On Turpentine Lane(53)

Which is when spokesman Dolan returned to announce that the racket we were about to hear would be his partners excavating. With crowbars and a concrete cutter.

“What’s there to excavate?” I asked.

“I’ll go down,” Nick said.

“Please.”

He then bestowed a comically dramatic, backward-tilted good-bye kiss as if going off to war. “Bye, baby. We’ll always have Paris”—at the precise moment my mother appeared.

“Nick’s checking on what they’re doing,” I explained.

Was she looking less happily conspiratorial than before her assignment? I said, “That was him being funny, the kiss. That was a line from Casablanca.”

“Who doesn’t know that?” she asked.

Purse strap over one wrist, she repaired to the sink, where she found breakfast mugs and glasses to wash.

“Sit,” I said. “Leave those.”

“I don’t like leaving dishes in the sink.”

“Are you angry? You sound angry.” I lowered my voice. “Are you upset that he smokes pot?”

She shook her head.

“But it’s something.”

“I wasn’t snooping . . .”

“But?”

“Upstairs? Nick’s room? It struck me as very . . . unlived in.”

Should I say yes, he’s neat as a pin, never a thing out of place? Instead, an involuntary smile escaped.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “your room looks very lived in. Your bedclothes . . . tousled. Water glasses and books on each night table.”

“And that’s bad?”

“I’m confused, to say the least.”

“Ma? What do you think two water glasses mean?”

She said flatly, “Two people sleeping together.”

“And that’s so confusing?”

She finally turned off the faucets and dried her hands. “Either your brother got it very wrong, or he was teasing me. Or you’re being played.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Nick. Joel said he was gay.”

I laughed, which lightened nothing. I tried, “Joel was teasing you, Ma. It was his way of avoiding the topic of Nick and me as a possible couple.”

“Is he bisexual?”

“Not bisexual. Not homosexual. Heterosexual.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“When did this start?”

First day I saw him, I thought. “It’s new. Since Christmas.”

She tore a paper towel from the nearby roll and wiped her eyes.

I said, “Please tell me you’re not crying over this.”

“I’m not . . . not really.”

“I still don’t understand what you’d find upsetting, unless it’s your lying son.”

She finally turned away from the sink and faced me. “I knew this time would come—big goings-on in the family . . .” She pointed every which way—me, Nick, the police. “And even though I’m furious with your father, we’re still your parents. When something goes wrong, my first impulse is to pick up the phone and call him. But I don’t make that call, which means he’s won.”

I said, “Is that a reference to terrorists—that if you don’t go about your normal business then Dad the adulterer wins? Because I don’t really see the parallel. You can certainly call Daddy. He’d probably be relieved you were talking to him.” And while I had her at close range, I whispered, “Did you get the stuff?”

“Affirmative,” she whispered.

I patted her purse. “Safe and sound?”

“In the zippered compartment where I keep my pills.”

I heard footsteps on the cellar steps—Nick’s. “There’s an army of them downstairs—a photographer, a videographer, a guy taking notes on every single thing said or done.”

“I asked about that,” said my mother. “They videotape everything in case it goes to trial. Even up here, on their way in. The whole house.”

“Not upstairs?” I asked.

“Just their path from the porch to here and down there,” she said.

“Which reminds me,” Nick said. “Mission accomplished?”

Not as happily conspiratorial as before, she said, “Yes. Found it.”

“Good work.”

“I never said I wanted to drive around town with it in my possession.”

I translated her frosty tone for him. “Mom did a little snooping upstairs. She noticed your room looked unoccupied.”

“And that’s not cool?” he asked.

She didn’t answer except to say, “I’d hardly call it snooping.”

“Did you see anything downstairs?” I asked him. “Do we know any more?”

“They’re ripping up the plywood. They knew there would be a cement subfloor underneath it, and there is.”

“Is there any chance it’s money buried down there?” my mother asked. “Or jewelry, or papers of some kind?”

I said, “The warrant said ‘blood.’ You can’t go to court and get a warrant to search for bloodstains if you’re really looking for buried treasure.”