“Sometimes. Mostly I thought that’s just how parents behaved,” she said. “Anyway, the upshot is I’m a chronic insomniac. Shrinks have a field day with that. The only time I remember sleeping well was when I was a little kid and my parents went out. It must have been the only time I felt safe, because Liza was in charge and I knew I could trust her to take care of me.”

“You remember anything else from those last few days?”

“A bubble bath. It’s the little things that get you. I was sitting in the tub and she was on her way out. She stuck her head in the door… that little yappy dog in her arms… and she blew me a kiss. If I’d known it was the last one I’d ever get, I’d have made her come back and kiss me for real.”

4

Daisy took an alternate route on our return to Santa Maria, swinging north in a wide loop that, according to the map, encompassed the townships of Beatty and Poe. In point of fact, I didn’t see either one. I squinted, saying, “Where’s Poe? The map says it’s right here close to a little town called Beatty.”

“I think those are company names. Poe, I don’t know about, but there’s a Beatty Oil and Natural Gas. If there were ever towns in those spots, they might’ve left the names on the map so the area won’t seem so desolate.”

The surrounding countryside was flat, entirely given over to agriculture: fields of lettuce, sugar beets, and beans as far as the eye could see. The air smelled of celery. Bright blue port-o-potties stood like sentinels along the road. Cars were parked along the berm adjacent to some fields. Wooden crates were stacked high on flatbed trucks, and migrant farmworkers bent above the rows, harvesting a crop I didn’t recognize on sight, flying by as we were at sixty miles an hour. The road made a wide curve north. Oil rigs dotted the land and in one section, there was a small refinery that threw off an odor reminiscent of burning tires. In sections, I could see a line of stationary boxcars that must have stretched for a quarter of a mile.

I looked past her through the driver’s-side window. Tucked in a stand of pines, a grand old stone-and-stucco house sat close to the road, abandoned to all appearances. The architecture had elements of English Tudor with a touch of Swiss chalet thrown in, the whole of it incongruous in the midst of tilled and untilled fields. The second story was half-timbered with three gables punctuating the roofline. “What the heck is that?”

Daisy slowed. “That’s why we came this way. Tannie and her brother, Steve, inherited the house and three hundred acres of farmland, some of which they lease out.”