“Kip and Rog?”

She shook her head once. “It doesn’t matter who. Just—someone planted the seed. ‘No one chases the dead.’ ”

There was a noisy clang of laughter from a booth at the far end of the joint, her eyes glossed, and in a rush of compassion I reached for her hands—ours had not touched since Disneyland, all those years ago.

“You were kids,” I said. “What you lived through, what you survived—”

She smiled sadly through a stream of tears and our hands squeezed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her face with the cuff of her coat. “I haven’t talked about any of this in years. You’ve got a kind face.”

“I’m glad it’s good for something.”

“Goofball. Whoever thought you’d care enough to come here and…”

“I’m glad I did.”

She finished her drink, just a little more peaceful, unburdened. Watching her, thoughts crashed in me like bottle rockets heading for each other—she had been open, candid even, she hadn’t lied—but I knew she hadn’t really let me in.

Not yet.

“The band,” I said tentatively, “you played a big part, right?”

She nodded.

“Lazerbeam told me about the record.”

“Did you see Larry?”

“I did. I saw Kip and Rog, too.”

“Wow. Good work, detective. What else you got?”

“A broken story. Your mom sent you to Kip and Rog? I don’t know if it was some kind of an audition or what, but…they didn’t bite, and then—”

She gave me a knowing look and didn’t speak.

“That’s where it gets foggy to me. Kip and Rog seem to have passed The Daily Telegraph on to someone who wasn’t really in the music biz, like maybe a wannabe producer? Why, I don’t know—practical joke or maybe paying off debts, I just don’t get it. So—it’s like there’s this mystery person that either no one wants to name or nobody can name or nobody will name. Who the hell is this guy? Sandoz and Grunes never mentioned him to me. But—the band allegedly made a recording with him? And then—”

She nodded knowingly. “And then death.”

“Yeah, but—”

“No, Adam, there is no but.” She squeezed my hands again. “I get that you want the whole story, and you want to do what’s right for Mr. Elkaim, that’s…lovely. And it’s astonishing what you already figured out. But I cannot live with putting one more person in danger. And anyway, we’re talking about the past.”

“So what?”

“So the past…is something to let go of.”

“Said the woman who sells Major Matt Mason dolls for a living.”

She froze, then smiled into a wet-eyed laugh that made me think of Endi’s laugh. There’s nothing in this world like a woman’s surprise laughter—it’s a truth detector better than any polygraph, an allegiance beyond vows, lust, all of it, and it emboldened me. I cut to the chase.

“Okay—forgive this. But what makes you so sure your mother didn’t kill Rey Durazo?”

“Believe me, I wish she had, it’d make it a lot easier to hate her. But she’s just not that kind of monster.”

I gave the half-nod. Everybody’s mother is innocent.

Sensing my skepticism, she said, “Both my parents had way too much guile to kill anyone. In their own backyard? There’s no way.”

“Well, then what happened to this band, Cinnamon? Who would want to hurt a high school kid like Rey?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why was Emil taken down before they even found him guilty?”

“I don’t know.”

“And why was Devon killed days after he told Mr. Elkaim he’d discovered the truth?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you know something. You’re running from it—for real. I can see it in your eyes.”

Just then, another round of olive-green mugs came, stern and forbidding. When the waitress was out of earshot, Cinnamon seemed to measure the invisible line between yesterday and tomorrow. She could get up right now, head for the door. She could never say one more word to me and keep pretending. Instead, she reached behind her head and let down her gray-auburn hair.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. On one condition. You tell nobody you found me—and I mean nobody. Especially not Mr. Elkaim. I would die if he knew I was this close and didn’t say goodbye.”

“Deal.”

29

Cinnamon hung her head. The bar was really bustling now, the Keack exotica piped in over the chatter and the yuks.

“All of us,” she said, “were part of Dr. Bahari’s thing.”

“What…thing is that?”

“Dr. Aharon Bahari—he’s a psychiatrist, or at least he was. He ran this workshop, the Mind-Life Actualization Seminar for Teens. He’d written this book called Aggressive Positivity, and he was everywhere. ‘Harness the power of consciousness.’ For teens. And we—took the bait.”

I flashed on Sandoz and the after-school seminar he attended. “But…was it a cult?”

“Not exactly. But it wasn’t not a cult, ya know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Bahari’s trip was all about…changing the way you think. You had to, like, completely embrace the program—no halfway.”