Table of Contents

Titlepage

Critical Acclaim for Blue and Abigail Padgett

Fiction by Abigail Padgett

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright

About Bywater Books

Critical Acclaim for Blue and Abigail Padgett

“The gifted author of the Bo Bradley mysteries kicks off her equally impressive new series with three bangs . . . suspenseful, boldly plotted.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Blue McCarron is a mouthy lesbian psychologist whose rat-a-tat-tat narration is the best part of this delightful detective story.”

—The Advocate

“Ms. Padgett knows how to tell a story with passion and purpose.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Superior . . . highly recommended . . . Padgett is a stylist of an extremely high order.”

—Houston Chronicle

“A daring and obviously gifted writer.”

—Chicago Tribune

“A completely webbed, very literate mystery, rich with idiosyncratic characters, insightful.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Padgett has become an excellent storyteller, and she builds suspense skillfully to an exciting climax . . . a promising new mystery series.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[This] witty, suspenseful lesbian-detective thriller is hard to resist.”

—Booklist

“An interesting who-done-it, fully constructed around a viable, courageous, and gay heroine, who will steal the heart and soul of readers. The mystery is fun and exciting . . . Padgett has imbued her new series with a feminist will that will leave fans feeling blue if more works are not soon released.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Blue is sassy, tough, scared, vulnerable, and funny—a great new character from Padgett.”

—Library Journal

“Here’s a mystery that’ll knock you flat . . . Padgett is an excellent writer.”

—Bay Area Reporter (CA)

“Well written with an interesting and enchanting heroine.”

—Sullivan County Democrat (NY)

“A complex, compelling, and ultimately satisfying mystery.”

—North County Times (CA)

“A page-turner . . . original and inventive.”

—Phoenix Echo

“The author’s sixth novel is well written . . . fast-paced. Sometimes funny. Quite literate. And quirky. Really quirky.”

—Lafayette Star Press (IN)

“Padgett is a sensitive, convincing writer with strong descriptive powers and a moving appreciation of small children that makes new novels so compelling.”

—Ottawa Citizen

Fiction by Abigail Padgett

Blue McCarron Mysteries

Blue

The Last Blue Plate Special

Bo Bradley Mysteries

Child of Silence

Strawgirl

Moonbird Boy

Turtle Baby

The Dollmaker’s Daughters

Stork Boy

Other Novels

Mandy Dru Mysteries

Bone Blind

The Paper Doll Museum

An Unremembered Grave

A Kiss at Morgan’s Bay

A Secret at Morgan’s Bay

To Johanna.

“Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”

Monique Wittig, Les Guérillè

Chapter One

When I was ten years old my godmother announced through clouds of Marlboro smoke that I was definitely not an old soul. It was clear, she explained, that I carried no baggage from previous incarnations and therefore should be encouraged to explore life without the usual annoying constraints. After all, I was starting at zero and had a lot to learn.

But for those long-ago remarks I might not have been here in the middle of the California desert when the body was found. I might have restrained my personal anarchy and conformed. I might have been a regular person, probably an insurance agent in the Midwest. State Farm. It’s unlikely that I would have been anywhere near Wren’s Gulch, California, less than three weeks ago when something large wrapped in a heavy-duty lawn and leaf bag began to thaw in a public freezer only ten minutes from my pool.

Not that I knew what was there and thawing, of course. But I think of that package now, the frozen blood melting, a pale hand moving sluggishly in the dark. Imperceptible movements. Lifeless but significant, nonetheless.

Sometimes I think of these small motions as a last warning, a danger signal I would have ignored in any event. At other times I just wonder what it felt like, trussing an adult human body tightly in the fetal position with lengths of clothesline. Then tucking it into a plastic bag and rolling it into a public frozen food locker.

It’s been twenty-five years since my godmother, Carter Upchurch, found temporary enlightenment with a New Age group and cheerfully defined the nature of my soul. But I haven’t forgotten. When Carter arrived at my childhood home that day for one of her visits with my mother, I had just created and then arranged for the dramatic kidnapping of an imaginary set of parents whose sole function was to supplant the jolly tedium of the real set, Elizabeth and Jake. I was between the fictional scenarios with which I entertained myself. And I was thrilled to hear Carter’s summation of me as a daring seeker who would never be bored. A New Age baby soul. Perhaps a bit of a flake.

The concept stuck. Without it I clearly would have been somewhere other than here when Beatrice “Muffin” Crandall, a sixty-one-year-old widow, confessed on the day the body was discovered to bashing a stranger in the head with a paperweight five years in the past. Then, she told police, she stored the stranger in a public freezer for half a decade. I read the San Diego newspaper account of her crime with interest but failed to imagine that I might have a role in its consequences. This perfectly ordinary oversight pales in comparison to the succession of dangerously erroneous assumptions I would soon make.

The body was found after a minor earthquake rumbled beneath the desert floor near San Diego. The quake disarmed the automatic timer on the generator at a public food locker called Roadrunner Ice and Food Storage outside the little desert town of Borrego Springs, where I live. Or at least where I reside. Roadrunner’s proprietor, a retired high school chemistry teacher with a lust for blackjack, was in Las Vegas when the temblor occurred. The temperature in Borrego Springs that day hovered around a hundred and fifteen. Nowhere near a record for the last week of August. Nothing unusual. Except at the locker.

I’m convinced that Brontë and I were swimming in the motel pool when the timer failed and everything in the Roadrunner began to thaw. I like to troll images of things past for those moments in which cosmic inevitability becomes for the first time completely obvious. I’m a social psychologist, so this hobby isn’t as weird as it sounds, although I am. I choose to believe that Brontë and I were swimming on that day less than two weeks ago when a man thawed inside a lawn and leaf bag and slumped against the locker door. We were undoubtedly still by the pool when the backcountry sheriff’s department arrived in Borrego Springs to assign the body its fictitious name, “Jose Doe.” The Spanish-American takeoff on “John Doe” never fails to make me think of square dancing.

I choose to remember that Brontë looked rather dashing then in the teal green life jacket that enables her to stay in the pool long after her lean Doberman legs have tired of dog-paddling. Human memory is quite selective, and I tend to select images in which things look dashing.

Certainly we were playing catch in the pool that day with a sodden orange tennis ball that might have been a small sun bursting through blue chlorine spray. Eventually I’ll assign a title and music to this picture, a soundtrack. Sun/Woman/Dog. Mozart, probably. But for now there is only silence echoing brilliant light on water. That was the moment in which a process began that would force me to remember a woman named Misha Deland, even though I’d just spent two years successfully forgetting her.

Social psychology is the academic discipline in which I earned the dubious right to call myself “Doctor,” but my business card says merely “B. McCarron, Consulting.” The “B” stands for Blue, the only first name I’ve used since leaving Waterloo, Illinois, for college at eighteen. Names like “Blue” do not inspire confidence in businesspeople, however. Hence the more acceptable “B.”

My increasingly adequate income is derived from advising retailers, mostly male, about the social psychology of women. The retailers are not aware that their wives and daughters could tell them exactly the same things that I tell them, without my exorbitant fees. They are also not aware that even shopping may be traced to its roots in primate behavior. To a man they have not read my book, an academic press release of my doctoral dissertation, which was roundly trashed as retro-Darwinian by postmodernists at the time of its publication. Postmodernists really hate the fact that males and females are innately different, and I agree that the concept is scarcely groundbreaking, merely supportable. Nevertheless, my book remains the answer to gangs, rape, drugs, teen pregnancy, and political imperialism, if only the right people would read it. Which is not to say that no one reads it. At least one man did.

My book, Ape, is responsible for my involvement in the Muffin Crandall case. Somebody read it. Then he showed up beside my pool on the first day in September, a Wednesday, two days after the body was found, displaying straight white teeth and the kind of hands that remind people of statues they saw when they were children. Big, out-of-proportion hands with no cuticles at the base of nails like shovels. I was, as usual, nude in the pool. And Brontë lost no time snarling her way up the net ladder I’d secured for her in a corner of the deep end.

Significantly, Brontë came to Misha and me four years ago after her owner, very drunk at his thirteenth birthday party, dressed the dog in his older sister’s underwear and sprayed beer foam on her. Finally, she nipped him. That same night the boy’s father, who had provided the lads with a case of brew and three of his milder porn videos as a birthday treat, drove the Doberman to a twenty-four-hour emergency animal clinic in San Diego. He explained that the dog had savagely attacked a child engaged in what he regarded as normal boyish hijinks. The father paid the euthanasia fee in cash.

But a clinic night attendant, an acquaintance of Misha’s from one of the multitude of feminist groups invited to meet in our apartment, phoned at two in the morning begging that we drive into the city and rescue the Doberman before a lull in emergency room traffic permitted the on-duty vet enough time to load and discharge a syringe. That’s how Brontë came to live with us, later with me. Not unreasonably, the scent of testosterone enrages her.

“Brontë, stay!” I bellowed as the man executed an impressive scramble to the top of the eight-foot chain link fence I installed around the pool to prevent its use as a watering hole by the larger desert fauna. The smaller fauna I net from the filter baffle each morning, waterlogged or dead. Limp mice, lizards, the occasional snake. These serve as a constant reminder that I don’t really belong here anymore than the pool does, but I love the solitude and the truth is, where else would I go? A tribute to careful training, Brontë froze at my command, forelegs flat on the pool decking, hindlegs paddling against the net ladder. But I could feel her ongoing snarl like a current that raised the invisible pelt of hair all over my body.

“I’ve read your goddamn book,” the man yelled from atop my fence. “I want to hire you.”

Sullen, he said no more and looked away as I climbed the shallow-end steps and pulled on the shorts and T-shirt I’d tossed on a chaise lounge. Dressing while dripping wet in the presence of strange men is always awkward, and old habits die hard. I remembered the smoke-enshrouded Carter Upchurch as I stashed my panties and bra under a bright blue chaise cushion. In addition to the knowledge that I was a new soul, Carty impressed upon my juvenile brain the concept that men should never see female undergarments except those designed as erotic props. This injunction applied also, Carty noted, to the eyes of my twin brother, David, who is now called “Hammer” and won’t see another brassiere until the Missouri State Pa­role Board releases him from a razor-wire cage full of people noteworthy for their lack of breasts.

Any clinical psychologist would surmise correctly that David is the reason for my research into human behavior as it breaks down by gender. We’re twins for God’s sake. Same parents, same house, food, church, and school. But David is a public menace and I’m not. Who wouldn’t be curious?

“Hire me to do what?” I inquired after helping Brontë from the pool and instructing her to sit. Competently, she managed the predictable canine flapping and spraying of water from a seated position. The electric snarl became a rumble of small tympani, but her eyes never left the man on the fence.

“A job,” he replied with an economy of presentation I would later understand was simply his style. At the moment it seemed insufficient.

“I guess you didn’t notice the sequence of no trespassing signs, the locked gate across the only access to my property, and the Doberman in the pool,” I pointed out. “If this were a hiring hall you’d have seen a coffee pot and a framed black-and-white glossy of Jimmy Hoffa. Either get the hell out of here or I say a word that frees this dog from the constraints of civilization while I dash inside to get into something more comfortable. Like the shoulder holster hanging on the other side of that door.”

I tipped my head in the general direction of all twelve doors anonymously facing the pool. There was nothing behind nine of them but bare cement floor and unpainted drywall.

“In the holster is a loaded Glock nine millimeter,” I added.

I didn’t mention the old single-shot bolt-action .22 rifle that was also in there somewhere. It was one of a matched set given David and me on our ninth birthday by our father, Father Jake McCarron. An ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, Dad nonetheless had and has a regrettable fondness for things that go bang.

David carried the concept a step further, beginning with con­venience stores and ending with a St. Louis bank. The St. Louis Post Dispatch said that during the attempted robbery my brother shot holes in two Tiffany glass panels, a plaster frieze depicting scenes from St. Louis’s early fur trade, and an enormous Made-in-Taiwan vase holding silk frangipani and bleached ostrich feathers. Men, for reasons explained in Ape, are sometimes made uneasy by large floral arrangements.

The man on my fence was being made uneasy by gravity. Baseball-sized biceps were straining to hold what looked like about a hundred and sixty-five pounds at the level of the horizon, while his heavy boots clanged uselessly against the chain link. Men in California, even the bikers and desert rats, do not wear boots like that. Their feet would rot off in a week, drowned in sweat. Men in California also don’t wear wool plaid Pendleton shirts with the sleeves rolled up over waffle-weave long johns. Southern California’s deserts still claim inferno status in late summer, at least during the day. It was becoming clear that Fenceman had dropped in from somewhere north of Seattle, at least. He reminded me of a poem Dad adores and frequently struggles to work into sermons. It’s about Alaska. “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”

“There are strange things done in the midnight sun, by the men who moil for gold,” I yelled at the man atop my fence. “The Arctic trails have their secret tales, that would make your blood run cold . . .”

David and I could recite the entire thing from memory by the time we were five.

“If your name’s Blue McCarron I’ve got to talk to you,” he said, thin lips whitening beneath a handlebar mustache that draped his teeth.

“Who wrote the poem?” I demanded, expecting nothing.

“Robert W. Service. Will you hold that damn dog or not?”

“Get down,” I answered. “Brontë, stay.”

Much nonsense can be made of coincidence that is merely co­incidental. But there’s another kind that feels like a typhoon in your bones and lets you imagine that the sky behind your right ear has just opened to reveal a hidden pattern. The hidden pattern. You jerk your head around and it’s already gone. But it was there, and the certainty falls on and through you like a breath, like that first scent of autumn you feel in your soul. That happened to me when the man on my fence named an obscure poet he shouldn’t have known. It was a message.

The improbable circumstances and eerie sense of connection created by his pronunciation of the poet’s name provided a jolt I’d been waiting for. And the world may be divided into two camps—those who know precisely how this works and those for whom such a connection sounds like nonsense. You either get it or you don’t.

“What’s your name?” I asked as he dropped the last three feet from the fence and hit hard, dark blue eyes registering pain. He knew the poem’s author and that meant I really was on the grid again. I was really alive and not just an entity marking time alone in a half-built, bankrupt desert motel until some poisonous snake, earthquake, or disease took my body to the great beige nothing I saw every night in an absence of dreams. I had feared for two years that “I,” whatever that is, had already died. But after he answered my question I could feel again my own movement on the roaring, warp-speed grid of universal intention. And my first whole thought was to tell Misha. My second whole thought was that I couldn’t. Misha was gone.

“Dan Crandall,” he answered, wiping sweat with a thumb knuckle from bushy dark brown eyebrows that didn’t match either his auburn mustache or the wiry mouse-tan hair he wore long and pulled back in a ponytail with one of those neon-pink elastic bands little girls purchase at drugstores. He had left the pink plastic ball attached to the elastic band.

“I’m Beatrice Crandall’s brother. She’s confessed to killing a man and freezing him like leftover pot roast. She didn’t do it.”

“The body in the freezer over on State Road Three,” I said.

He didn’t look old enough to have a sixty-one-year-old sister, but these things happen. An aging couple with grown children discovers one day that the wife is barfing every morning. Plans for the Winnebago are canceled. Additional life insurance is taken out. My guess was that little Danny Crandall had been just such a golden-years surprise to parents whose daughter, Muffin, was already pushing thirty when he was born.

“Yeah, the body in the freezer.”

“Why did she confess if she didn’t do it?”

The sun had already dried my grown-out, top-bleached brown shag to the consistency of hay, and Brontë was panting. We don’t just stand around in the heat out here, especially those of us covered with black fur. Or wool shirts.

“How would I know?” He sighed and gazed at the sky like a man who has just missed a plane. “Women.”

In that single word was the entire thesis of my 732-page dissertation. An admission of boredom, hostility, and paralyzing despair. Like many men, Dan Crandall did not like or understand women, including a sister who had recently confessed to murder. But the dumb fascination with which he’d first observed my naked female body in the pool signaled the fact that he had not escaped the usual male primate wiring either. Still, it was clear that the gross biology of Dan Crandall had been socialized to acceptable lines. He had come to help this much older sister with whom he had not shared a childhood and probably barely knew, recognizing the bond of clan. The significance of this was not lost on me.

Until I quit teaching at San Gabriel University a year ago in order to consult with shopping mall designers, I insisted that my Intro to Social Psych 301 students understand this—that the clan bond was the first step out of preconscious, instinctual soup for every species. Including, I told them, that species which pulls weeds for twenty years in blazing hot strawberry fields so that its young may study social psychology at San Gabriel University. And the bond of clan is each individual’s last defense against the slide back into brute muck. While it is primitive and flawed and not to be worshiped, it must at all costs be respected.

I was still searching for a way to respect my clan bond with David, whom I loathed as much as I loved Misha. And both were, for very different reasons, totally inaccessible. There was, as The Book of Common Prayer so bluntly puts it, no health in me. Nothing but black holes, head to toe. Until a short man who looked like Yosemite Sam climbed my fence, knew a poem, and hated his sister for being a woman but showed up anyway because she was family.

“Strip and get in the pool,” I told Dan Crandall, observing a desert etiquette which demands the sharing of water. Any water. “It’ll take me about ten minutes to make a pitcher of lemonade. Have your pants on when I get back.”

In the kitchenette of the motel office I turned on some music to drown the air-conditioner whine, and squeezed lemons into a gallon plastic pitcher as Brontë lapped bottled water from a red ceramic mixing bowl. One of the several reasons I was able to buy an entire motel for the price of a single DKNY outfit is that the Wren’s Gulch Inn has no piped-in water. That is, the pipes are there, but they’re empty. And they’ll stay that way until the settlement of a dispute initiated by the four remaining Indians on a tiny reservation everybody had forgotten existed until the Indians opposed a plan which would have extended water utilities to Wren’s Gulch through a few feet of reservation property. The youngest of the Indians is seventy-eight, but his lawyer is only twenty-nine. In the desert, people understand the value of simply waiting.

Meanwhile, I had the water for the pool trucked in at enormous expense, and every week another truck arrives to refill my modest water tank, also at enormous expense. The Indians could do nothing about the buried power and phone lines the owner, Cameron Wrenner, ran two miles in here from the main line on the road before abandoning the motel project to whatever fate his attorneys could arrange. It could scarcely have mattered to Wrenner, whose empire of used-car dealerships had made him one of the richest men in Southern California. It isn’t possible to live here without a car, and Wrenner’s ruddy face, topped by a white cowboy hat, smiles down from billboard ads from here to the Nevada border. Anyway, Wren’s Gulch, as the locals named this fiasco, has lights, music, wi-fi and electronic gadgets that allow me to chat with other weirdos all over the world whenever I feel like it, which isn’t often.

“Coming out!” I yelled through the blue Mylar film I’d painstakingly glued to the office picture window after the sun ate leprous patches out of the original cheap carpet in less than three months. After that I installed a sand-colored indoor-outdoor nylon Berber in the office and the first unit, which serves as my bedroom. Then I plastered up this blue stuff which is supposed to filter ultraviolet rays and keep the sun from burning away the molecules which comprise carpets, drapes, and upholstery. The effect is like living in a furnished aquarium.

Dan Crandall was hopping around beside the pool, trying to pull gray knit boxer shorts over a penis that looked tired in its nest of jet black pubic hair. It occurred to me that nothing growing naturally on Dan Crandall matched.

There’s an interesting study which suggests that women who have not been sexually assaulted score higher on tests of empathy for men after seeing pictures of naked men doing ordinary things like talking on the phone or grocery shopping. In interviews the women often admit to finding flaccid penises rather cute. Sort of like demitasse spoons or those little carved wooden fork sets from import stores that everybody gets as a wedding present from an aunt who wears jangling bracelets. Nobody ever knows what to do with these forks. And I’m one of those women who find penises cute despite the fact that the great love of my life is a woman. Or was. It had been two years since I had any definitive evidence that Misha Deland was still alive.

“I’m entirely tied up right now with a marketing research project, and I have no experience whatever in the legal-criminal field,” I lied, setting the tray on a cable spool I found at a dump and painted bright blue to match the chaise cushions. “Your trip out here has been a waste of time.”

Crandall failed one test when he poured himself a tumbler of lemonade while leaving mine empty, but passed the next with flair.

“The so-so lawyer I hired bills around a hundred-fifty an hour,” he said while wringing water out of his ponytail onto my foot. “I can pay you the same up to ten, maybe fifteen thousand.”

“Expenses?”

“Within reason. You’ll have to clear with me first.”

“What is it you think I can do?”

His dark blue eyes regarded me with the same interest people lavish on old movie tickets found in jacket pockets.

“Save my damn sister’s ass,” he said.

Miles beyond the baking sky a black-silver grid flashed for a nanosecond and then wasn’t there, had never been there. Its ten billion dillion bars and lines and filaments, each crossing each at curving right angles, was only a fairy tale. I had made it up myself.

“Call it God, call it Harriet,” Dad told David and me in our backyard in Waterloo. “Doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s there and the only choice you have is to hang on for the ride or sit it out on the sidelines.”

I was a kid at the time and decided to call it Snoopy. Now, at thirty-five, I just called it the grid because that’s what it felt like. And I was tired of the sidelines.

“Deal,” I told Dan Crandall. “You can leave a thousand-dollar retainer and email me everything you’ve got tonight. I assume your sister’s being held in Las Colinas?”

The women’s prison in a suburb of San Diego had been named either “The Hills” or “The Cabbage Seeds,” depending on translation. The notion of being confined in a cabbage seed struck me as mythical, even charming.

“Yes,” Dan Crandall answered with distaste while pulling a slim checkbook out of the right pocket of his wool shirt.

“How am I supposed to get in to see her?”

“I’ll tell the lawyer to fix it. Maybe you could analyze her and give him a report. He’ll set it up.”

“Crandall, my field is social psychology, not clinical. I don’t analyze people. Are you sure you know what you’re hiring here?”

“Talk to her,” he insisted. “Just do that, okay?”

The check, drawn on a bank in Anchorage, Alaska, fluttered happily beside the lemonade.

“Okay,” I answered, but the answer was more general than the question. I meant that I’d think about it while I wondered what it was he expected me to do.

In seconds he’d pulled on his socks and those platypus-foot boots, stuffed the rest of his clothes under an arm and walked away in the direction of the locked gate where I assumed he’d left whatever vehicle brought him out here.

“Misha,” I whispered into yellow-gray afternoon light, “a man in his underwear is leaving, but I’m back.”

It was the first time I’d spoken to her in two years.

Later I went online to find out what you wear while visiting a women’s prison. A retired cop in a Quaker chat room typed, “When visiting any prison you have to wear a bra, carry nothing that could be used as a weapon, and avoid dangling earrings in pierced ears. She might grab ’em and rip your lobes in half.”

When the moon rose like the edge of a spoon over my bowl of broken rocks, I was pawing through storage boxes behind the third of my twelve doors, looking for the tiny lapis earrings that had been my mother’s. They had gold posts. Muffin Crandall would have a hard time ripping them out of my ears.

Chapter Two

When the phone rang at five the next morning, Brontë snarled irritably from the foot of my bed. I knew that if I gave the attack signal she’d tear the phone out of the wall. It was tempting.

“Everything’s set for you to visit my sister at nine-thirty, phone ten,” Dan Crandall’s voice announced. “It’ll take them at least a half hour to bring her to the visiting area, so be there by eight-forty-five or it won’t work. You’ll be allowed ten or fifteen minutes this time, maybe more later, maybe not.”

“Phone ten?” I pronounced thickly.

“Yeah. The lawyer told me there’s a row of phones. You talk through plexiglass. They assign you a time and a phone. You’ll talk to her on phone ten.”

This set of instructions seemed unnecessarily concise for 5 a.m.

“Have you been to see your sister, Dan?”

“No.”

“So why are you doing all this?”

His sigh was more resigned than hostile. Like the sigh of somebody who’s been teaching introductory classes for too long. My kind of sigh.

“Just go talk to her. Incidentally, she won’t want to talk to you. Have you read the stuff I emailed?”

“Oddly, I don’t sleep with electronic devices,” I said, trying for a confessional tone. “There are others like me.”

“Ha,” he answered. “Call me when you’ve got some ideas.”

After leaving the number of a bayfront hotel in San Diego, Crandall hung up and I faced the rest of my life. At the moment it looked like one of those seventeenth-century Dutch paintings meant to emphasize the transitory nature of being. Wilted cabbage roses on a table with two dead birds and a snail. Except there are no snails in the desert, and my still life would be called Rumpled Sheets with Black Dog and Large Human Foot. Brontë had stretched happily across the width of my queen-size bed and was eyeing one outstretched paw as if contemplating a new shade of nail polish. The large foot was mine.

David and I are, for obvious reasons, fraternal rather than identical twins. He inherited Dad’s stocky frame and run-of-the-mill feet. I got our mother’s gangly height, topaz eyes, and feet for which the term “extended sizes” was coined. Fortunately Mom maintained a competent wardrobe. I was appropriately shod in her size ten double E black kid pumps for the all-stops-out funeral at St. Louis’s Anglican bastion, Christ Church Cathedral. A drunk driver had plowed head-on into her car as she left a meeting of the Sierra Club. My brother and I were thirteen.

Misha theorized that David began his transformation into a sleazebag criminal named Hammer when our mother died. But then Misha never met Mom or David, and for some reason couldn’t envision the relentlessly pleasant childhood that David and I enjoyed. I did describe this childhood to her. Often I marveled at odd details which, I thought, pointed to the day I would meet her. But either Misha’s own childhood, which had apparently been Faulknerian, or more likely her complete disinterest in narratives not involving the Flight of a Strong Woman from the Clutches of Patriarchy, rendered my stories meaningless. I remained strangely blind to Misha’s complete lack of interest in the details of my life for two years. Love, as they say, is like that.

Only after she’d been gone an entire year did it dawn on me that Misha, whose feminist concern for the most insignificant forms of female life rivaled that of God for sparrows, probably couldn’t have identified my hometown or remembered my mother’s name on a bet. For a while that made me feel funny, as if for the years I spent with her my own history had been lost in the mail. Pieces of it were still drifting in as I went outside with Brontë for her morning run.

“David hasn’t killed anybody,” I announced to a lone cottonwood that was probably there when the first stagecoach stopped to water horses at Coyote Creek. “But there will be similarities between his story and this woman’s. Criminology kinds of things. After all, they’re both in prison.”

As Brontë chased a black-tailed jackrabbit I recognized a certain flimsiness in this train of thought. I know a great deal about male primate proclivities, which, if not controlled, result in truly idiotic violence. But there was no precedent for what Muffin Crandall had done, or said she’d done, in the chemistry and subsequent social organization of female primates. Girl apes, as the song says, just wanna have fun. And babies. Although in the human ape the former urge usually dies almost overnight around thirty. That’s when estrogen levels begin to drop and the brain looks around, wondering where it’s been since fifth grade and where all these children came from. Female primates rarely kill except when defending their young or, more rarely, themselves. And the “self” being defended in the case of female humans is a more complicated entity than the mere physical body.

Muffin Crandall, I remembered, was sixty-one. Fifty-six when a man about whom I knew nothing was packed into a deep­freeze with sharks, tuna, doves, and mule deer. Muffin had been past prime for menopause, with its rotten reputation, at the time of the slaughter. Still, she might have been one of the late ones, one of the small, chagrined army of fifty-something women who secretly dread they’ll have to be buried with a feminine hygiene product. I threw rocks at a spindly ocotillo shrub and thought about that until Brontë loped back over the low hill which forms the eastern boundary of the gulch.

To my knowledge, the female chemical transition away from fertility and into wisdom had not been used successfully as the defense strategy in a murder case. Despite the Victorian mystique it still wears in some quarters, I was sure menopause could not cause women to start killing random strangers with paperweights on their way to the freezer. In my experience all it caused them to do was have parties.

As Brontë snuffled and growled at a kangaroo rat hole under a creosote bush, I thought about one of those parties and about the feminist icon, Eden Snow. The mythic author Eden Snow, resplendent on the only occasion that I’d actually seen her. The occasion after which nobody saw her again, or at least that was the story. Eden Snow more than four years ago, already well past sixty but ageless in that way peculiar to celebrity.

She had come to San Diego to give a lecture, to be the big draw for a symposium on Contemporary Feminism sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department of San Diego’s largest university. After the lecture there was a party at somebody’s house. Among Snow’s credentials were an impressive array of degrees, ten increasingly radical books of feminist theory, fluency in five languages, and the respect of women the world over. Despite those credentials I didn’t hear a single word Eden Snow said that night.

I had gone to the lecture and then the party with Misha, whom I knew in her capacity as program director for the Inter-Collegiate Women’s Studies Consortium. That is, I knew she arranged meetings and seemed to be everywhere. She also knew everybody, including everybody on the faculty at San Gabriel University where I was teaching. With her wiry body and strangely compelling eyes, she always made me think of the Little Match Girl. That bathos. Put her in rags on a street corner, and within eight hours she could raise enough money to fund a respectable day care center for a year. Actually, she had been a fund-raiser for some now-defunct runaway kids’ shelter before taking over the consortium directorship. I didn’t trust her.

There was, despite my mistrust, a jittery attraction between us that in her company brought a taste of hot metal to my throat and made it impossible for me to be near common household objects without harming myself or them. That night I had already splintered a chair rung and tripped over a perfectly flat expanse of carpet. Misha had spilled white wine into a toaster. We seemed to be riding some foreordained conclusion about to happen with or without our complicity. And it would happen that night. I did remember that. I do remember that.

By 2 a.m. the party had thinned to drying wheels of cheese, sesame-seed cracker crumbs, and fifteen or twenty women in turtlenecks drinking chardonnay from plastic cups near some pricey speakers. All night the background music had been foreign to me. Unfamiliar women’s movement music Misha explained was from before my time. Misha, ten years my senior, suddenly the only thing I saw in the stale, winey air.

Most of the others made a circle around Eden Snow, who sat in a wingback chair looking exultant as they belted out “Song of the Soul” for the third time. Snow’s wiry gray hair was tied back with a rumpled scarf, and she watched everything from lashless blue eyes that were at once brutally intelligent and too big. I remember that she was wearing beach thongs with a pair of baggy jeans and a silk kimono jacket so exquisitely designed most people would have framed it in an entry hall. From time to time she chewed thoughtfully on the kimono’s sash.

The women surrounding her were tenured professors, authors, attorneys, directors of grant programs pulling two hundred thousand a year in addition to whatever they picked up on the speakers’ circuit. They were remembering dark childhoods in which little girls were forbidden such futures.

One of the lawyers strummed chords on a guitar, and two women I didn’t know ran outside to their car to get balalaikas, they said. The music stopped, and somebody found an oldies station on the radio in time for the opening “sho-dote-en-sho-be-doe” of the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” The song prompted the second-“most memorable event of the evening. A sing-along with the radio.

Teenagers in the sixties, they remembered, they stood, and they sang. Perfectly. They sang to Eden Snow in four-chord harmony of feminism, of a time beloved and lost, its ghost alive again in that moment among them. A bunch of drunk, middle-aged women singing old doo-wop, or a choir in transcendent celebration of an idea, you choose. I was in tears by the time Misha and I went outside alone. Into the backyard, in the dark.

By then there was nothing else to do, nothing left but the in­evitable. I am certain that neither of us would have chosen anything quite as overwhelming if we’d been asked. But we weren’t asked. We were simply drawn toward some huge intention whose purposes demanded a connection between us so deep and fierce that I realized even then, my mouth on Misha’s hungrily on mine, that I might not survive it. I didn’t care.

Later there was some stumbling, urgent progress to a shed. Bags of peat moss and potting soil. A sense of there being no time left to do this. No time at all. The suddenly pointless yet stubborn presence of clothes, buttons, zippers. The impossible necessity of touch, the pounding vortex of orgasm. And all the while, over Misha’s ragged breathing and mine, the sound of balalaikas reaching out into the dark.

Much later, sometime the following morning, it would cross my mind that Misha was a woman and so this sexual cataclysm meant I could safely sneer at all further accusations of affectional ambivalence. I hadn’t been sure what the fuss was about either way. Now I was sure. Totally.

Misha would scarcely make the “A list” of potential romantic partners, but I was unmoved by such distinctions. Prone to disguising a Southern accent under fake “Hahvahd” pronunciations and telling people she grew up in Wellesley, Misha was the object of more than one raised eyebrow. Deland wasn’t her name, but that of a teenage husband long divorced, she said. Her real surname, she told various people at various times, was Carruthers. Or Hancock. Or McAdams. Names noteworthy for nothing so much as their presumed proximity to the Mayflower. Despite her ambiguous identity she wanted nothing so much as to be widely known, preferably admired. Misha never missed a meeting she could chair, and kept on her cell phone a contact list the size of the old Manhattan Yellow Pages. She wasn’t exactly a social climber, needing instead to be known by literally everybody. But none of it mattered to me. It would never matter.

What mattered was Dad’s response when I called to tell him I was really in love at last and with a woman. It had always been an option. Misha was not the first woman I’d made love with, just the first lover I’d been flung to infinity with. Dissolved with. Transformed with. All that.

Dad didn’t bat an eye until I told him about the balalaikas, about the unfathomable intent in me and Misha that seemed to come from somewhere else and have an agenda of its own. Then his voice broke and he whispered, “Oh, my God,” in tones trailing history, and secrets. Because of Misha I would eventually hear the story of my own existence, and be shocked. Later I would begin to know two people named Jake and Elizabeth, who had dealt with balalaikas of their own.

Brontë interrupted this train of thought by getting a half-dozen fire ants up her nose, requiring my immediate attention. I was already hot even though I was wearing nothing but shorts and a pair of ratty tennis shoes. The Muffin Crandall investigation, I decided, would be a test of my ability to return to the real world. The World Before Misha. A world in which people do not run around wracked by dead love affairs and inadequately clothed.

I was not brought up to walk dogs without first putting on a shirt. In fact, our two-story frame house in Waterloo was a veritable monument to those ordinary proprieties which make society possible. Dad was the rector at a little church called simply Grace, and our mother zealously cultivated at least the appearance of successful housewifery. David never noticed, but I’d often find Mom poring over women’s magazines, her high, tanned brow knit in concentration. Sometimes she jotted things in a small spiral notebook. Then, a few days later, we’d face the “Festive Ukrainian Borscht Compote” at dinner. Or we’d come home from school to find the front porch sagging under the weight of twenty-six pink geranium plants in wicker laundry baskets lined with calico. On these days there would be home­made cookies and Dad would read aloud from old children’s books about Abraham Lincoln or Clara Barton.

My parents sighed with relief at each successfully completed domestic vignette, each family outing and holiday. David and I were watched by glowing eyes that increased in wattage every time we succeeded, failed, or were merely average at anything. Our parents were terrified, but we didn’t know it. What David and I learned from them was that every humdrum event un-shattered by primal forces is cause for celebration. But we would find out about the primal forces later. Both of us. I pondered the fact that Muffin Crandall had obviously stumbled over them as well.

In my office/living room, actually the intended reception area for Wren’s Gulch Inn, I sat down to read Dan Crandall’s emails. Beatrice Crandall, I learned, had shortly after the earthquake, confessed to assaulting the man in the Roadrunner freezer. In a prepared statement distributed by her attorney, she admitted to hitting an intruder in her garage over the head with a paperweight on a Sunday night during July five years ago.

She awoke, she said, around eleven that night to the sound of her garage door opening. At first she thought it was an electronic glitch of some kind. Probably the door responding to a neighbor’s battery-operated door-opener. After all, the garage of her condo opened into an alley shared with fifteen other units, which meant fifteen identical automatic garage doors with identical electronic openers. But after she heard the door close there was a sound of someone “mucking around down there.” The garage, she said, was directly beneath her second-story bedroom. The windows were open because the night was warm. She could hear the intruder through both floor and windows.

Still, she wasn’t overly alarmed. “I thought there was some reasonable explanation,” she said. “Maybe a neighbor borrowing a ladder. I have a nice lightweight aluminum ladder that people are always borrowing. Of course nobody would do that, break into my garage in the middle of the night to get the ladder without asking me, but that’s what I thought when I was walking down the stairs. What I really thought was maybe he’d had too much to drink. I have a neighbor who drinks a lot at night. Everybody knows. You can’t hide much, living so close together. I really just thought it was probably him and that he’d be embarrassed and go away when he saw that he’d got me out of bed.”

On her way through the darkened living room, Crandall had grabbed a paperweight from her desk “just in case.” She hadn’t really intended to use the object as a weapon, the narrative went on. There were plenty of knives in the kitchen if she’d been thinking about a weapon. She just wanted something in her hand when she opened the kitchen door to the garage. Something heavy. She didn’t really know why.

But what she saw when she opened her kitchen door wasn’t her tipsy neighbor. It was a stranger. “A dirty, evil-looking man with his back to me,” she said, was pawing through some storage boxes containing items which had belonged to her deceased husband. “It didn’t make any sense, it was horrible,” she stated. “This disgusting creature touching Deck’s things there in the dark. He was squatting on the floor like . . . like an animal, opening those boxes. He was sickening, somehow. And then his face turned toward me and in the light from the kitchen I saw his hand reach toward one of the rocks I’d been collecting for a little rock garden on my patio. The rocks were stacked along the wall. I saw this look in his eyes, saw what he was going to do with that rock. He was going to hit me. I could tell. He was going to kill me!”

According to Crandall’s statement the subsequent events were a blur. “I hit him with the paperweight. I’m pretty sure I did that just as he turned back toward my little pile of rocks and started to stand up. It all happened so fast. I was so frightened. I knew he was going to kill me if I didn’t stop him, but I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing.”

Crandall went on to say that she did not own a gun. Her deceased husband, Roscoe “Deck” Decker, had told her that a gun is liable to be seized by an attacker and used against the victim. “In a surprise attack,” he told her, “you won’t be able to find and fire the gun before he sees what you’re doing and grabs it.” Prior to his death, Crandall’s husband had disposed of his own gun collection for her protection. And even if there had been a gun in the house, she explained, she wouldn’t have thought to get it before entering the garage. She hadn’t expected any of this. It was just some kind of nightmare.

When the man toppled over and didn’t get up, she thought he was faking. She thought that as soon as she moved, he’d spring up, roaring. She said she stopped breathing. She said she lost control of her bladder standing there, frozen with terror in the slice of light from her kitchen door. But the man didn’t move. Finally she kicked his shoulder. When he didn’t respond, she forced herself to feel his neck for a pulse. There was none. She knew he was dead.

I poured another cup of coffee and made a few notes. So far the woman’s story seemed implausible yet very familiar. It was every woman’s nightmare; the reason women fear noises in the dark. Rape, defilement, brutal death. This is the repetitive mantra bequeathed to us from hairy ancestors, cousins to chimps, gorillas, and humans. A glance at any chimp enclave, with the exception of the matriarchal bonobos, will reveal the source of the nightmare. Male chimps randomly batter females to ensure wholesale female subordination. And when she’s in estrus a female who refuses sexual penetration by a male may be beaten to death by him as his companion males hoot and whistle and hop about. A glance at any newspaper will reveal that the nightmare has not been extinguished in human enclaves, either.

It’s not hard to trace the primate archetype. It’s there. But humans are different from other primates in numerous ways. One of them is that the human female, unlike her chimpanzee sister, is not statistically likely to be bludgeoned and raped by a gang of strangers creeping across the landscape beyond her dwelling. That popular terror is the shadow of our past, although it can and does still happen. More often now, the human female will be bludgeoned, raped, and possibly killed by a male who is no stranger. A male she knows and may even like. A male who believes that he must control her, that he owns her.

Muffin Crandall’s story with its rock-wielding monkey ghost played to the old brain. I wondered whether she knew that. Then I wondered how she’d explain the heavy-duty trash bag and the years that had elapsed since that night in her garage.

“I don’t know why I did what I did then,” Crandall’s statement went on. “It was like I was in a trance or hypnotized. I don’t remember thinking anything except ‘Nobody can know. You’ve got to hide the body. Nobody can find out or you’ll die!’ ”

The remark brought me up short. I dreamed once that I had killed a man and hidden his body in a little-used closet beneath the stairs of an old house I shared with four other graduate students. The man looked strangely like Beethoven. And the dream bore that certainty of not being a dream, of being an absolute reality somewhere other than the waking state. I sat up drenched in sweat and locked in such agonizing fear that ten digital minutes traveled through my bedside clock before I could move. And there was a slurred chirping in my head, like a distant siren. I knew the sound meant the body would be found and I would be killed.

Muffin’s words echoed my dream, which I later learned is a common delusion in women at a certain stage in the progression of Alzheimer’s and other dementias. A terror of being put to death for killing a man may lie encoded in every female brain. It may be released by the neural plaques and tangles of brain disease or the nightly neurological housecleaning which results in dreams. Muffin Crandall’s narrative began to assume a particularly interesting framework. If it was the fabrication her brother believed it to be, it was brilliantly done.

“I tied him up with part of the clothesline I have in the garage for drying rugs and things I don’t want to put in the dryer,” her story went on. “I still wasn’t really sure he was dead, but even if he was I wanted him tied up. Somehow I knew I had to get rid of the body right away or I’d die. Don’t ask me how I knew that, or where the thought came from. I just knew that.”

Crandall’s story went on to describe her various approaches to removing the body. Getting it into the kitchen would be no problem, but cutting it up seemed too disgusting. Besides, the garbage disposal could not be employed out of fear that its excessive use at that hour would attract the attention of neighbors, or that “something would get stuck” and require a repairman.

Deck Decker had been a sportsman prior to his death at fifty-three from a massive heart attack two years before his widow’s encounter with a stranger in her garage. He maintained the rented locker near Borrego Springs for game he killed and stored for home use. At the time of his death the locker was only partially stocked. Muffin Crandall said she kept up the rental fees and made regular trips to the locker, both using the game left by her husband and restocking the space with bulk-buy bargains and gifts of fish and meat from her husband’s friends. She said she was used to making trips to the locker, and the idea of freezing the body “just seemed natural.”

Long before sunrise on that night five years in the past, she had trussed the body in a fetal position, gotten it into a trash bag, and transported it to the Roadrunner cold storage facility. Muffin said she may have spoken to friends on the phone the next day, but she didn’t remember. She said that no one was present at Roadrunner when she used the freezer’s hand cart to stash the new package behind boxes containing eighty pounds of chicken wings she’d purchased for a civic theater fund-raising picnic. She said the only thing she remembers from that time is terror, but after leaving the freezer, “it was as if none of it had really happened.”

“When I’d try to think about it, think about taking that bag out and getting rid of it someplace, the fear would come back,” she said. “It would just fill me up like black, cold ink in a bottle. My hands would shake and I’d want to throw up. I couldn’t even walk, it would be so bad. So I just kept paying rent on the locker and going out there with stuff, taking stuff out to use. I knew someday I’d have to do something, but I just couldn’t think about it.”

Diminishing the rest of Dan’s material, I opened a new file. “Crandall, Muffin—Initial Profile,” I centered in fourteen-point type. Then I typed a list of factors which seemed, even at this point, potentially significant:

1) Subject a fifty-six-year-old widow at time of the assault, uses her own surname rather than her husband’s.

2) Subject apparently living alone at time of assault, but maintains frozen food locker for bulk quantities of food. Why?

3) Subject does not mention children, friends, or family other than her deceased husband. Odd. Women typically refer to social cohorts in all narratives.

4) Subject displays a thorough comprehension of archetypal primate female fear in her narrative, leaving out no element but rape. Nowhere does she admit to fearing rape, only murder. This deletion from the usual fear profile is significant.

5) What was weight and physical condition of subject five years ago? Now?

6) What is estimated weight and physical condition of victim at time of assault?

7) Subject presents as self-sufficient and capable, yet permits herself to be called “Muffin.” Check origin of this nickname.

8) Subject mentions that bulk chicken wings in her locker were for a civic theater fund-raiser. What civic theater? How was she connected to it? Who else was connected to it? Does it still exist?

9) Subject’s deceased husband, Deck. Who was he, what did he do, what was the marriage like, and how did she cope with his death? Children of this marriage? Previous marriages?

10) What was/is her source of income? Education? Avocations?

After printing the list I took a cool bath, washed the woody, acorn-brown growth I call hair, and phoned for a haircut appointment near the prison at eight. My best gray linen suit with its long, straight skirt would make me look like an Edwardian nun, but that was okay. What wasn’t okay was that the only matching shoes I could find were the same black kid pumps I’d worn to my mother’s funeral twenty-two years in the past. Good shoes will last a lifetime if you take care of them, especially if you only wear them while in disguise. I wondered if Muffin Crandall would buy the act I was about to stage for her.

Chapter Three

As prisons go, Las Colinas is not unpleasant, at least from the outside. There are no coils of razor wire, no guard towers. There are no kennels of baying hounds waiting to track some hard-eyed woman in unflattering horizontal stripes through thickets and ravines. There are no thickets and ravines. Las Colinas is smack in the middle of a suburban San Diego community called Santee. The town is home to feed stores and barbecue restaurants where country and western bands play on weekends. And while my professional interests had skirted the field of penology, it wasn’t difficult to draw a few conclusions about the prison from what I already knew.

Women are fond of enclosed spaces. A by-now-infamous study suggested that while boys are prone to build towers with toy blocks, girls build elaborate enclosures, giving special attention to the decoration and security of entrances. Indeed, a classic Renaissance motif symbolizing the Mother of God was a walled garden. And Las Colinas, while scarcely meeting the aesthetic requirements of the term “garden,” looked to me less like a prison than a typical Southern California elementary school. Several single-story buildings, painted an institutional tan, clustered about a chain-linked central open area in which I could see a couple of picnic tables.

The few truly dangerous women confined here would be in some special, high-security area, I guessed. But the preponderance of the women prisoners could be safely contained with minimal provisions for security. They would display here the same impoverished identities that had led them to the prostitution, drug dealing, or accessory status to a boyfriend’s crime that had captured the attention of the police in the first place.

A very small statistical minority, the female criminal takes up less than five percent of the nation’s cell space and almost none of its razor wire. With certain exceptions such as the rare sociopath and those with untreated psychiatric problems, women offenders are not difficult to control. Even as children female humans easily comprehend the larger social consequences of theft, battery, and murder, and as adults rarely engage in these activities. Those who do, know themselves to be compromised in a much more devastating sense than their male counterparts. The fall is different, farther, and has broken them long before they wind up in prison. As I completed my “Visitor’s Request to See Prisoner” card I contemplated methodologies for learning the truth about the sequence of events that had landed Muffin Crandall in this sad and sterile place. Even then I suspected that the task might be over my head.

“Sit in there at phone ten,” a blonde woman directed from the prison reception area. She wore a badge saying “Corrections Trainee,” and was tucking a stray tail of her tan shirt into olive green wool-blend slacks that made me think of Boy Scout uniforms. I noticed that she carried a walkie-talkie but no sidearm, and looked as if she’d just arrived from a Junior League recruiting tea. That aura of cheerful wealth and privilege.

It seemed odd that she’d seek employment as a prison guard. I decided that she must be doing undercover research for some liberal foundation that would later publish a report decrying the poor prenatal care given pregnant prisoners or something. The fantasy explanation restored my sense of social congruence, as we social psych types are prone to say. It forced something puzzling to make sense.

“Your client’s in B Unit, so it’ll take a while,” she explained, smiling. “More security there. You know.”

I nodded, wondering in what sense Muffin Crandall was my “client” and why she needed more security. There had been nothing in the portion of paperwork I’d had time to read to suggest that in prison Crandall would do anything more dangerous than weave potholders out of cut-up socks. There had been no indication of prior criminal activity, not even a traffic ticket. So far, Muffin Crandall’s profile was an epic of law-abiding conformity so devoid of suspicious behavior that I should immediately have been suspicious. Nobody who drives can go ten years without so much as a parking ticket unless there’s a very good reason. Not wanting to come to the attention of police, for example. Unfortunately, this obvious concept had not yet crossed my mind.

The room with the phones was just off the reception area and a monument to sensory deprivation. Just a long, blah-colored room with a wall down the middle. In the wall were nineteen numbered plexiglass windows with phones on each side. Mismatched plastic chairs were fastened to the floor in rows facing the windows from both sides.

When the door to the reception area clicked shut behind me I felt something constrict in my chest. Walled gardens notwithstanding, I knew then why I’ve been so scrupulous about not robbing convenience stores at gunpoint. The reality that someone else was empowered to unlock or not to unlock that door tightened my ribs like a vise against my lungs. There wasn’t a single picture on the wall, not even a months-old copy of Good Housekeeping to read. When a woman in blue pants and a blue shirt with “San Diego Jail” stenciled over the pocket was brought to the chair across from mine twenty minutes later, the hair on my neck was slick with sweat and I knocked the phone off its ledge when I grabbed for it.

“Christ in the foothills!” she rumbled in a gravelly voice. “You look like warmed-over swan shit. Don’t tell me you’ve never been inside a prison before.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you,” I said too loudly into the phone. “My name’s Blue McCarron. Your brother thinks you’re innocent.”

The eyes watching me from behind bifocals in expensive alloy frames were the same dark blue as Dan Crandall’s. Unlike Dan’s, however, these eyes were circled with thick coverup that couldn’t cover enough. Muffin Crandall looked twenty years older than I’d expected. The flesh over her facial bones seemed unable to support its own weight and hung in folds. Yellowish skin tones suggested a fading tan that had once been deep. Perched above her ears was a synthetic auburn wig, permanently set in tubular rows. I could see the cheesecloth wig cap between each auburn tube. The cap wasn’t particularly clean. Wisps of dull gray hair jutted stiffly from its perimeter. Muffin Crandall looked like a poster for a very noir version of Annie.

“My brother doesn’t know his ass from the Holy Grail,” she growled. “And I don’t care who you are or what he’s paying you to do, it won’t work. I have a lawyer who’ll say I’m insane. That may work. I probably am insane. Nobody sane freezes people like stew meat.”

She lowered pale orange lids over her brother’s eyes and half smiled, revealing perfect teeth behind lipstick in a shade worn by peroxided exotic dancers in Germany at the beginning of the Cold War. A particularly ghastly purplish red. I knew this because I’d read an illustrated history of Barbie dolls and their origins in Teutonic pornography, not that the information was of any merit in deciphering Muffin Crandall. Then she opened her mouth again.

“Let’s just say I’ve ‘eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner,’” she pronounced in rolling tones. I could see the tones vibrating in the plexiglass window between us.

And that’s what did it. The line was from Shakespeare, I was sure. Probably Macbeth. And Muffin Crandall was acting. The wig, the grotesque makeup, the tough talk. All an act. I remembered that she’d had something to do with a civic theater.

“Great voice, but you can cut the act now,” I said. “Your brother’s not paying me to critique a performance.”

“Cut the act?” she answered, a real smile animating the folds of her face. “If all the world’s a stage, where do we go when we’re not acting?”

In that moment, in an airless room built to obstruct all but the most superficial human interaction, I became Muffin Crandall’s friend. I liked her. I recognized in her a kindred spirit, a person whose grip on the truly important questions remained unweakened by minor tribulations like dirty wigs and prison. Behind me the grid snapped and sizzled, leaving a scent of ozone in the air. It meant I was supposed to be there.

“We only have ten or fifteen minutes,” I told her. “How did you get the prison authorities to let you keep that wig?”

“I told them it holds my brains in and that without it I forget where I’m supposed to go to the bathroom. Fear-of-potty is the great American phobia, you know.”

“I know; I’m a social psychologist. But why do you want to wear a dirty Shirley Temple wig?”

“Because it holds my brains in and without it I forget . . .”

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “Why are you called ‘Muffin’?”

“I thought it sounded better with ‘Crandall’ than ‘Cupcake.’” She sighed, managing to suggest that the decision had been a difficult one. I could feel the minutes ticking by inside my watch as I got nowhere.

“You’re not used to interviewing people, are you?” she asked after a long silence.

“No,” I answered. “Usually I just interview data.”

“What have you learned?”

“Oh, you know,” I hedged, wondering what gem of social science might push her off balance, “stuff about the effect of annual rainfall on Iowa voting patterns, ethnic demography among jockeys, profiles of murders committed by women, the usual.”

“And?”

“And there are a lot more black and Latino jockeys than you’d think.”

Muffin Crandall laughed. Actually it was a rumbling guffaw that made her eyes twinkle but seemed to tire her.

“So my brother wants you to say that the murder I committed five years ago isn’t like the typical profile for murders committed by women five years ago? What is the typical profile?”

“Well—” I sighed as if reciting something everybody already knew, “for starters the victims of female murderers are typically husbands/boyfriends, or children, or least often strangers killed in the commission of felonies orchestrated by husbands/boyfriends.”

“No lone women defending themselves from attacks by strangers?”

“Doesn’t happen,” I stated with authority because, in actuality, it rarely happens.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“Because women are by nature passive and silly,” I lied, expecting to be struck by lightning. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, we assume a sweet smile will defuse danger. We’re simpering wimps. We don’t defend ourselves.”

Through Muffin’s telephone I could hear a radio on the guard’s desk on her side of the plexiglass wall. An oldies station. I could swear the station was playing “In the Still of the Night,” and in the music I imagined an army led by Eden Snow bearing down on me, shouting the names of a million women who fought bravely to the death. Misha would be in that army. I would be in that army despite the calculated stupidity of my most recent words. I had said them because I needed to know whether Muffin Crandall would be in that army.

Her sallow cheeks bloomed a dull cranberry color as she cocked her head and bellowed, “You fucking idiot! Get out of here!”

Muffin’s outburst caused the guard to stand and scowl near her desk, but I had won.

Women tend to fall into three categories when exposed to de­meaning remarks about women: those who start throwing the furniture around, those whose upper incisors draw blood as they bite their lower lips but say nothing, and those who seem not to have heard. Muffin Crandall’s response was diminished only by the fact that all available furniture was bolted to the floor. And I had learned more about her than she wanted me to know.

“If you’d actually killed that man, you’d never admit it,” I said as she stood to leave. “If you’d really killed him there would have been a good reason. You would have covered your tracks. You would not have stashed the body in a public freezer for five years. It’s too stupid, and you’re not stupid. Your story doesn’t work.”

I stood when she did so I could measure her against myself for height. I’m five six, and she was at least an inch and a half taller. Big-boned, although her hands weren’t as overlarge as her brother’s. She had a competent, self-assured posture even in prison denims. I concluded that Muffin probably could have killed a stranger in her garage five years ago, but that she probably didn’t. Or if she did, the story she now told to account for her actions was not the truth. Not even remotely.

Slowly she sat down again and picked up her phone. I copied each move, my gaze locked on those dark blue retinas.

“Kid,” she pronounced, “why don’t you just go back to predicting the number of cow pies in Arkansas after a lunar eclipse? Stop wasting my brother’s money. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that makes you an epic pain in the ass, capisce?”

“Capisce,” I agreed. At thirty-five it’s nice being called “kid.” “And you’re right,” I went on. “I don’t know what I’m doing and only accepted Dan’s offer because I’ve recently decided to make lots of money. God only knows why. There’s nothing I want to buy. Nevertheless, I know enough to have concluded that your story about the body in the Roadrunner freezer isn’t true. I have no idea what to do next.”

“Jesus,” Muffin Crandall said. It was not a prayer.

“Probably I’ll prepare a report. On legal-sized paper, no staples.”

“That will be nice,” she murmured sweetly. “Then you can give it to your psychiatrist, who will know what to do.”

The guard had looked at her watch and was moving toward Muffin.

“You’ve given me an idea,” I said. “Very helpful.”

“That was not my intent,” Muffin Crandall mentioned over a sagging shoulder as she was led away.

The door to the reception area was opened by the same chipper guard-in-training who’d locked me in. She continued to strike me as a debutante who’d accidentally wandered into a Marine boot camp, again tucking her tan shirt into those ugly uniform pants. The tucking created a sense of déjà vu that made me question whether I’d actually talked to Muffin yet at all. The presence of another woman in the visiting area lobby confirmed the passage of time. I was sure she hadn’t been there when I arrived. And I would have noticed.

I would have noticed because of the basket. She was an older woman with white curls framing a carefully made-up face. She wore a pastel blue shirtwaist dress accented by a flowered scarf used as a belt. And she carried a large basket lined with blue and white checked napkins. There was a blue ribbon on the basket’s handle. Nestled within the napkins was a mound of cookies. They filled the prison lobby with a mouthwatering scent that immediately derailed my train of thought, whatever it had been. All that remained were two words—“chocolate chip.” My trains of thought are easily derailed by any olfactory experience of chocolate chip cookies.

“Mrs. Tewalt,” the guard said politely, “we’ve explained to you and your friends several times that you may not bring gifts to a prisoner. We cannot take these cookies to Mrs. Crandall as we could not take her the sandwiches, cake, and jug of lemonade you brought two days ago. You can bring her white socks and underwear, shoes that cost less than fifty dollars, and personal toiletries from the approved list. Would you like another copy of that list?”

“Oh, no, dear,” the woman said. “But why don’t I just leave these cookies for you and the other ladies who’re looking after our Muffin. I assure you they’re freshly baked and not one of them has a file in it!”

“This sort of work must be very hard for you,” she said to the guard as an afterthought, a sympathetic frown wrinkling her peaches-and-cream brow.

The debutante guard caved in. Anyone would.

“Here, have a cookie,” she said to me after accepting a basket any American over twenty could immediately recognize as Red Riding Hood’s.

“Um, I’ll just take an extra one for my dog,” I agreed. “She’s out in my car.”

“In the parking lot,” I added as if there were some chance I’d left my car in a tree. Militaristic uniforms, even on toll booth operators and debutantes, cause me to attempt truly concise levels of explanation. I don’t know why.

The woman named Tewalt gasped. “In your car! Oh dear, it’s so hot out there. You know, leaving an animal in a closed car can be—”

“It’s actually a truck with a camper shell,” I explained, heading for the door with the Tewalt woman in fluttering pursuit. “And it isn’t closed. The back is open, it’s parked in shade, Brontë has water and a battery-powered fan covered in mesh screening so she can’t stick her nose in it, and did I hear you say you brought these cookies for Muffin Crandall? I just saw her.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Tewalt said. “Are you with the police?”

“I’m a social psychologist. Mrs. Crandall’s brother, Dan, has asked for my help.”

As we reached the door the blonde guard called, “Please, Mrs. Tewalt, don’t bother coming again except during official visiting hours, and please no more food.”

“Of course, dear.” The reply was not sincere.

“I’m Helen Tewalt, an old friend of Muffin’s,” she told me in the parking lot, averting her eyes to the ground for her second remark. “This has been terribly upsetting for her friends, you know. We’re all afraid it could happen to us.”

“You’re all afraid you’ll kill somebody and then store the body in a freezer?” I blurted.

“The, well . . . mental situation is what I meant,” she said softly. “Muffin just fell apart after Deck died. That was her husband, you know. She never got over it, started doing such odd things. Now we’re afraid it’s Alzheimer’s or something like that. If only we’d seen the signs long ago.”

Her sigh joined the warm breeze blowing eucalyptus leaves across the paved parking lot. I could see Brontë’s sleek head eagerly tracking my progress toward the camper. No doubt she’d already picked up the scent of the remaining chocolate chip cookie in my hand.

“What odd things did Muffin do?” I asked casually.

“Well, just lots of things, for heaven’s sake. Keeping that food locker in the desert like Deck did when he was alive. We told her it was silly, but she wanted to keep everything just the way it was. She didn’t even clean out his closet for months, just kept his clothes there instead of donating them to charity. That’s the thing, you know, just donate to charity and try to get on with your life. That’s what we do. But Muffin wouldn’t let go. We should have seen there was a mental problem.”

I should have seen that Helen Tewalt had just told me absolutely nothing, but I wasn’t used to real people with their charming duplicity. Numbers, graphs, hard data—these I can deal with. Real people are so sweet and complicated that I’m almost always mesmerized by them. I forget to stand back and check to see if what they’re telling me meshes with the big picture. Later I would realize that Helen Tewalt actually meshed way too well.

“Here’s my card,” I told her. “Would you mind if I called you at some point? There are so many things about this case that I can’t quite grasp.”

“Of course, dear.” She smiled. “I’m in the book. In Rancho Almas. H. Tewalt. Any of Muffin’s friends will be happy to talk to the psychologist who’s trying to analyze this awful thing. Just call anytime.”

“I’m not a clinical psychologist and I don’t analyze . . .” I began. But Helen Tewalt had veered off toward a cream-colored Buick, popping open the door lock with the remote control on her key chain. She merely waved as she slipped inside and started the engine.

“Why do I feel as if I’ve just walked through the set for a Martha Stewart special?” I asked Brontë when I got to the camper and gave the command that she could run free. The cookie held more interest for her than my question. But I knew somebody else I could ask, even though I’d have to wait until seven that night when Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro cleared its hardwood floor for line-dancing lessons. I’d be there. I had a lot of questions.

Chapter Four

But first I had to make a living. It was, after all, Thursday. Tuesdays and Thursdays are devoted to accumulating wealth, although as I told Muffin Crandall, I don’t know why I’m accumulating it. Nor is it wealth, exactly. More like what is meant when people say “comfortable.” As in “Well, I wouldn’t say the Kramers are rich, but they’re comfortable.” This comment is invariably accompanied by a meaningful look which suggests that the Kramers could buy and sell your grandmother if they wanted to. My wealth might be defined as a category of comfort several levels below that one. Many, many levels below, actually.

My truck is paid for and has four new tires. I own Wren’s Gulch Inn outright, and can afford the hauled-in water necessary to live there. Brontë and I both have the best medical insurance coverage available in California, and except on Tuesdays and Thursdays neither of us really needs clothes. Still, when a year ago a Pakistani strip mall owner at a party bet me a semester’s salary that I couldn’t rescue his investment from bankruptcy, I jumped at the chance. The job would be fun, I thought. But the real draw was the lure of income derived from an application of my skill as a social psychologist. Income not requiring panty hose, faculty politics, or a cheery attitude.

The little mall was in a dicey, ethnically mixed area of San Diego. The owner assumed that nothing could be done about the sequential armed robberies, drug dealing, and shoplifting that were driving out his commercial tenants. Had he not downed too many margaritas by the time I had downed too many margaritas, he would not have responded as enthusiastically to my assertion that men do not, in fact cannot, understand shopping and its context.

I did tell him that with the exception of guns, automobile parts, and beer, between eighty and ninety percent of over-the-counter sales are to women. Women are the purchasers of goods and services. If you want a successful shopping mall, make sure women like to go there. That part is not complicated.

Where men lose it completely is in understanding the aesthetic, social, even spiritual dimensions of shopping. They think—you need an item, you buy it, you leave. A man who needs a plumber’s wrench will buy the wrench from the back of a van, a dusty hardware store, or online. He doesn’t care as long as he gets the wrench. He will make this transaction alone and will not discuss it with other men. Should another man later criticize the wrench, suggest that there are better wrenches, the first man will become defensive. There is no social context for the wrench, so an assault against it is an assault on the man. It is an assault on his competence, his status. In the presence of other variables such as alcohol consumption, this kind of thing can result in headlines the next day which read, “Local Man Murdered in Dispute Over Wrench.”

What I didn’t try to explain to the strip mall owner is that women are entirely different. Women nest, which is just a cute way of saying that women construct social reality. The sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste of life is the construction of women, and the work is never done. Variety is necessary to keep things interesting, has been since our hunter-gatherer days. Getting tired of leached acorns? Try these nettles boiled in salt water. Maddened by your bland little cubicle at work? I know this place where they have silk plants really cheap. Shopping is for women the sacrament of reality construction. And it is not done alone.

It is done in the company of other women so that all aspects of the construction may be performed at once. Fabric for bathroom curtains is selected as you discuss what to do about your brother-in-law’s alcoholism. When somebody later suggests that the curtains don’t quite pick up the blue in the floor tile, you know the curtains are just fine because that idiot Ben finally got himself into a treatment program like you suggested and hasn’t had a drink in four months. When Ben falls off the wagon a year from now you’ll change the curtains. And go on. It’s an intricate tapestry, endlessly woven, ripped apart, altered, rewoven. Most men are completely oblivious to it. Certainly the Pakistani strip mall owner was.

But he gave me carte blanche to do anything I wanted, and I knew what to do. First I analyzed the demographics of the neighborhood and concluded that less than 7 percent of the local women who might patronize the mall’s remaining dry cleaner, convenience store, beauty salon, and Vietnamese takeout restaurant had access to cars. A twenty-four-hour surveillance of the parking lot revealed that it was rarely used except at night when local males bought beer at the convenience store and sat on their cars drinking it until they were ready to pass out or get in fights over whose wrench was the biggest. It was clear that the parking lot had to be reclaimed for the true purpose of the mall—shopping. Shopping in the sense of constructing life.

First I had a low cement-block wall built around the lot, which claimed the space from the street. Then it and all the mall shop facades were painted a pale mauve, just pink enough to identify the structure’s function as essentially feminine without deterring entrance by individual males on legitimate business. An extension of the wall into the parking lot created a small courtyard adjacent to the convenience store and beauty salon. A place for talking. This area was covered during the day by a roll­out awning for shade over conversational groupings of green plastic chairs around small tables. A number of flowering plants on casters completed the experiment. The plants, furniture, and awning were removed and stored in one of the empty shops at five o’clock each day.

There were a few disasters at first, involving trash left in the courtyard, competing music from the beauty salon (black) and the take-out restaurant (Asian) and several attempts by warring gangs of adolescent males to claim the courtyard for afternoon beer drinking and drug deals. The latter problem was addressed by a combination of classical music blasted alternately from the salon and restaurant, and some serious pressure on the convenience store owner to stop selling beer to minors. The alternative involved his explaining the practice to an Alcoholic Beverage Control agent whose name and number were taped to the window of each storefront, facing out. But it wasn’t enough.

Incidentally, I don’t know why adolescent males in gangs hate classical music, but they do. It actually seems to hurt them. My own research into primate behavior involves a time before there was music, so I can add nothing to the puzzle. Except that gangs are probably a regression to male primate social organization and the complexity of the music reminds them that they’re supposed to have evolved. I remember wondering at the time why David, who played French horn in our high school band, had become a criminal. David liked classical music. But then David was never in a gang. Until now.

That first mall conversion was eventually so successful that the owner began touting my services to his friends, all of whom seemed to own and lease retail property. I got gigs planning layouts for lingerie departments and security for sidewalk sales. A Japanese-run convenience store chain put me on retainer just to determine from store diagrams the optimal placement of feminine personal items. (Across from canned goods in an aisle which does not lead to the beer cooler.) I began to accumulate money. When I realized that the thousands in my savings account were at a number more than half my age, it felt sort of good. Nothing like holding Misha, feeling her birdlike heart, but good. We take what we can get.

Still, the project should never have worked. There were too many problems in the area. Charles Dickens named them—poverty, ignorance, disease. Even the life-building spirit of women is broken by these. But I found a secret weapon. When I tacked up an announcement for a part-time minimum wage job “managing” the first little mall at a community center up the street, the ad was answered by a large black woman in a conservative business suit. Her hair was in about a hundred and fifty looped braids woven with tortoiseshell beads. She wore cowboy boots. The beads made a pleasant clacking sound as she threw her substantial frame into a chair in the mall courtyard.

“Rox Bouchie,” she introduced herself, carefully pronouncing her surname “Boo-she” so I’d get it. It would have helped if she’d given the same attention to her first name, which I thought was “Rocks” for the initial half hour of our acquaintance. I also thought she was either the director of the community center or a social worker as she questioned me about my work at the mall. When I explained that the part-time job I’d advertised would involve keeping the courtyard area clean and alerting the police about drug deals and illegal drinking, she lowered gold-shadowed lids over coffee-brown eyes and shook her head. The beads rattled. She just said, “Girl. . .”

The way black women say “girl” can be magical. Frankly, I have no solid beliefs about the survival of consciousness after physical death. But if it’s going to happen I know what I want to see after my trek toward the light. I want to see a black woman who will smile and say, “Girl . . .”

The word’s resonance is utterly female, the opening syllable of a story that will explain what’s really going on. It says, “You don’t have a clue, but I’m going to give you the inside scoop.” The sound is hypnotic, like an audio version of that top-of-the-Ferris-wheel moment just before the downward rush. At that moment after my death I would like to be told exactly what the universe is, and why. I would like to see the point. And in my fantasy the story will begin with that word on the tongue of a black woman.

“Um, do you know of anyone, a woman from the neighborhood preferably, who might be interested in—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Nobody in this neighborhood is that dumb. The job you’re offering is suicide. But I like the way your mind works. I might be able to help.”

A client of hers, she said, was looking for a small storefront in which to open a used-clothing boutique. Skilled with sewing machine and serger, he enjoyed redesigning clothes. He also created wall hangings and fabric art. For six months’ free rent against a year’s lease on one of the empty storefronts, he might be willing to clean the courtyard and police the mall.

“He sounds promising,” I said. “Why don’t you run the idea by him, and I’ll talk to the mall’s owner. But why would he want the job if it’s so dangerous?”

“He learned to sew in prison and can handle anything that drifts in here,” Rox Bouchie said, watching for my reaction. “Got a problem with hiring ex-cons?”

“My twin brother’s in prison. In Missouri.”

I felt that the response established my credentials as a savvy, street-wise person. The twin sister of an incarcerated felon. Way cool.

“How often do you get back to the Midwest to see your brother?” Rox asked while frowning at something stuck to the bottom of her left boot.

“Um, actually I haven’t had a chance to visit him, uh, there,” I answered, giving similar attention to the removal of a shipping label from the table leg.

“I see.”

So much for cool. And the finesse with which Rox Bouchie unmasked my distance from David should have suggested that I was dealing with a pro in the unmasking field, but it didn’t. I was too ashamed of what I’d just said to notice.

“What’s this guy’s name?” I asked, changing the subject.

“BB. BB the Punk.”

“Uh, strange name.”

Rox shook her head again, slowly. The beads made a sound like acorns falling on dry ground as I noticed a smattering of freckles over her broad nose.

“His real name is Bernard Berryman. Do you know what ‘punk’ means in prison?”

I sensed that I was already a million points behind. Why lie?

“Probably not,” I said. “So just tell me.”

“It means ‘turned out,’ as in ‘whore.’ It means being beaten close to death, repeatedly gang-raped, permitted to remain alive only in the role of slave to a group of predators or, if you’re lucky, to one ‘daddy’ who protects you from the others. It’s done to the young, the weak, the naive. BB has a flair for the dramatic. He saved his life by getting into the role. He got out of prison two months ago. He’ll never get out of the role.”

David had been twenty-eight when he went to prison. Was that young? And had he been weak and naive? I felt a crippling wave of nausea. A need to run away.

“Girl, you’re turning green,” Rox Bouchie pointed out. “Never seen anybody so homophobic.”

“I’m not homophobic,” I yelled at her and an additional hundred yards of mean street. “I’m ready to puke!” Anger was displacing the nausea, which felt better. Later it would occur to me that Rox had called me homophobic to make me angry. She had done it deliberately to distract me from my fears about my brother. She had been kind.

“Sorry,” she said, rising and throwing a business card on the table. “Think about it and give me a call.”

When she was gone I looked at the card. It said, “Roxanne D. Bouchie, M.D., Forensic Psychiatry, Donovan State Prison.” I had been talking to a psychiatrist. A forensic psychiatrist. Now I can see the mark of the grid all over that encounter. I can see the shove at my shoulder blades. But I wasn’t ready to hop back on the ride. Not entirely. Because I’d be hopping back on alone. Thinking about David alone. And I would have to remember Misha. No way. I ignored it.

I did arrange for BB the Punk’s management position at the mall, however. And his shop, Death Row, took off. When not creating stylish outfits for the mannequin in his shop window, he patrolled the mall in dreadlocks, missing nothing that went on. He wore a prison denim costume with “Needle Freak” stenciled across the back of his blue chambray workshirt. He kept an enormous, curved carpet needle hooked through a front pocket. And nobody messed with BB. Everybody assumed that he had nothing left to lose. My project, and my future, were secure.

So secure that close to a year later on the day of my first interview with Muffin Crandall, I had three jobs going at once. The first was the Crandall Case, and the second involved nothing more than picking up some data for analysis from a failing vegetarian restaurant in a mall where nothing else was failing but a shop specializing in silver gifts and tableware. I could have told the silver owner to give it up and move back east, if asked. No charge. Silver tableware just doesn’t work in Southern California, probably because the region lacks both an entrenched aristocracy and cold nights. If a sterling compote can’t point to seven generations who’ve lived in the manor, then it needs to reflect lots of candlelight. Even in winter, nights here are rarely cold enough to tolerate more than two tapers on a table for eight. And no­body knows which fork to use for the fish tacos, anyway.

My third job was the one I’d taken as backup in case more retail gigs failed to materialize. I also took it because I love teaching. Real teaching, where you get to see the lights go on as people start thinking. The third job is responsible for my Tuesday-Thursday wealth-mongering schedule. Those are the days in which I spend three hours, one to four, teaching a class called American Problems to girls at San Diego’s juvenile detention center. The curriculum is vague to nonexistent, so I can teach the kids pretty much what I want as long as they glean a few standard concepts along the way. Like, there are social problems in the United States.

And of course my choice of a juvenile prison as venue may be traced to my ongoing conflict over David. At the time I thought it was just an interesting population on which to test the conclusion of my dissertation. I had concluded that understanding our primate behavior patterns enables us to reject them in favor of better things before we wind up with six kids or in prison doing twenty-five to life.

I wasn’t going to talk high theory to the kids that Thursday less than three weeks ago, though. I wasn’t going to talk any theory. On that day I was going to listen, because something was going on at juvy. Something weird.

Like all institutions, juvenile detention centers generate folklore. The traditional adolescent tales of prosthetic arms clawing at car doors and virgins who die of shock after finding mummified penises in their lockers are repeated, with jailhouse twists.

People in stressful transitional states lean on folklore to clarify fears and address them. Adolescence is nothing if not transition, and being in jail is major stress. Juvy produces a wealth of folklore.

For the girls it was a legendary former detainee named Frankie. Nobody currently in juvy had ever seen Frankie Lopez, who according to the story had been there and gone years ago. But Frankie hadn’t just been released to her mother or the foster care system like everybody else. Frankie had (a) stabbed a guard and then starved to death while trying to complete a secret escape tunnel that was still there, complete with her bones, although nobody knew where; (b) romantically entranced a guard and been carried by him in a laundry bag to his car where she died of suffocation as he drove frantically toward the Mexican border and safety; or (c) been killed by a guard and buried late that night beneath the curbside flower bed of the gas station visible through the dorm windows facing the street.

And while the most obvious feature of the Frankie tales is conflict and confusion about authority figures as embodied in the guard, there is also the theme of death, which doesn’t necessarily mean death. It can mean inexplicable change. It can mean absence. It always means fear.

Something had happened to Frankie Lopez, if indeed there had ever been such a person, which created enough fear for the story to become folklore. On the day of my interview with Muffin Crandall I walked Brontë in Balboa Park, picked up the data from the veggie restaurant, and arrived early at juvy. The kids were already in the classroom, which is unheard of. I’d changed into the slacks I usually wear so I can perch cross-legged on the desk to lecture. They were ordinary khakis with a nice-enough silk blouse. I’d worn them twenty times before.

“Hey, Dr. McCarron, you look pretty good today,” one of them greeted me.

I insist on the use of honorifics in my classes, so the kids call me Dr. and I call them Ms. or in a few instances Mrs., which is unnerving when the person being addressed is fourteen.

“Yeah, pants are pretty cool, like that pretty top, too,” said an­other.

“Gonna get me some tan pants like that, look like I’m in college.”

“Yeah.”

Female primates pick insects from the body hair of others in a grooming ritual which creates bonds and defuses tensions. Human females do this grooming verbally with compliments. I knew the kids were feeling tension about something and wanted to bond.

“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s read today’s assignment, the chapter on patterns in marriage and divorce in the U.S. since World War II?”

Nobody had read it.

“I heard they found that tunnel Frankie Lopez dug,” one of the girls said as though I’d never mentioned an assignment. “Did you hear that?”

“No, but then I just walked in the door and haven’t talked to anybody.”

“Well, somebody said they found it.”

The room was silent but full of a twitchy energy even Brontë was picking up. She kept pricking her ears and looking around, puzzled. I knew nobody had discovered an escape tunnel because there had never been an escape tunnel. Nobody stays at juvy long enough to dig tunnels and there’s no point in any event. It’s easy enough just to climb out a window. The kids do it all the time and are almost always immediately recaptured at the 7-Eleven next to the gas station, stealing Coke Slurpees and cigarettes. But the discovered-tunnel story meant something had been discovered. Something had changed. If I handled it right, I might be enlightened.

“Wow,” I said with forced neutrality, “that’s interesting. Tell me about it.”

The silence grew heavy as twenty pairs of clear young eyes looked grave.

“They didn’t find Frankie’s bones in there,” somebody finally said.

“Weren’t no bones in that tunnel.”

“Nothin’ there but mud, I heard. Just a buncha mud.”

They all knew the other variants of the Frankie story, but were not mentioning them. It was as if everyone in the room had heard only the tunnel version, and had believed it. I knew this meant something, but what? It’s always safe to punt.

“So it looks like that story about a character who died in an escape tunnel didn’t exactly happen, huh?”

I used “character” in an attempt to set up a discussion about what’s real and what are the uses of stories. I might as well have begun an explanation of the chi-square statistical analysis. They ignored the ploy. They wanted to talk about Frankie.

“Frankie was not in that tunnel,” the oldest and brightest girl said with finality, nodding toward the north side of the building.

I vaguely remembered seeing some construction in that direction when I parked. It made no impression. There’s always construction on government property. Campaign donors and relatives of elected officials have to make a living.

“There’s a lot of mud over there because I heard they accidentally cut into a water pipe,” another girl said.

It made perfect sense. But so what? What did somebody jack-hammering through a buried water pipe do to get these kids worked up over an urban folktale? There had to be something else. I scrounged around for a thread in what they were saying.

Frankie isn’t in a secret escape tunnel, seemed to be it. Which left the question, Then where is Frankie? A question about the possible futures of young women already off to a bad start.

“Maybe this Frankie really did okay and has a job up in Sacramento repairing computers for the state legislature by now,” I suggested. “What do you think?”

And it worked, sort of. One by one they advanced theories about where Frankie might be, doing what. The room has a pull-down map of the United States, which I pulled down so we could locate Frankie in cities all over the U.S. even though the map only has forty-eight states. We made a chart of jobs, job training, predicted income. At the break the kids went outside to smoke and play with Brontë as usual. I went to the office and asked for the record of a girl named Frankie Lopez. To my surprise, there was one.

Francesca Maria Elena Lopez had been in juvy several times, her last stay five years in the past, for prostitution. She was then fourteen. The ID photo clipped to her file showed a scrawny, big-eyed kid snarling at the camera. And failing to hide that hurt, lost look you invariably see in baby hookers. I can’t stand that look. It makes me think about killing adults who use children for sex. And then about going to prison like David, breaking my father’s heart. Unpleasant thoughts.

According to the record, Frankie Lopez served out her time and was released to the custody of juvenile court, which probably meant she was placed in foster care. The social worker, a Glenda Martin, had referred the girl to a family counseling center, but there was no follow-up on whether she ever went there. The juvenile probation officer had also contributed no paper to the file. Frankie Lopez, for all practical purposes, was just gone.

I didn’t tell the kids any of this. Confidentiality rules prevent any discussion of cases, but that wasn’t why. Something had happened to upset the girls, make them jittery as a herd rather than as individuals. Telling them about Frankie’s file wasn’t going to produce the explanation I wanted. Only their trust would do that.

After the break I talked about marriage and divorce rates even though nobody had read the chapter. They took notes as I drove home the fact that every woman must have a marketable skill, married or not. My mother and Carter Upchurch had told me the same thing. “You must be able to get a job and make money, just in case something happens to your husband.” All little girls are told that. It made me wonder why I needed a Ph.D. to say the same thing.

When the class was over three of the girls somberly approached my desk. Two of them petted Brontë while the third handed me a postcard.

“I got a library book outta the library this morning,” she said, watching me. “This book.”

It was a copy of Jane Eyre, not a big seller at juvenile detention centers.

“An interesting book,” I plugged. “About an orphan girl who has a rough childhood and later falls madly in love with a man who has a terrible secret. But she doesn’t let him—”

“That was in it,” she interrupted as the other two, and Brontë, looked at me expectantly.

I read the postcard, which had a photograph of tulips in a public park on the front. It had been mailed years ago, shortly after Frankie’s discharge. It had been mailed from Albany, New York, to a Bugsy Sneller at the detention center’s address. The message just said, It’s working out great! For sure! But you can’t write to me or anything. Okay? The bottom was a tangle of Xs and Os followed by Frankie. The I was dotted with a heart.

“Frankie Lopez?” I asked.

They all nodded.

“So who is Bugsy Sneller?”

They all shrugged.

“I’d like to keep this until next Tuesday and think about it, if that’s all right. It’s so interesting, isn’t it?”

Nods, big smiles of relief. They wanted me to take this voice from a past similar to their own. Take it away until they could revise their folktale. By next Tuesday it would be done. There would be new stories about Frankie Lopez, stories accepted as gospel, as if they had always been.

The clerical staff was gone when I left, so I couldn’t check the file on Bugsy Sneller. But at least I knew what was spooking the kids. The postcard, no matter who really wrote it, meant to them that their legend hadn’t died after all. And somehow that was scarier than starving to death in a tunnel. I realized how bad a real future could look to kids who didn’t have any future. It made me sick.

And tired. After feeding Brontë in the truck and grabbing a curried tofu salad for myself at a health food grocery, I went to the beach. Brontë chased a tennis ball for fifteen minutes and then I stretched out on my beach towel for a nap. San Diego’s beaches aren’t crowded at dinnertime in September, and the summer lifeguards are gone. But it didn’t matter. I could have been snoozing under a blanket of loose twenty dollar bills and no one would have come within six yards. Watchful Doberman eyes made sure of that.

An hour later I had more energy. A good thing, since I was about to hit Roxie Bouchie’s Thursday night line-dancing class at Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro. I was going to ask Rox to do a psychiatric evaluation on Muffin Crandall. She’d do it; I already knew that. But I’d have to pay for the favor by learning the Tennessee Stomp or something. Rox had been at me to learn line-dancing since I discovered her secret two months after our first meeting. The secret is that on Thursday nights Roxie Bouchie assumes an alternate identity—The Only Black Woman in North America Who Knows All the Words to Every Song Recorded by Garth Brooks. I had resisted her suggestions about the line-dancing classes, but curiosity about Muffin Crandall was pushing me over the edge. I hoped Rox wouldn’t expect me to have bought cowboy boots for my first lesson.

Chapter Five

As a rule, bars give me a headache. The music is usually little more than synthesized pounding, and I am always uncomfortable when total strangers sidle up to tell me they haven’t seen me in here before. I mean, what do you say? “That’s because I haven’t been in here before?” The linguistic rules of bars are not rational. I can’t cope.

But Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro, usually just called Auntie’s, isn’t like that. The music is recognizable as music and everybody assumes they’ve seen you before even if they haven’t. A laid-back gay hangout, Auntie’s still serves regular drinks although now practically everybody orders imported water. Non-carbonated, because nobody wants to burp while waltzing to Patsy Cline singing “I Fall to Pieces.” And everybody dances at Auntie’s. The two-step is everything. At Auntie’s the only rule is that if you’re not in a full-body cast you’re expected to dance at least once with anybody who asks.

When Brontë and I arrived, Rox was out on the dance floor already, wearing a spectacular purple-fringed blouse with a vest in gold and white patchwork brocades. I recognized the brocades from a set of upholstery samples BB the Punk had scored from one of his many contacts in the decorating industry. BB could turn practically anything into haute couture, and Rox was his favorite model. A guy in a Stetson leaned over the dance floor rail to tell me proudly that BB was also designing the costumes for Auntie’s competitive line-dance team. For an upcoming tournament the team would be in sequined ecru peasant shirts with Levi’s hand-dyed a particularly difficult shade of malachite green. A Celtic theme. Matching green Irish caps, also sequined, and homespun vests featuring lavish embroidery in Celtic motifs. But with Rox as trainer, Auntie’s team could win wearing baggy boxer shorts, right?

I nodded agreement as Brontë stretched out against the railing to watch. Then with fake enthusiasm I hopped down the three steps to the waxed floor and Roxie Bouchie’s suspicious smile.

“Ready to learn!” I pronounced weakly. Everybody else milling around on the floor was wearing cowboy boots and shirts with at least five mother-of-pearl snaps at the cuffs. I felt bland and underdressed.

“Girl, you must be lost,” Rox said, grinning. “The Society for the Preservation of Boring Clothes meets across the street. To what do I owe the honor of your presence on my dance floor?”

“I need a psych eval,” I admitted. “It’s a woman at Las Colinas. She’s confessed to killing a man. The body in the public freezer out by my place. Her lawyer says she’s crazy.”

“Whoa!” Rox replied, interested. “How did you get involved . . . ? Never mind. You’re gonna have to dance real nice for this, hear?”

“I hear,” I said, taking my place in a row of people whose thumbs were already hooked in the waistbands of their jeans. We were going to learn the Tush-Push, Rox announced as a spotlight clicked on, highlighting her in gold.

Misha, I have a good reason for doing this, I thought into the haze around the yellow light. I pushed the thought on through the ceiling and out into a dark sky beneath which Misha Deland probably was, somewhere.

Misha hated country and western music, although the hillbilly accent she tried to bury under her contrived Bostonese suggested that she might have had some familiarity with it in the past. She said country music reinforced the subservient role of women, who in its lyrics did nothing but sob over abusive husbands who’d run off with other women. The other women, she pointed out, would later sing about empty beer cans and foreclosures on double-wide trailers when the same men ran off with yet other women. Misha would have preferred a classic two-step urging housewives to shoot their husbands and live communally, growing their own food and hammering out social policy at night. I never bothered explaining to her why that two-step wouldn’t work.

Although I know why. It’s one of my favorite notions that the universe is essentially music, and that we came from there. Psy­choneurologists document cases in which people with brain deficits who can’t talk or read or understand words at all can nevertheless sing entire arias after one or two exposures to the music. Mute and autistic idiots savants have surprised their caregivers by sitting down at a piano and playing the themes from every commercial on television in the dayroom that morning. Even the ancient reptile brains of certain snakes respond dramatically to music.

I think music is the original language of life, half buried in the crumpled map of the brain. I think verbal discourse is an evolutionary newcomer, like opposable thumbs and politics. Music about communal utility bills would be like a mountain wearing a sweater. Beyond incongruous. Music has to be, and always is, about joy and despair, illumination and darkness, life and death. Even reptiles know this. But Misha wouldn’t have gotten it.

That is, she wouldn’t have gotten the theory. The practice she had down pat. Everyone said that on a good day Misha could seduce furniture, and it was true. She didn’t mean to be seductive, certainly didn’t cultivate an image suggesting steamy nights in heroin-chic hotel rooms. Scrawny little Misha in a leather bra and crotchless net tights would arouse guffaws from the dead. It wasn’t that kind of seduction.

It was more like an old hunger, deep and lonely and mean. Misha could touch people just by pronouncing their names and then staring at them with those huge gray eyes. Men, women, animals. Everything seemed stunned by some coded message she conveyed. It made her extremely good at her work, which involved organizing, getting people to show up and do things. I have seen the most rampantly macho throwbacks—cops, dry-wallers, tow truck operators—paralyzed with fascination for this butchy little middle-aged woman in designer clothes that never quite fit. Misha’s blouses were always buttoned wrong, the cuffs of her slacks coming untacked at the seams. She never cut the pocket threads of her jackets, but her pockets sagged anyway. She was everybody’s favorite waif, with an attitude.

And, she was music. Minor chord darkness, chaos, something from before even the idea of order. And then a nearly beatific sense of light I could almost see trailing from her fingers. I did see it once, when she touched Brontë’s head that first night at the Emergency Animal Clinic. Misha didn’t either like or dislike animals, and would later forget to feed Brontë half the time. It was something about hurt that made Misha into music. Hurt in others and a scrambled hurt that permeated the woman herself. I never knew what it was about. I did know that I was supposed to make the very strength of my soul available to her, stand with her in some battle raging just beyond my comprehension. I still know that.

“Blue!” Rox yelled over Garth slipping on down to the OH-ay-sis, “that’s slide, step-step, slide, honey. Not step, stop, and stand there.”

“Yes’m,” I shucked back. It was already clear that I wasn’t going to make the line-dance team, but then I look dead in green, anyway.

After an hour I could boast a beginner’s proficiency with three different line dances, although my hair was matted with sweat and I’d have to bury my blouse as soon as I got home.

“Where’s my minnow badge?” I asked Rox when we settled at a table in the back. I ordered an Evian for Brontë and a hazelnut-flavored Italian fizzy thing for me. Rox ordered tap water and took a baggie of soda crackers out of her purse. I thought it was strange, since Rox is usually one of the few who still order drinks with names like Cuba Libre and Singapore Sling.

“No minnow badge,” she said, letting most of her hundred and fifty beaded braids clatter against the tabletop as she leaned into a cracker. “And don’t drink out of my glass. Stupid stomach flu’s just about shut down the prison and me, too. You don’t want it, trust me. I’ve been barfing for two days.”

“What makes you think I’d drink tap water?” I replied.

“Oh, that’s right. Out at your place you squeeze water out of barrel cactus.”

“Actually, the liquid from barrel cactus pulp is poisonous when it’s milky,” I noted. “It’s just one of the reasons I drink the stuff that comes in bottles. So when can you do the psych eval?”

“She’s at Las Colinas.”

“Saturday, but only if her attorney or the court requests it. Have the attorney call me tomorrow at Donovan. How did you get messed up in this thing?”

Fifty people were two-stepping around the dance floor now, some in routines so polished that the rest applauded after a tricky turn or bit of footwork. The best dancers were two gray-haired guys in Wranglers and button-down dress shirts. The president of a small bank and his boyfriend of thirty years, a TV actor easily recognizable for his ongoing role as the bishop-sleuth in a religious detective series. My dad loves the show.

“Her brother showed up at my pool yesterday and hired me to help her,” I told Rox. “How outrageous would it be if I asked Bishop Brannigan to autograph a napkin for my father?”

“Tacky. Most people buy an Auntie’s T-shirt and he autographs that. I didn’t know you had a father. And why would this brother hire you? Hire you to do what?”

“To use my great skills as a social psychologist in proving his sister innocent,” I answered after paying fifteen dollars for a T-shirt. It featured the Wicked Witch of the West in cowgirl drag right down to her ruby-red boots. Beneath was the message, “It’s the shoes, stupid!” The actor signed his name across the back in red laundry marker. Dad would be overjoyed.

“And why would you think I’m the product of an immaculate conception?”

Rox let her head loll to one side and regarded me from tired brown eyes beneath sparkly purple lids. A real, no-bullshit look.

“You know what I mean.”

I did. She meant we’d known each other casually for almost a year since my first mall job. We’d seen each other around, talked on the phone about BB, had lunch a few times. Once I’d gone to Auntie’s with some of the old crowd from my years with Misha, and seen Roxie dancing provocatively with a woman who looked like Alicia Keys. It was safe to say Rox and I were comfortably, if dimly, acquainted.

Now she meant it was time either to open up and acknowledge that we might be friends or else draw the line squarely at our safer acquaintanceship. A dicey decision demanding navigational precision at least equal to that required for brain surgery. I knew she probably wouldn’t have even brought it up if she hadn’t had stomach flu for a week. Sometimes being sick makes people maudlin. The proximity of death and all that. Still, I was flattered.

“My dad’s an Episcopal priest named Jake. He lives in St. Louis,” I offered. “My mother, Elizabeth, was killed in an automobile accident twenty-two years ago. I grew up in a really little town in southern Illinois just across the Missouri state line. Waterloo.”

“Never heard of Waterloo, but we’re homies,” she said with a grin. “Sort of, anyhow. I was born in Chicago, brought up over on the Indiana side in Gary. My mother died when I was young, too. Twenty. God only knows about my peckerwood father.”

“Peckerwood?”

“White, honey, as in good old redheaded Scots-Irish stock. You know, four-chord harmony, plaintive ballads about lakes, ten thousand years of stomp-dancing just like you see on that floor out there. It’s genetic. Inherited. As it happens, I inherited it. Had to hide it from my friends, growing up. They’d have kicked my butt right into Lake Michigan.”

“You think tastes in music are genetic?” I asked, intrigued. It fit right in with my universe theory.

“Girl,” she replied, drawing out the word on purpose, “look at me. Do you see Dolly Parton? No, you don’t. What you see is an African-American woman whose DNA helix has a few codes that didn’t come from Africa. God, I love this music!”

“And you’re a psychiatrist,” I ventured, risking accusations of racism for suggesting that all little black girls in blighted Gary, Indiana, don’t grow up dreaming of the day they’ll prescribe their first antidepressant. “Is your father a doctor, too?”

“I have a picture of him and my mother,” she said, taking her wallet from her purse and showing me an enlargement of one of those photos that come in strips from a booth. The photo had captured a black woman with Rox’s eyes and broad nose, and a white man with Rox’s freckles and big ears. They both looked too young to be anybody’s parents. “I don’t think he was a doctor,” she added. “Probably a steelworker. Mama got a lot of those before the mills shut down.”

“A lot of steelworkers?”

The beads rattled conversationally as she turned her head.

“I was a trick baby. This man was the trick. She said she knew she was pregnant that very night, and kept the picture so I’d know what my daddy looked like. She never remembered his name, probably never even knew it. And maybe she made the whole thing up. That’s very possible, but this dude sure as hell looks like doe-si-doe to me.”

“And the ears, too,” I agreed, ducking the issue of mothers and prostitution entirely. “But why psychiatry?”

“All kinds of genetics,” Roxie mumbled through a soda cracker, curbing further inquiry. “So what about this woman you want me to evaluate? Do you think she’s faking it for an insanity plea? Is that why she confessed, so she’d appear incompetent?”

“I don’t know, Rox. Part of what I saw was a scam, some kind of act. I’m sure of that. On the other hand, there is something wrong with her. She looks like she’s been living on the street for years even though she hasn’t. And the prison has her in a high-security unit despite the fact that this is a first offense and there’s no record of any violent behavior subsequent to her arrest. Why would they do that?”

“Suicide precaution maybe,” Rox suggested. “If they think she’s crazy that’s standard practice. A stripped cell, no sharp objects, belts, cords, or shoelaces. A guard will check on her every twenty minutes.”

“But they let her wear this grungy old Shirley Temple wig . . .”

“I can’t think of any way to commit suicide with a wig, can you?”

Wig suicide was not a concept I had ever entertained. Suicide itself was not a concept I had ever entertained, even on the night I came home to the beach apartment Misha and I shared for two years, and she was gone. Misha, her clothes, books, and complete collection of Ms. magazines in Mylar slipcases, gone. There was a note taped to the refrigerator. “I’m sorry that . . .” had been scratched out in favor of We’ll always be together. I know you and Brontë will be okay. It was signed merely, M, as was Misha’s habit.

There was never any question of Brontë and me not being okay. Brontë is a dog and I’m not exactly unfamiliar with surviving the loss of loved ones, as they say. You just go on. Mothers die, brothers become felons, soulmates vanish without warning. I was in shock, but knew I wouldn’t die. Explanations were necessary, however. Some sort of accounting for the roaring in my ears and a sense that the only thing keeping me from a fall that would never end was my personal belief in the floor. The kitchen floor, in the kitchen, where there was a phone. It was ringing.

“Misha met someone at a conference several months ago,” I was told minutes later by the ex-nun editor of a feminist journal that published mostly translations of foreign articles about the role of women in the banking industry. The journal was so boring it was unreadable, and the editor, a nondescript woman in wire-frame glasses whose name I could never remember, was a friend of Misha’s.

Elaine Dennis. Or Denise Edsel. Something like that. She never came to our apartment and I assumed Misha saw her for lunch during the week occasionally. Now she was telling me that Misha had fallen head-over-heels for a multilingual grant writer who had just left the country for some project in New Zealand. She was telling me that Misha had gone, too.

No one among our mutual friends knew about the grant writer, but no one was surprised, either. In the following days they brought me pasta salads and sighed. Misha had always been so intense, they said. So odd. A bird of passage. Remember that time she couldn’t remember her maiden name when somebody asked her and then burst into tears at the English Department reception? Later she’d been seen defacing Republican bumper stickers in the Business School parking lot. Misha was, well, not always entirely appropriate, although God knew she could charm the socks off the pope when she wanted to. And she’d done such a great job with the Women’s Studies Consortium, and how difficult this must be for me, and blah, blah, blah.

I was numb. Then unbearably hurt. Then homicidally angry. Then numb again. I did take Brontë that weekend and drive as far as Mesquite, Nevada, before turning back. The plan had been to lose myself in some desert ghost town where no one had lived since the borax mine played out in 1947. I would waitress in a derelict truck stop with a flyblown picture of Willie Nelson on the wall. My only customers would be escaped convicts and local Native Americans exuding wordless understanding. Eventually I would publish a series of stark but transcendent essays about getting drunk and lying in ditches beside roads traversed only by tumbleweeds. Readers would be brought to their knees by my uncompromising metaphors of loss.

But people raised in the Midwest do not lie drunk in ditches writing about tumbleweeds. It just doesn’t happen. I had classes to teach on Monday. So I turned around and drove home, sick and sobbing and scared. Then I called Dad, who flew out the following weekend and helped me move to Wren’s Gulch. When he’d left and I was alone in the desert, I decided to kill Misha in my mind. I instructed everyone never to mention her name. I would not think of her beyond the most superficial level. The sort of level required by the fact that she’d forgotten to take her gallon bottle of windshield cleaner refill and about three hundred knee-high nylons I found on the floor of her closet. Suicide with or without hairpieces was never an option for me, but a sort of murder was. Somehow it didn’t seem like a good time to explain this to my pal, the psychiatrist.

“Muffin might die if she ate the wig,” I suggested as Rox scowled into her tap water.

“Nah.” She sighed. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff people swallow and don’t die. The stomach is an amazing organ. At least most stomachs are. Mine is just whining to go home.”

Brontë seemed reluctant to leave in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter, but I suspected that had more to do with the popcorn people kept slipping her than the song. Like most dogs, she prefers opera.

“So I’ll have the lawyer call you at work tomorrow,” I reminded Rox as we hit the cool night air of the street.

“Yeah, sure.” She seemed thoughtful.

“Blue?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s your brother in for?”

“Armed robbery,” I answered, veering off toward my truck. “He held up a bank. Shot a vase. I don’t know why.”

“Poor bastard,” she said, smiling over her shoulder before van­ishing into the shadow of a potted oleander by the curb.

An hour and a half later I was home and there were three messages on the machine: one from Dan Crandall saying he’d be by at ten tomorrow to talk about Muffin’s case. One from the owner of the vegetarian restaurant wanting to know if I’d had a chance to look at the terrible sales data he’d given me. And one from Father Jake, who sounded like he’d just had drinks with the Holy Ghost. I was too interested in his message to wonder why Brontë was dashing back and forth across the carpet, sniffing and growling. A field mouse had been there, probably.

“Betsy Blue,” my father’s voice announced, using a childhood endearment, “it’s good news. Your brother has found someone to love, and I think it’s going to make a difference. A big difference. Call you tomorrow with details. Love you. Bye now.”

“Oh, God,” I said to the answering machine as Brontë barked at my filing cabinet, which I thought in all likelihood contained the field mouse. Then I went for a quick swim and fell in bed trying not to think about what had happened to BB the Punk. About the sort of “love” my brother might find in a prison. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be like the banker and the actor at Auntie’s.

Brontë was still sniffing and casting concerned looks in my direction when I fell asleep and into what would become a recurrent dream. Misha hurrying up the steps of an old stone house on a residential street, agitated, maybe scared. Looking over her shoulder but not seeing me as I tried to call out to her but couldn’t. I had no voice. It was like I wasn’t really there. In that first dream I wanted to cry with disappointment.

I did cry, actually. Although it was dawn when I woke up sniffling. Dreams, like the grid, have a sort of funky disdain for linear time. But I wondered where I’d been in that flatland between an image of Misha dredged from my own brain for the first time in two years, and what should have been an immediate response to that image—grief. I was pondering the question when I realized Brontë had not come to bed.

She was still in the office/living room. I could see her through my open bedroom door, her nose resting on outstretched paws and pointing to something lodged in the carpet against the side of my filing cabinet.

First light in the desert is more felt than seen, even inside bankrupt motels. An abrupt shift from the otherworld of shadows and skittering silence to a real world at once comforting and banal. Then things come into focus with jarring speed.

What came into my focus was a small bright blue capsule being watched by a Doberman. Cerulean blue, I decided as gooseflesh crept up my arms. Nobody had been in my living room in two weeks and I hadn’t been sick since I moved. There was nothing in my medicine cabinet but generic aspirin substitute, natural vitamins I rarely remembered to take, and some worm pills from the vet that Brontë hadn’t needed in years. None of these was bright blue. I knew I had never seen, anywhere, a pill like the one nestled unaccountably in my carpet.

Still, it seemed ludicrous to be shivering in fear at the presence of a toy-colored pill, so I picked it up. “Inderal LA 160,” was etched in a wide light blue stripe around the overcap. The smaller half of the capsule sported three narrower light blue stripes.

There is no television at Wren’s Gulch Inn because I prefer books. But Misha loved CNN, so our apartment had cable and we sometimes watched killer dramas because she liked to cheer when the bad guy finally fell into a vat of boiling molasses or was run over by an armored car full of zany manicurists. From these dramas I had learned what to do with striped blue capsules found in my carpet. I dropped it into a zip-lock sandwich bag.

Brontë seemed relieved and immediately headed for bed. I joined her after checking my files and finding nothing amiss, but I didn’t go back to sleep. I was listing the phone calls I had to make as soon as the hour was decent. One of them would involve finding out what Inderal was, because the information might be useful in determining who had been in my living room without my knowledge. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.

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