The Invisible Woman E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 438

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

From the World Fantasy Award-winning author comes the suspenseful sequel to Pennies from Heaven The bright spring weather in Old Orange is deceptive, with dark undercurrents shifting beneath the surface of the busy lives of Jane and Jerry Larkin. Jerry is restoring an old boarding house, exposing its dark history, and Jane's busy Co-op is victimized by malicious mischief that grows more mailicious by the day. Their troubles roil together, sinister forces rising from the cheerful, root-cracked sidewalks of Old Orange, engulfing them in mystery and murder and the threatened collapse of long-held dreams.

Leseprobe

The Invisible Woman

Copyright © 2024 by James P. BlaylockAll rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2025 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

Originally published by PS Publishing in 2024.

Cover design by Pedro Marques

ISBN (ebook) 978-1-625677-75-4

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, Suite #5N

New York, NY 10036

http://awfulagent.com

[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Saturday

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Sunday

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Monday

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Tuesday

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Wednesday

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Thursday

Chapter 43

Friday

Chapter 44

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by James P. Blaylock

This book, as ever, is dedicated to Viki.And to two long-time friends: Kent Nielsen, who, along with my dad, taught me how to work with my hands (and with my back) and to enjoy the work.Dixie Durham, mentor and fellow teacher, who provided Viki and me with a much-appreciated Molokai getaway, complete with a Jeep to get away in.My thanks and love to both of you.

“In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.”

—King James Bible, Proverbs 10:19

“Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”

—William Ashbless, “Destinations 1958”

Saturday

1

Jerry lay in bed, his heart thumping and with no idea what time it was, only that something had awakened him. He had been dreaming, but the dream was rapidly evaporating, now only a dim memory of walking down a deserted road in the windy moonlight, hearing the scuffing of his own shoe soles on the pavement. In the dream he didn’t know who he was or why he was walking on a nameless road—only that he was alone in a dark, empty, unknown place.

The living wind moved the bushes beyond the window now, a limb rasping against the screen—probably what had awakened him.

Or it might have been someone walking on the pavement outside.

He slipped out from under the covers and stood up, pausing for a moment to get his bearings. It was 3:47 by the bedroom clock. Jane lay on her side of the bed, sleeping peacefully. Their dog Peewee, a mix of French bulldog, pug, and conceivably shih tzu, had been crammed in between the two of them. He was snoring softly, lying on his back with his feet in the air and with a grin on his moon-like face.

There were no footsteps now, although Jerry was increasingly certain there had been. He peered through the blinds and saw nothing but the quiet street, the early morning breeze fluttering the leaves on the big camphor tree at the curb, the streetlight glowing through the foliage. He moved to the half-open bedroom door and looked out into the living room. Absolute silence. The front door was locked.

A car door shut quietly now, and he looked out the window in time to see a black Chevy Bolt pull soundlessly away from the opposite curb and move away down the street with its headlights off—not one of the neighbor’s cars. He stepped outside into the cool darkness and eased the door shut behind him, hurrying down the steps onto the front walkway.

The sky was full of stars, the morning breeze having swept the sky clean. There wasn’t a living soul abroad in the pre-dawn darkness of Water Street except Jerry and the driver of the mystery car, which was too far away for him to make out the rear plate, which wasn’t illuminated anyway. The car’s headlights switched on when it rounded the corner onto Almond Street and slowly accelerated, although not in a suspicious hurry.

The footsteps in his dream must have been made by the driver of the car—a front porch thief, maybe, or someone prowling up the driveway, looking to sneak into the backyard. Six months ago there had been someone prowling up the driveway, an unstable woman named Lettie Phibbs, who had invented a grudge against Jerry and Jane. A local historian and librarian, she had been interested in human bones buried beneath the Larkin’s house and even more interested in the gold coins that shared the skeleton’s grave. But Lettie Phibbs was dead, and the bones and coins that Jerry had dug up were long lost. The resident ghost had been exorcised, the house having shaken off the past in six short, violent days. The week-long turmoil had left him with dark dreams and the knowledge that chaos in the form of a deranged reference librarian could come knocking at the door when a person least expected it.

Despite his tendency to laugh things off, he was still shell-shocked these six months later, which probably explained his roaming around outside barefoot right now, wearing a t-shirt and pajama trousers at four in the morning—a state of affairs that would needlessly alarm Jane. He couldn’t see that anything had been stolen from the porch, and the driveway gate was shut. They kept it bolted these days.

He headed back into the house, wide awake now and with no hope of falling asleep. “False alarm,” Jerry whispered to Peewee, who was waiting for him, and he carefully shut the bedroom door before going into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee and pour a bowl of buttermilk for Peewee. Despite his assurances to the dog, he wondered if his fear was a precursor of things to come, or a product of his dream-addled imagination. He sat drinking his coffee and listening to crickets outside the window. Six months ago false alarms had turned out to be authentic after all.

2

The square-mile historic district of Old Orange is a hodgepodge of century-old neighborhoods, with tree-shaded craftsman bungalows, Victorian, and Spanish revival homes with here and there a 1940s ranch-style house with steel-frame windows and broad eave-overhangs. A circular plaza, called the Plaza by long-time residents and the Circle by newcomers, with its tiled fountain, pie-slice plots of grass, rose gardens, old sycamore and pine trees, and green-painted benches, sits in the center of the downtown. Chapman Avenue bisects Old Orange, stretching away east and west, and Glassell Street does the same north and south, car traffic slowed by people in crosswalks heading toward antique stores, cafés, bars, clothing boutiques, and garden shops—a timeless place in the immense suburban sprawl of southern California.

Jane and Jerry sat out front of Scotty’s Drugstore and Soda Fountain at the east end of the Plaza District on a perfect southern California morning, their table adjacent to the sidewalk along Chapman Avenue. Peewee sat on his travel pillow next to Jerry’s leg, either asleep or meditating.

It was seven a.m. The sun had just risen from behind the Santa Ana Mountains, the eastern sky red-orange and dark blue. Overhead lights glowed on the underside of the wide canvas awning that sheltered the sidewalk. The café was already busy with early birds, and the air drifting out through the open doors was full of the smell of coffee and bacon and pancakes on a hot griddle. Jane had ordered bacon and pancakes. Jerry’s combo plate had the same, but with two fried eggs, over easy, which required a side order of toast.

Across from them at a window table sat six men in their seventies who wore garish aloha shirts—a group of Saturday morning regulars who had graduated from Orange High School back in the 1960s and had never found a reason to move away. In Jane and Jerry’s four years of living downtown, Jane had discovered that people tended to stay in Old Orange once they were settled in. Where better? One of the men tipped his straw hat at Jane, and she nodded and smiled back. It was spring, and spring made her happy. All was right with the world, or at least with Old Orange, and the future looked bright in the morning sunshine.

“How about The Barnacle?” Jerry asked. “There’s not another pub in the state called The Barnacle, probably not in the world.”

“The name is obscure,” Jane said. “I can picture the sign over the door—a brown lump that people would mistake for a meatloaf.”

“What you might not know is that the English used ‘barnacles’ as a synonym for ‘spectacles’ back in the old days. What I’m picturing is a wood carving of a barnacle wearing spectacles, waving little feathery arms.”

“No one under the age of two hundred will get the joke. Why not forget the feathery arms and just call it The Meatloaf?”

“Because I’m not opening a meatloaf joint.”

“How about The Owl or The Wren or The Swan? There’s lots of pubs named after birds. Better yet, how about a local amphibian? How often do you see a pub called The Newt? You could put spectacles on the newt.”

“Or a crown. The King’s Newt.”

Jane nodded and sipped her coffee. “Maybe this is one of those less-is-more things, but a crown might be a good touch.”

The sky above the mountains was robin’s-egg blue now, and there was warmth in the spring sunlight. Peewee’s eyes opened when half a slice of bacon somehow dropped off Jerry’s plate, which sat at the very edge of the table. Peewee slurped up the bacon, chomped it down, and closed his eyes again, resuming his meditations.

“That was accidental,” Jerry told Jane, who didn’t share his idea that feeding human food to Peewee would make Peewee more human-like. “It’s these tiny forks. They’re too small for my ungainly big hands.”

“Or your head and its ungainly brain. Peewee’s tubby enough without …”

Jane’s phone went off for the third time since they’d sat down. Saturday being the day of the Old Orange Co-op’s Farmer’s Market, the busiest day of the week for Jane, the phone would keep bugging her until she ended her workday and headed home at six o’clock. It was Mrs. Hazelton on the line. She was curator of the Little Tidwell Museum on Main Street in Santa Ana, and a working spiritualist on the side. Recently she had volunteered to drive the Co-op’s new bookmobile, which was debuting this morning at the Farmer’s Market. She was just then pulling her car into the lot behind the Water Department, which provided the Co-op parking.

“That was Hazey, checking in,” Jane said to Jerry after a short phone chat. Over the past few months Jerry had renovated the Co-op’s ’75 GMC box truck, a food-truck that he had turned into a bookmobile. Shelving and cabinetry replaced the torn-out ovens and cold storage, and now it was fitted out like the inside of a gypsy caravan or a sailboat—cubbies and compartments everywhere, map drawers, and brass portholes along one side. He had found the portholes for sale at Muff’s Antiques and installed them in the truck wall on the passenger side, giving the exterior of the truck a nautical flair.

A mastiff the size of a small cow ambled past them now on a short leash, led by a woman who could easily ride on the dog’s back. Peewee opened one eye, snorted, and then closed his eye again, having made his point. Tim Kistler, Jerry’s barber, turned the nearby corner. His shop sat behind Scotty’s, a stone’s throw from Jane’s Co-op office in the historic Prescott Building, and was a haven for locals, who got the latest news on the neighborhood while their hair was being cut. Jane loved that about Old Orange, seeing people you knew on the sidewalk, merchants waving at you through an open door, old houses with big curb trees, parkways with miniature take-one/leave-one mini libraries built like bird houses.

Jane was committed to keeping it that way. Her Old Orange Co-op, made possible nearly two years ago by a MacArthur Grant, had the long-term goal of turning Old Orange into a sustainable district and restoring Santiago Creek, which neatly divided the downtown park into two halves. Six months back the Co-op had been besieged by devastating winter floods, funding problems, and the murderous librarian Lettie Phibbs had fixated on Jane and Jerry, declaring Jane a friend and Jerry an enemy. Her fixation had gone from strange to deadly when Phibbs had been consumed by greed.

Those were problems of the past, or so Jane hoped, and she could feel spring in the air and in her mind. “Take a look at this new app I downloaded this morning,” she said to Jerry. “It’s called City Ponds. The photos are unbelievable, and lots of the ponds are local, so there’s useful information about freshwater ecosystems.” She watched him scroll through photos while she smeared peanut butter onto one of her pancakes and folded it up like a taco.

“Wow,” he said. “Here’s a Reddish Egret, photographed in Anaheim in a Santa Ana River catch basin.” He peered more closely at the photo. “I’ve always wanted to see one in the wild, but they’re rare as hens’ teeth around here. And vice versa, if you think about it. Does this have to do with natural ponds or man-made?”

“Both. Many of the natural ponds have been restored. There’s nothing wrong with giving Mother Nature a hand occasionally, especially when she’s under attack on all sides.”

Jane took the phone back from Jerry, and at that moment it pinged. The screen asked whether she wanted to download an augmented reality app called “OrangeScape.” The sender was someone named Albert Figgins, who claimed to be a Friend of the Co-op. She couldn’t recall that he was a member, but the name of the AR app was interesting, so she pressed “Allow” before closing her phone. She could check it out later and get rid of it if it was expensive or irrelevant.

Jerry waved at the waiter, who headed their way with the coffee pot.

“No more for me,” Jane said to him. “Did you hear my phone ring early this morning?”

“I did. I figured it was market business. Don’t tell me it was another hang-up call from last night’s mystery woman.”

“Yeah, it was her again. I blocked the number like you suggested. This morning it was a different number but the same woman. I have this strange feeling that I know who it is, although you’ll think I’m nuts.”

“Of course I will. That’s why I married you. Who do you think it is?”

She stared at him for a moment and then said, “Could be Lettie Phibbs.”

“Phibbs? Back from the dead? What did she say?”

“Not a lot. Last night she uttered my name and then hung up. This time she said, ‘Why, Jane Larkin,’ in a sort of I’ll-be-damned voice, like she’d been searching for me for years. I said, ‘Is this Lettie Phibbs?’ and she hung up again. It sounded like she was somewhere distant, maybe talking through a tube or something to distort her voice. I know that’s not supposed to be possible, but …”

“Do you mean it’s not possible that she was talking through a tube, or that she’s alive?”

“Both.”

“Maybe she’s calling on a spirit phone from the bottom of Irvine Lake.”

“I’d be fine with that. And I’m not sure that it’s Lettie. How could it be?”

“I don’t think it was. You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Okay. Did you call her back?”

“I tried to, but it was the same as last night—an automated answering service. So that’s two calls, two different numbers, no way to return the calls.”

Jerry looked around, as if considering this. “I don’t see it as a phone prank. Do you have some long-lost aunt who might be trying to look you up?”

“No, and why would a long-lost aunt be making hang-up calls? Why not say who she is?”

He swallowed some coffee and said, “Whoever she is, she’s probably using a burner phone.”

“Like a drug dealer?”

“Like anyone who wants to remain anonymous, which she would, if she’s actually Lettie Phibbs. She’d be wanted for murder, after all.”

“Now you’re talking like you think it’s her. I didn’t recognize the area code, so maybe she’s in Mexico or Canada or someplace. Like you said, she wouldn’t have come back here.”

“You can put any area code you want into a burner. The numbers are one-offs so that the call can’t be traced. For all we know she could have called from a car parked in front of the house.”

“Don’t say that!”

Jerry sat for a moment as if thinking about something. Then he said, “Okay, if it’s Phibbs, and if she got out of the water alive, it’s possible that she made it to her place on Molokai. That’s where I’d be if I were her. She was assumed dead six months ago. The Molokai cops wouldn’t have her place staked out. They’d have given up on surveillance after a couple of weeks, if there was any surveillance at all. And she wouldn’t just waltz back into our lives. We’d call the police and they’d put out a dragnet and haul her in like a rabid heffalump. She’d never see the light of day again.”

“Would we call the police?” Jane asked, pouring maple syrup onto the last few bites of pancake. “What if they gathered us up in the dragnet? We’d have some explaining to do about why we knew about her activities and never reported it.”

“But what did we know, really, before she went nuts? And it would be her word against ours. She’s the criminal. We’re law-abiding citizens. Credibility is on our side.”

“We used to be law-abiding citizens, until we got involved with Lettie.” Jane gathered up her phone and tapestry bag when she heard the Tidwell College bell toll the half-hour—seven-thirty.

“Don’t worry about the check, these eggs are on me,” Jerry said, pointing at a splotch of yolk on his polo shirt and grinning at her. He never missed a chance to wrangle a joke out of anything handy, often as baffling as his barnacle-with-spectacles idea.

“You’re heading to the Chalet from here?” Jane asked.

“Yeah, for the rest of the day, after I pick up the keys from Kat Winkle. I’m going to switch out the locks and then try to get a jump on cleaning things up.”

Jane disengaged Peewee’s leash from the leg of the chair and picked up his pillow. “See you later, then. I advise putting ice water out of your glass on that egg yolk and then scraping it off with a spoon. I learned that in Girl Scouts.” She kissed Jerry on the forehead and hurried away with Peewee cantering alongside, as if he were anxious to take up his position at the Farmer’s Market as King of the Pet Corral.

* * *

Jerry tried the ice water trick, managing to scrape off the yolk and then to scrub most of the remnant away. It was good to go into battle with polished armor, even if it was going to have dents beaten into it over the course of the day. In no rush, he drank his coffee and handed the waiter his credit card.

Next door to Scotty’s a street door led onto a stairwell to upstairs offices. The door swung open now and three men and a woman walked out onto the sidewalk. Jerry knew the woman, a local real estate agent and City Council member named Sally Fairchild. One of her clients had made an offer on the Chalet, the old building that Jerry was turning into a pub. Jerry’s realtor, Kat Winkle, had gotten Jerry’s offer in before them, and now Fairchild was haunting Jerry, trying to get him to sell out and make a quick profit.

She wore her hair pulled back so tightly that her skull showed through the flesh of her face. It was difficult to say how old she was, maybe sixty, and Jerry had the notion that she’d had facial surgery, probably more than once. At one time she might have been beautiful, but she had dead eyes that matched her plastic smile. She was aggressive as hell, which had made him determined not to sell the Chalet at any price. She walked away toward the Plaza now.

Jerry realized with a start that he knew one of the men, also—a cohort of the disappeared and maybe-not-dead Lettie Phibbs. He was a local lawyer, probably bent, named Bob Holloway. Jerry had a minor run-in with him last fall when Lettie Phibbs had brought him out to the house, pretending that he was a local historian so that the two of them could case the place. Things had got heated, and Jerry had offered to feed Holloway his dentures.

Anger was always a regrettable emotion, and Jerry considered waving Holloway over now and apologizing to him just to salve his own conscience, except that Holloway didn’t warrant an apology. Last fall he had looked bookish, with rumpled clothing and unkempt hair like the historian he pretended to be. He wasn’t rumpled now.

One of his companions was a short, heavyset man with a fire sale mustache. An Angels baseball cap sat low over his eyebrows, and he was wearing unnecessary mirrored sunglasses when he came out of the building. His puckered seersucker coat, with the usual pale blue railroad stripes, made him look like he was headed to the racetrack. He held a phone in his hands and was working the keyboard awkwardly, henpecking it with his forefinger. He handed it to the third man, older and dapper, who punched a few keys, said something that Jerry couldn’t hear, and handed it back. Sunglasses turned away without a word and slouched past Jerry’s table with his head down, looking at the phone and turning right at the corner in the direction Jane had taken, probably heading toward the parking lot behind the Army/Navy store. He stopped to look at the screen for a moment, as if taking a photo before heading down the sidewalk again. It seemed to Jerry that he had seen him around town somewhere, maybe another local politician.

Holloway and the older man stood for a moment talking in low voices while Jerry watched them out of the corner of his eye. This third man was probably in his seventies, tall and heavily built. His hair was longish, but neatly trimmed, as was his beard, and he wore a fedora that Jerry guessed was a Borsalino, probably expensive. He sported a sweater-vest under a tweed hunting jacket and tweed trousers. The brass clips of his suspenders were visible below the hem of his vest. He was talking turkey to Holloway, cutting the air with his open palm in front of his chest as if karate chopping an invisible assailant.

There was nothing suspicious about any of them being here, obviously just out of an early-morning business meeting in one of the offices upstairs. Holloway turned now and looked straight at Jerry, reacting with surprise, which he instantly hid. The waiter returned with Jerry’s credit card and a pen. When Jerry looked up again, the two men were walking west toward the Plaza. Both looked back now, Holloway muttering something into his companion’s ear. The old man nodded at Jerry, touched the brim of his fedora, and the two walked on.

3

Mrs. Hazelton climbed out of her Nissan Leaf in the empty gravel parking lot of the Water Department on Flores Street. She had been in and out of the chain-link enclosure for the last three weeks, driving the bookmobile around town to get used to maneuvering a box truck. Its automatic transmission made things fairly easy. In its previous life it had been a food truck selling meat pies—Patsy’s Pasties—but they’d had to paint over the dancing pies on the side panels when it was renovated, which was a shame.

She unlocked the heavy padlock on the chain-link gate, slid it out of its latch, swung the gate open, and crunched across the gravel to the truck. Placing her foot on the running board, she grabbed the pull-bar, and hauled herself heavily into the cab, where she dropped her purse into a wooden crate on the passenger-side floor. It was cool in the truck, although that would change as the sun rose, so she took off her collie-dog sweater, knitted by her friend Penny Potts in memory of Mrs. Hazelton’s dog Crumpet.

She put the sweater in with her purse, slipped the key into the ignition, turned it one notch, and switched on the CD player. The first notes of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance filled the cab of the truck. The CD contained the Vera Lynn vocals of “Land of Hope and Glory,” one of her favorite pieces. The lyrics were out of fashion, being about the glories of the British Empire, but being an American for the last thirty years instead of an Englishwoman, she wasn’t required to feel guilty for loving the song.

She ducked through the access door into the back of the truck, switched on the lights, and shut the door behind her. She had fifteen minutes of leisure time before setting out to the Farmer’s Market.

The interior of the bookmobile was as close to magical as it could be, smelling of lemon-oiled wood and paint and paper. The books were shelved old-style, with Dewey Decimal System numbers on the spines and actual paper check-out cards slipped into glued-in envelopes. Jerry had built a small card catalogue with a separate box containing titles of books in storage, so that customers could put in requests to pick up books next week. There was a narrow mahogany desk, also, contrived from an old school desk with a hinged lid and an inkwell, the desk full of useful items as well as fun things—old quill pens and fountain pens and pairs of spectacles and wax stamps for sealing envelopes.

Several rows of narrow map drawers were built in alongside the desk—Jane’s idea, since the bookmobile and everything in it was intended to be interactive. Later this morning, Jane would be teaching a class in topographic map reading to children while their parents shopped at the market. Everything was in its place, which wasn’t surprising, since she and Jane and Penny Potts had organized the compact spaces until they had gotten to the point of shifting things from one place to another and then putting them back again. She sat down in the small leather reading chair to take a breather. There was the smell of cigar smoke now—someone out in the lot, perhaps.

The cab door creaked open, and the truck abruptly bounced downward, the door slamming shut again. A thudding noise followed. She turned the knob on the access door and pushed, but the door was blocked. She was trapped. The truck engine roared to life and swung backward out of its space with a suddenness that threw her forward.

4

Santiago Creek is an intermittent stream that flows through Hart Park in Old Orange during and after the southern California rainy season. It disappears underground in the summer and into the fall unless there are early rains. Now in April it was flowing several inches deep in its bed, pooling up against a river-rock weir below the footbridge that spanned the creek. Weir Pond, an acre in size, was closed off by a pair of check-gates at the downstream end, which could be opened to regulate the pond’s depth and the rate of flow in the creek.

The Old Orange Co-op had rebuilt the weir two years ago as its first project, and at that time had planted two stands of white alder trees at either end of the footbridge across the creek. The alders looked like natural miracles to Jane, seeming to have grown a foot in the last month. There were still small white flowers on the trees, although they were falling fast with the approach of summer. Half a dozen sprouts a foot high had come up from the roots, the stand of trees slowly creeping upstream and down. A sustained drought would kill them unless they were hand-watered, but that wasn’t worth thinking about, since there was nothing she or anyone else could do about the eccentric rainfall in southern California.

Jane checked her watch—ten minutes of free time left to her. She walked out onto a stony little promontory that stretched into the pond and watched a big crayfish scuttle into the tangled roots of a colony of calamus plants, their sword-shaped leaves rising from the water surface. Despite what she’d said to Jerry about giving Mother Nature a hand occasionally, Weir Pond seemed to be taking care of its own business with very little human meddling, aside from the removal of invasive plants and fish and clearing out a weird array of trash.

Cans and bottles propagated along the shore and pond bottom, pitched out by littering slobs or washed downstream from the east. Paper and lightweight trash blew in on Santa Ana winds. There’d been an enormous dead racoon in the pond a week ago. Keeping a pond clean was a never-ending task.

Not long ago she had netted a small koi from the shallows and had given it to a neighbor with a backyard pond. If there was one koi in Weir Pond, there were probably more. Over the past month she had found black mollies, carnival goldfish, an ugly Plecostomus catfish nearly a foot long, and other hardy aquarium fish, probably let loose in the pond by people dismantling aquaria. She had also found a foot-long channel catfish and a tule perch as big as her hand, both indigenous to California and almost certainly escapees from Irvine Lake or the Villa Park Dam. Last fall an arroyo toad had turned up in the creek bottom, and she’d seen several since, as well as a western pond turtle a couple of times.

She saw the outline of something down in the shadows, and she shaded her face with her hand to get a better view. It was a rusty old coaster wagon half-hidden by a leafy tree limb. She’d need waders to fish it out, not something that was going to get done today. There was a sandy patch of pond bottom near it, and it was possible that she could get a rope tied to it and pull it free without tearing things up.

She looked back down toward the parking lot and saw that the market was doing a land-office business, with a half-dozen dogs waiting in line outside the Pet Corral and people swarming around Maryam Saliba’s coffee and pastries booth. It was time to quit fraternizing with Mother Nature and get to work.

5

Bob Holloway and Charlie Beckstein sat on an isolated bench in the rose garden near the Plaza fountain, like two old friends taking their ease. The morning was open for business now. Most of the parking spaces around the Plaza were full. The Continental Café was bustling, and there was a line snaking out the door of the Fillmore Coffee Company.

“There was that empty plate across from your man Larkin,” Charlie said, “whose was it, do you think?”

“I’d guess it was Jane Larkin’s plate. Unlike most married couples, they’re a pair of lovebirds. I see them around town together now and then. She’s got the Farmer’s Market at the park this morning, which is why they were at Scotty’s. Could be someone else was eating with Jerry, but I don’t think so. He’s pretty much a loner, except for his wife.”

“She’s the brains of the family, it seems to me,” Beckstein said. “I looked over those MacArthur Grant papers of hers. Boswell pulled them out of a file and made me a copy. They don’t give big-money grants to fools.”

“Yeah. Jerry’s a working man, you might say, mainly a carpenter. Thinks he’s funny, but his mouth gets him into trouble.”

“The truth is, Bob, he’s a working man with a degree in literature. I looked into him, just like I looked into Jane. You take him for a fool, and he might take you to the cleaners. Could be it wasn’t smart meeting upstairs in town here if you knew that the Larkins might be downstairs on the sidewalk, especially given your past with Larkin. You know what they say about six degrees of separation. In a town like this it’s about three degrees. I don’t have to tell you that there’s a lot riding on this venture.”

“Tell me?” You don’t have to tell me anything of that nature, Charlie. You know that.”

“This morning you weren’t thinking, opening the AR app like that. You should have given it to Councilman Boswell down the road somewhere. What’s the odds someone nearby might have seen it accidentally? I’ve heard about that happening, apps pinging nearby phones. That’s how sensitive information gets into the wrong hands.”

“No odds at all, Charlie. You can’t just grab something like an AR out of the air unless you know it’s coming. And they wouldn’t know what the app was anyway.”

“They wouldn’t have to know what it was if they couldn’t grab it out of the air. Do you know what the hell you’re talking about?” Charlie looked out at the traffic zooming around the Plaza rather than at Holloway. “Don’t get stupid on me, Bob.”

Holloway said nothing to this. There was almost no chance that Jane Larkin could have snatched the app out of the ether and downloaded it, unless someone sent it to her, which nobody did. He crossed his arms and sat back on the bench. “Proceed as per the plan when it comes to the Larkins, Charlie. Nothing’s changed.”

“What about Councilman Boswell? I’m not sure I trust a man who wears seersucker. You know what my daddy used to say?”

Holloway shook his head.

“He used to say, ‘This coat came from Sears, and I’m the sucker who bought it.’” He grinned widely at Holloway, who forced a smile. “Did Fritz Pellman come up with anything good to use against the councilman?”

“Enough to put a scare into him. Boswell’s a gambler, for one thing. Plays poker out in the City of Commerce and at the Morongo casino. Loses more than he wins. He had to borrow money to pay a couple of debts.”

“Is this a problem for him?”

“It’s heading that way. It was private money that he borrowed. Hank Clapper set it up with some guy he knows, and the interest is high. He didn’t quit playing and losing either. He’s anxious to play ball with us. You saw that. He has a lot of clout in the City. People owe him favors.”

“He wears sunglasses indoors. That says something about him that I don’t like. No one would put up with it in a poker game. And he already wants to call the shots. I don’t want his advice, I want him to commit himself, and soon. We’re down to the wire here. Boswell has to make himself useful. What my father used to say was ‘everyone to his station.’ You know what that means?”

“Yeah,” Holloway said. “We can keep him to his station just as soon as we know what his station is.”

“Who else is on board?”

“Walt Pittman, for one. He owns a contracting firm. And Mary Lou Smith, who’s a pal of Boswell’s.”

“That won’t carry it.”

“There’s a couple of others who are philosophically inclined. They’re from districts where people can give or take this historic nostalgia crap.”

“Boswell’s your job, then. Put him to work. He can talk philosophy with anyone who’s on the bubble. Have Fritz find out who owes him favors and what the hell kind of favors. If Boswell’s shy, we’ll use his family against him. Not his wife so much, but his children. We can have Morehouse spook him.”

As if to illustrate this, a family came along toward them on the walkway past the fountain now, happy parents with two children and a small dog. When they were out of earshot, Holloway said, “As your lawyer, I don’t advise making threats against a man’s children unless it’s your only play. There’d be a hell of a bad reaction.”

Charlie clapped him on the shoulder, stood up, pulled on his suspenders, and said, “I always mean what I say, Bob. Always have. You know that. Keep in touch. This train’s running downhill now, and the brakes are hot, so don’t daydream. I’m going to mosey on down to the park.”

He walked away toward the crosswalk in no particular hurry.

6

Holding on to steady herself, Mrs. Hazelton headed for the rear door of the bookmobile in order to get out quickly, nearly falling again when the truck lurched and began swinging around in a circle. The doorknob turned, but only opened about three inches. A small bungee cord encircled the outside knob, securing the rear door and trapping her inside. She tugged at it with her fingers but accomplished nothing, and now there was no question of her jumping out even if she could force the door open. She could see the parking lot moving below, which was unsettling, the truck bumping up from gravel onto asphalt as the box swayed and bounced on its springs.

They turned out onto the street and headed south, the music swelling, filling the truck until it blocked out all other noises. She thought of unlocking the long window on the driver’s side of the box, but of course the key to the window’s little padlock was on the ring with the ignition key, and she wouldn’t break the window unless it was absolutely necessary. If robbery was the motive, the man already had her purse.

She took her cell phone out of its belt holster and punched in Penny’s number, but when Penny came on the line, she kept yelling “What?” and then, “Turn down the music!” followed by, “Hang on!” Penny would know it was her, though, and would realize that something was wrong. Penny would get help.

Through one of the portholes on the passenger side she saw the old Water Department buildings passing by, the truck slowing to turn west on Almond Avenue. She braced her feet and remained standing, holding onto the map box, anxious to follow their progress through the windows. As they approached the stop sign at Shaffer Street, across from the Holy Spirit Lutheran Church, she hurried again to the rear door, pushed it open as far as she could, and shoved her arm through. She wasn’t a slim woman, and her arm jammed below the elbow in the narrow gap, but she waggled her fingers and shouted at the several people milling around the basement door at the side of the church. She could barely hear her own hollering over the music, and although a couple of people waved and stared after them as they passed by, they paid no attention to her, but seemed to be astonished at the sight of the colorful truck blaring out “Land of Hope and Glory” for the neighborhood’s pleasure.

She looked around for a weapon, thinking to knock the man on the side of the head if he came through the access door, but there was nothing obvious to be seen—nothing weaponlike. She pulled down a heavy old hardcover copy of The Pickwick Papers, which had plenty of heft to it, and then found a letter opener with a carved handle inside the desk. If it came to it she would beat him on the noggin with Pickwick and stab him with the letter opener, which should take some of the zing out of him.

They were heading up Glassell Street now, in the direction of Santa Ana where it would become Grand Street when they crossed under the freeway. But the truck moved into the right-hand lane and turned right on La Veta Street on a green light, bound for who knew where. She sat down in the chair and phoned Penny again, who shouted, “Hold on, Hazey!” and then hung up. It was the best she could do. She would have to trust Penny to call the authorities.

Who on earth would steal a bookmobile? she wondered. He must have known she was in the back, since he had fixed the door with a bungee, but he hadn’t shown himself, which probably meant that she wasn’t of interest to him. If murder was on his mind, he would have assaulted her in the empty lot, not locked her in and driven away hell for leather.

It came to her that he might have bungeed the door before she had arrived in the lot—that he had been waiting for her. He had known she would be there, carrying the keys to the lock on the gate chain and to the bookmobile itself, which he had obviously intended to steal all along, of all the strange notions. The truck was so easily identifiable with its porthole windows and ornately painted exterior that he couldn’t hope to avoid being spotted as soon as Penny had notified the police and they began a search. She wondered if they were bound for a garage or a warehouse in order to hide.

The truck made a left-hand turn, and she saw that they were on Memory Lane now, which curved alongside Santiago Creek in the direction of Main Street in Santa Ana. Oak and sycamore trees passed by, and she saw the stone pylons along the perimeter of Santiago Park. It came to her to make a sign calling for help, and she opened drawers searching for paper, but the truck began to slow down and to edge toward the packed-dirt verge of the road along the park-side shrubbery and benches. It stopped well off the pavement near the footbridge into the Park Santiago neighbor-hood. From what she could see the park was deserted.

The CD player shut down, the door opened and slammed shut, and there was blessed silence. She couldn’t see the hijacker through the porthole until he was partway across the bridge. He wore a hooded black sweatshirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, a man from the size and shape of him—tall and thin—and by the way he swaggered. He was carrying her purse under his arm, and he opened it now and pawed through it. Without looking back he pocketed something and tossed the purse itself over the railing before flipping his cigar onto the planks of the footbridge and walking casually away into the neighborhood. Mrs. Hazelton got her phone out and called Penny again, feeling the warmth of the morning sun through the walls of the truck.

7

Jerry sat in his pickup behind the old wooden mansion, locally known as the Chalet, that he would turn into a pub over the course of the next year or so. The building sat near the corner of Orange Avenue and Maple Street, a long block from Tidwell College and a short block from Glassell Street and the Plaza. It was a late-Victorian/early-Craftsman hybrid built in 1905, seventeen years after the town of Old Orange had been incorporated in 1888 and two decades before his and Jane’s house on Water Street would be built on the bones of an orange grove. The 3,000-square-foot Chalet had diamond-paned windows, a big attic gable, and green-painted beveled redwood siding. It had sat empty for the last thirty years, waiting for him to come along. He saw that a window in the upstairs corner room was broken, as if someone had thrown a rock through it. He’d have to tape a piece of cardboard over it. He’d have to do a hundred small things …

He heard the grinding noise of three skateboarders who swept around off Orange Street into the lot, cutting back and forth over the asphalt—his asphalt, it occurred to him. He poured coffee into the cup-lid of his Thermos and watched them kill time. One of them, a girl with long blonde hair apparently dyed with three flavors of Kool-Aid, flew past his pickup, narrowly missing the side mirror, and careened around Jerry’s dumpster like a swooping bird, disappearing and reappearing again. She hopped her skateboard over a broken concrete parking berm, but caught the wheel and went down hard. She climbed to her feet, looked at the bloody scrape on her elbow, wiped the blood on her shorts, flipped her board around with her foot, and took off again, following her two friends out of the lot, heading downtown.

He wondered whether he was liable for damages if she broke her head open. Worrying about these things was the price of becoming respectable. And it wouldn’t be the entire price. He remembered the long days that he had spent at the beach growing up, surfing at dawn with his friends, bonfires on the beach at night, and the vague idea that his life could be as constant as the ocean if he wanted it to be. But one thing had led to another—to Jane among other things—and as the years passed, it seemed to be moving on at an accelerating pace.

Jane’s work with the Co-op had been a motivation to him—her finding her life’s calling. His inheritance when his folks had passed away had made work optional for him, and for the past couple of years he had spent his time helping Jane with Co-op projects when he wasn’t putting a brick wine cave into their cellar, restoring their house, or taking Peewee for walks around the neighborhood.

Freedom had started to itch, however. In his mid-forties, with somewhere near half his life behind him, he had started to worry that he had climbed too early off the merry-go-round to become an eccentric handyman, still surfing or snorkeling alone now and then when he wasn’t being handy. Jane was moving forward while he was marking time—maybe not a good thing for him or for their lives together. Now he had climbed back onto the merry-go-round, leaving their wine cellar half-built and Jane looking for someone else to help with Co-op projects. Jerry had begun to miss his old life as soon as he opened the door onto his new one.

His mind told him that no one can skateboard forever, which immediately struck him as false. Did he have to lose the past wholesale in order to move into the future? He denied it, except that it felt like those were the stakes right now. It was simply a question of the cost of change—whether a person could negotiate a better deal with the fates.

His phone rang, and he half-recognized the number, which he checked against Sally Fairchild’s gilt-edged business card in his wallet. Maybe she had spotted him this morning. Her card displayed mysterious sets of initials after her name, probably obscure degrees from real estate colleges, if there was such a thing. He let his phone go to voice mail, then deleted her message without listening to it.

Feeling as if his life were out of kilter, he made himself climb out of the truck, and he saw now that there was something crammed in behind the vines and shrubbery along the back wall of the lot. He walked over to check it out, finding two rolled sleeping bags, well hidden. He had attached a hose to the water spigot at the rear of the building a few days ago, which made it convenient for people to help themselves to water. There was nothing wrong with that if they turned the water back off. On the other hand, the accessible water was an attractant that maybe he didn’t need.

It came into his head that as the property owner he had the right to pitch the sleeping bags into the dumpster and tear the vines and shrubs out—make a clean sweep. But that would mean that he would have gained respectability at the cost of his soul. Who gave a damn if someone wanted a drink of water or wash-up once in a while? There was no such thing as a public restroom anymore.

“To hell with it,” he muttered. He was running the risk of becoming civilized, like the Widow Douglas civilizing Huck Finn, but at least Huck Finn, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, had taken his corncob pipe and gone out through the window.

“Slacker,” he said to himself, trying to make a joke out of it. Work would clear away doubt. It took four trips to haul his portable workbench, tools, stepladder, shop-vac, cleaning supplies, and rolling table indoors, all of which he stowed in the kitchen, which was empty of cabinetry except for built-in shelves in one wall and the one cabinet that held a double-sink. There was a hazy old mirror over the sink, and a cracked ceramic plate on the small countertop. He put a bottle of hand cleaner on the plate and hung a towel on a bent nail driven into the wall beside the mirror. The kitchen was plenty big enough for a shop, with good light from a long bank of windows. He set up his bench and laid out tools on the shelves and on the rolling table, getting things organized—fixing to get started, as his old boss would have said.

The linoleum on the kitchen floor was dim with years of dust, disturbed by lines of footprints where he and Jane and Kat Winkle, their realtor, had wandered through the place before making their offer. The Chalet had been a rooming house for years, mostly students from Tilden College in the old days, or so he had been told, but had been locked and abandoned since the late ’80s until it had suddenly come onto the market.

He walked through the ground floor rooms, switching on the lights that were still operable, chasing out shadows, checking for signs of rats and discolored patches of plaster that would mark a leak. The place smelled of musty old carpets and dust and age. God knew what goblins were hidden beneath the wallpaper and spongey floorboards. There was something creepy about the lonely silence and abandoned atmosphere of the place. Sunlight and open windows would help. Standing around thinking about it wouldn’t help at all.

There was no evidence that anyone had been camping out in the downstairs rooms, although there was graffiti here and there— anarchy symbols that had been popular among skateboarders thirty years ago, illegible spray-paint scrawls, and a stick figure with a big, grinning face. The phrase “Big Dick Hangers” was written beneath it, maybe the name of an eccentric neighborhood gang.

He pushed curtains aside from the windows in order to let the sunshine in. There was nothing better than light and air to chase away ghosts. The old carpet was filthy as hell, and he opened the windows that were still openable in order to let breeze through. He unlocked and opened the door that led out to the alley entrance on the west side of the building, noting that the existing doorknob lock could be jimmied with a credit card. That wouldn’t do—not if he was going to leave his tools here for the next year or so. Who knew how long? He had brought two lock sets with him for the front and rear doors, and he didn’t relish the idea of spending more time going to Ace Hardware for another one, not today at least. The door would have to be replaced anyway, so he could simply fix it shut with screws and a two-by-four.

First things first, he thought, and walked back into the kitchen, where he removed the deadbolt from the kitchen door. He pitched the old hardware into the trash bin and cut away the molded plastic around the new hardware, dumping the parts onto the benchtop.