Hummingbird Salamander(70)
The bar from last night was not on her list. A little out of range, or too rough for a used-car salesman.
“He has a poker night with Ed on Fridays. It’s at Turtle’s.”
Tomorrow was Friday. I knew Turtle Fred’s. A weird regional chain, with franchises always built next to a pond. Stormwater. Wastewater. Natural. Didn’t matter, it seemed. Served wings. I hadn’t eaten there because it had several health citations, and the folks hanging out in the parking lot tended to be conducting business.
“Who’s Ed?”
“A high school buddy. They played baseball together. Most of his friends are Ed’s friends.”
The breakfast came: poached eggs on toast for her, a full breakfast of scrambled eggs, hash browns, corned beef hash, sausage, and oatmeal for me.
While we ate, mostly in silence, I marveled at how the world worked today.
Here a woman could worry about her husband cheating on her while just two hundred miles inland there was a mass exodus of disaster refugees headed north to a Canada that might not take them in. A “sanctuary” where aquifers and other water sources were drying up. In the Midwest, privatized security forces were brawling with protesters in the streets of small towns. Disease outbreaks had led to mass slaughter of affected livestock. While stocks remained bullish about the future even as the window for reversing climate change had shrunk to an unreachable dot.
What would Silvina think if she could see me now, in light of all that? An unanswerable question.
The grease on my breakfast plate brought a singe of warehouse to my nostrils. The snout of a badger with only one glass eye, shoved up against my face. On fire. The stench.
To cover my distress, I shoveled the last of my eggs and hash browns into my face. Eat the smell, eat the memory. Didn’t quite work.
“You might start by watching his office at the car dealership. It’s a separate building. He’s supposed to come home for lunch but hasn’t been.”
“Sounds like a good lead,” I said, cheery. “That’s where I’ll start. Then Turtle’s tomorrow.” A lie. Turtle’s today, to scope it out.
I’d learned clients didn’t like my smile, but “amiable” and “suggestible” were traits I could at least play-pretend.
“Oh, yes—so how long did you say you’ve been doing this?” she asked, in a way that made me feel like she’d forgotten the first line in a script.
Three months?
“Six years.”
Nora smiled, and I felt a sense of responsibility. But, then, I liked solving these cases. I wanted to solve them. At least it meant I’d solved something.
“Is that enough to go on? Especially his office? That’s important.”
“Yes. But, if possible, I need his Social Security number, driver’s license number—to check if he has any secret credit cards. Things like that.”
She blanched, then nodded. “Sure.”
By the date I was supposed to report back to her, I might have taken a case somewhere else, never come back to this town. If all went well, I would’ve performed some subtle surgery on her husband’s credit cards. Not enough for someone sleeping around to bother reporting. Along with letting the man know someone knew his secret. That would count for some sort of revenge.
Strange, how it felt like Nora needed the structure of hiring a detective to do what she might have done herself. Strange, how I needed the structure of a client. But those were strange times all the way around.
[74]
Some days I had the self-important or selfish or totally appropriate thought that I had broken something with my fall. That all over the world people were jumping off balconies and breaking the planet. But the truth was what Silvina had seen: we were already ghosts. We just kept haunting each other for no reason. Even as we kept awaiting the mortal blow. But there would be no mortal blow, just endless depths.
Yet there I was … on the houseboat Silvina had used so many years ago, back when it hadn’t been a rotting shithole.
A useless task, I’d found. A floating derelict, not even a reliquary. No note to me stuck down the side of the molding plastic cushions on the weird, low yellow couch. No secret compartment under the floorboards. No remnant of any kind.
All I found was a creased map of Unitopia on the coffee table. Too jaded to think it meant anything. To hope that Silvina’s hands had actually touched it. I wondered if she had ever gone back, what she would’ve thought of the overgrown, half-abandoned version? How ironic if the kind of place Silvina had imagined could only begin to truly exist once the construct called “Unitopia” became derelict.
Obscuring her presence further: all the others who had visited the houseboat since she’d left. This gave me evidence of Silvina’s cult, but that was no kind of evidence at all. First of all, it was ancient. No one had been there for a year at least. A little, spiderwebbed shrine with candles and letters. People who had lost touch with her but knew the houseboat story. People cast out from her inner circle until there had been no circle, nor even a parallel line. The curled-up edges of handwritten pages a rushed, breathless tribute to Silvina’s waning soft power. The pathetic fallacy of a plate of brownies left for Silvina, as if she were Santa Claus. Moldy, and ossified into oblivion, recognizable only through forensic investigation.
I’d been puzzled by the pink sticky remains of some soft insulation applied to the bedroom walls. Only to realize Silvina had put up crude soundproofing and her devotees had pulled off most of it as mementos.