Little Girl Gone (16 page)

T
he house that Jacky and Caro Jones built in the Belfleur section of Beverly Hills was a distinctly western style that would suit a landscape in New Mexico or Seattle as well as this knoll in Southern California. Constructed of stone and Douglas fir, redwood, cedar, and glass, the design was long and low and followed the curve of the hill on which it was built, facing west toward the ocean and overlooking a deep, wild canyon. From some angles it seemed to disappear into the landscape. Mr. Guerin had told Robin on the phone a few days earlier that several offers had been made on the property already. Recession or not, there were still people willing to spend millions of dollars to live in a work of art.

Robin parked the van behind the house just as the back door opened and Mr. Guerin stepped out, his arms open. Django ran into his embrace. With a pinch of shame, Robin remembered that when Django came to Arroyo, she had stood with her hands at her sides, as rigid as a pole and just as ungiving.

Robin’s friends would not call her cold.
Restrained
would be their word for her, or they might say that she was dignified, but never cold.
Restrained
and
dignified
would have pleased her and seemed accurate before Django came into her life. Now, as she watched her nephew and Mr. Guerin embrace, she had a flash of understanding. For a split second a light went on and she saw herself with stunning clarity. She had always envied Caro her uninhibited gift for life. Envied and resented and in reaction, she had gone to the other extreme, pulling a cool and dignified carapace about herself. She did not want to believe that her personality was little more than a reaction against her sister’s, but she thought it might be the truth.

She heard the lawyer say, “Mrs. Hancock’s upstairs, DJ. Go on up to her why don’t you?”

Guerin turned to Robin and reached for her hands, holding them between his warm, dry palms. “My dear, I know this is difficult, but I so appreciate your coming.” The shimmer in his blue eyes brought tears to her own.

He led her indoors, across a long enclosed porch crammed with shrouded outdoor furniture and into the kitchen. It was as if a maid had only moments before finished polishing the stainless steel, glass, and tile expanses. The hardwood floors gleamed in the sunlight pouring through the array of skylights. On the island counter someone had placed an arrangement of long-stemmed yellow roses—Caro’s favorite since her teens—in a cut-glass vase.

Robin looked at Guerin, questioning.

“Mrs. Hancock,” he said. “She’s arranged them throughout the house. She was their housekeeper since before Django was born. You probably know that.”

No, she had never heard of Mrs. Hancock.

“We had some great meals in this kitchen. Pasta, of course. It was the only thing Caro knew how to cook. We’d eat right at this counter. That’s how you knew Caro liked you. She fed you in the kitchen.” Guerin was garrulous in his grief. “She told me once that when Jacky got on her nerves she’d come down here and chop vegetables. Whatever was in the refrigerator. One of the women who came in to clean… afterwards… told me the big freezer was full of baggies of chopped onions and red pepper and celery.”

“What did you do with them?” Robin didn’t really care but she needed to keep Guerin talking while she struggled to compose herself into the pretense that visiting her dead sister’s house for the first time was a business-as-usual kind of thing.

“I took everything downtown to the soup kitchen our church runs. I did the same with the contents of the pantry.” He shook his head. “I still don’t always believe they’re gone. I used to talk to Jacky almost every day about something or other. His business affairs were huge, as you might imagine, and I tell you, I find myself with time on my hands these days. I’m thinking I might retire.”

“And the will?” Robin wondered if the question was crass and decided she didn’t care. She had not expected to be so emotional, and the important thing was to keep him
talking. Restrained. Dignified. Controlled. If Robin was not these things, what was she?

“Basically, the estate goes to Django. In trust until he’s twenty-one. Of course, there’ll be a generous allowance. You won’t have to foot the bills yourself. We’ll have a formal reading in another couple of weeks but I can tell you how it’s going to go. Your mother will have an income, a nice one, so if she wants to travel or live in Tahiti, she can do it. Caro told me they didn’t get along, but she was generous anyway. That was typical of your sister and Jacky. Huck gets a stock portfolio and some memorabilia, a lot of his dad’s music stuff. God knows, he doesn’t need more cash. Mrs. Hancock will be able to retire comfortably, and there are gifts for the rest of the help. They were generous people, Robin. The more they had, the more they were willing to give away. Jacky wanted Ira to have the house in Cabo. Jacky and Caro both wanted you to have the contents of this one.”

“All of it?” She had expected a token, no more.

“Everything. Including the switch plates if you want them.”

Robin folded her arms and pressed them hard and tense against her chest. “I had no idea. Everything about this has been such a surprise.” She looked at the old man and he nodded. They both knew she meant Django too.

“I haven’t handled this well, Robin. You deserved more preparation, but I must confess I wasn’t thinking clearly for a while. It was such a monstrous shock.” He kept talking,
talking. “I’m an early riser and I’d just made my coffee when the call came—a police chief up in the desert—and I literally dropped the cup. My wife came in and saw me just standing there, staring at the mess on the floor.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Caro and Jacky were the most vital people I’ve ever known. I miss them all day, every day.”

She wished she could comfort him, but she did not know how so she focused on practical matters.

“What about Jacky’s studio? All the sound equipment and electronics?” In one of their rare telephone conversations Caro must have told her this.

“It goes to a high school music academy in Southeast. A charter high school, whatever that is. I’ve never been quite sure. He wanted Django to have his piano. And any CDs he wants. Jacky had thousands. Will you have room for it all?”

Robin stared over Guerin’s shoulder at the digital clock on the stove. “They planned it all.” The luminous numbers bored a hole between her eyes. “As if they knew…”

“Last year they tossed out the old will and I wrote a new one for them.”

“That means she really wanted me to have Django.”

“Oh, yes, my dear. They both did. They were very clear about that.”

“But why?”

“She loved you, Robin. And obviously she trusted you. There’s no money in the will for you, but you’ll receive a
stipend for acting as Django’s guardian and everything else in the house, the furniture and the art, the rugs—all of it is yours, Robin. You’ll be a wealthy woman.”

If Caro trusted her enough to leave Django in her care, if she wanted her to have the contents of this beautiful house, why had she never reached out? What secret had Caro been hiding?

“There’s one other thing.” Guerin pulled a business card from his wallet and handed it to Robin. “Caro stipulated in the will that if anything happened to her, she wanted you to be the one to tell your father. She wrote his address and phone number on my card. He’s not far away. Up the road in Temecula.”

Robin escaped into Caro’s home. Taking all afternoon, she walked through the rooms, down every hall, and looked into each closet and cabinet. As she walked she heard her sister’s voice, a running commentary on the contents of the house.

Sell that painting. No one needs two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of white on white.

Keep those baskets; they were made by an old Washoe Indian woman. No one else knows that pattern.

That bit of silk—it’s nothing special, but I loved it.

Robin marked some of the items she wanted shipped to Arroyo with yellow tape; blue was for undecided and white for consignment. To do the job properly she would have to come back for at least another two or three days. Her mother might like some of the furniture, or perhaps she would move
to Tahiti as Guerin had said, live in a hut, and take an island lover. At this point in Robin’s life, almost anything seemed possible. She wondered if she would miss her mother if she left Southern California and added that question to the list she did not want to think about at present.

There were yellow roses throughout the house, and someone—probably Mrs. Hancock—had seen to it that the windows were open, filling the rooms with air and light. Robin imagined her sister’s spirit, a sprite, dancing through the rooms ahead of her.

Django pulled out of Mrs. Hancock’s comforting embrace. Turning his back to her, he wiped away his tears and fiddled with a line of vintage
Star Wars
figures his father had given him for his seventh birthday. He tore off strips of yellow tape.

“So how are you getting along down there in Arroyo?” Mrs. Hancock asked. “Do you have a nice room of your own, Django?”

“It’s okay.”

“Will it be big enough for your furnishings and all? Your father wanted you to have his piano. That’s a Steinway grand. Will there be room for it at your aunt’s house?”

“I guess.”

“Well, I hope that means yes. Don’t forget to put some tape on the bed and the dresser. And your PC.”

“I’ve got my laptop already.”

“You remembered that? With all you had on your mind?
That was smart, but you’ve always had a steady head on your shoulders, Django.” He taped the furniture he wanted, the pictures and posters, the sports equipment, knowing that her eyes were on him the whole time. “There’s not a bite of food in the house, but I could go down to Subway and get you a sandwich if you’d like. Or maybe one of those fancy coffee drinks from Mr. Locastro at Calabria? He was asking after you, Django. Up and down Sunset you’ve got friends sending their best wishes.”

“Did Lenny or Roid call?” Maybe they had lost his cell phone number. “Did they come over?”

“I’m sorry to say, they did not.”

“I’ve been texting and leaving messages.”

Mrs. Hancock nodded and pursed her lips.

“Maybe they went on vacation. Roid was saying they might go to Hawaii.” He felt foolish saying it. Even a digital dragon like Mrs. Hancock knew there were cell phones in Hawaii.

“You think maybe they got sick?”

Mrs. Hancock bent to pick up something on the floor, something so small he couldn’t even see it from where he stood.

“Maybe there was an accident?” If there was anything Django had learned in the last weeks it was that with terrifying speed unspeakable things could happen to the people he loved.

“Try not to fret too much, dear boy.”

She put her arm around him. Part of Django didn’t
want to turn toward her and didn’t want to cry again, but he couldn’t stop himself. Sorrow was a time machine and he was a little boy again.

Mrs. Hancock said, “When a person suffers a great sadness, some of his friends can’t help themselves; they just have to turn away. Roid and Lenny—they’re just kids and they don’t want to think about how this happened to you because it means it could happen to them likewise.”

Mrs. Hancock smelled like roses, sweet and cinnamon.

“You know, I was married once, before I came to work for your dear mama and daddy. My good husband had cancer and died when he wasn’t even forty. He never went to the hospital; I kept him at home and nursed him myself. At the end, the last weeks, his friends all stopped coming ’round. Our little house was so empty, Django. Empty as you feel right now.”

He brushed his tears away with the back of his hand.

“I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t care. To be sure I did, but in time I understood that the men he worked with, his poker club and all—they were afraid. They didn’t want to think about death. They wanted to live their lives like they were immortal.”

“Mr. Cody said we were a posse and that we were going to change the world.”

“And, of course, you miss them. It’s a dreadful time for you and don’t I know that. Myself, I’m going soon to live with my daughter and her family up in Bakersfield, and everyone is telling me how I ought to be happy not to work
anymore. But Django-boy, I’d stay with you if I could. If they’d let me, I’d raise you up myself.”

“I could ask Mr. Guerin—”

“Your parents wanted you to go to your aunt. It’s in the will.”

“She doesn’t know about kids. I don’t think she likes me very much.”

“What do you mean she doesn’t like you? How can she not like a good, smart boy like you? I never knew a better boy. Are you minding your manners, Django? Do you remember to look around you or are you in your head all the time, dreaming up those Jett Jones stories so you miss half of what’s going on?”

“I’m gonna live with Huck. It just takes a little while to arrange.”

“Ah. I see. Well, it’s a rotten situation all around, but give it time. That’s all I know to tell you. In time the pain will fade a little.” She stroked his cheek. “Learning that lesson is a part of growing up, my dear. It’s a pity and a crime you had to learn it so young, but there you are.”

“Will I forget them?”

“Those two? Your dear mother and that rascally wonderful father? Never, Django. No one ever forgets their kind. Especially not their son.”

The garage had a side door. Django let himself in and turned on the lights. Each of his parents’ cars was still in its place as if waiting for them to come back: a silver-blue Mercedes sedan, an old MG convertible with a wooden
dashboard, a white Land Rover. But at the far end of the garage one space was unoccupied, and that was why he had come into the garage. In order to believe that they were really gone, he had to see the empty space where the gorgeous new Ferrari should have been. That empty space was more definitive than all the explanations given by Ira and Mr. Guerin and Mrs. Hancock.

He opened the door of the Mercedes and slipped in behind the wheel. The car was only a few months old and still smelled new, but his mother had left a scarf on the passenger seat, and when he wrapped it around his neck, the scent of her perfume was still in the fibers. Yesterday or that morning, an hour ago, he would have wept; but at that moment, alone and unobserved, his eyes were dry. Possibly he had used up his lifetime supply of tears.