The Bluest Blood

by Gillian Roberts

  And where was Griffin? Why had he phoned Jake? Where had those boys driven?

  I stood in the checkout line watching my bill add up, but I was concerned about the things that didn’t add up. There’d been too many of them this past week.

  And yet, there were rules of cause and effect. Everything ultimately made sense—once you knew enough about it. Right now, pieces rolled around at large while the connection, the center link, was missing.

  I wrote a check and the cashier summoned the manager, who nodded gravely and signed off on it. Yet another unsolved mystery. What did that second person see on that check that the cashier didn’t? What made him approve it?

  I drove home, still absorbed in a futile attempt to connect the dots. Somewhere, somebody knew who had wrapped Harvey Spiers in straw and cloth, and why. And somewhere, somebody knew why—I wouldn’t even let myself think a name, I wouldn’t accept the obvious—somebody knew why, when he heard and felt his car hit a human body, he fled. Or worse, knew why he deliberately ran down Neddy Roederer and left him to die.

  And then, all I could think of was of not thinking. Of home and a nap and forgetting, at least temporarily, all of them and their complicated woes. I was too tired to decide whether I was a part of the them that was in trouble.

  Seventeen

  I slept precisely one hour and sixteen minutes before I awoke from unpleasant reruns of earlier, overpopulated dreams. Everyone was whispering, unintelligible messages—Mackenzie, Mr. Rochester, my mother, Dr. Wonderful, plus a new cast member, Neddy Roederer. This time, my mother was carrying what I’d thought was a dead body, but was merely pants and a jacket. That’s what jolted me awake—a maternal reminder, even while I slept.

  I was supposed to be at the seamstress’ who was altering a suit I’d bought at a secondhand store. How had my mother known that when I’d forgotten?

  I sat up, awake and guilt-raddled and convinced there were entirely too many things I didn’t understand.

  The pantsuit, of course, wasn’t ready. The seamstress’ cat had been ill and in need of surgery. I should have phoned instead of coming over, she said. I walked back toward my place, hoping Mackenzie would surface with a workable idea as to how to salvage this weekend. I considered possibilities as I crossed the street—until the blare of a horn at my side so terrified me that I levitated, arms flailing, like a figure out of a Chagall painting, if Chagall were having a really bad day.

  “Amanda!” a voice called, but I was too busy palpitating to identify the source. Or care. Earthbound again, I scuttled to the curb.

  The blare of horn again. “Amanda!” the voice called, and this time I turned and saw a hand waving from the driver’s side of a sizzly-blue car that had reduced my life span by at least five years. “Didn’t mean to scare you!” Loren Ulrich shouted. “Just wanted to catch your attention.”

  “And that you did,” I gasped, my hand to my chest.

  He pulled into a loading zone. “I need to talk with you.”

  I bent and looked in the car. “Where’s Jake? What are you doing here? And how did you know where I’d be?”

  “One at a time?” He tried for a grin, but failed. “You showed me where you lived, remember? We drove past after we dropped your—uh, Mackenzie, off.”

  We had.

  “I didn’t know where else to go. Betsy’s hysterical. I don’t even know if there’s a problem.”

  “Meaning?” Talking into a car is distinctly uncomfortable, and definitely undignified. My back whined. “Is Jake all right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I don’t know where he is. When I got to the police station, he was gone.”

  “Gone? Didn’t they question him?”

  He shrugged. “I was a little late, and meanwhile, some aunt of his came for him. A name I’d never heard of. Did Harvey have a sister I don’t know about?”

  This was not the day to ask me about the extended families of strangers. I stood up straight. “Why don’t you find a parking space? I’ll wait here.”

  He had an expression of desperate pleading—as if I had magical answers that would save him and the day. He’d been late, is what I’d registered. Had once again failed to do the right thing by his son. Betsy had been correct in her prediction. That made me still angrier.

  I waited a goodly amount, but I didn’t put that in Loren Ulrich’s column of offenses. It wasn’t easy finding a spot on a clear Saturday when winter seemed finally willing to go on hiatus. The promised rain wasn’t happening and the air was chilly but fresh. The street swarmed with people exploring the nearly forgotten sensation of not fighting the elements.

  Finally, I saw Loren walking toward me at a pace that was either leisurely or hesitant. He dragged a lumpy fabric bag. Jake’s pack. Which reminded me of its owner and its owner’s father’s incompetence, and made me angry all over again.

  “I couldn’t help—” he began, as he moved within earshot.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Wait till we’re upstairs. I want to hear this through. I need to make sense of it.”

  He was silent until I unlocked the front door and we were in the loft. “Nice,” he said. “Really nice.”

  Which it was. The airy spaciousness was accentuated by our lack of furnishings. But we did have an oak table that served as dining room, emergency desk, and whatever else was necessary. Mackenzie’s computer was on it, along with the morning paper, still folded, and the full bag of groceries, plus the mail I’d picked up on my way in the first time. I gestured toward the ladderback chairs and he sat down. I moved aside the litter, both electronic and not. Loren dropped Jake’s backpack to the floor and looked as if he, too, would like to lie there inertly.

  “What happened?” I put water on to boil. It seemed the thing to do in a situation that felt fraught. With hot water, we could have coffee, tea, or a baby.

  “I rented the car,” he said.

  I unpacked the grocery bag. “Horrible color.” Irrelevant, yes, but I was in a mean spirit and it’s so easy to wound a man via his car, even when it’s a rental.

  He shrugged. “It’s what they had. I went directly from the rental office to Radnor, but I got lost, so I was late. They must have rushed him in and out.”

  “Hold it. Lost?”

  “I had a map, but those roads are insane. One crossed a creek, I swear. You drove directly into the water. I couldn’t believe it! I backed off, tried another route, got all lost, and finally drove through the creek.”

  I knew that road, had grown up with it and its odd situation. It was a practical road, the shortest line between two points. A wet line, true, but such a trickle of a stream that constructing a bridge to ford it would have been pretentious. Very un-Philadelphia. But an idiosyncratic road wasn’t the point. “Lost!” I repeated. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. Long, maybe.”

  I sat down and silently counted to ten. Only then did I dare ask. “Did you ask directions?”

  He contorted his mouth and bobbed his head forward in male body language that translated as: Ask? Do you take me for the kind of man who can’t hack himself out of the wilderness? You can ask. You’re a girl. But not when I’m around.

  “What is it with men?” I stood up. The kettle made asthmatic sounds. So did I. “The woolly mammoth wouldn’t get you if you’d admit you’re lost! The—”

  “I read the book, too,” he said. “It’s stereotypical, it’s stupid.” He looked at me sternly. “And it’s what I did. Or didn’t do. Can we move on? When I finally found the place—and it is amazingly obscure for a police station, like you should just know where it is—Jake was gone. Gotten a ride from the woman he said was his aunt.”

  “Said?”

  “He doesn’t have one that I know of. Betsy has a widowed brother in Tennessee and a bachelor brother in Oregon. I’m an only child.”

  Why was I not surprised by that last fact?

  “And I don’t think Harvey has—had—family outside Canada. Betsy never hinted that he
did. Plus, the aunt was black. Who was she?”

  “You have a name?” I filled a glass teapot with hot water and put in the tea infuser. I forgot to ask if that’s what he wanted, and when I remembered, I didn’t really care. “Aunt who?”

  “Margaret Pail or Pael or maybe it was Paet—they just turned this book around for me to look—they were pretty busy, or acting like they were. I couldn’t make it out. Only a P and a tall letter at the end and vowels in between. I thought for a minute—hoped that somehow, Margaret was your real name and that you wrote Pepper in an idiosyncratic way.”

  That would be interesting—a dyslexic English teacher.

  “He phoned her.”

  “Then we have two good pieces of information. They can’t think he’s criminally involved in the hit-and-run or they wouldn’t have waved him off that way, and we can assume he wasn’t kidnapped. He went voluntarily.”

  “But why? I told him I was coming to get him. Why didn’t the kid listen? Why didn’t he wait?”

  He looked earnest and confused. I waited for him to reach the obvious conclusion, but his head-shakes and expression indicated ongoing befuddlement. I poured us both cups of tea and pushed the sugar bowl and creamer into his sight line. He didn’t react.

  I didn’t see the point of stating the obvious. That would be cruel.

  Then he muttered about irresponsible teens, and I lost the last of my charitable patience. “I’ll tell you why he didn’t wait.” I kept my voice level by dint of admirable self-control. “He didn’t wait because as far as I know, you have never shown up when you promised to. At least five different times this school year Jake told me about plans he had with you. You were coming to Philly to visit, meeting him in New York. Once you had tickets to a game in Pittsburgh, and you were sending plane tickets. I can’t remember the rest, but—”

  “Do you realize how erratic my schedule is?”

  “Real estate emergencies? Last minute scoops? Give me a break.”

  “I have deadlines, a column. I cover for people. That’s how it works there. I never deliberately set him up. You don’t have children, you don’t know what it’s like to—”

  “You’re right. I don’t know that—but I do know your son, and I know why he didn’t wait for you. Because I suspect there were more than the times he told me about. After a while, he stopped going public with those plans because he was mortified when they didn’t pan out. Today he didn’t know how or where to reach you, and everything he did know indicated that you once again weren’t going to show up. That you meant to, but something interfered. And by golly, Loren—it did. Did you call the police station when you were lost? Did you tell somebody you were on your way so they could tell Jake?”

  He exhaled so loudly it was like a snort. “I didn’t want to waste time, make myself even later looking for a phone. And I didn’t know the number of the station, and—”

  “And he left. He didn’t want to say that his dad is a flake, his mother an hysteric, so instead, he called somebody reliable.”

  Loren had ruddy patches high on his cheekbones. “What do we do now?” he asked in a low voice. “He didn’t go home.”

  “We find him. What’s in his backpack?”

  “I didn’t look. It’s Jake’s. It’s private, it’s—”

  I had already retrieved it. My rules of privacy are strict but shallow. If you are so private that you disappear, then the only rule left is: Whatever Works. “Maybe it’ll have a clue as to who Margaret is.”

  If it did, it was buried within an aromatic mass including worn socks, each wrapped around one of the china animals. They were actually fanciful boxes, Limoges china, and as Jake had said, pure fun. The St. Bernard opened at his neck, and inside was a tiny spare keg. The grinning cat opened between her teeth. I also found a paperback on computer graphics whose contents included “Three-D Data Visualization! Digital Image Manipulation! Advanced Morphing! Blobs!”

  High time “Blobs!” got excited recognition.

  And papers. Lots of them. “More of these damned unsolved mysteries.” He pulled out a dog-eared sheaf held together by an oversized green paperclip.

  On top, I saw the now familiar pale-faced embezzler. I didn’t think he had much to do with Aunt Margaret.

  “Look at these,” Loren said. “A kidnap in Missouri, the disappearance of middle-aged twin women.”

  I shrugged.

  “An empty Navy blimp that crashed in San Francisco in 1942.”

  Like father, like son. How could he question Jake’s interest in old crimes when he was detouring into them himself? “Loren,” I said. “Your son is missing.”

  “What else can I do about it? I am surely not going to call the police on him! It was your idea to investigate—this is all we have to go on.”

  “A blimp accident more than fifty years ago can’t be—”

  “The parachutes were inside, but no people. Never found them, either.” He spoke rapidly—the words didn’t matter. He simply didn’t want to allow space for thoughts about his son’s disappearance. “Like the Mary Celeste.” He sounded like a tape on the wrong speed. “The ship floating in the Atlantic back in the eighteen-hundreds with all its passengers vanished. Remember?”

  I did not, but I imagined the story had appeared in countless boys’ adventure stories.

  “Look, a notebook,” I said. Both of us eagerly grabbed for it. I let Loren turn its pages, waiting for a revelation.

  I might as well have waited for world peace. Or Godot. We found sketches—one that looked a whole lot like the principal, Maurice Havermeyer, wearing a dunce cap and writing I will learn to speak English over and over on the board. We found brief passages—quotes and wisdom as revealed via hip-hop. We found checklists concerning the digitalization of the photo of a donkey. I feared finding out for what that was intended.

  But we didn’t find Margaret, an M or even a phone number with no name attached. In short, nothing. “If not her, I’d hoped to find something that might take us to Griffin,” I said.

  “Why? We’re looking for Jake,” Loren snapped.

  I wasn’t going to tell him all my reasons for wanting Griffin around. “Griffin might know who Margaret is. Might be with her. Where else would Jake go? Where is Griffin? I’ll bet Jake knows. In fact, what if Griffin wore a disguise, pretended to be Aunt Margaret in high heels and a wig—”

  “Doesn’t he have facial hair? Wouldn’t he look ridiculous? Don’t you have to show ID? And Margaret was black.”

  “It was just a…” It had indeed not been meant to be taken seriously, but having said it, I gravitated back to it, feeling as if I needed to touch the idea again, get something from it I’d missed.

  “Just a what?”

  I shook my head, held up a hand while in my brain, a frantic voice repeated, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute!” So I did. And then I had it—via Griffin, friendship, wigs, Limoges boxes. “I don’t know who Margaret is, but I think I know where Jake would have asked her to take him.”

  Loren stood up. “Tell me.”

  I stood up, too. “Have your map-reading skills improved dramatically in the last ten minutes? Or your ability to ask directions?” I started refilling Jake’s pack.

  “Do you think he’s in danger?”

  “Not at all.” I didn’t want to touch Jake’s socks again, let alone put the china cat and dog boxes back into them. Instead, I pocketed the objets d’art and finished repacking. “He went to the only friendly place he knows. Knew. But they don’t know you, and you are not Canada’s answer to Lewis and Clark. You need a guide.” I put the pack over my shoulder.

  “You?”

  “You see somebody more qualified?”

  “All right, all right!”

  We made our way to Loren’s appalling car. “It’s the color of electrocution,” I said. “It buzzes.”

  “I told you, it was the only—stop picking on it.” He opened one screamingly loud door. “Hurry up,” he said, when I wasn’t in my seat qu
ickly enough.

  “Get this,” I said, when I realized I had no idea whether Loren Ulrich was a competent driver. “There’s no danger. No emergency. No need to speed or be reckless.” This radioactive car would be stopped immediately if it were speeding. I closed my eyes, but the blue shriek of color remained on my retina. “No rush,” I repeated. “I wonder what they put in the paint to make that blue so painful.”

  “How can you know Jake’s safe?”

  “You don’t want me to talk about your car’s horrible color?”

  “It’s moving, right? The color of a car doesn’t matter.”

  Color. The color of a car. That was it. And it could matter.

  “You never said how you know where he is,” Loren said. “I’m not a chauffeur, I’m his father. Don’t you think I’m worried, don’t you—”

  “It doesn’t take a Sherlock. Jake’s resources and options are limited. I’m sure he wants to comfort Tea Roederer. Her husband’s dead, and the poor woman thinks her adopted son murdered him.”

  “Didn’t he? Accidentally or not—what more evidence do you want? His car had blood on it.”

  “That’s just it. The color of the car is wrong.”

  “For Christ’s sake! You have an obsession with paint jobs!”

  “Last night Jake told me Griffin was driving a black car. They wanted to disappear, you see. But Griffin’s car is that washed-out, unattended, dull-finished, rusted-up no-color. A junker.”

  “Interesting,” Loren said. “But if he had taken one of his family’s other cars, they’d have noticed.”

  “I didn’t say he did. Other times, he did. But not last night when he was leaving for good. That would make the car too easily traced. I think he stole a car. It’s the only thing that makes sense, but Jake didn’t know what to do with that. Griffin didn’t commit manslaughter, because he was not in his car when it killed his adopted father. But he did commit grand theft auto. Jake wasn’t about to tell the police, at least not last night. All the same, I’ll bet he wanted to tell Tea Roederer, to set her mind at rest a little, tell her that things aren’t as completely bad as she thinks. An act of kindness. He likes her, and she was furious with him last night. As well she might be. I think he wants to begin to make amends.”