Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  “Arthur would never let me take Wesley away. That’s his son. His. If I left, I’d have nothing. And how would I find another husband at this age? I’m doomed.”

  “He hits you, and you said it’s getting worse. This is very bad,” Billie said. “Very dangerous. Go to a shelter. Get away.”

  “I can’t. You don’t understand. You’re young.”

  Billie knew it was no use if it wasn’t Sophia’s idea. Time to move on. “What happened to your disability claim?”

  Sophia shrugged. “Just my luck. Somebody took movies of me when… Well…I was moving around. Ruined my whole chance.” Billie, eyes wide, glanced at Emma, who actually came close to a smile.

  The damned tape had worked, then. Obviously the insurance company caught something she hadn’t. Incredible! So she wasn’t the screw-up queen yet. Not completely.

  “The point is, I don’t want her to come home,” Sophia said.

  “Penny? Not return? But you hired us to—”

  Sophia shook her head. “He’s worse than ever, and I think, if she comes home—he’s so angry with her now, so very angry. I’m afraid he let me hire you because he wants her where he could do her harm. They had some kind of face-off, accusations were made, but see, he always was unfair to her because she wasn’t his. If she comes home, I’m afraid he’ll hurt her. Maybe worse.”

  “But,” Billie said, “she’s still in high school. What will she—“

  “I have no other options.”

  Nor did Penny now, thanks to her.

  “Especially now that there’s no hope of the disability, I have no earning capacity.” Her phrase sounded practiced and she seemed resigned to, even welcoming of, the role of victim. And she didn’t seem to wonder who else might be injured by her passivity.

  “Penny,” Billie said. “If she shouldn’t come home, where should she go?”

  “This boy? Maybe she could stay with him until she’s on her own. It’s not ideal, but whose life is? Certainly not mine. All I ever wanted was to live like a normal, ordinary person, and look what’s happened. One bad thing after another.”

  “But it’s February. In four short months she could graduate, have her diploma. You don’t want her on the street, do you?”

  “Of course she doesn’t want her daughter on the streets,” Emma said. “Mrs. Redmond suggests that Penny remain where she’s gone. Win-win. They can both have what they want.” Emma flashed Billie a warning glance. Parent-child workshops were not one of the services they provided. Then she turned to Sophia Redmond. “Or are you saying you want to end the investigation?” she asked.

  “Oh, no. Don’t stop. Arthur—he wants to find her, too, for bad reasons, but he’ll pay. You have to find her. Just don’t tell him. Let me know she’s safe, and tell her to call me, please. I can explain everything. She has to understand how we…how everything got so bad. Will you?”

  Billie nodded.

  “And when you call me, don’t say if you found her. Don’t say where she is. Just say you’re ready to report, and I’ll come here. Arthur…”

  Billie nodded again.

  “She has to understand,” Sophia repeated.

  That was fine with Billie. If only she herself understood.

  Twenty-One

  Despite his embarrassment at having been an idiot there, Stephen left the Marshalls’ house smiling. Sunny was the right name for her. He was amazed how his mood had improved since he’d rung her bell. Good thing Penny had made him park halfway to the next neighborhood. He wouldn’t want her to see the grin he felt forming and reforming on his face. She’d be too eager to make fun of it because she’d understand it. All the same, Penny could take lessons from that woman. Should. It wasn’t just that Sunny was beautiful, which she was. She was good as well, she had a way of making you feel special. She was…

  He heard his thoughts and laughed at himself. A crush like a kid in junior high. A crush on a happily married mother of three. Great going.

  Whatever. He’d met Sunny Marshall and now he knew what he wanted for himself, what he would look for from now on. A healthy, sunny woman, the opposite of the unhappy, clinging types he attracted.

  He speeded his pace, past the Redmonds’, toward the corner. There was still time for sunset on the beach. He’d check out of the San Geronimo house for a few days, be by himself. Penny would understand, or she wouldn’t. His life didn’t have to be revised just because a teenager misunderstood it.

  When he turned the corner, he saw the hearse gleaming in the afternoon sun and felt a jolt of relief. He hadn’t fully trusted it to be where he left it. Things seldom were with Penny Redmond.

  He loved the car’s size and color, a slick wash like transparent layers of sunshine laid one upon the other, with mother-of-pearl as the adhesive. What a buy it had been. He couldn’t figure why people were so squeamish about its former function, but maybe if they weren’t, the retired cars would sell for what they were worth, and he wouldn’t have been able to own one. He opened the door.

  She wasn’t there. No note, no sign of her.

  He slammed the door and looked around. Nothing. Nobody. He wheeled and kicked the tree at the curb. Where the hell would she go? She, who was afraid to let the car be visible from her parents’ house. She who said she had nowhere else to go but his house, his room, his bed, his life.

  He took five slow, deep breaths because he’d been told it was a technique that helped regain perspective. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. What if while she had sat here she thought things through and decided—as he himself had suggested—to make peace with her parents? Maybe something had finally clicked in her brain, like common sense.

  That had to be it because it was the only possibility. There was nowhere else to go in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

  He locked the car, pocketed his keys, and walked back toward the Redmonds’. To make it official, discuss dropping off her stuff tomorrow. He felt his leg-irons being unlocked, and he walked briskly, lightly, back to the white Victorian.

  A scowling man with a thin, old-fashioned moustache answered the door. So her father was home from the houseboat already. Stephen had imagined him larger, less slickly dapper, more contemporary. This man looked out of place. The moustache didn’t go with the beer bottle in his hand, and his posture and expression made Stephen think this wasn’t the man’s first drink of the day. “Ah,” the man said with a nod. “Finally. I’ve been waiting.”

  Just like Penny to assume he’d figure out where she was and stop by. To think she could do whatever she pleased, be as irresponsible as the urge of the moment, and leave tracking-down, retrieving, and mopping-up to others. He followed her father into a large room, all flowery patterns and flounces. He didn’t know what it was about the place, but it made him nervous. Trying too hard, maybe. Reminded him of his parents’ house, only fussier.

  “Hot as hell, isn’t it?” the man said. “Weather freaky as hell lately. Must be that El Niño shit. Shouldn’t be this hot in February. Whole world’s falling apart.” He sounded slightly muzzy.

  Stephen nodded agreement although he found the temperature perfect.

  “You must like it, though,” Mr. Redmond said.

  “Yes, sure do.” What was going on? How could he get to the point and get away—and where was Penny hiding herself? “I’m heading for the beach from here, I like it so much.”

  The man stared at him blankly. “Stinson,” Stephen said to fill the silence. “Or maybe Limantour, at Point Reyes.” Where the hell was she?

  “What are we talking about? It’s back here,” the man said, and Stephen followed him into an old-fashioned kitchen. “What do you think?” His gruff voice and attitude didn’t go with his appearance, either.

  “It’s a very nice kitchen.…”

  “What the hell you talking about? Or is your mind still at that beach you’re so eager to get to? You said we could talk.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Talk about what?”

  “The job. The
stain on the wall, the flooring—the whole thing. Upstairs bath is fixed now. No more leak—but the estimate you gave my wife is ridiculous.” He peered at Stephen intently. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Water damage? You’re the contractor, aren’t you? We talked this morning. You said you’d come over and we’d talk.”

  “No, sir, I—”

  “Then who the hell are you, barging into my house under false pretenses?”

  “You asked me in, Mr. Redmond. You are Mr. Redmond, aren’t you?”

  Arthur Redmond squinted at Stephen. “Damn,” he said. “Then who are you and what did you want?”

  “I wanted to speak with Penny.”

  “Ha!” The sound was mirthless. “Go ahead, then! If you can find her. And if you do, tell her to give us a call, too. Hasn’t been seen in these parts for some time. Ran off with a lunatic. Why do you want her? Who are you?” He drained the can of beer, and in one smoothly practiced move, tossed it into a lined trash can, opened the refrigerator, and took another out. He didn’t offer Stephen one.

  “I—I’m a friend,” Stephen said. “I thought— Are you sure she isn’t here?”

  “You think I’m hiding her? Lying? You want to search the house?” He laughed his hard bark again, then said, “Go ahead. Look for little Penny. Maybe you’re right, maybe I misplaced her and she’s under the couch, or in the fridge. I’d ask the wife, but she’s never home now that she isn’t crippled anymore.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You aren’t married, are you?”

  “No, sir. No.”

  “Good for you. Trust me—it’s nothing but trouble. Women are impossible to start out with and then they go rancid with age. Happens fast, too. And their kids make it worse. Especially kids that aren’t yours. Penny didn’t have any friends except the crazy who abducted her, so who are you?” He peered at Stephen with the over-bright intensity of the slightly drunk. “Do I know you?”

  The room was warm, but Stephen felt a chill, as if the refrigerator door were still open. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, sir. Sorry to have interrupted you.”

  “What did you want with her?”

  Stephen shook his head and went back into the flouncy room, then to the hallway and the front door, and all the while, Arthur Redmond followed him, his belligerent questions piling upon each other.

  “Are you the one? Did she run away from you, too, now? Are you the one?”

  By the time he reached the front door, Arthur Redmond was shouting answers as well as questions. “Yeah, you must be. That’s the only thing that’d make sense.”

  “It isn’t the way you think, sir.”

  “How do you know what I think? And where is she?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I came here.”

  “I was right—she ran away from you, too. Did she say she was coming here? After everything she’s done. She said things to me, about me. Spied on me.”

  “Thanks for your time,” Stephen called out over his shoulder as he left the house, the porch, the front of the Redmonds’ house.

  “I’m still talking to you!” Arthur shouted out the door. “Where the hell you think you’re going?”

  Not until he was five doors down and could no longer hear Arthur Redmond did he feel able to breathe freely. The suffocation was a feeling his parents too often inspired with their eternal war, and when he’d been a child he’d thought he would be strangled by the poisonous strings of words that ensnared him. But at least his parents battled at a lower decibel level than Arthur Redmond’s.

  Penny’s mother wasn’t pretending to be crippled anymore. She wouldn’t go to jail for fraud the way Penny feared. He wondered what had made her stop the pretense.

  He was so absorbed by his thoughts he almost tripped over a scrawny boy standing still in the middle of the sidewalk. “Sorry!”

  “You were in my house,” the boy said. “I saw.” His arms were like skewers inserted in the knob of his elbow, and the backpack he dragged looked more substantial than he did. Stephen got the feeling that confronting him cost the boy a great deal of courage. “Who are you? Is my mother okay?”

  “Who are you?” Stephen asked. “Who is your mother?”

  “Wesley Redmond.” The boy’s hair was brown and straight and looked like it was cut at home. Stephen wondered how much taunting he got from his well-coifed classmates.

  “Penny’s brother?”

  A wispy cowlick accentuated the boy’s nod. “You own the hearse?” he asked back. “You’re the one? The Stewart?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Wesley nodded again. “She saw the school bus and waited for me and we went for a walk. When we got back to the hearse, it was locked up. You went to my house?”

  “I thought she might be there.”

  “My dad sounded really mad. I could hear him from here.”

  “He thought I was somebody else.”

  “My mom okay?” Wesley asked.

  “She wasn’t there.” How sad that he had to keep asking that question, that the accustomed images and possibilities in his brain required that question.

  “Is Penny ever coming home? Does she tell you? She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I don’t think she knows yet. For what it’s worth, I think she should.”

  “It’s way worse since you took her away,” the boy said. “I told her that, and I shouldn’t have, because now she’ll never want to come back. Could I live with you, too? She said it’s a big house.”

  “What else did she say about it?”

  “That there are these other people, too, in San Geronimo. I’ve never been there, but she said there weren’t pavements, like here. That there were horses around, and a place with a stream and redwoods. She said nobody carried on about the house the way our… That you had a bird that lived in your bedroom and a big kitchen where everybody hangs out and the other people lived there together for a longer time than you did, and this man next door has a garden that…”

  Stephen stopped listening. She had ruined his sanctuary. He’d have to move again. Look how freely the boy was relating everything he’d learned, and he’d learned too many details that could too easily migrate from this boy to his parents, to somebody else—and to Yvonne, who frankly scared the shit out of him. San Geronimo was tiny, small enough for her to track each street and watch each drive. For all he knew, she was watching now, watching Wesley Redmond, who’d give her all the information she could use.

  “She said she was going to get a job and then I could live with her and we’d go to court, she said, and they’d understand. She’d take care of me.”

  “Ah, kid.” Stephen looked at the boy and tried not to notice the bright moisture filming his eyes. Another victim, he heard himself think—but whose? His?

  “Since you took her away,” he’d said, making Stephen the demon.

  “Ah, kid,” Stephen repeated. “It’ll work out. You’ll see.” He patted the boy’s skinny shoulder, then turned and walked back to the car. He could feel the eyes on his back, the silent plea to be seen, noticed, saved.

  But Stephen’s “saving others” days were on hold. He was disconnecting the Penny Redmond distress line.

  She was by the hearse, trying to look invisible in her old neighborhood. He didn’t want to see her that way—vulnerable and quietly anxious. He had no room for anybody else’s problems right now.

  “Get in,” he said, after he’d unlocked the doors. “I’m going to the police—”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because if I don’t, it’ll nag at me. Because those are Greek letters on it, not a design and they could stand for something. A Greek word, or a name, maybe.” Because if I don’t, I won’t be totally, irrevocably through with you.

  “I’ll never get the lavaliere back from them.”

  “Of course you will, once the case is solved.”

  “Like it ever will be. A thing that old.” />
  Of course she wouldn’t get it back, but who cared? He felt her eyes on the side of his face, burning, like losing her amulet was the worse thing in the world. And he didn’t care.

  “After that, I’m taking you to the house and I’m cutting out for a few days. I need to think before I go crazy. I need to be alone.”

  She looked stupefied, as if this idea were incomprehensible, beyond the sphere of the imaginable. “Don’t make me be there without you,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone with them. I—”

  “This isn’t about you,” he said as he drove. “This is about me. I have to think and you should do the same. It’s not right to tell your brother you’re going to take care of him—”

  “You saw Wesley?”

  “—when you don’t know how to take care of yourself. It’s not right to tell him where you are, where I am, or that he’ll come there, too. And your father is furious about your snooping.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I didn’t know where you were—I thought maybe you were making peace with your family. But he figured out who I was, and he is royally pissed with you. I don’t blame him anymore.”

  “Oh, Luke!”

  He didn’t want to try the five-breath technique. He didn’t want to be calm. “He said something about your spying on him.”

  “That was from before.”

  “Who cares? The result’s the same. You really need to think of what you’re going to do from now on—and so do I.”

  Tears ran down her face, out her nose. He didn’t care. She cried, head in hands, all the way to, and even, he presumed, while he was in the police station. And when he returned to the car.

  He wanted out, but he didn’t want to be cruel. “I didn’t mean to make you so sad,” he said. Then his shoulders slumped. “I care about you. I did. I still do, I guess. But I can’t take care of you, Penny. It’s too big a job and I’m barely taking care of myself. I can’t handle your problems and you don’t want to handle them yourself. I wanted to give you a safe place while you needed it, that’s all. Not a permanent address. Can’t you understand?”