When Time Is a River

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  It was late, 10:14p.m, but he needed to follow up with the last four Volvo owners on the lists. If one of them admitted to buying the stuffed animal, the others could be eliminated. If no one did, he’d have to visit each house, wasting valuable time. He was far from certain of a connection between the purchase and Emily’s disappearance, but he had to follow up. He’d picked up the phone and dialed three numbers when Brandy burst into the room. He sighed, placing the receiver back into its cradle. Should he regret his decision to give the kid unlimited access to him?

  She stood beside his metal desk, tapping one cowboy boot against the linoleum, a manila envelope and a magnifying glass in her hand.

  “Isn’t it past your bedtime?” he said, though he knew she hadn’t gotten any more sleep than he had since Emily disappeared.

  “You told me I could talk to you anytime. Day or night. I wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t important.”

  Folk music from one of the bars on the Plaza drifted in through the open window. He softened, remembered her incredible performance at the vigil and her stepmother’s reaction to it. He glanced at the magnifying glass and smiled. “You look like a cowgirl version of Sherlock Holmes.”

  She pulled the photograph out of the envelope and thrust it into his hands. “It’s my mother.”

  The woman was striking, with her dark hair tumbling like silk over her pale shoulders. “She was quite beautiful.” He looked up to meet her gaze. “You look a lot like her.”

  Radhauser could almost see the grief as it crept over her face and into her eyes.

  “My dad claims I’m nothing like my mother.” She looked at the floor as if composing herself. When she looked up again, the tears were gone. She cocked her head. “Check out the necklace she’s wearing, my dear Watson.”

  Radhauser took the magnifying glass and studied the photo again. “Give me a minute,” he said, stepping out of his office to retrieve the pendant from the evidence room.

  When he returned, he used the magnifying glass to compare the two necklaces. The clear gems, maybe diamonds, were offset from the garnet at the same angle. It could be the necklace. Still, heart-shaped pendants were pretty common. Thousands of brides wore them every year. A coincidence? Another dead end? But he didn’t believe in coincidences, not when it came to a kidnapping case. Had Daniel Michaelson given that necklace to Emily? And if so, why hadn’t he said something?

  He glanced up at Brandy, hating to pull the thread that would make her optimism unravel. “I’m not sure.” He slipped the photograph back into its envelope and placed it in his briefcase. “Have you talked to your father about this?”

  “Christine made me swear I wouldn’t tell him she showed me the album.” Brandy explained what transpired between them on Saturday morning when she’d agreed to change her plans with Stone and babysit Emily.

  “Did your mother have any sisters? Someone she may have given the necklace to?”

  “Unless my father lied, my mother was an only child.”

  “Why do you think he’d lie to you about your family?”

  She shrugged. “He’s always been secretive about my mother.” She told him how the front pages of the album had been ripped out.

  Radhauser thought about Daniel Michaelson’s polygraph. It had shown a level of deceit when questioned about his former wife—not the fact that she’d died, but the timeframe. After reviewing the initial results, Radhauser had dismissed the issue as being inconsequential. Now, he wasn’t so sure. He needed to interview Daniel Michaelson again. “What happened to your mother’s things?”

  The kid curled into herself, as if her chest had caved in. “I don’t know. I was only three.”

  He lowered his voice. “Is your grandmother still living?”

  “I know almost nothing about my grandparents, only that they moved to Italy after my mother died.”

  “Could it be something your father kept for you? Maybe something Emily found and then made up the story about a big friend?”

  “My father didn’t keep anything of my mother’s.”

  “He kept the wedding album.”

  “Yeah, he kept it away from me. You have no idea how many times I begged him for anything that had belonged to my mother.”

  “I need to talk to your father.”

  “He’s not home. Please, don’t tell him about the photo album.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t want to get Christine in trouble.” She told him what her stepmother had said about their fight, her father storming out.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m driving you home before I go looking for your father. You’ve got no business being out this late.”

  “What about my bicycle?”

  “It’ll fit in my trunk. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Brandy couldn’t stop thinking about the photograph, the necklace her mother wore. She wondered what other secrets might be hidden in her dad’s office—if there were other things that might lead them to Emily’s kidnapper.

  The back door opened, signaling his return—his quick steps through the kitchen and into the hallway. He paused outside her room, close enough to darken the seam of light beneath her door.

  She considered calling out to him. But before she’d summoned up her courage, he walked the remainder of the hall and into the master bedroom. Brandy waited for the bedroom door to reopen, for the sound of his footsteps heading toward her room to confront her about the album. She heard nothing.

  A half hour later, around 11:30p.m., she plumped her pillows under her comforter and tiptoed into the kitchen. She took her father’s keys from the hook by the door. Dropping them into her pocket, she returned to her bedroom, climbed out her window and rode her bicycle to the university campus. The streets were dark and mostly empty. She was frightened for her own safety and nervous that someone might discover her in her father’s office. But Emily was missing and nothing else mattered.

  Once inside his office, Brandy waited as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She pulled the flashlight from her backpack and scanned the familiar room her dad shared with Melville professor, Steven Willingham. Two desks faced each other in the room’s center. Even if she’d never been there before, the one that belonged to her dad would be obvious.

  Devoid of any clutter, the top held only a framed photograph of the four of them, an empty inbox, and a stack of letters he’d signed, ready for his secretary to pick up and mail.

  The credenza on the sidewall behind her father’s desk was unlocked. She slid one of the doors to the center. It moved soundlessly across the narrow track. Brandy dug through the stacks of manila folders, lecture notes, and textbooks, then moved to the other side.

  More folders. A line of paperbacks, mostly Shakespeare plays. She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, and then rummaged through the four shallow trays in the center. Nothing.

  She expected his desk to be locked, but the middle drawer opened, releasing all the others. Brandy studied the contents, being careful to replace everything exactly. Once again, nothing.

  Only the file cabinet remained. She jerked on the metal handle. When it didn’t budge, Brandy fished in her pocket for the keys. “Please, God,” she prayed. “Let one of them fit.”

  After four tries, she found one that did. Three drawers of file folders hung on metal rods. Arranged alphabetically, the white tabs printed in her dad’s neat hand. Her gaze moved quickly over the tabs. At the end of the row, she fingered a folder labeled with the letters S&M.

  Brandy pulled out the folder, opened it, and read the first page. The ampersand on the file tab was really an R. Sophia Rose Michaelson. Brandy dropped the file. Legal papers scattered across the floor and dust motes floated up from the carpet.

  As if she’d just awakened from a dream, Brandy waited until the whole thought formed. Her mother’s first name had been Sophia, not Rose. When she’d asked her dad about a middle name, he’d lied, claimed Rose was name enough for any woman to live up to.
/>
  Brandy re-aimed the flashlight. A custody hearing. The word mutilated pulsed from the center of the page. She couldn’t see anything else. With each thump of her heart, that word swelled, then receded. She shrank from it, looked around, then picked up a newspaper article carefully cut from the August 9th, 1985 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  She studied the headline, then skimmed the first paragraph. Once again, words, not sentences, caught her, held her in their grip. Blaze. Vineyard. Arson.

  A dog yelped from somewhere far away and a damp smelling wind came through the main door as it opened, then swished closed. The barking sounds muffled into footsteps in the corridor.

  Flipping off the flashlight, she scooped up the papers and knelt behind the desk, attentive and poised as a cat. Thin slices of light from the corridor shined through the closed blinds on the top half of the door.

  She tightened her hold on the flashlight, held her breath and listened. Through the opaque glass on the top half of the door, she saw a man’s bulky shadow. He held a ring of keys, rhythmically banging them against his right leg like a tambourine.

  Grabbing her backpack, she scurried under her father’s desk and pulled the chair back into place behind her.

  The man unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  He flipped on the light.

  Brandy heard the sound of paper shuffling on the other desk. It must be Doctor Willingham.

  With her eyes wide open, she clutched the folder of information about her mother and huddled against the inside wall of the desk. Oh God, she prayed, don’t let him see me. It must be almost midnight. Her dad had often alluded to his office mate’s workaholism, but this was ridiculous.

  She saw the scuffed toes of his rubber-soled shoes, the brown polyester slacks as he walked past the desks on his way to the room’s only window. He lowered the window blinds and walked out of the office, leaving the light on. The door closed automatically behind him.

  The bathroom. He must be going to the bathroom.

  Brandy crawled out from under the desk and inched forward. She quietly opened the door and peered into the hallway, just as the door to the men’s room closed and the long corridor grew silent.

  Clutching the folder against her chest, she raced down the corridor and out the door—not stopping until she reached a bench outside the campus library.

  Maybe that fire had nothing to do with her mother. No—they had to be connected. Why else would he have kept the articles with the custody papers?

  Though the night was cool, Brandy’s shirt stuck to her back and her hands felt wet and clammy. “Custody?” She said the word out loud, abruptly realizing it could mean only one thing. Her parents got divorced. Why hadn’t she known?

  She slumped against the bench. And in that strange, out of sync world, she lingered over the rainbow sneakers, their laces tied in double knots, the odd fact that the kidnapper had taken off Emily’s shoes. Without warning, her thoughts jumped to the details of her escalator accident. She catalogued each separate detail, felt the accumulative weight of their meaning.

  Needing a safe place to examine the file, she followed a young man up the library steps.

  * * *

  Only a few students sprawled out on the black leather sofas or sat reading at small tables by the windows. Most of the computer desks were empty. The library smelled like paper, glue, and old leather. Brandy took a seat by the window, opened the folder, and took out the newspaper articles.

  Vineyard Destroyed in Sonoma Fire

  Sonoma detectives suspect arson in the fire that destroyed the home and vineyard of fifty-one-year-old Victor Delorenzo and his forty-eight-year-old wife, Sylvia.

  She skimmed over the details of the fire, the charred metal gasoline can found on the front porch. She searched for something, anything that connected this house to her mother. At the end of the article, she found it.

  The couple owns Sophia Rose Vineyards in Napa Valley, named for their daughter, Sophia Rose Michaelson of Palo Alto…

  Oh my God. Sylvia and Victor Delorenzo were her grandparents. She’d seen the wine bottles in Safeway, the purple ones with the fancy gold rose on their labels. But never, not even for a moment, did she imagine anything like this.

  Damn her dad. She’d asked hundreds of questions about her mother’s family. He should have told her.

  Arson.

  Brandy tried to imagine who could have done something so horrible, and why. She cringed, wondering how her mother had survived something this terrible. Her barrage of thoughts stopped. Her mother hadn’t survived. Brandy had read articles on the relationship between cancer and stress. Her dad had kept this terrible secret. Her hands shook so hard she could barely control them. She returned to the article, skimmed it again, then moved on to the next day’s edition where she found two paragraphs on page four interviewing a forensic toxicologist who confirmed police suspicions of arson.

  She scanned the headlines until five words sucked the remaining air from her chest.

  Daughter Suspected in Vineyard Fire.

  She stood and backed away, as if eye contact or even proximity to the words would stain her mother’s memory with a level of guilt that didn’t belong to her. There had to be some mistake. This didn’t make any sense.

  All around her, bookshelves were spinning. She wiped her hands on her pant legs, then slumped against a long wooden table, hunched forward, forcing deep breaths.

  Her hands shook as she picked up the article. She was afraid to answer the questions that had driven her here, but she had to find out what happened to her mother.

  Palo Alto police are questioning twenty-five-year-old Sophia Rose Michaelson in connection with the August eighth fire that destroyed her family vineyard…

  Her mind spun with possible explanations. Maybe her mother had been taking care of the place while her parents were out of town. Maybe she’d left a cigarette burning close to the ashtray’s edge. Or cut the grass for her father and set a half-filled gasoline can on the front porch. Oh my God, did my mother die in prison?

  She stuffed the articles back into the folder, crammed it into her backpack, and hurried out of the library.

  Once outside, she ran toward the bicycle rack. All around her, through the breaking layer of clouds, moonlight fell on the Ashland hills, like tarnish on old silver.

  Everything inside her demanded the truth about what happened to her mother. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but it did.

  It mattered so damn much.

  * * *

  Long after 1a.m., with the notes she’d made from the newspaper articles held firmly in her hand, Brandy squared her shoulders, tried to still her furious breathing, then stepped into the hallway. There was a seam of light beneath her father’s study door. What she had to say to him couldn’t wait. She knocked.

  He didn’t answer.

  She knocked again, harder.

  “Take the hint, Christine. I’m busy.”

  Brandy tried the knob. It was unlocked. She opened it and stood stiffly in the doorway, her heart still thumping fast against its cage.

  Her father sat behind his desk with a stack of student papers in front of him.

  “This is more important than those damn essays.” Her voice was thick and her whole body trembled.

  He glanced up, hope on his face. “Have there been any new developments?”

  She shook her head.

  He motioned her inside.

  She seated herself on the loveseat adjacent to his desk.

  “I was proud of you tonight. That was a beautiful song you wrote for Emily.”

  She wished for an instant that she still wanted nothing more than to please her dad. Her resolve was disappearing fast. She didn’t know how to begin, and kept fingering her notes.

  He took off his reading glasses, reached for an orange from the basket he’d brought in from the kitchen, and pointed to papers in her hands with a nod. “Are you stuck on some homework assignment?”

  “It’s a…just
stuff from newspaper articles.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad you’re keeping up with your studies. You might think about going to school tomorrow.”

  He must be frickin’ insane. “I’m not going anywhere until we find Emily. The notes have nothing to do with school. I read some articles about a fire.” With the word fire, her toes curled inside her shoes. “I know it’s a bad time to bring this up, but it can’t wait.”

  “It’s okay. Though it seems like it to us, the world didn’t stop because…” Like he always did, he kept his gaze on the orange, intent on peeling it in one continuous spiral. The citrus smell, tangy and sweet, spilled into the air around them.

  “My articles are from the San Francisco Chronicle. A series they ran in the summer of 1985.”

  His thumbnail dug too deep and the spiral broke. One long piece dropped into an orange curl on his desk. He peeled the remainder, then separated out a section with his thumb and forefinger. His hand quivered slightly, though his face remained impassive as he ate the segment orange, then leaned back in his chair. “Is there a point to your research?”

  She looked at the sheet of paper she’d so carefully folded into fourths, and considered wadding it into a ball and walking out of the room. Instead, she unfolded the sheet. “On August 8th, a vineyard and house burned in Sonoma. It belonged to Sylvia and Victor Delorenzo, my grandparents.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why do I feel like I’m about to be interrogated?”

  “I don’t know. Is there something you’ve been hiding from me?”

  He picked at the peel on his desk, sending out a fresh burst of strong orange scent. “No one has a perfect life.” He tossed the peel into the wooden trashcan. “I gave you everything I could.”