"Nothing big jumps out at me so far," Alesha said over the phone, "except how amazing it is that John and Laura ended up as put together as they were. Met at the University of Wisconsin. He studied graphic design. She was a psychology major. She worked as a social worker for Child and Family Services in Madison before she died."
I leaned back in my chair and looked out the window. The owner of the laundromat, an elderly Vietnamese man with a metal leg, was shoveling the snow off the sidewalk. Standing under the alcove, a woman who was young enough to be his daughter, but whom I knew to be the wife who'd died in Vietnam during the war, watched him silently. The falling snow stuck to her shiny blue kimono, a dress not at all appropriate for the weather. She was a beautiful woman. If her personality was even half as appealing as her looks, I didn't blame him for refusing to marry again, as he'd told me many times.
Behind me, sitting in the corner, I heard Jak talking softly with someone, undoubtedly another Mary Riddles. We'd split the names and started calling on our cell phones. Alesha had called while I was leaving a message for one of them, the MaryBeth who worked for the Winterhawks, and I switched over after leaving my name, number, and that I was a private investigator calling on an urgent matter.
"Real sad," Alesha said, "Laura dying in a car wreck a couple years ago. They had so many strikes against them as it is."
"Hey now," I said, "you're sounding almost sentimental. It's not like you, Alesha."
"Shut up. You want to hear the rest or not?"
"There's more?"
"Just that John's graphic design business started to fall apart after the accident. He failed to deliver on some jobs. People took him to court. His house was foreclosed upon. He really was spiraling down the drain."
"How about Tim and Bud? Heard from them yet?"
"Yeah, Tim just called. They didn't get anything from the neighbors. Just nothing there at all. John and Olivia kept to themselves. Nobody really knew them. He said they're going to extend their search beyond the apartment complex, but it's not looking good. Oh, there was one weird thing. It has to do with all the cats in the area."
"Cats?"
"Yeah. This is according to a woman who lived across from them in the apartment complex, and Bud said the air was pretty thick with marijuana smoke, so take this all with a brick-size grain of salt. But I guess this lady said all the cats would follow Olivia when she left the apartment. To the park. To the store. She said Olivia didn't go out much, but often there was a cat following behind. Pretty strange, huh?"
I adjusted the phone and thought about what to say. From what I knew of Olivia, her talking to cats wasn't strange at all. I thought about the crows. Olivia wasn't there, and yet the crows were still acting strange. Was she communicating with them somehow? And if so, what did that mean?
"It's strange, all right," I said.
"How about you and girl wonder? Got anything yet?"
"Nope."
"Would you tell me if you did?"
"Of course."
"Liar."
"What? Me? That's not a very nice thing to say."
She chuckled. "Yeah, well, it's your new sidekick. She's a bad influence on you."
"Hey now. That's also not a very nice thing to say, especially about…"
I almost added about my future wife, but managed to catch myself at the last second. I couldn't believe how close I'd come to saying the words, or how right it had felt to consider saying them. But I was getting ahead of myself. After the disaster my first marriage became, I really needed to be sure.
"About?" Alesha said.
"Huh?"
"You said, 'especially about…'"
"Oh, right. I was going say about someone who … who'd been nothing but nice to you."
"Uh huh. Right. Hey, you know, we haven't played pool in a while. We really should do that. Not now, of course. We have to find Olivia. But later."
There was something in her tone, a little edge, a little hurt, and I realized that before I popped the question to Jak, I needed to talk to Alesha first. It wasn't exactly that I wanted her blessing, although that would certainly be welcome. She was my best friend. She was my former partner. There was also the possibility of something more between us, a bridge we'd come close to crossing a couple of times but always stopped for one reason or another. I didn't know if we could talk about that or not, or even if we should, but I did know that we needed to talk before I proposed.
"Yeah," I said, "we should definitely play pool. If you don't mind losing, like you usually do."
"Ha ha. Nice try. I think I've beaten you seven times in a row. Unless you count that one time where I was so drunk off my ass I couldn't even count the number of balls still on the table."
"A win is a win, partner."
"Partner," she said. "I like the way that sounds. Hey, you thought any more about—"
"Don't."
"What?"
"You know where you were going."
She laughed. "All right. But one of these days you'll come to your senses and get your badge back. Now I'm going to go check on that crime scene analysis and see how that's going. I'll let you know, okay? Because that's what we're supposed to do when we find things out. We're supposed to let each other know."
"Yes, Alesha. Goodbye."
"Goodbye … partner."
She was laughing when she clicked off. Far from annoying me, I liked hearing her laugh. I always had. I was still thinking about that laugh when Jak finished her latest phone call. She told me she'd talked to Mary Amanda Reitles, the dental hygienist in Tualatin, and there didn't seem to be any connection to Olivia at all. She'd seemed genuinely shocked that Jak was calling about her. She even checked their patient records just to be sure she'd never met her.
I caught Jak up on what Alesha had learned about the Ray family. Then we looked at the list of names and decided on who we were each going to call next. I picked up the phone to dial the number and saw that Jak was smiling at me.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing," she said. "Just, you know, I like this."
"Like what?"
"This. The two of us. Working together. It's almost like we're … I don't know, partners."
Chapter 9
Working our separate phones, Jak and I managed to eliminate a few more Marys from our list. Or, if not completely eliminate, we were at least unable to find any obvious connections to our missing girl. Mary Ann Rottles was a librarian at the Beaverton Public Library. I got her on the reference desk when I called, and though she found the question odd, she didn't give me any reason to doubt her when she said she'd had no contact with Olivia. I hadn't been off the phone long when MaryBeth Riddle, the one who worked for the Portland Winterhawks, returned my call. She was equally perplexed and couldn't think of any possible way she would have known Olivia.
In meantime, Jak had a lengthy conversation with Marylou Rettles, a very senior senior citizen who lived at Sunny Oaks Retirement Community in Lake Oswego. At first, she seemed like a promising lead, telling Jak that she thought she remembered Olivia coming for a visit, but after much back and forth it soon became apparent that MaryLou's memory was not so good, and she was thinking of a girl who'd sung in the hospital back when she was a nurse—more than forty years earlier. She had a lot to say about the Nixon administration, however.
"We've got two more prospects I haven't been able to reach," I said. "Living prospects, anyway. Marilyn Lee Rittles, the fourteen-year-old freshman. And a Marry Ruddle, who was living in a halfway house on 78th but no one's seen her in three months. The halfway house says she's probably back on the streets, which is where she was when her friend brought her in to get cleaned up. Neither has a phone according to Alesha, at least not a cell phone."
"A fourteen-year-old without a cell phone?" Jak said. "And here I thought unicorns weren't real."
"I looked up Marilyn Lee Rittles's high school. It looks like she only lives a couple blocks away. I say we get some lunch, then head over to her place and
see if she shows up. I got her picture off Facebook. Her page was totally accessible to the public. There were some … interesting photos on there."
"Interesting as in risqué?"
"Let's just say the focus of many of them was on features other than her face."
"No phone, but an open profile with naughty pictures on Facebook. Well, I'm pretty sure we can say that her not having a phone isn't because her parents are overly protective. I'm all for lunch, but I have another idea for afterwards. You talk to the girl. I'll use the contacts I've made writing my article on the homeless to see if I can find the Mary Ruddle who's missing."
"Hmm."
"What do you mean, hmm? This doubles our effort."
"I know."
"You're worried about me going out on my own, aren't you? Myron, come on."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to. I can see it all over your face."
"No, no, I've just enjoyed working with you, that's all. I thought it was more fun to stick together."
"Uh huh. You're such a horrible liar. How do you get anywhere in this business, being such a bad liar?"
"I don't know. Dogged persistence, I guess. Or maybe I just use my charm until I wear people down."
I smiled, turning up the charm. She smiled back, but it was a wry and knowing smile, the smile of a woman who'd already been through too much in life to be swayed by my good looks. I turned up the charm even more. Sadly, it seemed to have no effect.
"Not going to work this time, buddy," she said. "We'll do it my way. Let's get some lunch."
We ate at a sub shop on 59th, one I particularly liked because it was next to a mortuary. Mortuaries, I'd discovered, were like graveyards, in that ghosts, who tended to abhor being around dead bodies, generally avoided them. This usually provided me with at least a little respite from the constant bombardment of the spiritual world. I'd often tried to describe to Jak what it was like to live with my particular affliction, how it was all the little choices I had to make to compensate, to try to live as normal a life as possible, and not the affliction itself, that was so exhausting. It wasn't seeing ghosts that was the problem. It was all changes to my life I had to make because I saw them.
All the time. Without end.
So I had a giant bacon turkey club and Jak had a tuna mini, then, after one last protest on my part to no effect, I dropped her off at the house in Sellwood. The snow had stopped and my house, all its flaws masked in white, looked like something out of a Thomas Kincaid painting. Jak wanted to change into the appropriate attire before heading onto the streets. With a sly grin, she asked if I wanted to watch her change, and see what might come of it. Though I admired her ability to compartmentalize—or maybe it was just a healthy coping mechanism that I lacked—I begged off by telling her that as much as I found homeless chic attractive, I was really feeling the clock ticking on Olivia. Jak said she understood and then gave me a long and passionate kiss that nearly made me change my mind.
I still had almost an hour before Lincoln High School's final bell, and I thought about going to the school instead of her place to see if I could catch her on the way, but I didn't think a man in a trench coat lurking around the school grounds was a good idea. I'd also found that high schools, oddly enough, were one of the most popular places for ghosts to frequent. Some of them, it seemed, wanted to relive their glory years on the varsity football team or the dances where they met one of their first loves. Others went back under the mistaken impression that they could somehow heal the scars of childhood that had never gone away.
The apartment was one of six units in an old house that had been converted. Marilyn Lee Rittles lived in number six, what must have once been an exterior garage but was now a standalone apartment. Blue Christmas lights blinked in the front window. A heavy man with greasy black hair and an even greasier jean jacket was shoveling the sidewalk. Since the snow was really moving, I knew he was alive. A woman sat on the wraparound porch, puffing on a cigarette and watching him. She was dressed in nothing but pink panties and a sleeveless white T-shirt festooned with burn marks and other stains. As the clothes were not at all fitting for the cool weather, or really any weather, I doubted she was among the living.
She confirmed it when she saw me. When I parked in front of the house, she made eye contact, her eyes flew wide, and she scurried into the house—right through the door.
My Prius looked out of place on a street packed with twenty-year-old Ford Thunderbirds and Chevy Blazers with off-color doors, vehicles that looked even more drab and old when contrasted with all the pristine white snow. I debated about just waiting in the car to see if Marilyn Lee Rittles showed, but the guy shoveling the walk made eye contact with me. I smiled. He glared at me with suspicion. Apparently my charm device was totally on the fritz.
I got out of the car and approached him. This time, he didn't look at me. I stood there with my hands shoved into the pockets of my trench coat, feeling the coldness of the snow beneath my tennis shoes seeping into my feet.
"Hello," I said.
He grunted. I waited to see if that was the extent of his hospitality, and sadly, it was.
"Excuse me," I said, "I hate to bother you, but can you tell me if a Marilyn Lee Rittles—"
"What she done this time?" he asked.
"What's that?"
"I told y'all I can't make her show up for school if she don't want to. All I can do is tell her to go."
I studied him. He obviously hadn't been working long, but his pink skin was already shiny with perspiration. He wasn't fat, just heavy, sort of blocky around the neck. He had one of those round pasty faces that made telling his age difficult, but I doubted he could have been more than thirty. Twenty-five was more like it, which didn't seem old enough to have a fourteen-year-old daughter, but then, one never knew. His greasy hair glistened as if it had already frozen in the frosty air. I glanced behind him and spotted the smoker woman in a first floor window. Her haggard face paled and she vanished.
"Are you her father?" I asked.
He snorted as if he found the question funny. "Shit, man, I would have been, like, ten. I'm her uncle. My sister was a lot older."
"Oh."
He stopped and leaned on his shovel. "Don't you have all this on file or something? It's like I see a new one of you every week. Must be a lot of turnover in your line of work."
"Tell me about it," I said. "But Marilyn does live here?"
"Yeah. Most of the time. When she's not at her boyfriend's. He's a student at PSU. I told her she's way too young for him, but it's not like she listens to me. About anything. I know she had it rough, but you'd think she'd be at least a little grateful, me giving her a place to live. It's not like I had to do it, you know. It does cramp my style. It's not like the ladies enjoy seeing some girl who dresses like a tramp at my place."
"Sure." I tried to picture a lady, any lady worth the description of being called a lady, spending any length of time with Mr. Greasy and found the image hard to conjure. "But you think she'll be along soon?"
"I am her guardian," he said, continuing his airing of grievances. "She should listen to me. There's stuff I could teach her, you know. About life. Make sure she doesn't end up going down the wrong track like my sister. Stupid crack whore."
"You must have loved your sister very much, the way you talk about her."
"Huh? Oh yeah, sure."
"But she'll be along soon?"
"Who knows." Then, looking past me, he nodded in that direction. "Looks like it's your lucky day. Here she comes now … dressed like a tramp, like usual."
With a sigh, he returned to shoveling. I saw Mary approaching a couple blocks from the west, shuffling along the sidewalk as if in no rush to get home, headphones on and head bobbing. I never would have guessed she was fourteen, not based on the way she dressed, and not based on her body, either. She wore a short leather vest over a tight white T-shirt, a vest so small I doubted she could have buttoned it over her breasts even if she'd
tried, and it was unlikely she had tried. If the point was to make people focus on her boobs, which she had in abundance, she was definitely succeeding—just as if the point of her exposed midriff and low-riding jeans was to expose as much of her nether regions without quite being a walking porn video. Was giving a peek of her black lace panties deliberate? Of course it was.
Didn't anybody dress for cold weather? Since she hadn't seen me, it probably would have been better to just wait until she reached me, but I had no desire to talk to her in front of her uncle. Or the smoking woman, who, it was a good bet, was probably her mother. I started walking in her direction, and it was probably my movement that made her look up and take notice of me.
She froze. Trying to be friendly and non-threatening, I waved. When she wasn't moving, and all that hyperconscious swaying of hips and breasts stopped, she looked more her age. Even under layers of purple eye shadow and thick, glossy lavender lipstick, I saw a bit of the kid who still remained, a baby-faced innocence that might have been an illusion but seemed real nonetheless.
"Hi," I said, "I'm Myron Vale. If you have a minute, I'd like to—"
She ran.
It was such a surprise, her spinning and bolting in the direction she'd come, that I lost precious few seconds gaping at her. I hadn't had many people run from me since my cop days, and those were the sorts of people I expected to run—lowlifes who knew that if I caught them, their next stop was the county lockup to await their trial.
But either she wasn't so fast, or I wasn't so slow, because I managed to close the gap fairly quickly. She slipped a few times but didn't fall, veering hard right onto a side street. When I got to the same corner, I saw that she was headed for a metro bus idling at a stop, ready to pull away. Another block and I would catch her, no doubt, but if she managed to hop on that bus there was a good chance I wouldn't see her again, at least not anytime soon. Also getting on the bus was a woman in a blood-soaked wedding dress, and since neither the bus driver nor the little old lady behind her paid her any attention at all, I doubted she was dressed up for a costume party.
The Ghost, the Girl, and the Gold Page 10
