Free Splendor by Elana K. Arnold Page B

hadn’t been many places. The island had always been my home, and since our family business revolved around the tourist season, we were pretty trapped during spring break and summer. The farthest I’d ever gone was on a weeklong road trip with Ronny and my dad to visit colleges during the spring of Ronny’s senior year. Mom had to stay home at the B&B. The three of us had taken the ferry to the mainland and rented a car, heading up the coast to check out the schools Ronny had gotten into—UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley—and the one school he
really
wanted but was wait-listed at, Stanford.
    I was a freshman. The weather was beautiful the whole trip. Ronny sat up front with Dad, taking turns doing the driving. I had the backseat to myself, and I’d brought a stack of books to read. Mostly, though, I held the books open on my lap, listening to my dad and my brother talk.
    “Can’t we just line the pond with rocks?” Dad asked.
    “No way!” Ronny sounded emphatic. “If you want the pond to last, and if you really want koi, we’ve got to use a rubber liner. And we need a bottom drain, and a good filter, and—”
    “Do we really need koi? Why not just get some goldfish?”
    “Jesus, Dad, come on. If we’re going to go to all the trouble of making a pond, we might as well make it the coolest pond on the island. Otherwise, what’s the point? I’m not interested in digging a freakin’ mud pit.”
    That was Ronny’s philosophy—go big or go home. No wonder he was hoping Stanford would upgrade him from wait-listed to accepted.
    Ronny turned around to look at me in the backseat. “What do
you
think, kiddo?”
    I shrugged. “Aren’t koi really friendly?”
    He nodded. “Like cats. They’ll eat from your hand.”
    “Cool. Then let’s have those.”
    Dad sighed. “Two to one,” he said. “Koi it is.”
    They built the koi pond that summer, before Ronny left for UCLA. It was the last project they did together. I didn’t do much of the digging, but I provided moral support, hanging out in the gazebo with my books and watching them work. They laughed a lot.
    Stanford didn’t end up accepting Ronny. Looking back, I’m glad; if they had, I probably would have seen even less of him that last year of his life.
    But the fact that he ended up at UCLA meant that every time I traveled to the city now, I was reminded of Ronny’s death and felt myself calculating the distance to the soccer field on UCLA’s campus where Ronny collapsed and died.
    On this day—the seventh of October—as I walked up a street named Linnie Canal in Venice Beach, I guessed I was no more than ten miles away from that soccer field.
    My mom’s new apartment, in Westwood, was even closer. Two, three miles, tops. But I hadn’t been there yet. After the ferry had delivered me to Marina del Rey, I’d shouldered my backpack and started walking. It was only a couple of miles from where the boat docked to the house I was searching for—the home of Sabine Rabinovich.
    She’d responded to the email I’d sent, writing that she’d be home all weekend and that I was welcome to stop by. So I was surprised when, after finding the house—number 234—and knocking on its door, no one answered.
    The house wasn’t much to look at. From the street it mostly looked like a two-car garage, green-painted wood with one of those white slide-up doors, and a second story atop it. A long thin path along the side of the house led to the front door, and next to the door was a side gate.
    Maybe I’d gotten the wrong house. I rechecked the map and directions I’d printed out. No, this was the right place: 234. But apparently, no one was home. I rang the doorbell and knocked again, loudly. Still nothing. On the right side of the doorframe, close to eye level, I noticed something familiar—a little rectangular metal object, hung on an angle, with a brass symbol on the front. It looked like a fancy
W
. I’d seen something like this before on the doorframe