A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(209)

When later asked if they had regrets about parting with something so valuable, Ferguson’s mother and son said, “It gave us a surprise to think of what was hanging in the house all those years” and “Heck, it was what Dad wanted and that’s good enough for me.” For her part, Sister Monica Casey admitted to “heart flutters aplenty” and she explained that they would sell the de Hooch at auction once they had it properly cleaned and restored. In the meantime, she’d told the newspaper reporter, the Sisters of Mercy would keep the de Hooch “some place quite safe.”

But not safe enough, St. James thought. That fact had put the ball in motion.

He clicked on the succeeding stories and he felt little surprise at the manner in which events had unfolded in Santa Ana, California. He read them quickly—for that was all the time it took to ascertain how Pieter de Hooch’s St. Barbara had made the journey from St. Clare’s Hospital to Guy Brouard’s home—and he printed up the relevant ones. He gathered them together with a paper clip. He went upstairs. Deborah made tea as China alternately picked up the telephone receiver and dropped it back into its cradle, sometimes punching in a few numbers, sometimes not even getting that far. On their walk back to the Queen Margaret Apartments, she had finally decided to phone her mother. She had to be informed what was going on with Cherokee, China said. But now that she faced the Moment of Truth, as she called it, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. So she’d punch in the numbers for the international line. She’d punch in the number one for the United States. She’d even get as far as punching in the area code for Orange, California. But then she’d lose her nerve.

As Deborah measured out the tea, China explained her hesitation. This turned out to be the child of her superstition. “It’s like I’ll jinx things for him if I call.”

Deborah recalled her using this expression before. Think you’ll do well on a photographic assignment or perhaps an exam and you’d fail completely, having jinxed yourself in advance. Say that you expect a phone call from your boyfriend and you’d jinx the possibility of his calling. Remark upon the ease with which traffic was flowing on one of California’s massive motorways, and you were sure to hit an accident and a four-mile tailback in the next ten minutes. Deborah had named this kind of skewed thinking “The Law of Chinaland,” and she had grown quite used to being careful not to jinx a situation while she lived with China in Santa Barbara. She said, “How would it jinx things, though?”

“I don’t know for sure. It just feels like that. Like I’ll call her and tell her what’s going on, and she’ll come over, and then everything will just get worse.”

“But that seems to violate the basic law of Chinaland,” Deborah observed. “At least the way I remember it.” She set the electric kettle to boil. At Deborah’s use of the old term, China smiled, it seemed in spite of herself. “How?” she asked.

“Well, as I recall how things work in Chinaland, you aim for the direct opposite of what you truly want. You don’t let Fate know what you have in mind so that Fate can’t get in there and cock things up. You go round the back way. You sneak up on what you want.”

“Fake the bastard out,” China murmured.

“Right.” Deborah took mugs from the cupboard. “In this particular case, it seems to me that you have to ring your mum. You have no choice. If you ring her and insist that she come to Guernsey—”

“She doesn’t even have a passport, Debs.”

“Which is all the better. It will cause enormous trouble for her to get here.”

“Not to mention the expense.”

“Mmmm. Yes. That practically guarantees success.” Deborah leaned against the work top. “She must get a passport quickly. That means a trip to...where?”

“Los Angeles. Federal Building. Off the San Diego Freeway.”

“Past the airport?”

“Way past. Past Santa Monica even.”

“Wonderful. All that ghastly traffic. All that difficulty. So she must go there first and get her passport. She must make all her travel arrangements. She must fly to London and then to Guernsey. And having gone to all that trouble—herself in a state of tearing anxiety—”

“She gets here to find that it’s all been resolved.”

“Probably one hour before she arrives.” Deborah smiled. “And voilà. The Law of Chinaland in action. All that trouble and all that expense. For nothing, as things turn out.” Behind her, the kettle clicked off. She poured water into a stout green teapot, took that to the table, and gestured for China to join her there. “But if you don’t ring her...”

China left the phone and came into the kitchen. Deborah waited for her to conclude the thought. Instead of doing so, however, China sat and fingered one of the tea mugs, turning it slowly between her palms. She said, “I gave up that kind of thinking a while back. It was always only a game anyway. But it stopped working. Or maybe I stopped working. I don’t know.” She pushed the mug to one side. “It started with Matt. Did I ever tell you? When we were teenagers. I walk past his house and if I don’t look to see if he’s in the garage or mowing the lawn for his mom or something, if I don’t even think about him when I pass by, he’ll be there. But if I look or if I think about him—even think his name—then he won’t be. It always worked. So I went on with it. If I act indifferent, he’ll be interested in me. If I don’t want to date him, he’ll want to date me. If I think he’ll never even want to kiss me goodnight, he’ll do it. He’ll have to. He’ll be desperate to. At one level I always knew that wasn’t how things really work in the world—thinking and saying the exact opposite of what you truly want—but once I started seeing the world that way —playing that game— I just kept going. It ended up with: Plan out a life with Matt and it’ll never happen. Forge ahead on my own, and there he’ll be, panting to hook up permanently.”