Blue. Abigail Padgett

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Blue - Abigail Padgett A Blue McCarron Mystery

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there and the only choice you have is to hang on for the ride or sit it out on the sidelines.”

      I was a kid at the time and decided to call it Snoopy. Now, at thirty-five, I just called it the grid because that’s what it felt like. And I was tired of the sidelines.

      “Deal,” I told Dan Crandall. “You can leave a thousand-dollar retainer and email me everything you’ve got tonight. I assume your sister’s being held in Las Colinas?”

      The women’s prison in a suburb of San Diego had been named either “The Hills” or “The Cabbage Seeds,” depending on translation. The notion of being confined in a cabbage seed struck me as mythical, even charming.

      “Yes,” Dan Crandall answered with distaste while pulling a slim checkbook out of the right pocket of his wool shirt.

      “How am I supposed to get in to see her?”

      “I’ll tell the lawyer to fix it. Maybe you could analyze her and give him a report. He’ll set it up.”

      “Crandall, my field is social psychology, not clinical. I don’t analyze people. Are you sure you know what you’re hiring here?”

      “Talk to her,” he insisted. “Just do that, okay?”

      The check, drawn on a bank in Anchorage, Alaska, fluttered happily beside the lemonade.

      “Okay,” I answered, but the answer was more general than the question. I meant that I’d think about it while I wondered what it was he expected me to do.

      In seconds he’d pulled on his socks and those platypus-foot boots, stuffed the rest of his clothes under an arm and walked away in the direction of the locked gate where I assumed he’d left whatever vehicle brought him out here.

      “Misha,” I whispered into yellow-gray afternoon light, “a man in his underwear is leaving, but I’m back.”

      It was the first time I’d spoken to her in two years.

      Later I went online to find out what you wear while visiting a women’s prison. A retired cop in a Quaker chat room typed, “When visiting any prison you have to wear a bra, carry nothing that could be used as a weapon, and avoid dangling earrings in pierced ears. She might grab ’em and rip your lobes in half.”

      When the moon rose like the edge of a spoon over my bowl of broken rocks, I was pawing through storage boxes behind the third of my twelve doors, looking for the tiny lapis earrings that had been my mother’s. They had gold posts. Muffin Crandall would have a hard time ripping them out of my ears.

      Chapter Two

      When the phone rang at five the next morning, Brontë snarled irritably from the foot of my bed. I knew that if I gave the attack signal she’d tear the phone out of the wall. It was tempting.

      “Everything’s set for you to visit my sister at nine-thirty, phone ten,” Dan Crandall’s voice announced. “It’ll take them at least a half hour to bring her to the visiting area, so be there by eight-forty-five or it won’t work. You’ll be allowed ten or fifteen minutes this time, maybe more later, maybe not.”

      “Phone ten?” I pronounced thickly.

      “Yeah. The lawyer told me there’s a row of phones. You talk through plexiglass. They assign you a time and a phone. You’ll talk to her on phone ten.”

      This set of instructions seemed unnecessarily concise for 5 a.m.

      “Have you been to see your sister, Dan?”

      “No.”

      “So why are you doing all this?”

      His sigh was more resigned than hostile. Like the sigh of somebody who’s been teaching introductory classes for too long. My kind of sigh.

      “Just go talk to her. Incidentally, she won’t want to talk to you. Have you read the stuff I emailed?”

      “Oddly, I don’t sleep with electronic devices,” I said, trying for a confessional tone. “There are others like me.”

      “Ha,” he answered. “Call me when you’ve got some ideas.”

      After leaving the number of a bayfront hotel in San Diego, Crandall hung up and I faced the rest of my life. At the moment it looked like one of those seventeenth-century Dutch paintings meant to emphasize the transitory nature of being. Wilted cabbage roses on a table with two dead birds and a snail. Except there are no snails in the desert, and my still life would be called Rumpled Sheets with Black Dog and Large Human Foot. Brontë had stretched happily across the width of my queen-size bed and was eyeing one outstretched paw as if contemplating a new shade of nail polish. The large foot was mine.

      David and I are, for obvious reasons, fraternal rather than identical twins. He inherited Dad’s stocky frame and run-of-the-mill feet. I got our mother’s gangly height, topaz eyes, and feet for which the term “extended sizes” was coined. Fortunately Mom maintained a competent wardrobe. I was appropriately shod in her size ten double E black kid pumps for the all-stops-out funeral at St. Louis’s Anglican bastion, Christ Church Cathedral. A drunk driver had plowed head-on into her car as she left a meeting of the Sierra Club. My brother and I were thirteen.

      Misha theorized that David began his transformation into a sleazebag criminal named Hammer when our mother died. But then Misha never met Mom or David, and for some reason couldn’t envision the relentlessly pleasant childhood that David and I enjoyed. I did describe this childhood to her. Often I marveled at odd details which, I thought, pointed to the day I would meet her. But either Misha’s own childhood, which had apparently been Faulknerian, or more likely her complete disinterest in narratives not involving the Flight of a Strong Woman from the Clutches of Patriarchy, rendered my stories meaningless. I remained strangely blind to Misha’s complete lack of interest in the details of my life for two years. Love, as they say, is like that.

      Only after she’d been gone an entire year did it dawn on me that Misha, whose feminist concern for the most insignificant forms of female life rivaled that of God for sparrows, probably couldn’t have identified my hometown or remembered my mother’s name on a bet. For a while that made me feel funny, as if for the years I spent with her my own history had been lost in the mail. Pieces of it were still drifting in as I went outside with Brontë for her morning run.

      “David hasn’t killed anybody,” I announced to a lone cottonwood that was probably there when the first stagecoach stopped to water horses at Coyote Creek. “But there will be similarities between his story and this woman’s. Criminology kinds of things. After all, they’re both in prison.”

      As Brontë chased a black-tailed jackrabbit I recognized a certain flimsiness in this train of thought. I know a great deal about male primate proclivities, which, if not controlled, result in truly idiotic violence. But there was no precedent for what Muffin Crandall had done, or said she’d done, in the chemistry and subsequent social organization of female primates. Girl apes, as the song says, just wanna have fun. And babies. Although in the human ape the former urge usually dies almost overnight around thirty. That’s when estrogen levels begin to drop and the brain looks around, wondering where it’s been since fifth grade and where all these children came from. Female primates rarely kill except when defending their young or, more rarely, themselves. And the “self” being defended in the case of female humans

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