Santa Cruz Noir Page 3

  * * *

  My girl Jane was nineteen right then and I was eighteen. I was thinking, No way, right? But then Jane said, “Let’s find our serial killer, Apex,” and who the hell could say no to that?

  “Culmination,” Jane said. Her eyes were sapphires. Had her eyes always been sapphires? In those gems I saw our two minds become one—the ifs all became is. The fucking Apex right there.

  Kemper’s voice kept rolling: “I didn’t go hog wild and totally limp. What I’m saying is I found myself doing things in an attempt to make things fit together inside.”

  And just then—I got it. That was my problem too—needing to make things fit together inside.

  We stood close, right on Mission Street. All the lights on.

  The first car that pulled over was this Audi with a Michael Dukakis bumper sticker. The guy driving looks creepy as all get-out with his horn-rimmed glasses and I look at Jane and I can tell she’s excited. We both get in the back and he turns around as he starts the car and says, “You girls really shouldn’t be hitchhiking out here, you know? Are you students?”

  For a second I think he means he’s the weirdo we shouldn’t hitchhike with and my heart races, but Jane rolls her eyes and shakes her head. ’Cause she knows.

  The guy turns out to be some do-gooder biology professor and Jane’s looking at the door handle, wondering if we can make a break for it, roll on out while this guy is driving, but it’s useless.

  He isn’t gonna be happy until we are all tucked in next to our mommies and our Barbie dream houses. So Jane says, “We’re sisters, we’re from Canada, and we’re meeting our aunt on Water Street and we missed the bus, okay?” She directs him to some better-than-Denny’s place which seems to satisfy his sense of propriety and we scramble out of the backseat and head over to The Jury Room to regroup.

  * * *

  Now, you gotta love a bar that looks like the goddamn Foursquare Church from outside. More than that, you gotta love a bartender who barely glances at your fake ID that features some blond bitch you never knew who once lived in your tent in San Lorenzo Park.

  The place smells like smoke and Roy Orbison croons on the jukebox. We sit on the red vinyl barstools and order a couple of Coors, ’cause up on the chalkboard it says they’re as cold as your ex’s heart.

  I say, “How about let’s try the road up to Felton.” It’s Highway 9 and it narrows fast and deep into the redwoods and I can already see the serial killers cruising up and down those curves waiting for two little girls with their thumbs out, and Jane nods. Her skin flickers red in the bar light.

  Outside, the asphalt’s wet, but it isn’t raining.

  First car that stops is some old sedan and the woman driving it cranes her neck toward us and says, “Where’re you headed?”

  And I say, “Felton?”

  I glance at my girl Jane, like, Can we trust a woman to murder us? Jane gets my question telepathically and she nods, so we climb into the back and it smells of patchouli. The woman starts talking, chattery-chat, and there’s graham cracker crumbs between the seats and I’m just shaking my head because where’s a goddamn serial killer when your girl wants one?

  Little Miss Chatty-Chat, mother of graham-cracker eaters, says, “Where in Felton?”

  My girl Jane looks like she’s gonna cry and I’m really about to lose it. I say, “Any goddamn place.”

  The woman driver startles, offended, and pulls over at the first stop sign in town. “You girls be careful out there.”

  I can feel all the blood moving in my veins and Jane takes my arm, like everything’s gonna be all right. We cross the street as the sedan rolls away and we stick out our thumbs again and skinny Jane winks at me and she says, “Third time’s a charm.”

  Maybe she’s right. We’re waiting out there a long time. Hardly any cars. It’s getting cold and I whisper to my girl Jane, “Are you cold?”

  She smiles at me sad, sad blue smile light, and that’s when the VW van rolls up and the front door flies open and I climb up into the front seat and Jane takes the back. The driver has long, greasy hair, and he says, “You wanna do some coke?”

  Hell yeah.

  He gets out this cracked old mirror and cuts three lines on it. Powder feels like power. I snort it and pocket the razor.

  * * *

  You ever sever a whole fuckin’ head with a razor?

  It’s not easy. All the skin and tendon and throat and bone. I gotta be honest with you: I blame Jane.

  Kemper said: “I am an American and I killed Americans, I am a human being and I killed human beings, and I did it in my society.”

  That cassette tape of hers really did a number. Even as I tightened my grip around her skinny little neck, she still begged me to squeeze harder. She was begging me with her sapphires, wasn’t she? I was just trying to give her what she wanted. For all the ifs to become is? I’m a runaway. I killed a runaway. Do you get that? I’m a dropout who killed another dropout. And even as I severed her psycho little head, all blood and tendons, I was thinking, I’m taking care of my girl, right?

  It’s not like I don’t have a conscience. I know a person’s eventually supposed to turn their ass in and make some calm confession. But that’s why I’m telling you right here at The Jury Room, where everything smells like smoke and Roy Orbison is still crooning. I had to get this whole thing off my chest before I blow this fuckin’ town. And while I’m at it, I’ll tell you the weird part.

  I went back to San Lorenzo Park. I couldn’t very well stay on at the St. George. For the first few nights I was paranoid, like the cops at sunrise were coming just for me. But they kicked everyone out like they always had, and I didn’t care—but, you know, not one of the kids in the park asked me what happened to my girl Jane.

  Like, how can a person fuckin’ vanish and nobody’s gonna come looking for her?

  I lace up my boots and walk up to the Clock Tower and the Food Not Bombs guy is getting ready to set up his grub and I ask him, I say, “Don’t you wonder what ever happened to skinny Jane?”

  Guy scratches his goatee and looks at me quizzical-like, and he says, “Apex, you’re the only person I ever met named Jane.” He smiles and shakes his head. “I remember when you showed up here emaciated and topless and bragging about the ten sheets of acid you stole from your psychiatrist before you busted out of Agnew.” He shakes his head again. “I was worried about you back then. You seemed really vulnerable.”

  I could just taste the faintest bile in my mouth.

  Sometimes I still think about that. I put a tab of acid on my tongue and I run my hands over my pink little tits and I wonder if skinny Jane was ever separate from me or if she was just the part of myself I wanted badly and knew had to die—like Bob Innes’s girlfriend’s baby back at the Catalyst.

  I remember a lot more about where Jane came from than where I did. I try to remember my life before I got here, and the furthest back I can recall is when I was on a bus riding Highway 17 up into the mountains where the oak trees give way to second-growth redwoods. I remember cresting the Summit, my passenger window cracked, and the wisp of ocean air and smell of eucalyptus.

  But then I let the questions go.

  What does it matter, really?

  I killed my girl Jane.

  I’ll never know if we started out as two, ’cause truth be told, nobody ever came looking for either one of us.

  I buried her head in San Lorenzo Park, right next to the duck pond and blue playground slide.

  I buried her looking up.

  MONARCHS AND MAIDENS

  by Margaret Elysia Garcia

  Capitola

  That little girl stood right in my way.

  “You’re lucky to be here,” she said.

  I was carrying the last of the boxes from the U-Haul trailer to my new furnished cottage. It was one of those mother-in-law units—sharing a long driveway with a main house up the road.

  “These were built to be maid’s quarters, you know,” the girl continued. S
he looked to be about ten, with straight dirty-blond hair and small brown eyes. I was taking an instant dislike to her. She was the kind of child privy to too many adult conversations and too many items on her Christmas list. She already knew she belonged to a class far above me, and likely most of the other tenants she encountered in Capitola.

  I smiled to acknowledge she was talking, but I said nothing back. She didn’t offer to help.

  “Really. This unit is never empty for very long. We used to use it as a guest room, but we’ve remodeled rooms in the main house. You could’ve wound up in the trailer park,” she said.

  I was to be here for six months, working on a grant project out of UC Santa Cruz. I wanted to tell the girl I owned a house someplace else. Someplace just as nice as Capitola, if not better. I was taking this job to be helpful and useful to the world—and because primo academic jobs were hard to come by. It was an honor. A feather in my cap. Why did I feel the need to explain this to a ten-year-old?

  “Sometimes my parents allow the tenant access to the pool too. I can put in a good word for you.” She sat in an oversized wicker chair by the door. Her legs dangled over the edge. She kicked at the marble umbrella stand with two long black umbrellas in them.

  I hadn’t even noticed how odd the furnishings were. It felt like the whole cottage was Hawaii-themed from the 1970s—perhaps an effort to make Capitola-by-the-Sea feel warmer and cozier than the fog would allow for.

  I smiled at the girl and stood in front of her to offer my hand and help her up. She didn’t take it. “Well, that looks like that’s my last box,” I said. “Going to go return the U-Haul now. You can come by some other time.”

  “I don’t need to go anywhere.”

  “But you do. I’ve rented this place from your parents. It is mine for the time being. I need you to go.”

  “But I always hang out in here.”

  “Not today, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re going to need me,” she said. She stood up and walked around me, eyeing me up and down. I felt defensive about—well, everything—my dress with its pilling around the arms, my shoes from five years ago. Everything. The girl opened the door and looked back. “Suit yourself. Though it is very—very ill-advised. My parents can tell you more about it.” She walked toward the main house.

  I exhaled, locked the door behind me, and headed out to return the trailer.

  * * *

  As I merged onto Highway 1, I could feel the fog settling in. Perhaps the Hawaiian décor would help a seasonal depression that was sure to take hold given the constant damp I’d felt in just a few days of being here. It was September and I felt like I couldn’t get warm.

  I found the Capitola cottage while having a bite to eat at the local strip mall book café. There were poetry anthologies out front and a giant brass elephant head on the wall. Both things made me calm. Their bulletin board said a cottage was available and that the owners only took graduate students or visiting professors. I fit in somewhere in between. I took their ad to mean they would be serious, older, and, for some reason, childless. They would, no doubt, invite me to tea. We’d exchange poetry.

  Sharon, the wife, had bobbed blond hair and a country-club smile. The husband, Bradley, seemed a little out of it, but innocuous—sandy brown hair, overly groomed face. I admired a Victorian chair they had in the foyer when I came for the interview. Its upholstery was faded yellow, with bright leaves in the print. Holes and a few brown stains. The arms were solid oak and the legs had an inlay of cast-iron fleur-de-lis. I liked the chair immediately. It signaled that they’d be appreciative of antiquities but not too fussy about having everything absolutely manicured.

  “This chair?” Bradley said. “It has a fascinating history. The innkeepers who used to own this property back in the early 1900s. Well, the wife shot herself in the face in this chair. You can still see the stains. Isn’t it marvelous? What a story!” He pointed out frays in the fabric and told me he just didn’t have the heart to restore it. He was sure you could still smell the gunpowder if you breathed in deep. He never looked at my face to gauge my reaction. Part of me appreciated him for that.

  Then they led me out to the cottage they were renting for nearly four hundred dollars under the current market for houses in the Santa Cruz County area. The girl wasn’t with them.

  * * *

  U-Haul had the usual queue. I couldn’t wait to drive back to the cottage to set up my desk. I’d made sure to leave space in the living room to house the library I’d need for the six months.

  The girl was sitting on my couch when I opened the door. “You took too long,” she said.

  “You’ve broken-and-entered my cottage. Are your parents home?”

  “You seem stressed out. You shouldn’t get stressed out. Although I suppose that’s what your kind does?”

  “My kind?”

  “Why, yes. The lower middle-class is always stressed out,” she said.

  I dropped my eyes. I couldn’t look at her. “I need time alone to set up my office,” I said.

  “It’s too bad you probably can’t afford a new laptop. This space could do without the clutter of older technology. But, chacun à son gout, as my mother says.” She stood up and I escorted her out and locked the windows and dead-bolted the door this time.

  “When people around here want to chill out, they go to Natural Bridges Park,” she said over her shoulder. “You should, too. Relax.”

  I unboxed my books and set up my old iMac on the old secretary’s desk I brought with me. I had a laptop too. A MacBook Air. Sure, it was a few years old—that just proves they last. I was muttering to myself again. I took out my old iPod and speaker out of a box and put on something old too. There was nothing on that iPod newer than 2006. I mean, my phone has newer things, but this particular device didn’t.

  Little girl wasn’t even there and I was still justifying. I picked up my phone and dialed Sharon’s cell phone. I left her a message. Could she meet me somewhere so we could have coffee and chat? There were a few things I wanted to go over.

  The phone rang. Sharon said to meet her at the book café.

  * * *

  “Oh. I’m so sorry,” she said the moment she arrived. “Madison is hanging out over there? She did kind of like to use it as a life-sized dollhouse. I’m so sorry. We’ll speak to her.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and took a sip of the hot chai I’d ordered. “I think it’s great that she takes an interest in people, but I’m here to do research and promote this new program and that’s going to really fill my time.”

  “I so understand. I do apologize for her. Madison doesn’t have many friends.”

  Yes. Yes, I might have known that. “Where does she go to school?”

  “Oh, we homeschool now. It’s really better this way—especially since the accident.” Sharon barely registered my raised eyebrow; she was practiced. “Madison did have a really good friend. They used to love gardening together. Well, one day Ashley and Maddy were climbing trees to catch butterflies. And Ashley missed a branch and stepped on one that was too small for her. Maddy was always telling her she was too fat to climb the trees. It broke and she fell out of the tree. Dead. Maddy said she couldn’t catch her. It happened too fast.”

  “I’m so sorry.” What else could I say? Jesus. It’s not what I thought going out to coffee would be about. “Madison does seem very adult for her age.”

  “Yes, I know she does.”

  I chickened out going further. There was no way of not sounding like an asshole. I drove back to the cottage to finish setting up my desk. Madison was on the doorstep. At least she wasn’t inside.

  “Your mother tells me you are homeschooled,” I said.

  “Yes. For now,” the girl replied. “I’ve had a few tutors—the last one lived here, in fact. The other is around here somewhere. Anyhow. Yes. It suits me much better.”

  “So is that why you keep hanging around my cottage? Because you used to come here for lessons?” I tried to keep my fac
e from giving me away.

  “My parents are busy. I manage our property for them since I’m home more often. I pay the gardener and the maid. I order the groceries. We have to make sure you’re a good fit for this place.”

  “I signed my agreement with your father and mother,” I said.

  Maybe I was hoping she’d see reason. I kept forgetting she was ten. This time I just closed the door and dead-bolted it behind me. I thought I could hear her mouth-breathing outside the door. I turned on music to drown her out and finished setting up my new temporary home.

  * * *

  In the early evening, before it went dark, I decided I’d take a walk into the village.

  I saw Bradley pulling up the drive as I walked down our little hill of driveway. He waved good-naturedly and rolled down the window. Did I need a lift? I politely declined. There was no sign of Madison or the mother.

  I walked clear down to the beach. It was a sweet two-street downtown filled with old-time-y quaint buildings. Present history clearly started at a specific time in architecture, by design. As darkness fell, my hair tangled in the salt air, I felt an uneasy veneer of displacement. I’d read that Capitola was once an Indian village—the Soquel people—driven out, of course, by those who sought to “better the land.” They were on my mind as I walked back up the hillside. That, and the knowledge that no matter what I did with my life now, I would never be able to afford to buy a house anywhere in my native California; I would always feel driven out.

  When I got back, there was a small tray on the porch with a lacquered black box on it and a note. A monarch butterfly painted on the top. I put water on for tea, placed the tray on the coffee table, and read the note: Don’t agree to be a tutor. It isn’t safe here.

  I looked over the message with the fortune-cookie-sized advice several times. I didn’t know the handwriting. It didn’t look like Bradley’s or Sharon’s when I checked their signatures on the lease agreement for comparison. I opened the black box and it contained a small crucifix necklace with a butterfly where the body of Christ would be.