herself from rolling her eyes. Sometimes her aunt was like a dog with a bone, and other times she had the shortest attention span Kate had ever seen.
When Kate didn’t follow her aunt, Kid looked around the store pointedly, as if some other customers might be lurking somewhere. Finding it empty, he asked Kate tersely, “Something you need help with?”
“There’s a lot of stuff up there,” she said again. “A lot of names, place names, I haven’t heard of. I got this book about her”—she gestured to the bag—“but … it would be really helpful if there were someone who knows her, someone who can identify some of the names for me.”
Kid crossed his arms over his chest. His forearms were iridescent with dehydration, dotted with hematomas. The woven bracelets that encircled his wrists were baggy, like he had recently lost a lot of weight. “Can’t her son help you?”
“He was just a kid. He wouldn’t have known her business associates.”
He snorted. “Whatever you say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kid looked her up and down. When he met her eyes again, his face was sealed shut.
“Listen,” he said. His voice was hard and deep, like a hammer striking a barrel. “You just got to town. You’re new. But you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. If I were you, I’d put your head down, do your job however you need to do it, and get the hell out of Callinas.”
Kate let out a shocked, nervous laugh. Kid’s lecture plus Theo’s warning yesterday made two pseudo-threats in less than twenty-four hours. The last time she had encountered this level of animosity in a source, she was fact-checking a story about a sex scandal that had ultimately gotten a senator thrown out of office.
“If you say so,” she said.
Louise came over to the counter, holding one of the salt lamps aloft in triumph. “For Frank’s study,” she explained.
Kate took a step back to let Kid ring up the purchase. He put the lamp in a box and the box in a bag and tied the bag with a straw bow. He ignored Kate completely. As it went on and on—he was slow with the register, jabbing the touchscreen with one crooked finger—an electric feeling began to web out over Kate’s shoulders.
Summers when she was a kid, her grandfather in Pennsylvania would take her out trawling on Lake Erie in his old speedboat. Her favorite job was dropping the anchor. The clunk when it hit solid ground. One time, the anchor went its whole length without ever catching. They must have been floating over some crevasse in the lake bed, her grandfather explained as he helped her haul up the chain. The soil might be a few more inches down, or a few miles.
That was how Kate felt now. Like she had cast down a line and found that she could not reach the bottom.
There was more to find.
A few months before, she had thought her journalistic instinct was dead forever, killed off by medication and exhaustion and unemployment and powerlessness. But now, as they said goodbye to Kid and left the shop, the old thrill bundled in her blood. She had forgotten how much she loved it: the glorious chase. The rush so bright it drowned out the rattle in the track. However deep this water was, whatever was down there, she was going in.
MIRANDA
SERIES 1, Correspondence
BOX 1, Personal correspondence
FOLDER: Toby-Jarrett, Lynn (incl. 12 photocopies of letters from MB, from LTJ private collection)
* * *
February 4 1979
Dear Lynn,
Thanks for the birthday card! Sending you back a very belated hi from New York.
I never really understood this city before. There are worlds within worlds here. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived where I feel like I need to expand to fit it, instead of the other way around.
The art community is radical. Performance artists, installation artists, other photographers, some painters … It’s not just the city that’s big. The art is big too. Electronic billboards in Times Square. Dramatic cartwheeling dances. Life-size drawings you would mistake for real people. Everything is huge, bright, intense. Everyone produces so much, so fast. You go out to a club and get as much dope as you want and then you go home and make things. It’s a frenzy. I love it. This lustrous city. It’s like being in the middle of an exploding star.
How is NM? And your special rocks? I’ve never been west of the Mississippi. I’m imagining it hot, with rattlesnakes, and you