Ted looked out over her shoulder, through the glass to where the swimming pool now flashed with sun, like a fish before it’s caught, unaware of any danger.
No more reassurances: “Be careful,” he said.
◆◆◆
Barren desert, train tracks, and fields of alfalfa lined the highway. Irrigated water from the canals emptied out into the Salton Sea, making it even more fetid. Because of the constant sunshine and irrigation systems, the Imperial Valley farms stayed in operation almost all year. Groves of date palms stretched off into the distance behind an ornate iron gate, like a portal to fairyland or a desert Gothic novel.
Izzy turned off the highway. Beside a scruffy, stunted palm a sign read, “Welcome to Bombay Beach.” She took a dirt road past the fire station and the Ski Inn. Like skin, Izzy thought for the first time, though she knew it was named for the water skiing that took place during the Salton Sea’s pleasure days.
“You are beautiful,” Cyrus had said, that last day at the Ski Inn. “I am strange.”
Had any of this occurred, Izzy wondered? Or had it been a dream from which she awoke, only to find him gone?
◆◆◆
Izzy stopped at Ms. Aqua’s Chow and Market, a brick box with iron bars at the single window and almost nothing on the shelves, just some candy bars in boxes and a bucket full of ice with water bottles.
“Lovely day,” the storeowner said, playing with the cross around her neck. “How are you on this fine day?”
“I’m looking for someone.” Izzy handed her the flyer. “We did some work around here.”
“Handsome fellow,” the woman said, looking at Cyrus’s picture. “He’s your man?”
Izzy nodded. She put two water bottles and some cash on the counter. “Do you recognize him?”
“I try not to get involved.”
“But does he look—”
“I put it all in the hands of the Lord,” the woman said. “You can always go poking around yourself.”
That was that then.
◆◆◆
Izzy drove past a bombed-out looking building tagged with a list of names—Valentine, Bunny, Google, Stretch—and a skull and cross bones. Someone had set up a drive-in with three rows of ruined cars facing the side of a truck where movies were projected at night. Across the road from this squatted a little building with a sign that read “Silverlight Cinema” and a silhouette of a man in a hat and trench coat. The Bombay Beach Opera House, painted blue to blend to sky. A building painted dirty pink like sunset sand—the Seaside Baptist Church. A few fat black and white rabbits hopped along the cracked cement road—someone’s oblivious dinner—and a dog barked behind a chain link fence, but otherwise the streets slept, deserted in the heavy heat. The selenium-filled wind stank stronger here.
She found the three-sister’s garden, already withering. What had made her and Cyrus think they could be of any help by trying to plant vegetables?
Across the road, stood the windmill house.