Crystal Clear

by Jane Heller

  “I don’t see a car,” I said as we rolled past the trailer in the Jeep. “He must not be home.”

  “I told you. He’s probably out hustling,” said Terry. He put the Jeep in reverse and backed it up to the front of Dan’s mobile home. Then he turned off the engine.

  “Now what?” I asked. “We’re not going to just barge in there, are we?”

  “Not this second,” said Terry. “First, we’re gonna snoop around outside.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said dryly.

  The three of us got out of the Jeep and began to prowl around the trailer, constantly looking over our shoulders for inquisitive neighbors, the police, or, God forbid, Dan. We tried the front door, but it was locked. We peered into the windows, but couldn’t see a thing, thanks to the dark curtains. We checked the pathetic excuse for a lawn, but there were no signs of Amanda, only a few cigarette butts.

  “Any ideas?” Terry asked.

  Will shrugged. “It would not be right for us to break in,” he said. “I would not feel right about it.”

  “Neither would I,” I said. “Maybe we could come back later, when Dan’s home. We could ring the bell and invite ourselves in.”

  “I say we break in,” Terry argued. “We know this guy’s hiding something.”

  “I say we come back later,” Will countered. “I have had my own home invaded over the last few days. It is not a pleasant experience. It would be wrong to do to another what has been done to me. No matter how guilty he may be.”

  Terry sighed, patting Will on the back. “I feel sorry for Amanda Reid, wherever she is,” he said. “If she’d hung around, she could have learned a lot from you—like what true spirituality is. You’re the genuine article, Will. And we’ll prove it to Detective Whitehead and whoever else is interested. You’ll see.”

  Will smiled. He was about to respond to Terry’s pledge of support when all three of us heard a noise from inside the trailer—a bang, a thump, something.

  “Maybe Dan is home,” I said, my body tensing.

  “Or maybe he’s got a cat,” said Terry. “Cats knock things over.”

  Then came another thump, followed by a succession of thumps.

  “That’s no cat,” I said.

  “No cat,” Will concurred. “Time to break in.”

  Terry laughed. “Don’t worry, pal. You’re still a paragon of virtue in my eyes.”

  “Same here,” I told Will. Spirituality was one thing; getting the police to believe you didn’t commit murder was another.

  Will found a rock and smashed one of the windows. Then he and Terry found more rocks and cleared away any jagged-edged pieces of glass that would make our entry into the window more treacherous than it already was, as far as I was concerned.

  “See anything?” Terry asked Will, whose head was now inside the window.

  “Only a small kitchen,” said Will. “Nothing special.”

  “Then we’d better have a look around the rest of this palace,” Terry said.

  Will nodded and climbed inside the trailer. Terry went next. He extended a hand to me. “Coming, darling?”

  I looked to my left, then to my right. None of the neighbors had rushed from their mobile homes to accuse us of anything. Not yet, anyway. And even if we were caught and word of my felonious behavior got back to the partners at Duboff Spector, what were they going to do, fire me?

  I grabbed Terry’s hand and let him pull me inside.

  The first thing I noticed as I stood in that poor excuse for a kitchen was that Dan was as bad a housekeeper as he was a dresser. There were dirty dishes everywhere—everywhere, that is, where there weren’t crumbs or candy wrappers or ants swarming around the crumbs and the candy wrappers. And the dust—God—no wonder Dan was coughing and sneezing when Terry spoke to him on the phone. Ten seconds in that kitchen and my sinus passages were as clogged as the Midtown Tunnel at rush hour. Fortunately, I had some Kleenex in my fanny pack and was able to blow my nose and regain partial use of my olfactory nerve.

  Which led to the second thing I noticed: I smelled perfume, one of those heavy scents you can sample on the pages of magazines—the first pages you rip out if you’re as allergic to things as I am. Either Dan was a drag queen or there was a woman in his trailer.

  I was sharing this thought with Terry and Dan when we heard more thumping. My own heart thumped as I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, what Sergei had gotten me into.

  “The sound is coming from that direction,” said Will as he pointed to our left.

  Without further discussion, he crept through the kitchen, around the corner and into the next room, with Terry right behind him and me bringing up the rear. When they both stopped suddenly, I nearly broke my nose on Terry’s back, so abruptly did they halt their movements.

  “Hey! What’s the big—” I shut up when I saw what they saw.

  Yup, it was Amanda. Nope, she wasn’t dead. She was lying face up on what I assumed was a massage table in what I assumed was Dan’s “Reiki room,” and she was bound and gagged, rope around her designer-clad body, duct tape across her collagen-enhanced lips. The thumping noise we had heard were her gyrations—her attempts to wriggle out of her restraints. When she focused on the fact that we were now in the room with her, she grew so excited that she began flopping around on the table like a just-caught fish.

  “I guess we’d better get her out of here before Dan comes home,” said Terry. Will nodded, and the two of them hurried over to untie her.

  “You can pull off her duct tape, Crystal,” Terry instructed me.

  “Okay.” I hesitated as I stood over the squirming Mrs. Reid, the millionaire heiress with the appeal of a fingernail on a blackboard. Part of me wanted to hear the whole story of how she had ended up in Dan’s trailer. The other part wanted to leave the duct tape right where it was.

  Terry glanced at me. “Crystal?”

  “I’m doing it,” I said and ripped the tape off Amanda’s mouth in one clean motion—instant electrolysis.

  She yelled at me. And then she thanked me, thanked us.

  “I never thought I’d be rescued,” she said, as Terry and Will set her free. “Never! I must look a fright.”

  None of us disagreed with her.

  “How in the world did you people know where to find me?” she asked.

  “We’ll go into it later,” said Terry. “First, you’d better tell us about Dan. He kidnapped you, obviously.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, not in the beginning, he didn’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Terry.

  Amanda heaved a heavy sigh, as if it were all too painful to recount. “As you may remember” she said, “I journeyed to Sedona to become more spiritual.”

  “I remember,” said Will. “That is why I agreed to take you to Cathedral Rock.”

  “Yes, and you were sweet to do it, Mr. Singleton,” she said. “But after you left me on that mountain all by myself, I was absolutely out of my mind with boredom and hungry beyond words.”

  “That’s the idea, Amanda,” Terry said impatiently. “Vision Quests aren’t fun and games.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she said. “Nevertheless, I was determined to stick it out, in order to become a spiritual person. And then this man, this Dan somebody or other appeared before my eyes. I was so delighted to have company that I invited him to sit down on my blanket. Heavens, what a mistake!”

  “What did he do to you?” I asked.

  “He looked at me in a rather peculiar manner,” she went on. “He has a problem with one of his eyes, you understand. In any case, he looked at me and then he said, ‘You’re in a bad space. A really bad space.’” She paused to collect herself, as if the memory upset her. “I said to him, ‘I’m sitting in a bad space? You mean because it’s not a vortex?’ Dan said, ‘Your bad space is in here.’ He placed his hand on my chest! Can you imagine the audacity? He said, ‘I can heal you. I do Reiki.’ Naturally, I didn’t know what he was talking about,
so I asked him to explain. He said that he was a Reiki healer, that he had the power to attract energy from the universe and pass it along to me, just by touching me. He said a one-hour Reiki session could do much more for my spirituality than a twenty-four-hour Vision Quest ever could. No disrespect intended, Mr. Singleton.”

  “So you went off with him,” I said. “Of your own free will. He didn’t kidnap you after all.”

  “I’m getting to that,” Amanda snapped. “I asked him how much this Reiki business would cost me. I said that even wealthy women such as myself have to watch our pennies.”

  “You came right out and told him you were wealthy?” Terry asked.

  “I assumed he knew,” Amanda said huffily. “I take it for granted that people recognize me from my photographs.”

  “I’m pretty sure Dan isn’t an avid reader of Town & Country,” I said. “But I could be wrong.”

  “Well, he didn’t recognize me, oddly enough, and so he asked me a lot of questions about myself,” said Amanda. “We sat on that blanket and talked and talked and talked.”

  “About your bad space?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And about my spiritual goals. I confided that my most fervent hopes were to launch my own clothing line, author both a book and a film about my spiritual quest, and have a Web site.”

  A Web site. I was tempted to reach for the duct tape when Amanda finally got to the part of the story where she ended up in the trailer.

  “I poured my heart and soul out to this man,” she continued, “and he promised that for sixty-five dollars—that’s what he charges for a Reiki session—he could guarantee that my goals would be realized. He said all I had to do was come with him, let him practice Reiki on me, and I’d have universal energy. Whatever that is.”

  “So he drove you here,” Terry said.

  “Yes,” said Amanda. “In a rather dilapidated old Ford, by the way. When he pulled up to this unfortunate trailer—please—you can picture my reaction.” She rolled her eyes. “Still, I forged ahead, wanting desperately to achieve my spiritual goals. He brought me into this room, which turned out to be his bedroom as well as his work area, and told me to recline on this massage table. He lit a few candles, put on some of that New Age-y music, and touched me with his hands as he mumbled a few Oriental-sounding words. And then he asked me for the sixty-five dollars, saying the session was over. Over! I was furious! I didn’t feel any more spiritual after he was finished than I felt before I met him! And I told him so!”

  “An argument ensued?” I said.

  “A heated argument,” she said. “I accused him of taking advantage of me. He accused me of reneging on our agreement. Eventually, we came to an understanding, though.”

  “You agreed to pay him half of the sixty-five dollars?” asked Terry.

  “No. I agreed to permit him to kidnap me,” said Amanda.

  Terry, Will, and I exchanged glances.

  “It was a business decision,” she explained. “A bad business decision, as it happened.”

  “Go on,” I said, thinking of what Rona would say when I told her all this.

  “It’s quite a tale, but, in a nutshell, Dan said, ‘Amanda, Reiki’s cool, but if you want the clothing line, the book deal, and all the rest of it, you’ve got to create some major excitement surrounding your trip to Sedona. You’ve got to get the media salivating. You’ve got to be a happening. Otherwise, you can forget the whole Martha-Stewart-of-Metaphysics bit.’ Needless to say, Dan had my attention.”

  “Needless to say,” I repeated.

  “He proposed a deal,” Amanda pressed on. “He said that if I were to disappear from that mountain and let the world wonder if I’d been kidnapped or killed, I would ignite a media frenzy and become front-page news. He said everyone would be speculating about what became of me. He said people would feel affection for me, because of the tragedy, including my philandering husband. He said even I could never buy the kind of publicity I would get from such a plan. The idea was that I would vanish from that mountain and then, miraculously, I would reemerge. ‘The clothing line will be a piece of cake,’ Dan promised.”

  “So it was a hoax. All of it,” said Terry, shaking his head in disbelief. “And you had no problem letting Will take the heat for murdering you, just to get a goddam line of clothes.”

  “It was not a hoax,” Amanda corrected him. “It was a business deal, as I told you. I had planned to give Dan a large sum of money in exchange for keeping me hidden until the time was right. As for Mr. Singleton, I’m truly sorry if he was inconvenienced.”

  “He’s touched beyond words,” Terry answered for his friend. “But there’s still something I don’t get. Why were you bound and gagged when we broke in here? Dan could have kept you hidden without tying you up.”

  “Yes indeed, he could have,” Amanda nodded. “The plan was moving along just fine in the beginning. But look around this dump. Would any of you spend more than ten minutes here? When I walked around and inspected the place, I nearly fainted. The decor! The filth! The food! Dan’s idea of a meal is canned ravioli! And when I asked for a glass of white wine, do you know what the man said?”

  “No,” said all three of us.

  “He said, ‘I don’t have any.’ I was stunned. ‘Not even Chablis?’ I asked. ‘It’s beer or nothing’ was his answer. Well. I realized then and there that the arrangement wouldn’t work. I said, ‘Take me back to my hotel. I’ll give you the sixty-five dollars for the Reiki session and we’ll forget we ever met.’ He became irate. He saw his payday slipping away and he couldn’t take it.”

  “So he decided to go ahead with your plan without your consent,” said Terry.

  “Exactly,” said Amanda. “He tied me to this table, covered my mouth with tape, and let me lie here for days. But now you’ve rescued me, and to show my gratitude I’ll leave you each a nice little treat in my will.”

  “No wonder they all wanted to kill you,” Terry sighed.

  “No wonder who wanted to kill me?” said Amanda, clueless as usual.

  “Never mind,” he said. “There are more important things to settle. We’ve got to get you down to the police station so you can tell Detective Whitehead everything you’ve just told us and clear Will of this bullshit. As for Dan, I assume Whitehead will pick him up and arrest him for something. Did he say when he’d be back here or even where he was going?”

  Amanda considered the question. “You know, Mr. Hollenbeck, now that I think about it, Dan did say where he was going. I didn’t mention this before because I assumed you and he were friends, living in the same town together.”

  “Mention what, Amanda?” Terry demanded.

  “When Dan came back to check on me a couple of hours ago, he mentioned that he intended to pay you a visit. In fact, I actually overheard him telephoning your home to announce that he was on his way over. When he hung up, he marched in here, like the cat that swallowed the canary. He said—and I quote, ‘Well, what do you know? The Jeep Tour guy’s got a kid.’ And then he left.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “If he touches Annie he’s a dead man,” Terry muttered as we raced along 89A, he and Will in the front seat of the Jeep, Amanda and I in the back.

  “Annie will be fine,” I said, trying to calm him. “The police are on their way over to your house as we speak, right?”

  “That’s what Whitehead said,” Terry acknowledged. He had called the detective from Dan’s trailer, the instant he realized his daughter was in jeopardy, and been assured that Sedona’s Finest would arrive at the scene as soon as possible.

  “You see?” I comforted him. “They’ll protect her, not that she needs protecting. She’s much too smart to be taken in by a loser like Dan.”

  “Unlike me, you mean?” asked Amanda, arching an eyebrow.

  “If the shoe fits,” I snapped.

  I was long past making polite conversation with the millionaire heiress; just sitting in the same car with her was a trial. I still couldn
’t get over the story of how she came to meet and be kidnapped by Dan, not even after hearing her tell it a second time, to Detective Whitehead. Never mind that she was vain and selfish and oblivious to other people’s feelings. She was a complete dipshit—the Queen of Dipshits—and I couldn’t wait to shed her.

  I leaned over, into the front seat, and patted Will’s shoulder. “Jean will be fine, too,” I said, knowing how worried he must be about his wife.

  “She and I have been married for fifteen years,” he said wistfully. “She is my family—we have no children.”

  “I have no children,” said Amanda, insinuating herself into the conversation yet again. “And from what I’ve seen of my friends’ children, I consider it a blessing. No children, no trust funds to squander.”

  “Amanda, you must be exhausted, too exhausted to talk,” I said hopefully. “But before you rest your voice, there is one thing I’d like to ask you. How did Dan’s silver-and-turquoise cross end up on the ground at Cathedral Rock? You two weren’t arguing at that point. You didn’t rip it off his neck, did you?”

  “Of course not,” she scoffed. “He ripped it off his own neck, then threw it down—a little showmanship. He was making a statement that material possessions were unimportant to him, that the sixty-five dollars he charged for the Reiki session was only a ‘love donation.’ Love donation, my buttocks.”

  Well, that answered that.

  Everybody was quiet for the ten more minutes it took to get to Terry’s. When we finally drove up to the house, there were two cars parked outside: Will’s beat-up blue Pontiac and Dan’s dilapidated old Ford.

  “No sign of the police,” Terry said tightly as he brought the Jeep to a stop. He reached across the dashboard and grabbed the kitchen knife he’d swiped from Dan’s trailer. “I guess we’re on our own here.”

  The fact that he was brandishing a potentially lethal weapon didn’t thrill me, but I understood his instinct to defend his child—a child, who, for all he knew, was at that very moment in the clutches of an extremely loose cannon.