Vanishing Point

by Marcia Muller

  Hy laughed. “I guess Elwood didn’t assemble in time.”

  “No, thank God, and-”

  The doorbell rang. I stiffened.

  No one seemed to have heard it.

  It rang again.

  Hy nudged me toward the entryway. “Showtime, McCone,” he whispered dramatically.

  Opening the door to Robin and Saskia was, at once, like catching a glimpse of my past and future selves. Robin, with her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, looked much as I had in my twenties, except that she’d recently cropped her black hair, while all my life I’d worn mine on the longish side. In the lines that bracketed Saskia’s full lips and the furrows on her forehead, I could envision how I would look when I reached my sixties. We three shared the same oval facial shape, tilt of nose, medium height, and slender body type; our eyebrows were slightly mismatched, one set a fraction of an inch higher than the other. No one could have missed the fact that we were related, even though Robin and I had different fathers.

  As she stepped into the entryway, Saskia smiled at me and placed her hands on my shoulders. Looking into my eyes she said, “I’m so happy for you.” Then she turned to Hy and hugged him.

  Robin embraced both of us, and I heard her whisper to Hy, “Thank God I’ve finally got a normal brother-even if you are kind of removed.” Then she turned, frowning, to Darcy, who seemed to have shaved his head for the occasion. He hung back on the doorstep, arms folded across his loose black tee, which was emblazoned in red with the word “Roog.” Whatever that was.

  “Well?” Robin said.

  “Uh, hi, Sharon,” he mumbled. “Congratulations.”

  Robin made a clicking sound with her tongue. Although fiercely protective of her emotionally damaged brother, she often ran out of patience.

  I said, “Thanks, Darce.”

  He nodded stiffly, his one long silver earring bobbing. In addition to shaving off the hair that had been purple the last time I’d seen him, he’d also removed all of his facial jewelry except for a small stud in his nose. An effort to appear normal to my family, or merely a change of fashion?

  Hy stepped forward and I introduced them.

  “Darcy,” Hy said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Come with me. You look like you could use a beer.”

  As they walked away, Robin said, “And he wanted to come. Can you imagine how he’d’ve behaved if we’d forced him?”

  “Robin, dear-” Saskia began, but then her gaze was drawn away from her to the archway to the living room.

  Ma stood there, her rigid social smile frozen on her lips. She held herself very erect, her blonde head at an angle that would have seemed haughty had her eyes not been so afraid. I started toward her, but Saskia-recognizing Ma from pictures I’d shown her-moved around me, reaching her in two strides and clasping both her hands.

  “Kay,” she said, “I’m so glad to meet you. You’ve raised such a lovely daughter.”

  Ma’s cheeks went pink, and her eyes showed relief. Her fears, I realized, were not of Saskia’s learning or professional stature, but that she would make a claim on me other than the one that had already been established. But by her words my birth mother-wise woman-had made it clear that she had no such intention. For a moment Ma seemed at an unaccustomed loss for words; then the social smile was replaced by a genuine one and she regained her poise.

  “Thank you, Saskia,” she said. “I think our daughter has turned out quite nicely. Even though,” she added with a dark glance at me, “I often despaired of ever seeing this day.”

  “I understand perfectly. Robin has a very nice young man, but apparently she prefers studying the law to him.” My half sister was transferring from law school at the University of Idaho to Berkeley this fall; she’d be going straight from San Diego to her new apartment there.

  Ma said, “Maybe when Robin does decide to get married she’ll have a proper wedding, rather than running off to Nevada like Sharon.”

  The bonding of the mothers. God help me!

  Robin elbowed me in the ribs and whispered, “The two of them in cahoots is not a pretty sight.”

  Saskia smiled tolerantly at both of us and introduced Ma to Robin. Then they linked arms and went off into the crowd, leaving us in the foyer.

  An hour later Ma found Hy and me in the gazebo-he had left Darcy behind it with Matt, and denied knowledge of any controlled substances being used there-and told us it was time to cut the cake. I squared my shoulders and followed her to the dining room, glad to dispatch what must surely be the last of my bridely duties. Just what I needed to round out my day-a sickly sweet white confection with the consistency of cardboard. I only hoped it wouldn’t be topped by a miniature bride and groom.

  When we entered the room, a woman in a white pastry chef’s coat was carefully placing a red rose on the top tier of an enormous cake covered in the the richest-looking chocolate I’d ever laid eyes on. She turned, motioned to it with a flourish, and I recognized my youngest sister, Patsy.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “You told me you couldn’t take time to attend the reception.” Patsy and her husband, Evans Newhouse, ran three restaurants, and the newest one, in the wine country town of Sonoma, had proved problematical and time-consuming.

  “It was the God’s truth,” she said. “I couldn’t take time because I was back there”-she motioned toward the kitchen-“creating this damn thing. You don’t serve store-bought wedding cake when you’ve got a master chef in the family.”

  At close to midnight, Hy and I had finished unwrapping our three gifts from John and his boys, Charlene and Vic, and Patsy and Evans. Identical baskets full of exotic bath toys from LuvYou.com sat plundered and pillaged on the floor of RKI’s condo.

  “Makes you wonder if they sit around speculating about our sex life,” Hy said, contemplating a package of organic body paints.

  “It makes me wonder about theirs.” The Love Mermaid leered up at me as I tried to figure out what one did with her.

  “Three sets.” Hy looked thoughtful.

  “One for the ranch, one for San Francisco, one for Touchstone. No riding up and down the highways for these babies. Good thing, too. What if we got in an accident?”

  “Yes. As your mother would say, what on earth would the highway patrol think?”

  “Not mother-mothers.”

  “And what would those mothers think about us experimenting with this stuff?” He winked and motioned toward the bathroom, where there was a Jacuzzi tub.

  But before we could try out the new toys, real life intruded: Mark Aldin called to tell me that Jennifer had gone missing.

  Monday

  AUGUST 22

  I left the Cessna in its place in the tiedowns at Oakland’s North Field and walked to where I’d parked my MG, lugging my travel bag and a cardboard carton filled with Laurel Greenwood’s few surviving possessions. From there I drove directly to Atherton, where Mark Aldin was waiting at home for me. Alicia, the maid, took me to the same room where I’d spoken with Jennifer and Mark last week, and he joined me a few minutes later. Red-eyed and unshaven, dressed in a rumpled shirt and chinos that looked as if he’d slept in them-if he’d slept at all-he was clearly distraught.

  “Any word from Jennifer?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Let’s go over what you told me on the phone last night.” I sat down on one of the sofas, but he remained standing, pacing in a continuous, jerky motion in front of the French doors.

  “She left around noon. Said she was meeting Rae at SFMOMA, and that she thought it would do her good to get out of the house. I didn’t want her to go; she’d slept very badly the night before, and I wasn’t sure she should be driving in her condition, but she insisted. When she didn’t come back by eight, I tried to reach Rae at home, but only got the machine there, and neither she nor Rick answered their cellulars. By the time Rae returned my call, it was after ten. She said they’d been in Carmel for the weekend, and that she hadn’t heard from J
en since Friday. Then I started calling around to Jen’s other friends, thinking I’d misunderstood who she said she was meeting. None of them had talked with her in weeks.”

  “And Terry hadn’t heard from her either.”

  “Not since yesterday afternoon, around three. Jen called her from her cellular, complained that we hadn’t had a report from you and that you must be having difficulty with the investigation. You’d emphasized to her that it might take a while, but Jen… patience has never been her long suit.” He ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, flopped onto the sofa opposite me.

  “Sharon, I’m afraid for Jen. I thought launching an investigation would give her some peace of mind, but instead it’s made her even more disturbed. It’s as if she’s become caught up in her mother’s insanity.”

  “I’ve found nothing to indicate that Laurel Greenwood was insane.”

  “Isn’t it crazy behavior to lie about where you’re going, run off God knows where to do God knows what, and leave the people who love you in limbo?”

  “Laurel didn’t lie; she went exactly where she said she was going. After that, we don’t know what happened to her. And Jennifer hasn’t been gone all that long. There may be a reasonable explanation why you haven’t heard from her.”

  “Nevertheless, I’m afraid that Jen is replicating her mother’s behavior for some skewed reason that only she can understand.”

  With a chill I thought of the possibility that had occurred to me on Friday: that Laurel Greenwood had killed herself. Had that possibility also occurred to her daughter?

  Mark added, “I think you’ll agree that for the time being you should drop your investigation into Laurel’s disappearance and concentrate on looking for Jen. We need to get her professional help.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best course of action.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I think it would be better if I work both cases concurrently. Like you, I have the feeling that Jennifer’s disappearance is bound up with whatever happened to her mother.”

  “So that’s where we’re at,” I said to my employees. It was two in the afternoon, and they were all assembled around the table in our conference room, casefiles in front of them. “And it means even more overtime for us.”

  No one protested. They all loved a challenge, even if it meant canceling personal plans.

  “The key here is to prioritize,” I added. “Do all you can for clients with urgent work, shift the non-urgent jobs to our usual subcontractors.”

  Charlotte said, “I tried to give the Ames job to Tamara Corbin, but her agency is swamped, too.”

  Tamara Corbin. The young, enterprising woman had recently become a full partner in my friend Wolf’s firm, and already it seemed natural to think of it as hers.

  “Dunlap and Dunlap are very good,” I told Charlotte, “and there’s also the Newell Agency. Now,” I went on, “Mark Aldin doesn’t want his wife’s disappearance to become public knowledge yet. She hasn’t been gone long, and there may be a perfectly good explanation for her absence. He’s contacted the police in Atherton, and while they-and most other official agencies-are bound by the seventy-two-hours rule for missing persons, they’ve asked the highway patrol to put out a BOLO on Jennifer. I’ve talked with my various contacts at other departments in the Bay Area, and their people will also unofficially be on the lookout. But those of us in this room are going to have a head start on any official investigation. Something triggered Jennifer Aldin lying to her husband and her unexplained absence. It’s up to us to find that trigger.”

  While I was handing out assignments and Kendra was passing around copies of the photograph of Jennifer that her husband had provided me, Rae slipped into the conference room and sat on an extra chair by the wall. I finished with Charlotte, asking her to get a list of Jennifer Aldin’s bank accounts and credit card numbers and check for activity on them, and then ended the meeting.

  Rae stood up and came over to the table. The fog had swept in around noon, enveloping the city in cold and damp, and she was bundled against it in a blue sweater that matched her eyes, her red curls disheveled by the wind off the bay. The sweater fit loosely, and I realized that she’d lost the five pounds of extra padding she’d always complained about. All that hiking, I supposed.

  I asked, “What’re you doing here?”

  “I want to help you look for Jen.”

  “You’re supposed to be home writing your novel.” She’d told me she had an October deadline.

  “It’s not going well. In fact, I’m blocked. They say that happens with second books sometimes. Ricky’s down in L.A. for a couple of days, and I need a distraction. Better to be doing something to find Jen, rather than sitting around worrying about her.”

  I considered. Rae had been a damn good investigator, and I could use all the help I could get. “Let’s sit down and kick some ideas around, then. From what Mark tells me, you’re one of the few people Jennifer’s remained in touch with.”

  “I am. Her other friends… well, I guess they just got tired of hearing about her obsession with her mother.”

  “But you’ve stuck by her.”

  “I don’t give up when a friend’s in trouble. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do. The two of you talked on Friday?”

  “Yes. She called in the morning, concerned because she hadn’t heard from you. I told her that the investigation would probably take time, assured her that you’d be in touch when you had something to report. But frankly, I don’t think she listened to me.”

  “How did she seem?”

  “Frustrated. Overly emotional.”

  “I’ve got Patrick, Craig, and Julia interviewing her other friends and clients. Charlotte’s checking on her credit cards and bank accounts. But this doesn’t feel like one of those situations where she’s just checked into a motel to brood. You have any idea where she might’ve gone? A special place, maybe?”

  “She and Mark have a second home near Tahoe-”

  “He asked a neighbor who has a key to check it; she hasn’t been there.”

  “His sailboat? It’s berthed at the St. Francis Yacht Club.”

  “One of the first things he thought of. No.”

  An uneasy look crossed Rae’s face.

  “What?” I said.

  “Well, there’s the flat. But I called there last night and went by first thing this morning and again before I came over here. No sign of her.”

  “What flat?”

  “Jen has this place that Mark doesn’t know about, here in the city, where she sometimes goes to be alone. It’s in one of those big old Victorians on Fell Street, across from the Panhandle.”

  The narrow wooded strip that extends some eight blocks from the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park. “She goes there to be alone?”

  “Yes,” Rae said firmly. “To be alone. Not to meet men, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I wasn’t. But can’t she find space to be alone in that big house in Atherton? Or at their Tahoe place?”

  “Shar, to understand her, you’ve got to understand Jen and Mark’s relationship. He’s a nice guy and he loves her, but he has a big ego, big needs. Sometimes it gets to be too much for her and she has to escape.”

  “Explain these big needs.”

  “Nothing unusual for a high-powered guy. He just wants her to be there for him twenty-four seven. Ricky can be like that, but it’s okay for us because the record-company business and his performing keep him away from home a lot of the time, and I can work then. But Mark does most of his work out of his home office, and Jen has her studio on the property; when Mark wants attention, he feels free to interrupt her whether she’s working or not, and she feels she has to drop everything. They also have a busy social life-exhausting, I’d call it. So, once a week she tells him she’s taking a class or meeting a friend or a client, and goes to the flat to work on her textile designs in peace.”

  Just as her mother had gone on day trips to paint
.

  “And she told you about this place that she keeps secret from her husband. Why? So you could cover for her?”

  Rae frowned. “You sound so judgmental.”

  I guessed I did. I liked Mark Aldin, and the idea of Jennifer deceiving him that way bothered me. But I’d learned long ago that you shouldn’t attempt to judge a relationship that you don’t live inside of. “Sorry,” I said. “But does she ask you to cover for her?”

  “No. I found out about the flat by accident two months ago-one of those odd coincidences. I’d parked right in front of the building and walked a few blocks to the DMV-naturally, their lot was full-to renew my driver’s license. When I got back to my car, Jen was coming down the steps, and I called out to her. She was so shocked at running into me that she couldn’t come up with an excuse for being there, so she invited me inside and explained.”

  “And you believe her story?”

  “I have no reason not to.”

  “Well,” I said, standing, “I think we’d better go have a look at this flat.”

  The block of Fell Street where Jennifer Aldin rented her flat was lined with tall, narrow Italianate Victorians, most of which were broken up into three units. Across from them the forested Panhandle was cloaked in mist, and in between traffic rushed by on the busy crosstown route.

  Rae parked her new BMW sports car in front of the building and motioned at the second story. “That’s Jen’s, the one with the blinds drawn.”

  I got out of the car and looked up at the bay window. Maybe it was some trick of the light, but even from this distance it looked as if the place were empty, perhaps abandoned. When Rae joined me on the sidewalk I asked, “Does she have garage space, or park on the street?”

  “The day I ran into her, her car was out front. Both times when I was here today I drove around, but didn’t spot it.”

  I studied the entrance, up a steep flight of steps from the street level. Three doors, each with an iron security gate across it. “Well, let’s ring the bell and see if she answers now.”