Looks to Die For

by Janice Kaplan

  “You didn’t do anything yesterday, so how could you be stiff?” Ashley asked the next morning, when I explained why I wouldn’t join them.

  “Maybe from standing on the slope watching,” I suggested lamely. I rubbed my hands into the small of my back. If only I were better at acting.

  “What will you do all day?” Dan asked.

  “I’ll go exploring, or shopping. It’s beautiful here. Don’t worry about me.”

  Dan and the kids got busy collecting equipment, all of them eager to take advantage of the perfect ski conditions — warm and sunny with a forty-two-inch base. I tucked two Kit Kat bars in the pocket of Jimmy’s parka to assuage my guilt for not joining him today.

  After dropping my family at the mountain, I drove back toward the town. But instead of stopping, I kept going on the two-lane highway that provided the only access in and out. Traffic in the opposite direction stacked bumper to bumper, with skiers trying to make their way to Sun Valley, but my lane remained almost empty. Why would anyone be driving away from the slopes on a day like this?

  I glanced at my watch: just after 9:00 A.M. When they finished skiing, Dan would take the kids on the shuttle bus back to the condo — probably getting there about four. That gave me seven hours. If I allowed two hours to drive to Twin Falls and two hours to drive back, I still had plenty of time. Nobody had to know I’d done anything other than shop for sweaters and get a massage.

  If anyone in my family somehow found out I’d gone to Twin Falls for the day, I’d explain it as a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment inspiration. Not the whole reason we’d come here. Sure, I’d been a little deceptive in planning this family vacation for my own secret motives. But who could complain when skiing the gorgeous mountain had improved everyone’s mood?

  I stayed straight on the highway for about an hour, then turned onto Highway 93, heading south. Before we came, I’d done some research online and written down the phone numbers of all the Barlows in the Twin Falls phone directory. Three of them. Not until I was leaving did I remember that Tasha Barlow had once been Theresa Bartowski. A quick check — only one. I hadn’t called ahead.

  When I reached Twin Falls, I pulled over and unfolded the slip of paper from my pocket. Hesitantly, I took out my cell phone and dialed the first Barlow number. Voice mail. Second number, ditto. Third number, no answer. Fourth number — the one for Bartowski. Disconnected.

  Not meant to be.

  I hung out for about an hour, poking around town and reading a magazine left in my car. Then I tried the numbers again. Still no answer anywhere.

  Discouraged, I drove to a gas station and asked the man at the small convenience store inside if I could use a bathroom. He handed me a key. A big sign on the door said CUSTOMERS ONLY, and, feeling gripped by the sanctity of small-town morals, I grabbed a Diet Sprite as I left and handed the man behind the counter a twenty. He took another bite of his jelly doughnut, then put it down and looked at the bill.

  “Have anything smaller?” he asked, leaning over the counter. In the process, his pilled woolen sweater curled up over his stout center, exposing a fleshy-white expanse. He hefted the waist of his baggy jeans, trying to pull them up, and finally got sweater and pants to make some kind of accommodation over his bulging belly.

  “How much is it?”

  “Dollar even.”

  I fumbled in my bag, but I didn’t have any singles. I dug into my change purse and carefully counted all I had. “Eighty-seven cents,” I said ruefully.

  “Deal,” he said jovially, handing me back the twenty and taking the change. “That’s good enough.”

  “Well, thanks so much,” I said, suddenly grateful to be getting a thirteen-cent discount on a soda I hadn’t wanted anyway.

  “Where you from?” he asked, ringing up the sale on an old-fashioned cash register. So old, in fact, it looked antique and interesting. What a find for that movie producer’s house I was decorating on Benedict Canyon — a perfect conversation piece in the high-tech entertainment room.

  “Uh, I’m from Los Angeles,” I said. What would he think if I asked him to sell me his cash register?

  His face fell. “Los Angeles. Too bad. You seem like a nice lady. And that’s a mean town.” He shook his head. “Mean town, Los Angeles. Makes good girls do bad things.”

  Something about his words sounded familiar. Then it struck me. Nora had used almost exactly the same phrase when she was talking to me about Tasha. I tried not to overreact.

  “I heard the folks around here have had some tragedies in L.A. lately,” I said slowly.

  He nodded. “Two girls dead. Theresa, she was the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen. I don’t mean just in Idaho — anywhere. But pretty isn’t everything. She went to L.A. and turned bad. Our Nora did everything she could to put that girl’s head back on straight. And then Nora ended up dead, too.” He put a pudgy thumb to his eye to wipe away a tear.

  Oddly enough, I felt a little lump in my throat.

  “Neither of them deserved to die,” he said, his voice shaky. “But Nora, she’d always been the good one. Too good to die.”

  “I knew Nora,” I said softly. “Kind of a coincidence, but I’d met her twice. I didn’t know the other girl.”

  The man blew his nose. Then he wiped his hand against the leg of his jeans and held it out to me. “I’m Bill Wilson, Nora’s step-father.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Wilson,” I said. “I’m…” Who was I? In these parts, I couldn’t say “Fields” because Dan’s name must be inscribed on the dartboard in the local bar. But I’d had an identity before I got married, too. “I’m Lacy Montgomery.”

  “Pleased to meet ya.”

  “You, too.”

  And then I shook hands with Nora Wilson’s stepfather.

  I expected him to ask how I knew Nora, but another customer came up with a six-pack of Coke and a king-sized bag of Fritos, and I stepped aside to let him pay. Then a woman with Nevada plates on her car shouted from outside that the gas pump was stuck, and Mr. Wilson excused himself and plodded out to fix it. A minute later, he came back in.

  “Ain’t stuck if you just lift the damn lever,” he muttered. “Tourists.”

  I gave a little smile. “We’re everywhere,” I said.

  “I don’t actually mind,” he said, running a not-too-clean cloth across the counter to wipe up some coffee stains. “Keeps this place going. Right now, keeps me going, too.”

  He looked sad, and I nodded sympathetically. I’d spent days on end thinking about the two dead girls, but I’d never considered them quite this way — as the lost daughters of loving parents. However bad my situation right now, it didn’t compare with the pain Bill Wilson must be feeling. You never knew how you’d been blessed until the treasure was lost. Never take it for granted. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer for Grant, Ashley, and Jimmy.

  “This must be horribly difficult for you and your wife. And for Theresa’s parents.” After all my half-baked planning, the encounter with Bill Wilson had been unexpected. And it wasn’t even the meeting I’d wanted. I’d come here hoping to get some information from the other set of grieving parents.

  “My wife’s pretty strong,” Bill Wilson said. “Her faith gets her through. She always spent a lot of time at church, and now I tell her the priest should name a pew after her.” He gave a little smile. “I don’t mind all her praying. We got married when Nora was thirteen, but she took my name and we were family. Her own dad had never been much — he killed himself when Nora was nine. How do you do that to a little girl?”

  “My God, that’s awful,” I said. But we couldn’t discuss it, because business picked up again. A truck driver whose sagging jeans made Bill’s look like they’d been custom fit on Jermyn Street strutted in, demanding two slices of pepperoni pizza. An excessively tanned woman in form-fitting black ski pants and white Ugg boots sidled up to pay for gas and ask where she could get a double skim decaf cappuccino.

  “Closest place’d be Sun Valley,�
� Bill said.

  The woman huffed out, and I gave a little laugh. I could start to like Bill Wilson. Too bad we weren’t meeting under different circumstances.

  When the store cleared and I had his attention again, I decided to give it one more try. “Do you see Theresa’s parents much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The Bartowskis moved away a few weeks ago. All the gossip was getting to them, and they wanted to go someplace where they could start fresh.”

  “What was the gossip?”

  “Oh, you know. What I said before — Terry wasn’t the same sweet girl anymore. She’d had her head turned. Become a whore, if you ask me.” He reached for the half-eaten jelly doughnut that he’d put aside before and scarfed down the rest of it. He dug another one out of the box and wiped the sugar off his fingers with a crumpled napkin. Couldn’t really blame the man for getting pleasure where he could find it right now.

  “Nora visited us right before Terry died. She said evil things were going on, and Terry didn’t even want her around. She’d told her not to come back. You could see it was hurting Nora. She went to church with her mother a few times and talked to the priest. They decided the devil was in Tasha and Nora had to go back and save her. But she never got the chance.” I was afraid he’d start to tear up again, but he didn’t.

  “So Nora was here in Twin Falls when Terry died,” I said.

  “I wish,” Bill Wilson said. “Then I would have kept her home. Never let her go back to that hell place and she’d still be alive. But she’d driven home in her old Jetta, and she said she was going to take her time getting back. She left here a day before the murder. I don’t know exactly when she got there. Maybe the next day after.”

  “And then…” I paused. “What do you think happened to her? How did she end up…” End up dead in the trunk of my car. Tough question to ask.

  “That hell place,” Bill Wilson repeated. “She got sucked into it. Nobody would want to murder Nora, unless it was same person who killed Terry. That doctor, the police say. Or maybe one of the people who’d been corrupting Terry. Who knows. Nora was a saint, but you can’t be a saint in a city of devils.”

  If you believed the newspapers, Dan was the Saint of Hollywood, and if you accepted her stepdad’s word, Nora was the saint of roommates. Now one was dead and one was accused of murder. Maybe saintliness wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  I ate a couple of slices of Bill Wilson’s pepperoni pizza and swallowed some lukewarm coffee, just to hang around the store a little longer. In between customers, Bill told me his wife worked in the church office every afternoon. “If she keeps busy, she doesn’t think about Nora every minute,” he said. He didn’t suggest I stop by. “She cries whenever she talks about what happened. So I say — don’t talk.” His simple solution made a certain amount of sense, though it wouldn’t go over big in L.A., where the answer to everything was three-times-a-week therapy at two hundred bucks per hour (now down to forty-five minutes) for endless talking about what hurt. Of course you could select the mode of treatment — emotive, cognitive, behavioral, analytical, attitudinal, interventional, or hypocritical. No, that was something else. But I couldn’t argue with Bill. God had given us defense mechanisms, so we might as well let them come to our defense.

  I finally got back in my car and cruised around for a while, passing a simple church that might or might not have been the one Nora attended. Little children scampered around a school playground, and a few blocks away, clusters of teenagers hung around a parking lot smoking. The small, well-kept houses on the side streets seemed meager and unimportant compared with the lavish estates in L.A. But basically, we all lived the same life — a house, some schools, children growing up for better or worse. When you lived inside one of those houses, it was the center of the world.

  Growing up, Theresa Bartowski had been one of the little girls on the playground, clambering to the top of the jungle gym and fantasizing about a future where she flew even higher. But pigtailed reveries of Oscar-night speeches and Harry Winston jewels ended in a sordid double death. Nora’s stepdad said Terry wasn’t the same girl once she got to L.A., and I didn’t doubt that. Tasha Barlow breathed her last in the poolside apartment, hoping for a shot at a porn flick. Beautiful, innocent Theresa Bartowski had disappeared from the world long before.

  I sighed. Metaphysical musings wouldn’t carry much weight in a courtroom. Nobody was murdered for a metaphor. Terry/Theresa/Tasha Bartowski/Barlow didn’t die because her dream died. Somebody smothered the life out of her. Maybe she’d abandoned her past, but somebody else had decided she wouldn’t have a future.

  I pulled a U-turn and headed north out of town. A mile up Highway 93, signs directed me to Twin Falls’ big tourist attraction — the site of one of Evel Knievel’s motorcycle jumps. Actually an aborted jump — he’d never done this one. I dutifully stopped in the parking lot and looked down the five hundred-foot-deep gorge, now irrigated and bright green. More notices directed me down the road where I could apparently gaze at the dirt pile that had been planned as the launchpad. Amazing. A monument to something that hadn’t happened.

  I arrived back in the Sun Valley condo before the rest of the family. Half an hour later, clattering in with wet clothes and high spirits, they found me lounging in the living room. Dan stuck his skis against a rack in the foyer and walked stiffly to the sofa. Only the satisfied smile on his face kept me from immediately offering Advil.

  “The best day in the history of skiing,” he said happily, settling in with the hot chocolate I held out for him. “But we missed you on the mountain.”

  The kids cuddled around him, filling me in on their exploits — Grant soaring over moguls, Ashley and Dan cutting perfect turns together, the whole family taking Jimmy down his first intermediate slope.

  “I fell twice, but it’s okay to fall when you’re skiing,” Jimmy said, clearly parroting what the others had told him.

  “You just get up again and keep going,” said Dan.

  “And I kept going,” said Jimmy proudly.

  Ashley’s day had been improved by a dark-haired sixteen-yearold boy who had flirted with her in the lodge during lunch.

  “His name’s Nick, he’s from Manhattan, and he goes to a private school called Dalton,” she reported. “I might visit and go to the junior prom with him.”

  “Dream on,” said Grant, who was leaning against the back of the sofa.

  “No dream. He already text-messaged me,” Ashley said smugly, as if the memo on her Motorola was just the first step to a lingering kiss, a BCBG charmeuse prom dress, and — God forbid — a post-prom breakfast on the beach. I shuddered, wondering when teenage dreams improved life — and when they turned dangerous.

  Grant bent forward to stretch out his skiing-constricted quadriceps, then nimbly touched his toes. “I’m going to shower,” he announced, bouncing upright and doing a couple of waist twists before heading to his room.

  “Good idea,” said Dan. He stood up with just a little creaking in the knees and, despite obviously aching muscles, scooped up Jimmy from the sofa and swung him onto his shoulder. “Come on, champ. Let’s get you into dry clothes.”

  Jimmy giggled happily as they went off, and once all the testosterone had left the room, Ashley took a sip of hot chocolate.

  “Think it’d be okay for me to call Nick? And maybe see him tomorrow?” she asked, swirling the cinnamon stick.

  “It wouldn’t do any harm,” I said slowly. “But just keep it in perspective. If he’s from New York, you’re probably not going to see him very much after that.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Ashley. She licked some whipped cream off the edge of her mug and sat back, curling her legs under her like a contented kitten. Maybe reality didn’t have to be that painful, after all.

  “So it was fun today?” I asked, going for the open-ended question.

  “Almost felt like we were a regular family again.” She sighed. “I wish we could just stay in Sun Valley and forge
t all the awful stuff in L.A.”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  “Daddy seemed happy skiing,” Ashley continued. “You know what I figured out? He wants us to be proud of him. He’s always been the one who saved people and got charity awards and stuff. Everyone admired him. Now all that’s gone. He must feel like less than zero.”

  “He does want you to be proud,” I agreed.

  “I was remembering that night a while ago when we were eating Chinese food and he made a big deal about getting a book contract. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad at him,” Ashley said ruefully. “Mandy says that whenever a boy’s being a jerk, it’s usually because he’s even more insecure than you are.”

  “Mandy’s probably right.”

  “You know, it’s not so easy being me these days,” Ashley said, not quite ready to lose the sympathy vote, “but it’s got to be even harder being Daddy.”

  I shimmied over on the sofa and put my arm around her. Fourteen wasn’t famous as the age of empathy. But she was doing pretty darn well.

  “You’re a great kid,” I said, giving her a hug. “And you’re really growing up.”

  “Think so?” Ashley took a final sip of hot chocolate and looked at me over the rim of the mug. She gave a little smile. “Then maybe I’ll meet Nick tomorrow, after all.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tim Riley agreed to talk to me about Roy Evans and suggested we meet at Club L.A. at 6:15 A.M. If that was the only time during the day that a big-time TV producer didn’t get disturbed, I was game. But five minutes after I dragged myself into the gym, Tim’s Blackberry started beeping. He apologetically thumbed through the e-mails already pouring in, then quickly called a reporter in Las Vegas to say that, yes, he needed his story edited and mixed immediately. He might use it in that night’s show.

  “I know it’s at a strip club, but keep it clean or it’ll never air,” Tim said to the producer. “Network Standards and Practices is now being run by two celibate monks and a kindergarten teacher.”