The Day I Killed James Read online

  “It’s late,” Annie said, which wasn’t why.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Who’s Annie Stewart?”

  “Oh. Well, that’s kind of a long story.”

  Frieda’s arms flew out wide, as if to take in every possible explanation. “I’ve got nothing but time.”

  Out of options, Annie conceded that she had best come in.

  I’m doing this very well after all those tequilas, she thought as she stepped back from the doorway, allowed Frieda into her living room, closed the door behind them.

  She turned back to Frieda, who said, “Boy, you’re hammered. Huh?”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “Look at you. Not even peach fuzz.”

  For the second time that night, a smooth hand across the bare skin of her scalp.

  “I was growing it out for a while. But sometimes I still—how did you find me here?”

  “Well, honey, that’s kind of a long story, too. Why don’t we save long stories for the morning? You won’t remember any of this tomorrow anyway.”

  “I’m not that drunk.”

  “Honey. I know you.”

  You don’t, she thought. Nobody does. You knew Theresa. But she didn’t say so, because it would sound like a hurtful thing to say. And because even Annie had to concede that she probably shared Theresa’s lack of resistance to alcohol.

  Frieda smiled suddenly and held her arms out. From force of habit and probably much more, Annie walked in. Frieda was a big, tall girl, and Annie’s head rested comfortably on her shoulder, her face in the crook of her neck. Frieda held her.

  It was every bit as comforting as embracing Todd, and a whole lot safer.

  THREE

  On Not Knowing Where

  Annie woke early, for no discernible reason. She found her way to her kitchen in the half-light, her stomach queasy, eyes grainy, head a mess. Thirsty. More than anything else, thirsty. She stood naked in the dawn at her own sink, preparing to stoop to drink the grotesque, mineral-laden local tap water. Pulled a heavy glass mug down from the cupboard.

  Dropped it on the linoleum at the sound of a voice.

  It said, “Damn. You’re skinny, aren’t you?”

  The cup landed hard on its base but did not break. The noise made Annie wince.

  Then, still rattled, she fell back against the counter, hand to her chest, breathing hard and talking to her heart.

  The lump on the living room sofa appeared to be, of all things, Frieda. The voice spoke again. “They say you can never be too thin or too rich. But you might be pushing the limits there, sweetie.”

  “Well, if it will make you happy,” she said, her voice still ragged with breath, “I’ll give away some of my money.”

  Frieda sat up, pulling the knit afghan around herself. “Sorry I startled you.”

  Annie put on a long flannel shirt and sat down on the coffee table next to the couch. Close enough to touch Frieda, but she didn’t. “Frieda. What are you doing here?”

  Frieda swept masses of hair off her face with both hands. “I was sleeping, but you put a stop to that.”

  “How did you get in?”

  Frieda fixed her with a pitying look. “I told you you wouldn’t remember last night.”

  “You did?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “When did you tell me that?”

  “Last night.”

  “Right. I guess I might have seen that one coming.”

  Her mind flickered back to the night before. Todd. She remembered sitting at the bar with him. Smoking and watching them both in the bar mirror. But what troubled her was what, if anything, took place in that big black hole of later in the evening.

  Meanwhile Frieda told her to put on her clothes, she’d buy her breakfast. But breakfast was the farthest thing from Annie’s mind. And the farther it stayed from her stomach, the better.

  They sat on the outdoor patio of Sebastian’s Store and Coffee Bar in Old San Simeon. Annie sat with her back to the original Hearst warehouses, looking in the general direction of the Castle. Currently blissfully hidden in the early morning fog. Watching instead the old one-room schoolhouse and the flat brownness of the dry summer grass. Still very aware that the Castle was up there. Waiting for her. Whether she could see it or not.

  Frieda’s breakfast arrived, and Annie tried not to smell it. She asked the waitress if she had any buttermilk.

  “That’s not on the menu,” was the reply.

  “That wasn’t the question,” Annie said.

  “I could ask the cook.”

  “Please do. Thank you.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to charge for it.”

  “Make something up. Overcharge me. I really don’t care.”

  The waitress disappeared, and Annie lit a cigarette. Inhaled deeply and felt the predictable sensation of queasiness. She’d known all along that the first cigarette of the morning would make her sicker, but it really wasn’t optional.

  She thought again about Todd. Maybe she should drive up the hill after this and talk to him. No, he was off today. She should call him. But she’d have to look up the number. Which meant she’d have to remember his last name. Damn it, she knew his last name. At one time she had. Hell, she saw it on the schedule every day. Why didn’t she pay attention to these things?

  Frieda waved her smoke away. “By now I would think you’d have asked again.”

  “Asked what?” She felt vaguely irritated to be distracted from this problem with Todd. Before working it out in her head.

  “How I found you.”

  “Oh, that. Did I ask you before?”

  Frieda only rolled her eyes, broke the yolk of an egg, and mopped it up with a piece of toast.

  “Okay. I’m asking again.”

  “I was my own private detective. Your father wanted to hire one.”

  A kind of creeping anxiety in her belly, tangible emotion. “So when you get back, you’ll tell him I’m okay. Right?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just tell him. Please.”

  “Right. Like I didn’t already call him from my cell phone last night. He’s worried about you. We all are. In the state of mind you’re in. You know.”

  “No. I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “You might do something crazy.”

  “For example.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Shave your head. Run away from home. Change your name and get a job herding tourists around a state monument. The name thing is weird.”

  “Why is it weird?”

  “Well, not the Annie part so much, being as that’s your middle name and all. But the Stewart part. Weird. Very unhealthy. Like you’re trying to marry a dead guy or something. Like those nuns that wear wedding rings because Christ is, like, their husband. Very unsettling.”

  “I’ve never been compared to a nun before. You still haven’t said how you found me.”

  The waitress appeared with a tall glass of buttermilk. Annie’s stomach felt more settled just to look at it. She indicated a spot next to her coffee cup, and the waitress set it there.

  “Cook says two dollars.” Almost apologetic. “Too much?”

  “A bargain at twice the price.” She sipped it gingerly as the waitress disappeared again, leaving them alone on the patio. A car full of tourists pulled into the dirt lot, but to Annie’s relief they only piled out and took photos, then drove away.

  Frieda said, “I just started at Ragged Point. Then next I tried San Simeon. Thought there might be a pattern there.”

  “And did what in these two places?”

  “Just asked about you. Described you. The Big Sur coast is a pretty sparsely populated place. Not as many bald women here as you might think.”

  “You know why I cut off all my hair.”

  “Do I?”

  “You should.”

  “Oh. Oh, right. The beauty thing again. You think they only want you for your beauty.”

  “I know it.”

  “So is everybody l
eaving you alone?”

  Annie drew on her cigarette and noticed that she wanted to be done with this meeting, to go find Todd and see what damage she’d done. More than anything, noticed a lack of joy at seeing Frieda again. But she didn’t know what that meant or how to change it. Merely that it was the case.

  Frieda sighed. “I keep trying to tell you.”

  “Right. I know. Something about spirit.”

  “Your enthusiasm. Your humor. Your sense of fun.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It must still be in there somewhere, or nobody would be giving you the time of day. It must still show, in spite of the containment unit you’ve built around it.”

  “How’s Leevon?” Annie said, to have something else to say.

  “Fine. I think he misses you. Every time I take him for a walk he tries to drag me down to your house.”

  “Sure, use your dog to play at my heartstrings. That’s fair.”

  Brief silence. Then Frieda said, “When are you coming home?”

  “I’m not.”

  Long silence. Several minutes, in fact. During which Frieda attacked her breakfast with the enthusiasm she had always shown toward food, killing a good half of it before setting down her fork and looking up again.

  Finally, she said, “When I was a kid, my dad was out late one night. Driving a ways out of town and back. It was raining. And I was lying in bed, and I couldn’t sleep. And I started thinking. What if he died? He didn’t, of course. But if he had…Mind you, I was only about six. If he had, I might’ve thought it was all my doing. Kids are like that. They have this overdeveloped sense of their own power. They think they can make things happen somehow. But we’re not kids, Theresa.”

  Annie put her sunglasses on in the fog. Drew hard once more on the cigarette and crushed it in the glass ashtray.

  “I know you mean this to be helpful, Frieda, but it’s not.”

  “What could I do to help, then, Theresa?”

  “Well, for one, you could not call me Theresa.”

  “What’s number two?”

  “You could go home.”

  Frieda seemed to sit with that a bit. As if rolling it over somehow. Annie knew that she was hurt but that she wouldn’t say so.

  “I’m sorry, Frieda. I’m sorry if that sounded hurtful. I realize I’m not being much of a friend right now. But I just can’t give you any of what I don’t have.”

  “Fair enough, I guess.”

  A long silence.

  “Did I used to be a good friend?”

  “The best. What should I tell your father? And Randy?”

  Her first reflex was to say, Tell Randy to go shove it. But it was inappropriate to the moment, she knew. Too much. Too aggressive. It wasn’t Randy’s fault anyway. It was her fault.

  “Tell them I know what I’m doing.”

  “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Probably not. But that’s still what I want you to tell them.”

  When she arrived back home, alone, she decided she did not want to call the guide trailer to ask Todd’s last name. Because she hated to bring other people into this. Hated to think of hurting him further by drawing attention to the situation. But otherwise she would simply be sitting home for two days, thinking. Wondering what she had done. So she called.

  Zewicki, she was told.

  She dug up the phone book, found no listing. Called information, was told there was no Zewicki listed. Then she pulled the phone out of the wall and threw it through her closed living room window. After some time to settle, she picked her way through the potential glass, barefoot, to see out. See if she could locate it. See if it was still retrievable in any way. But as far as she could tell it had rolled down the bank of the mostly dry bed of the Santa Rosa Creek, which abutted her trailer park. And she hadn’t the energy to go after it just yet.

  She decided to go back to bed, though she doubted she would sleep.

  When she woke up it was dark.

  She picked her way by moonlight. Through the gap in the chain-link fence. Along the path that bordered beach parking. Across the dry bed of a slough. Onto William Randolph Hearst State Beach. She didn’t know the time or care. She hadn’t eaten, and she felt hungry, but she also felt—vaguely, without quite putting it into words—that she deserved to be.

  She had a blanket around her shoulders, but her scalp was cold. After a couple of months giving tours in ninety-degree temperatures, though, part of her enjoyed being cold. The part of her that thought there was no such thing as cold anymore, that she would never feel it again.

  She padded down the beach, hurting her bare feet on rocks and mussel shells, to a spot in front of the old mission-style Hearst warehouse. There she stopped and sat in the sand, which felt cool even through the blanket. Wrapped up every part of herself, pulling the blanket over her head like a hood. And asked James a question she had been meaning—but was afraid—to ask since moving to the neighborhood.

  She asked if he was around here anywhere.

  While waiting for an answer she may have dozed briefly.

  When she woke it was still dark. And no sign that he was there. Even in the most marginal sense. She hoped he was angry with her, upset. Not speaking to her over what—if anything—happened with Todd. Because of the alternative. That perhaps he was nowhere at all.

  She found her way back to the car and drove north up Highway 1. Winding around the curves and switchbacks, taking each one a little too fast. Not turning on the heater even though she was cold. Watching for landmarks in the moonlight.

  She reached Gorda, which meant she’d been more conservative on the curves than intended. But it also meant she’d overshot her destination. So she found a place to turn around. Hunted more carefully this time. Twenty miles an hour or less.

  No Winnebagos on the road at this hour anyway. No other motorists’ progress to impede.

  When she found the place, she pulled off the road onto the dirt, on the cliff side. Got out and stood looking over the edge. Then sat with her back up against a front tire and hugged herself against the cold and did not go back into the car for the blanket. Watched the intricate pattern of moonlight on water, miles of black water. And thought about the fact that there could be whales out there, lots of them. Just because she didn’t see any didn’t mean there weren’t any out there.

  She rubbed her head, feeling the smoothness of fine peach fuzz.

  And even though she felt no indications of James, she said a few things to him out loud.

  She said, “Nothing I did with Todd was intended as a betrayal of you.”

  And also, “It just came out of being drunk, so whatever it was, even if I just gave him mixed signals, or if something serious happened, it’s still something I would never do if I knew I was doing it, so you see it means nothing. Nothing. Whatever it was.”

  Then, after a suitable silence, “My God, James. What if I hurt him?”

  Several minutes later, her voice betraying the shivers, “I think I might not be able to live like this forever.”

  But James either had no answer or wasn’t anywhere near. Or was nowhere at all.

  A voice startled her. It said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry to startle you.” A real voice.

  She looked up to see a man standing by the rear bumper. A little hard to tell in the moonlight but probably a drifter, a vagrant. Because she could see that his hair was long and uncombed and his beard untrimmed. Perhaps she should have been frightened of him, but she wasn’t. Something about his soft manner, his polite opening statement.

  When she didn’t answer, he said, “I just wondered if you were headed south. I was looking to get a ride south, you know? Not many cars at this hour, so I’ve been walking.”

  “As soon as I get done here I’m headed back south,” she said. Quietly and naturally, as though she’d had many conversations with this man. “I could take you as far as Cambria.”

  “How far is that from Highway Forty-six?”

  “Only ab
out four miles.”

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good. I can walk that. That’s a real blessing.”

  He came around the car and sat in the dirt beside her. Neither too close nor too far away. A respectful distance.

  She said, “I can drive you on to Highway Forty-six. It’s only a few minutes out of my way.”

  “That would be very nice, if you didn’t mind. If you don’t mind my asking, who were you talking to just then?”

  She looked over at his face in the half dark. Closer now, she could see pockmarks in his skin, a remnant of teenage acne perhaps. He smelled like he hadn’t bathed recently, but she felt buoyed by the company and disinclined to judge him. She also knew that many homeless people had mental problems, but she couldn’t find the line to separate him from herself even if that were the case.

  So she said, “A friend of mine who died.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s a good thing to do, then.”

  “Think so?”

  “If it helps. When somebody dies, that’s such a hard thing. Whatever you do to feel better is a good thing. Do you feel better?”

  “Maybe a little bit.”

  “Well, that’s good, then.”

  “Tell me something. Do you think that when somebody dies he’s still around somewhere? Or do you think he just isn’t anymore? At all?”

  The stranger sat with that a moment. Then he said, “I think everybody is somewhere. But as to where somebody is when they’ve died…I’m not smart enough to know that.”

  “No. Me either,” she said. “Come on. Let’s get on the road now.”

  They drove down the coast in comfortable silence for a few minutes. She reached into her glove compartment and took out a near-empty pack of cigarettes. Shook one out and took it with her lips and then held the pack out as an offering to her passenger, who’d seemed interested in her movements since the pack appeared.

  “That’s kind of you,” he said. “I could sure use one. But you only have a couple left. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “We can stop on the road and get more.”