Dark Water - Laura McNeal [28]
“Where were we going, anyway?” I asked. “I mean the second place.”
“Tintin’s on the trail,” Robby said.
“Whose trail?”
“Mary Beth’s, of course.”
“I think Tintin better drop me at home,” I said.
“Come on,” Robby said. “Let’s get something to eat first. It won’t take that long.”
“How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
I practically ran back to his car, and I was still sweating when he pulled the car into the parking lot behind Café Chartreuse.
“Is Tintin paying?” I asked.
“Tintin always pays,” Robby said.
Seventeen
She was our waitress, of course.
“What the le hell are you doing?” I asked Robby when Mary Beth had gone to a far corner of the restaurant.
“Assessing,” he said calmly. “It’s MBF, isn’t it? She’s the same height as the woman I saw from the hedge, plus this café did the catering last night.”
“Yes,” I said. I bit a fingernail too bitten to need work and looked around for friends of my mother’s.
Mary Beth came over to ask, “Have you decided?” If she was tired, it didn’t show, and if she recognized Robby, she didn’t say. I thought she was studying him more intently than she studied me, but that was natural. Robby was good-looking even in his stretched-out T-shirt and old tennis shorts and the shoes that he wore without socks. Greenie used to want me to set her up with him, but Robby was so indifferent when she was around that she finally gave up.
“What’s your most irresistible sandwich?” Robby asked, looking adorably curious.
“Statistically speaking,” Mary Beth said, “I’d have to say salmon. Though a lot of people order the goat cheese, too. And the Brie.”
He acted like she’d said something profound. “The salmon,” he said.
Personally, I wondered why Mary Beth was still in Fallbrook. Robby and I were both too ambitious and snobby to consider colleges within commuting distance.
“Do you have crab?” I asked.
“Not for lunch,” she said.
I ordered a panini and my mind drifted to Amiel’s house. I wondered how many other day laborers lived in the ravines and thickets of Fallbrook and whether we would like them better if we called them hobos. I also wondered what would happen if my mother walked into the café.
When Mary Beth disappeared into the kitchen, Robby asked, “What do you think?”
“Think?”
“Of MBF.”
The name had a vaguely insulting air, I suppose because of the F. “She’s conventionally pretty,” I said.
“You know the owner, right?”
“Sort of.” Mr. Eckert was standing at the espresso machine when we arrived, and I was relieved that he hadn’t seemed to notice me. I was dreading the questions he might have about my father, who used to bring me to the café for breakfast on his home weekends and sit at the counter afterward, talking to Mr. Eckert about Italy and New York, two places my father had once thought I ought to see.
“Quiz him a little. Get the le scoop.”
“But he’ll wonder why I’m so nosy.”
“So? Come on. Please. You of all people should understand what’s at stake here.”
I pictured Robby’s giant house turning upside down and coming to rest on its giant stone chimney. I pictured the foundation covered with soil and worms and roly-poly bugs as it was exposed, for the first time, to everybody’s shameless scrutiny. I won’t say that I didn’t feel that horrible niggling wish for other people’s lives to be as screwed up as my own.
“Please?” he asked again.
“Fine. I’ll pry for you. But only if you promise not to tell the police what we saw today,” I said. “I mean the hobo house.”
Robby tapped his fingers on the table and studied me like my father’s divorce lawyer had studied my mother’s divorce lawyer. “All right,” he said. “I won’t tell the feds on El Hobero.”
In spite of my work in Ms. Grant’s drama class or maybe because of it, I’m a terrible actress, and I began to get nervous when I saw Mr. Eckert heading toward us with tall glasses of pink soda. I asked Robby, “Can I say that I’m asking because you want to know?”
“Sure,” Robby said. “I do want to know.”
“Here you go, Pearl,” Mr. Eckert said, setting the drinks down in front of us. “Good to see you again. How