Vanishing Point

by Marcia Muller

  We climbed the steps. Rae indicated the door in the middle, and I pressed the buzzer. The bell rang above, a hollow sound. I pressed again, and again. No response.

  I said, “I don’t suppose she keeps a spare key hidden out here.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s look.”

  A large rubberized doormat covered much of the marble floor. I lifted it, peered underneath. Nothing. I then turned my attention to the big potted jade plants to either side, went over and tipped one. Nothing under it. I felt around in the pot, but came up with only fallen leaves and dirt.

  “Check the other,” I said to Rae.

  She tipped it. Beneath lay a key.

  I picked it up and slid it into the gate’s lock and it turned. One chance in three, and we were in. I hesitated, debating the situation. Even though Jennifer was our client and her husband had asked us to locate her, we’d be committing criminal trespass.

  Rae pushed my hand away from the key. “Jen gave me this spare so I could keep an eye on the place.”

  “Oh yeah? And what if she’s hiding out in there and decides to contradict that statement-to the police?”

  “She’s not there. I can feel it.” She turned the key and opened the gate. Unlocked the inner door and stepped inside.

  Ahead of us a steep staircase rose to the second floor. Musty air came to my nostrils, smelling of old carpet and dry rot. I followed Rae, shutting the door, and we climbed to a long hallway that ran the length of the building. Off it were several closed doors and an archway that opened into the front room. Rae called out to Jennifer, but there was no reply.

  I went through the archway, found a living room with a small gas fireplace and an armchair with stuffing leaking from tears in its maroon upholstery. Nothing else.

  Rae said, “That chair must’ve been here when she rented the place; Jen would never own anything that shabby. The time I ran into her, she took me directly back to the kitchen and dining area at the rear, where she had a drawing board set up.”

  I backed out of the room and went to the first door off the hallway. A bedroom, empty. The next led to a bathroom with a claw-footed tub and pedestal sink, the one after that to a smaller room containing only a toilet-standard arrangement in flats of this vintage and type. Another empty bedroom, and the hallway ended at the kitchen. It was old-fashioned, with outdated fixtures and high wooden cabinets whose top shelves even a tall person would need a ladder to reach. It looked as if a wall had been knocked out between it and the space where the drawing board sat. That, a stool, and a blue canvas chair were the room’s only furnishings.

  I said, “Why would she rent a place this big, if she only planned to come here to work?”

  Rae shrugged. “The building’s old and in poor repair; maybe the rent was cheap.”

  “No rent’s cheap in San Francisco, and I doubt that would’ve been a consideration, anyway.”

  “Well, she did say something about the light being good in this room.”

  I moved around the kitchen, examining its few contents: a tumbler and a wineglass in the sink, a couple of plates in one cabinet, a few pieces of cutlery in a drawer, a corkscrew on the countertop. The stove was old, its oven encrusted. The fridge held nothing but a half-full bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a carton of milk with a two-week-old sell-by date. The remaining cabinets were empty of anything but mouse droppings.

  Why had a woman of Jennifer Aldin’s means rented such a dismal, depressing flat? How could she possibly stand to spend time here? Why, if she needed a quiet place to work, hadn’t she rented a light-filled loft in SoMa? Or an attractive apartment in one of the city’s many new high-rise buildings?

  Rae was standing at the drawing board. I went over, and she pointed to the large sheet of paper spread there. It was a charcoal drawing: arcs that formed a series of parabolas that flowed one into the other. In the large, central one was a woman’s face, and when I leaned closer I recognized it as identical to the newspaper photograph I had of Laurel Greenwood. And at each corner of the sheet, in smaller parabolas, were figures: two little girls and two men. The faces of the girls and one of the men were well drawn, but the other was a question mark.

  Jennifer, Terry, and Roy. And another unidentified man.

  Whatever her reasons for renting this particular flat, Jennifer didn’t come here to work on designs. She came to try to make sense out of what had happened to her mother.

  “Jesus,” Rae said, “she’s worse off than any of us suspected.”

  “Apparently. How long ago did she rent the flat?”

  “She said six months, but now I’m wondering how truthful she was with me.”

  “We’ll have to find out who owns the building, get the details.”

  We were on our way back across town to the pier. Rae, always a fast driver, was working the gears as if she wanted to punish the little car for her friend’s possible betrayal.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “You don’t want to get a speeding ticket because you suspect Jennifer wasn’t completely candid with you.”

  She eased off on the accelerator. “I just don’t get it, Shar. Maybe she’s really gone crazy, like Mark keeps saying.”

  “Maybe.” But my thoughts were taking another tack. “You know Mark pretty well, right?”

  “Well enough. He and Ricky are close. Sometimes I tease him-Ricky-about how two such enormous egos can possibly fit on Mark’s little sailboat. Ricky says he has to leave his on the dock, otherwise they’d sink.”

  “How did Mark and Jennifer meet?”

  “Through a mutual friend, I think. Why?”

  “I’m just wondering about the marriage. He’s a good bit older than her, and they really don’t seem to have much in common.”

  “Well, I suppose there is an element of the trophy-wife syndrome there. Mark likes to show her off, and she is an asset in his business socializing.”

  “Mark handles a lot of money. Is in a position where he needs to maintain the trust of his clients.”

  “Yes. I’d say he handles billions. And is worth millions himself.”

  “What about Jennifer? Is her business successful?”

  “She does pretty well, charges big fees for her designs, but she’s not in Mark’s league.”

  “So he wouldn’t stand to benefit financially if something happened to her.”

  “Well, I suppose there might be a substantial life insurance policy on her, but it would be nothing compared to- What are you getting at, Shar?”

  “Okay, Mark would not benefit in a major financial way from her death, but if the clients who place their trust in him were to hear that his wife was behaving irrationally, that he couldn’t control her, it might have a negative effect on his professional life.”

  Rae almost ran the red light at Seventh and Howard. She slammed on the brakes, throwing both of us forward against the seat belts, and turned to me, blue eyes wide. “You think that Mark engineered this disappearance?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m just tossing out a possibility. You’ve got to admit it’s an interesting scenario: wife’s mother disappears years ago under suspicious circumstances; wife begins obsessing over mother, becomes a liability. Wife disappears, probably because-and these are Mark’s own words-she’s caught up in her mother’s insanity; husband no longer has to contend with her obsession and its possible negative effects.”

  Someone beeped behind us. Slowly Rae put the car in gear. “Mark loves Jen,” she said.

  “According to whom? Jen? Ricky? You? How well does anybody know what anybody else really feels?”

  Rae was silent.

  My phone buzzed. I pulled it from my bag, answered. Terry Wyatt, calling from her sister’s house in Atherton.

  “Any progress on locating Jen?” she asked.

  “I’ll know more after my staff meeting at five. You’re staying at the Aldins’?”

  “Yes, but my husband’s at home, in case Jen tries to contact me there. I don’t think t
hat’s likely, however; we argued when we spoke yesterday.”

  “About…?”

  “This obsession of hers, of course. She was carrying on about Mom’s cousin who died when we were little, Josie Smith. Said she thought Josie had something to do with Mom’s disappearance. When I told her it was a ridiculous notion, reminded her that Josie died a full year before Mom left, she got very dramatic and secretive. Said there were things I couldn’t understand because I hadn’t been there.”

  “Been where?”

  “That’s exactly what I asked her. When she wouldn’t explain, I kind of-no, I did lose it. I told her she’d better grow up and get some professional help for her problem.”

  I tried to recall the death date for Josie Smith that Derek had supplied me. It had indeed been a full year before Laurel’s disappearance. “Maybe Jennifer meant that the shock of losing Josie prompted your mother to disappear.”

  “Realize life is too short, dump everything and everyone, start over, you mean? I don’t know; I was too young to gauge how much or how little Josie’s death affected her. But if it was traumatic enough to make her want to bail on us, why would she have waited a year? And why all the drama on Jennifer’s part?”

  Good questions, both of them. I told Terry I’d phone her after the staff meeting and ended the call.

  Rae had been glancing anxiously at me as I’d been talking. She said, “That was the sister?”

  “Yes. Apparently Jennifer has concocted a conspiracy theory involving a dead woman.”

  Nearly ten that evening. I was on the couch in my sitting room, the box of Laurel Greenwood’s possessions open at my feet. I had a fire going against the chill of the fog and a cat slumbering on either side of me. Ralph and Alice, happy to have me home. A vase of orange gladiolas, a card reading “Congratulations!” propped against it, sat on the cedar chest I used as a coffee table. Michelle Curley, teenaged neighbor and guardian of the pets and premises in my absence, knew how to win points with her clients-even if her mother was going to give her hell about picking the flowers from her carefully tended garden.

  I sighed and closed my eyes. They felt dry, tired. Maybe I should try some of those drugstore reading glasses for close work…

  The staff meeting I’d called for five o’clock had run over two hours. Charlotte had come up with no activity on Jennifer’s credit cards and bank accounts. The field interviews with her friends and clients had proved inconclusive; all they really accomplished was to confirm that Jennifer had been out of touch with everyone except Rae. As I listened to the verbal reports, I was struck by the similarities between what people had said about Jennifer and her mother: both were described as talented, professional, reliable, a good friend, and by all appearances as having an excellent marriage.

  After I’d shifted some assignments and adjourned the meeting, Patrick, Rae, and I called out for a pizza and held a brainstorming session. We concluded that Rae should look into the particulars of Jennifer’s renting the flat on Fell Street and Patrick should continue coordinating our findings.

  I called Derek at home and asked him to dig further into the backgrounds of the two men who had lied to me in Paso Robles, Jacob Ziff and Kev Daniel. I would continue to delve into Laurel’s past, flying back to the central coast for follow-up interviews with Ziff and Daniel later in the week, and also try to see the Magruders upon their return to Morro Bay.

  Tonight I’d begun looking through Laurel’s possessions: handmade birthday, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day cards from Jennifer and Terry; a fifth-wedding-anniversary note from Roy, saying it was redeemable for “one hot screw” at the bearer’s request; Laurel’s diploma from San Jose State and other professional certificates; a framed photograph of Laurel, Sally Timmerman, and an attractive redhead who must be Josie Smith, all in their late teens and posed in front of a small Airstream trailer-the infamous “bordello.” There were dozens of letters from people whose names had not come up in the background on Laurel, but which seemed innocuous and had made for uninteresting reading. She’d saved programs from church and PTA events she’d helped organize. A newspaper picture of the Greenwoods on the occasion of the tenth-wedding-anniversary party Sally and Jim Timmerman had given them at the Paso Robles Inn showed a handsome couple; Roy was very lean, with chiseled cheekbones and wavy brown hair and a brilliantly white smile-a good advertisement for a dentist. And then there were the usual souvenirs: playbills and ticket stubs from productions that had run here in the city over twenty years ago; programs from sports events; a map of Yosemite National Park with a Tuolomne Meadows campground circled in red; mementos of various family-oriented tourist destinations. And photographs, dozens of them, of the four Greenwoods on those vacations.

  What was interesting to me was what was not there. Personal letters of the intimate kind I remembered exchanging with distant friends in the age before e-mail. A diary or journal. Mementos of her parents or sister, Anna. Her own school papers or report cards. Any evidence of any man before Roy came into her life.

  Well, maybe Laurel hadn’t been a letter writer. Or kept a diary or journal. Maybe Anna had held back the family and school mementos. Maybe, as he had her paintings, Roy had destroyed anything from her former lovers.

  Or maybe, if Laurel had deliberately disappeared, she had taken the important things with her, leaving behind what didn’t matter.

  Cards from her children and family photographs didn’t matter?

  Cold, extremely cold.

  Of course, if she’d deliberately disappeared, she was cold.

  I made a note to ask Anna Yardley if there were any more things of Laurel’s in existence, and then turned my attention to the last item in the carton, her postcard collection.

  It was contained in a small wooden file box, the kind that women with more domestic inclinations than me use to store recipes. A bundle of cards nearly three inches thick. I took out the first, saw it was addressed to Laurel in a bold, slanting hand at the Greenwoods’ home in Paso Robles. Just an address, no message. Its postmark was five years before her disappearance, roughly a year after Terry was born. I checked the postmark on the last card: two weeks before her disappearance; they must be arranged in chronological order. Then I began examining them from front to rear.

  First mental health day: Cayucos. Ironic that it was the same as her final destination. Second: San Simeon. Third: Cambria. Fourth: Morro Bay. Then she’d ventured inland: to Santa Margarita Lake, San Miguel, and Guadalupe. And on it went, with no seeming pattern, the destinations ranging farther and farther away. After four years the mental health days came closer together, from once or twice a month to once a week. I wondered if Roy had noticed the increased frequency; certainly the girls’ babysitter had. And I wondered why Laurel hadn’t sent postcards from here in the city when she came to visit her cousin Josie. Maybe the cards were only allowed on her solitary getaways.

  Pismo Beach, Orcutt, Oceano.

  Lompoc, Lake Nacimiento, San Luis Obispo.

  Shell Beach, Sisquoc-

  And then a card with a message. A photograph of the pier in Cayucos and a postmark a day after the disappearance.

  Roy-

  Please don’t notify the police that I’m missing, or look for me. It’s no use. I ask only that you and the girls remember me as I was, not as I have become.

  Laurel

  Deliberate disappearance, then.

  In spite of the fact that I’d suspected it all along, I felt shaken and saddened. Angry, too. Laurel Greenwood, loving wife, mother, and friend, had abandoned everyone she’d supposedly loved.

  Given the circumstances of her marriage, I’d felt a certain empathy for Laurel Greenwood, but now it was gone. It wasn’t in my nature to connect with someone who could so calculatedly abandon all the people who cared about and depended on her-particularly her young children. What Laurel had done to her family and friends raised echoes of what my brother Joey had done to ours: gone off, infrequently maintaining contact by postcard, and then committ
ing suicide.

  Laurel’s actions, in my eyes, were worse than Joey’s, because they were so clearly planned. And because of the uncertainty of her fate, they had created an even more widespread and damaging ripple effect of pain and grief.

  Suicide is the absolutely worst thing a human being can do to those who love him or her. It is unforgivable. The second worst is a coolly calculated disappearance.

  So here was the trigger that had caused Roy to burn Laurel’s paintings. And to call off the police investigation.

  The evidence had existed in this box for twenty-two years, undiscovered by Anna Yardley because, as she’d told me, she’d never looked through Laurel’s things. Placed there by Roy, out of chronological order where no one would find it. I pictured him taking the card from the mailbox, reading her words, and-once the shock wore off-slipping the card into the collection.

  But why keep it? Why not destroy it along with the paintings, rather than hide it in Laurel’s “legacy” to Jennifer and Terry?

  Simple-he’d wanted them to eventually know the truth.

  My own father had done a similar thing: collaborated with Ma in keeping the fact of my adoption from me, but stored the official documents in a box of papers he’d known I would be responsible for going through upon his death. The discovery had shocked me, sent me on a wild quest that, fortunately, had culminated in new, rewarding relationships. But nothing rewarding would come of Roy’s bequest to his children.

  Nothing but disillusionment and devastation.

  Tuesday

  AUGUST 23

  “So are you going to tell Mark Aldin and Terry Wyatt about the postcard?” Patrick asked.

  “Not yet. They’ve got enough on their minds. I won’t mention it until we locate Jennifer, and maybe not then.”

  It was ten in the morning, and we were seated on the floor of my office, files strewn around us, a big flowchart that Patrick had constructed spread between us. The chart impressed me: each line of investigation was delineated in a different color of ink, and it looked as if he hadn’t omitted a single piece of information. Questions and theories were jotted and circled in the margins. If only my mind were that orderly…