Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  "I'm not going to work," she said in answer to my question. "I called in and told them I'm taking a personal day."

  "Thanks," I said. She had turned on the portable television, and Channel Seven in Austin was broadcasting Brian's and Jacoby's photos and a plea for information. I turned away, not wanting to look. "What do you suppose iguanas and tarantulas eat?"

  We debated the question and decided to experiment with raw hamburger and lettuce, which I took upstairs and left in a saucer near Einstein's drape and on the floor of Ivan's terrarium. Einstein no longer looked malevolent, just lonely. Tarantulas are even more inscrutable than iguanas, but I thought Ivan looked lonely, too. Just being in Brian's room made my heart hurt, and I didn't linger.

  It was a morning for telephoning, on McQuaid's fax line so I wouldn't block incoming calls. Just after eight, I called Matt and reported what Sheila and I had found the day before. He didn't seem surprised.

  "I guess none of this is important any longer as far as you're concerned," he said. "After what happened to your kid, I mean. I saw it on the TV news last night." His voice was tight. "I wish to hell I'd never sent McQuaid off on that wild-goose chase. If he'd been here, this might not've happened. You tell him to hightail it on back."

  Blackie and I had talked about this. After my wakeful, remorseful night, I'd voted for calling McQuaid first thing this morning. Blackie wanted to hold off until evening, and I had finally given in.

  "The sheriff says to give it another twelve hours," I said. "If Brian hasn't turned up by tonight, I'll ask McQuaid to get the first plane out tomorrow morning."

  "Fair enough," Matt said. "Anyway, I've about decided that Jeff s gone for good. We'll probably never hear from him again."

  My second call was to McQuaid's hotel in Acapulco. I breathed much easier when he didn't answer the phone in his room, and left a message with the switchboard. I hung up, feeling glad that I hadn't had to talk to him and guilty for feeling glad.

  The third call was to Justine Wyzinski, a lawyer in San Antonio. Justine and I had been friends at law school at the University of Texas. Well, not friends, exactly —more like friendly enemies. The other law students called her The Whiz because she always came up with the right answer faster than anybody else. They called me Hot Shot because I tried like the very devil to beat her. After a couple of years of this competitive craziness, we both made Law Review, which blunted our rivalry and allowed us to relax into a wary friendship. I called on The Whiz a few months ago when Dottie Riddle got into trouble over her cats. I called her now, when / was in trouble, and sketched out what had happened. With The Whiz, you don't have to fill in a lot of details. She gets the picture very fast.

  "I need you to locate Brian's mother for me," I said. "I have to talk to her as soon as possible." I gave her Sally's name and the only address I had. "Her home phone's disconnected, and she's quit her job."

  "The news has been on TV, I take it."

  "Yes," I said. "It's probably in the newspaper, too. But she'd call me the minute she heard, and she hasn't called. See what you can do, would you?"

  "No sweat, Hot Shot," The Whiz said briskly. "I'll find the mom, you find the kid. Fair trade, no charge. Okay?"

  "Okay," I said, and hung up with a sigh, wishing I could be more like The Whiz. She has the great knack of reducing the problem to its simplest terms and making the solution seem easy.

  By the time I finished with this string of telephone calls, Ruby had arrived with the Missing Child flyers from Quick Copy, my herb conference pictures from Fox Foto, and a bag of jelly doughnuts from the Doughnut Queen.

  "Did you hear anything from Ondine?" she asked.

  I shook my head. "Did you?"

  "Not a word," she said. She held up the bag of jelly doughnuts. "Breakfast, anybody?"

  Ruby and Sheila and I installed ourselves at the kitchen table and plotted the morning's strategy. It was not quite as complicated as the landing at Normandy, but almost. Ruby would drop off flyers at the newspaper and radio stations and with a dozen friends, who had agreed to post them in all the small communities in the area and take them to the local radio stations. Sheila would use Mc-

  Quaid's computer to go on-line with Internet's Missing Child network. I would stay by the other phone, which had only rung once in the last hour, with a call from the Enterprise.

  It rang again and I grabbed for it, my heart pounding. Jacoby wasn't the kind of man who would just take Brian. He'd have to call and brag about it, have to make it hurt even more. But when he called, he'd give away his location. Surely this was him. Please, God, make it be him.

  But the number on the LCD was the shop's number and it was Emily on the line, calling to say she was sorry about Brian and to ask what to do about the air-conditioning.

  "Work it out with Laurel, would you?" I said. "I really can't think about it right now."

  I hung up the phone and tuned back into the kitchen-table conversation. Sheila was telling Ruby that she had a friend who worked with the Runaway Hotline, who might know something about the best way to search for missing children. Ruby was telling Sheila that her cousin JoAnne once coordinated a search for a little girl whose father took her to Canada instead of to the circus, where the mother thought they were going.

  As they talked, I reached for another jelly doughnut, and was momentarily distracted by one of the photographs Ruby had brought back from the photo shop. It was the picture I'd taken on Saturday morning: a group of smiling herbalists standing between the new fountain and a very crooked rosemary. The photo was perfect for a "What's Wrong With This Picture" caption in a gardening magazine. The rosemary had been stuck into the ground at an angle, so hastily and incompetently planted that the burlap root wrap was still intact. It could even be seen above the surface of the soil, bunched around the

  plant's trunk and held in place with a wire. Somebody really ought to dig up that poor rosemary and straighten it. I tucked the photo into my purse, with the thought that it would remind me to ask Matt to have it replanted.

  "Well," Ruby said finally, "I guess I'd better get going." She looked at me. "You'll be all right?"

  "I'll be fine," I said. "As fine as I can be, anyway." I hugged her as she headed out the door, the flyers under her arm.

  "Have courage, China," she said, and touched my cheek. "We'll get these posters up this morning. Somewhere, somebody's got to have seen them. Maybe we'll get some news this morning."

  But the morning wore on, and there wasn't any news. Sheila and I cleaned house (a woman's antidote for worry), made a batch of Brian's favorite cookies, and listened for the phone. Every time it rang I rushed to answer it; every time it rang I was disappointed. At noon, we fixed sandwiches and ate a few of Brian's cookies. I was washing up the dishes when the phone rang again. I looked at the LCD. It was not a number I recognized, so I started copying it as I reached for the receiver. I almost didn't recognize the voice, either, because it was so tense and raspy. The caller was Carol Connally.

  "I need to see you." I could hear the clamor of children's voices in the background, and she raised hers over the din. "I've been talking things over with my sister. She's convinced me that I can't go on with my life until I get this thing settled."

  "We've got a family emergency here," I said. "I need to leave this line open. Let me hang up and call you back on another line." I went into McQuaid's office and dialed the number I had copied down. Carol picked it up immediately.

  "I can't go into this over the phone," she said, when I asked her why she'd called. "You'll have to come to Austin."

  "I can't," I said bleakly. "My son's been kidnapped. I have to stay by the phone."

  "Kidnapped!" she exclaimed. "You mean that was your kid I heard about on TV this morning?" She paused, suspicious. "Wait a minute. I thought you said you didn't have any kids."

  "I live with his father," I said. "That makes him my son.

  It was an epiphany for me. For the four years McQuaid and I had been together, I'd always t
hought of Brian as bu son, a kind of weekend rent-a-kid whose antics livened up the picnics and kept things from getting too serious. But now he was my son as well, and the recognition brought raw, sharp pain. I loved him, I was responsible for him, and I didn't know where he was or even whether he was still alive. All my muscles were knotted up, and my throat hurt.

  She sounded resigned. "Well, I guess if you can't come here, I'll have to tell you over the phone. The thing is, it sounds so unreal, like I'm making it up. Sometimes I think maybe I am. Like maybe I dreamed it, and it didn't really happen." Her voice was thin, reedy. "Maybe you don't want to hear it anyway, with this kidnapping thing. You must be crazy with worry. I know I'd be, if somebody grabbed one of these kids. Maybe they're not technically mine, but I love them like — "

  "Please, Carol," I said. "I don't have a lot of time."

  She cleared her throat, seeming to pull herself together. "It's about Jeff."

  "You don't have to be afraid of him," I said patiently. "I told you. He can't hurt you. He's in Mexico."

  Her sigh was long and. trembling. "I'm not afraid of Jeff," she said sadly.

  And then she told me what she'd seen on Friday night when she was working late, and I understood what had happened. Not all of it, by any means. There were still a couple of big holes and quite a few little ones that had to be plugged, but I knew the basic outlines. The question was, where did I go from here?

  I was still sitting at McQuaid's desk, trying to reconstruct the narrative sequence of events in my mind, when the phone rang in the kitchen. I jumped up, but before I took two steps, Sheila was yelling.

  "China! China, it's Brian!"

  I ran. In a few seconds, I was snatching the phone from her fingers. "Brian! Where are you? Are you okay?"

  His voice was a whisper, as if he didn't want to be overheard. "I'm scared, China. Come and get me. I want to come home."

  "I'm on my way, honey," I answered fiercely. "Where are you?"

  "I'm at the — " There was a sudden scrambling noise and Brian gasped.

  "No, don't!" he cried fearfully. "Oh, no, please, don't hurt — "

  The connection was broken.

  "Brian!" I cried helplessly. "Brian!"

  Sheila was waving a scrap of paper. "I've got it! I've got the number, China!"

  The prefix was 512, which meant that Brian was calling from somewhere within driving distance. I dialed it with shaking hands. The female voice that came on the line was crisply efficient. "Town Lake Hotel."

  Town Lake? That was Austin. A hotel? I was momentarily blank. "Ub, do you have a guest by the name of Jacoby?"

  "Transferring to Guest Registration," the voice chirped, and my ear was filled with Musak. I sat with my jaw clenched, clutching the receiver as if it were a lifeline keeping me from going over the falls. A young and less efficient male voice, noticeably Texan, drawled "Howmi help ya?"

  "Jacoby," I said. What was his first name? "Jake. Jake Jacoby. Do you have a guest by that name?"

  More Musak. "Sorree, there's no Jacoby registered here." The voice was blithe.

  My stomach turned over. "Look," I gritted, "this is an emergency. My eleven-year-old son just phoned me from your hotel. He's wearing a maroon Star Trek jersey and Mr. Spock ears, so he shouldn't be too hard to spot. Have you seen him?"

  The voice chuckled. "Have I seen him? Ya don't know what's happenin' here this afternoon, ma'am?"

  "No," I snapped. "What's happening there?"

  "A Star Trek convention, that's what. This place is jammed with kids in maroon jerseys and pointy ears."

  Sheila called Blackie while I pulled on clean jeans, found my sandals, and ran a comb through my hair. I grabbed up my purse, and Sheila and I ran out to her yellow Mustang. When we got to the intersection of Limekiln Road and 1-35, Blackie roared up behind us with his light bar flashing and siren shrieking. The Jeep Cherokee passed us as we got onto the interstate, and Sheila pushed the Mustang hard to stay with it. I picked up Sheila's mobile phone and dialed the Cherokee.

  "Thanks for responding so fast," I said.

  "I've alerted the Austin PD," he replied tersely.

  "They'll have two uniforms waiting for us at the hotel."

  "Good. That means we can split up. Sheila and I will look for Brian, while you and the cops can go after Jacoby."

  Blackie cleared his throat. "The Austin police agreed to treat this as a kidnapping, China, but I've got to tell you, I have my doubts. Brian called from the hotel where they're having the convention. It sounds to me like the kid just took off and caught a bus."

  "But there was blood," I objected. "A lot of it. We all saw it. If Brian wasn't hurt, where did it come from?"

  A moment of silence. "The lab report came back this morning," Blackie said finally. "It wasn't real blood. It was fake."

  My heart flopped. I was remembering how I'd been conned by Arnold's nail-through-the-finger trick. I'd almost had the kid in the emergency room before I realized it was a mail-order gag. But still, something inside me couldn't accept the idea that Brian had faked a kidnapping-

  "Look," I said. "I can imagine Brian hitching a ride to the convention with one of his buddies, but I can't believe he'd stay away all night without letting me know where he was. And there's the phone call. He was scared. I could hear it in his voice. That wasn't faked."

  "We'll see when we get there, I guess," Blackie said, and broke off.

  "What was that about?" Sheila asked, her eyes intent on the road. The traffic was heavy on the six-lane highway, but Blackie's light and siren were clearing the fast lane ahead. The Mustang was doing eighty-five.

  I told her about the fake blood.

  "Shit," she said.

  "Yeah," I said. "But I don't believe Brian faked it. He wouldn't do that." "Then who?" "Jacoby?"

  "Maybe," she said doubtfully.

  "There's something else," I said, and told her about Carol's call. That kept us busy until we swung off 1-35 onto Riverside and Sheila had to pay more attention to driving than to talking. In a couple of minutes, we were hanging a right onto Congress, crossing the bridge, and making two more quick rights under the hotel canopy, where an Austin police car was already parked, waiting. Two uniformed officers got out just as we drove up. Blackie, Sheila, and I consulted with them briefly, and then we separated. Sheila and I went into the main lobby, while Blackie and the police went through a service entrance.

  The Town Lake is an older hotel, remodeled often over the years, the lobby resplendent now with imitation Persian carpet, dark paneling, overstuffed sofas, and crystal chandeliers. A sign directed us to the rear foyer, where I was brought up short by a six-foot-tall full-color cardboard stand-up of Lieutenant Worf with some sort of weapon aimed at my chest. Recovering, I was greeted by a scowling, flesh-and-blood Worf with walnut ridges on his brown forehead and lots of dark facial hair. He was wearing a gold and black jersey with a spiffy gold sash spangled with medals and ribbons. He was seated behind a table, taking money.

  "Fifteen dollars," he said in a guttural voice, and growled "please," apparently out of respect for human niceties.

  "I don't want an admission ticket," I said. "I'm looking for my son. He's been kidnapped." I pulled out Brian's photograph.

  "No kidding." The Klingon grimace might or might not have been a smile. "Fifteen bucks."

  Sheila's face hardened. "I'm a law officer," she snapped, pulling out her official ID. "This is a police emergency." Unfortunately, her identification showed that she was a campus cop. The Klingon smiled again, showing strong, malevolent teeth.

  "And I'm the security officer of this starship, lady. Fifteen apiece, or we'll beam you back to your home planet."

  I pulled out my wallet. "Let's stop wasting time," I said, and took out a ten and a twenty. The transaction resulted in two large lapel buttons, numbered, two boarding passes, and a forty-page convention guide. As these items were being assembled, the Klingon male was joined by a Klingon female, wearing a gold leather jerkin with a m
etal pentagram hanging around her neck, a short black skirt, black stockings, and black leather gauntlets studded with bits of silver.

  I thumbed hastily through the guide. "If I were an eleven-year-old kid," I said to the Klingon, "where would I be?"

  I was assuming that Brian wasn't bound and gagged and locked in a closet —in which case, we would have to do a room-by-room search to find him. That would mean a warrant, which would mean even more time. My breath caught as I remembered the fear in Brian's voice when he was pleading not to be hurt. Had we already run out of time?

  The Klingon scratched his rippled forehead, amiable enough now that we had paid up. But it was the female who spoke up. "Is he a trader?"

  I was blank. "A trader?"

  "Like, you know, cards."

  Cards! Of course! Only a few days ago — only a few? it seemed like a century — Brian had been in hot pursuit of a Mr. Data hologram card.

  "If he is," the Klingon male said helpfully, "the dealers' room is that way." He jerked a heavy hand to the left. The back of his hand bore the tattoo of a coiled snake.

  I stared at it, jolted by a new idea. Was Jacoby a Klingon? Was that why he had brought Brian here? It seemed to fit with what little I knew about his personality. It —

  But Sheila was grabbing my arm. "Let's check out the dealer's room."

  The first door down the hall to the left opened onto a ballroom-sized space filled with rows of tables that were spread with a chaos of intergalactic merchandise: sweatshirts, books, cassette tapes, weapons, toys, starship replicas, Trekker costumes, jewelry, and so on. It was peopled by a bewildering assortment of aliens, Druids, Starfleet personnel, and small children in Halloween costumes.

  "God help us," Sheila breathed.

  "Let's hope so," I said. "Otherwise, we may never find him."

  Sheila and I stopped at the first card dealer's booth and I took out Brian's photograph.

  "I'm looking for this boy," I said. "He's wearing a maroon jersey, Spock ears, and he's trying to find a Mr. Data holgram card."