Anna Louise broke off a large piece of muffin and stuffed it into her mouth. ‘You don’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, do you?’
She took a gulp of milk, swallowing it the wrong way, and started coughing and spluttering as the muffin lodged in the back of her throat. She gasped, her eyes watering and her cheeks turning bright red. She couldn’t breathe – it felt as if she was being choked, and Berenice had to hit her hard in the middle of her back as she retched and clung on to the edge of the table before at last she coughed the mouthful of food up, heaving for breath.
The housekeeper fetched some paper kitchen towel to wipe up the mess.
‘You see, what did I say about that snake? It just come and hissed an’ spat right now, almost chokin’ you, so you hear me right and don’t go meddlin’.’ But when she turned back Anna Louise was gone, so she went out into the hall, catching sight of the girl as she ran helter-skelter up the stairs.
‘Are you all right, Miss Anna Louise?’
Anna Louise looked down and then leaned over the bannister rail, whispering, ‘It was in my mama’s room. It wasn’t Tilda that saw it but me!’
She laughed suddenly and continued running up the stairs, not seeing the fear on Berenice’s face as she slipped her hand inside her uniform dress to feel for her own gris-gris. It was safely tucked into her underslip, on her left-hand side, beneath her heart.
Berenice returned to the kitchen: that silly spoilt child had no notion of what went on in the house, and she hoped to God she never would. She cleaned up the mess from the table, and finished putting the dishes away, then tipped all the freshly made blueberry muffins into the trash. She would make a fresh batch, just in case a drop of the snake’s venom that had hissed from Anna Louise Caley had touched them: there were some chances that just weren’t worth taking.
The following afternoon, accompanied by her parents, Anna Louise flew from Los Angeles to New Orleans. It was 15 February, and on 16 February, Anna Louise was officially reported as missing. Police in both Los Angeles and New Orleans attempted to trace her, and when they failed to do so, her parents brought in private investigators.
The weeks became months – no body and no ransom note were ever discovered, and even with top investigation agencies on the case, no clue as to the whereabouts of the missing girl, or her body, ever came to light. After nine months the disappearance of Anna Louise Caley was no longer news, and she had to all intents and purposes become just another statistic, another photograph on the missing persons files.
Eleven months passed, and with no new information, Anna Louise’s distraught parents faced the possibility that she might have been murdered. By this time, more than fifteen investigation agencies had been involved with the case, the Mississippi had been dragged and helicopters had searched the swamplands of Louisiana. Agnews Investigations, along with three other less well-known agencies, were still retained on the enquiry: the Caleys had paid out millions of dollars but the expenditure had yielded no motive, no suspect, no result. All the grieving parents were left with was an aching period of waiting, while they longed for a sign that their beautiful Anna Louise was still alive.
All the PI agencies involved had made a lot of money, and some had even traded information with one another, but the Anna Louise Caley bonanza was coming to an end. Pickings were getting slim for private investigators – it was a tough business in which contacts and recommendations by word of mouth were a necessity, as Page Investigations, a small PI company, had found out the hard way. Even getting a foothold on the lowest rung of such a competitive ladder had proved impossible, and the attempt had been financially crippling for Lorraine Page: now, her agency was virtually bankrupt.
Even though she was a former police lieutenant, her own case history as an alcoholic and an officer who had shot dead an unarmed boy while drunk on duty meant that instead of being welcomed into the PI fraternity, she was being frozen out – just as she had been kicked out of the LAPD. The hardest part was explaining to Rosie, the assistant whom Lorraine jokingly called her partner, and who was also a recovering alcoholic, that they were going under. Dear Rosie, who still hoped, Rosie who still maintained that business would pick up – but there had never been any business. There was nothing to pick up from: it had all been a gamble, a dream even, but now it was over.
Lorraine had the phone cupped in her hand, half-listening to the call, half-wondering whether tonight would be the night she would tell Rosie – she knew she would have to do it soon. She listened, interjecting twice how sorry she was as the man’s deep rumbling voice made incoherent references to his wife’s passing.
Rosie, a plump woman with a kind, open face, was reading her star signs, a cup of coffee and two orange chocolate cup cakes beside her. She had flicked a glance at Lorraine when the phone had jangled through the silent office and sighed when she had heard Lorraine’s over-cheerful ‘Hi, Bill, how ya doing?’
Rosie had been trying a new diet: proteins one meal, carbohydrates the next, with fruit forty minutes either before or after each meal, and no fats or fried food. She had stuck to it for a month and felt better for losing a few pounds, but today she was indulging in a binge of chocolate cup cakes, hating herself with each bite. Still, it was just one of those days – she couldn’t face another chicken breast without crisp golden skin or French fries, or another salad without dressing, and a whole month with no fresh crusty bread spread thickly with peanut butter had been excruciating.
At last Lorraine was able to replace the receiver. ‘That was Bill Rooney,’ she murmured, lighting a cigarette. ‘His wife died.’
‘I didn’t know he had a wife,’ Rosie said, lowering her magazine.
‘I don’t think he did,’ Lorraine said as she counted the butt-ends in her ashtray. She sighed and leaned back in her chair. By turning her head a fraction she could just make out the cheap sign printed in fake gold leaf on the outer office door – ‘Page Investigations Agency’. There was a stack of calling cards on her desk with the same inscription. It was a farce.
‘Well, the end of yet another over-active sleuthing day.’ Rosie chomped on her cup cake, staring at the free digital alarm clock she got from ordering some non-stick pans. It was almost six. Unaware of the smear of chocolate over her right cheek, she looked over at Lorraine, watching her as she inhaled deeply on her thirtieth or so cigarette of the day. Her eyes were staring vacantly across the small white painted office. Rosie hated it when she did those vacant stares. Sometimes her silences could last over an hour and Rosie could never tell what her partner was thinking. She hoped this was not going to turn into one of Lorraine’s moods. ‘You should cut down,’ she said with her mouth full.
‘So should you,’ Lorraine retorted, looking at the trash can filled with empty silver foil cup cake moulds.
‘I don’t smoke, so it’s expected to crave sugar. That’s half of what alcoholism is about too, you know, sugar craving.’
Lorraine pushed her second-hand typist’s chair back from her empty desk. ‘Is it? Well, well, isn’t that interesting. And just what are hamburgers and fries, are they a craving too?’
‘For chrissakes, don’t start having a go at me! You and your brown rice and your vitamins make me wanna throw up.’
‘Might do you some good!’
Rosie now pushed her large ass back in her catalogue sale of the month office chair. ‘Right, that is it.’
‘Yep, I guess it is, Rosie.’
It was hard to explain how each day Lorraine felt more isolated, because in physical terms she wasn’t: Rosie and big Bill Rooney were always there. It wasn’t that she didn’t have anyone to talk to, interact with – it just felt that way. Her mind seemed to be atrophying and she felt drained, lethargic; sometimes she wanted to weep, out of a deepening feeling of utter loneliness, or was it lovelessness? Whatever it was, it was having a more and more destructive effect on her, and she felt its undertow sucking her down.
Lorraine flicked the old Venetian blind that didn’t quite
fit the windows. She gave a sly look at her plump room-mate as she stubbed out her cigarette. She didn’t even live in a place of her own, but was sharing Rosie’s small apartment in a run-down district off Orange Grove. She was thirty-seven years old; almost six of those years had been lost in a sea of drugs and alcohol addiction, and sometimes, especially at times like this afternoon, she felt it was all a waste of time; in reality she was never going to get back into the only business she knew or had known when she had been a cop.
The two women had met when Lorraine had been recuperating from a near-fatal hit-and-run accident. It wasn’t the vehicle that had almost killed her, but her drinking and self-abuse. Now she had been sober and attempting to get her life organized for nearly two years. As an ex-lieutenant attached to the Pasadena Homicide Squad, she had experience not only in the field but as a detective, and she had been a very good one. ‘Had’ being the operative word: after drinking took over her life it had cost her the husband she had loved and the two daughters she had adored.
‘What you thinking about?’ Rosie asked, pretending to be immersed in her magazine.
‘Nothing,’ Lorraine answered, but she quite obviously was. She wondered if she should attempt another reconciliation with her kids. Yet as always whenever she thought about them, she decided they were better off without her intruding on their new life, a life she had not been a part of for too many years. Added to that, her ex-husband had remarried and her daughters called his new wife ‘Mother’. They didn’t even want to see her.
Rosie pored over her magazine again. Lorraine’s long sighs made her aware that something was coming, but she said nothing, flicking over the pages to a new diet that guaranteed you could lose weight with ease if you sent off for their special-priced ‘slimming drinks’. But as she’d attempted most diets, including slimming drinks, and none had worked, she flicked over to a knitting pattern.
‘This is a farce, you know it and I know it. I mean, I dunno what else we can do. How many more adverts can we afford to run, if we don’t drum up any customers by the end of the week?’
Here it comes, thought Rosie, scowling. ‘You’ve said that every week.’ She hated it when Lorraine started on this tactic, partly because she knew everything she said was true but also because it made her afraid. Afraid Lorraine would leave, afraid that without Lorraine she would go back on the booze, afraid Lorraine would too.
‘Got to face reality.’ Lorraine prodded her empty cigarette carton, hoping she’d overlooked a stray one. But it wasn’t to be, so she looked over the stubs in her ashtray again.
‘Yes, I know, I know, and I hear what you are sayin’, but at the same time we got to stick at it. Everyone knows any new business takes time to lift off, even Bill Rooney told us that.’
Lorraine appeared not to be listening as she rummaged in her purse and started to check her loose change.
‘I mean, we could get a case in tomorrow that’d make everything you just said obsolete,’ Rosie said a little too cheerfully.
‘What?’ Lorraine asked challengingly.
‘Obsolete,’ Rosie repeated flatly.
‘Really? Well, you’ve been saying that for the past month and we’ve not had so much as a telephone call. And if you want to check the diary out, we are hardly likely to get some case off the street that’d pay for your cup cakes and my cigarettes, never mind the rent on this place and your apartment, so straighten out, Rosie. Shit, I need a cigarette.’
Lorraine crossed to the hooks by the toilet closet. She yanked down her raincoat.
‘Maybe the rain’ll stop soon.’
Lorraine pulled on her raincoat. ‘Oh yeah, so it’s all gonna be okay if the sun shines, is it?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re a dumb optimist.’
‘What?’
‘Optimist, Rosie. Even if the sun cracked the paving stones that’s not gonna help us. Two stray dogs, a missing senile grandfather, a two-week stint in a department store to cover for their in-house detective’s vacation, five car traces, four warrants and a woman suspecting her husband of having an affair with his secretary, and as the wife was your size and his secretary looked like Julia Roberts, it didn’t take us long to investigate, and that . . . that is it, Rosie, that’s been all there’s been for the past nine months.’
‘You always gotta get personal. If you look on the good side, you’ve been sober nine months more, so have I come to think about it, so my guess is we’ll make it. This is just a bad patch.’
Lorraine clenched her teeth. ‘No, it isn’t, Rosie, it’s just a fact. We are flat broke and searching my ashtray for dog-ends is not exactly what I had planned for the future. We might as well admit it, face it, before we get any deeper in debt.’
‘But we are facing it,’ Rosie said stubbornly.
Lorraine closed her eyes as if talking to a child, her voice sounding annoyingly over-patient. ‘No, we are not. Fact is this whole idea was shit, and to be honest I am not feeling like patting myself on the back ’cos I remained sober. Truth is, right now I feel like tying one hell of a load on and the only thing stoppin’ me is that I have no money.’
‘Never stopped you before,’ snapped back Rosie.
Lorraine’s eyes were like cold chips of ice. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? What are you suggesting, Rosier Come on, spit it out, are you saying I go out and screw a few guys to keep this place open? That what you think I should do?’
Rosie blushed and turned away. She loathed Lorraine when she was like this, she could get so cold, so unapproachable, so downright nasty. But unlike the times they’d bickered about the agency before, there wasn’t another sarcastic retort forthcoming, just an ominous silence.
Lorraine was staring at herself in the small mirror glued to the back of the door. Her hair needed a cut and new highlights. She leaned closer, frowning, as she checked the scar running from her left eye down to midway of her cheekbone; that needed to be fixed but plastic surgery cost. She stepped back, giving herself a critical appraisal. Considering the punishment her body and insides had taken from all the abuse, her skin looked remarkably clear, but there were fine lines at the sides of her eyes and they were getting deeper. Either way, she didn’t like what she saw, and kicked the door closed.
Lorraine picked up her gym bag and flicked off the main overhead light switch. Her shadow etched across the main office wall as she reached for her purse. Caught in the half-light from the lit-up screen on Rosie’s word processor, Lorraine’s chiselled features never ceased to make Rosie’s heart lurch. She obviously didn’t see herself as Rosie did, because she was still a very attractive woman. Perhaps not as ethereal as Rosie thought, but for her age, and considering what she had been through, Lorraine Page was still a looker. The stronger she had become physically over the past twenty-one months, the more her natural beauty shone through. Lorraine’s strict diet, her almost obsessive work-outs at the gymnasium, had proved that a woman who lost six years drinking herself into oblivion, who had become a hopeless, scrawny, sickly alcoholic when she and the overweight Rosie had first met, could now pass for an athlete. The only thing ex-Lieutenant Lorraine Page could not recapture was her career, and her husband and two daughters. She never spoke of them, either to Rosie or at AA meetings, whereas Rosie spilled many tears about wanting to be reunited with her son.
Rosie now took a long deep sigh; maybe, as she herself had half-suggested, the failure of their business would send Lorraine back to the bottle, back to a life in the gutters. Rosie was therefore totally unprepared for what Lorraine had to say as she hovered by the main office door, about to leave.
Lorraine swung the door slightly with her foot. ‘I meant to tell you, the department store have offered me a full-time job as their store detective. Remember the job I took over for two weeks? Well, apparently she had one hell of a holiday and came back pregnant.’
‘What?’
‘So, we close up at the end of the week and at least I’ll have enough for the rent on the apartment.�
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‘What about Page Investigations?’ Rosie asked as the tears started.
‘Like I said, it’s over, end of the week we close up shop.’
‘What about me?’
Lorraine wouldn’t look at her friend, still tap-tapping the door with the toe of her shoe. ‘Well, I guess you got to go out into the big world, Rosie, and get a job. Shouldn’t be too tough, you can use a word processor and . . .’
Rosie turned away, her eyes brimming, and Lorraine felt awful. She went over and slipped her arm around her friend’s shoulders.
‘I’m sorry, sometimes I say things and they come out all the wrong way. What I am trying to say is – you got a life, Rosie, and maybe I have too, not just doing what we’re doing, okay?’
Rosie nodded and felt in her pocket for a paper tissue. Lorraine hesitated, knowing that to stay with Rosie would only involve going over old ground, but was saved by the ring of the phone. Rosie snatched up the receiver, hoping against all hope that the call would mean a job, but didn’t even get out ‘Page Investigations’. It didn’t matter anyway – it was only her sponsor, Jake, wondering if she’d be at AA that evening. By the time Rosie had replied that she would, Lorraine had gone.
‘You okay, Rosie?’ Jake’s friendly rasping voice enquired.
‘Nope, we’re shutting up shop. Can I see you tonight before the meeting?’
Jake agreed and Rosie replaced the phone, feeling the tears welling up again. Was it ever going to end? Did she have a life of her own, as Lorraine had said? Did she hell, as without Lorraine, Rosie knew she was hopeless – sure, she could use a word processor, but she didn’t have enough confidence to go out alone into the big wide world. That was the difference between them – Rosie needed Lorraine, and without her, the world scared the shit out of her. Or maybe it wasn’t the world, just her own weakness and low self-esteem. Just seeing the empty cup cake carton made her want to weep – she couldn’t even stick to a diet! How could she cope without Lorraine? By having a drink, that would be how, and that realization made her want to weep even more. She badly needed to go to that meeting.
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