Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was never given away, never changed. I called it. No one answered.
    I’m here
, I said aloud, or maybe thought. I’d spent so much time alone, I couldn’t tell the difference sometimes.
I’m here, just where we were supposed to be.
    But Tracy didn’t answer, because Tracy wasn’t there.
    Next I called Kelly. She picked up the phone and didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either. I knew she knew it was me and I knew she knew exactly where I was and who I was working for, the great Constance Darling. How could she not know? Wouldn’t the angels be singing? Wouldn’t Silette’s hand come down from heaven and mark us, all over again, with the mark of Cain, the stain of the detective, the scar of initiation, as he had when we’d read his book? Wasn’t it the most obvious thing in the world that something had actually happened, that my course, finally, was changed?
    Genius, we were learning, was only skin deep. Brilliance is as brilliance does. Our ability to solve mysteries was not particularly helpful in actual living.
    We didn’t say anything. The silence on the phone sounded like Brooklyn. After a minute Kelly hung up and I had a sour taste in my mouth and I remembered that even the best things would never be good again.
    I drove back to the hotel and used a sewing needle and the ink from a ballpoint pen to give myself a tattoo of a four-leaf clover on the top of my left foot, where it hurt the most. Maybe someday someone would ask me about it, and I would get to tell them about today. This day when everything changed. And then everything would change again, because someone cared enough to ask.
    The next day we started late. Constance was always a night person and liked her morning routine of coffee and poached eggs and meditation. She was quiet on the drive and almost seemed anxious, the tiniest cracks showing in her cool veneer. I asked a few times if she wanted to stop and she didn’t, my carefully plotted breaks just spots on the map.
    We didn’t go into the city proper but circled around it, starting at the cheaper suburbs and moving up to streets with mansions and gates.
    “Here it is,” she said. “This is the house.”
    A curved driveway led to a high fence surrounding a property lush with palms and hedges and desert flowers. Behind the plants I saw glimpses of a white mansion that looked like it’d been spun out of cardboard and cotton candy, brand new, and dropped in Las Vegas. I heard rustling in the plants—animals or maybe other humans were moving around, hiding.
    “Wait here,” she said. “I may be a while.”
    I waited outside the gate and watched Constance ring the buzzer, say a few words, and get buzzed in. She disappeared into the hedges. I waited. Even with the air full blast, the sun was hot and I felt a little queasy.
    Nine minutes later I saw a man in blue jeans and a black shirt and cowboy boots pulling her away from the house.
    I tried to catch Constance’s eye but she didn’t see me. Constance looked like she always did—too intelligent and a little bit bored.
    But when she tried to take her arm back from the man in the black shirt, he twisted, hard, and didn’t let go.
    I watched for another minute. They argued. Constance didn’t look scared. They exchanged a few more words and it didn’t look too heated, but when she tried to pull away again the man in the black shirt held on tight.
    I got out of the car and left the motor running and the door open. No one saw me. I went up to the gate and pulled a cheap little Saturday night special from the back of my waistband and pointed it at the man’s heart.
    Constance and the man were about fifteen feet away. I’d bought the gun when I’d first come to L.A. I liked to travel armed back then. It was the only way I knew to speed up time, to bend reality to my will. Constance taught me more effective and less painful ways to make thoughts real.
    I knocked on the gate with the gun.
    “Hey,” I said.
    Constance and the