Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(50)
June kept looking at him, but differently now.
“Anyway, my mom always had a big pot of soup on the stove, homemade bread in the oven. It was a small town, and word got around, not just our town but the ones around us, too. Mrs. Ash would feed you, would take you in. Her cousin was the county police dispatcher, and she made sure the word spread. So, once or twice a year, some kid would appear on the front porch, stay for dinner, and somehow still be there for breakfast. No questions asked, but sooner or later, they’d start to talk. If they stayed more than a few days, my dad and my uncle Jerry would put them to work on the Saturday crew, boys and girls both. Teach them how to do something useful, frame a wall or wire a light switch. Hang siding.” He smiled. “A couple guys stayed long enough to learn how to build cabinets. We were like the world’s smallest trade school.”
“Didn’t people ever show up to take their kids home? I bet that could get ugly.”
“Yeah, people get weird about their kids,” said Peter. “It’s an ownership thing. Tommy’s mom came by with an ax, a lit cigarette hanging out of her mouth. The burns on Tommy’s arms were barely scabbed over.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. My dad kept a shotgun by the back door. My mom has the cops on speed-dial. Tommy stayed with us a few more weeks. By then we’d found his grandmother in Green Bay.”
“Your mom didn’t just feed them,” said June.
“Oh, no. She was big on life skills. More like boot camp for early independence. Cook basic meals, keep yourself clean, keep the house clean. Boy or girl, that was the rule. Everybody learns everything. The older kids, she’d help find them jobs, start a savings account, even get their GED. And do something creative, always. My mom still teaches art at NMU, but that’s mostly for the health insurance. She’s really an artist, paint and watercolor. The last time I talked to her she was taking a welding class. My aunt plays about ten different instruments in bar bands all over three states. She always said if she had bigger hands she’d be the female Jelly Roll Morton.”
“That must have been hard on you, with all those other people in the house.”
“I learned a lot,” said Peter. “It definitely made me independent. I was pretty wild myself.”
She snorted. “I can only imagine.”
22
Back on I-5, June took them through downtown, with Puget Sound shining gunmetal gray through the gaps in the office buildings and condo towers, then got off again at Olive Way. She headed east up a steep hill through a dense neighborhood with a funky jumble of mismatched buildings and a lot of construction, the whole thing evidently in a constant state of evolution. Cars were thick on the streets. Peter figured parking would be at a premium here. The narrow, disorderly roads tangled and turned according to the needs of the hillside on which they ran. People were out on foot and on bicycles undeterred by the wet weather. Rain gear seemed to be a fashion accessory here.
“This is Capitol Hill,” June said, playing tour guide and pointing out the sights. “My neighborhood. That’s Glo’s, great breakfast. The Coastal Kitchen is up on Fifteenth, awesome breakfast. The Hi-Spot is down the hill in Madrona, maybe we’ll go there tomorrow for their green eggs and ham. And Caffe Ladro to the left, best coffee in town. Much better than Starbucks.” She knocked him with an elbow. “You’re not allowed to go to Starbucks unless it’s a national emergency.”
All the landmarks she pointed out were food-related. Peter took mental notes.
“Seattle was built on seven hills, or so they say.” She waved her hand behind her. “Queen Anne Hill is northwest of us, First Hill to the south. Denny Hill they bulldozed years ago, and used the dirt to fill in the tidal flats.”
At the top of the hill, she got off the main drag and drove expertly through the residential side streets lined with parked cars, often turning them into de facto one-lane roads. She turned left and right at seemingly arbitrary intersections that moved them through the streetscape at a much faster rate of speed than the main drag. She gave cyclists a wide berth, but played chicken ruthlessly with oncoming cars, forcing them over so she could continue at speed. It was about a mile to her place on the far side of the hill, she said.
“Do me a favor and slow down,” said Peter. “Circle around, starting about three blocks out. I want to see every street around your place.”
She raised her eyebrows and gave him a sideways look, but turned left and lightened her lead foot. “What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Anything unusual.”
“This is Capitol Hill,” she said. “It’s all unusual.”
It was true, Peter had never seen a burly bearded drag queen wearing a transparent plastic raincoat over a leopard-print minidress with five-inch platform heels. Or a 1970s Lincoln Continental turned into a kind of dragon-car, with an elaborate toothy snout in the front, spines along the rooftop, and a tail up in the air at the back, suspended somehow by a cable from the roof. But was any of that more odd than a group of women in burkas out for dinner in Baghdad? Or a village of ice fishing shacks on a frozen Wisconsin lake when the temperature hit twenty below? People were weird everywhere. Weird was normal.
“Let’s just say I’ll know it when I see it,” said Peter, his head on a swivel. He wasn’t worried about drag queens or art cars. He was looking for late-model vehicles parked with the engine running, or repeat viewings of men and women on foot, or work vans big enough to hold a surveillance team where there was no evident work being done.