Susan looked at him, scared. “Do you think it was really Alexi using the phone? I mean, someone could have grabbed her and forced her to write that.”
He tried to reassure her. “I doubt that’s what happened.”
Was she overreacting to Alexi’s disappearance? Probably. Most likely it was the case of a runaway child, and it would probably end—like most such cases do—with the child returning home. But Susan seemed to be caught up in the feeling that it was something worse. She could be right. And there wasn’t much he could do at the moment to shake her out of that mood.
“Did you check her room? Was anything missing—maybe her clothes, her suitcase or anything like that?”
“As far as I could see, everything’s still there. I can’t say for sure. Most of her clothes are still in her closet and dresser, but there might be a couple of things gone. I wouldn’t know unless I went through all the hampers and yesterday’s wash.”
“How about her toothbrush or anything personal?”
“There was a toothbrush there, but I think she may have more than one. Oh, I don’t know…”
She suddenly blurted out in anger.
“I’m so mad at them! I wanted him to call the police. But the minute we realized what happened, Allen had Mr. Blaiseck on the phone, and they were talking among themselves, making all the decisions about what they were going to do. When Blaseck came over here, they couldn’t get me out of the room fast enough. I probably should have called you right then.”
But as quickly as it started, her anger calmed down.
“Oh, don’t pay any attention to any of that. I’m just upset. I know we’re all trying to do what we can to get her back. I just feel so helpless.”
There was still some bitterness in her mood. But there was something else—a sense that life might be slipping out of her grasp and she had no way to get it back. When she wasn’t flashing her anger, she gave the appearance of being on the edge of defeat.
“Can I look at the message?”
She handed him a piece of paper. “It’s still on the phone, if you want to see it. But I copied it down word for word.”
Mom
I have to go away for a few days, and I don’t want you to be worried. I’m safe, and I will contact you as soon as I feel that I can. Please don’t try to reach me. If you want to know why I left, you should talk to your husband.
Love, Alexi
“Do you have any thought about where she might have been headed? She seems to be saying that she knows someplace safe. Do you know what she means?”
“I have no idea. I can’t think of any place she might be talking about.”
“How about the last sentence—the phrase where she says, ‘You should talk to your husband.’ That’s an odd way to put it. Do you know what she was trying to say?”
“Allen says she is just rebelling against him because he’s been so strict.”
“Do you think that’s it?”
“Oh, I guess.”
There was some hesitancy in her answer.
“Would it be all right if I took a quick look around the house?”
There had to be more information about what had happened than just that note—anything at all might be helpful. They walked into the living room, and Susan stopped short for a second, staring at an empty space where it appeared that a couch had been.
“What is it?”
“The couch,” she said.
“Is it missing?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just that…Alexi was so upset a few days ago, when the furniture movers took the couch away and we had to wait for a new one.”
“Why do you think that bothered her?”
Susan hesitated for a few seconds. “I’m not sure.”
There was probably something more to it than that. Susan seemed to be rerunning the whole scene through her mind.
“Did Alexi spend a lot of time on the couch?”
“I suppose so.”
They walked slowly through the rest of the house, while he asked her questions. Susan offered only brief replies. They got to Alexi’s room at the end of the hall.
“Can we go in?”
Susan nodded yes.
There was nothing in the room that looked helpful. There were no pictures on the wall, no stuffed animals, no rock star posters—not much decoration of any sort. If Alexi had spent much time there, she must have squirreled away the things that mattered to her somewhere else. There was a guitar in a soft plastic case sitting in her closet. From the dust on it, it didn’t look like it had been used in a while.
“Does Alexi play the guitar?”
“She used to, but I don’t think she’s touched it in quite a while.”
“Do you know why she stopped?”
Susan hesitated for a second. “I don’t know. It was like everything else…” She let the thought hang there.
She walked over to a dresser drawer and moved a few things, finding a picture she wanted. It showed Alexi holding the guitar, getting ready to play it.
“I think this is the most recent picture I have of her.”
“Can I take it? It might help if I have it to show it around. I’ll make sure you get it back.”
Susan nodded yes.
He scanned everything again, but there was nothing that caught his eye. The room left him with a strange sensation. What was missing was Alexi—not just the girl herself but any feeling she’d ever been there. It was an unnerving sensation. He remembered having the same thought when he looked into the room of his daughter, Mandy, after she and her mother had packed up and moved out.
He took a look at the handle on the door to the room and gave it a couple of twists. Then he bent down farther to examine it.
“Is there something wrong with the door?” Susan asked.
“It looks like the lock has been disabled.”
“I know the door locks.” She had a concerned look on her face. “There’ve been a couple of times when I’ve walked down the hall just to see if she was okay. I’ve tried the door, and I wasn’t able to open it.”
Her statement struck him as a little odd.
“Were you worried about something in particular—maybe, that there was an intruder? Or were you thinking she might have left?”
Susan shook her head, deflecting whatever thought she might have had.
“No, no real reason. I guess I was just being your typical worried mother.”
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He propped up the picture of Alexi next to his dinner plate that evening and stared at it for a few seconds, finally setting it aside with the stack of notes. He tried to figure out how the image of her squared with what else he knew. There were still a few bites left on his plate, but the leftovers from the takeout chicken weren’t too appealing. He shoved them aside.
The photo had his attention, but he wasn’t sure why. There was nothing in the picture or anything else that suggested why she might have run away. There was even less to hint that she might have been abducted. What had really happened?
He’d gone by the foundation building late in the afternoon after he talked to Susan. When he walked by Blaiseck’s office, he saw Wilder in the room with several men. Curly and Slim were there—they gave him blank stares. The others were men he had never seen before. When Blaiseck saw him in the doorway, he came out and shut the door behind him.
“Where have you been?”
“Talking to Susan Wilder, trying to help with her missing daughter.”
“Who told you to do that?”
“Nobody told me. She asked me if I could help, and I decided to do it. You can understand why she would be upset, can’t you?”
“We’re handling that, so I don’t see why you’ve gotten yourself involved.”
“Everyone else has left her out of the loop, and she’s wo
rried sick about Alexi. I just thought someone ought to have some respect for her feelings.”
Blaiseck stared at him for a few seconds.
“Okay, do what you have to do to keep her happy, but try not to interfere.” Then he seemed to have another thought. “And I want you to keep us informed of what you’re up to, okay? If you find out anything, you tell us. You still work here, you know.”
“How come you haven’t told the police that she’s missing?”
Blasieck glared him.
“I don’t need you second-guessing everything we do. But in case you’ve forgotten, there are some important reasons why Reverend Wilder doesn’t want this to get out to the public. We have a big conference coming up with a congressional delegation in a few weeks, and we don’t need any bad publicity about a child running away.” He paused for a second to let his words sink in. “And by the way, when you’re not wasting time like you did today, you’re supposed to be working on security for that conference.”
As he got back to the door to his office, he turned once more.
“And don’t worry about the kid. We’ll find her.”
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Where were his loyalties in this thing? He thought about that as he scraped the remains of his dinner into the garbage disposal. When he’d worked for the police, he never had to ask those kinds of questions. It was someone else’s job to decide whether a person had been pushed into a life of crime or had managed to get there on their own. The same was true of the people he worked with—it didn’t make any difference what he thought of them. The moral decisions were made somewhere up the chain of command. If you were assigned a case, you chased after the suspects—no questions asked. Your boss could be an idiot, a sleaze, or a total prick—he’d had all of them—but that was irrelevant. You did your assignment and let the others deal with the peripheral issues.
But what he was doing now was different. When you’re working with a private client, personal feelings can complicate things. Supposedly, he was employed by Blaiseck and the foundation. That’s fine. As long as they were paying him, he’d have to report to them and give them what they wanted. But he wasn’t going to be their robot, just following orders no matter what. If he had any loyalties, it was to Susan Wilder. As the day wore on, he became more and more sympathetic with what she was going through.
As they continued to talk that afternoon, Susan apparently decided she could open up to him. It was an odd situation in some ways. There was no personal attraction between them. He just seemed to be there when she needed to talk. The conversation wandered around for over an hour as Susan strung together her reminiscences, talking about Alexi and their life together. He started to get a clearer picture of her daughter, but there was nothing Susan said that shed any light on why Alexi had decided to leave—if, in fact, that decision was hers. According to Susan, she was a serious, intelligent child with no drug problems, no bouts with alcohol, and nothing else to suggest she might have gone off the rails. Allen Wilder’s name crept into the conversation, but it was mentioned almost tangentially in a story that was mostly about Alexi. Missing from her narrative was any sense of Susan’s usual deference to her husband. Her role as the reverend’s happy help-mate seemed to have disappeared along with their daughter.
The whole thing was a puzzle. When teenagers do a runner, you can usually chart a path of troubling behavior leading up to it. And, more often than not, their destination is clear—some drug underground or other wild bunch of kids that they’re trying to hook up with. And they’re rarely considerate of their parents’ feelings. He pulled out the text of her note and looked at. “I have to go away for a few days, and I don’t want you to be worried.” What was going through her head when she wrote that? She apparently pulled the batteries out of her phone and stopped calling or texting her friends. How many teenagers do that kind of planning? And what were her words? “I’m safe, and I will contact you as soon as I feel that I can.” That didn’t sound at all like a fifteen-year-old.
Alexi never told her mother why she stopped playing the guitar, just saying something vague about not feeling good about it anymore. But as he looked at the picture of her smiling and cradling that instrument on her lap, she seemed totally happy at the moment that picture was taken. On a whim, he went into his bedroom and pulled out a guitar that had been sitting in the back of his closet for several years. He opened the case and compared it with the one in the picture. As he guessed, the guitar in the photo was a knockoff. The one he had was a Martin D-28, while the other one was a much newer instrument that was trying to copy that classic design. He held the guitar for a few minutes longer. He knew he was just distracting himself from what he was doing, but his investigation seemed to be going nowhere. He didn’t mind his thoughts wandering off in a different direction.
It wasn’t his guitar—it was Jimmy’s. He’d gotten a call from Jimmy’s sister several years back to say that she was giving away some of his stuff. But she couldn’t part with the guitar—it was his favorite possession. Out of the blue, she asked him if he would take it. He was too surprised to say anything but yes. When it arrived a few weeks later, there was another package with a note from Carolyn, saying she’d sent some of Jimmy’s folk music books along with it. He remembered opening the box and seeing something out of another world. There were dozens of dog-eared copies of Sing Out magazine and a five-volume set of something called The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. As he thumbed through the first book, he realized that it would take him months to read the entire set.
At the bottom of the box was Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America. Jimmy had talked to him so often about those songs that he became intrigued by them. He thumbed the pages and saw many of Jimmy’s favorites. And in the margins were his long, handwritten notes. Whenever he read those words, he had the sensation that Jimmy was talking to him.
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This was the time of night when memories about Jimmy often popped into his head. They were usually an odd collection of bits and pieces that came and went with a will of their own. But there was one memory that stood out—one that he never talked about to anyone. He never told Carolyn about it, and he didn’t even mention it to Jimmy when he was alive. It was something that would have been too embarrassing. Maybe he was being too secretive. After all these years, someone hearing the story might find it more endearing than scandalous, but he kept it to himself nevertheless.
One afternoon, the two of them found themselves in a ramshackle building where their squad had been stopped for over an hour. Jimmy had received a letter and a photo that morning from LouAnn, and he was anxious to find a place to read it. He located a spot behind the building, knowing his buddy would cover for him. But the spot he chose turned out to be not all that private. Through the broken walls at the back of the building, Jimmy could be seen holding the letter with the photo propped up in front of him.
He couldn’t help but look at him. There was a different kind of expression on Jimmy’s face. And after a few moments he realized why: Jimmy’s pants were open and he was stroking himself. That vision froze him for a second. He had never seen another man do that. He looked way, trying to sort out his emotions. But the shock of it gave away to an instinctual feeling that he wanted to be protective of Jimmy, making sure that no one else saw it and that it remained their secret—really, only his secret. And over the years, that scene had mellowed in his mind, becoming another very personal memory to add to all the others. When he thought of it now, he remembered it only as a lonely act of love.
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He had dozed off, caught in a sea of strange images. But he awoke when his phone pinged with a text message from Susan. She’d received another message from Alexi.
Alexi
She stumbled into the motel bathroom and threw up.
It was still dark in the room as she raced toward the toilet. Gina was sleeping in the bed closer to the door, and she tried not to wake
her. But the noises she made as she cradled her arm around the toilet were so loud that Gina woke up anyway. Are you all right? she wanted to know. She mumbled something in response. The next thing she heard was Gina getting out of bed and plodding toward the bathroom.
She’d never known anyone like Gina. She was angry at first when Gina talked about herself and told her who she was and what she was like. She couldn’t believe it. She probably said things to Gina that she shouldn’t have said. She couldn’t really remember what she had done. But after a few minutes, she realized she wasn’t so much mad at Gina as she was angry at the world for creating so much confusion in her life. The more they talked, the more she calmed down about everything.
The thing was, she liked Gina. She felt good about her from the moment she got into the car, because she realized that Gina was on her side. But she was confused and still angry that things had to be so complicated. After they talked awhile, she started feeling a little embarrassed about how she had reacted. She didn’t want to hurt Gina’s feelings, but it just took a little while to get used to her. She wondered what she might do if Gina got up real close to her at some point. She didn’t know if she was ready for that. But ready or not, it was happening at that moment. The door to the bathroom opened behind her, and within seconds Gina was squatting down next to her.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She just wanted the vomiting to stop. But when she tried to say something about it, she felt another foul surge in her throat. A week earlier, her mother had been hunched down next to her in the same position at another toilet. It seemed like she had asked the same question.
“No, I’ll be all right.”
“Okay, take your time. Don’t try to talk.”
Gina’s hand was resting lightly on her shoulder. She flinched for a second at the feel of it, but then she relaxed. Gina eased up a bit, but seconds later the hand was still there. Her touch at that point was so light she could barely sense it. It felt good.
She shuffled back to her bed and put her head on the pillow, trying not to disturb her stomach. If the room didn’t start spinning around again, she thought she could get some more sleep. Gina was blaming herself for making her sick, even though it wasn’t really her fault. She kept saying that the whole day had been too stressful and that she never should have gone into that long discussion during dinner. Maybe that was part of it, but more likely it was just the foul-tasting hamburger she’d ordered. She wished she had scraped the sauce off of it.
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