“She left things here. Years ago, like a dog marking its territory.” Zandra Riddock pursed her mouth, then sighed and dragged on her cigarette again. “I had to ask her to stop. It was too much…closeness. As if she, too, lived here. A recipe for disaster.”
Billie didn’t want to ask her what she meant, if she were implying she believed that her son had bashed in the skull of his longtime friend, and that it had been Tracy’s own fault for leaving things behind. “Did you—did you have the chance to speak with her recently, perhaps?” she asked instead. “To get a sense of what was up?”
Zandra shook her head. “I tried not to interfere in my son’s life. He is an adult and deserves to be treated as such. I’d confer with the housekeeper, of course, and I kept track of how the money was being spent, but other than that…”
She ignored him as much as possible, is what she couldn’t say. Didn’t care, didn’t bother. Probably didn’t like him, either.
“Still a few years ago, I found her in the spare room there, with her hand in a dresser drawer. She said she was putting her things away. As if it were her home! I tried to come over once a week, to be sure all was well, and once I found a Saks box in the trash, and another time, a shopping bag from Nordstrom’s. I think she hid things at his house—things she didn’t want her husband to know she’d bought.”
This wasn’t the sort of information Billie had hoped for, and the resentment and suspicion couldn’t help Gavin any way she could figure. Billie wanted to believe what Gavin so obviously believed, that Tracy Lester had been his friend. In some large-hearted, giving way, Tracy had found solace and comfort in this gentle, handicapped boy-man. Billie didn’t want Gavin’s own mother twisting it into something mean-spirited.
Zandra Riddock stubbed out her cigarette and stood in front of Billie, uncomfortably close. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said abruptly. “You’ve heard I’m a terrible person. A witch. A bad mother. That I don’t care about anything except myself. Haven’t you?”
“No,” Billie lied. “No. Why would you—”
“Because everybody says that. Including, I suspect, the lawyer I hired who then hired you. Because…” She backed off and sat down on the loveseat across from Billie. “Michael Specht lives in Marin. In Belvedere, in fact. I almost didn’t want him because of that, because he’s got preexisting ideas about me, and he doesn’t see me, he sees my reputation, so anything I do is interpreted in the worst possible way.”
“Well, I surely…” Billie put her hands out, palms up, to say she was at a loss for words.
“I’m not an ogre,” Zandra Riddock said softly. “And neither was Gavin, at first.”
“Gavin an ogre? Who could ever think such a—”
Zandra’s eyes grew wide, her forehead furrowing above them. “Not my son!” she said. “My husband. My ex. He was an ordinary, sweet, dull boy who cared only for science. The ‘mad scientist’ my family called him, because he was almost a cliché. Incredibly brilliant, but he left things undone, forgot things, dressed sloppily—nothing mattered except his experiments. I expected to support him throughout our life. And then bingo, he got rich. He won awards. He sold his firm to an international group and had more money than God.”
Gavin Senior had developed some piece of the new genetic engineering industry, Billie remembered from Michael Specht’s notes. Something that led to vast pharmaceutical possibilities, and something he could and did patent.
“He changed,” Zandra said. “Let me rephrase that. I don’t think people change, they just allow themselves to be who they are. So it was as if this arrogant perfectionist had been hiding inside him all the while, ashamed to come out before he somehow ‘earned’ it. Back when he was just another scientist, he was arrogant only about his work. Maybe about his brain, too. But once he’d made it, the world was his and nothing was good enough for him. Everyone was his inferior. ‘Nobodies,’ he’d call them. ‘Idiots.’ I was still okay—his equal, perhaps—until I gave birth to Gavin Junior.”
She paused, stood, extracted another cigarette and repeated the crystal-studded routine before continuing. “There was a problem during delivery,” she said. “A mistake and the baby didn’t get enough oxygen for a while, so he wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t the best that money could buy.” She stared at Billie silently as if letting hot emotions cool down, before she could let them pass through her mouth. “He was not found acceptable. He was not a fit heir.
“His father sued everybody associated with the birth. He would have sued me, if he’d found an angle. Lots of headlines, accusations of incompetence, malpractice. My O.B. quit his practice and moved out of state. The entire hospital staff loathed our name, and I didn’t blame them. And ultimately, what difference did any of it make—except to make us hated. Because Gavin was, is, still…different. Nothing changed, except for the worse.
“I couldn’t handle how he felt about my child and how he handled how he felt, but I had this scary baby, so I stayed with him and Gavin decided to build a house suitable to his stature. So there were more lawsuits, more headlines. Now he was taking down an entire town, openly willing to bankrupt it, if necessary, to build his castle. Our name became a synonym for whatever was bad.
“And then he told me he was through with us.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and folded her hands, although her two index fingers tapped and tapped against one another. “I asked him how he could slough us off, like dead skin, and he said ‘because I can afford to.’ And so it went. I’d seen my husband fight a hospital and a town, so I fought long and hard when we were divorced. More headlines. The company he’d started after the one he sold was in jeopardy because of me, they said. Their stock would fall. Well, screw them. Screw him. I was in jeopardy, too. My son was in jeopardy. I didn’t play by their rules. I didn’t quietly slink away, taking whatever he was willing to dole out to me and Gavin. I fought for what was ours. And then I compounded it by staying in town, not disappearing the way he wanted us to.”
She stood up and moved slightly toward the entryway. Billie thought the interview, or whatever it had been, was probably over. She lifted another lid—this time, a box of inlaid woods. “I…I never knew what to do with Gavin, what would be right. And neither did anybody else.” She lit another cigarette and waved at the smoke she was producing. “I did the best I could, but I’m still the villain of the piece. Whatever I did about or for my son was wrong—deliberately so. Isn’t that how it goes?”
She sat back down across from Billie. “The thing is, I know that’s what you heard and I know Michael Specht hates me, but I hired him anyway. Because he’s good at what he does, and he’ll find the way to save my son. And that’s it. Did you find out anything new? Did you get what you came for?”
Billie stood. “I didn’t have an agenda.”
“I can’t tell you anything, don’t you understand? I—I don’t know my son. It somehow feels a choice between hovering and treating him with a measure of contempt, needing to know and control, and backing off and letting him grow and become himself—and not knowing him, pretty much. But I did the best I could. Don’t judge me until you’ve been in my shoes, until nobody anywhere can tell you what’s wrong with your child or how to fix it. Or where he belongs—with people slower than he is? Or people faster than he is. You do the best you can.”
Billie nodded, and when she shook Zandra Riddock’s hand, it wasn’t the hand of the witch she’d heard about. She no longer had an easy label to put on the woman.
Gone the villainess. Here the middle ground, the not-all-bad and not-all-good.
Gone the clarity.
Gray was not Billie’s favorite color. It was fog and smoke and limited visibility. She much preferred black and white, and mourned the loss of those solid hues.
Twenty‑Seven
Emma was awake and staring at the ceiling. Beside her, George slept deeply. She listened to his breathing: a shallow snore like a soft metronome keeping time through the night.
&nb
sp; What was this, though? Emma wasn’t an insomniac—George was. He made fun of how she could sleep through everything and anything. She wasn’t used to being up in the middle of the night and felt disoriented with fragments of a lost dream still floating in strips and threads around her. What had it been? Not precisely a nightmare, but not a good dream, either. More a nag, an annoyance. Frightening but not threatening…
A man, a face at a window, grabbing something.
And then she had it, and she sat up in bed and reached for her glasses and the notepad and pen that were always by the phone.
“What?” George asked in a half-asleep voice.
“Nothing,” Emma whispered. “I’m awake is all. Go back to sleep.” She saw the white outline of the notepad, and “Baby-78—check.” That was it. That had to be it. The whole thing still stunk. Stank? Whatever the word, it did it.
While she slept, her mind had put it together, insisted that she pay attention, finally, to what the blind alleys and deliberate obfuscations meant.
George had not resumed his soft pre-snore. “Whazzit?” he asked again. “You don’t wake up this way. What’s wrong?”
She should have known she’d wake him up. A loud breeze could do it. But since he was up, she wanted to hear it said out loud. “Remember the girl who found out she was adopted?”
He yawned and blinked. “Work?” he said. “You’re letting a client get to you to the point that it wakes you up?”
“It never made sense and still doesn’t. The mother’s playing games with me and her daughter. I’d decided to call Heather Wilson tomorrow and tell her sayonara. Except—something nagged at me.”
George’s yawns had deafened him in spots. She had to repeat herself and she listened again and was convinced that so far, she sounded logical.
“What about it?” George asked. “Adoptive parents probably all get nervous when their kids search. I would. I’d worry if they’d switch allegiances—I’d worry about a lot of things.”
“That’s not what it’s about. I’m positive.”
“The search fizzled out. Why let it get to you? Especially since you discourage people from this kind of thing. Why don’t you marry me and retire? Let me make you an honest lady of leisure. We’ll sell both our houses, find a new place and—”
“It’s the middle of the night, George.”
“What better time for a proposal?”
“You’re out of your mind.” She waved away his proposal just as she had the ten other times he’d made it.
“Thought maybe I’d catch you at a weak moment, when your mind wasn’t working yet.”
“Your mind, you mean.” She shook her head in mock despair, and wondered what he’d do if she accepted. Probably faint. “It isn’t that,” she said out loud.
“Want tea? Milk? Something to help you get back to sleep?”
She shook her head. “I’m supposed to listen to me. That’s what my dream was saying.”
“Your dream? You’re being directed by a dream? What’s happening to you? Emma’s gone woo-woo?”
She ignored him. “In my dream, I saw somebody in a mask—one of those silly raccoon masks, the kind the kids wear at Halloween. I saw him snatch something out of a window.”
“A pie. That’s what they’re always stealing in cartoons. And where else would a robber announce his occupation by wearing that stupid mask?”
He was right. Those robbers were always snatching pies, but what did pies have to do with her? And who were those housewives balancing fresh baked goods on wobbly window sills? “I think the mask was so I’d know what was meant. It was all…symbolic. The mask and even the guy’s outfit—striped long-sleeved T-shirt, you know the kind?”
He nodded. “You dream in comic strips.”
“The mask and the stripe signaled ‘Bad guy alert!’”
“So you dreamed about people stealing pies.”
“A child, not a pie. I’m sure that’s what the bundle they passed through was.”
“Bundle, schmundle—who cares? It could have been the recycling. Or laundry. Or stolen goods. Oh, what am I talking about? It wasn’t anything except a dream. Probably the revenge of something you ate.”
“I’ve been trying to get past a nagging feeling about this business since it started. I was censoring it, but it broke through in my dream. That’s what’s behind the mother’s fear of being discovered.”
“Come on, Emma. Like I said, there are hundreds of reasons this search would scare her.”
“They aren’t her reasons.”
“Have you asked?”
Emma swung her legs around so that they were on the floor. She shivered. The room was cold. She stood and got her robe. “I’m going to. But first”—she turned as she tied the belt of the robe—“I’ve got research to do.”
“On comic books? The interpretation of dreams? It’s the middle of the night.”
“I can’t sleep, George, and there’s nothing I hate more than lying in bed wishing I were asleep. There must be stuff on the Net.”
“What kind of stuff? You’re making me nervous.”
“Kidnapping stuff. Kids who disappeared roughly twenty years ago. It must be on there somewhere.”
He groaned. An honest, up from the innards, groan. “Please. Tell me I’m misunderstanding.”
“My gut’s telling me that’s the only thing that makes sense of this. That young woman was not legally adopted. There’s something criminal in her background and that’s why this mother has spun an entirely untrue story around it. Why she’s trying to look cooperative, to allay suspicions and monitor me. But she’s really trying to brick me up and shut me out. It’s about fear.”
“There must be a million other reasons for—”
“Go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you. I’m fine.” She left the room and padded first into the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of wine. It made her sleepy, but that was fine—she felt so on alert, it was going to take more than wine to get her back to sleep. And then she went into what was now called her study, but would always be, to her, Caroline’s room, though no real traces of Caroline were left, except the god-awful pale lilac walls that Emma meant to repaint.
The computer was always on, and as soon as she saw the familiar screen saver, she stopped, horrified. There it was: little men in striped shirts and raccoon masks. She’d forgotten. She watched as they hurled bombs and climbed up ladders into windows, while men in fedoras and trench coats paralleled their every move, guns at the ready.
Was that all it was? Had she been dreaming of her screen saver?
She sipped wine and controlled the urge to look over her shoulder to check whether George was there to notice the incriminating screen saver. He wasn’t, and she settled in.
She did a search under “kidnapping,” and was first amazed, then daunted by the number and scope of sites that came up. The Lindbergh baby. The kidnapping of Aimee Semple McPherson. The saga of Elian Gonzales’s long absence from Cuba. Sites on Uganda’s, Mexico’s, Chechnya’s kidnappings. Business kidnappings. Political kidnappings. So many misplaced people. On protecting yourself from and what to do if. And then, missing children sites promisingly full of photos.
Most were recent.
So many missing children, primarily noncustodial parent snatches. She thought about Billie, about her first interview, her expression when she described her ex-husband kidnapping their son, and her search for the boy. She looked at other people’s children, faces as they were ten or fifteen years ago, aged by computer to how they might look now, although Emma was skeptical about how accurate those artificially matured faces were. It had been her observation that huge noses flowered from baby’s button noses, and silken white blond hair turned dark and curly, ears flapped, chins disappeared, teeth bucked, skin erupted. She wondered whether the computer was aware of these developmental surprises.
Or of people dyeing the child’s hair—wasn’t that what Billie’s husband had done?
There were almo
st no listings going back to when Heather would have been born, except for a pitiful photo of an infant, nameless, who’d disappeared in 1947. The caption asked “Do you recognize this child?” Emma wondered who possibly could and who was still hopeful enough to have posted the picture.
She wasn’t going to find her on a list like these and would probably have to go back and comb through newspapers of that time. It would have to be for the entire US, and Canada, too. An overwhelming task.
And what if Heather hadn’t been kidnapped at all, but bought? Emma couldn’t hope to trace that.
“Oh, Emma.”
He was behind her. She could almost feel the air ripple from his head-shaking, and she watched his reflection on the screen. “Cut it out,” she said without turning.
“You couldn’t find the girl’s natural mother, and that’s that. There is no basis for this. There is no payment for this.”
“I know.” She leaned back into her battered desk chair and took a deep breath. “I know everything you’re going to say and I also know you’re saying it because you care about me.”
“Oh, Emma,” he said more softly.
“And I appreciate that.”
“But you aren’t going to listen to a word of it, are you?”
“Nope.”
“It’s the opposite of everything you’ve always preached. You’re getting involved where you shouldn’t and…and those faces—How can you sit and look at them. This…this is foolish.”
“Don’t you ever operate on gut feeling? On something you couldn’t describe, but it’s the sum total of all the years you’ve put into what you do know? Haven’t you, ever?”
“Sure, but come on, Emma, what are you going to do? Check every unsolved child-abduction for the last twenty years and then do DNA testing? This is futile and doomed and there’s no reason to do it in the first place.”
She swiveled around so that she could see him directly. “First of all, we aren’t talking two decades. The girl wasn’t taken when she was twenty, or fifteen, or even five. I know the mother’s lied about most things, but if she’d been taken, or bought at a later age, she’d probably remember something. She was an infant. It’s a small window of a few years.”
Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2) Page 20