Mother-Daughter Murder Night(68)

“So what you can promise me is that you’ll follow the rules. Which are changing. Starting now.” Beth looked her daughter in the eye. “No more going out alone on the slough.”

“Forever?” Jack’s voice cracked.

“Forever’s a long time, Jack. Let’s just say for now. Until I say otherwise. At least until they figure out what happened to that young man.”

“What about working at the Kayak Shack?”

“I need to think about it.” Beth reached out and touched her shoulder. “It’s not a punishment, honey. There’s just a lot going on.”

Jack heard the finality in her mother’s voice. Her mind raced through the implications, the doors slamming shut in front of her. No morning paddles in the fog. No paycheck. Which meant no sailboat. She’d been looking for the right moment to talk to her mom about the email she’d gotten back from the guy with the used twenty-two-footer, to see if Beth would consider helping advance her the money to buy it. Now she’d probably never set foot on that boat, let alone call it hers.

Jack squeezed her eyes shut, shoving back the tears she felt forming there. “Can I still help Prima with her investigation?”

“We can help. But, Jack, you have to be smart. No going off alone. Period.”

She swallowed. It all felt heavy and unfair. Except the we. The we was good.

“Do you want to hear what I found?” Jack asked.

“Was there more than just that man?”

“Well . . . last night, after you and Prima were in bed, I made these maps. They probably got ruined in my backpack in the water, but I think I found—”

Outside the car, the buzzer announced the end of fourth period.

Jack looked up at the school building. “I better go.”

“You can tell us more about it at dinner.”

Beth leaned over, still buckled in, and gave Jack half a hug. “Now go use those smarts to convince the dragon in the office to let you make up the work you missed this morning.”

*

Beth returned home drained and ready to reacquaint herself with the pillow from which she’d been so rudely separated three hours earlier. Her mother had other plans. Lana was sitting on the porch swing, knit cap pulled down over her scalp, her body wrapped in a fleece blanket like an oversize poodle. She was holding one of Jack’s early Mother’s Day presents, a hedgehog carved out of a pine cone, in her lap. When Beth got out of the car, Lana spoke.

“Beth, I—”

“Can we talk about this later?” Beth could feel the weight of every step up to the porch.

Lana reached for her arm. “Beth. Sit down a minute.”

Beth stood there, undecided.

“I want to apologize.”

Beth plunked herself down on the swing, trapping Lana’s blanket under her leg. “I’m listening.”

“I never meant to put Jack in danger. You know that, right?”

The older woman seemed genuinely nervous, as if Beth’s opinion might matter to her for once.

“This investigation of mine is stupid, I know. Detective Ramirez told me to back off. You told me to be careful. And then I land in the hospital and Jack gets lost up a creek with some maniac with a shovel . . .”

“Ma, Jack’s fine. Everything’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t. I knew this would happen.”

“That what would happen?”

“That I’d show up here, take over your house, and screw up your life. I’m sorry.”

Beth stared at her mother. Even when apologizing, Lana placed herself at the center of the universe. Then again, when was the last time Lana apologized to anyone for anything? This was a woman who had once browbeat a man she rear-ended into apologizing to her. So maybe this was progress. Beth looked at her mother’s anxious mouth. The thin collarbones visible through her sweater. And that lavender pom-pom hat hiding what was left of her patchy hair.

“Is that why you never visited us?” Beth said. “You thought you’d mess up my life?”

Lana swallowed. “The day you left, I was so angry. But now . . . I had no right to tell you what to do, Beth. I kept waiting for you to come crawling back to Los Angeles so I could tell you that. So I could look out for you. Instead, you started carving out this impossible little glimmer of a life up here with Jack. And I decided you were better off without me harping on you, trying to control you.”

Beth looked down at the hedgehog in her mother’s lap. “You decided, huh?”

“It seemed like you were making it work.”

Which was true. Once Beth got to know Flora and the other single moms at day care, they’d worked out a patchwork system of babysitting swaps and emergency handoffs, Beth gladly trading medical advice for steaming pots of black beans and tostones. But it took years to build that support network. When they first arrived, Beth had no one. She remembered resurfacing the floors on her own, bone-tired, sawdust everywhere, Jack screaming her head off in the secondhand crib.

“I must have packed up the car fifty times that first year to come back,” Beth said.

“But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. But I needed you, Ma. Every time you sent a package of gold-plated shoes or cashmere baby blankets, I wished it was you instead.”

Lana dropped her eyes to the hedgehog, not talking for a long time. “I’m sorry, Beth.”