Pretty, but not drop-dead. Not weird, not nervous, as they approached her. No eyes averted, no hunched posture or awkward giggles. Too self-confident to have been cast as pariahs or losers, but probably not the reigning queens of their class, either. The great bulge in the bell curve of adolescent possibilities. Which suggested that Penny Redmond was also nice-normal. Except nice-normal didn’t include running away the second semester of senior year.
She picked out the French braid as Rebecca and allowed herself a flash of smugness when that girl moved forward, taking leadership. The flash ended when the girl spoke. “Becca says you’re looking for Penny, right?”
So much for Billie’s ESP. The tawny port girl nodded, setting her cornrows jiggling, and tilted her head, waiting. Billie smiled greetings to Becca and nodded at the girl who’d spoken. “I was hoping you’d be able to give me information about her. I figured you guys would know what was really going on in her life.”
They wrinkled brows and looked at each other. “You police?” the French braid asked. “Could I see identification?”
“I’m not the police. I’m an investigator. A private investigator.”
“A PI,” French Braid said. “Cool.”
Billie couldn’t tell if that was praise or a put-down. “This isn’t a criminal matter. Penny’s eighteen. She can move out, quit school, whatever. But that doesn’t mean her parents aren’t worried about what’s happened to her.”
“Her parents,” Becca said. “Worried.” Words delivered in the teenage flat tone that implied complete, stunned disbelief.
“No?” Billie noticed the girl with the Joan of Arc hair shivering. “Listen, it’s cold. Is there somewhere we could go to get a soda, talk more comfortably?”
Becca shook her head. Billie wondered if she’d picked the hairdo because it reacted so nicely to her tendency to move her head, or if she’d developed the emphatic head-shaking to draw attention to the braids. “I have to get back. We’re rehearsing. Missy has to get back, too.”
“And me,” Joan of Arc said. “I’m stage manager.”
Billie wanted them to know that she’d been an actress, she’d been there, knew how wonderful-awful the rehearsal process was. Wanted to see a flash of recognition, of kinship, but instead, she said, “My car’s right here. It’d be warmer. I can turn on the heater.”
They nodded and filed in, four in the back, giggling over the squeeze, the partial overlaps, the girl with the bob up front with Billie, who swiveled to face Rebecca. At Billie’s request, they identified themselves. Dru in red hair, Becca in cornrows, Missy in French braid, Cara in the dark waves, and Anne as Joan of Arc.
“I wondered if you could tell me about her. What kind of person she was. Interests. Things like that.”
Almost as one, they shrugged and looked to each other for inspiration.
“She wanted to be an actress,” the girl with the black hair said. “To be famous. I know you have to have a passion to be a success in the arts and all, but she kind of overdid it for a long time. And then, boom, she didn’t even go out for this play, so I don’t know what she meant. She said she was coming to tryouts, but she didn’t.”
“I liked her better last year,” Becca said, “but it wasn’t like we were close or anything, even then. Not that we were enemies, but I was wondering why Mrs. Redmond gave you my number. I didn’t think she approved of Penny hanging with me, my being a dark-skinned girl and all.” She laughed as she drawled out her last few words.
“Then with whom was she close? Whom might she have confided in?”
Becca shook her head. “Like I said, she was real private this year.”
“A snob is more like it,” Dru said. “Called everything ‘babyish.’ She meant us, too.”
“Private,” Becca repeated. “Way more than she used to be.”
“Like nobody here was really, really interesting enough to pay attention to.” Dru was not about to give up her take on the missing girl. Nor was she or anyone providing any help in finding her.
“Do you think it might have been because she was involved with this guy?” Billie asked.
“What guy?”
“I was hoping you knew. She went off with a guy in a yellow hearse. Strike any bells? Did you see that car around?”
“There really was a guy?” Dru said. “We thought…”
“To tell the truth,” Becca said, “I don’t think Penny ever would have met him here—if she met him anywhere—where everybody could see.”
“Whyn’t you admit it?” Cara said. “If she did tell you something, you couldn’t count on its being the truth.”
“She…exaggerated?” Billie suggested.
“You could call it that.”
“Or lying.”
“Harsh,” Becca said.
Cara shrugged. “Why’d he have to be a secret, then? I mean, like from us? Why should any of us believe her—this time? Her true love. Really!”
“Her parents,” Becca said. “Really strict on her. She was probably afraid they’d find out.”
“Did she ever say a name?” Billie asked, but without consulting each other, they all shook their heads. “Does the name Stewart mean anything?”
This time they did check each other out before shaking their heads, then they muttered about a long list of boys named Stewart who were, however, the same age or younger than the missing girl. Plus, nothing mysterious. Plus, “in relationships anyway,” or “just too geeky to be a possibility,” or “maybe gay.”
And within minutes, they reminded Billie that they had to get back to play rehearsal. She wrote down their names and phone numbers, gave them her number and asked them to please call if they heard from Penny or remembered anything that might be at all helpful.
She thought she saw one of the girls flip the business card she’d handed her into the first refuse basket she passed. But maybe that was a trick of the light.
She shouldn’t be depressed or feel defeated. Even Emma had talked about slogging around, getting no results for a long time. But she’d been so set for a quick breakthrough. Her First Case, after all. Or second, if she had to count the surveillance, which she chose to think of as a warm-up exercise that didn’t count. But this was for real and with her first day gone, all she’d learned was that the missing girl needed a good haircut and was a liar.
On the other hand, maybe she should be depressed.
Eleven
People were incredibly stupid, Emma thought. Which was good news for her. She’d never entirely lack for business because human beings would inevitably, irresistibly screw up, lie, cheat, pose, and, in general, wreak havoc. And at some point during that process, someone who still believed life could be brought into alignment would want help from a person like Emma.
She drove along Route 80 from Sacramento, past stretches of tract homes that looked dropped from above, possibly onto the cows that till recently had been the only inhabitants, toward the East Bay urban sprawl. The latter mess was appealing because it meant home was over the bridge a few miles ahead. Her back ached for her chair—“nothing more than an impression of your butt with ugly upholstery,” her daughter had said three years ago, the last time she’d deigned to visit. Emma found the insult apt and endearing, and now she thought with yearning of the butt-chair and a cold beer, feet up while she wrote her report on the laptop. And then if she could find one, her favorite lullaby, a subtitled foreign film on TV.
Meanwhile, she worked on getting over personal disappointment about Glenda Walker, self-declared candidate for change, popularly known as Glenda the Good. Glenda was the advocate of everything compassionate. Perfect for her North Bay electorate. And furthermore, she was a newcomer to politics—a citizen-candidate with no prior elected office. She was what everyone wanted—a politician who wasn’t one. Luckily, in addition to intriguing ideas, she also had a husband who’d made millions in software and who doted on and bankrolled her, so she was not accepting any special-interest money. She was even photogenic and had
photogenic kids. A pure-gold candidate, Emma would have said.
Except that, having been hired to check up on her, Emma now knew that the woman was either overly sure or pathetically unsure of herself. One or the other impulse had prompted her to invent a past. To lie about items so easily checked, they weren’t worth the effort of fabrication.
Touching Glenda’s dossier was like grabbing an overripe peach. Emma’s fingers slipped straight through its rottenness.
Glenda was not the Phi Beta Kappa grad of U.C. -Davis her press releases and shiny-paper pamphlets claimed. She was an idiot. Why lie about that when university records showed that Glenda Arnold had never completed her degree, let alone been honored for scholastic excellence?
And, of course, this revelation prompted Emma’s employers, the gleefully disloyal opposition, to request further examination of her résumé and past life. Past lives had turned out to be more like it. Nothing criminal, but one more marriage and child than she’d chosen to mention and two fewer positions than she’d claimed to hold. She had indeed worked at those agencies, but as an office temp, not exactly the policy-making position she’d presented on her résumé. Automatic upgrades via frequent liar coupons, as Emma put it. At one point, her excellence at word-processing won the heart of her employer, Mason Walker.
Unfortunately, in order to acquire Mason, Glenda had had to shed an inconvenient pre-existing husband who was delighted to talk to Emma and the world about Glenda. And to detail why he’d been granted sole custody of their child (that person being another omission on her curriculum vitae).
Emma had a sick sense that Mr. Walker knew nothing about either his predecessor or his wife’s first child, and that all this news was going to result in something much more than an aborted run for state office.
The damnedest part of it was that if Glenda Walker really believed what she preached, she’d have made a great candidate and nobody would have cared about a missing Phi Beta Kappa key. Nobody had to be as smart as she’d pretended to be.
But neither did anybody—not even a senator—have to be that stupid. California didn’t need another double-talking, truth-twisting dummy lawmaker.
In any case, while Emma had lost a candidate, she’d gained a loyal client for a job well done.
She reached the span, paid, and waited to see if this toll-taker would break the San Rafael–Richmond Bridge’s code by uttering a civility. Not that she was hoping for the Golden Gate’s toll-taker effervescence. After all, in the waterbound, bridge-rich Bay Area, this was the stepbridge, the unremarked joining of two outposts of The City. No postcards showing refineries on one side, San Quentin on the other. No songs about this bridge. The desperate were never so overwrought as to commit suicide off it, make it the last thing they saw and touched. No wonder the toll-takers took a vow of silence.
As had this one, who took the bills as if they were tainted. Emma wondered whether these workers were recruited for their sourness, indifference, and lack of curiosity. Or maybe they were all burned-out former PIs who’d examined and questioned too much. Matter of fact, the more she thought about it, the more appealing the taciturn toll-taker’s life seemed. No office to maintain, no overhead. No bumbling hires. On a clear day, they even had a view across the Bay to the soft contours of Marin.
She, on the other hand, felt dizzy with problems. Wherever she pointed on her personal horizon, she saw something askew and worrisome.
Like Billie. Bright and eager, but, bottom line, she’d totally botched her first job. Beginner’s luck was supposed to be good, so what did that presage except even worse performances?
That job was over, but tonight she’d give it one last shot, write the company, find an excuse for her office’s incompetence, try to hang on awhile longer. Maybe she could say the video camera jammed, the investigator got sick, or…
Toll-taking looked better and better.
She reached the end of the span and approached San Quentin, the biggest waste of real estate in the universe. Why reward hardcore prisoners with a view across the Bay to San Francisco’s lights and towers? They could relocate the inmates, put ranges and hot tubs in the cells and sell them for millions.
Who had Saint Quentin been, anyway, and what had he done wrong to have his name used this way?
And then the saint was forgotten as she approached the futuristic ferry landing under its canopy of struts and skylights awaiting the return of waterbound commuters. A better way to get places than the road, for certain, as witness the bottleneck directly ahead.
When she crept forward a hundred feet or so, she saw the reason. A dead deer halfway across the freeway entrance, its neck twisted out of all its living elegance. Poor stupid beast. Nearly a century to grasp the concept of motor vehicles, but the lesson wasn’t taking.
George, her companion, her lover, her whatever, thought cars and deer represented the new Darwinism. “What else kills them, anymore?” George asked. “The mountain lions’ comeback is too little, too late.” It was illegal to harm a deer, except in the brief hunting season—although hunting wasn’t allowed anywhere locally she knew of. Deer were reviled and protected. In fact, Meatloaf, a neighbor’s Golden Retriever, had bitten a deer that later died, and although any idiot could see that Meatloaf had not brought down the animal—that it must have been ill and near death before encountering the old, bandanna-wearing dog—despite that, Meatloaf was on probation as a deerkiller. One more injured or maimed animal near his mouth, its owners were told—one more set of matching tooth prints—and Meatloaf would be history.
Meanwhile, the deer, the PLO of Marin, insisted that they’d never relinquished their ancestral lands. Which didn’t make the sight of the startled, stiff and still-beautiful carcasses less upsetting.
She finally made her way around the dead deer and onto the freeway, and once again returned to eager anticipation of home and ease. Her chair, her beer…
Which was when she clearly remembered drinking the last beer in the house the night before. She was too tired even to feel as annoyed as she wanted to. Just get thee to a market. The nearest one. United. Right off the freeway. Ah, yes. Sophia Redmond’s daily stop for veggies. That woman was a tedious pain in the butt.
She backed into a parking slot and tried to remember what else her pantry lacked. Bacon, she decided. For the hell of it. Her cholesterol was low, her weight satisfactory, but George s wasn’t. Even at this age, level of mutual tolerance, and nonexistent legal bonds, even with all that going for them, coexistence with the opposite sex remained complicated. While she pondered the ethical ramifications of George’s blood chemistry versus her taste buds, the door of the car in the handicapped space against the curb opened and a cane emerged, followed slowly and heavily by none other than Sophia Redmond, grimacing and moving with a stiff-backed, glacial pace. A martyr to the need for fresh vegetables.
Her performance deserved an Oscar. Emma’s pulse accelerated. She waited until Sophia stiffly inched her way into the store before she herself bolted out of her car, opened its trunk and retrieved the always-present video camera. Then she rummaged through her briefcase until she found an unused piece of yellow lined paper and her pen. SORRY ABOUT THE DENT! she wrote in block letters. GOOD THING IT DOESN’T LOOK TOO HARD TO FIX. OR TOO EXPENSIVE. I DON’T THINK THE THING HANGING DOWN IS AN IMPORTANT PART, AND I’M SURE THEY CAN MATCH THE PAINT. IF I HAD A JOB I WOULD PAY YOU, I SWEAR, BUT TIMES ARE TOUGH. GOD WILL PROVIDE AND BLESS YOU AND FORGIVE ME. End of message.
She smiled at her prose as she walked to Sophia’s car and put the note under a windshield wiper. Then she postponed buying the beer and lolled in her car, hands folded across her chest, fighting the urge to doze in the late-afternoon sunshine. She imagined Sophia slogging through the aisles, asking everyone for help. I’m hurt and deserted by my daughter. Could you get that can of soda off the top shelf for me?
Finally, there she was again, using the shopping cart as a walker, her cane protruding from between two paper bags. Emma sighed with gratification
, slid lower in her seat so that the video-cam rested on the dashboard and was barely visible, and watched.
Sophia wheeled her cart to the car, then, seeing the note under the wiper, stopped, took the cane out of the cart and slowly made her way to where she could retrieve the paper. She read it, frowned, glanced at the driver’s-side door, near where she stood, then looked left and right. Then she read the note again, her expression darkening. Once more, she looked around, this time, not at her car, but at the parking lot, searching for the dent-maker.
Emma started the videotape as Sophia examined her front bumper, bending low to one side, and then the other. She made her way around to the back of the car where, standing tall, she looked down at the trunk and twisted to see the bumper. After another quick look at the parking lot, she was miraculously and totally healed so that she was able to do a deep knee bend, straighten up, bend from the waist, then lean over and crane her body left and right. She could have led a yoga class. Having thoroughly searched for the dent and found none, she stood up, brushed off the knees of her slacks, and briskly repeated the drill on the other side.
Emma controlled the urge to laugh out loud. She didn’t want to contaminate her tape with the same childish behavior Billie had shown. Sophia was demonstrating enough flexibility and balance for a career in ballet.
Finally, confused and enraged, Sophia ignored her cane altogether and without so much as a grimace, hoisted the two bags of food. Holding one in each arm, she walked to the trunk, put one bag on the ground, unlocked the trunk, bent over it when it was opened, and put her groceries away.
Time and Trouble Page 11
