Follow Her Home (27 page)

“What's the address?”

“It's 2515 La Mesa Way. Santa Monica near Brentwood. Are you coming from the Ten?”

“We'll figure it out. We have GPS.” I dictated the address and Luke plugged it in.

“The code to get in is 1492.”

“Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

“Park on the street and buzz yourself in. Text me from outside and I'll meet you at the front door. I don't want to wake my parents.”

Luke looked up from the GPS. “Tell her we'll be there in twenty.”

“Did you hear that, Jackie?”

“Yeah. See you soon.” She hung up without noise.

“Where are we going?” Lori asked.

“Jackie's Diego's wife. I would advise against talking to her about Diego or anything that might upset her. But she can babysit you overnight and I'll get back in touch with you in the morning.”

We took Beverly past the Beverly Center and rode down Santa Monica Boulevard, through Century City, west, west, west. The street signs turned from blue and white to blue and white and striped with yellow, and soon enough we hit Twenty-sixth Street and hung a left. We turned onto La Mesa Way a few uphill yards past San Vicente and found 2515 on the right.

We parked on the street under a tall, leafy tree with a bifurcated trunk and muscular, sprawling roots. The Blumenthal house peeked out at us through a thick, bushy hedge that gleamed lush and licked in the dark. We followed the sidewalk to the gate and hit 1492. The gate buzzed and I grabbed the knob and pushed.

We walked into a front driveway four times the size of my apartment. A soft light turned on by the front door and pooled the view with a nectarine glow. This house was a house like the Louvre was a gallery and the
Mona Lisa
a painting. There was beauty in the Spanish architecture that murmured through the dim light, cut-out silhouettes and soft contours gasping out of shadow.

I borrowed Luke's phone and texted Jackie.

“I'm sorry for everything.” Lori squeaked. She was crying, like a child lost for the first time, with hiccups and an open mouth.

I patted the top of her head. “Stop it, kid. You don't even know what you're apologizing for.”

“Everything.”

“No, you can't fault yourself for everything. You're at the eye of a rotten storm, but you aren't rotten, not as far as I can tell.”

She looked up at Luke with swimming eyes puddling moonlight. “I'm sorry about your dad. I'm really, really sorry.”

Luke looked back at her with a weary hardness and I couldn't tell if he was going to say a word, but Jackie came to the front door and thereby changed the subject.

The door opened by inches and Jackie came outside and closed it to a slim crack behind her. She stood ensconced in a man's shirt with light blue stripes that I recognized as Diego's. She was barefoot. Barefoot and pregnant, I remembered.

Luke walked over and wrapped her in a long hug. He mumbled something into her hair and she started to nod and cry. Jackie had never connected with Luke, and I suspected she saw him as an airhead and a waste of her husband's time. I thought back to that morning, when she clung to my chest and soaked my shirt. Each shared friend and each shared space and each shared moment must have touched the tap of her tear ducts and hurt her anew. The poor woman's face was gaunt and angled, blotched and red from the wet and dry of grief. Diego was my ex, my friend, but he was her husband and the father of her child. It might have been better to leave Lori in a basket on a stranger's doorstep than to bother this woman at this time.

It was too late for that. Jackie would take Diego's place in my confidence, if not tonight then sometime soon. She would heal the circle without expansion, and she could keep Lori safe. I looked up at the Blumenthal mansion and saw echoes of turrets and towers. Cook was a man of money. He knew its power, and he knew how to use it. But he was also a lawyer, and if I knew lawyers, he would be too cautious to reach wrist-deep into a place like the Blumenthals'.

Jackie's sobs dwindled to silent swells and she and Luke separated. “Sorry,” she said.

“Don't apologize. It makes me a shitty person.” I hugged her. “Thanks so much, Jackie. I didn't know where else to go. This is Lori. Lori, Jackie.”

“Hi,” Lori said with a small wave.

“Run away from home?” Jackie looked Lori up and down.

“Sort of.” Lori spoke meekly and looked at me.

I coughed. “I needed to borrow her for a bit.”

“Juniper.” Jackie put a hand on my shoulder. “What sort of a mess have you gotten yourself into? Does it have to do with what happened to Diego? He was acting very preoccupied after you left, and then…” She trailed off and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Sorry. I didn't—don't, please.”

I looked up at the stars, blinking hard. They whispered small comfort, bright dots of overwhelming significance speckling the infinite dark. I gripped at my shirt, fist full of fabric like some desperate patriot. “Don't apologize. I'm in a huge mess, just an unbelievable, like, I don't know what historical catastrophe I should be belittling with a comparison, but for me, it's along those lines. And I don't know, maybe Diego was standing too close to the edge of the whirlpool. I don't know, Jackie, I think it's really likely. You know I would never have put Diego in danger if I'd known better. I'm going to find out what happened, I promise. And if at the end of the day I have to come back with my own head on a spike, I'll do that for you. Hell, I'll do it for me.”

There was a moment of quiet until Luke spoke. “When's the funeral, Jackie? What can I do to help?”

“We're still working that out. Ana and Jorge are flying in tomorrow.”

“How did they take it?”

She smiled bitterly. “Darling, how do you think they're taking it?”

There was another silence, one that lacked tautness and energy. It was as if Jackie had been holding one end of a jump rope and Luke and I the other, and the three of us had been thwacking it rhythmically against the playground floor, loop after loop, until we noticed that the kid for whom the rope swooshed had moved to another part of the playground, leaving us with too much rope, too much slack. I almost forgot about Lori.

“Jackie, Luke and I have to get going. Thank you so much for taking Lori. If there's any way you can keep this whole thing quiet, at least for a couple days, I'd really appreciate it. I'm sorry I haven't been all that forthcoming so far but I'll fix that when I find some slower waters.”

She nodded. “I'll watch her for now. Be safe, Juniper. Luke.” She hugged us in turn, with real warmth in her skinny arms. I had been half prepared to have Jackie attack me and blame me for Diego's death. There was plenty of time left for that, but for now I was grateful.

“Lori.” I mussed her hair. “Be good. Don't call your mother until you hear from me. And do not talk to Mr. Cook.”

She stuck herself to me again, her arms in a circle around my lower back, her cheek spilling warm breath on my chest. I felt true affection for the girl, this tiny, unbroken reflection of Iris. She looked at Luke with her tooth biting down on a glistening lower lip, a plea in her eyebrows.

He bobbed his chin at her. “Good luck.”

We exited through the iron gate and climbed back into the Porsche. It was 3:33
A.M.
and we were not quite close to home.

*   *   *

Luke turned on the ignition. “I need to stop for gas.”

“Perfect. I need cigarettes.”

We stopped at the corner of San Vicente and Twenty-sixth at a 76 that charged a small fortune for every gallon. Luke walked into the station and put his gas, a lighter, and a pack of Lucky Strikes on his card. Spending Cook's money gave me petty satisfaction until I remembered the cigarettes wouldn't cover a tenth of the tax on Lori's Chanel or on Yujin Chung's hush money.

I leaned against Luke's car while he filled it up with gas. “So what do you make of everything?”

“What do you make of everything?” He reflected the question back to me with varied inflection, an overrounded
you,
like a drama-class exercise.

I sighed and watched the numbers rolling on the pump. “I sort of believe Lori. I don't think she's sleeping with your dad. It fits, somehow. I mean, I think she's cut herself a lot of slack to keep herself feeling innocent, but I buy it. She likes church, she likes flirting, she likes attention. She let the attention go too far, but she ignored that line as long as there was nothing physical.”

“I don't know.” He put a hand to the pump and squeezed the trigger back and forth. The numbers stopped and started, stopped and started. “I don't know. I asked my dad pretty much point-blank. As did you, didn't you? I mean, wouldn't he have denied it if he were being faithful to my mom?”

He let the numbers climb steadily again and a minute later the pump let out a dry click. We got back in the car. As soon as we left the station, I lit a cigarette. It hit me like a blessing, a familiar warmth that spread from my lungs to my fingertips and the roots of my hair.

“Well, here's what we know. Miller was blackmailing your dad, and your dad was worried enough about what he had to send John to silence him.”

“But if he wasn't sleeping with Lori, what was he afraid of?”

“Well, for one thing, he didn't seem to think your mom would believe him. But even if she did…” I closed my eyes and spoke automatically, like a medium for my own thoughts. “When you saw those pictures, Luke, I'm not sure you saw the same thing I did.”

“The weird photo shoot? I saw it for what it was, and I didn't like it.”

“I know. It was just that, a ‘weird photo shoot.' But when I saw that picture of Lori decked out in that awful kimono, I felt, I don't know, sick.”

“As did I.”

“But I felt sick 'cause … I don't know, it was like, I felt exploited. Uprooted. Violated. And personally, too.” I grasped for words. “There was—look, I tell you everything, pretty much, but there is something I've never told you. I only told one person, and, well, he's dead now.”

He nodded, his eyes concerned.

“I know I don't talk about my sister a lot, and it's not because I don't think about her. It's just that in a lot of important ways, everything that happened with her feels so fresh it hurts to breathe on.” I shut my eyes tight and felt their lids quiver. “But you know that Iris has been here since Friday, living her last months in my head, scene-by-scene.”

He nodded again. “I'm sorry.”

“But what I'm telling you is, I didn't put Iris's teacher to the wall without any proof.” I wet my lips—they were parched. “She gave him a picture of herself, and I found it.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“That photo has some kind of power over me. I mean, I still have it, in a place where I will never see it by accident. I've thought about cutting it up, burning it, but it feels too important. Iris poured a lot of herself in there, and I'm not superstitious, but the thing seems too essential to my sister to destroy. I think about her taking that picture, thinking about Quinn and how much she loved him, and it just wears me down.”

“Is it…” He trailed off and I knew what he was asking.

“It's not a naked photo, but it wasn't taken for public consumption, either. She was wearing a schoolgirl outfit, and you know Greenwood doesn't have uniforms. Her blouse was open a button or two too deep, and you could just see that she was wearing a black bra under the white blouse.” I paused and thought about how to explain myself to my white male best friend. “When I first found it, I dropped it on the floor like it was something cursed. It made me feel inside out, just defenseless and even personally violated. But it wasn't the bra that got me. I didn't like that at all, of course, but you know what? People take naughty pictures. I mean, I sent bikini pictures to Diego the same summer, and Iris was more covered than that. It wasn't the skin, or even the lingerie. It was that costume.”

“I think I get it. I mean, schoolgirl is weird. When that picture of Lori came up with her in uniform, it made me feel pretty gross, too.”

“It's not the same for you. When I found that picture, it was like someone pulled a string somewhere in me, just yanked at it without warning, and I didn't know where it was coming from. I knew, in a vague way, what a fetish looked like, and Iris was dressed up to please a pervert. She was so young, and she was putting herself on display as this Asian-schoolgirl archetype. It made me feel sick, as her sister, of course, but I felt like it reached and grabbed on to the Asian girl in me, too.” I swallowed the drying saliva in my mouth. “But my point is, when I saw Lori's pictures, I got that same messed-in-the-organs feeling, groped and undressed by proxy, and unable to defend myself because the attack was on the inside.”

“What are you saying?”

“I'm saying that maybe I could've handled them sleeping together—creepy, but at least this time it would've involved two consenting adults. Affairs happen every day without anyone getting killed. Maybe this whole freak-show charade is worse. And maybe your dad feels the same way.”

“I disagree.”

“I know, but think of it this way. An office affair? That can be described and condemned with a choice word or two. What Lori told us about? That's harder to sort. It's the kind of thing that you can't dismiss because you keep trying to make it look one way or another. Eventually all you can know for sure is that it's twisted.”

“Sure, it's hard to classify, but how could that be worse than cheating?”

“Do you know how many married sleazeball lawyers fuck secretaries and HR girls? Your dad sleeping with Lori would've been a pretty standard story. Sure, people might have talked about it, but it would've fit. It wouldn't have fucked with their perception of the universe and they would've forgotten about it, confused him with another lawyer, whatever. But not this. This would stick. It would ruin him.”