“I agree. She’s coming home with me.”
“I’m advising her to take a few months off. If she isn’t seeing a psychiatrist, I strongly suggest she find one. She needs medication. She needs to be away from stress. She might have had a post-traumatic flashback. Honestly, this isn’t unusual. I think most of our military and police force should be getting some form of psychological support and learning self-care and stress management. I’m sure she’s going to be glad to see you.”
Rosalind wasn’t prepared for how bad Reni looked. She calculated how long it had been since she’d seen her. Just a few months. Not long enough for her to be so thin, with sunken cheeks and protruding bones and dark circles under her eyes. This hadn’t happened overnight.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” she told Reni. “We’re going to go home.” She could see Reni wondering about the word home. “California,” she explained.
Probably not the best idea to take her to the house where the bad things in her life had started. But it was also a place of comfort, or at least it used to be.
“I’d like to go to Grandmother’s cabin.”
It had always annoyed Rosalind that Beryl Fisher was the person who’d been able to care for Reni as an infant. “Oh, Reni. I hate the desert. You know that.”
“You don’t have to go.”
“There’s no electricity there, and even hauled water is hard to get. No cell service. That’s not the place for you right now. Let’s just get home and we can talk about that later. Okay?”
Reni nodded.
Rosalind helped her get dressed. The nurse handed Rosalind a bag of medicine and scripts. Outside, they took a cab to Reni’s apartment. While Reni sat on a chair in a stupor, Rosalind tossed clothes and toiletries into a suitcase. Then she noticed the dog dishes on the kitchen floor. Damn. She’d forgotten about the dog.
“Where’s Sam?”
“A neighbor’s watching him.”
He wasn’t one of those pocket puppies. He was a big Lab. Change of plans. They’d have to drive clear across the country. Rosalind knew even a heavily drugged Reni would not be okay with cargo-shipping the dog. Rosalind wasn’t comfortable with the idea either.
“What about my fish?” Reni pointed to a bowl containing a purple and red betta.
Rosalind tracked down Sam’s location, luckily in the same building. She traded the fish for the dog, passing the bowl and food to a man wearing workout clothing.
“My daughter’s been wanting a fish,” he said.
“Great.”
Back in the apartment, they boxed up everything for a permanent move. Five days later they were in California and Reni was resting in her old room, Sam next to her on the bed.
CHAPTER 5
Present day
It was always hard returning to the house where the police had hauled her father off in handcuffs. Normally Reni went out of her way to avoid stepping inside those familiar walls. She’d strongly considered calling to tell her mother about the deal Benjamin was trying to cut. It would have been easier over the phone. But in the end she felt she owed her mother, who’d done so much for her recently, a face-to-face.
So, hand on the wheel, a booted foot removed from the gas pedal as the elevation on the four-lane dropped, she drove the hour from the high desert to Palm Springs, watching the outdoor temperature increase with each mile. It wasn’t unusual for it to be twenty degrees hotter in the low desert.
Three days had passed since Daniel Ellis had shown up at her cabin. Since then, she’d attended a craft fair and had sold enough pottery to get her through another month. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever return to the FBI, but she’d used up all leave-of-absence pay long ago and was living hand to mouth, the pottery the only thing keeping food on the table and her small mortgage paid. She was okay with her current state of affairs, and actually liked the ever-present threat of immediate collapse. Everything could be gone tomorrow. Or not.
Her mother had offered to help out financially, but Reni declined for more than one reason. Rosalind Fisher could be controlling, and Reni didn’t want to be at her mercy. And unlike the rockiness of the past, their current relationship was decent. Not strong, but better. She didn’t want to risk disturbing it.
She hit town and cut through the tourist district.
Palm Springs felt like a coastal California city, but it was located a hundred miles from any beaches, on the edge of the Inland Empire. People were always commenting about how they thought the ocean should be just one street over, or just around a turn. Nope. Keep driving.
She’d been born and raised there, her view too close as a kid to really have a solid take on the place. It had just been the town where she lived. But in later years, Reni had come to understand Palm Springs was like a glossy magazine someone had left open in the sun by the pool. The desert city was famous as the birthplace of the mid-century modern movement. That influence could be seen everywhere, from coffee shops and hotels to private homes. Located two hours from Los Angeles, the city had also been the playground to the stars, and palm-lined streets with names like Gene Autry Trail and Frank Sinatra Drive reminded visitors of old Hollywood. The airport even had a concourse named after Sonny Bono.
When temperatures in the Coachella Valley got too intense, an aerial tram carried people up and away from the heat to the San Jacinto Mountains, while highways provided smooth car rides to and from lower and higher elevations, past fields of iconic giant white turbines lazily stirring ozone that had drifted down the valley from LA. The ozone usually came with air-quality warnings and at the very least a headache. If that wasn’t exciting enough, both the San Andreas and Walker Lane faults lay deep and hidden a few miles out of town. There had been some fairly big quakes in the past, but everybody was still waiting for the big one. Specialists said it was a matter of when, not if.
Bring it on.
Feeling a deep and familiar dread, Reni turned at a stop sign and drove down a wide, smooth street to the cul-de-sac where she’d grown up. Her family home, built in the fifties, was about as classic as it could get, with a butterfly roof and white breeze blocks and giant palms. A perfect example of mid-century modernism meets Desert Modernism. It had even been part of a few home tours over the years, something her mother was proud of. Reni figured people just wanted to see the place where the Inland Empire Killer had lived.
She hadn’t given her mother any advance warning about her visit, and as soon as she stepped inside and dropped her bag on the low couch, Rosalind Fisher began her purging ritual, which was what they’d both started calling it.
It had taken a while, but Reni had come to realize that odors were big triggers for what had eventually been diagnosed as complex trauma. The smell of the house was a blow to her no matter how prepared she was or how much time had passed. Even though the walls had been repainted and there were no family photos on display anymore, even though she’d lived there for years after Benjamin’s arrest, going away for any length of time and returning had a way of reawakening a response that made her curl her hands into fists until her nails cut bloody half-moons into her palms.
Even now, so many years later, as her mother moved from one spot to the next, lighting candles and turning on an essential-oil diffuser, Reni could smell the dark childhood she hadn’t known was dark until later. The place where your life changed in a moment, where your reality turned upside down, could never be hidden or covered with paint or artwork or the cloying scent of a million candles. Rather than becoming something new, overwriting what had come before, the candles and art merely merged with the past.