Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  Stern Emma was on the verge of tears—although, of course, the verge was as far as she let herself go. Nonetheless, she barely masked her emotions with gruff mutterings and throat clearings before presenting him as the much-missed receptionist/manager.

  His long absence wasn’t explained. That omission, plus Emma’s relief and pride at his return and Zack’s own earnest intensity suggested to Billie that he was in recovery from something major, but whatever it was remained unmentioned. He was a model of efficiency at this, his day job, and from the moment he sat down at his desk with a happy sigh, he answered calls efficiently, relayed messages, did the billing, and fielded calls Emma didn’t want to handle, all while appearing a good-enough sort. No wonder he’d been missed. Like barely audible background music, he established a base level of sanity and coherence the office had painfully lacked. Plus, he didn’t seem to have hangups about working for and with two women.

  “Gorgeous day,” he said when Billie entered in the late afternoon.

  “Hmm?” She was appalled by the non-information she’d amassed in two days. Take good notes, Emma had said, and she had. Except there was nothing to note. What could she report about her interview with Penny’s school counselor, in an ambience of barely controlled chaos—piles of papers on the desk and floor, weighted with her pocketbook, a phone which rang incessantly, a giant-size bottle of aspirin and a doorstop shaped like a dalmatian. Her “client list” was massive, her days too short, and she had nothing to add to the existing fund of knowledge about Penelope Redmond. “Her grades were falling,” she said. “I tried to get her to talk about the skid she was on, but she was clamped-up, silent, seemed increasingly isolated—I’d see her walking to class alone. Didn’t used to be like that, but she wouldn’t tell me a thing except that it was her life and she’d handle it.”

  She’d waved at the stacks of papers. “I wish I could have followed up, seen about counseling. I tried once, called the house, spoke to her father, who told me to butt out. I should have persisted, and in a perfect world I would have, but I’m also involved in their college application process which is overwhelming. Besides, it isn’t as if I could force families to do anything.…” She let go of the sentence and sighed.

  Billie’s attempts to plow for information had yielded a pathetic harvest. Famine time.

  “Not a nice day for you, then?” Zachary asked.

  His initial pleasantry belatedly reached her consciousness and she realized that it was indeed a very nice day, with winter-crisp sunshine and no wind at all. “You’re right,” she said. “And I hadn’t noticed, so thanks.”

  “Good going, Sherlock.” His fingers still poised over the computer keys, he studied her. “Truth is, you don’t look like you’re having a great day. Something wrong?”

  She made a small tsk of impatience with herself. “I thought…I had fantasies about investigation. What it would be like questioning people, finding things out and putting two and two together. Now, I’ve talked to her parents, two of her baby-sitting clients and four of her so-called friends, plus her high-school counselor, and you’d think—at least I thought—but not one knew—or at least said—a single tangible thing about her. No one knew her, and that’s sad enough, but it’s sadder still that I’m right where I was when I began. The single thing I had to go on was a boyfriend who apparently doesn’t exist. It isn’t supposed to be like this. Or else I’m just so bad at interviewing I should quit right now.”

  “Have a panacea.” Zack held up a dish filled with Tootsie Rolls. “Have several.”

  “Do you always do this?” she murmured, unwrapping one. “Why aren’t you fat?” The prodigal son had returned bearing M&M’s the first day. The menu would vary, he promised, but the concept would not. He was convinced that chocolate was the antidote to all life’s woes. Popping a Tootsie Roll in her mouth, she decided he might be right.

  She went into her cubicle and called home, where all was apparently well. “I’ll be awhile,” she told Ivan, and, more gently, her son. “I need to see a few people who weren’t around earlier.” She wasn’t going to end the day with zero to show for it. Other days, maybe, when she was secure enough to understand that such things happened. But not yet.

  “I’ll be home to”—she glanced at her watch—“tuck you in, maybe even before, to give you your bath.” Certainly, now that she thought of it. Because the baby-sitting clients, if home, would have tucking-in duties of their own and not want to talk with an investigator at that hour. “I’ll read you a story, sweet Jess. Pick out a book.”

  She suddenly missed him acutely. Wished she could be enjoying him in person. Saw him growing, stretching, changing contours until he was Wesley Redmond with his skinny neck and his enormous backpack, and she felt panic, the danger of missing her son’s intervening years while she searched for other people’s kids.

  Wesley lingered in her mind, dragging his load both literally and figuratively, missing his sister, his ally. He didn’t think of Penny as a cipher the way everybody else appeared to.

  The way she had been doing. She’d discounted Penelope Redmond the same dismissive way the girl’s so-called friends, her oblivious employers, and even her parents, seemed to. Penelope had changed, her friends and counselor agreed. Aloof, a snob, slipping grades. Put that together with a deliberate disappearance, an escape from her life, and it had to mean trouble. Her father had mentioned drugs, a pregnancy, but her mother didn’t seem to think so. Either way, a crisis. Either the kind she herself had created or one she was trying to avoid. Whichever one, she’d been lost long before she ran away.

  Billie knew almost nothing about the pleasant-faced girl who’d been a name, a challenge, a problem: Missing Girl—one half-step up from the “Have You Seen Me?” kids on milk cartons. But neither did anyone else know her, and the sadness of the situation was a spur. It became imperative to find her, and not only for the sake of Billie’s job security.

  She was searching the phone book for the rest of Penelope Redmond’s baby-sitter clients when Zack appeared at her door. “Could you take this?” he asked. “Weepy woman wants Emma, but Emma’s still digging through records in Sacramento. I tried to patch in this call and couldn’t. She said she already talked with Emma, so I thought you might know about it. I don’t want to screw up something the boss is working on.”

  “Sure. Let me be the one to do that,” Billie said. She lifted the receiver. “This is Billie August, an associate of Emma’s. Can I help?”

  “No,” the woman said. “Okay, yes. This is Miriam again.”

  “Yes, I’m sure, but perhaps your last name?”

  “She knows me! Tell her I was putting the trash can back—not till late this afternoon because I forgot about it and my arthritis was killing me, but when I did, I remembered. And I thought to tell my next-door neighbor. After all, they could be in danger, too. Except they weren’t home.”

  “Yes,” Billie prompted. “And?” Agreeing to take this call hadn’t been one of her better ideas.

  “I thought they might be out back and there, on their pool—well, really next to the pool. The cement, what do you call it?”

  “Deck?”

  “Stains. Dark ones. Something had been there. Blood. Don’t try to tell me that one was beet stains!”

  Billie stared at the “While You Were Out” pad on which she’d written Miriam and bloodstains on neighbor’s pool deck. She added, in quotation marks, “Not beet stains.” Was this perhaps Emma herself playing a practical joke? “Did you call the police?” Billie asked.

  “I don’t want a lot of men milling around, asking questions and I already explained that to Emma, and why hasn’t she gotten back to me?”

  “It’s been really hectic here—”

  “But this is urgent, can’t you see? Tell her Miriam!”

  “I surely will, the second she comes in. You want to give me your phone number?”

  “She knows it!”

  She had let Zack’s woeful expression and their shared fea
r of Emma con her into taking a crank call. “To save her time looking it up, could you please give me your phone number?”

  “You don’t think I actually know Emma Howe, do you? Old people are crazy, that’s what you think!” She slammed down the phone.

  Billie resumed her search for the addresses of people Penny Redmond baby-sat for, then dropped Miriam’s message, for what it was, on Zack’s desk. “You’ve worked for Emma a while, right?”

  “Two years,” he said. “Two years and seven weeks. Not counting time out for bad behavior.”

  “You saw a lot of my predecessors come and go, I’ll bet.” She had her jacket on and came into the outer office.

  “A few.”

  “Short-timers, right?”

  He nodded in a sad, slow way.

  “Now I understand the amazing attrition rate. You asked each one of them to handle Emma’s crank calls—maybe the same woman does it for you each time—until they get canned for incompetence. Was that a setup?”

  “The call was that bad? Sorry.”

  “Something about blood, not beet juice, on a deck. I’m tempted to rip up the message and save my job.”

  He shook his head and put his hand out for it.

  “You take the crazy call-ins,” she told Zack. “I think that’s under your job description, anyway, not mine. Besides, you apparently have tenure. I don’t.”

  “Have another Tootsie Roll.”

  Chewing one, she was off to San Anselmo, to question another of Penny Redmond’s employers. This batch had to yield something.

  And yet, for all their late-night talks, what sort of things did she know about her own baby-sitter? If Ivan disappeared, what could she tell an investigator? That he’d been born near Moscow, that his father was dead, his mother Tatiana, was a dressmaker in Eureka. She knew what courses he was taking, that he was attractive, soft-spoken, and addicted to TV because he said it helped his English. She knew he was good in the sciences, agonized over every paper he had to write in his new language, that his mother didn’t speak much English, had iffy health, something about the lungs, lived with a cousin, and wouldn’t or couldn’t relocate closer to Ivan. And that was it, except for the names of girls who floated or stormed through his nights off.

  She knew more real things about Ivan’s mother than about him. She hoped fervently that this new batch of Penny’s employers were more observant and inquisitive than she was. If they were as vague and unhelpful as the earlier interviews, she had no idea where to turn next. Another failure on the résumé, and Penny among the missing.

  She drove through downtown San Rafael until the street broadened and the solid blocks of California-retro buildings were replaced by more randomly placed strip malls and fast-food stops. She checked the address and made a right turn that changed the landscape to homes that climbed the street up into the hills. Number twenty-seven turned out to be a modest, wood-shingled cottage with a fenced-in, shallow front yard.

  “Hi,” she said when the doorbell produced a pleasantly rumpled man in a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and socks. He held a drink—scotch on the rocks, she thought—in one hand and had a small and silent blonde girl attached to his right leg. “Mr. DeLuna?”

  He nodded, and waited while she explained her mission. “So,” she concluded, “if Mrs. DeLuna’s around, she could—”

  “Carole? Carole won’t be home for hours.” The little girl looked up at him as he spoke, then stared at Billie.

  “Then perhaps tomorrow would be a better time to talk with her? Or tonight, if you’ll tell me a—”

  “Why ask Carole about Penny? She didn’t know her.”

  Nobody had known Penny. Nobody. She might as well question the silent clinging child. How had Penny passed through so many households without touching a single one? What had happened to community?

  “I’d be the one,” he continued. “Not that I know much. But feel free to come in and ask away.”

  Billie felt herself balk, do the automatic calculations self-preservation required. Going into a strange man’s house. Safe? Did the existence of a child, attached to him like a wart, confirm his sanity and acceptability? How did her new job mesh with her old cautions?

  “Listen,” he said. “Maybe the situation isn’t clear. I’m the one hires the sitters, changes the diapers, does the car pooling. Don’t look shocked. Such things happen.” His smile took the slight abrasive edge off his words. Even in Marin, house husbanding must not be the easiest role. “If you need to know something about the daily care and maintenance of our kids, Carole is not the one to talk to. On the other hand, if the kids assault you and you need a crackerjack lawyer, then it’s smart to talk to Carole.” He grinned and ran a hand through his already mussed and thinning blond hair. “I’m Russ,” he said. He stood back from the door, dragging the leg with the girlchild attached, allowing Billie passage if she wanted it.

  I’m a goddamned PI, she reminded herself as she briskly entered. I go where I want to. Need to.

  The DeLuna house was rustic, with wood-paneled walls and not quite enough light for Billie’s taste. But comfortable and comforting. Bookshelves lining one entire wall. A playpen full of toys and a dozing infant in stretch pajamas to one side. All surfaces appeared to have been cleared of breakables.

  She liked to think she was beyond sexist prejudice, but she was surprised by how well he appeared to be taking care of the house and children.

  Russ DeLuna gestured for her to have a seat on a dark green sofa. “Drink?” he asked, lifting his glass. “Iced herbal tea. Peach. Good.”

  She declined. He sat on an oversized easy chair. The little girl crawled onto his lap and sat, thumb in mouth, watching Billie. “How can I help you?” he asked.

  She explained Penny’s disappearance, her parents’ need to find her, and asked for anything that might provide a lead.

  “She’s a nice kid,” he said. “A little shy at first, but only with me. Great with my two. Sometimes she’d ask me about what I did—I’m a writer, when possible. I’m afraid she thought I was a romantic figure—the artist in the garret. Instead of the househusband in the garage with the dishes still to wash.”

  He was indeed attractive, radiating warmth and acceptance. Billie wondered if Penny’s crush could have been on him. Was his car yellow? Too good to be true, an interior voice warned. Some instinctive malleability instantly accommodated the other’s tempo and temperature. Dangerous for an unhappy adolescent. “The garage?” she asked.

  “There’s a room over it that I use when possible, as when somebody like Penny is around to watch the kids. I’m working on a novel, but I freelance articles, too. Generally, I’d hire Penny only when I had an actual sale and a deadline. Given the situation, we didn’t spend a lot of that time talking. Now and then, once the kids were asleep, she’d come up to the studio to say good-bye before she left, and we’d talk awhile.” He shook his head. “Can’t remember about what, however. Probably about what I was working on, that sort of thing.”

  But enough about me, let’s talk about my novel, Billie thought. Charming, but shouldn’t a novelist be more observant? A father notice more about the baby-sitter’s psyche? And that room above the garage, the romantic garret. Danger and more danger.

  “Your work sounds like it’d be really interesting,” he said. “You like it?”

  “Most of the time.” Better be hypocritical than admit to being such a rank novice that she didn’t yet know if she liked the work. “How did you find Penny?” she asked.

  “She found me. Answer to a madman’s prayer. She left a flyer in the mailbox. Said she had references, was an honor student. She seemed worth the try. After all, I was right there, up in the studio. I could monitor her the first few times.”

  “Did she talk about school? About her plans?”

  Another head-shake. “Sorry. She couldn’t do homework while she was here. She left when they were asleep. She told me once that she, too, wanted to write someday. But it didn’t sound like a burning ambit
ion.”

  It sounded more like adulation. Emulation. This good-looking, obviously loving man who had to be a little starved for company, whose wife was never home.…

  Was she imagining Penny’s emotions or her own?

  “Once, I finished an article while she was sitting and that night, we did hang out awhile. The article had been about adolescent sex—safe or none or whatever. She asked to read it. Her comments were pretty mature for a high-school senior.”

  He had gone over the line. Billie felt queasy at the image of this charming grown man and Penny discussing the sexual habits of her age group. “She didn’t talk about her own social life, did she?” she asked.

  “I certainly wouldn’t have encouraged it. It was weird enough having her discuss the theoretical habits of her age group. She didn’t seem uncomfortable about that, but I was!”

  Maybe he wasn’t too good to be true. Maybe he was an actual nice guy. Which would mean there were such beings. The thought made her inexplicably sad. Or perhaps explicably, but she didn’t want to look at that right now. “I wondered if you ever saw anybody pick her up, particularly a young man driving a yellow hearse.”

  “A hearse?” He shook his head. “Our arrangement was that she’d come over, get through the awful late-afternoon hours, feed the kids dinner, get them ready for bed, read to them. I’d come in and kiss Molly good night—”

  “Paolo, too,” the little girl said in a piping voice.

  “Paolo, too,” he said, ruffling her hair. “That’s her brother, the live wire over there.” He gestured toward the playpen. “Then once they were asleep—”

  “And my Bepsy, too,” the little girl said.

  He nodded. “Bepsy, too. That’s Molly’s teddy bear and best friend and she gets kissed, too. And I’d turn on the intercom and go back to work and Penny’d go home. Mostly by bus or her bike. Bedtime here is early.”

  “Did your wife ever meet Penny? Talk to her?”