morning and he hoofed it out the back. Murray wouldn’t kill anybody. He’s just a jackass.”

  “So you think she just . . .” Alma can’t finish the sentence, and Kozinsky doesn’t help, just watches her struggling for words, as long as the game is stopped. “Just fell down and froze?”

  Kozinsky finishes his beer before answering and tosses the can toward the kitchen arch behin
d Alma. “Look, sis, I’m sorry too. She was a nice chick, most of the time. Touchy about her kid. I told the police, I don’t know anybody who’d want to hurt her. Her luck just ran out, that’s all.” He clicks the game back on and swivels instantly to it.

  Alma grabs the doorknob and stalks out without a word. She’s got another La-Z-Boy dweller to deal with.

  She heads for the last address she knows for Dennis Willson, Brittany’s father. It isn’t far, a little fourplex off North Twenty-Fifth Street with missing shingles and a few bricks fallen from the front façade, the same apartment where he lived with Vicky before she got fed up. There’s movement from the sheets over the windows upstairs in the place that was Dennis’s. The downstairs door is open. Alma takes a chance, climbs to Dennis’s old door, and knocks.

  Dennis answers in green camo board shorts and a T-shirt featuring a huge marijuana leaf. His face softens in immediate recognition. “Hey there, Alma, what’s up?” He greets her with some kind of hand jive she has trouble following, then hugs her with one arm and waves her in.

  Dennis is fleshy like Kozinsky, shorter and hairier, with an untrimmed beard under the wide, ready smile that was always his best feature. The beard improves his appearance by hiding the acne scars on his neck, although he’s doing something spiky and unappealing with his hair these days. The living room is mostly filled by a dilapidated sectional couch, a wide-screen television, and an expensive stereo and speakers, all supported by plywood planks and cinder blocks. Dennis has hung a black plush blanket with an Elvis graphic behind the couch, using oversized pushpins. In the adjoining kitchen area, dirty dishes are visible in the sink. A professional amp and three guitars are propped in the corner. Dennis can’t pay child support, Alma notes, but at least he hasn’t had to pawn the guitars.