Page 42 of Mother-Daughter Murder Night

“Like on a map?”

“No.” Lana headed to the back door. “Outside.”

Jack and Lana stood at the top of the hill that led down to the slough from the back of the house. Lana looked around, surprised she hadn’t been out here before. They were standing right under the bedside window Lana looked out of every day, but it felt different without a pane of glass in the way. There was a rock garden out there, a maze of stones weaving in and out of each other in mesmerizing swirls.

“Did you make this?” Lana asked.

“Mom did. She started working on it a couple weeks ago. Says it’s healing. She was out here this morning when I got up.”

“Huh.”

Lana wasn’t sure how to square this delicate labyrinth with the Beth who’d shoved her out of the car at the chemo clinic earlier. She wrapped her robe tight across her chest against the chill. The slough felt more alive out here, more demanding. The smell of overripe marsh rose up the steep embankment. Hawks ripped sharp lines across the sky. Lana could see little switchbacks in the hillside dug in from all the times Jack took her paddleboard down to the water.

Lana clenched her freezing toes in her slippers and looked out to the slough. “If I dropped a leaf or a paddleboard in the water right here, where would it go?”

“When the tide is coming in, it would go east, upriver, to Kirby Park. When the tide goes out, it might just swirl around or maybe go west to the marina. It could float for miles, maybe, all the way out to open ocean.”

“Could it cross over to the other side of the slough? Like, from where we are here to Bird Island?” Lana pointed at the shit-splattered rock on the northern bank of the slough where a group of pelicans was holding court.

Jack considered it. “I doubt it. The water moves fastest in the middle, west to east, ocean to farmland. When the wind comes up, kayakers hug the banks so they don’t have to fight the current as much. It would have to be totally stagnant or swirling weird for something to cut across in either direction.”

Lana watched a pelican choke down a fish, anchovy probably, shaking silver in the dusky light.

“And besides, if there was a body floating right in the middle of the slough, someone would see it before twenty-four hours had passed,” Jack said. She sat down on the concrete pad that pretended to be a back porch. “Ricardo must have gotten stuck in a creek, or snagged on something. He had a life jacket, but he was wearing shoes, and jeans, which would weigh him down. He could have gotten caught underwater, on a rock or one of those old shark-hunting blinds, and spun around.”

“Especially at low tide? When the water is lower in the channels, right?”

“Right.”

Lana sat beside her granddaughter and squinted across the water, searching out places a man could get trapped. The Rhoads ranch was over there. And the land trust property beyond it. “Could he get stuck, and then break loose again?”

“I guess,” Jack said. “Yeah. In twenty-four hours he’d hit multiple high and low tides. But it would have to be somewhere people wouldn’t see. A creek or a drainage ditch. There’s hundreds of those. He could travel down a creek at high tide, get stuck at low, and then get moving again.”

“Always staying on one side of the slough?”

“Right. None of the creeks cross over.”

According to Jack, Ricardo couldn’t have floated to the mud flats from just anywhere. He must have been traveling somewhere along the north side of the slough. He could have been killed along a creek that let out into the slough, or maybe an irrigation ditch. But the path of travel was all along the far bank.

Lana was comforted to learn he hadn’t died on their side of the slough. It put the murder farther from her window, past the weeds and fast-moving water. She gazed out to the far shore, wondering where Ricardo’s life had ended.

“Can I ask you something?” Jack’s voice was thin, uncertain. “Why don’t you and my mom get along?”

Lana tilted her face to the sky, her eyes tracking a pair of white-tailed kites circling the marsh for their dinner. She wondered how much Jack had heard of their argument on Thursday night.

“You know how you call me Prima?” Lana finally said.

Jack nodded, too fast. “If it hurts your feelings, I could call you something else—”

“No. I like it. In opera, prima donnas are the stars. Leading ladies. Some people say they’re demanding, but that’s just another way of describing women who have power, women who know their own worth.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

With Beth as her mother, of course she didn’t.

“Your mother is always supporting others, Jack. It’s a good thing. Noble, even. She loves you more than she loves herself.” Lana turned to look at Jack. “But you have to love yourself the most. No one else can do that for you.”

They stayed there on the freezing step for a long time.