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  Melanie was sobbing hard.

  “Please don’t come back,” Alice Steinbach said as she shepherded me to the front door. “You can see how you upset her. And to what purpose? We all know Skye had an accident.”

  “I’m not so sure it was an accident, Mrs. Steinbach.”

  “Nonsense! Tell me the truth. Why are you stirring the pot?”

  I halted just inside the open doorway, and turned to face her. “I think the question is this—why are you holding down the lid?”

  “Excuse me?” Alice Steinbach scowled. “My husband and I feel we know what’s best for our family. Certainly we know better than you.”

  * * *

  “Just what do you think you’re doing, harassing my family at a time like this?”

  I shifted the office phone to my other ear. “Dr. Steinbach, I haven’t harassed anyone. Melanie and Dave—”

  “They’re overwrought, and you’re taking advantage of them. I paid you, your involvement is done. Now I’m telling you, leave my family alone.”

  I rolled my eyes at Gabi and took a deep breath. “Dr. Steinbach, your daughter—”

  Silence. The line had gone dead.

  I handed the phone back to Gabi. “Just another one of my fans.”

  “He don’t sound like a fan to me.” Gabi folded her arms over her chest and fixed a pair of mascaraed eyes on me. “Miss Jaymie, you sure you should take that job?”

  “Why, don’t you think I can handle it?”

  “Huh? Sure, I think you can handle it. I just don’t like to see people be mean to you. This case, I think it’s gonna get nasty.”

  “That’s why I have you, Gabi. To kick butt.”

  “I know you are joking, Miss Jaymie. But I do protect you, you just don’t know it.”

  Gabi was dressed to kill. I’d never seen her like this before: lipstick, sparkly blush, mascara, and something improbably blue painted on her eyelids. Black toreador pants and a pink crocheted top completed the look.

  “You seem kinda—dressed up,” I observed.

  “Sorry, I know this is a bad outfit for the office. Not professional. But Angel’s picking me up right at five.”

  “I see. Where are you and lover boy going?”

  “First to dinner. And then we’re going out to dance. Salsa, meringue, even tango. Leopoldo’s downtown, they have Latin dancing every Thursday night.”

  “Hm. So when do I get to meet this Angel from heaven?”

  She raised a sharply penciled brow. “Miss Jaymie? I don’t like to say this. But you sound kinda jealous.”

  “What?” My voice squeaked as it slid up an octave. “I don’t need a man to make me happy. And that, I might add, was your lifelong attitude, up until a few weeks ago.”

  “Things change. You just gotta meet the right man.”

  “You sure about that?” I decided to pick up the gauntlet. “This Angel character is pretty slick. He tosses a few roses at you, and you fall at his feet.”

  “You got him all wrong.” Gabi shook her head and smiled. “Angel, he is no slick guy. He’s a rosarian. That’s a expert on roses, in case you don’t know. The ladies he works for, they all grow roses. Know what, I’m gonna introduce him to you. Then you’ll see.” She nodded sagely. “You should maybe think about being more nice to Mike, know what I mean?”

  So Gabi was now the Ann Landers of love. “Mike’s gone, past history. He’s with another woman now—you know that. And somebody told me she’s wearing a ring.”

  Ouch. Saying it out loud didn’t feel so good.

  “Ring. Pft.” Gabi waved a dismissive hand in the air and got to her feet. “Some other woman? Don’t worry about that. Mike’s just a man, he’s gotta be with somebody, right?” She headed for the kitchenette.

  “But don’t wait too long, Miss Jaymie,” she called through the open door. “Things happen. Luz Montez, she wanted to marry a guy named Aurelio Sanchez, but he was just fooling around. Know what she did? She took a needle and made little holes in his, you know, his condoms.” Gabi pointed a dramatic finger at me. “You know what happened next?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Excuse me, you can’t. Yes Luz got pregnant, but so did this other girl too. And that Aurelio, he couldn’t marry both of them, could he. So what he did was—”

  “Gabi? I’ve got to go. I’m meeting those two kids in twenty minutes, at McConnell’s.”

  “And that’s another thing, Miss Jaymie, you need a car. Investigators don’t ride around on old bikes, it looks like—”

  “Enjoy your rosebuds while ye may,” I called as I went out the door.

  Chapter Five

  I was still pining for Blue Boy, the El Camino I’d inherited from my brother. Last year, in a funk I didn’t like to recall, I’d donated the car to the local homeless shelter. They’d quickly sold it on to a collector down in LA, a well-off boomer who rechristened Blue Boy Dudette.

  Since then I’d rented vehicles a few times, testing the waters, but nothing measured up. Still, as I pedaled down De La Vina in the late-August heat wave, wishing I’d worn shorts instead of black jeans, I did find myself considering the undeniable virtues of the automobile. Any automobile.

  By the time I turned into McConnell’s parking lot, I was more interested in their Meyer-lemon ice cream than in my two potential interviewees, Porter Logsdon and Vanessa Hoague.

  Vanessa and Porter were ready and waiting, though, seated at a table on McConnell’s tiny patio. Each held an ice-cream cone. The heat was melting the ice cream faster than they could lick.

  The two watched me as they lapped like sleek satisfied cats. I rolled my bike into the stand, pasted a smile on my face, and approached them.

  “Hi. Vanessa, Porter?”

  The young woman, a blonde with hazel eyes, blinked slowly and continued to lick away with her pointy tongue. The boy blinked at me. “Nope.”

  Then they both laughed. “Who else?” Porter Logsdon asked. He had a Midwestern look, muscled and fair. The thickness of his shoulders and neck suggested supplements.

  Vanessa Hoague, on the other hand, seemed observant and quick. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was quite pretty. The combination of her bottle-blond hair and bright hazel eyes made her compelling to look at. She inserted the tip of her tongue into the cone and came up with a curl of chocolate ice cream. Porter turned away from me and watched Vanessa with fascination.

  “Right, who else. I’m Jaymie Zarlin.” That was the trouble with this job, I thought with annoyance. Too often, you had to be nice to people who you wanted to send to a time-out chair.

  “You sure?” Porter crunched his cone between perfect square teeth. “You don’t look like a detective.”

  Enough of this bullshit. Time to bring these two toddlers to task.

  “Like I said on the phone, I’m here to talk about the death of Skye Rasmussen.”

  To their credit, they now seemed distressed. Porter frowned, and Vanessa dropped her head and stared at the ground.

  “Where were you on the evening of August sixteenth, between five and ten P.M.? Porter?”

  “Is that—the night he—died?”

  “Yes. It was a Friday.”

  “I was at a party up on Camino Cielo. Vannie was too. Lots of kids were there.”

  “The party started at five? That’s unusual.”

  He looked over at Vanessa. “What time did it start?”

  “Around nine, Port.” Vanessa turned to me. “Yes, I was at that party. Before that I was at home with my mom and my sister, and before that I was shopping downtown with a girlfriend.”

  “How about you, Porter? Where were you before the party?”

  “Surfing. At Leadbetter, with some buds,” he added. “Like usual, it was flat. I stayed out there for a couple of hours, then I went home and got cleaned up. After that I drove up to the party.”

  The two beamed at me, pleased with themselves. Apparently they didn’t realize their alibis were as porous as sponges. “OK?” Vanessa challen
ged.

  “For now. Tell me, did Skye have enemies? Anyone who might have wanted revenge?”

  “Revenge? No way.” Vanessa tossed her head. “Skye was like maybe the most popular guy in school.”

  “Porter, any ideas?”

  “Naw.” He looked away. “Dude was too cool.”

  “Now, I want to ask you about the aquarium. I understand you both volunteer there, and it was Skye who got you the positions. Is that right?”

  Vanessa nodded. “Skye’s grampa is real important.”

  Bless teenagers today. The way she said “grampa” made her sound abut five. I looked over at Porter. “So the three of you were close friends?”

  “Yeah, we knew each other like forever. Right, Vannie?”

  “Uh-huh. I moved here in seventh grade.” She turned to me. “Skye was my friend right away, you know? And in high school I was a cheerleader, and Skye and Port were both on the varsity football and basketball teams. So we were like, traveling to all the away games together.” She stopped and looked at Porter. “Wait. You were on the football team but not the basketball team, at least not till this year. Skye was on both all the way through.”

  Porter gave a short nod. “Yeah. He was on both all the way through.”

  “So did the three of you always get along? Or did you have the occasional fight?”

  Porter picked up a napkin and swiped at a smear of ice cream on the glass tabletop. “Sure, we got along. Why not?” The kid smoked a lot of weed: the thumb and index finger of his right hand were stained a dark yellowish brown.

  I looked over at Vanessa. “Yeah, sure.” She shrugged.

  “You two don’t look so sure.”

  They both tensed. I let the silence expand.

  “Why—why are you asking this stuff?” Vanessa picked at the corner of her mouth.

  “I thought I explained on the phone. Skye’s parents have asked me to look into his death. There are some unanswered questions.”

  “So you really are a detective.” Porter looked as if he still couldn’t believe it.

  “An investigator.” I handed each of them a card.

  “Of course she’s for real, dummy.” Vanessa frowned at him. “Don’t you know she’s the one who figured out who killed that Mexican girl at Solstice?” She turned to me. “What was her name?”

  “Lili Molina. And a boy named Danny Armenta was murdered, too.”

  “Wow.” Porter flicked the card with a chewed fingernail. “That’s cool. What else do you want to know?” It was hard to tell if he was being sarcastic or serious.

  “I want to know what you’re hiding from me.”

  Their mouths flopped open like the jaws on a pair of ventriloquist’s dummies. “Nothing,” they echoed each other, a little too late.

  “Mm-hm. Tell me something. Did Skye have a girlfriend?”

  Porter shrugged, but Vanessa flushed scarlet. Good. Pay dirt at last.

  “Yeah, he did,” Porter said. “Did, as in months ago, but not anymore. As a matter of fact—”

  “Porter,” Vanessa squeaked. “I think you should probably shut up now.”

  Suddenly, it was as if I wasn’t there.

  “Why? The whole school knows.”

  “Yeah, but do his parents know?”

  “His parents? So what. The dude’s—”

  “Porter! Shut up!”

  He leaned back in the resin chair and spread his hands in surrender.

  “Listen,” I said. “I know all about it, of course. But I want to hear how you guys see it.”

  Porter looked over at Vanessa. “Go ahead,” she muttered after a moment.

  “Dude got the girl pregnant, that’s all. Big effing deal. Taryn what’s her name. They broke up, and she got an abortion. No surprise.”

  “They never were really together,” Vanessa added. “She wasn’t his type.”

  “Whatever,” Porter said. “Actually, she’s kinda hot.”

  “Hot?” Vanessa made a face. “It’s pretty much like Porter says, though. Taryn used to hang around Skye. And if a girl throws herself at a guy, she gets what she asks for, right?” She lifted her chin and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Of course she got an abortion—Skye wasn’t really her boyfriend! It was all in her head.”

  * * *

  That evening I carried my laptop and a glass of chilled wine out to the concrete patio at the back of my house. Santa Cruz and Anacapa loomed purple-black in the twilight, guarding the channel as they had for thousands of years. The other islands, Santa Rosa, San Nicolas, San Miguel, were lost in the velvety dark.

  I’d planned to mull over the case. But the night seemed filled with romance, and Mike Dawson slipped into my mind. I was better off without him, I reminded myself for the sixty-third time. Sixty-three times, because in one way or another, I told myself this every single day. And it had been over two months now since he’d started up with somebody new.

  No matter what Gabi was feeling at the moment, relationships weren’t simple. Anything but.

  I thought about the girl named Taryn. According to Vanessa and Porter, she was pregnant with Skye’s baby, then had an abortion after he jilted her. If this was true, Taryn could be a person with motive.

  I switched on the laptop and expanded the photos I’d taken of the mortuary guest book. Starting at the beginning, I scanned through the pages. Many signatures were hard to decipher, so the going was slow. I was coming up empty-handed—till I got to the end.

  Dex pushed at my free hand with his muzzle, seeking a pat. I ignored him and stared at the screen.

  I should have guessed that the last signature would be Taryn’s. The girl in the restroom: I recalled her pretty face, dark eyes swimming in tears. This was my prime suspect? Please, no.

  I peered at her last name. I couldn’t quite figure it out. The letters were clear, written in a round girlish hand. But what they spelled was “Tactacquin”—not a name I’d heard before. I googled and got a few hits. Tagalog—a Filipino surname.

  I needed to speak to Taryn Tactacquin again. My intuition protested she was no killer—but my intuition had failed me before, and besides, in my line of work you deal in facts. I would locate her in the morning. With a name like hers, it wouldn’t be hard.

  I closed the laptop, and the moonless night turned black and opaque. The vinegar tang of the ocean, tinged with the natural seepage of oil out in the channel, filled my nostrils.

  Suddenly, I felt alone. “Brodie,” I murmured. “Brodie, come back.”

  Usually my brother’s spirit, or whatever it was that lingered with me, was comforting. But tonight I felt nothing. “Don’t leave, brother. Please, not yet.”

  When someone you love kills himself, you want to reason with him. You want to turn back the clock, persuade him not to do it. Convince him life is worth living. I’d been having that argument with my brother for nearly three years now.

  I heard a slight scuffling on the steep bank below, then smelled a few puffs of skunk. The animal was warning me it was time for humans to go inside, to shut their doors and leave the night world to the creatures who owned it.

  But I didn’t leave. What was inside for me but four blank walls? Better to be out in the dark, swept up and carried away in the black current flowing up from the channel.

  * * *

  “Thanks for seeing me on your lunch hour, Taryn.” I pointed to a bench at the end of the bluff. “Shall we sit over there?”

  “Sure.” She cinched her navy terrycloth wrap more tightly across her chest. “It’s not an hour, though. I only get thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll try to keep it short, so you have a chance to eat something. Working with kids takes stamina.”

  She nodded. “They keep you running, that’s for sure. But I like it, teaching them to surf. The program’s for disadvantaged children, you know? They live in Santa Barbara, but some of them have hardly ever been in the ocean.”

  “They must love it, then. So you’re a surfer?”

 
“Not really. I’m a beginner. Skye taught me—” She stopped, and her face twisted.

  “Taryn, I’m sorry.”

  We sat down side by side. It was better that way. We could look out to sea while we talked, instead of staring at each other.

  “What you just said, that you’re sorry?” Distracted, she wrung the water out of her ponytail. “Nobody else has said that to me.”

  I patted her arm. I wanted to give the girl a hug, but I was afraid she’d burst into tears if I did. Besides, I reminded myself, Taryn Tactacquin was a suspect.

  “I can see how much you cared about Skye.”

  “More … more than that. I loved him. Now I know that for sure.”

  I watched as a clutch of small sailboats bobbed past the point like baby waterfowl. “Before, you weren’t sure?”

  “For a while I thought I hated him. When we—” She stopped and picked at a white thread caught in the terrycloth. “I suppose you already know.”

  “I’ve been told you were pregnant. You know how it is: that kind of news travels.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, it does.”

  Taryn was quiet for so long that I thought she’d decided not to talk. But then she drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if she were letting go.

  “When I got pregnant, I didn’t know who to tell. I knew my dad would be really mad, and my mom—well, things aren’t so good in my family these days. My brother, Kenny—” She shrugged.

  “Your brother?” I encouraged her.

  “Kenny does drugs. The really bad stuff. He’s in prison right now, up in Avenal. When Kenny comes out next month, Mom wants him to live at home, but Dad says no way. My parents fight about it all the time, you know?”

  Boy, didn’t I know. “That kind of thing can put a lot of pressure on a family.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Skye and me, we didn’t know what to do, not at first. We talked about abortion. I’m not against it. But we were together, you know? We were close. We started thinking about the baby, and we made some plans. We wouldn’t have done it unless—” A sullen tone entered her voice.

  “Unless?”

  “Unless that—that grandfather of his hadn’t gotten involved.”

  “Rod Steinbach?” I looked at her in surprise. Taryn’s face was turned away from me, but I could see the tension in the set of her jaw.