Mother-Daughter Murder Night(101)
“It got quiet. I thought they were coming out.” Beth nodded her head down the hall. “But now I’m not so sure.”
“Hear anything good?”
“I wouldn’t say ‘good.’”
Lana listened to the muffled voices. She could make out Martin yelling about how he needed this and Diana lashing back that it was her turn now, that he never took responsibility for anything. It sounded like their dispute was genuine. If not, they were trying to win an Oscar with their performance.
“There is one thing I wanted to show you.” Beth gathered up a stack of plates, and Lana followed her to the kitchen.
“This is different,” Lana said, taking in the light-colored wood in the bright room. Her eyes swept over the drawings of birds, her mind subconsciously supplying names for all the species she’d gotten to know over the past few months.
“Look at this,” Beth said, walking over to the framed photograph by the sink. “Martin told me it’s from when they built the new barn after the fire. When I was packing up Mr. Rhoads’s room at Bayshore Oaks, I found a cut-up copy, just Hal with that woman and the baby. I wondered if she might be—”
“Sofia Cruz,” Lana said.
“Who?”
“Ricardo’s mother. And that’s Ricardo.” Lana pointed at the toddler squirming in the woman’s arms. The pieces were falling into place quickly now.
“Do you think it’s possible Ricardo was Hal Rhoads’s son?” Beth asked.
Lana thought of the cards she’d found upstairs, addressed to both Hal and Diana, their simple messages blending formality and warmth. “I don’t think so. I think . . .” Lana rubbed her eyes, rerouting the connections she’d made upstairs to everything they’d mapped on the corkboard in the back bedroom.
“I have to talk to Jack,” she said. “I’m going outside.”
“Should I come?” Beth asked.
“Stay here,” Lana said. “Let’s hope they keep fighting.”
Chapter Fifty-One
When she got to the driveway, Lana noticed the barn door was swung open. She headed inside, sure she’d find Jack there, rummaging around. As she entered, Lana noted the fine-grained wood walls and shiny brass hinges. Mr. Rhoads had spared no expense in rebuilding this barn. There were modern copper light fixtures hanging down over each stall, and Jack had turned on the ones in the back row, suffusing the piles of junk in a warm glow. Lana thought back on the photo in the kitchen, the unsmiling Rhoads and Cruz families standing in the newly erected doorway. This barn had been built out of loss. While the structure could be revived, Alejandro Cruz and Cora Rhoads could not.
Jack called to Lana from a stall at the back of the barn. Lana gingerly stepped into a cul-de-sac of tennis rackets, toys, and moldy sleeping bags. She ran a finger over an electronics set, the bright yellow box standing out against the dusty browns and grays of the other items in the stall.
“Look at this.” Jack placed a baseball glove in Lana’s hand. It was a tiny catcher’s mitt, real leather, the kind an optimistic father might get for his baby boy. Lana could barely put three fingers inside of it. But it clearly had been used. The glove was well-worn, a spiderweb of cracks erupting across the faded leather pocket. The bridge was brittle, and one of the ties had been chewed, maybe by a mouse. On the side, along what would have been the back of the thumb, “Ricardo” was written in bold block letters. And under it, fainter, another name: “Martin.”
Lana clutched the glove and closed her eyes. She remembered the story Diana had told her about the fire, and what Beth said had happened after. How Martin and Hal had stayed on the ranch but grew apart, while Ricardo, the miracle baby, grew up.
Lana had had it wrong. She’d known Ricardo’s murder was about love and betrayal. But it wasn’t about Victor’s love for Ricardo, or an affair gone wrong between Diana and Ricardo. It was about family love, something that had started decades earlier, something that had burned down and been rebuilt from pain. It was about Hal’s son, and Hal’s boy, and the distance between them.
“Jack, you were right. It wasn’t BATNA at all.”
“Do you mean—”
Lana nodded. “Martin.” She flashed again to the strange black bag in his car. She didn’t have words yet to explain it all, but she could feel it. She could see the excitement in Jack’s eyes too.
She looked down at her phone. Seven thirty. There was barely any cell service inside the barn, and she hadn’t heard anything more from Ramirez. She looked up at the double kayak lofted in the front corner of the barn, the lone life jacket hanging beneath it.
“Is this the one you saw at the wake?”
Jack nodded.
“Anything different about it?”
“No.” Jack looked carefully at the boat. “But a double kayak should have two life jackets . . .”
The girl’s voice died, as if she’d been hit by the terrible memory of it: Ricardo Cruz, floating in the mud, a red life jacket strapped around his lifeless body. The timeline leading up to that discovery snapped into focus in Lana’s brain. Ricardo was killed midday Friday and dumped in the creek late that night, to be found Sunday morning by the tourists. By Jack. For the first time, Lana considered the significance of that gap on Friday, the hours between the murder and the creek. She considered how long it would take to travel from San Francisco to Elkhorn, back up to the city, and then down again to Elkhorn late that same night. On a bike, it’d be impossible. But in a Maserati, it might even be a pleasure.