would not think of her beyond the most superficial level. The sort of level required by the fact that she’d forgotten to take her gallon bottle of windshield cleaner refill and about three hundred knee-high nylons I found on the floor of her closet. Suicide with or without hairpieces was never an option for me, but a sort of murder was. Somehow it didn’t seem like a good time to explain this to my pal, the psychiatrist.
“Muffin might die if she ate the wig,” I suggested as Rox scowled into her tap water.
“Nah.” She sighed. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff people swallow and don’t die. The stomach is an amazing organ. At least most stomachs are. Mine is just whining to go home.”
Brontë seemed reluctant to leave in the middle of Mary Chapin Carpenter, but I suspected that had more to do with the popcorn people kept slipping her than the song. Like most dogs, she prefers opera.
“So I’ll have the lawyer call you at work tomorrow,” I reminded Rox as we hit the cool night air of the street.
“Yeah, sure.” She seemed thoughtful.
“Blue?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s your brother in for?”
“Armed robbery,” I answered, veering off toward my truck. “He held up a bank. Shot a vase. I don’t know why.”
“Poor bastard,” she said, smiling over her shoulder before vanishing into the shadow of a potted oleander by the curb.
An hour and a half later I was home and there were three messages on the machine: one from Dan Crandall saying he’d be by at ten tomorrow to talk about Muffin’s case. One from the owner of the vegetarian restaurant wanting to know if I’d had a chance to look at the terrible sales data he’d given me. And one from Father Jake, who sounded like he’d just had drinks with the Holy Ghost. I was too interested in his message to wonder why Brontë was dashing back and forth across the carpet, sniffing and growling. A field mouse had been there, probably.
“Betsy Blue,” my father’s voice announced, using a childhood endearment, “it’s good news. Your brother has found someone to love, and I think it’s going to make a difference. A big difference. Call you tomorrow with details. Love you. Bye now.”
“Oh, God,” I said to the answering machine as Brontë barked at my filing cabinet, which I thought in all likelihood contained the field mouse. Then I went for a quick swim and fell in bed trying not to think about what had happened to BB the Punk. About the sort of “love” my brother might find in a prison. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be like the banker and the actor at Auntie’s.
Brontë was still sniffing and casting concerned looks in my direction when I fell asleep and into what would become a recurrent dream. Misha hurrying up the steps of an old stone house on a residential street, agitated, maybe scared. Looking over her shoulder but not seeing me as I tried to call out to her but couldn’t. I had no voice. It was like I wasn’t really there. In that first dream I wanted to cry with disappointment.
I did cry, actually. Although it was dawn when I woke up sniffling. Dreams, like the grid, have a sort of funky disdain for linear time. But I wondered where I’d been in that flatland between an image of Misha dredged from my own brain for the first time in two years, and what should have been an immediate response to that image—grief. I was pondering the question when I realized Brontë had not come to bed.
She was still in the office/living room. I could see her through my open bedroom door, her nose resting on outstretched paws and pointing to something lodged in the carpet against the side of my filing cabinet.
First light in the desert is more felt than seen, even inside bankrupt motels. An abrupt shift from the otherworld of shadows and skittering silence to a real world at once comforting and banal. Then things come into focus with jarring speed.
What came into my focus was a small bright blue capsule being watched by a Doberman. Cerulean blue, I decided as gooseflesh crept up my arms. Nobody had been in my living room in two weeks and I hadn’t been sick since I moved. There was nothing in my medicine cabinet but generic aspirin substitute, natural vitamins I rarely remembered to take, and some worm pills from the vet that Brontë hadn’t needed in years. None of these was bright blue. I knew I had never seen, anywhere, a pill like the one nestled unaccountably in my carpet.
Still, it seemed ludicrous to be shivering in fear at the presence of a toy-colored pill, so I picked it up. “Inderal LA 160,” was etched in a wide light blue stripe around the overcap. The smaller half of the capsule sported three narrower light blue stripes.
There is no television at Wren’s Gulch Inn because I prefer books. But Misha loved CNN, so our apartment had cable and we sometimes watched killer dramas because she liked to cheer when the bad guy finally fell into a vat of boiling molasses or was run over by an armored car full of zany manicurists. From these dramas I had learned what to do with striped blue capsules found in my carpet. I dropped it into a zip-lock sandwich bag.
Brontë seemed relieved and immediately headed for bed. I joined her after checking my files and finding nothing amiss, but I didn’t go back to sleep. I was listing the phone calls I had to make as soon as the hour was decent. One of them would involve finding out what Inderal was, because the information might be useful in determining who had been in my living room without my knowledge. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.
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