by Rob Thomas
“I don’t miss crummy little apartments without yards or gardens or windows that open. I definitely don’t miss that.”
It was her favorite part of Keith’s house—the yard. When she’d been in high school, after the recall election in which they’d lost everything, they’d made their home in an apartment, less crummy and less little than anywhere she’d lived in Manhattan, but definitely not anyone’s picture of the good life. It’d been comfortable, though, and it’d been theirs, back when it was the two of them against the world. And at least there’d been a courtyard with a pool where she could sit and get some air.
But it was a true luxury to be able to sit in a little patch of garden while the light faded, to take charge of the weeds in the garden, to swing gently between oaks older than she was.
“Oh yeah? You might miss it more after cutting the grass every weekend for a few months.” He glanced up at her from where he knelt, his mouth twisted wryly.
“Hm. I was thinking about adopting more of a supervisory position when it came to yard work. But I’ll bring you lemonade between mowings.”
He tugged a tough, sinewy weed from the soil. Its roots were dense and gnarled.
“What’s that you’re reading?”
She held up the little book. “Aurora’s diary. Last entry is a little over a year ago, so it might not be the most up-to-date information. But it’s somewhere to start.”
The diary was actually a sketchbook, filled with line after line of wide, looping handwriting in multiple colors of ink. Sketches and doodles showed up throughout in pencil—a cartoon Frankenstein’s monster shambling his way across the page, a perfectly shaded picture of a flower in a vase, an abstract doodle illuminating the margins. Aurora was a good artist. Sometimes the text ran in straightforward lines, but sometimes she’d turned the diary sideways or wrote in weird curlicues that spiraled around her drawings.
Can’t stand another day around the dead-eyed zombie hordes.
Every time Mrs. Nelson mispronounces the word “chlamydia” in health class, an angel gets its wings. Or maybe it just gets chlamydia?
Got a drug and alcohol lecture today from the arch-hypocrite himself. Does AA make you retarded, or did he kill all his fucking brain cells before that?
Aurora wasn’t always so hostile—almost every page had a reference, sometimes punctuated by hearts or smiley faces, to “Barkley,” who Veronica gathered was a family dog. And a full page of the journal was devoted to a sketch of Hunter, looking sober and skeptical, captioned with the words “The Boss.” But the image of Aurora Scott that started to emerge somewhere between the lines was prickly and impatient. She was smart, creative, petulant, bored. Unlike Hayley Dewalt, she didn’t seem eager to please anyone but herself.
“So how was your mom today?”
Veronica looked upward through the filigree of leaves. That morning, seeing Lianne on the small screen in the kitchen, neither of them had even said her name out loud. Veronica had watched the press conference open mouthed, lost in her own shocked horror, and it wasn’t until the screen went back to Trish Turley that she thought to wonder what Keith was feeling. But there’d been no time to discuss it; Petra Landros had called, and she’d had to hurry to get dressed and out the door.
When she’d gotten home, Keith had dinner on the table, glasses of wine at the ready. They’d eaten in an almost polite silence. She had the feeling he was waiting for her to talk about it. She’d opened her mouth to speak once or twice and changed her mind. Maybe it was just habit that made it so difficult. She and Keith talked about almost everything—but Lianne was one of the few topics they’d always avoided.
Now she propped herself up on her elbow to look at him. “Devastated. She’s terrified.”
Keith nodded, not looking up. He jabbed a gardening fork into the tender earth, trying to pry out the deep and stringy roots of another weed. She watched him for a moment before going on.
“But besides that? She seems like she’s doing well.” She paused for a moment. “She has another kid. A little boy.”
He nodded. “I saw that in one of the articles.” He paused. “Did you meet him?”
“Yeah. He’s cute.” She just had to avoid saying the word “brother” and she’d be able to keep it together. “And Tanner’s nice enough. I mean, he’s a little sketchy. Mac turned up some old check forging charges from back before he married Mom. And he does that bullshitty, self-mythologizing thing addicts always seem to do. But it seems like he really does care about her. Since they’ve been together, he’s been on the straight and narrow.”
“I’m happy for them,” Keith said simply. “I mean, not about what they’re going through, obviously. But I’m happy they found each other.”
She sat up in the hammock and swung her legs down. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. It’s been a while. When are you going to get back on the horse?”
Keith grimaced. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, honey, but I’ve currently got my hands full recovering from a catastrophic injury or two. I’m not sure I could handle dating.”
“Come on, ladies love vulnerability. You’ve just got to limp on out there and be yourself.”
“Why, you know any MILFs in the market for a cripple?” He waggled his brows.
“Oh my god. Please never say MILF again as long as I live.”
Her laughter was interrupted by the sound of her cell phone trilling in her pocket. She stood up out of the hammock and pulled it out.
“Veronica Mars.”
For a minute all she heard was background noise—traffic, maybe, or the patter of a TV. Then there was a phlegmy cough. “I got this number off a flyer.”
She froze, her senses going on alert. “I’m listening.”
“I might have some information for you.” Another cough. “You should probably come on by, 20111 Meadow View Road.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
She drove down the stretch of smoke shops, free clinics, and pay-by-the-hour motels that ran along Meadow View. The address landed her in front of a small square building, a bright yellow banner hanging across the front that read WE BUY GOLD. A picture of a capering leprechaun was painted across one window. The iron bars over the glass made it look like he was in jail.
There was a bell on the door that jingled as she entered. A smell of burnt coffee and heavy-duty cleaner stung her nostrils. Inside was a waiting area, with a small vinyl chair adjacent to an empty water cooler. There was a service window in the wall, filled with warped Plexiglas like a bank-teller’s station. To the left of that was a door, with a sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY.
“Hello?”
A blurry shape appeared on the other side of the glass. Then a small window shot open, and a sagging, doughy face with bloodshot eyes and wiry gray hair appeared.
Veronica unfolded a copy of her flyer from her purse. “You called me. About the flyer?”
His expression didn’t change, but a little glint came into his eyes. They were pale watery blue, veined like a cracked marble. “Is there some kinda reward?”
“Depends what you’ve got.” She let her smile drop. “If you give me a lead I can use I have a crisp hundred dollar bill with your name on it. Actually, it’s more like five crumpled twenties. But it spends the same.”
“A hundred seems a little thin when there’s a ten-K reward for finding the girl.”
“Oh, does that mean you’re going to bring her home?” Veronica mimed wiping her forehead. “That is a relief. Because I’ve been running all over town looking for information, but if you know where she is, that lets me off the hook.”
“Hey, I just want to make sure my information is appraised at its proper value.” He mournfully raised the straw of a Big Gulp to his lips and slurped loudly, eyes tracking her every move.
Veronica pressed her lips together. There might be other ways to get his information—but every second she stood here was another lost opportunity to find
the girls.
“Okay. I have a hundred and fifty for you to tell me everything you know, right now. And if I find Hayley Dewalt, I’ll come back and give you another fifty.”
He suckled at his soda for a moment, slurping the dregs up from the bottom. Then he slammed the Plexiglas window shut.
For a moment she thought that was it—she was dismissed. Then the door in the wall swung open. The face was now a body, slouching and slow, in a wrinkled khaki-colored shirt the same miserable shade as the carpet and the walls. He beckoned for her to follow him to the back room.
His work space was cramped and cluttered, every surface covered with a hodgepodge of equipment—electronic probes and scanners, tweezers, scales, gauges. Small bins lined the shelves on the walls, dusty and full of odd parts. A broken watch lay in pieces across a counter. A small TV was perched precariously on the corner of his workstation, tuned to Fox News, the screen smeared with something greasy.
The shopkeeper leaned down and pulled a small basket from a shelf below his workstation. A label on one end read 3/12. Inside, Veronica could see a jumble of plastic baggies, each containing something different—a gold-link bracelet, an ugly old brooch. A few engagement rings. She wondered briefly if any of their owners had been her or her dad’s clients.
“She’s not wearing it in any of the pictures they’re showing on the news,” he muttered. “But I recognized it the second I saw that flyer. Never seen another one like it.”
Veronica was about to ask him what he was talking about when he found what he was looking for. He ripped open the bag and poured a necklace out into one surprisingly fine-boned hand.
It was a pendant—a tiny gold birdcage, on a slender golden chain.
Veronica stared at the necklace in his hand. For a moment she didn’t recognize what she was looking at. Then, all at once, she understood. She reached into her purse and pulled out one of her flyers. There it was, hanging from Hayley’s neck on the night she disappeared. It dangled into her cleavage, the cage hitting the curve of a breast.
“This came in two days after that girl disappeared.”
“It’s pretty.” Veronica shrugged, playing it cool. “Are you sure all the girls aren’t wearing them? It’s not being mass-produced for Urban Outfitters or anything? Birds are sort of ‘in’ these days.”
“That’s not mass-produced,” he scoffed. “Whoever made it is a real craftsman. And look …” He opened the cage door on tiny hinges. “Her initials are engraved inside. I noticed ’em, but I didn’t put it together until I saw your flyer.”
Veronica held out her hand. The man reluctantly let the necklace slide into her palm. He was right—even she could see it, and she wasn’t exactly a jewelry expert. The birdcage was skillfully cast, the bars on the cage delicate and glittering. A cluster of three small diamonds was set in the roof. And there, inside, were the initials HD.
“Most of the stuff I get I sell for scrap. This? This is special. I was going to try to resell it.”
“Do you keep records on your clients? Who brought this in?”
He set his drink down on the counter and shuffled painfully over to the TV. A small stack of VHS tapes sat next to it. “It’s lucky I saw your flyer when I did. I usually only keep ’em for a week and then tape over ’em.” He selected the tape that said WEDNESDAY and pushed it into the built-in VCR.
There were a few tense moments as he fast-forwarded through the day’s tape. It looked like he didn’t get a lot of business until late evening—but by 9:00 p.m. the parade of despair commenced. Very young women with young children clinging to their legs; wobbly old men with unkempt beards; strung-out, bone-thin beings of indeterminate age. They filed in, one by one, the black-and-white cameras picking up their raw hope, and then their defeat when they realized how little time their treasures had bought them.
Then, at 10:05, a white guy with a sprout of pale dreadlocks came in. The shopkeeper hit Play.
“This is the guy,” he said, pointing at the screen. His fingernail was lined with grime, but his hands were otherwise clean. “I’ve got his ID information on file too. William Murphy, twenty-four years old. He signed the paperwork ‘Willie.’ Real twitchy kid—I assumed he was jonesing. Talked non-fucking-stop.”
“What’d he talk about?”
“Oh, he had a big long story about where he’d gotten it. His sister’s best friend’s cousin sent him to see what he could get for it, because she needed milk for her sick infant son or some crap like that. Basically didn’t want me to think he’d stolen it.”
“Which of course you believed, because buying and reselling stolen goods is a crime.” Veronica gave a tight smile. The man gestured as if to say, Sure, whatever.
She leaned closer to the screen, trying to get a glimpse of his face. Something about Willie Murphy was familiar to her. She’d seen him somewhere around town—or maybe he was just one of the handful of trustafarians who came to Neptune for spring break. He was twitchy—there was no sound, but she could tell by the quick, birdlike movements of his hands that he was talking excitedly. He kept looking behind him, like he thought someone might be sneaking up on him.
When he turned to leave, stuffing the bills into his wallet, he looked up for a split second, right at the camera. “There. Can you rewind and pause it when he looks up?”
The shopkeeper did.
And that was when she recognized him.
He’d been in the background in one of the pictures Hayley’s friends had given her, nursing a beer while Hayley Dewalt fed Rico Gutiérrez a strawberry. And he’d been at the party the night Aurora went missing—she’d seen him jumping into the pool.
She turned away from the shopkeeper, pulling her phone out of her purse. As she dialed, she put the necklace into her wallet.
“Hey, you gonna buy that?” the shopkeeper demanded. She snorted, covering the microphone to reply.
“You mean this stolen necklace that you illegally purchased? I don’t think so. This is evidence.” She uncovered the microphone. “Hi, Mac, sorry about that. Yeah, I need you to run another background check for me and e-mail the results, ASAP.”
“Sure,” Mac answered. “What’s the name?”
“William Murphy.”
She paused. For a split second she thought about telling Mac what she was planning to do. But then she remembered how Mac and Wallace had looked at her that night in Mac’s apartment, after they’d discovered just who owned the house on Manzanita.
Well, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And if she wanted to find Willie Murphy, she didn’t have a choice.
She was going to have to go back to the party.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The theme that night was simple: bikinis. Only for girls, of course; the guys seemed to be perfectly happy in pop-collar polos and baggy jeans. But to get in with a pair of X chromosomes, you had to be showing some skin.
Veronica moved slowly through the crush, a beach bag tucked under her arm like a life preserver. She didn’t have a lot of time for sunbathing these days, and she was painfully aware of the fish-belly white of her bared midriff. Still, she could feel eyes tracing the lines of her body beneath her pink string bikini, prying and eager.
As she made her way through the house, she kept her eyes peeled for any sign of Willie Murphy’s dark blond dreadlocks. Mac’s background check had yielded a portrait of a petty criminal: public intoxication, possession, disorderly conduct, trespassing. He’d been in and out of county lockup since he was seventeen years old, the longest stay a six-month stint for possession with intent to sell. His last known address was a grimy efficiency down the street from the Camelot, but he’d been evicted in January. Since then he’d had no known permanent address.
She’d considered calling Lamb, handing her new evidence straight to him—but she’d decided against it. Lamb wouldn’t want to bust the party. He’d just put Murphy’s picture all over the news and give him a chance to run. No, the only way she’d get answers was to talk to him before
he knew he was being hunted.
Now she just had to find him.
The house was packed with sweaty, bared bodies, faces leering from every dark corner she passed. Tonight’s celebration was, if anything, more frenzied than the party she’d seen the night before. It was nearing the end of spring break for most of these kids, and they seemed determined to push through the exhaustion, as if holding still would bring an end to this magical pretend world where everything felt good and you didn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to. Clouds of smoke billowed up from the crowd—she caught a whiff of tobacco and the sticky-sweet smell of pot, and something else, acrid and chemical, like the air in a cheap salon. Meth. She’d encountered the smell once before, tracking down a deadbeat dad in Riverside, finding him in a garbage-strewn apartment with a pipe in his hand.
She squeezed through the crowd, eyes sharp. A herd of beefy, shirtless boys stampeded past her in the hallway, chanting something she couldn’t quite make out. In the kitchen a game of strip poker was under way, and a smooth-chested boy had already lost his shirt. A girl in an electric-blue bikini sat across his lap, wearing an incongruous silk necktie. In the music room an elfin boy sat on a gilt coffee table, a friend helping him secure a length of tubing around his upper arm.
Out on the patio she took a deep breath of clean air. She made her way down the stairs to the lower level, where the pool roiled with activity. No sign anywhere of Willie—or the Gutiérrez cousins. She craned her neck to scan the pool and the Jacuzzi and for a moment forgot to watch where she was going. She walked right into someone.
“Ow!”
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry …”
The words died on her lips. Standing in front of her, in board shorts and a puka shell necklace, was Dick Casablancas.
He did a double take. “Hey, Ronnie,” he said. “You know, this is not where I expected to bump into you.”
The cluster of girls he’d been standing with eyed Veronica with interest. She stood frozen to the spot, hoping against all hope that he wouldn’t say anything too stupid.