A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(7)

“Look,” China began.

“Forget it,” he said. “It sounds stupid to you. I sound stupid to you.”

“Did I say that?”

“I don’t want to live like the rest of the world—eight-to-five working for the man and a lousy paycheck—but you don’t approve of that. You think there’s only one way to live and if anyone has a different idea, it’s bullshit, stupid, and liable to end them up in jail.”

“Where’s all this coming from?”

“What I’m supposed to do, according to you, is work for peanuts, save the peanuts, and put enough of the peanuts together so I can end up married with a mortgage and kids and a wife who will maybe be more of a wife and a mother than Mom was to anyone. But that’s your life plan, okay? It isn’t mine.” He flung the burbling hose to the ground, where water flowed onto the dusty lawn.

“This has nothing to do with anyone’s life plan. It’s basic sense. Look at what you’re proposing, for God’s sake. Look at what’s been proposed to you.”

“Money,” he said. “Five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars that I God damn need.”

“So you can buy a boat you know nothing about running? To take people out fishing God only knows where? Think things through for once, okay? If not the boat then at least the courier idea.”

“Me?” He barked a laugh. “I should think things through? Just when the hell’re you going to do that?”

“Me? What—”

“It’s really amazing. You can tell me how to live my life while yours is a running joke and you don’t even know it. And here I am, giving you a decent chance to get out of it for the first time in what...ten years?

more?...and all you—”

“What? Get out of what?”

“—can do is put me down. Because you don’t like the way I live. And you won’t see the way you live is worse.”

“What do you know about the way I live?” She felt her own anger now. She hated the way her brother turned conversations. If you wanted to have a discussion with him about the choices he’d made or wanted to make, he invariably turned the spotlight onto you. That spotlight always became an attack in which only the nimble-footed could emerge unscathed. “I haven’t seen you for months. You show up here, break into my house, tell me you need my help in some shady deal, and when I don’t cooperate the way you expect me to, suddenly everything becomes my fault. But I’m not going to play that game.”

“Sure. You’d rather play the one Matt’s got going.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” China demanded. But at the mention of Matt, she couldn’t help it: She felt the skeletal finger of fear touch her spine.

“God, China. You think I’m stupid. But when the hell’re you going to figure things out?”

“Figure what things? What are you talking about?”

“All this about Matt. Living for Matt. Saving your money ‘for me and Matt and the future.’ It’s ludicrous. No. It’s sure-as-hell pathetic. You’re standing right in front of me with your head so far up your butt that you haven’t figured out—” He stopped himself. It seemed as if he suddenly remembered where he was, with whom he was, and what had gone before to bring them both to this place. He stooped and grabbed up the hose, carrying it back to the house and turning the water off. He coiled the hose back to the ground with too much precision.

China watched him. It seemed to her suddenly that all that was her life—her past and her future—was reduced by fire to this single moment. Knowing and not, simultaneously.

“What do you know about Matt?” she asked her brother. Part of the answer she knew already. For the three of them had been teenagers together in the same ramshackle neighbourhood in a town called Orange where Matt was a surfer, Cherokee his acolyte, and China a shadow cast by both. But part of the answer she had never known because it had been hidden in the hours and the days that the two boys had gone alone to ride the waves in Huntington Beach.

“Forget it.” Cherokee moved past her and returned to the house. She followed him. But he didn’t stop in the kitchen or the living room. Instead, he walked straight through, swung the screen door open, and stepped onto the warped front porch. There he stopped, squinting out at the bright dry street where the sun beat down on the cars parked there and a gust of wind whoosh ed dead leaves against the pavement.

“You’d better tell me where you’re heading with this,” China said.

“You started something. You might as well finish it.”

“Forget it,” he said.

“You said pathetic. You said ludicrous. You said a game.”

“It slipped out,” he said. “I was pissed off.”

“You talk to Matt, don’t you? You must still see him when he visits his parents. What do you know, Cherokee? Is he...” She didn’t know if she could actually say it, so reluctant was she in truth to know. But there were his lengthy absences, his trips to New York, the cancellation of their plans together. There was the fact that he lived in LA when he wasn’t traveling and there were all the times when he was at home but still too busy with his work to make a weekend with her. She’d told herself all this meant nothing, placed in the scales against which she measured their years together. But her doubts had grown, and now they stood before her, asking to be embraced or obliterated.