Follow the Dotted Line (31 page)

She began snapping photos, turning the pages of the passport as quickly as possible. The camera trembled, as if she had Parkinson’s. She tightened her grip, which made the wobble worse. She put the passport on the desk and picked up the stapler, thinking she could use it to hold the book open, while she steadied the phone camera with both hands.

Outside she heard the momentary chirp of a car horn. Too muffled to be Lorna, she felt confident. Her two-handed grip wasn’t improving matters. Neither was a second beep of a horn that sounded miles away. She inhaled a yoga-sized breath, hoping to reach the Zen of photographic stillness, when the front door suddenly blew open and Tilda Trivette flew in, flipping on the lights as she did. The Wicked Witch stopped mid-stride and stared at the intruder.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, looking Andy up and down with penetrating and undeniably sumptuous eyes.

The younger woman was definitely a bracing presence in any room. Taller than Andy and perfectly proportioned, she had very white skin and fearsome black hair that framed an enigmatic face. Her features—narrow nose, high cheeks, trim chin—looked as if they’d been cut from glass and then painted for Kabuki Theater. All of this perched on the most elegant pedestal of a neck Andy had ever seen.

“Andrea Bravos,” Andy heard herself answering over the din in her ears. “I live here. At least, I used to. And who are you?”

“Tilda Kornacky. And I live here now.”

The voice pierced right through the percussion of Andy’s heartbeat. She scrambled like a quarterback desperate for an open receiver.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Andy. “I didn’t think anyone was using the place. Don’t you live in Texas?”

Tilda stepped closer, and Andy had to restrain herself from backing away.

“I don’t believe you have any claim to this property,” Tilda said, running an elegant index finger along the arc of her eyebrow, in a gesture that would have made Bette Davis proud. “What are you doing here, Andrea Bravos?”

“I am …” she said, completely unable to fill the vacancy with a plausible explanation. It was like having writer’s block, only with actual consequences. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and did what she did when she was sitting at her desk at home; she stopped thinking. Like magic, a totally unexpected line of dialogue popped out. “I’m looking for my keek-stane.”

“Your keek-stane?”

Where the hell did that come from, she wondered. And where was it headed? “Yes,” she managed. Just go with the flow, she reminded herself, and your imagination will do the rest. “It’s a sort of a scrying stone. Only, well, more authentic.” Whoa, she was managing to be both imaginative—and catty—under pressure.

“I know what a keek-stane is,” Tilda pronounced. “And I find that very hard to believe.”

Andy was starting to get a handle on the scene now. It was amazing what her mind could do unattended. “I guess Mark never mentioned that I’m a practitioner of Scottish Wicca,” she smiled. “Directly descended from the Picts. Do you know the story of Iona, by any chance?”

“What?”

“One of the great diviners of my people,” she explained, feeling she had located the character. “Say, aren’t you a psychic, too? I thought it was a little strange when I heard Mark had married another clairvoyant. What are the chances of that?”

Her performance was complicated by the fact that, while she was delivering her lines, Andy was also trying to slip Tilda’s passport off the desktop and back into the drawer. In the process, she had to maneuver around the state-of-the-art cell phone next to the stapler and realized that Tilda must have forgotten it and returned to get it before going to the bookstore.

“Anyway, I lost my regular keek-stane,” she jabbered on, “and I’m supposed to do a reading tomorrow, and I used to keep a back-up here at the cabin. Years ago. When I was, you know, married to Mark. So I thought I’d just come up here and try to find it.”

The passport was finally back in place, however, the drawer refused to close completely. She tried unsuccessfully to tap it with her hip, as she kept talking. “I thought it wouldn’t matter. Since he’s dead and all. Anyway, I had no idea you’d moved in here. So sorry. Let me just get out of your way.”

Giving up on the desk drawer, Andy began to make her way toward the door. Tilda countered with calculated efficiency, blocking her way.

“How did you get in here, Andrea?”

“We, ah, always kept a spare key under the bear butt on the porch.”

“Are you the one watching me?”

“Watching you?”

“Parking outside my house for hours? Following me in a dark sedan?”

“A dark sedan?”

“Everywhere I go?”

“No,” Andy said, tensing. She couldn’t figure out what the woman was talking about.

Tilda inched closer, pale freckles peaking out from under the exotic makeup. Andy felt dizzy from the thick sweetness of her perfume. “I told your son, Mitchell, that I wanted you people to stay away from me,” she said, in the same ominous tone she had used in her note to Mitch. “I should have you arrested for trespassing.”

“I won’t do it again. I promise,” Andy said, her reserve of impromptu dialogue now depleted.

The younger woman reached out and locked her hand on Andy’s forearm in a grip that was both controlled and cold-blooded. “Give me the key.”

Deciding obedience at this moment was the better part of valor, Andy dug into her pocket and pulled it out.

“You’re a liar, Andrea,” came a voice so hot it burned. “Don’t think I don’t know that.” Then the psychic took the key, pushed up the sleeve on Andy’s jacket, and sliced raggedly from elbow to wrist.

“Jesus Christ!” Andy shouted, trying to pull away from the searing pain. “What are you doing?!”

Dropping the key, Tilda reached out and clamped her free hand on the back of Andy’s neck, forcing her face downward into the younger woman’s breastbone and holding it there with suffocating pressure. “I have capabilities you can’t imagine, old woman,” she whispered. “And I will use them on anyone, including you and your family, if you get in my way.” Then she pulled Andy’s head up by her hair and, quite literally, shoved her out the door.

Like a drunk who’d been booted by a bouncer, Andy tumbled onto the porch, picked herself up, and made her way to the car without ever entirely catching her balance.

“We called the police!” Harley explained, urgently, as Andy opened the door and fell into the front seat. “We were coming in ourselves in another minute.”

“Drive,” barked Andy. “I mean it. Drive. Home. Now.”

Without another word, Lorna put the car in gear and pressed down on the gas pedal with enough authority to make the tires spin before getting traction. And that’s how they drove down the mountain and all the way home. Without another word.

Two and a half hours later, the two women were seated at the dining room table in Lorna’s Sherman Oaks condo with a bottle of cabernet between them. Harley had been swooped up by The Impresario almost the moment Lorna’s car pulled into the parking garage. Since then, Lorna had been debriefing Andy relentlessly about the encounter with Tilda. Both of them were tired and cranky.

“Why did Melissa feel it necessary to bring Harley all those clothes?” Andy suddenly said, as if she’d just remembered the Banana Republic shopping bag The Impresario handed her nephew upon their arrival.

“Henry Higgins,” Lorna replied.

“Huh?”

“You know, she’s making him over in her own image. Her Henry Higgins to his Eliza Doolittle. Or that shopping scene in Pretty Woman.”

“Oh,” nodded Andy, too tired to process either allusion. “I hardly recognized him by the time she got him dressed and out the door. Where were they going?”

“As if I know, Andrea.”

“Okay. Okay.”

They reached for the bottle simultaneously.

“All yours,” Lorna said. “Please.” Standing up to retrieve another bottle, she noticed that the gash traversing Andy’s arm was still weeping beads of blood. She turned the corkscrew and seethed. “We should have stayed and had her arrested for assault.”

“She would have had me arrested for trespassing.”

The cork popped out with such force that they both mistook it for a gunshot.

“Sorry!” said Lorna. “Should have prepared you. And myself.” She topped off Andy’s glass and refilled her own. “Did you really tell her you were looking for, you know, a—”

“Keek-stane.”

“Ballsy. Andy. I mean that.”

“I walked out in one piece, didn’t I?”

“Are you sure we shouldn’t bandage that?”

Andy shook her head. “I think it will heal faster if it’s left exposed.”

“I never pegged you for a stoic, you know.”

“Don’t worry. You pegged me right.”

“Then why in god’s name did you fail to mention that injury all the way down the mountain?” Lorna pressed.

“I didn’t want Harley to know. He likes confiding in pretty girls. He’d tell Melissa, who’d then tell Mitch.”

“Maybe they should know.”

“Not yet. I don’t want my kids finding out how up close and personal I came to Tilda. They’d kill me. Besides, we need to look at these passport photos in peace.”

Lorna, who had just picked up her glass of anesthetic, carefully put it back down. “I thought you said you didn’t get any pictures of the passport.”

“I have been waiting until Harley was out the door and you were drunk to bring it up.”

“Holy shit,” Lorna whistled. “Talk about self-discipline. First the flesh wound, now the photos. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you exercise this kind of self-restraint in my life.”

“It’s not really restraint, Lorna, it’s avoidance. I was shaking so much, there’s a chance I didn’t get anything we can use. I wanted to prepare you for the worst.”

“Well, something has got to be better than nothing.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Geez, Andy, what’s got into you? You sound like Debbie Downer.”

“I know. I know. It’s just that I feel like I poked a mad dog with a stick tonight, and I’m afraid it was all for nothing.”

“Oh, my god,” said Lorna, grabbing Andy’s purse. “I don’t mind the stoicism, but self-pity drives me crazy. Stop wallowing in ignorance, woman, and get out that damned phone!”

It turned out that Andy had good reason to be worried about the quality of the photos. Her nerves, combined with a lack of light in the room, had produced indecipherable, grainy images. “I can’t read any of these passport stamps,” she sighed, spreading one of the images with her fingers to make it larger and more visible, then pinching it to make it smaller and sharper. “In fact, it’s hard to tell how many stamps are on each page.”

“Did you get a shot of all the pages that had stamps?” asked Lorna, leaning doggedly over Andy’s shoulder with a magnifying glass in her hand.

“Back off, Sherlock. Who cares how many pages I got, if we can’t read them?”

“Did you get them all?” Lorna asked again.

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yes. I believe I did. So what?”

“Email them to me.”

“Why?”

The CPA had picked up her own phone and was texting. “I have a friend with a photo editing program that can re-render text.”

“What does that mean?”

“It locates the basic shapes of letters and numbers in a document and draws them, filling in anything that’s missing or unclear. I sometimes have to use it to enhance faded receipts my clients need for a business audit.”

“I’m not following.”

“You don’t have to. Just send me all the pictures you took.”

Andy tried. She really did. But instead of feeling energized by what Lorna just said, her beleaguered brain began to retreat, leaving her to stare dumbly at her phone. Lorna slipped the device out of her friend’s incapacitated fingers and completed the task herself.

“There,” Lorna said. “We should get these back before ten tomorrow morning. Now, when is Melissa bringing Harley home tonight?”

“She didn’t say,” Andy mumbled.

“Not a problem. You’ve got the guest room. I told him to take the futon in the study.”

Without indulging her comatose co-conspirator a moment longer, Lorna removed the two wine glasses from the table and emptied them into the sink.

“Why are you taking my wine?” Andy whimpered through the late-night fog of exhaustion.

“It’s time for another Tylenol, my woozy friend. And you need sleep.”

Andy looked down involuntarily at Tilda’s 8-inch keepsake. The elongated keystroke was throbbing again, shooting hot pulses of pain along the inside of her lower arm. The edge of the jagged metal blade had not so much sliced the skin, as riddled it with dozens of tiny punctures. Andy sat stupefied by the purpling flesh. She’d been wrong to call Tilda a mad dog. Mad dogs acted and reacted in the moment. People like Tilda had volition; they were creatures of choice, with a strong self-will and a long-term strategy.

Fifteen minutes later, Andy succumbed to sleep, drifting off on the notion that the palm reader might simply have been drawing a dotted line to follow, so that next time the two of them met, she would know exactly where to make the real cut.

More Convoluted than the Tax Code

Harley returned to the condo later that night, apparently unharmed by his evening with The Impresario. All Lorna and Andy knew was that he was sleeping deeply and out of earshot on the futon in the study, as they waited for the pictures of the passport to arrive the next morning. The enhanced JPEGs began to appear in Lorna’s inbox at 10:20 a.m.

“These are eye-boggling!” Andy trumpeted, as Lorna opened the second of the five digital files.

“That’s not a word,” Lorna pointed out.

“It is now,” Andy declared. Within moments, three of the five photos were spread across Lorna’s laptop screen, each one a photo of a different passport page. “You can read every one of the entry and exit stamps, even the ones that overlap.”

The accountant was already fishing for papers in an accordion file folder lying on the table next to the computer. “Here are the obituaries for John Levin and Ernie Pacheco,” she said a minute later, “the two husbands who came before Gus-the-Greek. All we have to do is work backwards from these two dates and see if Tilda was out of the country just prior—and, if so, where.”