by Neil Clarke
“And the bride?”
“Some Indian fluff—Rashy or something.”
“Rashmi Jones.”
She nodded. “Her I never met.”
“Did she go to school?”
“Must have done high school, but damned if I know where. Didn’t make much of an impression, I’d say. College, no way.” She opened a drawer where a flock of colored vials was nesting. “You want polish or clear coat on the nails?”
“No color. It’s bad for business.”
She leered at me. “Business is good?”
“You say she did massage for you?” I said. “Where did she pick that up?”
“Hold still now.” Noreen uncapped the vial; the milky liquid that clung to the brush smelled like super glue’s evil twin. “This is fast dry.” She painted the stuff onto my nails with short, confident strokes. “Kate claimed her mom taught her. Said she used to work at the health club at the Radisson before it closed down.”
“Did the mom have a name?”
“Yeah.” Noreen chewed her lower lip as she worked. “Mom. Give the other hand.”
I extended my arm. “So if Kate didn’t live here, where she did live?”
“Someplace. Was on her application.” She kept her head down until she’d finished. “You’re done. Wave them around a little—that’s it.”
After a moment, I let my arms drop to my side. We stared at each other. Then Noreen heaved herself off the stool and led me back out to the reception room.
“That’ll be eighty cents for the manicure, fluff.” She waved her desktop on. “You planning on leaving a tip?”
I pulled out the sidekick and beamed two dollars at the desk. Noreen opened the payment icon, grunted her approval and then opened another folder. “Says here she lives at 44 East Washington Avenue.”
I groaned.
“Something wrong?”
“I already have that address.”
“Got her call too? [email protected].”
“No, that’s good. Thanks.” I went to the door and paused. I don’t know why I needed to say anything else to her, but I did. “I help people, Noreen. Or at least I try. It’s a real job, something bots can’t do.”
She just stood there, kneading the bad hip with a big, dry hand.
I unchained my bike, pedaled around the block, and then pulled over. I read Kate Vermeil’s call into my sidekick. Her sidekick picked up on the sixth chirp. There was no pix.
“You haven’t reached Kate yet, but your luck might change if you leave a message at the beep.” She put on the kind of low, smoky voice that doesn’t come out to play until dark. It was a nice act.
“Hi Kate,” I said. “My name is Fay Hardaway and I’m a friend of Rashmi Jones. She asked me to give you a message about yesterday so please give me a call at [email protected].” I wasn’t really expecting her to respond, but it didn’t hurt to try.
I was on my way to 44 East Washington Avenue when my sidekick chirped in the pocket of my slacks. I picked up. Rashmi Jones’s mom, Najma, stared at me from the screen with eyes as deep as wells.
“The police came,” she said. “They said you were supposed to notify them first. They want to speak to you again.”
They would. So I’d called the law after I called the mom—they’d get over it. You don’t tell a mother that her daughter is dead and then ask her to act surprised when the cops come knocking. “I was working for you, not them.”
“I want to see you.”
“I understand.”
“I hired you to find my daughter.”
“I did,” I said. “Twice.” I was sorry as soon as I said it.
She glanced away; I could hear squeaky voices in the background. “I want to know everything,” she said. “I want to know how close you came.”
“I’ve started a report. Let me finish it and I’ll bring it by later . . .”
“Now,” she said. “I’m at school. My lunch starts at eleven-fifty and I have recess duty at twelve-fifteen.” She clicked off.
I had nothing to feel guilty about, so why was I tempted to wriggle down a storm drain and find the deepest sewer in town? Because a mom believed that I hadn’t worked fast enough or smart enough to save her daughter? Someone needed to remind these people that I didn’t fix lost things, I just found them. But that someone wouldn’t be me. My play now was simply to stroll into her school and let her beat me about the head with her grief. I could take it. I ate old Bogart movies for breakfast and spit out bullets. And at the end of this cocked day, I could just forget about Najma Jones, because there would be no Sharifa reminding me how much it cost me to do my job. I took out my sidekick, linked to my desktop and downloaded everything I had in the Jones file. Then I swung back onto my bike.
The mom had left a message three days ago, asking that I come out to her place on Ashbury. She and her daughter rattled around in an old Victorian with gingerbread gables and a front porch the size of Cuba. The place had been in the family for four generations. Theirs had been a big family—once. The mom said that Rashmi hadn’t come home the previous night. She hadn’t called and didn’t answer messages. The mom had contacted the cops, but they weren’t all that interested. Not enough time would have passed for them. Too much time had passed for the mom.
The mom taught fifth grade at Reagan Elementary. Rashmi was a twenty-six year-old-grad student, six credits away from an MFA in Creative Writing. The mom trusted her to draw money from the family account, so at first I thought I might be able to find her by chasing debits. But there was no activity in the account we could attribute to the missing girl. When I suggested that she might be hiding out with friends, the mom went prickly on me. Turned out that Rashmi’s choice of friends was a cause of contention between them. Rashmi had dropped her old pals in the last few months and taken up with a new, religious crowd. Alix, Gratiana, Elaine, and Kate—the mom didn’t know their last names—were members of the Church of Christ the Man. I’d had trouble with Christers before and wasn’t all that eager to go up against them again, so instead I biked over to campus to see Rashmi’s advisor. Zelda Manotti was a dithering old granny who would have loved to help except she had all the focus of paint spatter. She did let me copy Rashmi’s novel-in-progress. And she did let me tag along to her advanced writing seminar, in case Rashmi showed up for it. She didn’t. I talked to the three other students after class, but they either didn’t know where she was or wouldn’t say. None of them was Gratiana, Alix, or Elaine.
That night I skimmed The Lost Heart, Rashmi’s novel. It was a nostalgic and sentimental weeper set back before the devils disappeared all the men. Young Brigit Bird was searching for her father, a famous architect who had been kidnapped by Colombian drug lords. If I was just a fluff doing a fantasy job in the pretend economy, then old Noreen would have crowned Rashmi Jones queen of fluffs.
I’d started day two back at the Joneses’ home. The mom watched as I went through Rashmi’s room. I think she was as worried about what I might find as she was that I would find nothing. Rashmi listened to the Creeps, had three different pairs of Kat sandals, owned everything Denise Pepper had ever written, preferred underwire bras and subscribed to News for the Confused. She had kicked about a week’s worth of dirty clothes under her bed. Her wallpaper mix cycled through koalas, the World’s Greatest Beaches, ruined castles, and Playgirl Centerfolds 2000–2010. She’d kept a handwritten diary starting in the sixth grade and ending in the eighth in which she often complained that her mother was strict and that school was boring. The only thing I found that rattled the mom was a Christer Bible tucked into the back of the bottom drawer of the nightstand. When I pulled it out, she flushed and stalked out of the room.
I found my lead on the Joneses’ home network. Rashmi was not particularly diligent about backing up her sidekick files, and the last one I found was almost six months old, which was just about wh
en she’d gotten religion. She’d used simple encryption, which wouldn’t withstand a serious hack, but which would discourage the mom from snooping. I doglegged a key and opened the file. She had multiple calls. Her mother had been trying her at [email protected]. But she also had an alternate: [email protected]. I did a reverse lookup and that turned an address: The Church of Christ the Man, 348 Vincent Avenue. I wasn’t keen for a personal visit to the church, so I tried her call.
“Hello,” said a voice.
“Is this Rashmi Jones?”
The voice hesitated. “My name is Brigit. Leave me alone.”
“Your mother is worried about you, Rashmi. She hired me to find you.”
“I don’t want to be found.”
“I’m reading your novel, Rashmi.” It was just something to say; I wanted to keep her on the line. “I was wondering, does she find her father at the end?”
“No.” I could hear her breath caressing the microphone. “The devils come. That’s the whole point.”
Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. “That’s sad, Rashmi. But I guess that’s the way it had to be.”
Then she hung up.
The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I’d found the girl: case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I’d try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I’d attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle’s Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.
And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.
3.
Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick facade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls—our hope for the future.
There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn’t take me to schools very often; I couldn’t remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers’ lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.
Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,
Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
there sits Stacy pretty as a rose! She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,
Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!
Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,
How many kisses does she get?
One, two, three, four, five . . .
The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.
“Hey you, behind the tree.” She shaded her eyes with a hand.“You hiding?”
I stepped into the open. “No.”
“This is our school, you know.” The girl set one foot behind the other and then spun a hundred and eighty degrees to point at the door to the school. “You supposed to sign in at the office.”
“I’d better take care of that then.”
As I passed through the gate into the playground, a few of the girls stopped playing and stared. This was all the audience Ponytail needed. “You someone’s mom?”
“No.”
“Don’t you have a job?” She fell into step beside me.
“I do.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
She dashed ahead to block my path. “Probably because it’s a pretend job.”
Two of her sisters in green-striped shirtwaists scrambled to back her up.
“When we grow up,” one of them announced, “we’re going to have real jobs.”
“Like a doctor,” the other said. “Or a lion tamer.”
Other girls were joining us. “I want to drive a truck,” said a tommy. “Big, big truck.” She specified the size of her rig with outstretched arms.
“That’s not a real job. Any bot could do that.”
“I want to be a teacher,” said the dark-haired sister who had been jumping rope.
“Chantall loves school,” said a furry. “She’d marry school if she could.” Apparently this passed for brilliant wit in the third grade; some girls laughed so hard they had to cover their mouths with the backs of their hands. Me, I was flummoxed. Give me a spurned lover or a mean drunk or a hardcase cop and I could figure out some play, but just then I was trapped by this giggling mob of children.
“So why you here?” Ponytail put her fists on her hips.
A jane in khakis and a baggy plum sweater emerged from behind a blue tunnel that looked like a centipede. She pinned me with that penetrating but not unkind stare that teachers are born with, and began to trudge across the playground toward me. “I’ve come to see Ms. Jones,” I said.
“Oh.” A shadow passed over Ponytail’s face and she rubbed her hands against the sides of her legs. “You better go then.”
Someone called, “Are you the undertaker?”
A voice that squeaked with innocence asked, “What’s an undertaker?”
I didn’t hear the answer. The teacher in the plum sweater rescued me and we passed through the crowd.
I didn’t understand why Najma Jones had come to school. She was either the most dedicated teacher on the planet or she was too numb to accept her daughter’s death. I couldn’t tell which. She had been reserved when we met the first time; now she was locked down and welded shut. She was a bird of a woman with a narrow face and thin lips. Her gray hair had a few lingering strands of black. She wore a long-sleeved white kameez tunic over shalwar trousers. I leaned against the door of her classroom and told her everything I had done the day before. She sat listening at her desk with a sandwich that she wasn’t going to eat and a carton of milk that she wasn’t going to drink and a napkin that she didn’t need.
When I had finished, she asked me about cyanide inhalers.
“Hydrogen cyanide isn’t hard to get in bulk,” I said. “They use it for making plastic, engraving, tempering steel. The inhaler came from one of the underground suicide groups, probably Our Choice. The cops could tell you for sure.”
She unfolded the napkin and spread it out on top of he
r desk. “I’ve heard it’s a painful death.”
“Not at all,” I said. “They used to use hydrogen cyanide gas to execute criminals, back in the bad old days. It all depends on the first breath. Get it deep into your lungs and you’re unconscious before you hit the floor. Dead in less than a minute.”
“And if you don’t get a large enough dose?”
“Ms. Jones . . .”
She cut me off hard. “If you don’t?”
“Then it takes longer, but you still die. There are convulsions. The skin flushes and turns purple. Eyes bulge. They say it’s something like having a heart attack.”
“Rashmi?” She laid her daughter’s name down gently, as if she were tucking it into bed. “How did she die?”
Had the cops shown her the crime scene pictures? I decided they hadn’t. “I don’t think she suffered,” I said.
She tore a long strip off the napkin. “You don’t think I’m a very good mother, do you?”
I don’t know exactly what I expected her to say, but this wasn’t it. “Ms. Jones, I don’t know much about you and your daughter. But I do know that you cared enough about her to hire me. I’m sorry I let you down.”
She shook her head wearily, as if I had just flunked the pop quiz. One third does not equal .033 and Los Angeles has never been the capital of California. “Is there anything else I should know?” she said.
“There is.” I had to tell her what I’d found out that morning, but I wasn’t going to tell her that I was working for a devil. “You mentioned before that Rashmi had a friend named Kate.”
“The Christer?” She tore another strip off the napkin.
I nodded. “Her name is Kate Vermeil. I don’t know this for sure yet, but there’s reason to believe that Rashmi and Kate were married yesterday. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Maybe yesterday it might have.” Her voice was flat. “It doesn’t anymore.”
I could hear stirring in the next classroom. Chairs scraped against linoleum. Girls were jabbering at each other.
“I know Rashmi became a Christer,” she said. “It’s a broken religion. But then everything is broken, isn’t it? My daughter and I . . . I don’t think we ever understood each other. We were strangers at the end.” The napkin was in shreds. “How old were you when it happened?”
