Through the Bookstore Window
Page 15
She hesitated for a moment and then said she would.
“Why did you stop playing?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t feel like it anymore.”
There was a longer explanation, but she didn’t have energy to go into it at the moment. It was the reverend—he cheapened everything. She used to practice the guitar and sing to herself in the evenings just before dinner. Her mother would usually say something nice about her playing, but he wouldn’t say a word when all of them were together. It was only later on when he snuck into her room that he would start swooning to her in his oily voice and telling her how much her music turned him on—telling her she was a sexy little temptress with the voice of one of God’s angels. After the last time he did that, she shoved the guitar into the back of her closet and never played it again.
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She liked Gina. She had already admitted that to herself when she wrote it in her journal. She was forming some sort of relationship with her, but she didn’t know what to call it. She couldn’t get used to the idea that Gina was her father. But she was happy that her real father wasn’t some abusive character—she’d had enough of that.
As she looked at the woman sitting next to her behind the steering wheel, there was no way in the world she could think of her as “Daddy” or any other name that she might associate with a man. Her tongue and her brain just didn’t work that way. She tripped over that problem as she wrote in her diary, starting a sentence that said, “She is my father,” and then deciding that it didn’t look right. She finally decided to get around the problem by just thinking of Gina as her new friend—a special kind of friend, maybe, but a friend nevertheless.
“Gina, it looks like we’re getting close.”
“We are, sweetheart.”
“Is this the Golden Gate Bridge?”
“No, we’re on the Bay Bridge. The Golden Gate is the prettier one over there on your right. That’s San Francisco ahead of us. We’re almost home.”
Part Four
Gina
I had a business to run, and I’d been letting it go to hell.
Miriam pointed that out to me—in much more polite terms—when I got back to the store. I’d cancelled three sales rep appointments while driving across the country. And when I got back, there was a larger-than-usual stack of invoices awaiting my approval for payment. I’d also missed a couple of big author events, including a “Community Book Forum” that I had cooked up a few months earlier. I was supposed to be the lead person for the whole event, but when it happened I was driving somewhere across Utah.
The staff did a great job, but I always worried about missed opportunities. In the book business, you can’t afford to miss a thing if you’re going to stay afloat. Part of my job is to convince the newer staff members that we don’t just sell books—we sell the book experience. People walk into bookstores because they like the feel and the majesty of books, and they want to be surrounded by them. If we had to rely on people coming in just looking for something with lots of words, we wouldn’t survive for a minute. They want knowledge, they want passion—but, most of all, they want someone who will get out of their chair and meet them at the bookshelves.
So imagine my delight when I discovered I’d just added another passionate book person to the team. Alexi and I arrived late in the afternoon, and I suggested we go straight upstairs to my flat and just rest awhile. But as soon as she saw the bookstore, she insisted on going in and finding a few things to read. She glanced at our young adult section with a critical eye, pulling out one, then two, and finally three books that she wanted. She didn’t stop at that. She talked to a woman who was browsing in the section and pulled a book off the shelf that she was sure that the woman’s daughter would like. She gave her a nice little talk that resulted in the woman walking to the counter with the book in hand. How much do I believe in genetics? I believe in it a lot more, after watching her in action.
Miriam asked somewhat guardedly where I had found this talented young woman. I decided, for the moment, to tell her she was my niece. Miriam was getting an enthusiastic bookseller to help with customers, so that answer was fine with her. Morrie was also pleased to have a teenage assistant to help with the young adult books, and the same was true with rest of the staff. I knew that I would have to tell them the real story sooner or later, because I had no intention of keeping Alexi’s identity or whereabouts a secret for very long. Once I’d gotten her out of that awful situation, I wanted to do what was right for her.
While this was going on, Alexi was figuring out her relationship with me. She said in rather touching fashion that she considered me her friend—a special one at that. I loved her, and that was good enough for me. She was my daughter, of course, but I didn’t feel very paternal. I managed just once to tell her I was her “father,” but I couldn’t bring myself to utter the phrase after that. Maybe I was feeling maternal, but Alexi already had a mother—two of them, in fact. I know how Anja would have felt toward her, and I was guessing Susan probably felt the same way. Alexi wanted me to send her another picture, and of course I said yes. Alexi’s disappearance must have been causing that woman a great deal of pain, and that made me realize all the more why we had to resolve things quickly.
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But the truth is, I was a nervous wreck about the whole thing. We’d gotten across the country without incident, but I knew that was just the beginning. There were sure to be people looking for Alexi, and I kept waiting for them to show their faces. And then there were the ones looking for me. Despite Paolo’s assurances, I’d been looking over my shoulder ever since I talked to him, thinking they might appear at any minute. After a while, I started wondering if I could tell one group chasing me from another.
Miriam seemed to pick up on my mood. A day to so after we arrived, she said that she’d seen a guy outside the window, spending a little more time than normal looking into the store. Something about him made her uneasy. “I don’t know for sure, but it looked to me like he might have been packing.”
The minute she said that, I jerked my head around expecting to see something—I don’t know what, maybe a hit squad—staring at me through the glass. But there was nothing there. Miriam must have sensed how much she had alarmed me, so she made a point of assuring me that the whole thing was probably nothing at all. I tried really hard to believe her.
No matter how jumpy I was, there were still things we had to do. We paid a quick visit to a couple of the women’s clothing shops on Hayes Street to get something more for Alexi to wear. She couldn’t keep wearing the same things she’d stuffed in her backpack when we left Indiana. I also set up an appointment with my doctor to get her a checkup. She still wasn’t feeling great, so I wanted to take every precaution. My meeting with Sylvia was the last thing on the list but maybe the most important. When she said she was cancelling a couple of appointments to fit me in, I knew she understood we needed to move fast.
I settled down into the chair in front of Sylvia’s desk and went through the usual ritual of telling her secretary that I didn’t want a cup of coffee or anything else. Sylvia surprised me a bit by just letting me talk. She wanted to hear the whole story from the minute I set foot on the airplane to the moment we got home. She asked a couple of questions, but for the most part she said very little. When I was done, she rubbed her eyes for a few moments before saying anything.
“I know you’re expecting to be scolded.”
I was.
“Did any of my warnings sink in?”
I shrugged but didn’t answer.
“You’re like a lot of my clients who never ask my advice before getting into trouble. They think I’m a janitorial service that can clean up their mess later on.”
She looked up at the ceiling for a second and then back at me. Then she said something that surprised me.
“I have to say I admire you for doing what you did.”
“I wouldn’t love you as much as I do if you weren’t the kind of person who would risk everything to save someone else.”
I came close to breaking down in tears.
“What shall we do?” I asked. “Do you want me to bring Alexi in right now so you can meet her?”
For the first time since I walked in the door, I saw Sylvia get agitated. “Is she right here in the office?”
“She’s sitting out in the waiting room. When I walked in here, she was talking to Cristina.”
Sylvia stared at the ceiling again, tapping her fingers on her desk.
“Did I do something wrong by bringing her here?”
She let out a sigh.
“Look. You know you could be in big trouble for all this, okay? I’ve been checking the filings and police reports out of Indiana every day since I found out what you were doing. For some reason, nothing’s been reported. I don’t know why. Apparently, her family hasn’t decided whether to report her as kidnapped or missing or anything, but we have to assume that they will sooner or later. And when they do, there could be both state and federal charges hanging over your head for abducting a minor.”
She held up her hand as if to stop anything I might say in protest. But I kept my mouth shut.
“I know you did what you did for the best of reasons. That gives us something to work with, if and when an indictment comes down.”
I didn’t like the sound of the word “indictment,” but I didn’t argue.
“What I’m trying to assess right now is my own involvement in all this. The minute Alexi walks through that door, I run the risk of some prosecutor arguing that I stopped being your attorney and became a coconspirator in a kidnapping plot. They’ll say I should have turned her over to the authorities immediately as soon as she was in my presence.”
“Do you want her to leave?”
Sylvia fumed.
“No, of course not. You might as well bring her in so I can meet her.”
Alexi walked in, and Cristina came in with her. Apparently, Alexi had hit it off pretty well with Sylvia’s legal intern. Sylvia walked around from behind her desk and pulled up a chair next to the two younger women.
“I’m happy to meet you,” Alexi said. “Gina’s told me a lot about you.”
I was beaming about her good manners. Her mother had raised her right in that department, at least.
Sylvia’s smile broadened. “And Gina’s told me a lot about you, as well.”
And I decided at that point to keep my mouth shut.
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A couple of days went by, and nothing happened. I was waiting for the world to come down on my head, but so far there hadn’t been a sound.
Sylvia had made a slight change to our arrangement—I called it a technical change, but she seemed to think it was important. Alexi was now Sylvia’s client as well. Sylvia decided she could continue being the attorney for both me and Alexi until someone told her she had to give up one or the other because of a conflict of interest. That all sounded very lawyer-like—and very Sylvia-like.
As she promised she would, she had her law firm’s investigators taking another, closer look at the God’s Children Foundation. The lead investigator had called her that morning and said they might be on to something. He didn’t say what it was, but he did make an appointment to come in and talk with her. I begged her not to hold out on me, but she just threw her hands in the air.
“I don’t know any more than what I just told you.”
Sylvia had a contingency plan worked out if we got any hint of a criminal investigation. She’d made copies of the original, heartbreaking video that Alexi had sent to me and picked out some particularly damning passages from the diary that Alexi had carried with her. She’d tied all this together in a group of affidavits that would be ready whenever we needed them. Once we got word of any law enforcement action, Sylvia planned to contact the prosecutors involved and offer to assist them in finding Alexi in exchange for their commitment to investigate the child abuse charges. No names would be mentioned at first. I would be identified only as her unnamed client until a deal was struck. She also saw no reason to give up Allen Wilder’s name until it became necessary. I questioned her on that, but she persuaded me that it was better to get the DA’s commitment to go after a child-abuser-to-be-named-later than scare them off with the name of a prominent member of the community. She’d be asking them to grant me immunity in exchange for my testimony. That was an unusual approach, but she thought that the law firm name of Crichton, Moss, Harris, & Kaplan might carry a bit of weight even in Indiana.
I wasn’t sure how this was all going to work. “Have you ever handled a case like this before?”
Sylvia looked at me with astonishment. Then she started to laugh.
“Of course not! No one has ever handled a case like this. No one’s ever had a client like you.”
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Sylvia continued to monitor the law enforcement bulletins out of Indianapolis, but there was no word of anything. She was starting to get the idea that the Reverend Wilder was too scared to call the police. If that’s what he was thinking, the whole thing might drag on for a while. But something in me knew that it wouldn’t happen that way.
I left Sylvia’s office and headed for the Ferry Building. I’d made a commitment a month earlier to appear there at a noon panel about “Mysteries set in San Francisco.” The city looked beautiful—in full picture-postcard mode—as I walked down to Jackson Street and then turned down the Embarcadero. I tried to enjoy the surroundings, but I was in a nervous mood, getting skittish at every corner. The events director from the bookstore at the Ferry Building was chairing the event along with a couple of local mystery writers. The topic was “noir mysteries set in San Francisco.” I couldn’t help thinking that I was about to play a part in one of them.
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I left the Commission Board room when the panel was over, heading across the rotunda for the big staircase that would take me downstairs. Then I felt a hand on my arm.
“Ms. Perini, do you mind if I talk to you for a minute?”
I turned and saw a man I’d noticed earlier. He’d been sitting in the audience during the panel about mystery books. He’d caught my eye because he seemed totally out of place. Most of the people in the audience were young office workers from the nearby buildings, some of them brown-bagging it while others had takeout plates from some of the vendors downstairs in the big food hall. It was a pretty jovial group that picked up quickly on all the arcane references to San Francisco mystery writers that the panelists threw out. There were lots of questions and lively, hand-waving comments. Names like Dashiell Hammett and Joe Gores were tossed around, and everyone had favorite books to discuss.
But not this guy—he looked more like a refugee from a mystery rather than someone who spent any time reading them. He stared straight ahead during the presentation and never cracked a smile. He was gray-haired and partially bald, and I guessed him to be in his late sixties or maybe seventies. His rumpled sport coat bulged out in several places. At the time, I didn’t focus on what was behind those bulges, but now that he wanted to talk to me, that was all I could think about. Was he carrying a pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat? His most dominant feature was his eyes—some of the saddest I’d seen anywhere. And right now I could feel those eyes on my neck, as I realized that he’d been watching me throughout the entire panel discussion. My instincts told me to get out of there.
I sped up a bit, but he kept pace with me even as I hurried down the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” I said over my shoulder. “I’m in a hurry to get back to work, so I don’t have time to talk.”
“It’ll just take a few seconds,” he insisted. “I have a couple of questions
to ask you, and after that I won’t bother you.”
He didn’t say what he wanted, but I had a bad feeling.
I turned and went into the main floor of the Ferry Building, heading north down the big food aisle, hoping that the crowds would distract him or—if I was lucky—swallow him up. But he was still tagging closely behind. I finally headed out to the walkway along the pier, using that time to sort things out in my head. I pointed to an empty bench.
“Okay,” I said. “We can talk here for a minute, and then I really do have to go.” I grabbed a seat, sitting on the edge of it to make the point that I planned to get up shortly. He sat down next to me.
“What is that you want?”
I conjured up my most bland voice, trying to stifle a sense of panic.
“I’m trying to get some information about a young girl who’s gone missing, and I’m hoping you can help me.” He pulled out a picture and showed it to me. “This is the girl.”
I looked at the picture, and my heart jumped. It was Alexi, and she was holding a guitar—probably the same guitar that housed a lot of her bad memories. I tried to turn down the voltage on my feelings, hoping they wouldn’t show. I had to keep everything under control until I could get away from him.
I handed the picture back to him. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
He kept looking at me. I thought I saw a touch of sadness in his eyes.
“Her name is Alexi, does that mean anything to you?”
“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do for you. I wish there were.”
“We’ve had information that Alexi might be in this area, and we have reason to think that you might be able to help us.”
My mind was racing around the inside of my skull, while I tried to maintain a bland exterior. Had my cover been blown that quickly? How did I screw up? My instincts told me the best thing to do was to say nothing, but I was dying to find out what he knew. So, I snuck in a question.
“Are you with the police?”