Perri O'Shaughnessy - Presumption Of Death

“Well, at the mention of money, Wish’s eyes lit up. I have to admit Dus and I wanted to know what was going on, but Danny and Wish went into his room. I heard him ask Wish, ‘You still got your camera?’ Wish said ‘Yeah, but I gotta go to Tahoe tomorrow. I don’t think this is such a good idea.’ He was reluctant, you know?”

“Wait a minute,” Paul said, holding up a hand to slow him down. “What’s not a good idea?”

Tustin shrugged. “Who knows? They shut the door. All I know is, he was pushing Wish to go somewhere. Told him he could be home that night-this was Tuesday-in plenty of time to pack for Tahoe.

“We could hear them arguing. Wish wasn’t up for it. And then Danny’s voice, loud, insisting, talking some more about money. He had an accusatory tone, like, ‘You turned on me, man, you’re such a wuss.’ Then it would get quiet in there, like they were whispering.

“My brother and I went into the living room and sat down to watch the baseball game on TV and eat our pot pies. Wish and Danny came out, and Wish acted embarrassed. He had his backpack and we said, like, where you headed, man? He just shook his head, but when Danny went into the can Wish motioned to me to come into the kitchen and said, ‘Listen. I’m going to Robles Ridge. Okay? Just in case anything happens.’

“‘What’s going to happen?’ I said, but he just shook his head.”

Dustin finally appeared at the front door. He gave some signal to his brother, who said, “We can go in now.” They mounted the three steps to the welcome mat. Dustin, in scruffy cutoffs and bare feet, held the screen open for them. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Inside, to Nina’s relief, aside from scuffs on the hardwood, dirty fingerprints around the light switches, and overlooked dustballs in the corners, the main room looked okay. However, closed doors to the two bedrooms beckoned. She resolved to have a look before they left. She sat down on the sprung couch with Paul.

Dustin, who acted the householder while his brother did duty as the greeter, went into the kitchen and she heard the fridge door open. In a minute he came back with Gatorade for all. Nina was hungry. Gatorade would do. She unscrewed the top.

“So what’s the news?” Dustin said, getting right to it after the introductions.

“No news,” Paul said. The Boyz looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Tustin was telling us about Danny’s visit,” Nina said. “Go ahead. But maybe you could turn down the music?”

Dustin went over to the stereo and Eminem stopped cleaning out his closet and dissing his mama over Dr. Dre’s menacing arrangement. She thought of Bob’s complaints when she made him clean out his closet. Maybe he too would become famous someday from telling the world about his mean mom.

“Yeah. So. Where was I? Right, Wish says, ‘Robles Ridge, just in case.’ ”

Dustin broke in, “So Tus says, ‘You better tell us more than that,’ just as this loser Danny came back into the kitchen, and this made Danny bullshit.”

“Told us to fuck off,” Tustin added, “only he was less polite.”

“What a poser,” Dustin said.

“Drugs?” Paul asked.

“He didn’t stagger or laugh a lot or smell funny and his pupils were normal-sized.”

“We looked,” Tustin added.

“I could see Danny and Wish went way back. At one point Danny was going on like, ‘See, the whole cop-school thing, that’s to prove you’re not afraid. But you are, aren’t you, Willis?’

“And then they left.” Dustin took a long swig of Gatorade. A few pounds heavier than his brother, he had apple cheeks and a more innocent air. Nina could see the Boyz in a few years in identical suits, staring at computer screens through identical glasses, juggling mortgages and families, saving consumer capitalism.

The Boyz came from Rhodes, Iowa. She wondered where they would end up.

Paul had been taking notes. He took over. “Describe what they were wearing.”

“Danny had on a camouflage jacket, like I said,” Tustin replied. “Jeans. He wore the shirt buttoned up, and I had the impression he had a lot of stuff in his pockets. I asked him if he was Army, but he said he got the jacket up at the Moss Landing military-surplus store. I didn’t really think he was even ex-military, not with the ponytail.”

“Shoes?”

“Sorry, I never noticed. Wish was wearing his Doc Martens, I remember that. The only reason I noticed Wish’s boots was he talked about buying them, how expensive they were. He thought about it for a long time…”

“What else did Danny wear?”

The twins looked at each other and shrugged. “I think the T-shirt under the jacket was white. I could see the neck part,” Tustin said.

“What did his teeth look like?”

“Teeth. He wasn’t a smiler. Why do you ask?” Dustin said. “Oh. Dental records. Damn. Of course. Danny’s missing too, is that it? And the firebug, it could be he’s the victim. But you only have the one victim. Well, Wish and Danny are both tall and skinny, although I’d say Danny’s more muscular. Both Indian-looking.”

“Native American-looking,” Tustin said.

“Danny’s hair is longer.”

“I don’t know where Danny is,” Paul said. “He may not be missing. Any idea where he lives?”

The Boyz shook their heads. Dustin said, “But they talked about Danny’s uncle. His name was-”

“Ben,” Tustin said.

“That’s it, Ben. He called him Tío . Seems like Wish knew him too.”

“Did you hear the last name Cervantes?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Still, that’ll help.”

Dustin and Tustin nodded several times.

Nina went on, “What kind of camera did Wish take with him?”

“A Canon. Digital, with a megazoom lens. He just bought it at Costco with some birthday money and his first paycheck.”

“What was Wish wearing?”

“Uh, denims. Denim jacket. I don’t know what underneath. Same old Bob Marley T-shirt as always, I guess,” Tustin said.

“He’s a good guy,” Dustin said. “Quiet and no creepy habits.”

“Let’s check his room,” Paul said, getting up. Tustin led the way down the short dark hall. Nina’s memories of the place flooded up, Aunt Helen and her mother cooking on Easter Sunday in the kitchen, Nina years later carrying Bob from the bedroom when he woke up coughing with a high fever one night, through that very hall, out to the rattletrap Chevy she drove then, and the doctor saying he had pneumonia… those had been desperate times. She put her hand on Paul’s broad back in front of her.

They crowded into the smaller bedroom at the rear of the house, Bob’s kindergarten bedroom. Wish had taken down the blinds over the window in back and left the window open. Sunflower heads waved through it from the tiny overgrown backyard and the room felt swept by air.

Wish’s bookshelf, full of the thick textbooks on criminal justice he had studied the previous year, sat in one corner. Aunt Helen’s old upholstered chair in a yellow-and-green flower pattern sat in the other, and there was just room for a conference table squeezed along the wall, stacked high with auto tools, comic books, CDs and DVDs and a DVD player under the tiny TV.

In the closet, T-shirts, ten or twelve of them, folded on the upper shelf, an empty duffel on the floor, and several plaid flannel shirts that Nina recognized from Tahoe.

The room smelled like Wish, a dusty outdoors smell, the scent of a living breathing person, and this even more than his shirts frightened Nina. Wish might really be dead. He had been her friend, a cheerful, innocent, eager spirit in her life, too young to be an equal, too old to be a son. Paul too seemed moved. He searched with irritable, feverish efficiency, running his hands over the shirts, checking pockets, unfolding cuffed pants, pushing behind baskets on the closet shelf, searching.