by Kate Gable
"Mom. I already did everything, okay? I mean, I set it up. I just can't be there today. I have to get back. I have a case I'm working on."
"Don't you think that your sister's disappearance is more important?"
"Mom, if I take another day off, or another couple of days, there's no guarantee that Violet will be back, but there is a guarantee that I'm going to be assigned to some murder case that will have a dead body and all sorts of leads, which would put me in LA for a good week. I won't be able to come back, okay? That's what I'm trying to avoid."
"Yeah, I get it," she says, waving her hand though I can tell that she's upset. Tired of the back and forth, I decide to leave.
I tell her goodbye and give her the location where the search party is going to be meeting up. They're setting up not too far away from her house. I tell her to be there right at three p.m.
I'm leaving a little bit earlier than I thought that I would, but I've had enough. Besides, if I can avoid some of the LA traffic, I can get back to the city, do my interviews, and hopefully gain some traction on this Moore Kaslar case.
The drive back to LA is rather uneventful. Sydney and I talk about Violet a little bit and then about Luke.
After I drop her off, I try to put all of my personal issues out of my mind so that I can focus entirely on the Karen Moore Kaslar disappearance. After Elin texts the address, I’m surprised when my GPS takes me to Park La Brea apartments. This is the place where Mark lived when we dated and where I had spent almost every day and night of our relationship. My apartment, closer to campus, was used more like a crashing pad where I took occasional naps in between classes.
I think back to that time and how utterly devoted we were to one another. I guess some people might call it toxic, but we just wanted to spend every waking minute together and nothing was going to stop us. I drive through the familiar gate as Elin beeps me in and I park in the visitor parking lot just like I used to, back in the day.
There are towers looking over West LA, each with thirteen floors. Mark lived on the twelfth floor. He had a huge floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the green fields below. All the apartments are set up around a park with playgrounds and workout equipment.
They're almost like their own little town with larger townhouses, offering more luxury to the side closest to The Grove, and more city-like. This is where people with families typically live. On the other side of the park stands the towers with gorgeous views of the Hollywood Hills. This is where we lived, or rather Mark and his roommate.
They had a two bedroom with an enormous living room that was unlike any other two bedroom I’ve ever lived in since. Elin lives in one of the lower apartments facing a playground. I press the button to her apartment and she buzzes me in. The floors and the walls look completely different, but then again, it was years ago when I was here.
Elin is a heavy-set woman who looks to be about my age with big eyes and long hair that has a few extensions sticking out just a little bit. There are pictures of her and her friends all over her hallway. I can tell that, under normal circumstances, she looks a lot better. She's dressed in camouflage-colored leggings, bare feet, and a gray tank top with a sports bra underneath.
She welcomes me inside and her little yappy dog jumps up on my ankles and barks loudly. I kneel down to pet her after asking if it's okay. After a few minutes, the dog and I are friends. Pepper makes herself comfortable in my lap and demands pets.
"Thanks for making the time to see me," I say.
"No, thank you for coming by. I'm just really worried about where she could be. It's been another whole day."
Elin looks nervous and distressed.
"Can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me more about your relationship? More about yourself?"
"Yeah, sure," Elin says, twirling her finger around her hair.
She slides around on her leather couch. It's white, soft, and covered in fluffy throw pillows, like the kind you see in Bed Bath & Beyond catalogs college edition.
"I don't know where to start," she says again while sitting down, tucking her hands underneath her thighs and leaning close to me.
I pull out my recorder and put it down in front of her.
"Would you mind if I record this conversation?"
"No. No, not at all."
"Okay. Thanks," I say and repeat myself once the recorder is going. She agrees one more time. Then I dive right in. "Can you tell me about yourself and how do you know Karen Moore Kaslar?"
"Well, we met at a Jamba Juice and then we realized we were in the same yoga class. It was at the YMCA on the corner. I had never been there before and neither had she, but we didn't want to pay much. I guess we independently saw that they were having these classes for only ten dollars each. We signed up because the other ones up for like twenty or twenty-five bucks and that’s just too much. We started talking and decided to go to coffee. We became friends. She doesn't live very far from here, so we could always meet at The Grove and get some brunch, that kind of thing. Her husband works a lot."
"Yeah. Do you know Robert?"
“Yeah. But I don't want to say anything bad."
"Please. You have to be as honest with me as possible. Your friend is missing and I'm trying to help you find her."
"I don't know what to say. I met him once. First time she invited me over to watch a movie and have some wine. It was fine. I mean, he seemed friendly enough. He was just sort of walking by. I kept inviting him out with us to a bar or something like that, but he never wanted to come. He said he was too tired from work. That was when he was still working on his PhD."
"Okay. Yeah. What about you? Do you live here alone?"
"No," she says. “My husband lives here, too. It's a two bedroom."
"Oh, okay. Sorry. I just saw the door to the one room," I say, actually surprised.
"Yeah, we have a child and we're trying to have another one. So, we're not going to be staying here for long."
"Okay. How old is your child?"
"Nine months. It was great. We're working on buying a house, but LA prices and all."
"Are they somewhere together now?"
"Yeah. I just wanted to talk to you without interruptions. So he took her to the park that's just right downstairs. That's probably the one thing I'm going to miss about this place."
"Yeah, I get it," I say. I've given stuff like that practically no thought. "So, you two hit it off, right?"
"Yeah, we did. We've been friends for about half a year or so."
"You’re also business partners?" I lead her.
"Well, yeah. I mean, not partners, but I told her about how I was making money. I'm selling candles for Candle Love. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
I shake my head.
"It's a network marketing company. We're all each on our own. We're all entrepreneurs."
"Her husband mentioned how she had to buy all of these supplies in order to sell them first."
"Well, yes." I feel her getting agitated. She twists her hair around and pulls her hands from underneath her butt and places them firmly on her knees. "Of course he would say something like that. Robert, he just has no patience for anything like that. He just doesn’t believe that she can be successful."
"Can you tell me what you mean by that?"
"Well, in Candle Love, we all know how important it is to be engaged with your business and have a supportive partner who will believe that you can become successful. What can you do? I mean, he wasn't like that. He thought it was a big scam. You have to invest in your business. If you were going to start a bookstore, a coffee shop, or any other business, you'd have to buy supplies and you'd have to spend money marketing, that kind of thing. This one had very little costs up front. Yet he still complained about it."
"He told me that it was $4,000 in candles?"
"It wasn't just candles. There were gift packages and gift boxes. That kind of thing. You don't just sell candles, you sell a scent experience."
"Oh, okay. I got it," I
say.
Suddenly, she shifts into selling mode. She goes over to the console table, opens the drawers, and pulls out different types of candles packaged in a variety of different ways.
One smells like peach, another like ginger. In addition to the candle, there's also the box and the presentation of it all. One is packaged elegantly into a glass container while the other lays on a box of wooden splinters, which I'm about to point out is probably not the safest thing, but it does look nice.
She shows me all the various boxes and packages, moving her hand around in an elegant sort of way like they do on the Home Shopping Network.
I quickly try to shift the conversation back to Karen.
"So, tell me what happened. You went on a business trip with her?"
"Yes." She puts the box down on the coffee table and looks directly at me. "We went on a business trip. It was a conference, basically showing us how to be better entrepreneurs. It was really inspiring. They had all of these business leaders there and motivational speakers. We just knew that this was going to happen. This was finally going to work out for us."
"Finally?"
"Well, I'm having struggles as much as she is. After the initial few sales, it's hard. People have such a negative view of network marketing nowadays. It's like, anytime you reach out to one of your old friends from high school, they just shut you down."
"Oh, I understand. So, you went through basic? So, what are you doing? What were you told to do? How is Karen getting sales now?"
"I think she sold about $1,000 worth of candles initially when she first joined. Of course, Robert was very happy about it, but then things sort of dried up like they tend to, unless you recruit more of your own people into your network to join the organization and become entrepreneurs themselves. Not everyone has it in them to run their own company. Not everyone has that entrepreneurial mindset that you really need to succeed in this business."
"She was losing money?" I ask, trying to pin her down on exactly what she knew of Karen's financial situation.
"Robert was upset. They were down four grand including the conference-"
"Thousand? You said that's how much it costs?"
"Well, yeah. It was seven hundred just for the ticket and then the flight and the food. It adds up."
I make a mental note of the fact that Robert said that it was either six or seven hundred and that means that's exactly what he thought it cost or perhaps that's what Karen told him it cost.
"Would you say that this was a major issue in their relationship?"
"I don't know," Elin says. Her demeanor appears rather cagey and I don't believe her. "We were close friends, and I don't want to reveal her secrets."
"You're not gossiping,” I encourage her. “I'm trying to find her, and every little bit of information helps me to do that."
"Yeah," she says. She gets up and puts the boxes of candles away. "I'm assuming you don't want to buy one."
"I really can't. I'm working right now," I say and suddenly realize just how awkward this conversation must feel for all of her old friends and relatives who just want to catch up or have a little fun with a friend and end up being marketed candles that they don't really want and that are way overpriced.
Elin walks over to the big window that looks out onto the playground below. Then she opens the door and walks onto the little patio. There's a table made of metal in the corner, along with two chairs and a baby bouncer.
She waves to her husband who walks with his head buried in his phone, pushing the stroller.
"Karen always wanted to have children," she says, pointing to the patio chair.
I take a seat putting the recorder in between us.
"How long have they been married?"
"Five years, I think. Long enough, but he was in graduate school. He was always working. He was always teaching. She said she wanted to do it. She said that she was willing to do it herself, like taking all the baby duties, that kind of thing, but he said he wanted to be around for that. He said he didn't want to miss the first year or two with the baby so they would have to wait, and they did. After he graduated, he still stalled. She's just got this feeling that there is something else going on. A month ago, we spent one Saturday night trailing him."
"Really?"
"Yeah. First, even before she ever told me anything about it, she put a GPS on his car because he would turn off the one on his phone all the time. So, she put one in his car to track him to see where he was going. She just wanted to make sure that he was actually going to work all the times that he's out until, like, midnight. Guess what? He wasn't. He was going to different bars over in Santa Monica and in the Hills. One time, even all the way to Calabasas. It was ridiculous. He acts like this shy engineer guy, but what was he doing going out to all those places? That's what she wanted to find out."
"So, what happened?" I ask.
"She was really upset when she found out. I thought that it was about her sales and how she couldn't recruit anyone in her downline, the people that are salespeople under her, like she's under me. Anyway, she was upset about that, too. She was more upset about her marriage. She was crying. She was inconsolable. I suggested that we follow him. That Saturday night when he said he was working, I got Pete to babysit and we just went out and did it."
"What do you mean by that?" I ask. "What happened?"
11
It gets a little bit cold on the porch as the sun starts to set and Elin offers me something to drink. I follow her to the kitchen as she puts on the kettle. The walls have recently been painted and a few professionally shot photos of the family of three are hanging on the wall. "Tell me about what happened when you followed him," I say.
She pours hot water into two identical West Elm mugs and drops an English breakfast tea bag into mine. The recorder is still running and I watch as the seconds on the front face tick by.
Forty-five.
Forty-six.
Forty-seven.
She clenches her jaw, moves it from side to side as if to release some tension, and then looks up at me.
"It was horrible," she finally says. Elin takes a sip of her tea, shaking her head again, her eyes full of disappointment. "Frankly, I thought it would actually be fun or exciting maybe. It's not that I wanted her husband to be cheating on her, but I've never been involved with anything like that. I'm not a detective, or a PI, or anyone from your world. I just stay home with my kid, take her on play dates, and try to find ways to make a little bit of extra money for our family."
I nod. I take a long sip of my tea and let the warm liquid rush down, warm me up from the inside out.
With the sun setting over the horizon, it suddenly becomes very dark in her apartment. She flips on the light above our heads and luckily it's not fluorescent, but a pleasant, warm candlelit hue that washes over her and gives her a serene kind of look.
She adjusts her bra strap and fidgets to turn around to the refrigerator and look inside. She offers me something to eat, but I quickly say no, waiting for her to continue. She pulls out a half-eaten cake perfectly sliced from the middle out.
"Baking is a passion of mine," she says when I comment on how nice it looks.
There's a thick layer of frosting wrapped perfectly around the circular cake like someone had put a lot of effort into making it. The frosting glistens and shines with colors of turquoise and gold. I lean over and notice a few speckles of gold flakes sprinkled all around.
"You have a real talent."
"Wait until you try it," she says.
I'm about to say no again, but my mouth starts to water and I decide, why not? If she's willing to talk to me and open up, I might as well try a little bit of her cake. She cuts me a piece that is way too generous and grabs one about half that size for herself.
"I really won't be able to eat this much."
"Oh, please, wait until you taste it. I'm sure you will," she says.
"What about you?" I ask.
She shrugs and answers, "Look at me. T
his baby weight is not going anywhere unless I stop baking and that's probably not going to happen."
"Exactly my point," I joke.
"No, I need to at least try, right? Put in some effort. I'm not even thirty."
I smile. That kind of attitude is not particularly common in Los Angeles, especially since people tend to worship their Pilates classes and their gyms. I appreciate her bluntness and her honesty.
I sit down in her dining table nook and I ask her again about what happened the night they followed Robert.
This time, she opens up.
"She tagged his car, so she knew exactly where he was going. We met up around seven that Saturday night."
"When was this exactly?" I ask.
"I don't remember. Probably about a month ago. Maybe three weeks. Not too long."
"Okay, keep going."
"Well, she could track where the car was going on her phone on this website using his GPS coordinates. She picked me up and we went there together."
"Where did it take you?"
"Up Laurel Canyon all the way to Mulholland Drive and then to Reseda."
"Reseda? Up in the Valley?" I ask.
"Yeah."
"What happened there?"
"He was going to this house. At first, she thought that maybe he was having an affair with some rich girl or something, but it was just this average middle-class kind of house, two bedrooms, one bath. A small pool in the backyard, but nothing extravagant."
"How do you know how big the house is?"
"We drove up there," she says, "and then when we parked outside, I looked it up on Zillow. This woman, she just recently bought it. I can give you the address."
"Did Karen go in?"
"Yes."
"She did?" I ask, surprised.
"Yeah, we waited in the car for a while for him to come out, like an hour. There was an In-N-Out Burger right across the street and I got hungry, so we went there, ate it in the car, fries, Coke, the whole works and then she said, 'That's it.' She was going in."
"What about you?"
"I was going to stay in the car at first, but then I wasn't sure what was going to happen and I didn't want her to get hurt. It was dark. The neighbors started walking their dogs. It wasn't a scary kind of neighborhood at all, kind of pedestrian, actually. I've actually never thought about Reseda before but when I looked up the houses there, it's probably one of the only places where Pete and I can afford to get a house. Of course, it'll be quite a commute for him to get to West LA, but it'll be a nice place for Logan to grow up, right?"
