Kayla came running from the back room where the flowers were stored. Annie and I froze in place, too stunned to respond to the strange reaction.
“We, uh, I ...,” I stammered. Kayla cut me off, her attention focused on Annie.
“Are you Gina Berkley’s girl?”
Annie’s mouth fell open. She seemed unable to answer, but at least she had the presence of mind to nod.
“I realized it right after you left!” Kayla said. She came around the counter and threw her arms around Annie’s shoulders. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes, sure as I’m standing here.”
“Then ... you worked with my mom?” Annie asked.
“Worked with her! Heck, your mom and I were best friends for thirteen years.”
CHAPTER TEN
When Kayla let go of her, Annie gasped and staggered sideways a little. I reached for her arm, thinking she was about to faint, but if she’d been light-headed she recovered quickly.
“Did you baby-sit me sometimes when I was little?” she gasped, “and give me horsy-back rides?”
“I sure did,” Kayla agreed, laughing. “You always wanted me to jump over things like the horses on television did, and you couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t.”
“I thought you looked kind of familiar,” Annie said. “But it’s been a long time. And your hair is totally different. Didn’t it used to be red?”
“I coloured it dark cherry for a long time, but I went back to my natural brown shade after my ex and I split,” Kayla said.
I don’t know about Annie, but I never know what to say when someone tells me they’ve broken up with their boyfriend. If you say you’re sorry, you’re sure to hear about how dumping that loser was the smartest thing they ever did, but if you say it’s probably for the best, you’re likely to be passing the Kleenex for the next hour.
Of course, this was different. For one thing, it was an adult, and for another, we had no idea if the break-up happened last month or three years ago. But it didn’t matter anyway, because there was no chance for an awkward silence. Kayla was already talking again.
“You said you were looking for your mother when you were here a bit earlier, right?”
Annie told her that was right and asked if we could run a few questions by her.
“I’ll be glad to help out any way I can,” Kayla said. She skittered a glance my way. I tried to look friendly, but she didn’t speak to me. Instead, she turned back to Annie and said, “This isn’t a good place to talk, though. All we have are the storefront, the flower room, and a bathroom. Let’s walk over to Tim’s.”
We did, and in short order we were seated at a table in the corner with coffees that Kayla had bought for everyone.
“So, what would you like to know?” she asked. She glanced around furtively, like a secret agent might be at the next table, trying to listen in.
Annie filled her in, briefly, on how she’d never heard from her mother again after she and Lenny went to the city.
“Lenny,” Kayla said. She made his name sound like some kind of horrible disease. “I never liked him. It was his fault that your mom and I quit hanging out.”
“What didn’t you like about him?” I asked.
“Be quicker to tell you what I did like, which was basically nothing. He was arrogant and pushy — he was always telling Gina what to do and she’d just go along with whatever he said. He took over every last thing in her life: where she went, with whom, what she wore, what she ate. Control freak. It got so that Gina had to ask Lenny about everything. She was crazy for the guy, at least at the beginning, but I couldn’t figure it.”
“Did things change?” I asked. “You said she was crazy for him at the beginning.”
“I don’t really know, not for sure. I saw her not long before he dragged her on out of town, and she said she was thinking hard about going back to school, which was something Lenny never wanted her to do. He couldn’t stand the idea of her being more educated than him, if you ask me. I took it as a good sign — that she was finally starting to stand up to the creep — but I guess it was just talk.”
“Was that the last time you saw my mother?” Annie wanted to know.
“Far as I can remember,” Kayla said. She sighed and her face grew sad. “I should have handled the whole thing with Lenny differently. If I could’ve just learned to shut my mouth about him ... well, she might have told me her plans, or gotten in touch again sometime over the years. But not me. I always had to be flapping my yap, telling her he was this and that and saying she should get rid of him.”
Kayla rummaged in her purse and pulled out a package of mints. She popped one in her mouth and went on.
“I’ll tell you girls one thing: you see a friend with a guy who’s no good, tread carefully! A woman will turn her back on her friends faster than she will on a guy she’s in love with — or thinks she is. But anyway, enough of that. You had some questions?”
“Did my mom use drugs?” Annie asked.
“Huh. I wasn’t expecting that,” Kayla admitted. “Did she use drugs? Not the way you’re asking, I don’t think. I mean, when we were kids your age ... if someone was passing around a joint, she’d take a hit. But she was never what you’d call a doper, and I never knew her to touch anything after you came along. Why?”
“I thought it might be a reason, you know, that she never came back.”
“Well, it’s not impossible,” Kayla said. “I mean, Lenny had so much influence over her, I could see her trying something because he pressured her to, and there’s some pretty addictive stuff out there.”
“I hope that didn’t happen,” Annie said softly.
“You and me both,” said Kayla.
“I’d rather think she just turned her back on everyone, including me, and started a new life. Maybe she met someone really great and she didn’t want to tell him she had a kid, and they got married and had their own family and ....” She stopped there, barely holding back the tears.
“It must be rough,” Kayla said, reaching a hand over and patting Annie’s arm. “And it’s the last thing I’d have expected from Gina. I thought she was a pretty good mom, really. Of course, I hadn’t seen much of her for the last couple of years she was around here, but when you were little she just doted on you. Only thing I can figure is that Lenny persuaded her to leave in the first place, and then things happened that kept her away. I’ll never believe she left with the plan that she wasn’t coming back for you.”
“For years after she left, I used to fantasize about her showing up and having some really great reason for being gone so long.” Annie blew her nose into a tissue and forced a smile.
“I imagined all sorts of crazy things. She’d been sent on a secret spy mission, or maybe she’d been abducted by aliens. Then, as I got older, the things I came up with were a little less off-the-wall. Like, I thought maybe she’d been injured and had been in a coma, or got a blow to the head and had amnesia.” Annie rolled her eyes. “I finally stopped making excuses for her a few years ago. But I still wonder.”
“Sure you do, Annie,” Kayla said. “You wanna know the truth? I do, too. I mean, why she never came back for you, of course, but I wondered how she just completely forgot about our friendship that way, too. Even though things went kind of bad between us, we’d been friends for all those years. Ever since junior high school, we’d been inseparable — until Lenny came along. We knew each other’s secrets and fears and hopes — all the stuff best friends tell each other. It was hard to believe that it all went down the drain over a guy, or that she could just up and leave without so much as saying goodbye.”
“That’s one of the hardest things for me,” Annie said. She raised her head and looked right at Kayla. “That she never said goodbye. I mean, she knew, that last morning, that she was leaving. Maybe she even knew she wasn’t coming back. But even if she planned to at that point, you’d think she’d have wanted to say or do something special, something for me to remember and hang on to when she was gone.”
&nbs
p; “And she didn’t?”
“She wasn’t even there,” Annie said. Bitterness had crept into her voice for the first time during the conversation. “When I got up, she’d gone to pick up her pay cheque at work. She could at least have waited until I’d left for school to do that. And then, when I came home, the note was there and she was gone.”
“That’s gotta be really rough.” Kayla shook her head and took another mint out of her package. “I quit smoking last month,” she said, “and now I’m addicted to these. Gotta give them up pretty soon, too, before my blood sugar goes through the roof. I hope neither of you girls smoke.”
She looked at us inquisitively and seemed satisfied when we indicated that we didn’t. “Good,” she said. “It’s a disgusting habit. Your breath stinks, your clothes stink ... and I’m sure you know the health issues. Plus, it’s torture quitting.”
We nodded to show her we were taking her advice seriously. Then, Annie took a deep breath. She looked kind of nervous and I realized at once what she was going to ask Kayla next.
“Do you know who my father is?”
Kayla stared at her for a moment, like she hadn’t quite understood the question. Then she shook her head and said, “That’s the only thing she ever kept from me. I wish I could help you, Annie, I swear I do. But I just don’t know.”
“But don’t you have any idea?” I asked, speaking for the first time since we’d entered the coffee shop.
“Oh, believe me, I drove myself half crazy trying to figure it out back when Gina got pregnant,” Kayla said. “There were a couple of guys she’d been kind of interested in, but she never went out with either of them that I know of. Whoever it was, there had to be some reason she kept it a secret from me. I thought for a while maybe it was a married guy and that’s why she wouldn’t say, but she swore that wasn’t it. And that’s all she’d ever say on the subject.”
“Does Annie resemble anyone you knew back then?” I asked.
“Honestly, just her mom,” Kayla said.
Annie looked crestfallen, and I couldn’t blame her. It had to be a huge disappointment to find out that even her mother’s best friend couldn’t tell her who her father was. Kayla and I were silent, waiting for her to be ready to go on.
“Did my mother ever talk about any places she’d like to go someday?” Annie asked when she next spoke.
“We used to talk about that, yeah,” Kayla said. She looked relieved that the topic had moved on past Annie’s father. “We talked about going a lot of places, in fact. Like Hollywood and New York, plus a few other spots in America. Then there was Paris and China and Greece. Oh, and Australia. She thought it would be awesome to see real live koala bears and kangaroos.”
“Did any one of those places stand out over the others?” I asked.
“For Gina? Nah. Not that I ever noticed, anyway. It was just one of those things everyone did when growing up in a small town: talk about all the places they’d like to go and things they’d like to do someday. I don’t even know if she really wanted to go anywhere. It could just as easily have been idle chatter to pass a few boring hours. I know that’s all it was for me.”
“I just wish I knew something,” Annie said. Her voice was full of despair.
That made me think about other situations I’d found myself in over the past couple of years. I’d often felt exactly the same way — discouraged and feeling as though I didn’t have any information that was important. And every time, I’d been proven wrong. So, I’d come to realize that there’s often something in the information you have that means more than you realize.
Whether or not that would turn out to be true this time remained to be seen. After all, we were following a trail that was eight years old. Cold clues and fading memories made it seem less and less likely that we were ever going to find out where Gina Berkley went. And even if we did learn where she’d gone, the chance that she would still be there after all this time was highly doubtful.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I woke up the next morning with a vague feeling that something wasn’t right, only I had no idea what. I did know that it had to do with Annie’s mother, and our search for her. So I did what I usually do when I get that kind of feeling: I got out my notes and read through them, looking for something that might jump out at me. I even read them out of order, which sometimes helps.
Nothing.
I set them aside, showered, dressed, and went to the kitchen. Annie and I had planned to meet at my place at noon and figure out what we were going to do then.
The phone rang as I was finishing my breakfast. Betts. I kind of expected her to pester me some more about what was going on with Annie, but she never mentioned it. I thought that after I’d stood my ground when she asked the other day, she’d either given up or had some alternate plan to find out what was up. Turned out it was neither. She had something else on her mind.
“You’re not going to believe who I ran into today!” she said breathlessly.
“Matt Damon again?” I said. Betts had sworn that she’d spotted the star when she and her ex-boyfriend were checking out some yard sales one Saturday. Not impossible — celebrities go places just like anyone else — except the “Matt Damon” Betts had encountered was playing drums in a garage band.
“No, not Matt Damon. And anyway, I still say that could have been him.”
“Didn’t you get the guy’s autograph and it was Cody somebody?”
“Colby, but it could have been Matt Damon tricking me. Anyway, this was someone else.”
“Okay, so who was it?”
“Edgar Manchester!” she screeched. “And he asked me out!”
“Who?” I’d drawn a total blank, though it was clear she’d expected me to recognize the name.
“Edgar Manchester,” she repeated. She sounded exasperated. “Remember? His family used to live next door to me until I was about nine. He’s older than us — like, a couple of years or something. But, his folks split up and his father just moved back here. Edgar and his brother came with their dad.”
“You’re not talking about that guy who had his hair dyed neon green, are you?”
She was.
“Betts!” I protested, “he isn’t a couple of years older than us. He had to have been at least sixteen when they moved. That would make him twenty-four, or older, now.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know ...,” she said. It was a bit too vague, coming from the gossip queen. I didn’t buy it.
“You do know!” I accused. “You know perfectly well. And you can’t go out with a guy that age.”
“I can if my parents don’t find out how old he really is,” she said. Then she giggled, which made me even angrier.
“Well, you must think they’re pretty stunned if they can’t to figure it out when the guy used to live right next door to you.”
“Yeah, but he looks totally different now, and he has a stage name, so there’s no way they’ll know it’s the same guy.”
“A stage name?”
“Uh huh. With his band, Mudslide.”
“So, what’s his stage name — Muck ’n Mire?”
“Oh, that’s real funny,” she said. “It’s “cruel,’ but with a “K’ — Kruel Danger.”
“And you figure your parents will believe that’s really his name, do you?” I asked, glad she couldn’t see me rolling my eyes.
“Why do you have to be so negative?” Betts’s voice was annoyed, but I wasn’t about to worry about that.
“Negative? You’re talking about dating someone in his mid twenties. You’re seventeen, Betts! Think about it.”
“You’re making it sound way worse than it is.”
“I don’t think I am, Betts. I don’t think I’m even scratching the surface of what’s wrong with this. I mean, have you wondered at all about what kind of man that age wants to go out with a high school kid?”
“I told him I was nineteen.”
I took a deep breath. From the tone of her voice, I knew I wasn’t making an
y gains with her whatsoever. Still, I had to try. “Betts, tell me what good can come out of this? Just tell me how going out with someone that you’ve lied to about your age, and someone you’re planning to lie your head off to your parents about, tell me how this has even the remotest chance of turning out well.”
“He’s really cute,” Betts said.
“Are you kidding me?” I practically yelled. “That’s the big important thing to you? That the guy’s cute?”
“Well, he is.” Her voice had turned petulant. “And you don’t need to yell at me.”
“I’m sorry, but someone needs to yell at you, Betts,” I said, forcing myself to sound calmer. “You just can’t go out with this, this Edgar or Kruel, or whatever you want to call him.”
“Kruel. And he’s going to make sure I get a backstage pass for all of his band’s gigs. Once they make it.”
“Make what?” I knew she was drawing me away from the main subject, but couldn’t quite help myself from falling for the bait.
“You know, make it big.”
“Right. Because that almost always happens for anyone who has a band.” I realized suddenly that something wasn’t quite right with the conversation we were having. I tried to sound light and casual, and asked, “So, where did you say you ran into, uh, Kruel?”
“Um, it was in town.”
“Whereabouts in town?”
“What difference does that make?”
My suspicion was growing. “Betts, what’s the big deal? I just wondered where you happened to see the guy. Why are you being so evasive?”
“I’m not. It was outside the post office.”
“So you see this guy after about eight years ... just run into him outside the post office ...and right there on the street he tells you all about his band and his new name and all the things he’s going to do for you — like these fabulous backstage passes — in what, a couple of minutes? Not to mention the time you needed to recreate yourself as a nineteen-year-old.”
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