Pickups lazed in driveways and a gaggle of kids rode bikes down the middle of the street. A massive elm tree dwarfed the Troupe’s front yard and a lawnmower buzzed nearby.
“You must be Rafferty.” The man looked up from polishing the hood of the Oldsmobile parked in the garage. “Kathy-Lee told me you were coming.” He grabbed a rag from the fender and wiped his hands as he walked down the driveway. “I’m Wayne. It’s good to meet you.”
Wayne was average. Medium height, weight, even his hair was not quite brown, nor black. Ordinary polo shirt and scrubbed-clean jeans. Pleasant enough smile, a firm handshake and nothing to leave an impression one way or the other.
I got another glimpse into the sketch artist’s frustration of teasing out identifying marks and attributes from witnesses.
“Come on inside. Let’s tell Kathy-Lee you’re here.”
After re-meeting Kathy-Lee, handshakes, how-do-you-do’s and coffee for all, we were seated on floral-patterned lounges around a dark timber coffee table.
Kathy-Lee grabbed her husband’s hand and said, “I’m glad you’re here Mr Rafferty, and that you’ll be bringing Kimberly home.” She smoothed her skirt with her free hand and I felt relieved for her third finger. Hold on, Wayne.
“How can we help? What more can we tell you?”
They both smiled at me.
You could start by telling me why things were so bad that Kimberly felt she needed to run away. I thought it might come down to beating it out of them, because I wasn’t picking up anything weird about the house or the occupants at first glance.
The living room in which we sat—the house wasn’t big enough for it to be called a sitting room—was neat and clean. Cream painted walls matched the carpet. Aside from the couches there were two armchairs, covered in maroon corduroy. That sounds awful, but the color matched the flowers on the couches which made it work. Sort of.
A tall lamp stood between the two chairs, behind a glass-topped timber side table. Twin bibles, bound in blue leather, rested there. I assumed the bright fabric bookmark was Kathy-Lee’s which left no prizes for guessing who the all-business, brown one belonged to.
A shiny, black upright piano sat in a corner. Religious paintings adorned the walls, matched in number by family photographs, some showing all three Troupes, some just Kimberly at various ages.
I could see the kitchen poking out around a corner, all Formica and dark timber. A large carved spoon, with a clock face in the bowl, hung on the wall above a regiment of spice jars.
Looking out the windows to my right, the small backyard was neat and tidy. Sunflowers dwarfed the back fence and smiled at me. A tree-fort in the rear corner looked a little unloved. At eighteen, I guessed Kimberly wasn’t playing up there much anymore.
I realized I hadn’t answered their question, so I sipped my coffee.
Ugh.
Nice house, terrible coffee. Like television Jim before me, I wouldn’t be having a second cup.
“I often find it useful to meet clients in their own house, Kathy-Lee. It lets me get a feel for what Kimberly was thinking when she left.”
They smiled again and nodded.
“Wayne, tell me about Kimberly.” I set my coffee down, pulled out my notebook and pen. To work now. Professional.
“She’s always been our pride and joy, since the day God blessed us with her.” Wayne smiled again at his wife and let his free hand join the pile on her leg. “Kathy-Lee always wanted to be a Mom, and I knew she’d be a great one, but it took a long time for her to conceive. It’s testament to the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ that he healed Kathy-Lee and allowed Kimberly to enter our lives.”
Uh huh.
“She’s your only child, right?”
“Yes, she is, Mr Rafferty.” Kathy-Lee’s turn. “Complications during her birth meant I’m unable to have any more children. God decided that we would be perfect as a family of three. And we have been.”
Uh huh.
“I’m having trouble here. Help me to understand this,” I said. “Kimberly was desperately wanted as a child. She had a good childhood, got good grades and stayed out of trouble. You loved her and didn’t mistreat her.”
Kathy-Lee’s eyes narrowed and I patted the air between us.
“She started dating Brian last year, who, by your own account, treated her well and is quite the goal-oriented boy himself. They’re eighteen, in other words, adults. Two months ago, you find a note, explaining that she left because she felt you didn’t accept her relationship with Brian.”
I looked up from my meaningless doodles.
“Do I have that right, more or less?”
Wayne and Kathy-Lee looked at each other and turned to me. They nodded in sync but their smiles were gone.
“That’s right.”
“Okay. Here’s my problem.” I sighed and closed the notebook. “What you’re asking me to do is to track down an adult who left home over your objection to her point of view.”
“She’s our daughter, Mr Rafferty,” Wayne said.
“That’s the only reason I’m still here.” I shrugged. “What I’m saying is, I can’t go around forcing adult children to stay home just because their parents want them to.”
“It’s not that, Mr Rafferty,” he said. “I’m not saying that we wouldn’t like Kimberly to live at home forever. Sure we would. But we’re not that naive. We know she has to spread her wings and live her own life. And we know that she will make decisions that we don’t agree with.” Kathy-Lee didn’t look quite as convinced of this as her husband. “After all, God showed us his love by giving us free will. We wouldn’t be good Christians in His image if we didn’t allow our child the same now, would we?”
There was no way I could dig up an answer that wouldn’t be falsely sycophantic or, more likely, insulting, so I rolled out my strategy of shutting up once again. Wayne didn’t break stride.
“The truth is, Mr Rafferty, when Kimberly left and … well, when Kathy-Lee showed me the note, I was heartbroken.” He slumped and examined his hands. “I thought I’d driven my daughter out of our house. Out of the only home she’s ever known. Can you have any idea what that feels like?”
Kathy-Lee grabbed her husband’s hands and continued. “We both felt like we’d let her down. For her to feel like the best thing she could do was to leave home … I was heartbroken, too.” She squared her shoulders. “Wayne and I prayed on it and came to know that we needed to let her go. We will always be here for her, whenever she needs us, but it was time for her to start living her own life.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m still not sure—”
“Let me finish,” Kathy-Lee said. “That’s the reason why we didn’t do anything for so long after she left. It was hard, Mr Rafferty. If you have kids you’ll know how hard it is to let them go out into the world. But, we let her go. We waited for her to get back in contact, just like she said. And we prayed every day. For Kimberly to be safe and happy and for God to give us the strength to keep letting her go. Each day it got a little bit easier. Until the day before yesterday.”
“What happened the day before yesterday?” I asked, and then wished I hadn’t.
“God told me she was in trouble and needs our help.” Kathy-Lee’s eyes had again taken on the steel-melting glare I’d seen at the office.
“We won’t force our child to live a life she doesn’t want to, Mr Rafferty, but we also won’t sit by while she is in danger.”
“And you know she’s in danger because …”
The glare zeroed in on me.
“As I have told you repeatedly, God told me she is.”
Wayne nodded alongside.
“Uh.” I wished Hilda was there; she’s better than me at this type of thing.
“Let me ask you something, Mr Rafferty,” Wayne said as he patted his wife’s knee. She’d gone to work on the wedding ring again and I almost winced. “Are you a religious man?”
I shook my head. “Not even a little.”
“I t
hought not. I also guess that you don’t believe in God and might consider religion to be well-intentioned nonsense.”
“That’s a fair summary.” I thought it best to not get sidetracked with a debate over my real beliefs about organized religion.
“Well then, since we are your clients, just know that when we talk about God, He is our best friend, He is omniscient and he’s infallible. He sees everything and He’s never wrong.”
With a skillset like that I wondered about my chances of getting him on the payroll.
I cleared my throat.
“Okay, we’ve covered one of the basics. You want me to continue looking for Kimberly.” They nodded and gripped hands again. “As long as we’re all clear. You said you spoke to her friends, and they couldn’t tell you anything.”
Kathy-Lee nodded. “That’s right.”
“Including Brian?”
They looked at me like I’d shucked off my clothes and started a pagan worship dance.
If there was such a thing. Maybe there was. The Troupes certainly looked like it.
“Why would we talk to him?”
Huh?
“As her boyfriend, he might know where she is,” I offered. “Plus, he might be concerned about her.”
“If we were meant to talk to Brian, God would have told me,” Kathy-Lee said.
I don’t get lost for words often, and thought I’d better start moving before I found a few that the Troupes didn’t want to hear.
I slapped my knees and stood.
“Okay then. Did umm … did he give you any information on where I should start searching for her?”
They both looked up at me.
“You’re the Private Investigator, Mr Rafferty. I really think that’s your area of expertise.”
I drove home against the early afternoon traffic. The Mustang’s shadow led me down the freeway and the smoke from my pipe trailed out the open window.
I was pissed off.
I’d let myself get steamrolled into taking on a non-case by a couple of people who liked bad coffee and believed in a bearded sky-man. And it’s not like Wayne had to beat me up for it, either. He had creases ironed in his jeans, for chrissake.
Maybe I was getting soft in my old age.
A Buick with an unfortunate green paint job wobbled from an on-ramp, cut across two lanes and nearly side-swiped me before lurching back right and settling into a lane. I flipped the driver the bird and yelled some of those words that I’m sure the Troupes wouldn’t have approved of.
It made me feel better.
When the Buick driver turned out to be a blue-haired lady who graduated school the year before Moses I thought for a moment about going back to being pissed off.
I drove and smoked and mulled instead.
Thirty minutes spent in Kimberly’s bedroom had confirmed the picture-book story I’d gotten from her parents. The room was neat, clean and squealed “All-American Teen from Good Family” through braces and pigtails. The color scheme seemed to be Ice Cream and Candy Parlor white and pink. A desk stood in one corner with a view to the backyard. The matching white timber bed sat under pink striped blankets and a white lace pillowcase. Fluffy toys leaned against the pillow and looked to the door, waiting for their Mommy to come home.
A pair of cheerleader pom-poms on a shelf surprised me. I had thought that an only daughter in short skirts and tight sweaters might be too racy for conservative Mom, but notch up another point for Wayne and Kathy-Lee letting Kimberly live her own life.
Posters of clean-cut boys in jeans and leather jackets hung on the papered walls. The kid from that karate movie seemed to be a favorite. Recent photographs of Kimberly with friends—in jeans and sweaters, in bathing suits, in graduation gowns—smiling and laughing at the camera with arms around each other, were stuck to the wall alongside the bed. She had a natural ease and beauty in each one. Three Polaroids showed Kimberly with a boy. I assumed Brian. These were the only ones that showed her as part of a couple. Not a serial dater.
After I’d been through all the drawers, her closet and even the boxes under the bed, the overall picture hadn’t changed. I’d found clothes, school books, Church Youth Group flyers and her diary.
What I hadn’t found: bad grades, threats, drugs, razor blades, sexy underwear, satanic books, or diary entries bitching about school friends. Not even a discreet copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover pushed to the back of her sock drawer.
Do kids still read that?
I had left the Troupe house with a photograph of Kimberly, Brian’s address, a burnt coffee taste in my mouth, and not much else. Least of all, the willing help of the missing girl’s parents.
The Dr Pepper plant peeked through the haze above the freeway railing and I snapped out of auto-pilot. I was almost home, there was beer in the fridge and Hilda would be back from Houston tomorrow.
And after all that I’d learned today, it was unlikely that Kimberly was in any real danger, so I saw no reason to start losing sleep over it.
Boy, when I’m wrong, I’m all the way wrong.
Chapter 4
I was into the office early the next morning, tracking down Brian’s home phone number from a Coles reverse directory, and leaving a message on their answering machine a little after nine. They were in Irving too, which meant I’d have to make another trip out, and I wasn’t going to waste time heading back on the hope they might be home.
I’d thought about talking to Kimberly’s friends. Figuring I’d hear the same story as I got from Mom and Dad, I decided to save that for if, or when, things got desperate.
Brian looked good to me. Mom and Dad might choose to not read between the lines of Kimberly’s note, but it was obvious that they’d run off together.
Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer is more likely to be the right one. Rafferty says: Find Brian, find Kimberly.
I spent the next hour or so sipping coffee, leafing through an old gun shop catalog and trying to decide between taking Hilda out tonight for BBQ or trying that new Japanese place she’d mentioned. With heavy decisions like that weighing on my mind, I was able to avoid cleaning up the office. What the hell, the tower of phone books and reverse directories in the corner wasn’t going to be any more useful stacked alphabetically. Or geographically.
I was pleased with the day’s progress and was starting to consider a nap to finish the morning off, when the phone rang.
“Crime Busters Incorporated. Vice-Chancellor Rafferty speaking.”
The voice on the other end of the line was light, brittle and tired. “Hmm, perhaps I don’t have the right number. This is Helen Garrison. Someone left a message for me to call.”
“Yes, Mrs Garrison. I’d like to talk to you about Brian, and Kimberly Troupe.”
“What is this about?”
Brian’s whereabouts weren’t front of mind in the Garrison household. Interesting. Either they weren’t concerned that Brian was missing, or they knew where he was.
I bet it was the second.
Hot damn.
I could have this wrapped up by the time Hilda got back this afternoon and we could spend the whole weekend together. I got sidetracked into thinking about all the things we could do in two days, or maybe it was the same thing over and over …
“Hello? Are you there?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes. Mrs Garrison, I’m looking for Kimberly. Her parents are worried about her. I understand that she might be with Brian.”
“I see. I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Why not?”
“Because Kimberly isn’t with Brian.”
Huh?
“You know this for certain? You’ve spoken to him?”
“Of course I have. He’s my son.”
“When did you last speak? Did he tell you where he is? Did he say where Kimberly is?”
“Too many questions, Mr Rafferty.”
“Where is Brian?”
“He’s at church right now, helping to prepare for tonight’s se
rvice. He should be home in the next hour.”
I sighed.
“How can I reach him? What’s his number?”
“This one, Mr Rafferty.” My sigh was echoed back down the line. “This is his home and, aside from the week he wasted trying to be a good boyfriend to that … that whore, he’s lived here his whole life. Why don’t you come out and talk with Brian yourself? He’ll tell you what happened.”
I wanted to dislike Brian Garrison.
He had turned from my best lead in finding Kimberly into just another Texan teenager and, in doing so, had ruined the possibility of closing this case before Hilda got back. Just one of those was enough to earn him a place on my shit list and it would be only my self control and critical reasoning that stopped me from beating him to a pulp. That and the other thing.
He was a helluva nice kid.
“I’m not sure what I can tell you, sir. I haven’t seen Kimberly in six … no, wait a minute, seven weeks.” He shook my hand firmly when we met, introduced himself and had looked me in the eye the whole time we’d been talking.
Brian was tall, a couple of inches over my six-two.
What the hell were they feeding the kids these days?
He had straight blonde hair which flicked over his forehead to threaten his eyes. Only repetitive head twitching and the occasional swipe with his long fingers kept ocular catastrophe at bay.
Except for the small differences in color schemes, we could have been sitting in the Troupe’s living room. Smallish house, equally neat. Tidy backyard, visible through the big windows on the rear wall. A rose bush exploded bright pink in one corner. Inside, blond timber instead of dark for the furniture and blue stripes, rather than flowers, seemed to be the theme.
The Garrisons also liked music, a Casio electric piano their instrument of choice. Sheet music for a gospel song sat open on the music stand, as if I’d interrupted a revival. Brian’s mother fussed in the kitchen and probably thought I didn’t see her take two different cartons of milk from the fridge, lingering both times to look around the corner at Brian and me. He was talking again, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
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