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  “What isn’t?” quipped Josie.

  “You’re calling about the Carson plant,” guessed Ben.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I’m a good guesser.”

  “Some assistant plant manager keeps leaving voicemails. He sounds pretty anxious.”

  “Tell ’em I called my guys at OSHA and got their inspection pushed until I submit my recommendations.”

  Of course you did, reasoned Josie. If Ben Keller informed the Office of Safety and Health Administration that he was a paid consultant for Foster Farms, they would put inspections on hold under the direct assumption that Ben would convincingly keep any and all chickens out of harm’s way.

  “Anything else?” asked Ben.

  “Not much. Jack Stein had to cancel lunch tomorrow, it looks like that tire recall is going to go through, and World Toys has a question about a shipment of kids’ jewelry they just got from China. Oh, and you got a weird-looking, registered letter that says PERSONAL all over it in purple Sharpie. Want me to see what it is?”

  “Nah. It can wait. Probably nothing. Gotta go now,” said Ben before smoothly merging his Volvo to the right and into the paired traffic lanes earmarked for the southbound Interstate 5.

  By the time Ben finished the commute to his Burbank office he had forgotten about the curious letter. It was an uneventful, low-key day. With no big fires to put out he was able to catch up on returning emails and touch base with some clients about recent legislative changes. With ever-changing government regulations there were always new and higher standards that his clients had to meet. They trusted Ben to keep them safe from consumer and employee lawsuits and stiff federal and state penalties should they be found in violation of any codes or policies.

  Before folding his laptop promptly at five, Ben went to Google Maps to see what the drive home had in store for him. He scrolled along the 5 and 118 freeways and mercifully saw nothing but green and yellow lines. He should be home by six. All red and that would have meant anywhere between seven and nine and a cold plate waiting for him in the microwave.

  Ben made his way to his Volvo. As he pulled his keys from his shoulder bag he also happened to pull out the forgotten and unopened padded envelope marked PERSONAL. The package tumbled down in an arc and landed behind the car’s front tire. Ben stooped to pick it up, sat in the car, buckled his seatbelt and turned over the engine. Curious, he unzipped the envelope’s pull tag and discovered a CD along with a handwritten note.

  He shoved the disc into the CD player and unfolded the letter

  Dear Mr. Keller,

  My name is Debbie Pepper. It is with a heavy heart that I write this letter. I am enclosing a recording made by my father, Arthur Pratt on his deathbed at the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City He mentions a crime which may unfortunately be of interest to you.

  May God Bless you and keep you,

  Debbie Pepper

  Ben felt chilled. He wondered just how long he had been sitting there, rereading the succinct letter. At some point, the Volvo’s air conditioner had mysteriously switched to full arctic blow. The temperature in the car had to be sixty-two. Yet Ben was sweating. He finally guided the setting back to AUTO and the fan slowed. That’s when Ben heard the voice. Arthur Wayne Pratt’s voice, barely audible, as if whispering through his car speakers. Without thinking, Ben jammed his index finger at the eject button. The whispering stopped and the player gently spit out the CD.

  “Christ,” said Ben aloud.

  Ben knew instinctively that listening to the CD while driving would certainly be unsafe for him. Not to mention the other drivers on the road. The CD would have to wait.

  ****

  Alexandra Love Keller was a true blue Valley Girl. Born and raised in the suburban hills overlooking Tarzana, she was the youngest of three children born to Maurice Keller, of the famous Keller Karpet and Flooring. One of her earliest memories was a television image of her late father pitching wall-to-wall shag. For a time, her old man was a genuine Southland celebrity. “As recognizable and tan as a TV weatherman,” Maurice would often boast to his youngest child. Of course, little Alex was only four and at that tender age, there were no TV stars bigger than Big Bird and Elmo.

  Unfortunately for Maurice, the celebrity factor, fueled by a thousand dinner-hour commercials, proved to be the downfall of his first marriage. With Keller Karpet and Flooring showrooms expanding as far away as San Diego, Alexandra’s beloved father was spending so much time south of Disneyland that he felt oddly compelled to start a second family. At the time of Maurice Keller’s death-by-heart-failure, he had garnered eight children, two ex-wives, and a mountain of red debt. What leftover assets not picked over by banks and the government were eventually held in trust—the Keller Family Trust—shared equally by the thirty-eight-year-old Alexandra and her seven siblings. Alex’s stake was by no means a fortune. But the trust did provide her with enough of a stipend to provide an early retirement from her not-quite-flourishing singing career and a small college fund for her three daughters: Elyssa, Nina, and Betsy.

  “Nina!” barked Alex. “Where’s your sister?

  “Which one? I’ve got two,” quipped Nina, only nine but a wiseass in the making. She wouldn’t look her mother in the eye, preferring to mentally catalogue the miles of breakfast cereal choices.

  “Betsy,” answered Alex. “Just find her, will you?”

  “After I make my choice.”

  “Now or there’ll be zero choice.”

  “Almost done.”

  “Cold oatmeal for the rest of your life.”

  “Fine!” spat Nina, trudging off down the supermarket aisle to search for her six-year-old sister.

  Strange how the world has changed, thought Alex. Cold oatmeal of all things. What was repugnant to her middle child had been a breakfast favorite of hers since she could remember. “From the old country,” her father would say to her. From Russia. Cook the oatmeal, chill it overnight, and serve with warm molasses on top. Like bread pudding. Alex had wisely chosen not to share the story with her girls. Not yet. Not while she could still use the threat as leverage.

  Next on Alex’s list were rice cakes, applesauce, and tomato paste. Like some über-organized moms, Alex had a list neatly ordered by supermarket aisle. Like Patton, she refused to battle through the same real estate twice. And if she missed an item, one of her girls was there to fetch it.

  “They don’t have the soy milk Ben likes.” Eleven-year-old Elyssa appeared from behind Alex. She was holding two different half-gallon cartons of soy milk, fully expecting her mother to choose.

  “You pick,” said Alex.

  “No way,” answered Elyssa. “Then it’s my fault if he doesn’t like it.”

  “If he doesn’t like it, he won’t drink it,” said Alex flatly.

  “That’s so wasteful.”

  “What’s more wasteful?” asked Alex. “Buying a half-gallon of soy that Ben won’t like or wasting time and gas driving to another supermarket that still may not have what Ben likes?”

  “Okay. So choose,” the eldest persisted, pre-adolescence infecting her tone. “My arms are getting tired.”

  “Find Nina and Betz. Have Betz eeny-meeny-miny the soy milk. She likes to do that.”

  “Whatever.” Elyssa spun on her Converse All Stars, tucked those cartons of soy milk under her arms like footballs, then trudged off to find her sisters.

  Alex checked her watch. It was two minutes shy of six. Home by six-thirty, she calculated. Set the girls to homework, begin preparing dinner by seven. Ben would let her know when he would be home. There would be a voicemail, email, or text message. He was good that way. No mystery or big surprises. Ben was steady, stable, and predictable.

  Ben was safe.

  The thought made Alex smile, ever mindful of the times in her life when everything seemed unsafe. Especially unsafe were the men she had been with and the substances she had experimented with. Especially unsafe was her first husband and the father of her precious daught
ers. God rest his tortured soul.

  By the time Alex had piled eleven bags of groceries and her three daughters into her black Escalade, she had checked all her electronic sources for messages from Ben. So far she had received none. It was odd, but she expected she would hear from him any minute. He was that regular.

  But Ben wouldn't call or text or leave a voicemail because he wouldn’t need to. Ben was already home.

  “I’m not a well man. Docs say the fuckin’ cancer’s just about everywhere. But that’s just the shit they say. I never seen it. Nobody had a mind to even show me a picture. Cons get no goddamn respect.”

  Remote control in hand, Ben unconsciously rode the volume on the CD player. Every time that hollow voice inhaled, Ben experienced an irritating, high-pitched whistle. An audio anomaly produced somewhere in the transfer. Ben could have simply filtered out the annoying noise by reducing the high frequencies on the equalizer. But that assumed Ben could move more than his right thumb. It was volume up, volume down. Dry swallow. Then wait for the next mumble of recorded words.

  Ben had the blackout shades drawn in his backyard office. The office was above a game room, roughly paneled with board-and-batten painted a country cream. The room sported an open-beam ceiling and an old, school fan that never stopped turning. The furniture was a mix of warm oaks and leather. The single wide window overlooked a coral-blue swimming pool. The pool itself was horse-shoed by a 1995 two-story, stucco family home. The Kellers’ home was on a cul-de-sac snugly fit into the planned community of Vista Viego. “Vista” suggested foothills and the two hundred-plus houses in the development had sweeping views of the incorporated city of Simi Valley, California.

  “Fuckers use all these words. Curse words to make people sick. Like what... Like glioblastoma. Don’t remember most big words but that ugly fucker stuck in my head. Bet if I said glioblastoma ten times on this tape you’d get the cancer, too. Fuckin’ glioblastoma. Hope the docs get it just so they know that the shit feels worse than it sounds.”

  Glioblastoma.

  Ben thought maybe he had heard or read about the disease. Glioblastoma described a difficult-to-treat brain tumor. Cellular phones? wondered Ben. Maybe those university studies were on to something. Cell phones were going to kill everybody. The final human solution courtesy of Nokia and Motorola.

  “Like you give a shit about my problems. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. Already said that, I think.”

  Damn straight, thought Ben. He didn’t know the voice at all. Not a whisper of recognition. So why the hell was he still listening, rapt, cemented to his reclining desk chair? The gristled voice escaped from the speakers in a disembodied, poorly recorded, and cryptic monotone. As Ben listened on, he felt the sweat from his neck coagulating between his lower skull and the leather headrest.

  The voice grew weary.

  “Suppose you’re tired of me babbling... Suppose you want to know what this shit’s all about.”

  At every pause or broken thought, the automatic gain on the original recording would elevate as it sought to register the thinnest decibel. This provided an increased hiss that Ben found irritating. He instinctively lowered the volume, but then found himself leaning forward, listening more intently. He could hear the old con’s breathing slow, a certain sign that either sleep or death was just around the corner.

  “Tired,” popped the voice. “Tired of holding it in. Tired of remembering the pictures in the papers. Just pictures. Your wife and baby girls. Twins, I think. Did I read that or was that a picture too?”

  A rush of heat surged inside Ben. It was a sudden autonomic thrust of blood turning his skin pink and squeezing fresh perspiration from every pore. His stomach tightened.

  “Was right around them riots. I was in County and there was a guy who’d just got popped for beatin’ on his girlfriend. Happiest guy to ever get popped. Happy cuz he was inside while the cops were outside lookin’ for the guys who did it.”

  Doors opened in Ben’s mind. He could actually see them swinging free like those of a saloon. His thoughts and memories flooded through without the usual interceptors.

  “Anyway. He wasn’t braggin’ or nothin’. He was relieved. Why he told me? Fuck knows. I coulda turned him over. Made a deal for somethin’ but I figured he knew I wouldn’t. I was pure convict. Code and shit.”

  Lunch, thought Ben. He hadn’t eaten lunch. Otherwise he would be vomiting.

  “Guy didn’t think he’d go down for it. Said it was real clean. No evidence. In, out, cash, jewelry...”

  Another silence came, followed by a room-shaking hiss, like a giant gas valve had blown and was filling the room with nothing but earth-moving sound waves.

  “Twins. That’s why I remember. It was the twins. See, I met some evil fuckers inside. Why they made the inside, man. Had to have a place to put all the evil. But this one, he got out. Free bird and hell if anybody ever knew what he did. Hell if you knew what he did. Maybe he got caught. I just never knew. Was those little twin girlies that stuck in me. Those sweet little faces.”

  Those sweet little faces.

  “Lea and Mae,” uttered Ben.

  Names he hadn’t spoken in years. Not a single whisper. Twins. His precious girls.

  “Mom looked kinda pretty. And young, I guess. Were you that young? Suppose we all were once.”

  Sara, thought Ben. This time his lips didn’t move. Surprisingly, he remembered her often. More so than the baby girls. He wondered why that was. First real love? Only real love? Questions he had learned not to ask. Not if he wanted a real life again. Not if he wanted to move on.

  “Stu,” said the voice. “Guy’s name was Stu. Stu Raymo. Cons called him Stuey. I might be old, but I didn’t forget that one. Evil fucker killed those sweet faces.”

  Stu Raymo didn’t register for Ben. He was good with names and phone numbers. Faces too. Ben was so good at matching the faces with the names and the numbers he would often see the face, think of the phone number, then pull up the name. Stu Raymo had no face or number. He was just a name served up by a faceless voice. Why? wondered Ben. Why that voice, that name, and that moment? Why now? Why me? Questions without answers, thought Ben—anchors that keep life from moving on.

  “Stooo-ey,” said the voice, purged and groggy now, inviting sleep. “Stooo...”

  “Evil fucker!” shouted Ben, kicking over a nearby floor lamp before succumbing to tears. He wrapped himself tight with his arms and pulled his knees up. The sobs came faster and harder than Ben could ever remember. Painful wrenchings, eventually bringing on an involuntary sleep.

  Ben would later calculate that he was out for nearly an hour, snapping to from what he thought was an earthquake. His chair was vibrating as was just about everything else in the office. The loudest racket came from a wastebasket full of recyclable diet soda cans. Wall to wall, the room itself was physically buzzing. As Ben reclaimed consciousness he soon discovered the remote control still in his fist, the volume maxed. Five hundred watts of electronic nothing were surging through the 5:1 speaker system. The subwoofer had caused so much vibration that objects in the room had seismically shifted.

  Ben stiffly rose from the chair, ejected the CD from the tray and with shaky hands, repacked it and buried it deep in the back of his top desk drawer. It was 6:16. Alex and the girls would be returning home any minute.

  Ben managed to get through the rest of the evening on autopilot and after lying about having post-lunch-food-poisoning, none of the girls expected him to sit at the dinner table.

  The evening assumed the usual tag team effort. Ben drilled Nina on her spelling, played good cop to Alex’s bad cop on the subject of Elyssa’s failed pre-algebra exam, and cuddled with Betsy for the umpteenth reading of The Runaway Bunny. Ben did his evening rounds without any indication whatsoever that there were stirrings underneath his usual sunny demeanor. Nobody, not even Alex, suspected a rearrangement in Ben’s inner chemistry—that an emotional wrestling match raged just beneath his skin. He seemed merely him
self. Ben. And for a short while even Ben believed it too. That he was himself.

  Until, of course, the bedroom lights were extinguished and Alex curled into him. After Ben complained that his stomach was still cramping, Alex kissed him good night, wished for him a better tomorrow, then quickly sailed off into seven easy hours of sleep. She was magic that way. A true talent. No matter what her workload or level of anxiety, Alex could go horizontal, flick a mental light switch, and be snoring before Leno’s opener.

  As Ben twisted toward the flat-panel screen, he upped the volume two notches before surfing the TV He was searching for a program engaging enough to occupy his mangled brain, but narcotic enough to lull him to sleep. The exercise proved fruitless. For no matter what channel he rested on, at the precise point his body gave in to sleep, his subconscious would come alive with the same soul-jarring propaganda. Sounds, faces, snapshots from the past rushed in. Smells even. Crime scene photos. Not to mention the voice on the CD. Who was that anyway? Was he dead already? Did the cancer kill him? Ben hoped so. Ben wanted the voice dead. Wished for it. Even prayed.

  “Who’s Stu?”

  Had Ben imagined Alex’s voice? He could feel her breathing, slow and steady, and was certain she was asleep. That was until Alex asked, “You awake, hon’?”

  “I am, now,” lied Ben.

  “I asked who is Stu?”

  “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “You said some names. Sounded like you said Stu and Sara.”

  Had he actually fallen asleep? How else would Alex have heard the names?

  “Musta been talking in my sleep,” said Ben.

  “Sounded kinda creepy.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Alex folded herself in closer to Ben, molding her body to fit his.

  “You’re warm and sticky.”

  Ben took her hand, briefly fondled her wedding ring then pretended he was going back to sleep.

  “Anything you wanna talk about?” she asked.

  “No... Everything’s okay.”

  “Mmmm. Awake now.” Alex stroked Ben’s thigh, knee to hip. “Wanna fool around?”