A heartbreaker. That’s what Gray’s father, Victor, would say about pretty girls like Isabel Lincoln. Big, innocent eyes. Sweet, innocent smile. Long ponytail and Vogue cheekbones. The kind of girl you married. A Mary Ann. You’re not a Mary Ann, Victor would tell Gray. You’re … the Skipper. No-nonsense. Reliable. Resourceful.
Gray reread Isabel’s race as listed on the intake form. White?
Isabel Lincoln was not “white.” Mixed, maybe. High yellow, definitely. Isabel Lincoln was as white as Halle Berry.
The second intake form had been completed for a dog with curly chocolate-blond hair. The Labradoodle, named Kenny G., belonged to Dr. Ian O’Donnell and had been with Isabel on the day she disappeared.
“Gray Sykes?”
Gray looked up and over to the door that separated the waiting room from the treatment areas. That voice belonged to a tall, sun-kissed god with dirty-blond hair and swimmer’s shoulders that strained beneath his blue scrubs.
“Dr. O’Donnell?” When he nodded, she floated over to him with her hand out to shake. Something quickened and fluttered in her belly—he’d knocked her up by simply standing there.
His eyes peeked at her short, boy-cut hairdo, her Rubenesque hips, and her Victorian bosom, and then his eyes glazed and he stopped seeing her altogether. He finally accepted her hand. “You can call me Ian. I was expecting…”
“Nick assigned your case to me.”
“Ah. Let’s talk in my office.”
Past the double doors, past the bleeding and asthmatic, and past the beeping machines, Gray finally landed in Ian O’Donnell’s office. It was a clean, ordered space with folders placed on the corner of his desk and pictures of patients pinned on a corkboard. Near the desk phone, there were pictures of Ian holding Kenny G., a picture of Kenny G. wearing a doggie surgery cap, and then another picture of Kenny G., romping on the beach.
Gray sat her bag in the other guest chair, then noted the one picture of Isabel. In this shot, the sun was setting at Isabel’s back and her face was hidden in shadow. Gray could barely see Ian’s one-and-only.
Did the nurses they’d passed—the ones who’d gazed at him as though he lit the skies each morning—did they believe that Isabel was his one-and-only? Had she been his one-and-only?
According to the good doctor, yes, Isabel had been. They’d been so happy. They’d rarely argued. They had plans, ambitious plans—a wedding, then a honeymoon in Barcelona and Pantages Theatre season passes.
“I really thought we were happy.” Ian was pinching his bottom lip, and it now looked cherry red and bee-stung. “I just want her to come back home. I want her to just … talk to me, you know, and explain why she left this time. And why she pulled my dog into all of this.”
“You think she’s alive and well?”
His hand froze mid–lip pinch. “Of course. The police would’ve found her and my dog by now if something had happened, right?”
In her mind, Gray shrugged. “Did you contact the police?”
“Yep. End of that week she disappeared. June first.”
Gray wrote “June” on the pad, but then the pen stopped writing. She scribbled. No ink. Her pen was dead. She offered Ian an apologetic smile, said, “One minute.” She reached for her purse and her nervous hands knocked the bag to the ground. Wallet, hand sanitizer, chewing gum, coins, all of it, clattered out and around the linoleum floor. Gray dropped to the ground and shoved spilled contents back into the handbag. The doctor’s stare burned her back and she wanted to cry as she hurried with the cleanup. And, in all of the ruckus, she neglected to find another pen.
Slipping back into the chair, she said, “Sorry,” then pushed out a breath. She’d have to remember as much as she could.
He was staring at her. “All done?”
“Yes.” She was boiling inside—heat jumped off her skin like flares off the sun.
“Are you okay?” the doctor asked. “You look a little—”
“I’m good, thank you. So … June first. What did the police say?”
“They said that she broke up with me, that the text message she sent proved it.”
Gray ran her palm across her sweaty hairline. “And what did the text say?”
He swiped around his phone, then set the device before her.
The text had been sent on Monday, May 27:
LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE. YOU CAN GO STRAIGHT TO HELL. WE ARE DONE!!!
Gray nodded. “Yeah. Reads like a breakup.”
“The cops said that I pissed her off enough that she decided to take the dog, and unless there was evidence of foul play, they had no reason to look for her. I could report Kenny G. as stolen, but they said that reporting could backfire. They think she’ll get tired of the dog and will bring him back. They obviously haven’t met Kenny G. He’s a keeper.”
Gray held up a hand. “Let’s back up. You said, ‘left this time.’ She do this a lot? Leave?”
“Are you going to write any of this down?” he asked, eyeing her.
Gray’s cheeks burned. “Umm…” She pointed to the cup of pens near his computer monitor. “May I?”
He nodded.
She scribbled as much as she could in five seconds. A bead of sweat trickled down her temple but she didn’t swipe it.
Ian O’Donnell bent to open a small refrigerator near his desk. He pulled out a bottled water and twisted the cap. “I think you need this.”
She caught that bead of perspiration with a knuckle, then reached for the small bottle. As the cool liquid slipped down her throat, the craggy, cranky places in her smoothed and cooled.
Refreshed, she dropped the empty bottle into her bag. “Thank you.”
“It’s hot out there.” He leaned back in his high-backed chair. “So, Isabel leaving … Whenever we’re in a rough patch—if we’re arguing or her friends are being jerks or whatever—Iz—that’s what I call her—Iz just gets in her car and leaves. Since we’ve been together—it would’ve been a year on the fourth—she’s walked off about two or three times. She’s gone for a few days and then she comes back, ready to be a grown-up again.”
“Where does she usually go?”
“Palm Springs. Vegas once.”
Las Vegas used to be a great disappearing town, before the casino owners installed all those surveillance cameras, before sorority girls Snapped and Boomeranged and selfied, sometimes catching random, taggable folks in the background. It was damn near impossible to hide in Vegas now.
Gray asked, “Is it possible…”
No ink coming now from the nib of the borrowed pen.
She wanted the earth to gobble her up for good. Since the earth refused to move, she lifted the binder some, so that Ian O’Donnell couldn’t see that the words she wrote on her pad were now invisible. “Is it possible that Isabel just didn’t want to come back this last time?”
The doctor’s green eyes flared. “We have a future together. I’m a nice guy, and … and there’s her family. I don’t think she would’ve left them to get back at me. No way.
“She’s selfish, that’s her problem. Thinks only about herself, and part of me wants to…”
“Part of you wants to … what?”
He pinched his lip.
“You don’t think she wants to come back,” Gray said. “Why, then, does she need to be found?”
He turned a sad pink. “Because I want my dog.”
“Are there other folks I should talk to?”
Isabel’s parents, Joe and Rebekah Lawrence; her best friend, Tea Something; her coworkers Farrah, Beth, and Nan; and Pastor Bernard Dunlop.
“Oh,” the doctor added, “and one time, this guy Omar texted her while she was in the shower. I took down the number but never called it. Don’t know who the hell he is.”
“Did you read Omar’s text message?”
“Nope. Her phone was locked.”
“Could you send those numbers to…” Gray offered her new phone number, and Ian O’Donnell texted contact information for everyone ex
cept the Lawrences.
“I’ve never met her parents,” he said. “Tea’s been my go-between in this craziness.”
“When was the last time you talked to Tea?”
“I saw her about two weeks ago. She still hadn’t seen Iz.”
Gray held up the intake form. “On here you describe Isabel as being white. I’m looking at her and I’m … not seeing that. Which means that other people won’t see that, either.”
“She’s biracial. She prefers to check that box instead of the other box.”
“The … other box?”
Ian waved his hand. “I don’t see color. She’s human to me.”
Gray’s nerves jangled, and she was almost certain that her eyes had crossed.
He cocked an eyebrow. “What?”
Gray jammed her lips together.
“Iz and I … we’re post-racial, and really … Do you act this way with all of your clients?” He sighed at her just like the white boys she’d dated back when Public Enemy and Air Jordans had crossed color lines.
“What questions should I ask her to prove that she’s Isabel and that she’s okay?”
Ian O’Donnell rubbed his chin as he thought. “What was my first car? What was my first gift to her? And … what am I allergic to?”
Ian, Ian, Ian—even in Isabel’s proof of life.
“Did you and Isabel live together?” she asked.
“We were talking about her moving to my place, but we hadn’t done it yet.”
Probably because she smelled the crazy on him and didn’t want it to get into her favorite coat. Hard to get the stink of nuts out of wool. Gray had lost many a good outfit that way.
“I helped pay her rent, though,” he said. “Since her credit’s shot, I hold the lease.”
“Where does she live?”
“Some neighborhood. I don’t know. I don’t go over there a lot. Never went over there before we started dating.” He then recited Isabel’s address on Don Lorenzo Drive.
“That’s off Stocker Street,” Gray said. “In Baldwin Hills.”
“Sure. I don’t know that part of town.”
“Tina Turner had a home there. John Singleton, Tom Bradley, Ray Charles…”
“Wow,” he said, unimpressed. “Anyway, I can meet you there later today.”
“Awesome. So, where do you think she went? The desert or the Strip?”
He lowered his chin to gaze down at her. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking you for help, now would I?”
She thought of his single nice gesture toward her, the gift of water. One small bottle. Though she was fake smiling, she wanted to lunge across the desk and drive his cheap, dry pen through his golden cheek.
He frowned at her as though she were a child. “Her friends probably think I’ve done something to her. I haven’t touched her. I haven’t seen her, and I would never, ever hurt her. Like I said, I’m a nice guy. We’re a typical couple. Yes, I’d get mad. Yes, she’d get mad. I’d scream, she’d scream, we’d both scream.
“Our last argument, though? She told me that she hated me, that she’d kill me if she could get away with it, which was unbelievable. I know she didn’t mean it, but goddamn, it hurt, hearing that. And then, to take my dog on top of that?”
There was a knock on the door, and a cute blonde nurse with Michelle Pfeiffer eyes poked her head in to say, “We need you, Dr. O. It’s getting crazy out here.”
Ian O’Donnell offered Hot Nurse Pfeiffer a ready-made smile. “I’m almost done, Trin.”
A moment passed after the nurse had closed the door. Then Ian’s eyes and Gray’s eyes met—his now shimmered with tears while hers remained as dry and flat as all of Los Angeles. Those dry and flat eyes doubted that they were looking upon a man madly, deeply, truly in love.
Because weren’t men all madly, deeply, truly in love before they were no longer madly, deeply, truly in love—minutes before they shot up classrooms, sanctuaries, dental offices, or bedrooms? Boyfriends and husbands, baby daddies and one-night stands were always madly, deeply, truly in love. Bloody love. Crazy love. Love-you-to-death kind of love.
Gray was a skeptic, a cynic, an agnostic of love. She believed more in yetis, chemtrails, and human-meat restaurants than in that four-letter word. “Here’s your pen,” she said now, dropping the doctor’s nonworking writing utensil back into its cup.
Ian O’Donnell stood from his chair. “I’d like a report from you at the end of each day. Nick promised that in my contract. Even if it’s just a couple of sentences, I want to know your progress. Who you’ve talked to. What they said. Et cetera.”
Gray closed her binder with a pop. “Certainly.”
“No excuses. Every day. Do you understand?”
Ian O’Donnell. The hero, the god, the man who healed people every day. The man who probably always got what he wanted from women. He’d expect nothing less from Gray.
Yeah.
He had no idea.
4
Last year, a day before the Fourth of July, Ian and Isabel had a meet cute. She’d slipped in a puddle out in the UCLA Medical Center courtyard. He’d witnessed her fall from fifty yards away, ran to her rescue, and carried her to the emergency room to personally ensure she received immediate care. Two hours later, Ian had returned to his office with her phone number and Isabel had left the E.R. with a broken ankle protected by a soft cast. The next day, they grabbed a prepackaged picnic basket from a gourmet supermarket and headed to the Hollywood Bowl to watch fireworks. They kissed for the first time as canned Ray Charles sang about America, as fiery red, white, and blue pyrotechnic peonies burst in the skies above the city.
Ian O’Donnell shared this story with Gray as he escorted her to the main entrance. “Again: nice guy here.”
Gray said, “Aww, that’s sweet,” but she knew that if she typed “Boyfriend kills girlfriend neighbor says he’s nice” into any search engine, or “Husband kills wife neighbor calls him nice,” “Husband kills ex-wife neighbors thought he was nice,” or any combination of those words, she would get almost six million results. She’d get stories of police recovering handguns the nice guy had used; she’d read stories of paramedics pronouncing the woman’s death at the scene. That is, if the nice guy hadn’t buried her in a shallow grave, left her bundled in a blanket in the back seat of his truck, or dumped her in a bay, marina, or harbor to disappear her altogether.
Had Isabel Lincoln met her end like this? Was Ian O’Donnell now performing Nice Guy Kabuki because he thought Gray was dumb? Because he thought Gray was awed by him?
If he hadn’t been a jerk, she would’ve been awed, but she wouldn’t ever be dumb.
Today. Because Gray had also stumbled through those heady romances with successful and beautiful men who knew just how successful and beautiful they were. She, too, had looked beyond their arrogance and casual disrespect because ohmigod, look at him; look at me riding in his Bimmer. She’d change him, love him enough so that he’d soften like butter. She’d be the diamond drill bit to his slab of marble. Alas, those successful, beautiful men had never changed. No—she’d changed, pushing away friends, pushing away gut feelings, pushing down tears, all to make him love her. He had been the diamond drill bit and she had been simple hardwood.
Eventually, she had wised up.
And maybe so had Isabel Lincoln.
“We used to see each other for lunch every day,” Ian O’Donnell said now. “Before everything went wrong.”
“She works close then?” Gray asked.
“At the Alumni Center up on the main campus. She’s an alum. Class of 2009. Not me. I went to Brown for undergrad, then Harvard Med, and now I’m here. Weather’s better in L.A. than Boston. Girls are prettier, too.” He chuckled. “Just kidding. Not kidding.”
Gray laughed for him.
She didn’t like Dr. Ian O’Donnell, and she hoped that Isabel had left a scorching review of him on Yelp before she disappeared. “… and the tiny-dicked bastard hogged all the covers and ate his earwax.
” But liking wasn’t a requirement of the job, especially since Rader Consulting’s business model was built on the backs of cheaters and scammers, hags and nags.
The doctor and the P.I. exited the medical office building and entered the bright outdoors with its thick, hills-on-fire air and flecked blue sky. One of Gray’s laparoscopic scars, left by her emergency appendectomy just six weeks before, burned and hissed beneath the waistband of her slacks, and she took a deep, cleansing breath of that tainted air.
“You know how to get to the Alumni Center from here?” Ian O’Donnell asked.
Gray pointed north. “Just walk that way.”
“You know who you’re gonna talk to?”
“Farrah, Beth, and Nan.”
“If you don’t solve this thing by four today, I’ll meet you at Iz’s place at five. She told me about ‘C.P. time,’ so not five ten or five thirty. Five sharp. Don’t be late. Please.”
The nerves beneath Gray’s skin crackled. Isabel Lincoln had the nerve to discuss “Colored People Time” with Ian O’Donnell? And then, he dared to utter that shit…?
Fifteen years ago, he’d be catching these hands. Alone again, Gray squeezed her eyes shut, waited for the pain in her middle to pass, and wished that she had completed her regimen of amoxicillin, then remembered that she carried in her purse the new refill of oxycodone that Dr. Messamer had prescribed for the pain.
She couldn’t find the oxycodone—she’d just picked it up from the pharmacy—but she did find a bottle of ibuprofen, 600 milligrams. Good enough. She popped one giant pill dry and it scraped along her throat. It was bitter, but then, on days like today, so was she.
I need another pen. “You have to do better than this.”
She fumbled through her purse again. After finding an ancient ballpoint coated in stickysomething and strands of hair, she sat on a nearby retaining wall and quickly transcribed her conversation with her new client. Alas, she had only approximations for dates, since she couldn’t decipher the gouged scribbles made by the dry pens she’d used in Ian’s office.
And Now She's Gone Page 2
