“Cam is missing. Are you Sarah?” I repeated.
She opened the door all the way and stared at me. She could have been a Charles Addams sketch. A little shorter than me, she was skeleton thin. Her dyed-black hair was lank and faded below two inches of blond roots. Even without makeup, her face was glow-in-the-dark white with lavender circles of sleeplessness deepening her eye sockets into pits. But her eyes, unlike her brothers and mother’s, were hazel green. She wore a black-and-white-striped tunic over black leggings and bare feet.
She mulled her answer. “I’m Sarah. Who are you?”
“My name is Harper Blaine. I’m a private investigator, and your mother hired me to find your brother. He’s been missing for about six weeks. I thought you might be able to help me. May I come inside?”
She stood aside and I walked in. She closed and locked the door behind me and led the way into the kitchen, then pointed to the tiny drop-down table mounted to the wall opposite the fridge. The dried-blood red varnish on her short nails was chipped and bitten. I headed for one of the two chairs by the table and settled myself with my bag in my lap.
She looked at me a moment, gnawing her lower lip, then said, “I was making coffee. You want some?” She went to the sink, pulled the plug and water gurgled away down the drain. The garbage disposal growled, cutting off my reply. She glanced over her shoulder at me, drying her hands on a cotton dish towel.
“Sure. Thanks,” I replied.
She reached across the sink and pushed a button on the small stereo on the counter; Vivaldi’s Gloria swelled. In a minute, she came back with a small, painted tin tray and dipped like a cocktail waitress to unload it. A garish picture of the Space Needle from 1962 was painted on the inside. Sarah returned the tray to the counter before she sat down across from me. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She took a book off her half of the table and placed it on the floor; then she pushed a mug of coffee in front of me and arranged a neat little barrier of milk jug and sugar bowl between us. She dawdled over mixing her coffee, keeping her head down.
I sipped my coffee black. It tasted like brackish water run through oil-soaked sawdust.
Sarah swished her spoon around in her cup. “So, you wanted to talk to me…?”
“Your mother hired me to find Cameron. I’ve got some ideas about where he might be, but not why. I was hoping you could help me out with that.”
She raised her head and glared at me. “Oh, so ‘Mummy’ thinks that if something bad has happened it must be Sarah’s fault, huh?”
I stared back in silence until she blushed and lowered her eyes. “No. Cam’s roommate mentioned that you called a few times and that you two seemed to be close.” I let that hang.
She poked at her mug.
“When was the last time you talked to him?”
She heaved her skinny shoulders, defensive and sullen. “I don’t know. Sometime in March, I guess. Haven’t seen him or talked to him since, so I don’t know where he is.”
“In March, did you see him in person, or talk on the phone?”
“In person.”
“Where did you see him?”
“In a bar.”
“Where?”
“Pioneer.”
“Pioneer Square
?” I clarified.
“Yeah.”
“Which bar?”
“Don’t remember.”
I sighed and sat back in my chair. I drank my bad coffee, then put it down on the table. “This would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to play Twenty Questions with you.”
Again the glare.
My purse shuddered and Chaos exploded from it, scratching and scrambling to look over the table edge. Sarah started and stared at the furry apparition hoisting itself onto the table.
The ferret poked her nose into my coffee mug and I scooped her up. “Chaos! No.”
She sneezed and shook her head in annoyance just as Sarah lit up and reached for her, too.
“Sweet!” Sarah cried. She offered a finger for sniffing. Chaos licked the fingertip after a careful snuffle. “Does it bite?” “No.”
Sarah stroked the ferret’s head as I put her down again. Then Chaos skipped off to investigate Sarah’s coffee mug.
“Don’t let her into the sugar,” I warned.
“Can it—she—have some milk? Is that OK?”
“Only a little,” I allowed.
Sarah dipped her pinky into the milk jug and offered it to Chaos, who licked up the milk with a rapid tongue.
The girl beamed at me. “May I pick her up?” “Uh, sure.”
Sarah lifted the ferret with care and brought her up to her shoulder, cuddling the animal against her neck. “What a sweetie!” Chaos nuzzled her jaw.
Sarah exclaimed over the wonderfulness of my pet for five minutes while Chaos endeared herself, trotting along Sarah’s shoulders and offering whiskery, tickling kisses—the attention hound.
Brimming over with the joy of mustelid nuzzling, Sarah began pouring out a story. “I don’t know if this is related to Cam going missing, but I suppose it could be. He helped me out of a bad situation back… in February, I guess it was. I was really stupid to get into it in the first place, but I was mad, you know?”
I prompted her. “What happened?”
“Well, first you gotta know the family thing. Cam’s not the oldest. I am. But because he’s a boy—a male—everything is for him.” Bitterness crept into her tone. “The car, the trust fund, the education… everything. I only get an allowance out of it until I get married. If I never get married and never have any kids, I’ll get an allowance for the rest of my life. It’s like being on some kind of parental welfare! When I asked my mother why I didn’t get a trust fund for college, you know what she said?” “Tell me.”
Her voice swooped and rattled in fury. “She said that she and Daddy didn’t want some man to marry me for my money! How antediluvian! Mom is always on about all that upper-middle-class-masquerade crap! It is so Mrs. Robinson. And you know, I tried it. I really did. But it’s not what I want. So I decided that if I couldn’t do what I wanted, I wasn’t going to take her money.”
She sneered. “You can probably imagine how well Mummy liked that! And she had a lot of ways of letting me know just how much she disapproved. So I got mad. I started doing things I knew would piss her off, just to irritate the hell out of her. Cam tried to give me money so I wouldn’t have to work, but there was no way I was going to take it.”
She waved her hands to indicate her hair and body. “So I did all of this. The whole Gothic-dead thing. I pierced my nose, my eyebrow… and a lot of other parts, too. I talked about getting a tattoo, but really, the idea kind of squicked me—and branding is right out! I even had a pair of red contact lenses I used to wear.” She cackled. “They really weirded Mom out. I started hanging out with some rough guys, playing the slut, taking drugs—all that teenage rebellion crap. Except I didn’t get around to doing it until I was twenty-one, so it’s not like drinking was going to be a big deal. I had to be totally vile. And manage to keep just inside Mom’s tolerance level, because, if she threw me out, how could I keep on making her life as miserable as mine was?”
Her voice began to slow and she caught the ferret, petting her with repetitive strokes. “But right after Christmas I finally broke the camel and Mom threw me out. I bummed around and slept on friends’ couches and all that. And then I met this guy…”
Chapter Thirteen
Sarah lowered her head and stared at the memory. Her words wafted out like a cloud of drug smoke. “I used to see him in some of the clubs and I was just kind of drawn to him. He was beautifully scary, like a perfect knife. He used to say things that frightened me, but I was… fascinated. I guess I was just so low, I had made myself into this despicable thing so well, that it seemed like the right thing for me, like I deserved to be hurt.” She was holding on to the ferret with both hands and tears began to roll down her face. Her voice slowed until it barely trickled.
“And
one night I saw Cam in one of the clubs with some musicians we used to know and I just wanted to be with him. I wanted to get away from the man I was with and get back to what I really was. I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I tried to catch Cam’s eye, but he didn’t see me. So the next day, I called him and we met and I cried all over him and told him all about it and he said he’d help me get away.” She stopped talking and stared at the table. Silent, melancholy thoughts weighted the air between us. I barely breathed. “And Cameron did help you get away?” She shivered back into speech. “Yes. He did. I’m not sure how. I don’t know what he did, but one night, the guy just said he didn’t want me anymore, that I could go.” Chaos turned in Sarah’s grip and to lick her face. The young woman sniffed and snuggled the ferret closer to her face, shaking out quiet sobs. Chaos kissed away the tears until they stopped.
“He said that you could go? Were you living with him? It almost sounds like he was keeping you prisoner.”
Sarah let Chaos onto the tabletop and picked up her now-cold coffee, keeping her eyes turned from me. Chaos scampered for the milk jug. I grabbed her. Sarah picked up the milk and sugar and carried them to the counter without meeting my gaze.
“Kind of. I guess. I didn’t start out living with him—not the first night or two—but then things started to get kind of strange and kinky. You know, it’s hard to remember details now.” She came back to the table with a saucer of water and a plateful of cookies. She handed the cookies to me and put the saucer on the table for Chaos. Sarah sipped her tepid, sweet coffee, ate a cookie, and offered the crumbs to the ferret.
“Did you ever read The Story of O?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted, “but I know about it.”
Chaos decided it was nap time and jumped down into Sarah’s lap. Sarah stroked her warm, furry body while we talked. Bit by bit, stroking the trusting little creature in her lap, Sarah calmed.
“Sometimes I felt like I was O, but it wasn’t quite the same. It’s so hard to remember… He used to tie me up and leave me that way all day, he made me sleep in a box… things like that. He had the role of Master, but I wasn’t really Slave. I was more like… Plaything, or Toy. It was like living in a Fellini film. I was so relieved to get out, but sometimes, I—I almost miss it. God, am I some kind of sick puppy or what?”
She raised her head and gave me a wavering smile. Any smile was more than I had expected.
I had my notebook out. “What was the man’s name?”
“Name? I can’t remember his last name. Maybe I never knew it. His first name was Edward. That’s all I can remember.”
“Did he give you drugs?”
“No. That’s one of the funny things about it. He absolutely would not let me take any drugs—not even pot or aspirin—only a little wine or tea once in a while. Maybe he was doctoring the tea? I don’t know why the details are so fuzzy. Maybe I just want to forget it, so I do.”
“Can you remember any details about Edward himself? Where he lived, what he did for a living? Physical description?”
“I never knew where he worked. He was gone all day and came home at night—if he came home—and that was when things would happen. I slept during the day a lot, too. I stayed in a condo down-town. One of those fancy buildings with a doorman near the Paramount Theater.”
“You remember the address?”
She rattled it off. “But I think it’s leased by a corporation. I can’t remember why I think that… Maybe Edward told me.” She shook her head. “It’s hard to remember stuff about that time.”
“It’s all right. I can find out. What does Edward look like?”
“He looks like James Bond.”
“Excuse me? He looks like Sean Connery?”
“Not Connery. The new one. Sort of, but not quite. I think his hair is thicker and his face is thinner and he’s a lot scarier. But, you know, that dark-haired, movie-star look, only cruel.”
I made a note. I couldn’t believe I might be looking for a Pierce Brosnan lookalike. Crazy. “You don’t know what he does for a living, but what was his lifestyle like? Did he seem to have money? Did he ever say anything about family or where he was from? Did he have an accent? Anything like that?”
“No. He just sounded rich and American. You know that super-lean, no-accent voice? He had that. Always sounded so cold and remote…” Sarah shuddered, then shook herself and resettled.
Her voice was clear and calm when she continued. “I don’t think he had a family, though he had a lot of friends who were all as creepy as him. He did seem to have a lot of money and a lot of people who hung around him—I think they were kind of scared of him, or, like, his employees or something. Really subservient. Total pack behavior. Edward is definitely the top dog. I think he’s from Seattle, though, because sometimes his friends would talk about stuff that happened around here when I was a little kid or before I was born, like they saw it. Like the World’s Fair and stuff like that.”
“Well, if he’s a local boy and he has connections to a local corporation that leases that condo, I’ll find him. What do you think Cameron did to get you away from Edward?”
“I’m not sure. I think it took a while. I think they met a bunch of times before he let me go.”
“Edward, you mean?”
She nodded. “Uh-huh. I think, at first, Cameron tried to frighten him, or pressure him somehow, blackmail, sort of. You know, ‘Leave my sister alone or I’ll sic the cops on you.’ Or maybe he said he’d have someone break Edward’s legs—that’s one of Cam’s favorite mock threats, because he’s so skinny and wimpy-looking. But I think they must have made some kind of deal. Maybe Cam paid him off. Cam lives pretty tight for a rich kid, so he has plenty of spare change, if you know what I mean.”
“Why would a rich man take money from your brother?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just a guess. Some people are greedy, no matter how much they’ve got. Or Cam could have offered him something else. He’s a smart guy. He’d have found out what Edward wanted.”
“Do you think Edward could have anything to do with Cameron’s disappearance?”
Her face became bleak. “He could.” She leaned toward me. “Do you think my brother’s dead?”
“No, I don’t. I think he’s alive, but in hiding or unable to let anyone know where he is. Could Edward arrange something like that for Cameron?”
She frowned. “I think he could kill someone. And I know I wasn’t the first plaything he had, so he could do that, too, but I can’t imagine it happening to Cam. He’s very strong-willed. And he’s smart, like I said. Not very many people ever put one over on Cam. If he’s not sick or locked up in some fashion, he’ll find some way to save himself. But it’s good someone’s looking for him. You’ll find a way to help him, won’t you? You’ll find him?”
“I’ll do my best. I think I will find him. Soon.”
Now she was fierce. “Good. You know what I said before, about how Cam gets everything? Well, it’s not because I hate Cam. I don’t think he even wants it. It’s what Dad wanted and what Mom wants. That makes me a little pissed, still, and sometimes I really could hate Mom and Dad—if it was worth the energy—but I don’t. None of that is worth my time. But Cam… Cam is worth my time because I was worth his. You find my brother. And when you do, let me know. I owe him a lot. And I love him a lot, too. If I can help, you just say so.”
“I will.” I handed her one of my cards. “If you think of anything, call me.”
She looked at my card as if memorizing it before reaching down and placing it between the pages of her book: Divina Commedia by Dante. She reached into her lap and picked up Chaos, raising her to her face for one more nuzzle. Chaos yawned, nipped lightly at Sarah’s nose and licked her. Sarah kissed her and offered her to me. I took the ferret and put her into my bag, where she stuck her head out of the top for a good view.
Sarah walked me toward the door. I stopped in the doorway, unable to resist.
“Ca
n I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure,” she answered, shrugging and reaching to stroke Chaos’s head with a finger.
“What are you doing here? What is this place?”
“This?” she asked, looking around. “This is my place. It was my grandparents’ house. I inherited it a couple of years ago when the trust matured. My family’s really into trusts. Right now I guess it’s some kind of therapy. I’m trying to fix it up a bit. It’s a lot better than it was when I came here in March.”
“What about the motorcycle parts?”
“Those belong to my sort-of boyfriend. He’s in Italy right now, visiting his family, and I kind of like to have the mess around to remind me of him.”
“Oh. So that’s why Dante in Italian.”
She blushed and looked away. “No. That’s why the Italian boyfriend. Can I ask you a question?” “Sure.”
She surprised me. “Do you think I would be good with ferrets?”
I smiled at her. “I do.” I gave her the name of the shelter where I’d found Chaos and told her to call them. She smiled, looking twelve years old.
As I drove away, I waved. Sarah waved back. I found I kind of liked the girl, but I felt more drained than by any other interview I’d ever been in. Despite my tendency to feel instantly chummy with any other ferret person, leaving was a relief.
By the time I reached my office, it was raining in earnest: big drops that hit with a splat like a thrown water balloon. I bundled Chaos into the bag and tried to run between raindrops. We both got wet.
The answering machine was blinking. I pushed the button as I set down my bag. Chaos jumped out, tumbled onto the floor, and began exploring.
The voice on the single message was familiar. “Hi, Harper. This is Will Novak. I was thinking… well, it’s started raining, so I was wondering if I could cash in my rain check for dinner. If you’re interested, please call me.” He rattled off a phone number.
An impatient suitor. Let’s face it, I had a bad case of lust for him, but dating someone connected, even tangentially, to a case can be complicated. I thought about my options as I set down some food and water for the ferret. Chaos fell on the bowls as if starving.
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