CHAPTER SIX

“There she is! There she is! Get ready to follow her!” Maddie hissed, scrunching down in the front seat of Dingo’s car as they sat parked at the edge of the strip mall where Fiona’s aunt Susan rented a small office. She peeked out over the top of the dashboard, adding with far less certainty, “That is her, isn’t it?”

Dingo nodded. Yes, the woman tapping her way across the nearly empty parking lot on her ridiculously high heels was indeed Fiona’s aunt Susan. Whose condo Fiona had apparently set fire to Friday last.

Fee’d been living with her father’s stepsister since last summer—which was when Dingo’d first met the girl at a rave in Santa Monica. They’d hooked up that same night, and then suddenly she was his girlfriend—which had freaked him out a bit. Fiona was gorgeous, true—if you liked blond girls with big breasts and crazy eyes.

The breasts had been nice. The crazy eyes, not so much.

But back when they’d met, she was only visiting for a two-week vacay. So that worked for him, majorly. Except then, suddenly, it was permanent, with Fee moving in with Auntie Susan and enrolling in the local high school for her senior year.

To be fair, even then, Dingo had been pretty much okay with it. The sex was relatively regular and decent enough despite all the weeping and teeth-gnashing that Fee carried around with her 24/7. But then, a few months ago, she’d introduced him to her new friend Maddie, and…

For Dingo, it had been love at first conversation. Maddie was not only significantly better read than Fee, but her favorite movies and music didn’t give him a headache from suppressed eye-rolling. Bottom line, though, was her sense of humor. Fee’s idea of funny had a heavy mean streak. Maddie’s, while sometimes dormant due to her mom’s recent tragic death, was delightfully deep and even dark, but never cruel.

“You don’t need to hide, love,” he told her now as he opened his door. “Susan’s already seen my car and she’s coming over here to—” What? Spit at him? Dingo chose “—chat.” Assuming one could chat at a screamingly high volume. He also suspected Susan was charging over here to grind his face in the fact that Fiona was gone for good. She’d never liked him, but after last month’s incident with the hidden camera, her hatred had gone nuclear and she forbade him from seeing Fee.

A rule that Fiona had broken repeatedly, since Susan was never home.

Still, this was gonna suck. Dingo would’ve preferred Maddie stay in the car, but she got out, too—the better to see his impending humiliation.

Susan opened with a snarling, “What part of Stay the fuck away from me do you not understand, you pervert?”

“That camera wasn’t mine,” he said for the five thousandth time, even as he realized that if she hadn’t believed it before, she probably wasn’t going to believe it now. Still, he couldn’t stop himself, because Maddie was listening. “I’ve never even owned a digital camera.”

Susan turned to Maddie. “Make sure you check the shower fan or the air vent in your bathroom—or in your bedroom if you let this creepy fucker in there. He hides cameras that he’s connected to the internet, so be ready to share your diarrhea face with the entire universe.”

God. The look Maddie shot him was filled with disgust and horror, but Dingo couldn’t tell if it was aimed at him or Susan. “Yeah, I’m pretty certain, at this point, that it was Fiona’s camera,” he said weakly.

Susan looked at him as if he were walking, talking dogshit. “Some of those pictures were of her. Even she’s not that screwed up.” She’d argued that point before, although, for the first time, as she said the words, she didn’t look convinced.

“Lookit, love, we just want to know where Fee’s at,” Dingo said, leaning extra hard on the accent because it made him sound easygoing and gentle and just other enough, but crap, that love was definitely a mistake because the woman bristled. So he talked faster. “Maddie, here, needs to get in touch with her. We’re really sorry to bother you like this, but it’s kind of urgent.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that,” Susan said flatly. “She’s back in Sacramento.”

Maddie spoke up. “Did she really set fire to your condo?”

Susan sniffed. “It was an accident. One of us—probably me—left a pot on the stove. A pile of mail was nearby….It was an accident.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, and assume Fiona’s father is paying to clean it all up,” Maddie said.

Susan started to huff and puff in protest, but Dingo interrupted. “Where exactly is she?” he asked. “At her mum’s? Or her dad’s?” Both of her parents were strict, but according to Fee, her mother was a freak-show who screened all of her phone calls.

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “And frankly, I don’t care.”

“Do you have their phone numbers?” Maddie asked. “Or maybe an address?”

Susan looked from Maddie to Dingo. “Chuck and Maisy are divorced—both remarried. So it’s Charles and Donna Fiera, and Douglas and Maisy Clark. They all live in Sacramento. Get a phone book and look ’em up.” And with that she tippy-tapped away.

“A phone book,” Maddie fumed as she got back into Dingo’s car. “What, is she seventy? Who even has a phone book anymore?”

“That camera really wasn’t mine,” Dingo felt compelled to say.

“I know that.” Maddie aimed some of her ire at him as she dug in the hard plastic pocket on the door and came up with a scrap of paper and pen. She scribbled down the names Susan had rattled off. “Don’t be stupid. That whole thing reeks of Fee.” She jammed both paper and pen into the cupholder and fastened her seat belt. “Will you drive already?”

“Oh,” he said, clearing his throat. “Um. I don’t have enough gas to get to Los Angeles, let alone Sacra—”

“We don’t need to go to Sacramento,” Maddie interrupted. “At least not yet. We just need to get to wherever you can hack into someone’s wi-fi so we can look up those stupid phone numbers.”

Dingo nodded. That he could do. They were trying not to use Maddie’s phone, for fear her dad would somehow be able to track her. And he saved his own limited data usage for emergencies. But there were nonsecure wi-fi hotspots in virtually every neighborhood—and he’d found and used them all as he’d boondocked his way through the Greater San Diego area. He pulled out of the parking lot, and headed for one of his favorite camping spots—a dead-end street near an upscale apartment complex. They could overnight there, too. It was far enough off the main road with no easy turnaround, which meant the police wouldn’t drive by and hassle them.

Still, the lack of proximity to a bathroom would make it way less comfortable than last night’s stay in a truck stop parking lot—and, of course, just because Dingo hadn’t been hassled in the past didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen tonight. Two people exhaling all night long made his car windows steam up twice as quickly. Someone out walking their dog could see that and call in a complaint which would make the police drive past and…

It was entirely possible he wanted to park there because he longed to get caught—to get Maddie back into the safety of her father’s more-capable hands.

Because she was only freaking fifteen years old, and Nelson was a freaking lunatic.

“Were there any of me?” Maddie asked, startling him out of his reverie. “Probably not, because Susan would’ve recognized me.” She laughed her disgust. “Of course, that doesn’t mean Fiona doesn’t have ’em.”

At Dingo’s obvious confusion, she explained, “Photos. From the camera in the bathroom. I’ve been there. Before it burned down. Susan’s condo. Never when Fee’s aunt was home, though. But I took a shower there once—after Fee dumped a pot of tomato sauce on me. In hindsight, I’m sure that she did it on purpose—it was totally in my hair so I had to take a shower, so she’d then have naked photos of me. Shit.” She looked over at him, her eyes worried in the light from the dashboard. “If she was trying to get you into serious trouble…”

Yup. If naked pix of Maddie showed up on Dingo’s computer or phone, well, wouldn’t that be some kind of extra-awful felony, since the girl was underage? Forget the impending wrath of her Navy SEAL daddy….

“We’ll find them,” Maddie decided. “And delete them. And then we’ll find and call Fiona.”

“If she’s at her mum’s we won’t get through.”

“Then we’ll find the money we need for the gas to get to Sacramento.”

“Find?” Dingo asked. “Like, just lying there on the street? Or find, like, in the cold, dark, locked house of someone who’s out for the evening.”

“We are not thieves,” Maddie told him sternly.

“That’s all well and good, love, but it’s five hundred miles to Sacramento from here. Gas’ll cost a small fortune—this creature guzzles the stuff—and that’s just one way. We’ll also have to get back. And I feel compelled to point out that even if we do drive all the way there and actually find Fee—which is questionable—she’s just gonna tell us she’s already spent the cash and then laugh in our faces,” Dingo said.

“Good,” Maddie said. “Because we’re gonna record it. The whole conversation. We’ll get her to admit to everything—the camera, the photos, the money she stole from Nelson—even starting the fire in Susan’s condo.”

“And then what?” Dingo asked. “We’ll have a blackmail video, but you can’t blackmail someone who doesn’t give a shit.”

“Someone will give a shit,” Maddie said. “Fee’s father gives a shit. And even if he doesn’t, at the very least, we can use the video to protect you.”

Dingo glanced at her again, but she was serious—gazing back at him with what he’d come to think of as her warrior’s face, filled with courage and resolve.

“I’m ’sposed to be taking care of you, love,” he whispered.

Maddie nodded. “But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t also try to take care of you. You’re all I’ve got, Ding.”

And just like that, he was done.

She was still talking. “I think I know where we can get some money—not a lot, but enough for the gas to Sacramento. I have this crazy great-aunt who was always trying to give Lisa these stupid family heirlooms. We can go visit her in the morning, and maybe walk out with an armload of stuff that we can pawn. It won’t be worth a whole lot, but…” She shrugged.

“That sounds like a bloody brilliant plan,” Dingo said, and she smiled back at him.

He’d been goners long before she’d said that—You’re all I’ve got—but now?

He was toast.

I didn’t know the city all that well, so I was just driving around trying to find the ocean. See, I’d just spent two years on a really remote island in Indonesia, and the ocean was in my blood.

I was sixteen. I was the new kid at the high school, which sucked as much back then as it probably still sucks today. I’d spent a lot of time alone over those past few years, and the crowds and the noise of the city were intense. So, yeah, I was in my father’s car and looking for the beach—while doing some heavy hating on San Diego in general.

I headed west—and traffic was thick, partly because a car had broken down on the shoulder. Trunk’s open, hood’s up, flashers are on. Someone had attached a white handkerchief to the radio antenna—like the situation’s so bad, they’ve surrendered. And as I was approaching, I could see this little old Asian lady—she was literally tiny—maybe five feet tall and probably in her sixties. At the time that seemed ancient to me. She was wrestling the spare tire out of the trunk of her car. As I got closer, I could see she’d gotten the jack out, too.

And I was watching all these other people—most of them adults—in all these cars in front of me just drive past her, like she was invisible. That was weird to me, coming from a place where if you didn’t stop and help someone in trouble, there was a chance that they’d die.

So I pulled over, just behind her, and yup, her back right tire was flat. It was shredded—it’s lucky she didn’t lose control and crash when it blew.

I climbed out of the car and I said, “May I give you a hand with that, ma’am?”

That was when I realized that she’d picked up the cross wrench and was holding it defensively. My first thought was maybe she’s scared because she doesn’t speak English. I was pretty sure she was Japanese—there was a Japanese family that owned a ferryboat on our island, and I’d learned a bit of the language—not much, though. We mostly spoke in Malay or Indonesian. Anyway, I held out my hands to show that I wasn’t dangerous and I said something like “Good day, Grandmother” in Japanese. I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell her that I’d change her tire, so I pointed to the tire and the jack and to myself, and I said, “Help you, I will.”

I remember that clearly, because she laughed and lowered the wrench and said—in English that was better than mine—“Thank you, Yoda. Very kind, you are. I’m so glad of that. People who look like you aren’t always friendly to people who look like me.”

I gaped at her honesty, and I think I blurted something like, “That’s terrible!”

She just smiled and said, “I think the spare’s flat, but if I can wrestle it onto the car, at least it’ll let me limp to a gas station.”

We chatted while I got the jack into place. She asked where I’d learned to speak Japanese. I told her about the island and my parents moving back here, and how I missed living so close to the ocean. I’m sure my homesickness was radiating off of me in waves.

She told me she lived about a block from the beach, and if I wanted to, I could park in her driveway when I visited my old friend, the Pacific.

Her name was Hiroko Nakamura, and maybe it’s weird that a sixteen-year-old boy was best friends with a sixty-year-old Nisei woman. (Nisei means that Hiroko was born in America. Her parents were Issei—they were born in Japan and immigrated here.)

And maybe it’s not weird. I was safe in the quiet of her garden. And I quickly established a routine of stopping in for an early morning—

“Wait,” Peter said.

Shayla looked up from the computer screen and into the man’s disconcertingly blue eyes. They were still sitting at the breakfast counter in the SEAL’s kitchen, and she was reading aloud what they’d already written—the story of how Peter had come to meet Maddie’s mother, Lisa, back when they both were in high school.

Those eyes narrowed slightly. “Did I really say that?” he asked.

She knew exactly the that to which he was referring.

Harry was hovering and he repeated it: “I was safe in the quiet of her garden.”

“I paraphrased,” Shayla explained. “You talked in circles around it for about ten paragraphs, so rather than make this an epic tome, I boiled it down to the essence. Isn’t it true? You felt safe there.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “But…”

“Too touchy-feely,” she guessed. “For you, maybe, but your audience is a fifteen-year-old girl. She’s dealing with some of the very same things that you were back then—new city, new school, a loss—”

“My loss wasn’t even close to hers,” he quickly pointed out.

“But acknowledging it still makes you—sixteen-year-old you—more relatable to Maddie,” Shayla countered.

“Okay, but that bit about the garden just feels like I’m, I don’t know…” He laughed. “Sharing an embarrassing secret.”

“What’s embarrassing?” Shayla asked. “About wanting to feel safe?”

Seriously? Harry said. You just seriously asked a Navy SEAL alpha male…?

It was, indeed, a serious question, and she held Peter’s gaze as he silently looked back into her eyes for a moment. A long moment. She tried to ignore that inappropriate feeling of warmth and connection as she stared back at him, determined not to look away.

Peter blinked first. And nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Also, the point of this story is…to share. I have to get used to the fact that if I’m uncomfortable, that means we’re probably doing this right.” He met her eyes again. “Right?”

“Yes. Right,” Shayla said as Harry laughed and whispered Oh my God is this guy real? I need you to have sex with him, immediately. “Shhhh—sure! Absolutely!” She cleared her throat and focused on the computer. “Where were we…? Ah.”

I was safe in the quiet of her garden. And I quickly established a routine of stopping in for an early-morning swim, before heading off to the pain in my ass that was school.

Anyway, that long introduction—how I met Hiroko—brings us to a foggy San Diego morning, several weeks later.

I’m sure you can guess what’s coming, since you already know that Hiroko was Lisa’s great-aunt. She’s Lisa’s grandfather’s youngest sister, and was childhood friends with Kiyo, Lisa’s grandmother.

But back then, I didn’t know about that connection and I was caught off-guard.

I’d seen Lisa at school. It would’ve been hard to miss her. She was a senior and one of the popular kids. She had the lead in the school play, she was dating the school basketball star, she was the prom queen….I stayed far away. I had no time for any of that. But Lisa had this charisma. When she walked down the hall, it was impossible to look away.

So. Foggy morning. I drove over, parked in the driveway, and went for my swim.

Hiroko had an outside shower—a small, wooden, open-aired stall attached to the side of her little cottage. I used it to rinse the salt from my skin before I changed and went to class.

Sometimes she was awake and in her kitchen. On those days she always shared her breakfast with me.

But sometimes, probably when she hadn’t slept much the night before—insomnia was her mortal enemy—her kitchen door was tightly closed, and the windows were dark.

This was one of those shuttered mornings.

I was quiet as I came, barefoot, up from the beach. I silently unlatched the gate to the garden, and went around to the back of the house.

I was running late, so I went for the efficiency of pulling off my trunks and hanging them over the clothesline on my way to the shower. I swung open the door, turned on the water, and was underneath the spray before I realized I was not alone in there.

Lisa was sitting on the bench where I’d left my clothes for school.

That was as far as they’d gotten. “So yeah, that was awkward” was how Peter had concluded the story when he’d first recounted it. “We talked, she made sure I wasn’t taking advantage of her aunt, and, well, that was that.”

Except for the part where he’d been naked in front of a girl he couldn’t keep himself from watching when she walked down the high school corridor.

“We’re gonna need a few more details,” Shayla said briskly now.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like, what exactly happened. Did you dive for your towel?”

“Nope,” Peter said. “She handed it to me. Eventually.”

“Eventually? So you’re just standing there, hanging out, everything just kind of…lazily blowing in the breeze…?”

He smiled at that. “Yeah, but no breeze. I think Lisa was as surprised as I was—maybe more, because my family was unconventional. So I was comfortable with nudity. I turned off the water, and I think I might’ve said What the hell, or the equivalent. She was trying to play it cool, but she blushed, which pretty much gave her away.”

Shayla’s fingers were flying as she typed his words, even as she asked, “So what did she say when you said What the hell?”

“She goes, Of course Auntie’s new pool boy is you, Goldilocks. I should’ve known. And I now know what she meant—but then I didn’t get the cultural reference, having lived on an island for two years, and also having never seen any porn at that point, so I said something like, Hiroko’s your aunt? And then, She doesn’t have a pool.”

“Wait,” Shayla said. “Rewind. She called you Goldilocks? Like, And the Three Bears?”

Pete laughed. “Yeah. Here’s another of those shameful secrets. At that time, I had really long blond dreadlocks. One of my friends from the island was a Rastafarian.”

“A Rastafarian?” Shay repeated.

“He was from Jamaica and was best friends with a Tibetan monk who’d taken a vow of silence. I’m pretty sure they communicated via interpretive dance. We also had a curmudgeonly eighty-year-old former rock drummer who used the beach as a giant Zen garden, these incredibly jacked German women who were into blacksmithing, and a constantly rotating group of Americans looking for inspiration, which I’m pretty sure was code for getting high and sleeping with someone else’s spouse.” He laughed again. “It was an artists’ colony.”

Shayla nodded—suddenly it all made sense. But as fascinating as this was, and as much as she hated reining in this backstory tangent, these were details for another chapter. It was nearly ten-thirty. Her boys had been home for a while—she could see the shifting glow from the TV through her living room window—and she wanted to get back there before they went to bed.

Still, her detail-loving heart broke a bit as she forced herself to ask, “What did Lisa say after you pointed out that Hiroko didn’t have a pool?”

Peter smiled. “She said, Are you seriously tan all over? And I think I said, Yes? And then she kind of shook her head and made a Harold and Maude reference, which I also didn’t get at the time. That’s that cult classic movie—”

“About the suicidal kid who gets into an intimate relationship with an eighty-year-old woman,” Shay finished for him. She knew. “Lisa seriously thought…?”

“That I was banging her aunt H,” Pete, in turn, finished for her.

And there was another creative use of that verb to bang, also used with authenticity.

Was he? Harry wondered.

Shhh, Shay murmured silently.

“At the time, I was clueless,” Peter was continuing with a rueful shrug. “Lisa told me later, you know, that that was what she’d thought. She and her family lived just a few blocks over and a neighbor told her about some kid with really long hair visiting Hiroko at odd hours. So Lisa came swooping in to protect and defend.”

“That’s really sweet,” Shayla said.

“Yeah, I’m not sure about that,” he said. “Yes, it’s what she said, but in truth, it was more complicated. Hiroko and Lisa didn’t always get along. It’s possible Lisa was looking for leverage or even blackmail material—more about power and self-defense. But that’s not for Maddie to hear. Anyway, I’m standing there, with literally nothing to hide as Lisa grills me as to how I met Hiroko, and where I’m from, and what I’m doing there. I told her, and I guess she believed me.

“She finally stood up and handed me my towel, probably because she’d also figured out that she was way more embarrassed than I was about the full frontal nudity. But then she said, Hurry up and get dressed, Goldie. We’re already late for school. I’ll wait for you in your car.” Pete smiled at the memory. “So I drove her to school, and I’m thinking, Okay, that was interesting, but now it was over. You know, it felt kind of like an alien encounter—I was pretty sure it wasn’t gonna happen again. Except the next day, after my shower, I head for my car, and she’s sitting in the front seat. She hated riding the bus, so it became a regular thing. She called me her carpool buddy—when she wasn’t calling me Goldie or Goldilocks. She was funny and smart and blindingly attractive, and she gave me her full attention for twenty minutes every day. I’d get in the car and she’d announce a topic of discussion. Kirk or Picard? The Beatles: Yes or No? Who’d Win a Wrestling Match: George Bernard Shaw or Shakespeare? Was Filming Flipper Animal Abuse?

“A few days in, I remember thinking, Huh, I kinda don’t hate it here anymore. A week later, I’m all Yup, I love San Diego. And a few days after that, I knew I was doomed, because I recognized that what I really loved—who I really loved—was Lisa Nakamura.”

Shayla was typing as fast as her fingers could move, but she just had to glance up, because his tone—his voice—had changed. He sounded softer—dreamy—and yeah, his face and body language had softened perceptibly, too. His eyes were distant and warm—he’d time traveled. And she knew she was looking at the ghost of teenaged Peter Greene, and she wished Maddie could see just how powerful and pure his love for her mother had once been.

He wasn’t done. “I was smart enough to recognize that when a girl—especially a senior who was already dating the school’s star athlete—used words like buddy and nicknames like Goldilocks,” he continued, “Well, the chances that she’d fall in love with me were a snowball’s in hell.”

Shayla nodded as she transcribed his words. This was good. With just a few minor tweaks, it would be ready to send.

Still, she wondered if Maddie would recognize what she did—that the melting-in-hell snowball really represented Lisa’s chances of not falling for Peter. There was no way on earth that that boy could have successfully hidden his feelings from anyone, let alone the object of his affection. And that much adoration would’ve been hard for anyone to resist.

Also? Harry pointed out, Lisa had seen him naked, in his all-over golden-tan glory.

Yup. Game. Over.