by Paula McLain
“And borderline unethical,” I add. “What about something like ‘Foul Play Is Suspected’? That might hit a good middle spot and get us a little more attention. Today is the sixth. We’re two weeks in without a single solid lead. I don’t like the way the odds are shaping up.”
He nods soberly just as Wanda comes up with a plate for Cricket, a hamburger patty she’s broken up into bite-sized pieces. “Shh,” she says, flicking her eyes at the kitchen window before running to grab our check.
Though I know it will probably lead to an argument, I say, “Why did you tell Caleb I’m on this case, Will? I thought we agreed I was totally off the record.”
“What? It’s Caleb, not some journalist.”
“So?”
“I’m sorry. It just came up when we were talking. I guess I thought it would make him feel better.”
“Better how?”
“About Jenny. That the two of us are on it. That we won’t let it all happen again.”
What he’s saying has already crossed my mind. As a story, it’s too much for anyone to live through once, let alone twice. And not just for Caleb. Pretty much anyone over twenty-five was here when Jenny was murdered. That’s why things have to turn out differently this time—for all of us.
(thirty-seven)
An hour later, I’m squeezing down bumpy, narrow Cahto Street in my Bronco to find Gray on his way home from school, shoulders hunched beneath the straps of his backpack, his red hair lacquered into a pyramid or some sort of protest flag.
“I hope it was okay, what I told you the other day,” he says once I’ve parked and caught up with him.
“It’s all okay. Your help means a lot to us, Gray.” We’ve stopped in the middle of the street, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no traffic, no noise at all, not even birdsong—as if the whole world’s on pause for us. “Girls who have gone through a lot of tough stuff like Cameron has can often have a hard time getting close to people. But the two of you have proven that’s not always the case. What you have is special. It also makes me feel optimistic for her once we bring her home. Meaningful relationships can change outcomes. Can change everything.”
I can see from the way Gray looks at me that he’s grateful for my certainty. Not if, but when. Also that what I’m saying about trust is registering in a deep way. He has probably come to need that closeness just as powerfully as she has. “Have you thought any more about who might have had access to Cameron? Anyone she might have mentioned. Anyone you spotted together, even once, that gave you an off feeling.”
“I’ve been trying, but I just don’t remember. We were together all the time, almost every day. We told each other everything, too. If she’d met someone, I think I’d know.”
“Okay. Keep racking your brain. And in the meantime, I have a big favor to ask. Saturday night we’re going to have a town meeting at the community center to talk about Cameron. I want to make a sort of collage of her life so that people know who she really is and what she cares about. No one’s closer to her than you, Gray. Will you help?”
“I can try.” His expression is tentative, but I also know he’d do anything for her.
“Great. Think of everything that makes Cameron Cameron. What she loves. What’s special about her. Make lists of her favorite things, and get some great pictures of her photocopied to share. This doesn’t have to be professional, just come from the heart.”
“I only have a few years’ worth of things. We didn’t start spending a lot of time together till the end of seventh grade.”
“That’s okay. Two years is a long time when you’re really close to someone.”
We start to walk again, toward his front door. He’s nodding to himself, still processing what I’m asking of him. To do this right, he’ll have to dive back into all sorts of painful feelings. Stepping up will hurt, maybe a lot.
“Who was her best friend before you?”
“Caitlyn Muncy, in sixth and seventh grade. But she’s sort of a bitch.”
“She might be, but I’ll bet she’ll help anyway. She holds a piece of Cameron. Get her to show it to you.”
“How do I do that?” He stops in place, pulling on the straps of his backpack as if it’s just grown heavier. All of this has been too hard already. “What if I screw it up?”
I recognize the signs of panic whirling through him. He reminds me of myself at so many moments. Whenever the stakes have been high, and I’ve cared too much. Like right now.
“You won’t,” I tell him gently. “You love her. All of this is about love.”
* * *
—
My next stop is the Curtises’, to get them on board somehow. Troy happens to be away for the day, an emergency meeting at Paramount, Emily explains after she’s buzzed me in and offered tea. I feel irritated with him but not surprised. The greater emergency in his own home is probably too much to take without some sort of escape hatch. Plus his life has been exploding for some time. His doing, yes, but it makes sense that he wants to be somewhere else as the pieces continue to fall.
“Do you have anything new to share?” she asks from one side of the pale marble island in her kitchen, chrome and glass gleaming all around.
“Another girl has been reported missing, down in Gualala. We don’t know yet if this has anything to do with Cameron. No one’s seen her since June.”
Without moving, Emily seems to falter. “All this waiting and not knowing. I don’t know how I can keep doing it.”
“Just try to take it one day at a time if you can. Sometimes it helps to find an outlet. You can talk to Cameron, or write notes to her. Let her hear you.”
When she looks up, Emily’s eyes have filmed over. “Okay.”
“We went over to Napa to talk to Drew and Lydia.”
Her breath catches audibly. “You did?”
“We polygraphed them both. It’s standard to interview any family members,” I say without tipping my hand. “I also spoke with Steve Gonzales. We don’t believe he’s involved in any wrongdoing, but he did share a little about Cameron’s writing. It seems she showed him work that was pretty dark. He wonders if it might have been autobiographical.”
“Was she really so unhappy here?” Emily’s voice sounds small and wounded. “I should have been paying more attention.”
“We’re holding a town meeting to drum up support,” I say, shifting the focus back to Cameron. “On Saturday evening. You and Troy should be involved. A public statement could get more eyes on the problem and a lot more bodies in the field, too. We need to increase involvement, Emily, and not just locally.”
“Reach out to the media, you mean…” Her voice trails. “Troy and I have talked about it and think it’s a mistake right now. For us. You can imagine the kinds of stories that would run. Sensational, exploitive. Those people are monsters.”
“I’ve seen the ugly side of publicity in my work, too. I wouldn’t begin to say their motives are always virtuous, but ours can be. We can control the message.”
“You can’t, though. That’s just it.” She sounds diminished, physically and literally, as if she’s receding when I need her to grow, to reach. It makes me want to shake her. To show her there are much-bigger monsters in the world than TV journalists. One has taken her daughter.
I take a deep breath and try something else. “Right now, Cameron’s just a name on a missing poster that no one’s even paying attention to. But if people are moved, they act. They come forward to help, make phone calls, offer time, money.”
“We’ve offered money. We did that right away.”
“I know you did, and trust me, it will be put to good use as the search continues. But I still think your presence could galvanize the community. I get why you’ve been reluctant to be a real part of this town, Emily. Celebrity has made you wary. It must feel strange to try to open up to people as yourself, an
d not some character. But this is important.”
Emily looks away as I finish my sentence and seems to spiral inward. Beyond her, through a massive window, the afternoon is hazy, the sun only an idea behind low, loose clouds. Between us, the silence becomes its own weather system, a pressurized feeling. “Whatever you think, I love my daughter. She’s the most important thing in the world to me.”
“I believe you,” I say, and I want to. I can see her struggling just to stay upright. So much has gotten away from her. There are things she would have done differently. Things she will do differently if she can just get Cameron back safely. We all make those bargains, offering anything, everything, for one more chance.
“Do you have children, Detective?”
The question is simple. I can’t answer her.
(thirty-eight)
At Searchlight, my supervisor, Frank Leary, is a seasoned veteran. He looks like Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco, with a bulb nose, enormous gray caterpillar eyebrows, and a slanted, sideways smile that’s nothing like Hap’s but often reminds me of him anyway. For thirty years, he’s been on the job, and it’s almost miraculous how sane he is.
He and his wife, Carole, live in North Beach, in the same neighborhood where Joe DiMaggio grew up. Theirs is a gently sagging Victorian with a wraparound back porch and a grill the size of a small car. On Sundays, Frank cooks for his three married daughters and eight grandchildren plus husbands and neighbors and anyone at all who happens to be hungry. I was there one Sunday just a few weeks after I started seeing Corolla.
“How’s therapy going?” he asked, clipping off the h so that the word came out more like “tare-apy.”
“Fine,” I said, opening another bottle of Heineken. “It’s not really my thing. How come you don’t see a therapist, Frank?”
He chuckled a little, and then used his grill tongs to point at the yard, his kingdom. The yellow roses and the big garage full of power tools. The sloping lawn where four of his granddaughters were playing on a massive blue tarp like a homemade Slip ’N Slide. The girls were all between five and seven, shrieking and tumbling in bright two-piece bathing suits as Carole squirted them with the fizzing end of a garden hose. “This is my therapy.”
I smiled, knowing he was completely serious. But it wasn’t an uncomplicated solution. In the yard, I watched one of the girls split from the herd to run back and forth on the lawn for some reason only she understood, her body a blur of color. The picture of innocence, of vulnerability. “You must worry about them a lot.”
He lowered the lid of the grill and faced me, hands on the hips of his Kiss the Cook apron. “Some days are tougher than others. I’ll work a case that gets in too deep, and then I want them all to move in, like a bunker. A bomb shelter. But they have their own lives, and that’s as it should be. I get this gripping feeling when they leave sometimes. Like an elephant is sitting on my goddamned chest.”
“And then?”
“And then the feeling passes and I clean my grill and put the toys away. I go to bed and kiss my wife good night, and when Monday morning comes, I go to work. When you love someone, there’s risk. You can’t avoid it.”
I nodded and swigged from the beer, so cold it punched the back of my throat going down. Lately Brendan had been pressuring me to get pregnant, and I was having a hard time justifying my reluctance. I had told him early on in our relationship about how my mom had died, obviously, and that I’d grown up in foster care. He knew I had baggage, but I’d kept some things hidden. How I’d screwed up with Amy and Jason. How I’d lost them. I knew it wasn’t rational, but on some level, it almost felt as if I’d already had my chance at kids and botched it, badly.
I still checked in on Amy and Jason from time to time, which I also didn’t share with Brendan. Almost the first thing I did as a cop was search for their names in the database, trying to piece together from a scattering of home addresses and workplaces and speeding tickets whether or not they’d really made it through their childhood. Whether they were truly okay.
The last time I’d looked, just a year or so ago, Jason was a day laborer living in Daly City with a dodgy girlfriend who had a long list of priors. Mostly small-time stuff. Jason had no criminal record beyond shoplifting, traffic violations, and one DUI, but he was a frequent visitor at a methadone clinic, a detail that made me feel sucker-punched when I read it. Amy was still in Redding and had been married twice, as far as I could tell. I’d asked a colleague with ties in the area to do a little more digging, discreetly, without explaining my relationship with her or why I needed to know how many kids she had and if they were from different dads, what kind of neighborhood she lived in, and how long she’d been a manager at the Burger King where she worked, and if she looked happy.
I could have driven there myself if I’d had the courage, of course, and knocked on her door. I had imagined that reunion thousands of times, but had never made it past the moment in the script where she slammed the door in my face for failing her. The closest I’d come in real life was sitting in my car one day watching Jason rip shingles off the roof of someone’s tired-looking garage with a few other shirtless guys. Then he shotgunned a forty-ounce in the front seat of his dusty two-tone El Camino while I thought about that damned stuffed cheetah of his, how he couldn’t sleep without Freddy pressed right against his face. I never knew how he was able to breathe like that, but as he cranked up the Beastie Boys and peeled away from the curb, I found myself wondering, instead, how he breathed without it now. Without me.
* * *
—
But it wasn’t just the way I’d failed Jason and Amy that rattled me when I thought about becoming a parent. It was my DNA, too. My mother hadn’t lived to see thirty. My father had been shot and killed in 1989 in a domestic dispute over a woman that sounded like a seedy episode of A Current Affair. If that weren’t enough, I’d had half a dozen foster parents who had made me seriously wonder if any grown-ups had their act together. It wasn’t until I came to Mendocino that I saw some actually being that, grown-up, doing more than just getting by. Hap and Eden had a stable marriage—another first for me. They said what they meant. They were patient with my moods and outbursts. They asked questions and seemed to care what I had to say. They gave me a real childhood when I’d long since stopped hoping there was such a thing. And all I had to do was be myself.
All of this—the presenting evidence on each side of the decision I needed to make—seemed far too complicated to try and wade through with Brendan. He didn’t have any ambivalence at all about starting a family. He was part of a sprawling Irish brood, with five brothers and sisters who were loud and cheerful and always in one another’s business. When I saw them with their kids, I could almost see it—that messy, happy version of domestic life we could have, maybe, if everything lined up just right.
“You wouldn’t do anything different?” I asked Frank as he manned his grill tongs, turning over peppers and onions with a satisfying hiss.
“Maybe go to dental school instead?” He smirked. “Nah. I like my life.”
“How do you know when you’re ready?”
His laugh was a snort, as if I’d asked the funniest question he’d ever heard. “No one’s ever ready, kid. You just gotta leap.”
(thirty-nine)
Crayoned sun drawings with goofy, large-headed stick figures splayed beneath. A chameleon on a cloud and the words Dear Mom, I have been missing you! A spelling test from second grade with “100%” circled in red, with stars by two extra-credit words, “parallel” and “integrity.” A glittery purple beanbag lizard with loopy plastic eyes. A Strawberry Shortcake tea set. All of this in one large plastic bin in the attic—fragments of a girl, a childhood. One white roller skate with slightly battered wheels. Tucked inside, a pair of rainbow suspenders like Robin Williams wore in Mork & Mindy. Four pastel My Little Ponies with a collection of tiny pink hairbrushes for their m
anes and tails. I never had a box like this, but I recognize I’m looking at treasure. Somehow these things add up to Cameron. I need to find her so she can get back to who she was. Who she is.
There are photos, too. In one she looks five or so, standing on the beach—Malibu?—holding a pearly pink seashell in her hand, bare feet half swallowed by sand. Several feature a preteen Cameron next to a girl about the same age, but fair where Cameron is tawny, with a heavy blond ponytail next to Cameron’s glossy black curtain. In some, both girls have the same hairstyle as if they were looking for ways to get closer. Closer to being the same person. That’s what young friendship is, I remember. You meld, and it feels wonderful. Like you’ll never be separated.
“That’s Caitlyn,” Emily says from the door with fresh mugs of tea in her hands, tendrils of steam rising like flame. “They were best friends from the time we moved here until the end of seventh grade.”
I look back down at the photo, at Caitlyn’s wide smile and glinting metal braces. The earrings she’s wearing, pink enamel hearts. “Then a falling-out?”
“I think so. Cameron wouldn’t talk about it. I was worried about her, actually. She seemed so sad. She told me no one sat with her at lunch. She didn’t seem to have any friends at all, and then Gray came along. Thank God.”
“Misfits find each other.”
She looks taken aback. “What do you mean, ‘misfits’?”
“It’s not a criticism. Some people feel out of place when they’re young, not because anything’s wrong with them, but because there’s something special that sets them apart. Something they haven’t figured out yet.”
“Figured out? What are you saying?”
I can feel her confusion palpably and decide to tread a little more lightly, leaving my suspicions about Gray out of it. “Well, with Cameron it might be about identity. She had another life behind her, like turning the page of a book. Maybe she’d begun to wonder about that. About where she might fit.”