Kissing Arizona (22 page)

The first seashore nightmares began during that time, when she knew something bad was going to happen but was somehow never allowed to ask what it was. In her dreams nobody took her hand, she forgot to back up, and the waves quickly became monstrous and swept her out to sea. She woke screaming and ran to her mother for comfort. Janine was snoring loudly, under the influence of the several empties adrift on her bedside table, but Denny clung to her back anyway and finally got to sleep.

The next day Grandma Aggie, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Howard all came to the house at an odd time, just after lunch on a weekday, and got Mom out of bed where she was taking a little nap. Grandma took Denny into her own room, found her some dolls and toys, and asked her to stay in there and play.

How could she play? She stood by the door, feeling sand slide out from under her feet as she listened to solemn talk in the next room. Mom argued in a loud voice until Sarah said something sharp and short that made her stop yelling and start to cry. After the crying stopped the serious bargaining started, all the family taking turns. Then there was silence and a scraping of chairs as they all stood up.

When the door opened the women spoke to her in cheerful, unreal voices. Their faces looked hot and sore. Howard stood stiffly in the yard, smoking a cigarette, while the women packed bags, made phone calls and wrote notes. When they were ready Mom hugged her hard and got in the car with Aunt Sarah. Denny went with Grandma and Uncle Howard to the ranch. On the ride, Grandma explained to Denny about detox, that Mom had a bad habit that she had to break. Denny asked why she couldn't break it at home. Grandma explained that breaking some habits took help, and said they should be glad Mom was getting the help she needed. Grandma didn't look glad, though. Denny thought she looked almost as sad as she had when Grandpa died.

After lunch the next day Grandma went home and Denny stayed at the ranch. Nobody wanted her there, but there was no place else for her to be, so she stayed all summer.

Eventually Aunt Sarah took her to town so she could start school. When Mom got out of detox she rented a house on the east side and got a job in an office. She promised Denny they were going to be very happy from now on, and they almost made it for a while, until Mom started drinking again. Then there were boyfriends and dope, hungry days and scary nights. During the chaotic craziness that got Denny rescued again by Aunt Sarah, Mom ran away rather than face detox again. Denny worried about her but couldn't help liking the life she had in Aunt Sarah's house, regular meals and clean clothes and staying caught up at school. She was glad when Aunt Sarah filed motions in court to get custody, aiming at adoption so Denny's life couldn't ever get torn up again.

But Grandma Aggie made it all possible, coming over every weekday afternoon, to be there in the house when Denny got home. Even if Aunt Sarah had to work late, which sometimes happened in Homicide, Grandma was there to help with homework and supper. Denny knew she'd been managing those things herself and could again, but the grown-ups in her life now wanted her afternoons supervised, and so did the judge and social workers in the court where her adoption was going to take place.

Watching Aggie talk funny and fall down, and then hearing about her hooked up to a lot of tubes and being asked to wiggle her toes, had made Denny realize how much depended on a functioning Grandma who could wiggle everything. Denny tried to keep her mind on wishing her Grandma well, but the thought kept surfacing:
What's going to
happen to
me now?
What if Aunt Sarah can't keep me?

Why was her world always built on sand? She thought she would do anything to find a place on solid rock. She did her best, after Grandma got sick, to show how little trouble she could be, her clothes always ready, lessons done. But by the middle of the week the seashore nightmare came back, and she woke up crying. She held her breath, afraid she might have wakened Aunt Sarah, but luckily her aunt, during that exhausting week, slept soundly when she got the chance.

For a couple of days Denny thought she was building an alliance with Will Dietz. She had just begun to trust the strangely silent boyfriend a little, and when she saw him trying to find a foothold in the new scheme of things, she tried to show him she would help. Just when she thought they were a team, though, Aunt Sarah moved them out to Marana to stay in Grandma's house, and then they both got very tense about keeping everything nice and helping Grandma. Denny could hardly taste her food, she got so anxious to wash the dish it was in.

When she found Aunt Sarah and Will Dietz whispering in the kitchen, she knew she'd stumbled into the middle of a conspiracy. When Aunt Sarah took Grandma for one of their ‘little walks' and lingered a long time on the corner talking, Denny knew for sure something was up.

Then Dietz and Aunt Sarah disappeared in town for most of a Saturday. When they suggested a ride into town on Sunday, she could tell by their faces they were excited about something.
I bet they found her a rest home. And that means I go back to the ranch.

They dropped Denny at Martha Cooper Library, where she'd never been before. Aunt Sarah said, ‘Have a good read while we do a little shopping with Grandma.' She reached into a row of books, pulled one out and sat staring at it, too frightened to read with understanding. Was she really going to have to go back to the ranch, where nobody but Uncle Howard ever talked to her? Maybe I'll just get on a horse, she thought for one wild moment, and ride away from there. But where would she go? She was brave, but too experienced to be foolhardy. She knew all about chaos, it was order she craved.

When Aunt Sarah came back for her, Denny walked out to the car on legs that felt rubbery with dread. They stopped in front of a strange older house and Denny thought, This must be the place they found for Grandma. Aunt Sarah parked in the carport, and led her through the back of it to a brick patio behind the house. Her grandmother was sitting there, looking happy and relaxed, almost like her old self.

‘Hello, my little bird,' she said. ‘Welcome to your new home.'

Denny looked around at them, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sarah said, ‘Will and I have been looking for a way we could all live together, and Will found this house.'

‘It's got a little house here in back for me, see?' Aggie said.

‘Got a workshop here,' Will said. ‘I could make you a tree house, would you like that?'

‘You're finally going to have a room of your own,' Sarah said. ‘With a dresser. Put your socks in a drawer instead of shoeboxes.'

When Aunt Sarah said that about the socks, and she finally understood that this was not a joke, Denny uttered one strangled cry, put her hands in front of her eyes and wept. The grown-ups watched her heaving shoulders in astonishment, saying, ‘What? What is it?'

Aunt Sarah figured it out first. ‘I should have thought of this,' she said. ‘But there's been so much to think about, I just didn't . . . she thought her life was coming unstuck again, that I wouldn't be able to keep her,' she told Will and Aggie. ‘That's it, isn't it, Denny?' Denny nodded mutely, still leaking tears between her fingers. ‘OK now,' Aunt Sarah gathered her into her arms, hugged, rocked a little and patted. ‘I understand this time and I'll take all the blame, I should have told you what was going on. But this is the last time. You hear me, Denny? I want you to promise me you will never have doubts like that again. Look at me!'

Reluctantly, Denny pulled her hands down from her wet face and looked at her aunt. Aunt Sarah smiled into her red, swollen eyes and said, ‘We're a family now. The four of us are going to live together in this house. We'll probably drive each other nuts soon enough, but right now, sweetheart, let's walk through it and enjoy ourselves.'

As soon as she let herself believe it, Denny loved it all. ‘So . . . so . . . beyond wonderful,' she said, bestowing a blazing smile none of them had ever seen before. The plain little room she picked for a bedroom began to be adorned at once, in her imagination, with framed awards and gorgeous posters. She said the old kitchen faucets were ‘cute', and when she saw Will's tool shed she said, ‘Dremmel's got a home!'

There was a long wait in the realtor's office while the grown-ups did a lot of bargaining and signed a complicated three-way lease-with-option. It would have been very boring for Denny, but she tuned out most of it and imagined her room in different colors, moving the bed from wall to wall in her mind.

By the time they drove back to Marana, she was incandescent. She said, for the tenth time, ‘I love it all,' and saw Aunt Sarah nudge Will's elbow. She recognized it now for what it was: not a conspiracy, just a simple nudge of pleasure.

‘I don't know yet where the missing gun is,' Tracy said. Leo and Sarah leaned over his shoulder, watching filenames scroll down off the screen. ‘Why don't you bring me his other computer, I'll see if there's something in there about it?'

‘What other computer?' Sarah said.

‘You've got the desktop he had in his den,' Leo said. ‘Plus Kindle, iPhone, iPad, monitors, speakers, modem – that's all we found.'

‘It's not any of those gadgets,' Tracy said. ‘It's not brand new, either. Look for a laptop or maybe a netbook, something small that he carried around for Internet fun.' He smirked. ‘Naughty fun, mostly.'

‘Frank Cooper?' Sarah frowned. ‘You found something that says he's got this other—'

‘Other computer. Yes. The modem's LAN status page lists a second machine named “funbox”. Explorer on this box shows an L Drive mapped to a share on another machine with a local 192.168.yaddayadda address. And I found old thumbs of nasty pictures on this machine that didn't get here through the browser.'

‘Talk English,' Leo said.

‘O Immortal Software Gods,' Tracy Scott said as he lay back in his chair and implored the ceiling, ‘why hast thou abandoned thy faithful servant here in Neanderthal Country?' He lifted the coke-bottle glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose for a few seconds, emerged from his funk with a bright smile and lifted his right index finger like a baton. ‘Think of it this way. You know how you always have your techies photograph a crime scene before you set to work on it? Why do you do that?'

‘Because the laws of physics say that as soon as you start to measure and evaluate the scene you're going to change it.'

‘Exactly!' Tracy crowed happily. ‘So you need to be able to look back and see how it was before you touched it, don't you?' His smile kept growing brighter; he liked this mentor persona he was working up. ‘So in the very same way, a person who's tasked with finding important things in a computer,
if he knows what he's doing
, will very carefully, and in the most deliberate way, start from the outside in, check what's hooked up to the box or has been, how the folders are organized, what's in them or has been,
etceteraaahhh
. Because he knows, as soon as he starts to mess with this thing, he's going to start changing file dates and all that, isn't he?'

Sarah watched Leo examine his loafers and realize this brat knew he'd been mucking around in Frank Cooper's computer for days, without taking any of those precautions.

‘OK, smart ass,' he said. ‘You know so much, tell me where to find the LadySmith and the second computer.'

‘Hey, you're the detectives. I'm just the geek. I don't know where that second machine is, I just know it exists. And I'm pretty sure that's the machine he was using to surf the web and download the naughty stuff. The browser history on this machine is clean as the driven snow. It hasn't been erased; it's complete but full of harmless sites. Occasionally, though, he'd transfer pictures to this machine from the one he was using to download – maybe to see stuff on that big flat-screen monitor. That's what makes me think it might be a netbook – you could be looking for a real small box, fine for downloading but not so good for watching the juicy bits.

‘He clearly tried to clean up after himself. I didn't find any actual pictures anywhere, but I found some leftover thumbnail image files, from a couple of years old to one updated last month. He must have thought that since
he
couldn't see the thumbnails any more they were gone. But of course I can see exactly what pictures used to be there with a free tool that takes about 2 minutes to download over the web.'

His derisive laughter echoed through the entire second floor. ‘Why are people so brain-dead about this stuff?' His hilarity was infectious – people began coming out of their cubicles to see what was funny.

Sarah and Leo walked away from him, shaking their heads, trying to look disapproving. Tracy was a lot more amusing, Sarah realized, when all of his comedy was directed at somebody else.

‘Please don't put her in my room,' Luz implored Tía Luisa. ‘She will interfere with my studying and drive me crazy.'

‘Stop whining, it gives me a headache,' Luisa said. ‘I will talk to your mother before I decide what to do about Victoria. For now she will use the other bed in your room, what else would she use?'

As soon as Luisa was out of the room Vicky seized her sister's arm, stuck the shiv in her ear and whispered, ‘Complain about me again I will make you deaf in one ear.' She pushed on the point and Luz squeaked in fear. ‘I am going to stay here and you are going to help me, you hear? Nod your head!' Luz bobbed a tiny nod. When the point hurt her ear she panicked and put her hands together in supplication. ‘Very good. When Luisa asks you how we are getting along you will say fine, fine.' She took the sharpened nail out of her sister's ear and smiled. ‘And we will. Get along. Just fine.'