Woman in Blue

by Eileen Goudge

  “I won’t be long,” he told her.

  “Why can’t I come with you?”

  “I told you, I’ll only be a sec.”

  “It’s dark. What if I get scared?” Her lower lip began to quiver.

  Jeremiah felt himself growing annoyed. He wasn’t used to being around little kids, and after the long car trip followed by dinner and a movie, the shiny-new-toy aspect of it was beginning to wear thin. Couldn’t she cut him a break on this one small thing? “There’s nothing to be scared of, baby,” he told her, struggling to contain his impatience. “Anyway, like I said, I’ll be back before you know it. So be good for Daddy, okay? Just this once? I promise I’ll make it up to you.”

  Jeremiah knew what he was doing was wrong. Not just leaving his kid alone in the car but bringing her here in the first place. Kerrie Ann would skin him alive if she were to find out. He wouldn’t have come if he weren’t in serious need. Anyway, it was just this one time, he told himself. Okay, twice if you included last week’s visit. And he could quit anytime. It wasn’t like he was hooked or anything. Not like before. He’d never let it get that bad again.

  Before his daughter could guilt-trip him any more, he jumped out of the car. “Stay put! I’ll be right back!” he called to her as he jogged up the path.

  The house was in a brand-new subdivision and resembled all the other cookie-cutter houses on the block—ranch-style with a stucco exterior and a newly seeded lawn into which half-a-dozen poplar saplings were stuck like birthday candles in a green-frosted cake. On the front door was a kitschy ceramic plaque with the name “Tucker” painted on it in flowery script. He smiled to himself, thinking that if any of the folks around here were told their neighbor was up to no good, they wouldn’t imagine it to be anything worse than an illicitly hooked-up cable line.

  He rang the bell, then waited on the stoop for what seemed an eternity, hands jammed into the pockets of his windbreaker as he jigged from side to side, whistling tunelessly under his breath. Finally the door opened, and he was greeted by a slender blond man in his late twenties who looked clean-cut enough to pass for the engineering consultant he billed himself as in order to allay suspicion about the high volume of traffic in and out of his house.

  “Jeremy, right?” He stuck out his hand.

  “It’s Jeremiah.”

  “Either way, you’re in the right place. Come on in. The party’s just getting started.” The man Jeremiah knew only as Tucker broke into a grin. As Jeremiah was ushered inside, he could see that he wasn’t the only visitor. Several other people were gathered in the tidy if somewhat spare living room. Tucker didn’t bother with introductions, and no one seemed to notice or care. The rules of etiquette were different in places like this.

  Jeremiah recognized one guy, though. Dan something. They knew each other from the meetings they both attended. It was only last week that Dan, a former corporate attorney whose career had gone up his nose, had shared at one of those meetings. But he showed no embarrassment at being seen sucking on a crack pipe—he was too far gone. He gave Jeremiah a friendly nod, as though they were just a couple of frat brothers running into each other at a campus function. When Jeremiah wandered over, Dan offered him the pipe.

  “Go ahead. It’s on me.”

  Jeremiah was sorely tempted but resisted. “Better not. My kid’s waiting in the car.”

  No one raised an eyebrow. Dan merely shrugged and said, “Suit yourself.”

  Jeremiah looked at Tucker. “Seriously. I should get going.” He dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a wad of bills, the bulk of his last paycheck, holding it out. “It’s all here.”

  Tucker ignored the money. “What’s your hurry? You just got here.” He clapped a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder.

  “Like I said, I got my—”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time. But see, here’s the thing, I like to get to know my clients. Builds trust. And what’s a business without loyalty, huh? For instance, how do I know you’re not an undercover cop?” Tucker chuckled as if it were a joke, but his smile took on a less benevolent cast as he stood kneading Jeremiah’s shoulder with enough pressure to make it just shy of painful.

  Jeremiah gave a nervous laugh. “Come on. You know me.”

  Tucker appraised him coolly. “Do I?”

  The last time Jeremiah had come with a buddy from work, one of Tucker’s regulars, and there had been no screwing around. Now, desperate to be on his way, he thrust the money at Tucker one more time. “Look, I really have to get going. So can I have the stuff?” The clean-cut young man eyed the wad of bills with distaste, as if this were a tony club where it was considered bad form for cash to exchange hands. Jeremiah remembered too late that deals were done in the back room. Privately.

  He felt an elbow nudging him in the ribs and turned to find Dan standing next to him, his doughy face flushed and his pupils so dilated that his pale blue eyes looked black. He thrust the pipe at Jeremiah once more. “Go on. What’s it going to hurt?” he urged in the voice of someone who’d come face-to-face with his own personal demons and decided they weren’t such bad guys after all.

  With Tucker’s hard-eyed gaze on him and the stem of the pipe just inches away, Jeremiah closed his mind against the thought of his daughter sitting all alone out in his car and took a long, sweet hit.

  Ollie cruised the streets of Heritage Oaks. It was one of the newer subdivisions, just east of Blue Moon Bay in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, and all the houses looked exactly alike in the dark—the same facades, the same newly seeded lawns and spindly trees. He crawled along at a speed that would have made his ninety-year-old grandma seem reckless by comparison, peering out the window, trying to make out street signs. Even the streets were indistinguishable from one another, and for some reason, maybe because of the vaguely Italianate architecture, they were all named after various Italian cities and towns—Portofino, Ravello, Castellino, Positano. Quaint, he thought. But where the hell was Florence Court?

  It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where he would’ve expected to find a drug dealer. On the other hand, thought Ollie, if the dude was looking to hide in plain sight, what better place? Who would ever imagine a police raid on one of these quiet streets? Probably not even the cops themselves. In fact, Ollie was beginning to wonder if he was even in the right place.

  He finally spotted the street sign for Florence Court. His pulse quickened as he turned onto it. He found the address he was looking for, where several cars were parked out front, one of them an older-model white Caddie. Minutes later he was standing on the front stoop of a pinkish stucco house tricked out with decorative wrought iron, staring into a pair of cold blue eyes. The clean-cut man summoned by his knock was wide awake and fully dressed in cords and a light blue pullover. He might have been on his way to work.

  “I’m looking for Jeremiah,” Ollie told him.

  “Sorry, you have the wrong address.” The man started to close the door on him, but Ollie’s right foot, shod in a bright orange Converse sneaker, shot out to wedge itself in the door frame.

  “I don’t think so. In fact, that looks a lot like his car.” Ollie pointed out the Caddie, which matched the description in the police bulletin. He knew that physically he was no match for the buff-looking man, so he used the only weapon at his disposal: his talent for running off at the mouth. “I mean like, dude, how many guys you know with a set of wheels like that? It kinda sets you apart from the pack, don’t you think? Now, a guy like that, I’d say he’s not your average dude. Like, he’s probably into all kinds of shit that a guy who drives, say, a Volvo station wagon wouldn’t be. Maybe even some illegal shit.” He rolled his shoulders in an elaborate shrug. “Of course if you don’t want to help a brother out, no problemo. You can always tell it to the cops. They should be here in, oh …” He pushed back the sleeve of his jacket to peer at his watch … “about three minutes.”

  He turned as if to go, and the man lunged forward to grab hold of his arm, jerking him
back so hard Ollie nearly lost his balance. “You little shit. You’re lying—you didn’t call the cops.”

  Ollie pried his arm free, rubbing at the spot where it had begun to throb. “I guess that’s for me to know and you to find out.” He spoke calmly, but his heart was racing and he’d broken into a light sweat. Get a grip, dude, he commanded himself. This is no time to be a wuss.

  “You don’t know shit,” snarled the man, who suddenly didn’t look the part of Respectable Suburban Dude anymore. “In fact, if you don’t get the hell off my property, I’ll call the cops on you.” It was a bluff. Ollie had seen the look of panic that had crossed his face.

  Suburban Dude retreated into the house, slamming the door behind him. Now what? Ollie wondered as he stood shivering on the stoop, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in an effort to stay warm and wishing he’d thought to throw on something heavier than his Polarfleece jacket. I believe this would be the time to stop screwing around and bring in the cops for real, answered the cool voice of reason in his head. Ollie was pulling his cell phone from his pocket to do just that when the front door burst open and someone came hurtling out, helped along by a shove from the rear: a handsome, light-skinned black man with curly dark hair, wearing jeans and a faded navy T-shirt under an open, long-sleeved shirt: Kerrie Ann’s ex. Ollie recognized him from his mug shot.

  So violent was the shove that Jeremiah would have been sent sprawling if he hadn’t fallen against Ollie, who grabbed hold of him to keep from losing his own balance. The door slammed shut again, and Ollie was left staring into the face of someone so whacked-out he probably didn’t even know what universe he was in. Glassy, unseeing eyes stared back at him, so dilated it was like looking into the mouth of a tunnel. The arms he was gripping twitched spasmodically, as if he were holding a live wire.

  Ollie gave him a little shake. “Dude. Where’s your kid?”

  Jeremiah blinked at him and drew back. “My kid?” He looked as if he’d forgotten he even had a kid, his face furrowed in the yellow glow of the porch light. Then faint comprehension dawned. “Bella, you mean. She’s fine. I left her in the car.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Dunno … few minutes maybe.”

  “Try a few hours,” Ollie growled.

  Jeremiah brought his hand up to peer at his watch, the old-fashioned wind-up kind with a braided leather strap so old it seemed fused with his wrist. He frowned. “Shit. That can’t be right.”

  Ollie spun around, racing across the lawn to the Caddie. But when he wrenched open the door and peered in, there was no sign of Bella. She must have gotten tired of waiting and gone in search of her dad. She would have knocked on the door of the house first, to no avail. Ollie felt sick at the thought of the defenseless child standing on the stoop, begging to be let in, only to be shooed away. Where would she have headed next? Would she have tried walking back to Lindsay’s? If so, she could be wandering the streets right now, lost. Ollie started to panic before remembering that it was a safe neighborhood with very little traffic at this hour. Also, how far could a six-year-old get on foot?

  He straightened and swung around to find himself confronted by Jeremiah, who cried, “Hey, that’s my car, man! What the fuck you think you’re doing? Do I even know you?”

  Ollie grabbed him by the front of his shirt, handfuls of checked blue fabric blooming from each fist like flowers pulled from a magician’s hat. “Dude. Don’t you get it? Your kid is missing.”

  “Fuck.” Full comprehension sank in, and Jeremiah stared back at him. He looked like a cornered rabbit, twitching all over, with his eyes bugging out of his head. But the seriousness of the situation must have overridden the high he was on because he said in a more lucid-sounding, if decidedly panicked voice, “So we’ll find her, right? She’s gotta be around here somewhere.” He flicked Ollie a nervous look. “You’re not gonna call the cops, are you?”

  “We’ll worry about that later. Come on.” Ollie released him and started toward the Willys at a brisk jog. It would have made sense for Jeremiah to take his car as well, so as to cover more ground, but that didn’t seem like the wisest move right now. And this way Ollie could keep Jeremiah from bolting until the police got here. He’d alert them as soon as he’d done a quick search of the vicinity. Bella couldn’t have gone far, he told himself again.

  Kerrie Ann wondered if she was dreaming. Incredibly, she’d managed to nod off while curled in the chair by the window, and when roused by the sound of a vehicle noisily rattling its way down the drive, it seemed at first to be happening in her dream. Then her eyes flew open, and she jerked upright. She felt momentarily disoriented, like in the old days, after a night of partying, waking in an unfamiliar place not knowing how she’d gotten there. But confusion quickly gave way to a thud of recollection: Her daughter was missing. That was why she was sitting here in the clothes she’d been wearing the night before, the phone clutched in her hand.

  She struggled to her feet, wincing as her cramped muscles released their knots. Her sister had fallen asleep, too, and in the kitchen she could hear the tap running—Miss Honi making another pot of coffee, no doubt. Outside, the rattle of the approaching vehicle grew louder. Kerrie Ann ran to the door and jerked it open, darting out without bothering to slip on her shoes. In the darkness, the twin beams of headlights jounced their way down the rutted drive. Then the vehicle swung into view, and she saw that it was Ollie’s Willys.

  She felt a quick, hot burst of disappointment: not the police with her daughter. But her disappointment quickly gave way to a kind of relief. Ollie would make it better. He would help her through this. In that moment, as she stood there with her stomach seesawing and her arms wrapped around herself to keep from shivering, she couldn’t think why she’d dumped him. He was the best guy she’d ever known. Maybe too good. Maybe the reason she’d chosen Jeremiah instead was because she’d felt she didn’t deserve any better.

  She ran to meet the Willys as it lurched to a stop. Watching Ollie clamber out from behind the wheel, she realized he wasn’t alone. Someone was buckled into the passenger seat beside him—a small, droopy-headed figure. Kerrie Ann let out a choked cry. Could it be?… Then she saw that it was and let out a cry of joy, her heart taking flight.

  “Bella!” She darted forward, mindless of the sharp bits of gravel digging into the soles of her feet. She was at her daughter’s side within moments of Ollie’s hoisting her from her seat, and then Bella was in her arms and the two were hugging each other while they both sobbed.

  At last she turned to Ollie, managing to choke out, “Where on earth did you find her?”

  “Asleep on somebody’s front lawn. She’d gone looking for help and gotten lost.” Ollie looked a little shaken himself, as if thinking of how close they’d come to a very different outcome.

  “Oh, God.” Kerrie Ann clutched her daughter more tightly to her.

  “I saw on the news that she was missing. I thought I might as well join the search party.”

  “But how did you know where to look for her?”

  “I didn’t. Not at first. But I asked around, and that’s what led me to your ex-boyfriend. He’s fine, too, by the way, in case you’re wondering. I dropped him off at the police station on my way.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Jeremiah. He can rot in hell for all I care,” replied Kerrie Ann through gritted teeth.

  Ollie was glad to hear that she felt that way, though he was quick to inform her, “Not that it’s any excuse, but I don’t think he knew what he was doing. He was pretty high.”

  “Figures,” she muttered.

  The whole story came out once they were inside and Bella was tucked in bed. While the four adults sat drinking coffee in the living room, Ollie told how he’d tracked down Jeremiah’s dealer. He played down his role, feeling a bit ashamed of his old connection, from the days when he’d been a druggie, too. The only thing that separated him from a guy like Jeremiah was that he wasn’t a born addict. And it truly had been
a lucky break, finding Bella on the lawn of a house not more than half a mile from the dealer’s. Luckily, too, the sergeant on duty at the police station was an old friend of his family, so Ollie had been given the okay to bring Bella straight home.

  All Kerrie Ann could think of was that, if it hadn’t been for Ollie, her daughter might still be out wandering around, alone and scared. She recalled Miss Honi’s words about there being an angel on her shoulder. Kerrie Ann now knew who her guardian angel was: She was looking right at him.

  “I imagine that fella’s neighbors got the surprise of their life when the cops showed up,” said Miss Honi of Jeremiah’s dealer. “And all that time, them thinking he was just the nice guy next door.”

  “Thanks to Ollie, it wasn’t something worse than a drug bust,” said Lindsay. “If he hadn’t come along when he did …” She wasn’t thinking only of what might have happened to Kerrie Ann’s little girl; she was remembering the long-ago night when she and Miss Honi had searched frantically for the then three-year-old Kerrie Ann. So much had happened since then, yet they’d come full circle in a way. She could only hope the outcome in this case would be a happier one once all the dust settled.

  Color rose in Ollie’s cheeks. “It was just a good guess,” he said modestly.

  “No, it was more than that.” Kerrie Ann looked at Ollie with tears in her eyes and said, “You were smart and brave and … and I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  Ollie held her gaze as he sat there with his heart beating in slow motion. His present state of consciousness bordered on an out-of-body experience, but at the center of it all was a single clear thought: She needs me. He smiled at her. “Lucky for you, you don’t have to.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The fallout was as Kerrie Ann had feared. The Bartholds, Mrs. Silvestre, and the state of California all held her personally responsible. Unsupervised visits with Bella were suspended for the foreseeable future, and the Bartholds were so cold to her over the phone whenever she called to speak with her daughter that she’d remarked bitterly to her sister that it was a wonder she didn’t have frostbite. Her lawyer had informed her that her position was so shaky right now that the judge, if pressed to make a decision now, would most likely grant custody to the Bartholds. The only thing she had going for her, it seemed, were the once interminable and now welcome delays of due process. She was using the time to redeem herself as best as she could.