Fire and Rain

  Laura looked as though this news was too much to be believed. “You are? Are you just friends, or… how serious? I mean… does he know about your breast?”

  “Yes. And he doesn’t care.”

  Laura slouched down in the sofa. “God,” she said, “Glen was a pig.”

  “He’s coming over for dinner tonight. The man I’m seeing.”

  “He is? What time? We should straighten up this place.”

  Mia laughed. “He’s not that kind of man.”

  LAURA CHECKED HERSELF IN the mirror more frequently as the hour neared for Jeff’s arrival. She was helping Mia cut vegetables in the kitchen, when every once in a while she would disappear from the room. In a moment, Mia would hear the click of her sister’s shoes on the tiled bathroom floor.

  Jeff knocked on the door while Mia was stir-frying the vegetables.

  “Would you get it, Laura?” she asked, and she clutched the spatula in her hand as if she expected the next few minutes to turn her world upside down.

  She heard Laura and Jeff exchange greetings. Jeff said something she couldn’t quite make out. Laura laughed in response, and Mia dug at the vegetables in her wok with a new vengeance, annoyed with herself for her lack of faith in Jeff.

  “Hi.” He walked into the kitchen, Laura close on his heels. He had showered. He smelled of soap and shampoo, and his hair was still damp. He wore khaki pants, a gray-and-blue striped shirt open at the neck, a brown braided leather belt. She wished he didn’t look quite so beautiful.

  She pretended to be absorbed in her work on the stove when he bent over to kiss her cheek.

  “Brought some wine.” He slipped the bottle between her eyes and the wok. “Want me to open it?”

  “That’d be great,” Mia said. Her cheeks felt hot.

  There was a different sort of energy coming from Laura with Jeff in the cottage. Her scent seemed to overshadow the aroma of Mia’s cooking. Where she had been mopey and weepy throughout much of the day, now she glowed and glittered, her smile radiant.

  Mia felt herself sinking down. Disappearing.

  “That’s my favorite wine,” Laura said as Jeff pulled the cork from the neck of the bottle. “You have great taste.”

  “Thanks.” He poured them each a glass, then rested a hand on Mia’s back. “What can we do to help?”

  “Everything’s under control.” She glanced up at him. “Just keep me company, okay?”

  “So, Jeff.” Laura leaned back against the counter. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Engineering.” Jeff answered quickly, and Mia knew he had rehearsed this. “I work for Valle Rosa’s water conservation program.”

  “Oh, that sounds interesting. Isn’t this where that rainmaker guy is? Have you met him?”

  Jeff reached into the cabinet above Mia’s head for the napkins. “Once or twice,” he said.

  “How does he do it?”

  Jeff shrugged, setting the napkins on a tray. “He’s very secretive.”

  “Well, I saw the film of that so-called rain on TV.” Laura rested her glass on the counter and folded her arms beneath her ample breasts. “It looked fake to me.”

  “I thought so, too,” Jeff said. “The way those clouds were boiling up like that. I’ve never seen anything like that outside of the movies.” He reached into the wok and plucked out a pea pod, slipping it into his mouth. “So, Laura,” he asked, “how long are you staying?”

  “Just till tomorrow. I was hoping maybe I could take Mia shopping before I leave, though. My little baby sister.” Laura put her arm around Mia, and Mia could feel the awkwardness in the gesture. “How close is the nearest mall?”

  “Escondido,” Mia said.

  “Well, that’s not too terrible, and I don’t mind driving. And I’m buying—I’m sure I’m making more money than you are. You could use some new clothes, Mimi. I remember that skirt you’re wearing from when you were in school, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s very comfortable,” Mia said. Laura was right, though. The skirt was at least a decade old.

  “Maybe, but nobody wears long skirts like that anymore.”

  “Your sister sets her own trends,” Jeff said to Laura.

  “Wouldn’t it be fun to go to one of those make-over places where they take glamorous pictures of you?” Laura asked. “I think—now that I’m thirty—I should make some changes in my makeup or something. And you could get the works, Mimi. Wouldn’t she look great in bangs, Jeff?”

  “I think she looks great just as she is,” Jeff answered gallantly.

  Mia rolled her eyes above the wok, hoping neither of them could see her. “This is done,” she said, pulling a bowl close to the stove.

  “Let me help you with it.” Jeff lifted the wok and tipped it toward the bowl while she scraped out the vegetables. “Smells good,” he said.

  They carried the vegetables and rice and salad into the dining room. Mia was quiet while they ate, focusing her attention on her food while Jeff and Laura talked about Valle Rosa and about Laura’s promotion to senior sportswear buyer at the large department store where she worked. It wasn’t until they were halfway through the meal that Mia let herself study Jeff. She watched as he spoke to her sister. She watched his hands as he ate, thinking of the ways he had touched her with those hands, thinking about the taste of the skin on his neck, the scent of his hair. She remembered sitting with him on her porch the other night, after his nightmare. She remembered how he had clutched her arm, how he’d let her know he wanted her there. Needed her there.

  He poured more wine for Laura, and he smiled at hef as he handed her the glass, but Mia could see there was something missing in his smile. An emptiness. A shallowness she hadn’t seen in him before, and she realized all at once that he didn’t like Laura. It was a shock. A revelation. A relief. He didn’t like Laura at all.

  After dinner he joined Mia in the kitchen, setting mugs and teaspoons on a tray while she made coffee. She dropped the paper filter, and he bent down to pick it up. When he straightened again, he drew his hand under the front of her skirt, slipping his fingers under the top of her panties to rest his hand there, flat against her stomach. She sucked in her breath, and he leaned close to her neck. “I happen to be fond of this old skirt of yours and the easy accessibility it provides.”

  She turned her head to muffle a laugh in his cheek.

  “I’m going to miss you very much tonight,” he continued. “And furthermore, your sister’s a grade-A bitch. My apologies for talking you into letting her stay.” He withdrew his hand then and left the room, carrying the tray.

  “So,” Laura said, when each of them had a mug of coffee in front of them, “did Mia tell you I’ve been given the deep-six by my boyfriend?”

  Jeff nodded, glancing at Mia. “Yes, she did,” he said. “Glen, right? He used to be Mia’s old boyfriend?”

  “Uh huh. He’s an artist. He’s made an art out of ditching Tanner women.” Laura’s eyes filled, and Mia knew she’d reached her limit on being able to talk about anything other than Glen. It was going to be a repeat performance of the previous year, when she’d talked obsessively about her break-up with Luke. Laura and her men. She couldn’t exist apart from them.

  Laura dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t understand him. Can you explain men to me, Jeff? I mean, he was totally in love with me and then wham, he’s gone.”

  “I don’t think unpredictability is a uniquely male trait,” Jeff said.

  “But to ditch me, out of the blue!”

  “It’s no different than what he did to me,” Mia said quietly.

  Laura lifted her mug to her lips. “At least in your case you can make some sort of sense out of it, with the mastectomy and all.” She took a swallow of her coffee. “But with me… I just don’t get what he had to complain about.”

  Jeff stood up suddenly. He pushed in his chair and rested his hands on its old wicker back. “Well, Laura,” he said, “maybe it was your inc
redible lack of tact that drove him away.”

  Laura stopped her mug mid-air. “What do you mean?”

  Jeff looked her squarely in the eye. “Or maybe you were as insensitive to him as you are to your sister.”

  Laura looked stunned. Her mouth was open in a little U-shape, her eyes disbelieving. Mia felt Jeff’s hands on her shoulders as he bent down to kiss her on the neck.

  “I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She watched him walk across the living room, and she kept her eyes on the door long after he had closed it behind him. She didn’t dare look at her sister until Laura stood up and began clearing the table. There was a splotch of crimson low on her throat.

  “He’s got a mean streak,” Laura said. “You’d better watch out for it.”

  In another minute, Mia heard the angry rattling of the dishes from the kitchen. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat back with a smile, raising her feet to the chair Jeff had vacated. She would let Laura do the dishes.

  38

  TOM FORREST AND HIS New Jersey connection tracked down the first company Jeff had worked for after receiving his Ph.D. and passed the information on to Carmen. The company was Environmental Classics in Passaic, New Jersey, and Carmen planned her phone interview carefully. She wasn’t certain how much national media coverage had been given to Jeff and Valle Rosa, but she couldn’t take the chance that someone she interviewed might be able to link Jeff Cabrio and Robert Blackwell. So when she reached Warren Guest, an old co-worker of Jeff’s, she didn’t even identify News Nine. She was calling from a station “out West,” she said. Robert Blackwell was involved in a “small environmental issue,” and she was interested in learning more about him.

  “I just wanted to verify that he worked at Environmental Classics,” she said.

  “He worked here all right.” Warren Guest laughed. “And we were glad when he left, because he made the rest of us look like slouches with a collective IQ of about 50. Seriously, it wasn’t his fault his brain didn’t work the same as everyone else’s. When I see a problem, I see a problem. Rob would look at the exact same thing and see a solution.” Warren paused, then added, “He was a pretty good guy, though.”

  Carmen now knew first hand that Jeff was a “good guy.” He had rescued her from covering that bus accident. He hadn’t allowed her inside the warehouse as he and Rick moved the equipment to the roof, and there hadn’t been much to see from the ground, but she’d managed to get a story out of the morning nevertheless.

  “How long did he work at Environmental Classics?” she asked.

  “Oh, let’s see. Seven or eight years I’d say.”

  “Was he married or involved with anyone during that time?”

  “Yeah, actually, he got married while he was here. I didn’t go to the wedding. It was one of those small, quiet kind of deals. His wife’s name was Leslie.”

  Leslie Blackwell. Where was she now? Could she and Jeff still be married?

  “Do you happen to know Leslie’s maiden name?” she asked.

  “No, sorry. Don’t have a clue.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She seemed nice, though I didn’t really know her. I just saw her at office picnics and that sort of thing. They had a baby a few years after they got married. A girl. I remember the pink ribbons on the cigars.”

  Carmen thought of the picture in Jeff’s wallet of the two little blond girls on the elephant.

  “Were Rob and Leslie still married when he left your company?”

  “Yeah.” Warren hesitated. “You mean he’s not with her now, huh?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t know too much about his personal life, but it appears they’re no longer together.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, but what is it these days—one out of every two marriages ends in divorce? Not the greatest odds, and he’d be a strange guy to be married to. He was strange enough to work with.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, he was different. The rest of us sometimes felt as though we’d been hired to clean up after him.”

  “What do you mean? Do you mean he was sloppy at the office, or—”

  Warren Guest laughed again. “No. It was his work that could be sloppy. He would come up with ideas—brilliant ideas— and do what he wanted to with them, and the rest of us mopped up after him. At first I resented it. Then I realized that he wasn’t merely a scientist; he was an artist.”

  Carmen frowned. “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

  “Well, picture an artistic genius. Picture Picasso, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t try to contain genius. You don’t try to put limits on it. You watch him work, and he’s frantically mixing colors, creating a work of art on the canvas, and if he happens to mix a color he doesn’t like and tosses the brush on the floor as he starts to mix a new color, you don’t say to him, ‘pick up that brush before you continue.’”

  Carmen laughed.

  “You get it? So that’s how it was with Rob. Once he was on a roll, you didn’t stop him. You just stood out of his way and let him do his thing, and if he happened to screw up along the way, you cleaned up after him.”

  “Wow.” Carmen was struck by Warren’s creative analogy. She wondered how efficient Rick Smythe was at cleaning up. “When did Rob leave Environmental Classics?”

  “Hmm. Five years ago, maybe? He started his own business as a consultant, he and a guy he knew from college, Kent Reed. Another whiz kid.”

  “Really. Do you know where I can find Kent Reed?”

  Warren groaned. “He’s the kind of person you try to figure out how to lose, not find.”

  “Why do you say that?” It seemed that, even as an adult, Kent Reed had won no popularity contests.

  “Oh, he’d hang around here all the time, sticking to Rob like glue. The supervisor finally told him to get a life of his own, but Rob left shortly after that, and he and Kent started their business together.”

  “Do you remember the name of the business?”

  “Probably have it in my Rolodex,” he said. “I never get around to updating that thing. Hold on.”

  She heard him flipping through the cards.

  “Blackwell and Reed Environmental Consultants,” Warren said. He gave her an address in Morristown, New Jersey, along with a phone number. “This is old info, though. I know they’re not still there. I’m not even sure they still work together. But you really should try to talk to Kent if you want to learn more about Rob. He knew Rob Blackwell better than anyone.”

  Carmen tried to find a number for a Leslie Blackwell with no success, and the phone number Warren had given her for Jeff and Kent’s Morristown business now belonged to an elderly man who was overjoyed at hearing her voice, thinking she was his long-lost daughter. Carmen was nearly in tears by the time she managed to convince him that she wasn’t.

  Finally, she called Tom Forrest.

  “Check old business licenses,” he suggested. “No, never mind. I’ll take care of it and get back to you.”

  “I can do it myself, Tom.” She didn’t like his paternal attitude.

  “Come on, Carmen,” he said. “You’ll do all the work once I get the information. Let me do this much for you.” After a moment’s hesitation, he continued. “You’re doing great, Carmen. That article in the Union was terrific.”

  An article in yesterday’s San Diego Union had stated that getting a taste of Carmen Perez again “points up what has been missing from Channel Nine these past four years.” Carmen had read the article three times.

  Tom called her back in less than an hour. “Reed left the state a couple of years ago,” he said. “I’ve got a forwarding address to Lamar, West Virginia, but it’s a post office box. Tried to get a phone number for him there, but looks like it’s unlisted.”

  Carmen wrote down the address. “All right,” she said, “I’ll take it from there.”

  SHE FLEW TO DULLES International Airport in
Virginia on a red-eye flight the following evening. Dennis Ketchum had given her the time off with some reluctance, and as she stood in line at the car rental window, exhausted from the fitful sleep she’d had on the plane, she hoped this wouldn’t be a wild goose chase.

  The drive to West Virginia took her two hours, the last half hour seeming to go straight uphill. The countryside was beautiful and green. Even with the rise in altitude, though, the day was sticky hot, and she was grateful for the rental car’s air conditioner.

  She followed the map spread out on the passenger seat, and as she neared the town of Lamar, she realized that the jade green crepe suit she was wearing wasn’t the appropriate attire for this region. The terrain ranged from thick woods to open fields. Houses were spread far apart, and they were small and, for the most part, in need of paint and repair. Rusting metal furniture graced lopsided front porches, and statues of flamingos and baby ducks and upright, fully-clothed, kissing pigs adorned the yards.

  She passed a small sign for Lamar, barely visible in the leafy overhang of a tree. This was it? Sighing heavily, she continued driving along the narrow wooded road, passing the occasional house, the occasional horse and cow. Lamar made Valle Rosa look like a metropolis.

  Finally, she came to a cross street with a small store on one corner. She pulled into the parking lot, stopping near an old gas pump. The air bore down on her with its damp, sucking humidity as she stepped out of the car, and she pulled a clip from her purse to pin up her hair. Why would anyone choose to live here in this heat, she wondered, although she supposed the residents of Lamar might wonder why anyone would choose to live in a place where they could flush their toilets only once a day.

  It took her eyes a minute to adjust to the dim light of the store after being out in the late morning sun. She appeared to be the only customer. A middle-aged man sat on a stool behind the counter, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette, while a woman arranged cans of soup on one of the shelves. They both turned to look at her as she walked in.

  She approached the counter. “I’m looking for the post office,” she said.