Elspeth had already closed the library and was hunkered down in her rambling Russell Street house. As we hugged good-bye at the Ice Pick, she explained that her plan was to ring in the New Year in an oxygen chamber that a professor friend of hers ran near U.C. Berkeley. Carlos, his partner, Larry, and their pugs (Victoria and Albert, how cute is that!) were heading to their cabin in the mountains up by the Stanislaus National Park, near the scene of my ill-fated fence post incident, though I didn’t elect to point that out. Sydney was filling in for a French teacher who suddenly “had to” get home to Paris a day early so I had no opportunity to download to her about our latest Goth encounter. And Melanie slipped out before anyone, leaving word through Elspeth that her daughters had surprised her with a plane ticket to Boston.

In fact, an unsettling number of the B-C families had flown the coop as much as a week early, explaining in emails to Sydney that the only flights they could get to the Hana-Maui airport left last Friday. I felt their pain, really I did.

It is such a cliché to say that you could hear a pin drop. So I’ll try to do better, though you could, you really could hear a fucking pin drop. The profiles of everyone in that room were taut with confusion. Gloriously buffed faces, swept back hairstyles, eyebrows lifted to perfection. All of them were frozen. As were the businessman haircuts and the cashmere sweaters over pinpoint cotton shirts. Not a thread moved on a wool blend suit jacket. Not a rustle of silk could be discerned. The only movement, other than Dick DeNutti snapping his neck repeatedly in a most disgusting effort to crack a vertebra, or to quell the crazed tension mounting in his brain, was the soft sound of Sonya Sterling whispering Excuse me, Cerise or Pardon me, Payton as she tilted her head to the side and strode through the couples up toward John Thomas Mueskes while tiny beads of sweat formed on his skin, magnified for the world by the spotlight frying his forehead.


At just about the moment that Sonya arrived without slipping (darn) to the spot next to John Thomas, his words had begun to gel in my head. Something about a “real estate broker,” and I flashed back to that moment in the library when John Thomas and Sonya emerged from the elevator with that nauseating laughter and said something about…what was it now? A portfolio?

 

“Then tell me what Benno said in his letter to you.” I patted the sofa again. “Because that’s what I really came in here for.” Elspeth nodded as if she couldn’t avoid the topic any longer. She retrieved an envelope from her multi-colored rice paper shoulder bag made by Cambodian peasants that was slung over her desk chair, and crept back to where I guided her down into the sofa, my hands just below her hips. I loved Elspeth Waldron, but not so much that I wanted my mitts to rest on her ass any longer than necessary.

The stationery was a grayish green in the finest paper with a discreet watermark. The name Dr. Benno Beckmann was embossed across the top and the handwriting was a spidery European script. Elspeth’s hands trembled as she unfolded the paper. She cleared her throat, took a deep breath in through the nostrils, exhaled through the lips.

“Dear Elspeth,” she began. “As someone who has reached the Eight Fold Path, I trust you will find forgiveness in your heart for my absence. The weather has turned bitterly cold and I am in bed even earlier than my habitual time in California. In fact some nights, it is lights out by eight o’clock.” Elspeth smiled mutely. I nodded encouragement.