Hummingbird Salamander(34)
The blazing-white kitchen island eclipsed most of the rest. The off-white walls faded into the backdrop. A coffee table in the living room and a couple more chairs. Generic landscape paintings on the wall. The smell wasn’t new apartment or old apartment, but stripped apartment.
Over the fireplace, perched precarious on the mantel: three foxes, fur tattered and mangy. Old taxidermy, with clipped fiberglass paws. A male, female, and kit. Whoever or whatever they had fallen afoul of, death had come long ago. The male had a dusty bluish tint to his coat from overapplication of chemicals.
They had no eyes.
Did that mean someone had gotten to a clue before me?
My blood pressure had risen. I had expected, I guess, more evidence of a secret life. Some comfort in the mundane. Books, magazines, a better sense of her.
Instead: cautious, precise. Why had I expected the disorganized mind of a hoarder anyway? Because my mother had lived that way, and that’s what the past meant to me. An accumulation of crap.
But I was already there. I would search among the non-wreckage to glean any possible clue. I put down Shovel Pig and got to work. I checked behind every painting. Nothing. I went through the few cabinets and drawers, entered a bedroom stripped down to the mattress.
No one and nothing lurking in the closet.
I came back into the common space, feeling an urgency. I picked up the foxes and rattled them. Solid. And still I was shameful, disrespectful, in my desperation to be thorough but to finish fast. I treated those bodies like objects. I tore the first two foxes apart, just in case. Massacred them again. Nothing. Nothing in them.
The third, the kit, remained in position on the mantel. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tear it apart, too. There was in its scruffy decay a kind of ancient, vulnerable quality combined with youth that overwhelmed me.
Something about the empty eye sockets got to me. And I saw.
Three sets.…. . from Silvina’s note … and three foxes. It could be. It could not be.
Where did they stare? Where did the last one stare?
The balcony and a dead houseplant in a large ceramic container, flanked by faded falling-apart lawn chairs.
I slid the door open, went out on the balcony. The “railing” came up to my waist and was made of thick concrete. I didn’t think I could be seen from the other apartments. No building taller nearby. Just a gridlocked grid stretching, stitched, farther down the hill.
The planter was enormous, the plant housed by it ridiculously small and dead, the soil dry, almost like sand. Even for me it was an effort to lift the planter, make sure nothing was hidden in the saucer beneath. An awkward, unwieldy weight, like trying to lift a concrete ball in a strongman competition.
I put it down again, dug with my bare hands through the porous soil. I had hoped to leave no trace, but that wasn’t possible. I could discard the remains of the foxes, but there was dirt everywhere. My fingernails were caked with evidence of my own crime. I was a mad gardener, searching for roots. I don’t know what I was.
My hands in the dirt felt real. As if I could’ve just done that for an hour, as therapy. But then I encountered something. Way deep down.
With difficulty, I brought the object to the surface. A small black journal, hardback, protected in its own clear plastic case.
A sound came from the street below, carried by the wind. Like a sharp cough. Just that. I froze. Maybe I was wrong, but I felt like I had no more time. Cleaned nothing up—what was the point, I’d been a disruptive mole—ran to the front door. Then realized I was disheveled, covered in dirt, and had left Shovel Pig on the coffee table. Next to the ripped-up foxes.
I stuck the journal in my waistband, on the side. Tried to get clean in the bathroom, gathered my belongings, put the poor foxes in the bedroom closet.
Ran down the stairs. Only slowed to a walk out on the street. I didn’t think anyone was following me as I headed into the office.
Something nagged at me. Something I’d forgotten to check in the apartment, but it eluded me.
As if I’d failed. That there had been something else I was supposed to find.
[41]
Larry had been the victim of a hit-and-run in the parking garage the night before. For once, he’d been working late. Details were sparse. It had happened in a corner not covered by a surveillance camera or the camera had been broken. The irony. He’d been seen arguing with someone right before. A parking attendant had called an ambulance, and, in the confusion, no one at the office had known about it until the morning.
Larry, in the hospital, with broken ribs and broken collarbone and a broken arm. Larry, not yet conscious, but his wife said his phone and wallet had been taken. The car ransacked after he was hit. “Cold-blooded,” is how Alex put it. Alex had already been to the hospital, as had some of the rest of the staff. Allie was ashen. I didn’t have to apologize to anyone for coming in late. No one cared.
I made supportive, sympathetic noises. I chipped in as a cup went around for money for flowers and a card. I said I’d visit later that day. But I wouldn’t. I kept thinking of the watcher in the yard. Larry wouldn’t be answering questions for a while. If I was right, Larry would just be … bait. As I tried to see things from the point of view of a private eye. Which meant, be paranoid. Which meant shoving aside the uncomfortable idea that I was complicit in Larry’s condition. Ironically, this wasn’t the first lapse in garage security. I could be wrong.