Fire and Rain

  Carmen shut her eyes, pressing her fingertips to her mouth. “Oh, Mia,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Mia was shaken by the sincerity in her voice. “I don’t need… I don’t want pity,” she said.

  Carmen opened her eyes again. There was sympathy in them, sympathy that could only be construed as genuine. “I had no idea,” she said. “I was jealous of you. I am jealous of you. I know you don’t need pity.”

  “Jealous of me?”

  “Of your youth. Your talent. Of the lovely life you’ve created for yourself—coming way out here to pursue your art. Your passion. And I envied how easily you seemed to fall into a relationship with a man no one else can get close to.”

  “I’m Jeff’s friend. I don’t want anything else from him. He knows he can trust me.”

  “And he knows he can’t trust me for a minute, huh?” Carmen’s smile was wistful.

  “Not for a second.”

  Carmen nodded toward the prosthesis. “How long has it been?” she asked. “Are you all right now?”

  “The surgery was in January, and I’m fine. I’ll have reconstructive surgery next year.” She walked back into the living room, Carmen close behind her, but at the front door, the older woman stopped.

  “I mean it about the laundry,” she said. “And if there’s anything else you need, please let me know.”

  “Just don’t mention me in your reports on Jeff, all right?” Mia asked. “The next thing you’ll say is that he’s befriended a one-breasted woman.”

  Carmen looked stricken. “Do you think I would do that? Do you think I’m that cruel?”

  Mia answered her with silence. She knelt down on the plastic and began organizing the pictures on the bulletin board.

  “I’m sorry for what you’ve gone through.” Carmen stepped closer, touching Mia’s shoulder, bending low, and with some horror Mia realized she meant to embrace her. She folded her arms across her chest again and stood up, and Carmen dropped her own hands to her sides.

  “I’m not a mean person, Mia,” she said. “Really I’m not.”

  Mia felt herself color. She was the mean one. Instantly, she knew that it was Carmen in need of the comfort an embrace would provide. Carmen needed it far more than she did.

  Tell me about your son, Mia thought. Tell me what’s made you so hard.

  “I know you’re not cruel,” she said, walking toward the door again. “You’ve been good to me. But you’re hurting Jeff.”

  Carmen nodded, slowly. “Well.” She reached for the door knob, “if it’s any consolation, I don’t like myself much either these days.”

  She offered Mia a cheerless smile and left the cottage, slipping quietly once more into the rose-colored morning.

  30

  CHRIS’S PALM PERSPIRED on the handle of his tool kit as he waited in the darkness outside Carmen’s kitchen door. He’d asked her if he could work on the leak in the bathroom while she was home, telling her it might take him a few days before he could get to it at a time she would be gone from the adobe. It was a lie; he could have fixed the leak while she was at work the following day. But he needed this time with her. He needed the opportunity to talk with her about Jeff. He had to ask her to leave Jeff alone.

  Yet when Carmen opened the door for him, when she ushered him up the stairs and into the master bedroom they had shared, he knew the source of his nerves had nothing to do with his deception, but rather with being near Carmen in the bedroom that held so many memories for him, good and bad.

  “I’ve appreciated all you’ve done in the house,” she said, leading him into the master bath.

  “I’ve enjoyed it.” He set his tool case carefully on the tiled counter top.

  Carmen pointed to the dripping tap in the white whirlpool tub. “It doesn’t seem that bad right now, but I swear, at night the noise keeps me awake. Even with the door closed.”

  He remembered how lightly she slept, how anytime he would awaken in the middle of the night, she would already be awake, usually holding him, snuggling close to him.

  As he hunted in the tool case for a screwdriver, she took a folded green towel from the chrome etagere near the tub, fluffed it open and hung it on the towel rack. She stepped back to admire it, and he realized this bathroom was nothing more than one more room in the house to her. Of course. She couldn’t possibly share his memory of this room—the blood everywhere, the splashes of red in the tub, on the towels. She had been nude when he found her, and more than anything else, that had told him she’d been serious about killing herself, that she truly no longer cared about anything, not even what people thought of her.

  She surprised him by sitting down on the white-tiled tub surround as he worked on the faucet.

  “Have you thought about running, Chris?”

  The question surprised him. He was wearing shorts, and he glanced down at his legs. His muscle tone wasn’t what it used to be.

  “I know I should,” he said, prying off the gold-toned handle of the faucet. “I don’t work out at all any more. Just don’t have the time.”

  Her face registered confusion, and then she laughed. “I meant run for mayor.”

  He gave her an incredulous stare. “Are you out of your mind? Every morning I count the days until the election when I can turn this mess over to someone else.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “I think you should consider it.”

  “DeLuis and Burrows are far better qualified.”

  “But they’re such… politicians. Their primary interest is power. They don’t really care about Valle Rosa. No one loves Valle Rosa the way you do, Chris.”

  He removed the screw holding the old washer in place. “And it would make a good story, huh? You could get a lot of mileage out of good ol’ Chris Garrett running for office.”

  She let out her breath. “That wasn’t what I was thinking about at all.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Oh, Chris, don’t you get it?” She rested her elbows on the tub surround to lean close to him. “You’re doing something miraculous for Valle Rosa. You’ve got everybody excited, everybody full of hope, hanging their umbrellas from the treetops. You’ve got everybody in this little hamlet working together for a change. Whether or not Jeff succeeds in making it rain is almost immaterial at this point. This is the toughest thing Valle Rosa’s ever going to face. If you can handle this, you can handle anything.”

  He thought of Sam Braga’s editorial in the Journal the day before. Sam had—at some cost to himself—eaten his words. “The Journal has been critical of Mayor Garrett in the past,” he wrote. “In light of the recent rainmaking experiment, that criticism must be reconsidered. Christopher Garrett may well emerge from this ordeal as a visionary.” In the same edition, someone called for the start of a fund to keep Jeff Cabrio working without sacrificing the transportation needs of Valle Rosa. The residents of the town were indeed working together with a spirit of community Chris hadn’t seen since he was a child.

  Chris replaced the handle, pushing its decorative ceramic cap into place. “I don’t have a political bone in my body, Carmen,” he said, closing the tool chest.

  “I know.” She stood up. “That’s why you’d be perfect.”

  They left the bathroom and walked together into the bedroom. Chris pointed to the skylight above the bed.

  “Speaking of leaks,” he said, smiling, “how’s the skylight holding up?”

  She laughed. He saw her try to stop it, but she couldn’t.

  “That was really funny,” she said.

  “How long did it take us to realize it was leaking?” he asked, although he knew the answer. They had been making love while a cold winter rain fell outside and a fire burned in the bedroom fireplace. Carmen had been above him, and he remembered the glow of the firelight in the slim stream of water that slipped over her shoulder, her breast. Even then she didn’t seem to notice, and he wasn’t about to bring it to her attention and risk destroying the pure, pleasured concentration in her fa
ce. They had exaggerated that leak over the years when they recounted the story to friends. What had begun as a trickle became a deluge.

  “Well, I knew it right away,” she said, “but you were lost in ecstasy.” She looked away from him, almost shyly, and he wanted to touch her, to pull her into a hug, but he didn’t dare. Instead he stared at the bed. In that bed, he hadn’t been a pitching ace and Carmen hadn’t been the star of San Diego Sunrise. They’d been nothing more than two human beings in need of one another.

  A sudden, soft breeze blew through the open window, bringing with it the smell of eucalyptus, strong and familiar. He felt a wave of longing, not to make love so much as to recapture the closeness he and Carmen had shared in this bed. He wanted the warmth of her body next to him, wanted to see the tangle of her dark hair in the moonlight spilling from the skylight above them.

  He looked at her now. “I’m sorry I ruined everything,” he said.

  She bent over to smooth an imaginary wrinkle on the floral bedspread. “So, seriously now, what do you think about running?”

  He smiled at her abrupt change of topic and changed it again. “I think you and I need to talk about Jeff.”

  She sat down on the bed. “What about him?”

  Chris folded his arms across his chest. “Well, I was hoping you could lay off his story for a while. Let him get his work done and get out of here before you reveal anything else about him.”

  “You know I can’t do that. This is the biggest story in Valle Rosa right now. It’s the biggest story in southern California.” She looked up at the skylight with a sigh. “They’re finally paying some attention to me at work, Chris. What do you think they’d do with me if I suddenly stopped reporting on him?”

  He knew she was right. Her dilemma was real. “I’m just afraid you’re going to scare him off,” he said.

  She frowned at him. “Doesn’t it bother you that he’s obviously hiding something? For all you know, you could be harboring a murderer. Or has he told you something I don’t know? Has he told you what he’s running from?”

  “No, and frankly, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me what he did before he came here. All I know is that he can help us in a way no one else can.”

  Carmen smoothed her hand again over the spread. When she spoke, her voice was soft. Confidential. “Sometimes I appall myself.” She looked at him, her eyes dark and wide. “All I can think about is getting more information about him. It’s obsessive. I wake up in the morning trying to figure out whose brain I can pick next, who can tell me something about him I don’t already know.”

  She hadn’t spoken to him—confided in him—like this in so long. He wished he could hold her. He sat down on the bed himself, but left a space between them.

  “They were laughing at me at News Nine, Chris,” Carmen continued. “They were literally ready to get rid of me. Now, they’re taking me seriously again. Jeff is big news, and I have him in my back pocket. Am I supposed to let that opportunity slip through my fingers?”

  He started to speak but was interrupted by a knocking from downstairs. Carmen immediately got to her feet. Disappointed, he followed her down to the kitchen, where Mia stood at the screen door.

  “Sorry to disturb you.” She seemed to be speaking only to him. “Jeff wants to know if you could come to his cottage to talk about some more equipment he needs.”

  “Now?”

  Mia nodded. “He said it’s important. He needs to get the stuff soon.” She smiled. “And he asked if you could bring your guitar and a bottle of wine, too.”

  Chris looked at Carmen. He wasn’t ready to leave the adobe, not when they were finally talking like something other than adversaries. The image of the white bathroom, blood-streaked, flashed though his mind. Irrational, he told himself. She’s all right. She’s all right because she has Jeff’s story.

  “I guess I should go,” he said to her, wondering if his tone conveyed his reluctance.

  Picking up a sponge, Carmen began wiping the already clean kitchen counter. “No problem. Thanks for fixing the leak.” There was a formality in her voice, telling him that, even if he were to stay, the spell had been broken.

  Still, as he walked across Sugarbush with Mia at his side, he couldn’t help but picture Carmen, standing alone in the kitchen of the adobe, with only her obsession as company.

  31

  IT TOOK HER SEVERAL days and some help from Tom Forrest—who apparently had a tight-lipped connection in New Jersey—for Carmen to find the name and phone number of the foster parents with whom Jeff had lived during his senior year of high school.

  Only the foster father, Walter Hunt, was still living. Carmen called him one evening from her kitchen. She had decided to downplay who she was and where she was from in order to prevent him from discerning that Robert Blackwell was the rainmaker in southern California. She had to be particularly careful now; the reclusive Valle Rosa rainmaker was becoming national news.

  But Walter Hunt wasn’t going to be a threat. He sounded very old, his voice tired and soft. He had some trouble following her as she explained that she was doing a profile on Robert Blackwell. He didn’t seem the least bit interested in her reasons, and she was pleased when he simply began to talk.

  “We took in a hundred and twelve kids over the years,” he said, a certain pride in his raspy voice. “But I remember the one you’re talking about. The county told us he was a genius, but the truth is, he was too smart for his own good. He wasn’t a real happy kid, either. Who could blame him? His stepfather was locked up and his mother died a few years earlier having an abortion.”

  “An abortion?” Carmen guessed Walter Hunt had Jeff mixed up with one of the other hundred or so kids he’d taken care of. “I thought she died in a car accident.”

  “That’s what the kid told everyone. Abortions weren’t legal back then, you know—and they shouldn’t be legal now, if you ask me—so of course he and his stepfather tried to cover it up. The county social worker said it had been done in a back alley somewhere, and the police found her in the parking lot of a church. She’d bled to death.”

  “Oh, God.” Carmen closed her eyes, wishing she could block out the image of Beth’s suffering. At some point she was going to have to tell Susan Cabrio what had become of her sister. She wished she didn’t know quite so much.

  She drew in a breath. “When did Rob come to you?”

  “After they arrested his stepfather. Watts, his name was.”

  “And why was he arrested?”

  Walter Hunt sounded as though he were yawning. “Well, I think a couple of people got killed during one of his drug deals, even though it was an old case. He’d stopped pushing drugs long before. Not fair, I guess, for a man to go straight and then get put away for something that happened long ago. But that’s the way the law works. Rob was real defensive about him. Amazing the kid never got into drugs himself, ‘cause he really loved that man. He visited him as often as he could, taking off without telling us where he was going. That was typical of him.”

  “Where was Mr. Watts incarcerated?”

  “Hmm. Good question. I don’t recall, except that Rob used to take a bus to get there. We knew when he’d disappear he was either out seeing his convict stepfather or having sex with some girl.” Walter Hunt laughed. “He was fast. We heard that from the other kids. They said he’d move from girl to girl, that he’d done it with practically every girl in the senior class by the time he graduated.”

  “I see.” Carmen wasn’t certain how to respond to that particular piece of information. “What else can you tell me?”

  “Well, I remember this friend of his—a boy—who was always hanging around. Felt like we’d taken in two kids, sometimes. He was another brainy type.”

  “Was his name Kent?”

  “Yes! That’s it. Kent Reed. Real tall. Bad skin. Had a few fingers missing on one hand. He and Rob could scare the living daylights out of you when they got together. One of those brains that was always cooking up somet
hing was enough. Put two of them together and you could have a real catastrophe on your hands. You never knew what they were going to do next.” Walter Hunt paused for a moment. “Anyway, Kent gave the other kids at the house the willies. He was always over, always wanting to be with Rob—even Rob would get annoyed with him. So, the wife and I made some rules about when he could come over, how long he could stay, that sort of thing.”

  Carmen had written the name Kent Reed down on her notepad and drawn three circles around it.

  “Do you have any idea at all where Kent Reed might be now?” she asked.

  Mr. Hunt yawned again. “Interesting question. I’d guess either a top secret government agency where they cook up futuristic weapons, or an insane asylum. Take your pick.”

  “How about Rob? Do you know where he ended up?”

  “Can’t say that I do. When he graduated, though, the schools were falling all over each other to get him. Don’t remember which one he picked. MIT, might have been. One of those technology schools.”

  She jotted ‘MIT?’ down on her notepad. “Well, thank you, Mr. Hunt. You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t sound ready to say good-bye. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I remember Rob as one of the most difficult kids we had, though that’s odd in a way. We had kids who got high or who didn’t know right from wrong. We had ones who were borderline retarded, others who broke the law. Robbie wasn’t any of those things, but he was sad and angry and hard to reach, and none of our rules mattered to him if he wanted to break them. He wasn’t a mean boy, just single-minded. When he left for college, the wife and I thought, good riddance. We told the county we didn’t want any more kids with genius IQ’s.”

  Carmen got off the phone. She poured herself a glass of iced tea, then sat at the table again, tapping the tip of her pen on the notepad. Where the hell was she going with this? She felt like disregarding Tom Forrest’s advice to move slowly. She wanted to call the FBI to see if Jeff was wanted for something. She was tired of working in the dark, tired of trying to decide what was significant and what wasn’t. Lately, she’d found herself studying the wanted posters in the post office, examining the features of the shifty-looking men for some resemblance to the man living on her property.