Hollywood Ending by Kathy Charles Read Free Book Online

someone’s house as they slept.
    Richard Ramirez—the ‘Night Stalker’—was one of Los Angeles’s most infamous serial killers, and also favoured neighbourhoods like this. The neatly trimmed hedges and manicured front lawns were a far cry from the bleakness and despair of downtown Los Angeles, where he regularly scored drugs at the bus terminus and slept in whatever car he had stolen at the time. The suburbs made the Night Stalker angry, just like they did the Manson Family. The warm little houses in tidy rows were a reminder of every comfort he didn’t have. The order of suburbia affronted his need for chaos.
    Aunt Lynette’s house was a California bungalow with a large front yard and an old-fashioned porch. The light was on in the living room and I could see Lynette bent over her books, a glass of red wine in her hand. From a distance she looked just like my mother, with her hair hanging loose and those thick-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t until you got closer that her features became her own. Green eyes instead of brown. A mole on her chin where my mother had none. From a distance I could imagine it was my mother, and for a brief moment everything was as it used to be. But the closer I got the more reality came crashing back.
    Aunt Lynette and I were always being mistaken for mother and daughter, something that made us both equally uncomfortable. It was easier not to correct people as that would involve going into details, which neither of us wanted to do. But there was no denying the family resemblance. The same round face, the same large, Kewpie-doll eyes. I didn’t get much from my dad’s side of the family, except a healthy suspicion of authority that my teachers liked to call an ‘attitude problem’.
    Aunt Lynette was an assistant District Attorney. She prosecuted people on behalf of the county, regardless of whether she thought they were guilty or not. This didn’t seem to bother her. She’d worked hard all her life to make it this far, and whether clients were guilty or not was largely irrelevant to her career. She had prosecuted battered wives and mothers, and sent innocent men to jail. But still she slept well at night. All that seemed to matter to her was that she was doing her job effectively.
    Lynette also had the alarming habit of flashing her DA badge. Once when I was nine she took me to Disneyland, and two guys got into an argument in the line at Splash Mountain. She pushed through the crowd, walked straight up to them, flipped open her little leather wallet and watched the blood drain from their faces. No one even looked closely enough at her badge to see that an assistant DA wasn’t actually a real cop. The two men held up their hands and stepped back as if she was going to taser them, or perhaps cuff them to the fence where they’d have to listen to ‘Zipadeedodah’ all day long. I remember being mortified and hiding behind a corn dog stand as everybody stared at us. Lynette wasn’t fazed by the attention. She was proud of working for the county.
    As I walked in the front door she looked up from her casebooks. Next to her on the dining table were two plates, one stacked high with some kind of casserole, the other scraped empty.
    â€˜I’ve already eaten,’ I said as I kicked off my shoes. Lynette looked at the casserole, brown and congealing on her fine china. I watched her swallow her anger.
    â€˜Maybe we should get you a cell phone,’ she suggested, ‘so I can call and check whether you actually want dinner or if I’m going to all this trouble for no good reason.’
    â€˜Cell phones give you cancer,’ I said, ‘and the government use them to track your movements.’
    â€˜That sounds like something your father would say,’ she said, a comment I chose to ignore.
    â€˜So what exactly did you and Benji get up to today?’
    â€˜Just stuff.’
    â€˜Oh really?’ She put her