In short, the bathroom contained just about everything that the average American twenty-five-year-old woman would take with her if she were going away for a day or two.
If she had planned to go away, that is.
I wandered back into the main room, a gnawing feeling of unease working at my guts. It wasn’t looking good, not good at all. I had expected—half-expected, say; the other half was hope—to find some kind of evidence that Meredith had simply decided to take a day or two off and, for whatever reason, had failed to notify anybody. But it obviously was not so. The suitcase, the quantities of clothing, the bathroom artifacts all said otherwise. So there were three possibilities.
One: Meredith had gone away for a few days—her car wasn’t around—but hadn’t packed, deciding to buy everything she needed when she got where she was going. Highly unlikely.
Two: Meredith had dropped out of sight for a few days, but hadn’t left the Big O. Her car was missing because she had gone to the movies, gone shopping, gone to have her hair done, or whatever twenty-five-year-old women do with a day off. Not as unlikely as the previous possibility, but not exactly in the “Eureka!” category either. Why wouldn’t she have picked up the phone, called her boss, and said, “I need a couple of days off”?
Three: Meredith’s mother was right, and something had happened to the girl. An accident—an auto accident would explain the missing car. But surely the police would have notified Donna Berens by now, for surely Meredith would be carrying identification. It was the most likely possibility—indeed, the only likely one—but even it seemed unlikely.
Something had happened to the girl, all right. But not a car wreck.
I was interrupted by a faint, tentative rapping from the other side of the main door, the bare brushing of knuckles on wood, the kind of a knock you undertake when you’re afraid someone might actually be home. I froze. Had Mrs. Schneiders heard me moving around the apartment? I doubted it: My efforts weren’t big noise-generators and, in any case, I had been taking pains to work quietly. Plus I was certain I would hear her shuffling and clacking down the hallway long before she reached the door.
I ignored the door and concentrated on inventing some kind of brilliant next move.
And was standing in the middle of the dinky apartment, mulling over the nonexistent alternatives, when a key scraped in the lock and the door swung inward.
CHAPTER THREE
We hard-boiled private-eye types have an instinctive reaction to situations like this: We look for someplace to hide. In a small, square, closetless room there aren’t too many such someplaces. I suppose I could have hopped into bed and pulled the covers up over my head, but that seemed a little inefficient. I settled instead for dropping into one of the low-backed chairs, the one that faced the door, and affecting nonchalance. It’s what Simon Templar would do.
The door opened and the door closed, and when it was through with all of that I no longer had the place to myself. I had been joined by a pale, platinum-blond woman who was just a little “too”—too made-up, too bejewelled, too old for the too-gaudy clothes that were just a little too small on her. She wasn’t much younger than me, which meant she was breathing hard and hot down the neck of the mighty four-oh, and, like most of us aging postwar baby-boomers, she could have stood the loss of ten or fifteen pounds. Nevertheless she had begun the day by wriggling her way into one of those shapeless dresses that’s little more than a knee-length sweatshirt. On her, the shapeless dress got a shape, at least a hip and bust, both of which were generous. The dress was a color that you might have called green, although a shade not to be found in nature, festooned with yellow geometric shapes in an abstract, asymmetrical patttern. She also wore yellow hose and white ankle-boots, and I’ve already hinted at the makeup that earned her a line on Mary Kay’s permanent Christmas card list.
She had been scanning the room in an unfocused, uncertain fashion—I recognized it because it was exactly what I had been doing until she interrupted me. Now she spotted me, sitting motionless in my chair, and jumped a little. “Who the hell are you?”
“No fair. Since I was here first, I should get first dibs on the questions. Who the hell are you?”
The pale-haired woman hesitated for the thinnest shaving of a second, if that much. Then she stepped farther into the room and dumped her oversized canvas bag into the unoccupied chair as if she owned the joint. Which was exactly the intended effect.
“My name’s Meredith Berens, if it’s any of your business,” she said with almost—almost—the right amount of indignation. “This is my apartment, and if you’re not out of it in just about five seconds I’m gonna—”
“Call a cop. All the good lines have been said to death, haven’t they?” I slipped two fingers into my shirt pocket and extracted Meredith Berens’s graduation photo. The woman watched me closely as I pretended to examine the picture.
“What’s that?” she wondered suspiciously.
I turned it so she could see it. “Your graduation picture, Meredith. If you don’t mind my saying so, these past six or seven years must’ve been pretty tough. I mean, I don’t think your own mother would recognize you.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“Your own mother. More accurately, Meredith’s own mother. The one who hired me to look for”—I tapped the picture—“her. The one who gave me the key to this place. The one who—ah, well, I’ve made my point. How ’bout you? You want to have another go at the who-are-you question? Tell you what—I’ll give you a hint: Try Dianna Castelli.”
Her head came up as if she’d been hit from behind. “How’d you know my name?” Her voice trod the middle ground between anxiety and indignation.
“I’m a detective; I deduced it. Process of elimination. You aren’t Meredith Berens and you aren’t her mother, and the only other female-type name that’s been kicked around so far belongs to Meredith’s boss. Dianna Castelli. Okay, so it’s more of a guess than a deduction; it’s right, isn’t it?”
She said nothing, which was as good as saying yes. She shoved her bag into a corner of the easy chair, leaving enough room to plant herself in, which she did. She combed her hair with her long-nailed fingers. The hair was the color of cotton wool, short on the sides, longer and almost spiky on top, still longer in back, delicate tendrils tracing down her neck.
“Detective, huhn?” she said, making a good job of trying to sound unimpressed. “Your parents give you a name?”
“A couple of them. The one I use most is Nebraska. You can use it too.”
Dianna Castelli’s eyebrows—which, incidentally, were considerably darker than her hair—went up. “Peculiar name. For a person, I mean.”
You get used to it after the first thirty or thirty-five years.
“From the Osage word nibthacka,” I said, “which means ‘flat water’ and probably was a reference to the Platte River.” The Platte cuts a lazy, meandering path across the state and empties into the Missouri River, the boundary between Nebraska and Iowa, south of Omaha.
“Really?” said the Castelli woman. “Are you a Native American?”
“There are no native Americans; everyone here came from somewhere else originally.”
“And you came from …”
“Decatur Street.”
“Uh-huh.” She hooked a heel on the edge of the trunk that was pretending to be a coffee table and hoisted her other leg up over the first. It was a nice leg—they both were, in fact, being a matched set and all, and I didn’t in the least mind having a closer look at them, yellow-wrapped though they may have been. “Well, detective from Decatur Street, here we are.”
“So it would seem.”
“What have you detected so far?”
“No Meredith Berens here.”
“No fooling,” Dianna Castelli said drily. “Tell me, how much does Donna Berens have to pay for that news flash?”
“You knew Meredith wasn’t here, eh? Then why’d you knock on the door before busting in?”
&n
bsp; “I … Oh, hell—touché, already. I knew she wouldn’t be here but I knocked anyway. Partly out of habit, like closing the bathroom door when you’re the only one home. And partly because … well, for all I knew maybe she was here, sick or something, and I didn’t want to just come barging in.”
“Too sick to call in to work? Too sick to let her mother know? That’s pretty sick, especially for someone who was apparently in good health Sunday afternoon, the last time Donna Berens spoke with Meredith.”
Dianna Castelli shrugged, an odd sort of shrug, right shoulder coming up and head tilting as if to meet it. “People get sick.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I’ve known people who got sick. I’ve been sick myself.”
I frowned. “Sick or well, Meredith Berens is decidedly not here.”
“No fooling,” she repeated, no less sarcastically this time around. “Any idea where she might be?”
“Not a one. I had hoped that having a look-see at the place might provide some inspiration. Clues, you know, like the guys in the books are always tripping over.”
“And … ?”
“And the only kind I find are the kind I’d just as soon not find. Meredith Berens isn’t here. Obviously. But her suitcase and her clothes and all of the sorts of things you would take with you if you were going away are here.”
The Castelli woman frowned. “Meaning she hasn’t gone away?”
“Meaning she didn’t plan to go away. Or something happened.”
“Something as in an accident.”
“Possibly,” I said. “It’s hard to say for sure. I’m guessing it’s unlike Meredith to simply disappear like this, without saying anything.”
“Completely unlike her.” She noticed the apartment, as if for the first time. “This is how you found the place?”
“This is how I found it, and this is how Meredith left it—most of the time, by the look of it. Incidentally, how did you get in here?”
“Amazing.” She was referring to the state of the apartment. “At the office, her desk is always so tidy. You can find anything in her files.” She looked at me. “It’s called a key, I believe. Handy little things.”
“I can imagine. Meredith gave you a key?”
“No, I took a wax impression of it one day at the office when she was in the ladies’ room. Of course she gave it to me. She took a couple days’ vacation back in June. I offered to water the plants. She said she didn’t have any plants—she didn’t lie; what could live here?—but she thought it’d maybe be a good idea for someone to have a key, in case of emergency. Today’s the first time I ever used it. It seemed like an emergency to me, sort of.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little peculiar that Meredith would give a key to you and not her mother?”
“I didn’t know that Donna didn’t have a key to this place, but I’m not surprised. This is where Meredith came to be free of that woman. She gives her a key, the freedom’s gone.”
“They didn’t get along, Meredith and her mother?”
Dianna Castelli sighed, recrossed her legs in the other direction, which was just as good a view as the first, and folded her arms beneath her ample bosom. “I don’t know …” She stopped, frowned, and tried again. “It’s tricky, because Meredith and her mother don’t fight as such. It takes two to fight, and Meredith won’t. She buckles, every time. You’d think the girl was five, not twenty-five. It was everything I could do just to get her to move out of the deep freeze.”
I smiled. “You’ve been to Donna Berens’s home, then.”
She pantomimed a shiver. Or perhaps it wasn’t an act. “I was there—to help Meredith move out, and I hope it’s the last time.”
“Moving out was your idea, not Meredith’s?”
She shook her head. The medium-length spiky hair on top swayed. “No, it was Meredith’s idea, all right. She’d been talking about it for more than two years, ever since she started working for me, in fact. But that’s just it: All she did was talk. I finally told her to put up or shut up, and just to make sure she didn’t chicken out—for the umpteenth time—I threw her into the car and we went apartment hunting, and then I helped her pack and got her moved in here.” Again she surveyed the room. “Geez, it looked a lot nicer last winter.”
“When did Meredith move in?”
“January first—second, really. Liberation Day, we called it.”
“And up until then she lived at home?”
Dianna Castelli nodded. A couple of things were starting to come into focus, on the edges at least. Moving out, not giving her mother a key to this apartment, keeping the apartment in a state of clutter bordering on mess. In a sneaky, passive kind of way, Meredith was rebelling against Donna Berens. The first two acts were perhaps obvious; the third less so. But by keeping her apartment chaotic, cluttered, wasn’t Meredith making a statement, albeit a private one, against the orderly, underfurnished, even sterile home she had grown up in? Like the actor hawking cold medication on TV, I’m not a doctor, but I’d spent quite a bit of the past nine or ten months playing doctor with a very good local psychologist, and I was willing to bet money she would agree with my guess.
“Is there animosity between Meredith and her mother?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t say that. I think Donna overprotected Meredith to the point of suffocation. And I think, the last couple years, being out in the ‘real world’ and everything, Meredith has begun to realize how sheltered a life she’s been forced to live. I suppose she must resent that at least a little—wouldn’t you?—but I wouldn’t say there was any real animosity or anything. Why? You don’t think—”
“I’m just trying to get an idea of whom I’m dealing with here. I barely know Donna Berens, and I don’t know Meredith at all. But as I told Donna, if we assume Meredith went away, and if we can guess at why she went, we may get an idea of where.”
“But you said Meredith didn’t go away.”
I wagged my head. “I said Meredith didn’t take the sorts of things you would expect her to take if she went away. And I said that makes me think she didn’t plan to go away. That doesn’t mean that something didn’t come up suddenly to cause her to leave.”
“Like what?”
“Like I don’t know—that’s why I keep asking you questions.”
She blew out a disgusted breath and crossed her arms even tighter, hugging herself, digging her chin into her chest. “And I’m not much help, am I?”
“That’s not your fault. What about Meredith’s father?”
“What about him?”
“Did she ever talk about him?”
She paused, and her face took on that expressionless, abstract, let-me-see look. “No-o …” she said slowly. “Not really. I knew that her parents were divorced, of course, but I guess I didn’t know one way or another if her father was alive.”
“He is. Apparently. Donna Berens wasn’t of much help on that score. I gather the parting was not amicable.”
Dianna nodded. “I have the same impression,” she said, “mainly from the way Meredith never spoke of it. I mean, after two years of working together we’ve gotten to be pretty good friends, yet she never would talk about her father. Kind of strange, I always thought. But in another way it kind of all added up, too. The way Donna sort of kept Meredith under wraps, protecting her from the big bad world and all the big bad people in it—like loudmouthed blonds.” She laughed at herself. “I kind of figured that the divorce had been a mess, and that in her own cockeyed way Donna figured she was doing the kid a favor. Does Meredith’s father live around here?” she wondered, suddenly hopeful. “You don’t suppose she—”
“It’s a nice thought,” I agreed, “so hang onto it. Evidently the old man lives in Illinois. Wilmette. Donna says they haven’t been in contact since this state was admitted to the Union. That’s about all the useful information she supplied, if you call that useful.”
“Not very.” She tossed her head, indicating the wall behind her. “
There’s the phone.”
I shrugged, got up, went over to the wall phone, and called directory assistance for Area Code 312.
“Strike one,” I said to Dianna Castelli as I replaced the receiver. “There’s no listing for anyone named Berens in Wilmette.”
“Crap.” She thought a minute. “Wilmette—is that around Chicago?” I nodded. “Well, maybe his mailing address is Wilmette but the telephone exchange or whatever you call it is for some other suburb. Haven’t you ever gotten a phone bill that you think is wrong because it lists a call to a city you never called, and then you find out you did call, but you thought you were calling somewhere else because of the address?”
I looked at her hard. “I almost know what you’re talking about.”
She sighed. “I have an aunt who lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, but whenever I call her the bill says Minneapolis, not Eden Prairie. See?”
“Where the heck is Eden Prairie, Minnesota?” I said.
“Well, it’s just south of—Look, that’s not the point. The point is—”
I laughed. “I take your point, but I think you’re wrong. I might call Wilmette and see Chicago on my bill, but if a guy lives in Wilmette and I call directory for Wilmette, they’re going to show a listing. If he’s in Wilmette and if he’s listed.”
“What if he’s moved away? What if he’s not listed?”
I moved back to my chair. “Then the job becomes a little harder, but not impossible. I know some people in Chicago. Besides, Meredith’s father isn’t our only possibility, or even our best: If Meredith had gone to visit him, wouldn’t she have called in to let you know? Wouldn’t she have packed a bag?”
The woman jumped up and paced the room, what paceable space there was, her arms still wrapped around her. “You know, Mr. Nebraska, you’re a whole hell of a lot better at asking questions than you are at answering them.”
“We’re not to the answering part yet, Ms. Castelli. I’ve found you pretty much always have to go through the asking portion first. And, yes, I am good at asking questions. You don’t know the right questions, you don’t get the right answers.”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 4