Chasing Shadows

by Valerie Sherrard

  Well, there was no sense worrying about it in advance. I checked in with my folks then grabbed a banana, some peach yogourt, and a glass of milk and went up to my room. Once I’d had my snack, I took out my notebook and jotted down what I’d done that evening, though it made a sad-looking entry indeed.

  I didn’t suppose it would hurt to look over the other notes I’d been keeping since Nadine disappeared, so I flipped through the book and reread everything I had. Some of it seemed to make little sense, and other things looked like potential clues, but they didn’t necessarily fit with one another.

  It was all very frustrating.

  I booted my computer then, thinking to do some kind of research that might be helpful, but when I went online, all I could do was sit there and stare at the search engine. I’d have liked to get some suggestions that might help my investigation, but I had no idea where to start. Besides, my stomach was all tied up in knots.

  I checked my email then and found a message from Greg. It was a sweet, funny little note that only served to make me feel even worse. I sent him an answer in case he checked his mail when he got home that night, then went back to staring blankly at the monitor, waiting for inspiration to strike me.

  After a few fruitless moments passed, I suddenly thought of the business card that Neil Elliot had given me. Curious as to what kind of work he did, I pulled it out of my pocket and examined it.

  The print under his name was small and dark, tiny raised bumps in the centre of the card. It said simply: “Professional Services.” That didn’t tell me a thing about what he did.

  I shrugged, stuck it in my desk drawer, and went back to looking at the monitor. After a few moments I reached over, meaning to shut the system off. That’s when an idea came to me, though I have to admit it was one of the lamest ideas I’ve ever had.

  I tapped a few keys, typing in the words “Julie Andrews movies,” and then pressed enter. Seconds later the search engine brought back eighty-seven hits. I scrolled through them, selected one that seemed to offer a complete list of all the movies the British actress had ever made, and clicked on it.

  I’d seen Julie Andrews in The Princess Diaries a few years before and knew she’d starred in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but I’d never seen them and that was all I’d ever heard of her acting in. I was surprised to see a fairly long list of movie titles. I guess if the nutty landlady spends her days watching movies that Ms. Andrews is in, well, it’s nice that she has a variety.

  “This is not going to help me find Nadine, that’s for sure,” I said to myself, feeling ridiculous. Still, I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Since the landlady is apparently obsessed with this actress, most of her remarks seem to be related to one of Julie Andrews’s movies. To understand any potential clues in what she’d said, I’d need to go to the reference point, namely, whichever movie she was talking about at the time.

  As unlikely as it seemed, I decided that if there was any chance that something she’d said could even point me toward a clue, it was worth a shot. The first thing I’d have to do would be to find out if any of the movies happened to be about a haunted apartment. That was what she’d been raving about tonight anyway.

  The task looked like it would take a while, considering that I’d have to check out the synopsis of each film. Even then, it might need further research before I’d get the details I was looking for, and at that point the most likely scenario was that it would turn out to mean absolutely nothing.

  I sighed and scanned down through the list. Maybe there’d be a movie called The Haunted Apartment or Moaning in Apartment D or something like that, something that would tell me exactly where to look before I spent hours wasting my time.

  Well, there was nothing like that, but my eye was suddenly caught by a 1967 title anyway. My heart sped up a tiny bit, even though it wasn’t related to what I was looking for at the moment. It was called Thoroughly Modern Millie.

  Twice, the landlady had referred to someone named Millie. Not trusting my memory, I glanced through my notebook to see exactly what she’d said: Ask Millie what happens when you say goodbye to good goody girl. Excited, I clicked on the title. What I found out was, as I should have expected, a big disappointment. Still, I made a few brief notes about the plot, just to feel like I was doing something: Set in the 1920s at a women’s hotel, the main character, Millie, has a friend who vanishes. Millie’s boyfriend disguises himself as a woman and moves in, in order to help her investigate her friend’s disappearance. They discover that the woman in charge of the hotel is an opium addict and is selling the girls into white slavery in order to support her habit.

  I made a mental note to make sure no one ever saw my notes on this whole thing. They’d think I’d gone right off the deep end for sure.

  It’s true that the movie was about a girl disappearing, but there was no way there was anything related in the rest of it. If anything, putting any stock in a crazy woman’s strange remarks was a pretty pathetic indicator of how this whole investigation was shaping up.

  I did get a smile at the thought of Greg dressing up as a woman, like Millie’s boyfriend had, but thoughts of him reminded me again of what I had to confess the next time I saw him.

  It was also kind of amusing to realize that if I took the movie plot as an actual clue, the landlady would have just framed herself, since it would mean she was behind Nadine’s disappearance. She was nutzoid all right, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t an opium addict who’d sold Nadine into white slavery.

  I sighed, looked half-heartedly through the list again, and then shut down my system.

  Maybe, if I still had no real clues, some other day I could check all of the movies carefully to see if there was a mention of a haunted apartment, but at the moment I was too tired and discouraged.

  I felt no closer to finding out what had happened to Nadine than I had been when I first discovered she was missing. Worst of all was the knowledge that since the police didn’t believe there’d been any foul play, I was the only one looking for her.

  Wherever she was, I hoped and prayed that she was still alive. And that I’d find her in time.

  I showered, dried my hair, and took the remains of my snack to the kitchen. I put my glass into the sink and dropped the banana peel and empty yogourt container into the garbage can.

  As I did, something seemed to click in my head, but before an idea could fully form, it slipped away again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I was pretty distracted at the restaurant the next day, which was especially unfortunate since I was working with Carlotta.

  “What you thinking?” she demanded once, when I’d absentmindedly put a tray of glasses through the dishwasher a second time by mistake. “Maybe you like to pay for hot water from paycheque?”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, for once thankful for the racket in the pipes. The unearthly groans weren’t enough to drown out her voice though, and she spent a good ten minutes berating me for my apparent laziness, stupidity, and general uselessness. I tuned her out.

  It was just a little past three when he came in. I’d gone out front to get a piece of pie for Carlotta, happy at the thought that at least she couldn’t growl at me when she was eating. I was just about to push through the swinging door that led back into the kitchen when I saw him out of the corner of my eye.

  For a second I froze, as the guy who’d made Nadine so nervous with his incessant staring walked in and sat down at a table. Ruth was the waitress on duty, and she began to cross the room to take his order.

  I realized that I was gawking at him and quickly averted my eyes, trying to think of some reason not to leave the room just yet.

  I deliberately knocked the fork that I’d sat on the edge of the plate onto the floor. After I’d squatted down and picked it back up, I returned to the station where supplies of clean glasses and cutlery were stored. I dropped the fork into the soiled cutlery section and took a fresh one.

  Having stalled as long as I could, and awa
re that Lisa was watching me with her usual frown, I made my way back to the kitchen, pushing slowly through the door.

  “You get lost looking for pie?” Carlotta asked, snatching the plate from me. “Or maybe you just like waste time.”

  “You’re welcome,” I muttered under my breath. With one of the suspects in the next room, I wasn’t in the mood for her grouchy comments.

  “What you say?” she asked. “Maybe you like to say again so I hear. Or maybe you only brave when I no hear you.”

  “I said you’re welcome,” I repeated, this time plenty loud.

  She looked both startled and confused at that, and I might have been amused by her expression except my mind was racing trying to figure out what to do about the guy in the next room.

  “You no be smart to me,” she huffed after a moment, but she seemed deflated somehow, and without following her remark with the usual harangue, she turned her attention back to the pie.

  Gathering up my courage, I walked back out into the dining room and approached Lisa, who was standing at the cash register. That was also where the phone was, which didn’t help things.

  “May I use the phone, please?” I asked, wondering how I was going to ask her to leave the area so I could speak privately.

  “You want to make a personal call on work time?” she asked coldly.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s really important.”

  “If you’re more than a few minutes, it will count as your break,” she said.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said. I looked at her pointedly.

  She seemed to understand my unspoken message because she moved away from the cash, but after taking a couple of steps, she turned and asked me to pass her the key from the cash register.

  What does she think, I’m going to stand here and rob the cash in front of her? I wondered, but I reached over and turned the small silver key that was protruding from the register, pulled it out, and dropped it into the palm of her outstretched hand.

  I dialled Greg’s number, praying he’d be there. His dad answered on the second ring.

  “Dr. Taylor, this is Shelby,” I said quietly. “Is Greg home?”

  “He sure is. I’ll get him for you.”

  “Thank you.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Then I waited what seemed like ten minutes but was probably only one or two.

  “Hello?”

  “Greg,” I said, dropping my voice as low as possible, “it’s me.”

  “Hi, you,” he whispered back.

  “Listen, I need your help. And I don’t have time to explain.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I’m at work and that guy is here, the one I told you about before.”

  “The one who stares at Nadine?”

  “Yes, him. Remember what we talked about you doing?”

  “What, you mean your idea about me following him?”

  “Yes. Can you do it?”

  “Are you serious? I thought this whole thing was settled.”

  “I kind of lied to you, sort of. But can we talk about that later? I really need you to do this for me.”

  I heard a heavy sigh, which was impossible to read. It might have been exasperation or anger or disappointment. I was pretty sure it wasn’t admiration.

  “Please, Greg,” I implored.

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “Jeans and a light grey polo style shirt.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not promising anything.”

  “Thank you, Greg,” I said. “Will I see you this evening?”

  “Well, it sure sounds like we need to get together and talk about a few things,” he said with another sigh. “Call me when you get home.”

  “I will,” I said. “Bye then.” My throat was constricting and I felt like I was about to cry. He’d sounded so totally fed up, his tone of voice colder and more remote than I’d ever heard it before. And yet, in spite of that, he’d still been willing to help me when I asked.

  I felt absolutely horrible about the whole thing. The thought of facing him made a cold lump start to form in the pit of my stomach.

  I sat the phone back into the cradle and turned to go back to the kitchen, tears threatening to fill my eyes. From beside the waitress station, Lisa stood watching me.

  “You can take the rest of your break now,” she said softly as I began to pass her with my head down so she couldn’t see that my eyes were brimming.

  The unexpected kindness was enough to put me over the edge. I managed to squeeze a quick thank you out and then hurried to the staff room in the back, where I burst into tears.

  When I emerged ten minutes later, the guy had finished his pie and gone. I had no way of knowing whether or not Greg had gotten there in time to follow him.

  To Carlotta’s great joy I worked like a madwoman, determined to keep busy for the rest of the shift. The faster the time went by until I could find out what had happened, the better!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I’d been expecting Dad to pick me up after work so it took me a few seconds to realize that Greg was sitting in the parking lot in his father’s car. I hurried over, hoping I didn’t smell too much like onions, which I’d been chopping just a few moments before I finished my shift.

  “My dad is supposed to be picking me up today,” I said, leaning down to the driver’s window.

  “I know. I was talking to him a while ago and I told him I could get you instead.”

  “You were talking to my dad?” I gulped. “You didn’t tell him anything about, you know, Nadine and stuff, did you?”

  “You mean did I rat you out to your folks?” He shook his head in disbelief. “No, Shelby, I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t really think so,” I said, though I was actually relieved. “So, how’d it happen that you were talking to my father?”

  “I saw him coming out of Stoneworks right after I finished following that guy for you.”

  “So you did get here in time!” I said. “Well? What happened?”

  “Are you going to get in,” he asked, “or will we just have this whole conversation with you leaning in the window?”

  I went around to the passenger side and slipped into the car. Facing Greg, I smiled in what I figured was a pretty darned alluring way, thinking a kiss would go a long way toward smoothing things out between us, but he didn’t take the hint.

  “Okay,” he took a deep breath, “I’d barely gotten here when the guy came out. He was on foot, so I had to park and follow him that way. It’s harder than you’d think, even though he wasn’t suspicious so he wasn’t really looking back over his shoulder or anything. I hung back as far as I could without losing him.”

  I considered saying something admiring about his cleverness but thought better of it. He is smart, which only means he’d see through that kind of flattery in a second.

  “So, anyway, I got his address. At least, I assume he lives there, since he went right into the house without knocking.”

  “Greg, that’s great!” I said, delighted. “What is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “The address?”

  “Ha! You can’t really think I’m just going to pass it over to you.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Let’s see, can we think of any reason that I might not give Shelby the Out-of-Control Detective the address of a possible kidnapper?”

  “C’mon,” I said, but I giggled anyway, mostly because relief was flooding through me like crazy. It almost made me feel weak. If Greg could still joke with me, then he wasn’t as ticked off as I’d feared.

  “No, wait! I just thought of a reason. Shelby the Out-of-Control Detective is … how should I put this … out of control!”

  “Greg! I’m not that bad.”

  “You’re not that bad.” The way he said it didn’t exactly sound like he was agreeing, I noticed.

  “I’m not,” I said again. “Anyway, what do you think I’m going to do with it?”

  �
�Who could even begin to predict what you might do?” he sighed. “I figure that the safest thing is for me to hang onto this bit of information until it’s needed.”

  “I wonder if he lives alone,” I thought aloud.

  “See what I mean!” Greg threw up the hand he wasn’t using to steer. “You’d go there and snoop around if you knew where he lived. I know you would.”

  I started to deny it, but the truth was I probably would have done just that. I tried another charming smile instead.

  “Maybe we could go there together, later on tonight,” I suggested, “and if anyone catches one of us, the other one could, you know, create a diversion or something.”

  “I wonder if there’s any hope for you at all,” he mused. He laughed then and reached over and touched my face with his hand, all gentle like.

  “I thought you were really mad at me,” I said, taking hold of his hand and holding it tight. “I worried all day that we were going to have a big fight or something.”

  “It’s a bit difficult staying angry with you,” he smiled. “Don’t take that to mean that you can just get away with anything, though. And by the way, I want the whole story of what you were up to last night, and don’t leave anything out.”

  I told the whole story and didn’t leave anything out. By the time I’d finished we were at my place and had been sitting in the driveway for about ten minutes.

  “So, are you going to forgive me before we go in?” I asked. I leaned toward him and tried to make my lips, you know, kind of full and luscious, though it probably just looked as if I was pouting.

  “I forgave you before you started talking,” he said. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me over a bit and kissed me, so I figured I’d managed the luscious look after all.

  We went into the house then and Mom and Dad put on this big act to embarrass me, only it didn’t work because I was so happy.

  “Shelby? Is that you dear?” Mom started. She squinted as though she was straining to see me. “Randall, can you tell if it’s her?”