Enzo liked hands. In his book, they were right up there with legs. Anna Carson’s were strong, slightly square, and well proportioned. On her left ring finger she wore a gold wedding band topped by some kind of doubtless very impressive diamond. On her right was a large emerald she was studying with an intensity that suggested she’d never seen it before. Her profile was classic, her nose so perfect that Enzo wondered if its shape was entirely due to nature. Anna Carson’s skin was bronzed. From playing tennis probably, or golf. No fake tan, Enzo decided, which probably meant no fake nose either. In his experience women went one way or the other—all natural, or not. So it was weird that her hair was dyed.
It was done well, of course. Expertly. There was no darkness at the roots, and doubtless it had cost a fortune. But it was dyed. Enzo had seen enough people trying, for one reason or another, to be someone else, to be sure. Maybe, he thought, her husband had a thing for blondes. He gave a mental shrug, made a doodle on his pad, and surveyed the rest of the table.
Apart from Pallioti, himself, the deputy consul, and Kristin Carson’s parents, the only other people present were Clarissa Hines, the Sherbrooke College junior professor of art unfortunate enough to be in charge of the program when Kristin decided to go AWOL, and Mary Louise Tennyson.
Looking at Mary Louise, Enzo realize he owed the girl an apology. He’d assumed Kristin Carson’s roommate had been living with Kristin because they were two of a kind. This, however, was patently wrong. One glance told him that if Mary Louise Tennyson had chosen to share an apartment with Kristin Carson, it was definitely not because like attracted like. The photograph of his daughter that Kenneth Carson was currently passing around the table made it more than clear she was blond walking trouble. Half confrontation and half come-hither, with blue eyes and a smile that virtually telegraphed I-dare-you, Kristin Carson was every parent’s teenaged nightmare. Mary Louise, on the other hand, had nice girl written all over her.
She would be the one, Enzo thought, who did not lose tickets and keys. The one who could be relied on to make friends with the fat and the shy. A keeper of secrets and always on time, she was loyal, generous, and everyone’s friend because she was safe. Safe because she wasn’t desired. Yet. Mary Louise’s eyes, and her dark curly hair and generous mouth, all suggested that one of these days, probably one coming up pretty soon, she’d turn into a bombshell. Most likely without being aware of it, which meant she was destined to break hearts left, right, and center. For now though, round and reliable, she was every teacher’s dream. And every bad girl’s shill. Which was why she was sitting here, and obviously unhappy about it.
Mary Louise’s arms were folded across her chest. Her pretty face was scrunched into something very close to a scowl. Looking at her, Enzo thought that, in her place, and faced with the unenviable choice of either covering for Kristin by lying to the police, the consulate, and her parents, or telling the truth and incurring Kristin’s probably undying wrath, he’d be pretty annoyed, too. He made another doodle on his pad, this one of a devil with horns, and placed a bet with himself about how much money Kristin Carson owed Mary Louise. Then he wondered, when it came to it, if Mary Louise Tennyson would lie out of some kind of tribal loyalty, or because she was afraid. And if so, of what.
Pallioti stopped talking. He had removed his black overcoat and sat, impervious, in his black suit. His tie was a deep crimson. Gold cuff links winked at his wrists. He steepled his fingers and let silence fall over the room.
“What I don’t understand—I mean, what I think we should try to get a handle on here,” Kenneth Carson said finally, “is, when was the last time anyone actually saw Kristin?”
He looked around the table, expectant, like a professor who has just asked a very easy question and is waiting for one of the dunces he’s burdened with to raise their hand. Enzo wondered if the man had heard a single word Pallioti had said, or if he’d simply been waiting for his turn to talk.
“I mean”—Dr. Carson raised his eyebrows—“when, exactly, is the last time we can verify that?”
As predictable as the February rain, it was the beginning of the requisite This could never happen at home because the foreign police are so stupid lecture. Most parents of missing, drug-addled, or otherwise in-trouble children, usually the fathers—especially those who rarely dealt with them and, having rushed in at the last moment, found themselves burdened with guilt and wonder at the strangers their offspring had become—felt compelled to give it at some point. The lecture did exactly nothing to help their child, but it did make them feel better, or at least direct their anger to any target but themselves. Enzo let it pass. The art teacher, Clarissa Hines, took the bait.
Something close to panic crossed her face—as if she had looked into the absent crystal ball and seen her career going down the drain. She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again.
“Wednesday,” she said finally. “Wednesday afternoon.” The words were strangled. “At about two o’clock. That was when I last saw her. At the end of the last class.”
“A week ago?” Dr. Carson’s voice suggested he had just looked at a diagnosis and realized it was far worse than he thought. “Is that right?” he asked. He looked around the table, his eyebrows all but disappearing into his hairline. “How can that be?”
Pallioti did not respond, but Enzo knew what he was thinking. Let him play it out. Let him get it off his chest. It may tell us something, and even if it doesn’t, the faster he gets it over with, the faster we can get on.
“How can no one have seen Kristin for a week? How can no one have realized anything was wrong until we couldn’t find her on Monday?”
The question was met with thick, unhappy silence.
“How can that be?” Kenneth Carson asked again. He turned on Clarissa Hines, his voice rising. “How,” he demanded, “can the whole weekend have passed and no one realize my daughter was missing?”
“Because she wasn’t.”
It was Mary Louise Tennyson who spoke. She had an accent. Southern, Enzo thought, if he had his movies right.
“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Carson looked at Kristin’s roommate as if she was a stuffed toy or a small pet, a hamster, possibly, who had just uttered a full sentence. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said, she wasn’t missing.” Mary Louise scowled.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kristin’s father snapped. “Of course she was missing.”
Enzo couldn’t decide if Dr. Carson was more annoyed by being contradicted or by being interrupted.
“No, she wasn’t.” The girl shook her head. “At least, not on the weekend, she wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Kenneth Carson banged his hand on the table. “She disappeared on Wednesday and—”
“I mean—” Mary Louise tightened her arms across her chest, fixed her gaze on Kristin’s father, and spoke very slowly and clearly. “I mean,” she said, “that Kristin wasn’t missing because she didn’t expect to be back.”
Kenneth Carson began to sputter. Before he could get any actual words out, Pallioti cut him off.
“I don’t understand, signorina,” he said quietly. “When you say she didn’t expect to be back? Do you know where from? Did you speak with her? Did Kristin call you?”
“No,” Mary Louise said. “She left me a note.”
“A note?”
Unless Kristin’s father was as good an actor as he was a surgeon, Enzo thought this really was news to him. News his daughter’s roommate had apparently decided to keep to herself until now. Which made him look like an ass. Enzo reconsidered Mary Louise. Maybe she wasn’t as nice as he’d thought.
“Why didn’t you tell us this?” Kenneth Carson’s voice began to rise. “Yesterday. Yesterday morning, you told us you had no idea where Kristin was.”
“I don’t.” The girl bristled visibly. She looked to Enzo like a small, angry black cat. “I don’t know where she is,” Mary Louise Tennyson said. Then she turned and spoke directly to Pallioti.<
br />
“I don’t have any idea, because Kristin didn’t tell me where she was going. She just said she was gone. Which I kind of figured out anyway, since the apartment was empty. She said she’d be back Sunday or Monday. I assumed she’d called them.” Mary Louise glanced at Kristin’s parents. “When they told me she hadn’t, I called her cell. Yesterday, last night, a bunch of times. I left messages saying her mom and dad were here, and that they were worried and she should call. It didn’t say anything anyway.” Mary Louise added. “The note. It didn’t say anything,” she said again. “Just that she’d left.”
Kenneth Carson’s face colored. He didn’t seem like a particularly nice man, but even so, Enzo felt a pang of sympathy. Someone should have reminded him that teenagers were not for the fainthearted.
“This note,” Pallioti asked, “you received it, when, Signorina Tennyson?”
“Last Wednesday,” Mary Louise said. “Wednesday night. I didn’t get back till around nine, so I guess I found it around then. It was on the table. A bunch of us went to a movie,” she added, “in the afternoon, after the last class. Then out to dinner. To, you know, start the break. I asked Kris if she wanted to come. But she didn’t.”
“Was that unusual?”
“No,” Mary Louise said after a moment. “Kris didn’t do things with us. You know, movies and stuff.”
There was something in the words that Enzo couldn’t quite put his finger on. Hostility? Disapproval? Hurt feelings? Pallioti leaned forward.
“Do you still have the note, signorina?” he asked. “Or did you throw it away?”
“I have it.”
Mary Louise reached in to the small purse slung over her shoulder and produced a folded slip of pink paper. Dr. Carson’s hand stretched out. She ignored it and passed the note to Pallioti.
Slipping his gloves on, Pallioti took the paper by the corner. He unfolded it, glanced at it, then handed it to Enzo, who slipped it into a plastic evidence bag he’d produced from the inner pocket of his jacket.
Dr. Carson sat back in his chair.
“Is that really necessary?” He nodded at the plastic bag, his voice petulant. For the first time Enzo saw fear in his eyes.
Pallioti saw it, too. “I’m sure it isn’t,” he said. “But we like to be careful. As I have told you, Dr. Carson, an EU alert has been issued for your daughter. That is standard procedure. My suspicion, now that I realize that she has been missing for forty-eight hours, rather than a week, as we first thought, is that she will reappear, probably any moment, of her own accord with a perfectly simple explanation. However”—he nodded at the evidence bag—“until that happens, we will take appropriate precautions. Which, I am sure you will agree, is in your daughter’s best interest.”
Kristin’s father opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
The brief message had been penned in bright purple ink, and read: Hey, ML! Decided to go away for a few days. Back Sun or Mon. Don’t be good and have fun!!—K.
The letters were loopy and flourished. There was a smiley face after the words have fun. Something about the way it was drawn suggested it might as well have been a raised middle finger. Enzo stood up and handed the evidence bag to Kristin’s stepmother.
“Could you confirm,” he asked, “that this is your stepdaughter’s handwriting?”
Anna Carson glanced up at him. Her eyes were wide set, a dark greenish-brown. The wrong color. Her skin tone didn’t match her hair, either. Definitely dyed, Enzo thought, not sure why this interested him as much as it did.
She took the bag, laid it in front of her and looked at it, one hand fingering a small gold locket that swung from a chain around her neck. “Yes,” she murmured, sliding it toward her husband. “Yes, that’s Kristin’s writing.”
It was the first time she’d spoken, and, close as he was, Enzo had to strain to catch the words.
* * *
The slip of pink paper had a numbing effect on the room, suggesting as it did that they had been set up. Duped.
James MacCready concentrated on his fountain pen. Clarissa Hines sank further into her sweater. Dr. Carson sat eyeing Mary Louise’s tiny purse as if he expected his daughter to hop out of it. Kristin’s stepmother returned to the study of her hands.
It was Pallioti who finally spoke.
“Is there anything else, Signorina Tennyson,” he asked, “that you might be able to tell us? Did she, for instance, have a boyfriend?”
“The girls aren’t allowed to have men in their dorms or apartments,” Clarissa Hines announced, as if she believed this might actually mean something.
Mary Louise shook her head.
“No. No,” she said again. “Honestly. She didn’t have a boyfriend. I swear. I last saw Kris, Kristin, in class last Wednesday. Like everyone else,” she added.
Enzo smiled and drew another devil on his pad.
* * *
Once the routine list of questions had been asked and answered, Kristin’s passport and laptop computer—both of which had been taken by her parents from her apartment—were handed over and signed for, along with information on her cell phone and credit card accounts. Given that she was, technically at least for another day and a half, a minor, this could be done on Dr. Carson’s say-so. There were small blessings in the world. On the whole Pallioti was on good terms with the city’s investigating magistrates, most of whom he knew well and admired. They were busy men and women, and he preferred, for everyone’s sake and if at all possible, to present them with a solid chain of evidence suggesting a crime had been, or was in the process of, being committed. When it looked as if the girl had been missing for a week, he had leaned in that direction. The pink note, however, suggested the opposite. Kristin Carson was acting up. Again. He’d take all the necessary precautions, make sure they had plenty of evidence bags, so to speak, but what he was really interested in was finding her, so the Carsons could have their expensive birthday party and the rest of them could get on with their jobs.
The meeting broke up. Kristin’s parents and Clarissa Hines stayed behind to talk with James MacCready, and possibly with the consul himself, who was threatening to make an appearance. Mary Louise took one of the cards Enzo handed her without meeting his eye, mumbled something, and fled. He planned on giving her an hour before he appeared at the apartment in San Frediano. In any event, he didn’t have to wait that long. As he and Pallioti came down the last flight of stairs, Enzo spotted her in the lobby, waiting for them.
* * *
The American military base in Lucca was the consulate’s primary reason for being. A steady trickle of people, many of them obviously armed forces, came and went. None of them paid any attention to the two men and the girl standing in a corner.
The doors behind the security gate opened and closed, letting in gushes of cold air. Enzo suspected that, like spies on foreign territory, all of them would rather talk outside the enemy gates. But the idea of standing on the sidewalk in spitting snow wasn’t inviting and it was obvious that whatever Mary Louise had to say was urgent. Where upstairs she had looked defiant and more than a little annoyed, now she just looked scared.
“I’m sorry,” she said, barely whispering. “But, look, Clarissa—Ms. Hines—she’s not bad, really, and she’s in enough trouble already because of this. And, well, I didn’t want to drop Kristin in it, either. I mean more than she is, with her dad and all.”
She looked from Pallioti to Enzo and back again.
“Ah.” Pallioti nodded. “So Kristin does have a boyfriend?”
Mary Louise blinked. Up close it was easy to see that her large dark eyes were glassy with exhaustion. She seemed almost too tired to utter any more words. Watching her, it occurred to Enzo, not for the first time, that secrets sucked blood every bit as efficiently as vampires.
“I take it,” Pallioti murmured, “that you think she’s gone off with him?”
“I don’t know.” Mary Louise shook her head. “Honestly,” she said. “I really don’t know. I didn’t tell her
parents about the note so I’d have a chance to call her. Give her a heads-up. You know, so she could get back here. Or at least call them and stop them freaking out like this.”
The loyalty between kids, even if they didn’t particularly like each other, never ceased to amaze Enzo. Inconvenient as it almost always was, it filled him with admiration. And sometimes more than a twinge of jealousy.
“I don’t get it, really,” Mary Louise was saying. “I don’t understand. I mean,” she added quickly, “don’t get me wrong, Kristin can be a total idiot. Most people don’t even like her. But she’s not as bad as she pretends to be, and she wants to go to college. Have a life. She gets thrown out of here, out of this program, and she’s nixed. Anyway,” she added, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I mean, with what happened to her mom, you know, her getting killed when she was little and all, it’s not all Kris’s fault. Everybody’s got stuff, you know?”
Mary Louise studied Enzo and Pallioti for a moment, presumably trying to judge whether people their age could have “stuff.” Apparently deciding they could, she went on.
“I really did think, I mean, she was excited about her birthday. About the party. So I thought she’d be back. I can’t imagine her missing it. She had her dad invite all of us. She wanted to show off. She’d even invited him. Her boyfriend. It was a big deal. She was looking forward to it. At least I thought so.” Tiredness sagged her shoulders. “But maybe it was an act.” Mary Louise Tennyson took a breath, the middle-aged woman she would become fluttering across her face. “You think you know people, but you don’t. I guess I could be wrong.”
For the first time since he had heard the name “Kristin Carson,” Enzo felt a hum, something like a string deep inside him being plucked.
“Do you really believe that?” he asked. “That you were wrong?”
Mary Louise looked at him. Then she shook her head.
The Lost Daughter Page 6
