Always (18 page)

I let Suze try it on me, but kept the muscles in my throat expanded protectively.

“Good. One other thing. Kim, remember that knuckle extension I showed you?” She held out her arm obligingly. Everyone copied her. “Good. Now support your middle knuckle with your thumb and tuck the other fingers in, as though making a fist. Face your partner.” I moved Suze into position. “There’s a spot right in the middle of the breastbone where the nerve lies very close to the surface. Feel for it. Now put your knuckle on your partner’s breastbone and push.”

“Ow!”

“Shit!”

Everyone sprang apart rubbing their sternums.

“This is a very useful little tool. Appropriate for delicate situations, particularly those times when you have no wish to draw attention to yourself.” Appropriate. My mother would approve. I knew Therese would go home and practice that until it hurt to breathe. “Remember, the right tool for the right job. Even naked in an empty room you have plenty of tools. But the first tool you should practice is communication: Know what you want and don’t want, be prepared to communicate that clearly. Make sure your body and your words send the same message. Don’t apologize, don’t explain, don’t threaten. It’s all information they don’t need, and information is currency. It’s power. It’s a tool.”

They frowned. I thought for a minute.

“Jennifer.” Her jaw twitched. “When was the last time you got a wrong-number call?”

“A wrong number?”

“Yes. When?”

“About six months ago.”

“Remember how it went?” I picked up an imaginary phone and held it to my ear. “They called, and you picked up the phone and said . . . what?”

She picked up a phone, too. “Hello?”

“Hey, is this Annie?”

“Er, no.”

“Well, who is this?”

“Jennifer.”

“Is Annie there?”

“No, no one called Annie lives here.”

“Annie Contin. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, it’s just me and my husband.”

“And it’s not Contin?”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Well what number is this?”

“555-2658.”

“Well, that’s Annie Contin’s number and I’m supposed to deliver a load of dog chow this afternoon. What’s your address?”

“We don’t have a dog. We have a cat. And . . . and you don’t need my address! ” and she slammed the imaginary phone down. Everyone was giving her sympathetic looks, the kind that in the South mean Dear Lord, what a moron. In the space of half a minute she had given a total stranger her name, her phone number, the fact that only two of them lived there, that she had a cat and no dog, and that she could be browbeaten without too much effort.

“Anyone think they can do better?”

“Yep.” Suze picked up the imaginary handset. “Hello.”

“Hey, is this Annie?”

“Nope, fuck off, asshole.” Slam.

“That’s always an option,” I said. “But similar to using a pile driver on a picture nail. Anyone else?”

Therese raised a phone to her ear. She smiled. I nodded. “Hello.” “Hey, is this Annie?”

“No. What number are you trying to reach?”

“Is this Annie? Annie Contin?”

“No. I believe you have the wrong number. Good-bye.”

“Excellent,” I said. “The less people know about you, the less they can hurt you. Think about it: who in your lives has the power to hurt you most, to wound you cruelly with a word?”

“My mother.”

“My husband.”

I nodded. “The people who know us best can hurt us the most because they know us, know how we think and what our vulnerabilities are. Any information you give a stranger can be used against you. Anything. Information is valuable. Don’t give it away.”

I WOKE AT NOON ON SUNDAY WITH MY MUSCLES STEADY AND MY MIND GATHER
ING speed, cold and clear as a bobsled in its ice run. I got out of bed without having to think about it, called room service without referring to the number listings, and ordered breakfast—fruit and cheese—without a hitch.

The shower fittings were solid nickel-plated steel, heavy and cool. I twirled taps, watched the steam curl up from the tile floor. Even the water smelled different from the water in Atlanta; no heavy chlorine tang.

The water pressure was strong, the shower like a fizzing drill on my skin. I soaped thoroughly, found the light blue stain of small bruises on my inner upper arms, where the police officers had taken a grip, a scrape on my left shin and three tiny cuts on my right ankle, like paper cuts. I’d probably never know where they had come from.

Hard white tile, as in a hospital room. I increased the hot-water flow and my goose bumps went away.

My mother had moved me here while I was unconscious and had no say in the matter. But the Edgewater was a dark and damp place. Despite its moneyed smugness, the Fairmont was lighter and brighter, and my room accessible only via the door, not the water. So I’d stay. I didn’t need Suzanne anymore, so she could go.

I toweled my hair dry, smoothed moisturizer methodically on my back, and shivered—as I hadn’t for more than six months, since the nerves healed—when my hand ran over the bullet scar on the underside of my left arm.

AT THE
breakfast table by the bar, Suzanne did her best to take it philosophically. “Well, I guess it’s good that you’re feeling better. I mean, it is good, definitely.” She looked around wistfully while I wrote her check, and indeed the suite looked beautiful: thick glass tabletop gleaming in the sunshine, flowers vivid, Barber playing on the Bose.

I signed the check, handed it over. “I’m sorry about the lack of notice, but I’ve added a bonus.”

When she saw the amount, her pupils, clenched tight against the bright sunshine, expanded briefly. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

I stood. “Do you have more work lined up?”

“Oh, well, I work through an agency. It’ll be okay.” She touched her pocket unconsciously, and stood. “I’ll be okay.”

Even in Seattle I imagined it wasn’t too easy to get work as a private nurse with pink hair and a nose ring. I doubt my mother would have hired her if it hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night emergency.

She shrugged. “Well, hey, time to pack.” She gave the silk upholstered sofa one last pat and went into her room.

I set up my laptop on the table and opened Rusen’s spreadsheet, the employment information. It looked as though he’d been thorough.

No one knows for certain if it was Einstein who said,
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,
but it is a useful guiding principle. This wasn’t, as the police appeared to think, a one-off grudge or a prank. There had been trouble with my property for two years. The trouble had continued with Hippoworks Productions. The drugging incident meant more trouble. It seemed entirely possible that there was some kind of connection. Also, as William of Ockham said,
pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.
And Kick had seen no strangers on the set.

Hippoworks LLC had two partners, Rusen and Finkel, and two permanent employees, both of whom worked at their Culver City office in California. For the
Feral
production, they employed about four dozen others on a contract basis. They were nonunion contracts, but at scale, with the exception of Sîan Branwell, who, being the star, had a few extra clauses and a bit more money. The end-date of her contract surprised me: less than a week away.

I scrolled to Kick’s information. Not much: addresses, references, a City of Seattle business license for Film Food, plus a notation that Rusen had checked her bond and insurance information and had two outside references on file. I opened a Web search bar and typed in KUIPER, VICTORIA K, and got several dozen hits, all relating to Film Food. Her website was rudimentary: a few menus, contact information, a professionally shot photo of Kuiper in white coat and hat, knife in hand and smiling self-consciously.

I changed the search to KICK KUIPER, and this time got several thousand hits. IMDb had a list—a long list—of her films.
Stunt!
had a cover interview with “Top Diving and Driving Artist ‘Kick’ Kuiper” from four years ago. The picture was of a woman in a red harness suit smiling brilliantly, bright with that reckless shine that comes only from riding a wave of adrenaline to survival. The caption read “Kuiper on the set of
Tantalus.
” I remembered that film. The action hero had been too old for the actress. The action scene with the actress had been good—Kick’s scene, I now realized.

There was also a smaller piece, about a year later, another interview, with Kick saying, “Hell yes, I’ll be back. The docs say the pins will be out in a month. Two months after that I’ll be as good as ever.” She sounded like a character from a fifties western, not like Kick at all. I backtracked, and found the news item—reported in
Variety
and
Hollywood Reporter,
even a one-liner in
EW
—about the fall that went wrong. I paid the subscription fee for the first two and read the articles.

The word
miracle
cropped up three times, along with
unbelievable
and
inexplicable.

Something caught my eye: a report a year before her accident from
BusinessWeek,
about product liability and various industry insurance rates. There was a thumbnail photo of Kick,
noted stuntwoman Victoria “Kick” Kuiper,
and a quote from her about why she wasn’t planning to sue the makers of her harness. “Stunts are dangerous,” she said. “***t happens.” I followed the link and found that that time it had been a broken scapula.

All that work, all that risk, and now she cut fruit for a living. Maybe she was good at it, but did it ever make her smile like the sun?

I looked up. Suzanne, eyes tired and cynical, held out the check. “You forgot to date it.”

I took it. “So I did. Do you have—” She handed me a lime green plastic pen. “And what is today’s date?”

“May seventeenth. Holy shi—I mean, are you okay?”

“Absolutely. Yes, fine.”

I watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope while she picked up the piece of splintered pen that had skittered across the glass-topped table. Where I had snapped it, the lime green plastic had turned milky pale, like the sepals that protect new tree blossom in spring.

“My apologies for that,” I said. “I will of course reimburse you for the damage.”

“It’s a pen,” she said, and bent to pick up the rest of it from the carpet. I got another from the laptop case, took off the cap, tested it on the back of the check. Blue. I turned the check over, aligned it carefully with the edge of the table, and wrote in the date. My hand didn’t shake. I capped the pen, returned it to the bag, refused to look at the photo of the woman who still smiled because she hadn’t lost anything.

“Excuse me,” I said, and stood. “Please see yourself out.”

I stood with my back against the bedroom wall until she left, thinking nothing.

I WALKED TO
the waterfront. Waves slapped and seagulls squabbled, as at any other beach, but traffic fumes wafted over the grass. It was crowded with smiling people wearing sandals and shorts, even though it was only in the mid-sixties, and they seemed unreal, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. I walked north, to the Seattle Aquarium, but I remembered pictures from the guidebook and couldn’t bear the idea of being trapped beneath the surface with marine otters swimming ceaselessly from one side of their tiny concrete tank to another. I kept going north, the water to my left. Past the Edgewater— I wondered what Dornan was doing today; I should call him and invite him to move to the Fairmont—past the Pacific Science Center, which on another day would be interesting, and on through Seattle Center, the theater district. At some point I found another park with fewer people. Instead of gulls, this one was full of crows. One strutted along the path in front of me. In the sunshine its feathers shone with a dull, oily sheen, as though carved from slate.

I watched the water and the sky, where cumulonimbus massed on the eastern horizon, zinc and pewter.

After a while, I headed back south and then east, down more of a gradient. For the first time that day I found myself panting slightly. A few days, Loedessoel had said. I slowed, and breathed more easily.

South again, Boren Avenue, Howell Street, where the city began to look like any inner urban wasteland: empty blocks, patched pavement. In Atlanta the air would have felt heavy and tired; here it was light and capricious, as contradictory as the waterfront park.

It was as I was walking past a low, industrial-looking building with the unlikely name of Re-Bar that I realized I was being followed: a white man sixty or seventy yards back. About forty, my height, casual dress, not an athlete but moving easily enough. Usually I was the one doing the following. I stopped, and pretended intense interest in the sign that said, Open at Eight. The man slowed, took out a phone. I shook my head at the sign in mock regret, and started back south, but slowly, hoping he would close the gap. He didn’t.

A professional, which made it unlikely I had been picked at random. Which raised a very interesting question. Was he connected to the people who were steering the warehouse mess, the people who were systematically reducing its value? Time to start getting answers.