Hummingbird Salamander(29)

In addition to the main corporation and its subsidiaries, there were, as always, a flurry of shell companies and investments in other corporations. (Incorp Corp, Inc., was my favorite.) Which was where the crude and the blunt became a knot.

I wasn’t yet ready to undo the knot. I just needed to know what company names Vilcapampa had operated under in the Pacific Northwest, to get a sense of other physical locations that might hold the clue to a hummingbird, a salamander.

The easiest thing was to locate the properties Silvina herself held or leased. What was in her name? The storage palace, until recently, because so unprofitable, no doubt. The history there was fraught. Her father had basically bought the whole mountain, fenced off most of it, and had briefly intended to continue an abandoned mining operation near the summit. Except permits had been difficult to get due to community concerns, and he’d withdrawn from the effort after a year or two. Contented himself with some halfhearted logging.

Which fit a pattern: whenever Vilcapampa Senior seemed on the verge of being in the public eye, the shell companies would retreat and he would move on to something else. But he rarely parted with the properties, clearly preferring they lie derelict than be sold to anyone else. In 2007, perhaps at Silvina’s initiative, a lot of money had been sunk into trying to create a second storage palace farther up the mountain, and they’d even broken ground. Perhaps to salvage the initial investment. But then the 2008 recession hit, and Silvina or her father had decided to abandon the idea. Leaving just a storage unit business in the foothills that dipped in and out of the red. Tax shelter?

Shortly thereafter, it felt as if her father had lost his last scrap of patience with Silvina. Or he’d discovered the money she’d stolen from him. I couldn’t tell which came first. Or if the company had recovered the funds. Nor even how much money Silvina had stolen. It must have been a lot, because from then on she had to provide for herself.

I also found an apartment that she’d owned until a year before and then sold. Occupied. Had been rented by Silvina to a series of what looked like college students. No clues there.

But: where had Silvina lived while surveilling me? No record of it.

After another drink, another thought: that she could have been watching the house. That she could have known all kinds of facts about my family.

The veering, the drift—it told me I was rattled. I bore down, there at the bar, holding court with my fourth drink. Ten in the end. Ten companies I could find with connections to Vilcapampa. Thirty properties. I scanned the lists trying to visualize the parts of town. The neighborhoods. The purpose of each. Some were leased as gas stations or hardware stores. Others as restaurants. A fair amount of commercial property. But also apartment complexes.

It wasn’t until I wrote the addresses down, until I looked at the full list, that it hit me.

The numbers. From behind the hummingbird’s eyes: 23 and 51.

And right in the middle of Silvina’s properties: 3215 Avalon Boulevard.

That had to mean something.

Registered to a tenant that didn’t exist. Alexander Humboldt. Clever, but not clever.

It wasn’t that I suddenly became sober. It was that I was exuberantly, profoundly drunk. Maybe because it made me forget about Fusk. Maybe because it felt manageable: checking out an apartment in my hometown.

I felt like I’d won the lottery.

But, really, it was what Silvina wanted me to find.





THE DAMAGE





[35]


I knew the risk in giving myself over to Silvina’s mystery. I did, on some level, know. But on another level, this drift felt more like depth to me. I wasn’t drifting; I was being pulled deeper, and, with each step I took, I learned more, and thought that just around the corner … it would end. I would have the answers and, tug of disappointment, life would return to normal.

Knowledge was power, right? That’s what Alex liked to say, because he liked to say simple things. But the truth is, I enjoyed the sensation as much as I enjoyed badly lit bars and unfamiliar men, as if losing your balance was a kind of pleasure. That sweet retreat from control and yet you knew someone was in control.

Because Silvina was always there, far ahead of me, even though she was dead. Beckoning me on, and me too stupid, or too smart, not to follow.

As the plane landed and I turned my phone back on, I remember thinking: what world was I returning to? Would this be the time something had happened to make it unrecognizable?

On the familiar route from the airport to the house, the weather had turned warm and humid even though it was winter. In a day or two, it would freeze again. Bees would die in confusion. The plants that had bloomed out of season would fade and decay. Alerts popping up that a pandemic raged in far-distant places.

Almost dusk, but enough of that dark gold, late-afternoon light. Staring once again out the window, observer in my own life, I saw the holding pond around the corner from home. The crosshatched branches of a beaver’s lodge, there, where the creek became something human-made.

I hadn’t seen it before, the pond or the lodge. Not really. It had registered as dead branches, just something clogging up the system. And maybe this time, too, for the last time. I can’t recall if I passed that way again; it wasn’t the usual route. But that time or the next, I saw it as a home. As someone’s home. Something’s home. Right in the middle of our subdivision. And how had that happened? Weren’t they supposed to be out there, in the parks, in the wilderness? That was the agreement. Not here. Not with us. Beside us.