When she exited the room, amid whispers and stares, his mouth was still hanging open.
* * * * *
He was at his desk, thumbing through the snake book Ingram had given him, when the phone rang. He picked it up absently. “DiSalvo,” he said.
“Nick, it’s Lenore.”
His attention sharpened instantly. Something in her voice. And she never called him at work. Not since the divorce. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“Janine’s run away from home.”
His backbone straightened like a steel rod. “What? Why the hell would she do that? Have the two of you been going at it again?”
“Go ahead,” she said, “blame it on me. Blame everything on me, Nick. If Janine had a father who was there for her, maybe this kind of thing wouldn’t be happening.”
A ball of fire ignited in the pit of his stomach. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “I’m not the one who went whoring around,” he said, “so you’d better be careful where you’re tossing blame, Lenore.”
“This has nothing to do with you and me, Nick. This has to do with your relationship with your daughter. You’ve never been there for her. All you cared about was your damn job.”
The ball of fire expanded to volcanic proportions. “Look,” he said, “we can sit here all day and sling mud at each other, but it’s not getting us anywhere. If you’d just calm down, maybe we could—”
“My baby’s out there somewhere, and I don’t even know where she is! Maybe you can stay calm, buster, but I sure as hell can’t!”
He reminded himself that no matter how much he wanted to reach through the phone and wring Lenore’s scrawny neck, Janine was her daughter, too. “I know you’re upset,” he said. “I’m not exactly jumping with joy myself.” He tried not to think about the runaways he’d seen on the streets of New York, or how most of them ended up. “What happened?” he said.
“She left sometime during the night. When I went in to wake her up this morning, she was gone. Along with my suitcase, and most of her clothes. No note, no nothing.”
“Did you try her friends?”
“That was the first thing I did. I called everybody I could think of. Nobody’s seen her. Walter’s been out all morning, driving around the neighborhood, looking for her.”
“What about this boy she was talking about? Robbie somebody?”
“He’s in Vermont with his parents. They left three days ago.”
“She wouldn’t have gone up there, would she?”
“I don’t think so. I talked to Jenny Giulio, and she said Janine told her Robbie Morrison was a dork.”
He drew a notepad across the desk and began doodling on it. “Have you called the cops?”
“Of course I’ve called the cops!” she snapped. “You know what they told me?”
He sighed. “That there are thousands of runaways every year in New York City alone, and they’ll call you if she turns up.”
“Damn it, Nicky, isn’t there something you can do? You’re a goddamn cop, for Christ’s sake!”
“Not much,” he said. “Especially from six hundred miles away. Who’d you talk to?”
He wrote down the name and number she gave him. “I know the guy,” he said. “I’ll give him a call. Look, she’s probably hiding out at a friend’s house. Try not to panic yet. I’ll see what I can do from this end. And for Christ’s sake, let me know if you hear anything.”
He hung up the phone and sat there with his head bowed, running his fingers through his hair. From the doorway, Rowena said, “Everythin’ okay?”
“It’s my daughter,” he said. “She’s run away from home.”
“Oh, Lord. How old is she?”
“Thirteen. Goddamn kids think they’re invincible, you know?”
She let his vulgarity pass unnoticed. “That’s a very difficult age,” she said. “I imagine her mother’s about fit to be tied. I would be, if it was my daughter.”
“She’s probably just at a friend’s house,” he said, “but it’s still enough to scare the living daylights out of you. Kids don’t realize what can happen to them out there. I was a New York cop for sixteen years. I’ve seen what happens to kids on the street, and it isn’t pretty. But they don’t think about that. They don’t think it can happen to them. And they sure as hell don’t understand the fear we parents go through, every damn day of our lives. I guess you have to be a parent yourself before you really understand.”
“She’ll show up, Chief. Tired and hungry and most likely more than a little sheepish.”
“I hope to God you’re right.”
“I’m right. Can I fetch you a cup of coffee?”
“Thanks, but I’m already wired so high I’m about to take off for the moon. I have to call this guy Ramirez in New York. If anything comes through, interrupt me.”
The NYPD wasn’t much help. “You know how it works, Nick,” Ramirez said. “We don’t have the resources to be combing the streets of Manhattan, looking for teenage runaways. I wish I could help you out, but you know as well as I do that she could be anywhere. We’ve followed standard procedure here. She shows up somewhere, we’ll hear about it, and so will you.”
It was the best he was going to get. He broke the connection, called Lenore back and made soothing noises. When he finally got rid of her, he swiveled around in his chair and stared out the window, wondering where Janine had gone, who she was with, what she was doing. But that kind of thinking made him crazy. When he got his hands on her, he was going to—
Going to what? he thought gloomily. At thirteen, she was a little old for him to be taking her over his knee and whaling the tar out of her. He couldn’t very well ground her. He’d abdicated that right the day he walked out the door and left her with Lenore. To all intents and purposes, Walter the friendly pharmacist was her father now.
Furious at that thought and all it implied, he shoved his chair back from his desk so hard it hit the wall and bounced off. His face was set in grim lines when he stalked past Rowena’s desk. “You hear anything,” he said curtly, “you page me.”
“Chief?” she said. “Where are you headed?”
“Out,” he said, and left her shaking her head in dismay at his dearth of proper manners.
Georgia Pruett Pepperell had obviously tried hard, but neither the matronly hairdo nor the severe cut of the gray linen suit were capable of camouflaging the exotic beauty that must have made her the object of many a young man’s fantasy. She walked the corridors of the Cumberland Convalescent Center like a queen inspecting her kingdom, pausing to touch a shoulder here, whisper a word of encouragement there. Reaching an elderly colored lady in a wheelchair, Pepperell knelt to take her bony hand. Pressing it between both of hers, she said, “And how are we doin’ today, Marion? Is the rheumatism any better?”
“Oh, yes,” the old lady said, beaming. “And my son’s coming to see me on Saturday, you know, all the way from Raleigh.”
“Why, that’s wonderful, Marion. You give him my best, you hear?”
She worked the room like Wayne Newton working the crowd at Caesar’s Palace. Everywhere she went, eyes brightened and faces lit with smiles where vacant stares had been a moment before. Straightening, she beckoned for Nick to follow her.
They passed through a glass door into an atrium where potted palms shaded sturdy redwood patio furniture. In the center, beneath a thirty-foot palm, stood a marble statue of a cherub, his dimpled smile intended to distract the viewer from the fact that he was continuously peeing into a shallow pool. “Classy,” Nick said.
“Isn’t it, though?”
He sat on the edge of the pool. “How often do you come here?” he said.
She perched, legs crossed with circumspect refinement, on the opposite corner. “Three afternoons a week,” she said in dulcet tones. “My grandmother died in this place. Alzheimer’s. That was when I became determined to devote my free time to comfortin’ the elderly. These people, Mr. DiSalvo, are at their final stop on
the road of life, and I do my utmost to see that their last days are spent in comfort.”
“That must be a very satisfying calling, Mrs. Pepperell.”
“Certainly preferable to sitting around drinkin’ tea and playing bridge,” she said dryly. “Now, what can I do for you?”
“What can you tell me about Michael McAllister?”
Her sweet expression never altered. “Michael McAllister,” she said.
“I expect you’ve heard that his wife is back in town.”
“This is Elba, Mr. DiSalvo. The whole town knew a half-hour before she arrived.”
“Somebody left a five-foot rattlesnake on her porch a couple nights ago.”
“Something else that I’ve heard. What possible reason could anybody have for doing that?”
“I was hoping,” he said, “that you might be able to tell me.”
“I can’t imagine,” she said.
“What was your relationship with Michael McAllister?”
She reached up to brush an invisible strand of hair away from her face. She had the most perfect skin he’d ever seen outside the pages of a fashion magazine. “We were lovers,” she said.
“Before or after his marriage to Kathryn?”
Her smile was distant, cool. “I was very young, Mr. DiSalvo. Very immature. I’d just been jilted by my lover, a man I’d expected to marry. A young girl in love like that does things she wishes later she could take back.” She shrugged philosophically. “I pleaded. I begged. I cried. I threatened. But it was all for nothing. The day Michael set eyes on Kathryn, as far as he was concerned, all other women ceased to exist.”
“How did you feel about that?”
Casually, she said, “I wanted to kill her.”
Behind them, the smiling cherub continued to urinate into the pool. “And now?” he said.
“Michael was the most incredible lover I ever knew,” she said. “He knew—perhaps by instinct, perhaps from experience—exactly how to turn a woman inside out with need. And then how to satisfy that need. Losing him was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me. I can only begin to imagine how much worse it was for Kathryn. She had an added advantage, you see, Mr. DiSalvo. Michael loved her.”
“You don’t believe she killed him?”
“Kathryn was a convenient scapegoat. Of course she didn’t kill him.”
“Any idea who did? An old girlfriend? A jealous husband? A pissed-off business associate?”
Pepperell uncrossed and then recrossed her spectacular legs. “It was no business associate,” she said. “You and I both know that Michael’s killin’ was personal. Whoever plunged those shears into him was nursing a powerful rage. If I were Kathryn McAllister, I’d get as far from Elba as I could get, as fast as I could get there.” Her mouth thinned. “And I would never, ever look back.”
An hour later, he was back in the office, thinking about what she’d said, when the phone rang, jumping him out of his sullen reverie. He snatched it up. “Yeah?” he barked into the receiver.
A very small voice said, hesitantly, “Daddy?”
His stomach went through the floor. “Janine,” he said. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at the airport,” she said, her voice growing more querulous by the minute. “In Raleigh.”
Dumbfounded, he said, “Raleigh, North Carolina?”
“Will you come get me?”
His hands started shaking, with relief or anger, he wasn’t sure. “Do you have any idea,” he bellowed, “how much you scared your mother and me? Any idea at all?”
“I just wanted to be with you.”
“Damn it all to hell!”
His daughter sniffled. “Don’t you want me?” she said.
“Of course I want you! But that was damn irresponsible of you, taking off like that without telling anyone. Your mother’s been frantic!”
“I didn’t mean to upset anybody.”
“Well, you did. A lot. I want you to sit yourself down, and you’re not to move an inch until I get there. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said pitifully.
“I’ll be there in an hour or so. And then I’ll decide what to do with you.”
“Daddy? You’re not going to send me back, are you?”
“Right now, I’m too mad to know what to do. What I’d really like is take you over my knee and spank you so hard you won’t be able to sit down for a week.”
He hung up the phone and called his ex-wife. “Janine’s okay,” he said. “She just called me.”
“Oh, thank God! Where is she?”
“Seems she decided to pay me a little visit. She’s at the airport in Raleigh, waiting for me to pick her up.”
“I’m gonna kill her, Nicky! I’m gonna ground her until she’s forty. That damn kid just took ten years off my life. I’ve been sitting here all day, imagining all the awful things that could have happened to her!”
Unexpectedly, he softened. Lenore might not be at the top of his list of favorite people these days, but they had made this child together, and for better or for worse, that bond would remain between them until death. “Yeah,” he said, “me too. Look, I’ll have her call you as soon as we get in, okay?”
Rowena looked up expectantly when he blew through the door of his office. Smugly, she said, “Told you she’d turn up.”
“Damn kid’s in Raleigh,” he said. “Can you believe she got on a plane and flew all the way from New York to North Carolina, all by herself? Thirteen years old.”
“Gutsy little thing,” Betty said.
“Yeah.” He laughed humorlessly. “Gutsy. What on God’s green earth am I going to do with her?”
“Well, Chief,” Rowena said, sliding those hideously outdated harlequin glasses up her nose, “not that I believe in tellin’ people how to run their lives, but you could try lovin’ her. In my experience, it seems to work quite well.”
He promised he’d give himself time to cool off before he lit into her, so they drove for nearly an hour in an awkward, pregnant silence. It wasn’t until he reached the outskirts of Elba that he trusted himself to speak without blowing the roof off the car. “What on earth were you thinking?” he said grimly.
Janine, no bigger than a peanut to begin with, shrank even smaller as she burrowed into the Blazer’s seat. “I just wanted to be with you,” she said.
He muttered a few choice words under his breath. “Where’d you get the money to buy a plane ticket? That must have cost two, three hundred bucks.”
Incredibly, she seemed to shrink more. “I used Mom’s credit card.”
His mouth fell open, and the pain in his stomach exploded with volcanic intensity. “Great,” he said. “That’s just great. Guess who’s gonna take the heat for that one?”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“You should be. Christ, Janine, I’m living in a one-bedroom apartment. Where am I supposed to put you?”
“I’ll sleep on the couch. I won’t take up much room. And I’ll wash the dishes and do the laundry and keep the apartment clean. I’ll be so quiet, you won’t even notice I’m there.”
He gaped at her in amazement, this slender teenager who couldn’t even keep her own room clean. “Look,” he said, softening, “first we call Mom. See what she says. Then we take it from there. Okay?”
She sniffled. “Okay.”
Because it was past suppertime and his stomach was gnawing, he pulled into the drive-thru of the only fast food joint in town and bought them both burgers, fries, and shakes. The apartment smelled musty when he unlocked the door. Janine carried their meal to the kitchen table, set it down, and looked around at the oatmeal-colored wallpaper, the matching priscillas that covered the bay window. “Home, sweet home,” he said wryly. “This is as good as it gets.”
Chocolate shake in hand, she left him in the kitchen while she explored the rest of the apartment. It didn’t take long. “This is where you live?” she said when she came back.
He drew his eyebrows tog
ether. “You got a problem with it?”
“How long have you been living here?”
“Four months. I told you not to expect much.”
“It looks like a motel room, Daddy. You haven’t even hung any pictures on the walls!”
“What do I need pictures for?”
She looked at him as though he suffered from profound retardation. “To make it into a home. There’s nothing personal here at all. It just looks…blank.”
“I have a picture of you on the dresser in the bedroom,” he said defensively.
“And except for the CD player, that’s the only personal item in the place.”
“Bullsh—baloney. I have a TV I bought on sale at Circuit City in Raleigh.”
Janine rolled her eyes. “Do you have to be such a man, Daddy?” She crossed the hardwood floor to the television and drew her fingertip across the screen. Holding it up so he could see the grayish accumulation of dust, she said, “And when was the last time you watched it?”
“I watched the news,” he said, “just last week.”
Janine shook her head in pity. “It’s a good thing I’m here,” she said. “Mom was right. You do need to get yourself a life.”
They ate cold burgers together, phoned his ex-wife, and then they spent five minutes moving his clothes from the bedroom to the hall closet. He wiped off the TV screen and put the framed picture of Janine beside the TV. “Are you sure you don’t mind sleeping on the couch, Daddy?” she said as she hauled Lenore’s massive suitcase into the bedroom. “It really doesn’t matter to me where I sleep.”
“You take the bedroom. A young lady needs privacy.”
She disappeared into the bedroom to get settled, leaving him alone to consider the situation he’d unexpectedly been thrown into. Lenore hadn’t been thrilled, but she had consented to let Janine stay, at least for the rest of the summer. After that, they’d reassess and regroup. The local high school was just around the corner. She could easily walk to school in five or ten minutes. Maybe he should move into a larger place before September. Maybe he could buy a house somewhere nearby. He liked living here. It was close to work, close to everything. Easy to swing by Kathryn’s house several times a day to keep an eye on her.
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