“What did you want to consult about?”
“I broke into Jules’s computer.”
“How on earth did you do that?”
“I had some help. A lot of what I found was what you’d expect, school assignments and such, but there were three files that bother me. One of them seems to be a kind of novel she’s writing, all about a little girl—her words—named Julie. I should mention that according to Dio, one of the things her strange phone caller said was, ‘You’re mine, Julie.’ The story is an endless round of these idyllic episodes, picnics and horseback rides and travel and camping and cooking dinner at home, with her in the middle of a family: Mommy, Daddy, and Julie. Pages and pages of detail, actually very monotonous. If it hadn’t been in her personal files and had her kind of vocabulary, I wouldn’t have thought she could write such drivel.
“The second file was a lot more like Jules. It was notes and references and statistics, all about relationships.”
“Relationships?”
“Marriage, mostly. Pieces of articles about marriage and divorce, statistics about the effects of divorce on children, things that sounded like advice-to-the-lovelorn columns—how to keep your man, things like that—next to a part of some university study with a hundred footnotes, all of them copied. Oh, and personal research she’d done, as well. I recognized several conversations I’d had with her over the last few months, transcribed. She had an amazing memory.”
“And the third file?”
“That was the strangest of all. She named the file ‘J.K.,’ just the initials. Now, I just got off the phone to the vice-principal of Dio’s high school, and she told me that Dio is using the last name Kimbal. Wanda Steiner, who’s fostering Dio, thought that was Jules’s original last name.”
“J.K.”
“Yes.”
“What’s in the file?”
“A name. That’s the whole file, just a name: Marsh Kimbal.”
Lee thought for a moment, looking progressively more unhappy. “You’ve got to talk to Al, ask if he knows who Marsh Kimbal is.”
“And how do I explain how I got the name? Broke into his apartment, violated Jani’s privacy?”
“You did get the name from Dio’s school.”
“The last name, yes, but the name Marsh would take some explaining. I know I’ll have to tell him eventually. But first I need to talk to Dio: There are things he’s not telling me. And I’ll run a search on the name Marsh Kimbal, see if anything turns up, though it’s probably a pseudonym.”
“You still haven’t asked me a question,” Lee said mildly.
“I have several. First, would you say those first two files indicate a normal reaction on the part of a single-parent child?”
“A highly intelligent thirteen-year-old who doesn’t have a family aside from her mother; who, as you told me the other day, just learned her father was a violent criminal; who, furthermore, is going through a rough time with her mother and is facing the upheaval of having a new father wished on her, even a father she’s fond of—all this considered, I’d say yes, it’s an unusual interest in family dynamics, but an understandable one.”
“Okay. Now, you know Jules; you know how smart she is. Could someone who found out about this fixation—”
“Not a fixation, I’d say that was too strong a word.”
“Okay, this strong interest—could he sucker her into running away by playing on a sense of family?”
Lee saw immediately where she was heading. “There’ve been a number of cases like that lately, haven’t there? Kids making friends through the Internet and running away to join them.”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re asking me if Jules might have done that?”
“I can’t believe it. I’d have thought she was way too bright to fall for a con.”
“A con she wants to believe in? A fantasy to fit her own, a way out of the problems she’s had building up in school and at home, a way to follow the romanticized notions of homelessness she may have built up around Dio? Kate, you know as well as I do that a teenager always believes he or she is both isolated and invulnerable—‘You don’t understand’ and ‘It can’t happen to me’ form the bedrock of her age group.”
“So you’d say she could have done it?”
“Gone with someone who presented himself as a father figure? Sure. Were there any Internet conversations in storage?”
“None. Richard—the computer kid—said there were signs she’d dumped files. But she’d done it so cleanly, he couldn’t retrieve them.”
“So what do you do next?”
Kate put the delicate horned figure back on its shelf. “What I’ve been doing all along. What I always do. Ask ten thousand pointless questions and follow any answer that doesn’t feel right.”
“But we’re still planning on going out of town?”
“Tonight. After I’ve seen Dio.”
“Wanda told me not to harass you,” she told the boy over their hamburgers. He looked startled, then smiled uncertainly.
“Did she think you were going to?”
“She knows I’m going to.” Calmly, she ate a bite of her food and took a pull at the straw in her milk shake. “But she wanted you to know that you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
“And do I? Have to talk to you?” He was thrown off balance by her odd attitude.
“No.”
“So, why should I stay here?”
She shrugged. “Be a shame to waste your burger.” She took another bite, and after a minute, he followed her example.
“So,” he asked after a while, “when does the harassment begin?”
“It’s been going on since I left the message for you at school. I plan to make you so sick of little notes and big hamburgers that you tell me what I want to know.”
His jaws stopped, then started moving again, more slowly.
“What do you want to know?”
“The same thing I wanted to know last time. Whatever you’re not telling me about Jules.”
“What am I not telling you?”
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to harass you.”
“What makes you think there’s something I’m not telling you?”
“I don’t think; I know.”
“How do you know?”
“You tell me every time you open your mouth.”
“Maybe I’ll just keep my mouth shut, then.”
“See? You just did it again.”
Resentment and outrage mingled in Dio’s face as he searched for the proper reaction.
“Dio, you’re going to tell me sooner or later, because you want to. You can tell me now, or you can tell me after I’ve beaten you into submission with hamburgers and milk shakes. Oh, and ice cream. You like ice cream?”
“Yeah.” He was beginning to look alarmed.
“There’s a killer ice cream parlor in the other direction from the school. I can bring in the big guns; they have a brownie sundae that makes you think you’ve died and gone to heaven. That ought to bring you to your knees. And if it doesn’t, I’ll have to torture you with the occasional ball game.”
Suddenly, it dawned on him: This adult, this policewoman, was making a joke. She could see him rejecting the idea, trying it on again, and slowly working around to considering the possibility. Eyeing her curiously, he ventured a response: “If you really wanted to hurt me, there’s a movie I was thinking of seeing.”
She threw the remnant of her hamburger onto the paper-lined basket; he jumped; she reached for the napkins and began to wipe her hands in disgust. “Wouldn’t you know,” she said bitterly. “Here I try to threaten someone, it turns out he’s a goddamn masochist.”
His mouth went into an O, and then he saw the skin around her eyes crinkly slightly, and he suddenly began to laugh.
Kate was inordinately proud of that laugh, but she gave no indication. Instead, she finished dramatically wiping her hands and fought hard to keep a look of disgust pasted o
n while the boy dissolved in snorts and choking laughter. She doubted he’d laughed like that in a hell of a long time.
It wiped away his fear of her. However, when the brief episode was over, he became suddenly shy, and she decided that Wanda Steiner was right: It was best to take things in stages—too soon to ask about the name Kimbal. She led him off to the car and drove him home, chatting about nothing.
But when they were in front of the Steiner home, she caught him before he could open the door.
“Jules was my friend, Dio,” she said quietly. “I intend to find out what happened to her, and I can’t afford to ignore what you know. Think about it.”
He walked away, subdued. She drove away, buoyant with the knowledge of a step taken, and with the thought of some days alone with Lee.
“Has Jon been home since this morning?”
“Just to drop off the swimsuit he bought me. You like it?”
Kate turned from her examination of the closet to look at the piece of nylon Lee was holding up.
“Good heavens, it looks like you could actually swim in the thing. I’d have expected something that looked like spiderwebs, or with plastic fruit hanging off it, or made out of snakeskin. How on earth did you get him to buy just an ordinary suit?”
“I told him I’d make him go back until he got me one that I would wear, that I’d pay for only one suit, and that if he succeeded, he could have three days off.”
“Clever you. Does it fit?”
“More or less.”
“Will wonders never cease? But anyway, he does know we’re going away?”
“I told him I doubted we’d leave before tomorrow morning—I didn’t think you’d actually get away, to tell you the truth.”
“Ye of little faith. Do you want the sweatshirt or the sweater?”
“Both. I did tell him we’d leave a note if a miracle happened and we actually got away before he gets back. Which reminds me, did you make any arrangements with work, or are you just calling it medical leave?”
“I called in two days of vacation. Have you seen those rubber sandals I bought last year?”
“Jon put them in the box on the left. Sweetheart,” said Lee in a different voice, “what do you want to do with these?”
Kate turned from the closet and saw Lee holding the envelope and loose pictures.
“Ah, hell,” she said. “I don’t know. Send them to Al, I guess. No, not the one of Jules. And leave the negatives out, as well; he won’t need those. Just stick them in the drawer, and here, give me the envelope.” She sealed the flap and, downstairs, paused in the act of carrying out the suitcases to address the envelope to Al in care of D’Amico’s department. She then added a P.S. to Lee’s note, asking Jon to mail it, and then she carried the suitcases out to the car.
She left her gun in its drawer and the cellular phone on its charger. After much agonizing and changing her mind three times, she left her pager too, on the table next to the phone. Like it or not, this would be a holiday. She felt that she owed Lee the symbolic commitment of leaving the beeper behind.
Three hours later, Jon came in, his arms filled with grocery bags. The puzzled look on his face cleared when he found the note propped against the saltcellar, and he looked pleased, then mildly irritated as he glanced at the food he had just bought, and then he began to look even happier as he realized he did not, after all, have to cook it. A phone call and a quick distribution of groceries into the refrigerator and freezer, followed by a trip downstairs for a change of clothes and a small overnight bag, and he was also out the door. However, a minute later his key sounded in the lock. He went back to the kitchen, picked up the manila envelope, and went out again.
At the shipping place, Jon hesitated briefly over the methods of delivery before deciding that the other jobs he’d done for Kate lately had been matters of life and—no, maybe that wasn’t the best phrase—had been urgent as hell, so he might as well treat this the same way. If Kate was too busy to mail it herself and couldn’t be bothered to give instructions, well, she’d just have to pay for it. Besides, the expense made him feel he’d had revenge for having had to put that lovely fresh bit of salmon into the freezer instead of directly onto the grill. He sent the envelope the fastest way they offered, and the most expensive.
He then climbed back into his car and headed across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin and the mountaintop house of friends.
In the other direction, near Monterey, Kate and Lee found a hotel with a room on the ground level and a glimpse of the ocean. One of the first things Kate did was to leave a message for Jon on the machine to tell him where they were: the freedom from responsibility represented by leaving her beeper and gun behind extended only so far. That done, however, she forced herself to relax. During the night the rhythm of the waves pervaded their bodies, and during the day they walked and did tourist things at the aquarium, and they talked.
For the first time since August, they began tentatively to explore this new stage in their relationship, with both of them now convinced that Lee was, literally, back on her feet and able to shoulder a real part of the burden. Cautious of hurting each other, careful not to wield grievances, trying hard for a clean beginning, they talked.
One of the things they talked about was a topic that had lain between them for five months, ever since the argument about Aunt Agatha’s letter. Yes, Lee still wanted a child. No, she hadn’t forgotten it; she hadn’t said it in a fit of madness; it had not been a passing fantasy. She also was not about to go ahead with it unless Kate agreed. If she had a child, that child would have two parents, not a mom and an “other.”
She had, she told Kate, gone so far as to research the problems. On the medical side, there were actually a few doctors out there who regarded pregnancy in a woman who had poor use of her legs as something other than a prescription for an abortion. On the legal side, she felt she could now present a case, if called for, that she was competent to perform the tasks of motherhood. She might not be able to run after a two-year-old, but she could hobble fast. The dual legal threat concerning the status of the child of a lesbian and a handicapped woman would remain, but she was as prepared as she could be.
Kate did not agree with any of this. She did, however, listen.
All the members of that family—householder, partner, servant, and the ghost of an as-yet-unformed child—spent a quiet two days in their various places of rest, blissfully unaware of the storm that was moving in on two fronts.
At 1:15 on Sunday afternoon, the telephone in the empty house on Russian Hill began to ring.
By the time Jon Samson arrived home later that afternoon, relaxed and slightly rosy from the wintery sun beating down on his friends’ sheltered swimming pool, the tape on the answering machine was filled, almost entirely with the same message, delivered in Al Hawkin’s increasingly frantic voice. When Jon got out of his car, he was pounced upon by a burly but not unattractive uniformed police officer who had been doing drive-bys all afternoon, waiting for a sign of life at the house.
While Jon was rescuing the salmon from the freezer and preparing to grill it with some tiny red-skinned potatoes for his new friend, Kate and Lee, also sunburned and satisfactorily tired, were approaching the city.
“Do you want to go somewhere for dinner, or just pick something up?” Lee asked. “If we just go home, Jon will feel obliged to cook.”
(Jon, meanwhile, was trying hard to cook, although the telephone calls were becoming very frustrating, not only because he hadn’t the faintest idea where the pictures in the envelope he’d sent had come from but also because they kept interrupting his attempts at conversation with the burly cop. The beeper’s intermittent noise also drove him bats, because it was locked into the small table with Kate’s gun. He finally had the uniformed officer carry the table into Lee’s consulting rooms and shut the door on it, and went back to his charcoal.)
“I don’t feel like a restaurant,” Kate said. “Shall we just stop for a burger? In fact—would you like
to meet Dio?”
“I’d love to, but you can’t just drop in on him on a Sunday night.”
“Oh yes I can,” she said, a shade grimly.
Wanda Steiner opened the door. “Kate! Hello, dear. Do come in.”
“Hello, Wanda. Sorry to drop in on you like this. I was wondering if Dio was in. I don’t know if you’ve had dinner, but I thought he might like to come out and have a hamburger with us.”
“I’m sure he’d love to—you know how boys his age can eat, and he did seem to enjoy your last meeting—but he’s still out at the park with Reg, kicking around a soccer ball.”
“Oh well, that’s okay. Another time.”
“No, dear, why don’t you just pop down and see if they aren’t nearly finished? Reg won’t admit when he’s had enough, but he did pull a shoulder muscle the other day playing basketball. That’s why they’re playing soccer, to give his arm a rest. No, I’m sure he’d be happy for an excuse to quit, and I think Dio wanted to talk with you, anyway.”
“Did he?” Kate said, feeling her pulse quicken.
“I think so. Anyway, you go see. It’s only at the park—that’s two blocks up the way you were going and one over to the right. Just have him back by nine. School tomorrow, you know.”
With Child Page 24
