Lavender Lies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Hey, look!” Melissa nudged Brian. “It’s the one that got away!”

  Howard Cosell hurried over to see whether the escapee was something he should personally take responsibility for. I scooted it onto the dustpan and tossed it into the trash. “Cancel one mouse,” I said, firmly. “Howard, you need to stick to dog food and milk thistle seeds.”

  “Milk thistle?” Melissa asked.

  “It’s an herb,” I said. “Howard is taking it for his liver.”

  “You don’t have to order any pizza for me,” Brian announced. “I’m going to Melissa’s house.”

  “May I go to Melissa’s house,” I said.

  “Oh, sure,” Melissa said, grinning wide enough to show all her braces. “Dad is cooking hamburgers on the grill tonight. I bet there’s enough.” She looked at Leatha and asked, politely, “Would you like to come too?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I was just correcting Brian. He needs to ask permission before he makes dinner plans.”

  “Oh,” Melissa said, disappointed. “If you came, we could look at where I want to dig Jennie’s herb garden, and give me some ideas about how big it should be.”

  “May I?” Brian asked.

  “Yes, you may,” I said. I gave Melissa a quick hug. “Ask me again soon, okay? I’d love to look at your garden site.” If Rachel Lang’s assertion checked out, Melissa’s world would soon be rocked by a major earthquake. She’d need all the friends she could get.

  “I forgot to mention that Mike called a little while ago,” Leatha said, as Brian and Melissa left with their snake and Howard settled down under the window, chin on paws, to brood over the mouse that got away. “He won’t be coming home for dinner. He said something about a murder investigation.” She dusted her hands, sifting more flour onto the floor. “After everything that happened this spring, his getting shot and all, I hope he’s not planning to go back to police work, permanently, I mean. I thought he was so well settled at the university, with a good salary and job security. Really, China, at your ages, I should think you’d be—”

  I cut in sharply. “Whatever McQuaid decides to do is fine with me. People have to follow their bliss.” I swept up the pile of flour and bits of mud I had gathered and dumped it on top of the dead mouse. “Did he say where they were with the investigation?”

  “Not really,” she replied vaguely. “Oh, wait. He said to tell you something about a fingerprint.”

  My head snapped up. “What about the fingerprint? Whose fingerprint? Did he say they’d found a match?” Was Jorge the killer, after all? “Did he say whether they’ve located Garza?”

  “My goodness, China.” Leatha took off the apron. “You can’t expect me to keep track of things like that. If you want to know all the gory details, you’ll have to call Mike and ask him to tell you. But it did sound as if he had his hands full.” She put a carton of cream and a bowl of eggs back into the refrigerator. “Since it’s just us, let’s run out for a quick bite. I want to make another practice cake tonight, and it takes an hour and a half to bake.”

  Another practice cake? If it were me, I’d give it up as a bad job and go look for a baker in Austin. But I had to admire Leatha’s resilience in the face of adversity. And it’s the thought that counts—right?

  “How about having a sandwich here instead?” I asked, putting the broom away. “We’ve got the makings for subs left over from last night, and I need to see somebody at seven this evening.”

  To tell the truth, a quick sandwich was about all I had time for. I still had the combination to Coleman’s floor safe, and I had to decide what to do with it. I could hand it over to McQuaid, who would then have to spend valuable time sorting a batch of stuff that might not amount to a hill of beans. Or I could go over there and poke through the safe myself, with the same outcome. Either way, it was probably a waste of a good hour. But I’m only human, with as much healthy (or unhealthy) curiosity as the next person, and I couldn’t help wondering what sort of dirt Edgar had dug up. Quite apart from its potential relevance to his murder—and perhaps to the death of his wife, as well—whatever was in that safe might have a certain tawdry entertainment value. So I thought I’d squeeze in a trip to Coleman’s office later in the evening.

  Before I did that, though, I needed to get out of the clothes I’d been wearing all day and into jeans. Then I had to stop by the Pack Saddle Inn and find out for myself whether Rachel Lang was who she claimed to be, and, if so, what was ahead for Melissa. And sometime this evening or tomorrow, I had to go to Ruby’s house and see exactly what she intended to wear to the wedding. Between Leatha’s experimental wedding cake and Josephine doing pirouettes in the Gulf, I had enough anxiety for three or four brides. I didn’t need to be fretting over whether my matron of honor was going to remind people of something out of a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza.

  If you find yourself in Pecan Springs overnight, you might consider staying at the Pack Saddle Inn, on River Road, or at least dropping by for dinner. (You won’t be sorry if you order the asparagus with hollandaise and potatoes roasted in olive oil and herbs to go with your medium-rare rib eye.) Bring your camera and plan to make time for a leisurely stroll along the crystal clear Pecan River, which loops through the landscaped grounds, wide swaths of native wildflowers and ferns growing lush along each bank. It’s an idyllic spot.

  My first stop was the reception desk, where I had better luck than I deserved. Linda Davis is the Pack Saddle’s manager and a longtime friend. She was behind the registration desk, giving the harried desk clerk a hand with last-minute check-ins. As I came into the lobby, the last person in line was getting her key and Linda was switching on the No Vacancy sign beside the lobby door.

  “Looks like you’ve got a full house,” I said, after we traded greetings.

  “There’s a conference at the university,” Linda replied, going back behind the counter. “We get the overflow when they can’t handle it.”

  Linda Davis has a bright, alert face, snappy dark eyes, and a quick smile. She’s a little over five feet tall, and beautifully trim—one of those tiny dynamos that never seem to stop. She attributes her mile-a-minute energy to a combination of daily workouts at the new health club, the ginkgo biloba she buys at Thyme and Seasons, and the meditation classes she takes from Ruby. Whatever the source of her vitality, Linda is an adventurer. In her belted khaki suit, neat white camp shirt, and zebra-striped silk scarf, she looked as if she were about to set off on safari.

  She flipped her hands through her brown, curly hair, tossed me that quick smile, and said briskly, “Hey, China, how’re things? I see we’ve got you down for Friday night, wedding party of fifteen, with a mariachi band. Your big day must be right around the corner.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Sunday. Outdoors in the garden at Thyme and Seasons.”

  She moved the vase of wildflowers to the end of the counter and squared a stack of untidy promotional flyers. “Sunday, huh? Have you been watching the weather? Do you know about Josephine?” She lined up the plastic display racks so they faced out, and straightened the brochures. “They’re saying it could come ashore around Corpus Christi, which means rain for us.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I made a face. “If it happens, I guess we’ll move the wedding into the shop.”

  “Into the shop?” Linda raised an eyebrow. “That’d be a little crowded, wouldn’t it? How many people are you having?”

  “Only forty or so,” I said. “It isn’t a very big wedding.”

  “If you need more room, you might think of moving it here. The Garden Room isn’t booked. We’ve had several weddings there, and it works fine. The room opens onto the river, which is just a few yards away from the windows. There’s a pair of resident swans and quite a few geese and ducks. Serene and romantic.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I was a guest at Maureen Rodman’s wedding, and it was lovely. I’ll think about it and let you know. One way or other, we’ll ma
nage.”

  “Right,” Linda said cheerfully. “Life’s a blast. If it isn’t one damn thing, it’s another. You’ve just got to take it as it comes and be flexible—that’s my motto.” She picked up a stack of registration cards and began to riffle through them. “How can I help? Want to go over the menu for Friday night, or is Mrs. McQuaid taking care of everything? Do you need to make some reservations for out-of-town guests?”

  “No,” I said, “I need to ask you to do something mildly illegal.”

  She stopped riffling and looked at me with interest. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got a guest named Rachel Lang. At least, that’s the name she gave me. I’d like to see her registration card.” I spoke half-apologetically, not knowing how squeamish Linda was about breaking the law.

  She went back to the cards. “Care to tell me why?”

  “The woman came to see me today. She says she’s the biological mother of one of Brian’s friends. She claims that her daughter was abducted by the child’s father nearly ten years ago. I need to verify her story, if I can. I know that you check driver’s licenses at registration. If she’s registered with you as Rachel Lang, I’m safe in assuming that’s the name on her license.” The Pack Saddle is old-fashioned that way, checking IDs on all their guests. The practice only antagonizes drug traffickers and other villainous types; honest people don’t mind proving they are who they claim to be.

  “Mm-mm-mm,” Linda said, frowning. “A parental kidnapping ? Nasty stuff. Very bad. My cousin’s twin boys disappeared a few years ago. Their father drove them from Little Rock to San Diego, where he was shacked up with his girlfriend, would you believe?”

  “Yeah, I’d believe. What did your cousin do?”

  “Well, first she tried the Little Rock cops, which got her exactly nowhere. The kids were gone and out of their jurisdiction, and at that point, she didn’t have a clue where they were. Then she hired a private eye from Dallas, but still no dice. Finally she got connected with an outfit called the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they located the kids in less than a month. Put their pictures on a Web site, and a day-care worker out there in San Diego spotted them and made a phone call.” She shook her head. “You know, I used to worry about privacy and computers and the web and all that stuff, but not anymore. You got people stealing kids, they’ve given up their right to privacy, far as I’m concerned.”

  “This woman says she’s working with the Center,” I said. “That’s how she located her daughter.” I pulled out the card Rachel Lang had given me. It had the Center’s address on it, and the case worker’s name and phone number. “I intend to give them a call before I talk to her.”

  “Well, if that part of the story checks out, you can believe the rest,” Linda said decidedly. “The case workers review everything to make sure it’s a legit claim. My cousin had to give them copies of her custody papers and the police reports and everything, before they’d even talk about working with her.” She shuffled the deck of registration cards once more, and dropped one on the counter in front of me. “Excuse me,” she said, turning away. “I’ve got to go to the dining room for a coupla minutes. We’ve got a new kid waiting tables, and I want to make sure he knows what he’s supposed to be doing.” She heaved an exasperated sigh. “The last one we hired, turned out she couldn’t read the menu. Took us a month to get her trained, and then she ran off to New Orleans with the dishwasher. Sometimes I think I could have found an easier career path.”

  The card on the counter was Rachel Lang’s. I copied down the automobile license plate—a rental, most likely—and the Orlando home address and phone number, then stuck the card under the vase of flowers where Linda could find it when she got back from the dining room. I stopped at the pay phone in the outer lobby, where a long-distance conversation confirmed that Rachel Lang had first requested the Center’s services two years before to institute a search for her missing daughter, Elena, and that she was now in Texas, following a lead. The story Lang had told me was checking out—as if I had needed any additional verification, after seeing the age-progressed photo and comparing mother-daughter noses.

  The Pack Saddle’s main building, brown-cedar-shingled and with a red tile roof, is contructed like a large ranch house, with a half-dozen wings angling off in various directions. Rachel Lang’s second-floor west-wing room was large and comfortable, with chairs on the small balcony overlooking the river and a sweep of lawn, khaki-colored from the summer’s heat. I accepted the offer of a soft drink over ice and we sat outside on the balcony.

  The sun had slipped below the western horizon and a flock of mallards was settling down for the night in the ferns along the riverbank. Nighthawks zipped across the lawn in search of winged snacks, and the tree frogs practiced their metallic call. Ms. Lang—Rachel, as she asked me to call her—began to tell her story, and I spent the next half hour listening and learning and asking questions, not just about Rachel’s experience but about parental kidnapping, a painfully tragic crime that destroys lives as surely as murder but is rarely sensational enough to hit the headlines.

  Rachel’s tale wasn’t sensational by tabloid standards, and she told it in a quiet, steady, reportorial voice that underplayed its human drama. But even so, her story was terrifyingly, horribly real. While she was getting her accounting degree, Rachel worked as a bookkeeper in a large Orlando furniture store owned by her uncle. Following a complicated series of events that she didn’t explain, Rachel and her uncle were charged with tax fraud. (Although she didn’t directly accuse her uncle, I got the idea that he had set her up, and I wondered if a smart defense attorney could have gotten her off.) Both went to federal prison, he for ten years, she for six. At the time of her trial, Rachel was pregnant—the child had been conceived during a brief sexual relationship with a longtime friend—and a few months after she went to jail, she gave birth to Elena.

  The child’s father, whose name was Jim Carlson, tried numerous times to persuade Rachel to marry him. She kept refusing him, and he angrily demanded that she surrender Elena to him. He sued for custody, but the court considered his history of intermittent unemployment and awarded temporary custody to Rachel’s mother, who had been caring for Elena since the child’s birth. Carlson was granted regular visitation rights. Rachel intended to go back to court to seek permanent custody as soon as she was released. But shortly before Elena’s second birthday, Carlson took the little girl to Disneyworld on a regular weekend visit and failed to bring her back. Father and daughter disappeared without a trace.

  The child’s grandmother was devastated by Elena’s loss and held herself responsible. For Rachel, still in federal prison and unable to do anything to help her frantic mother, the pain was excruciating. Even though she had rejected Carlson’s repeated offers of marriage, Rachel had considered him a friend, and she felt betrayal and a racking grief, as well as anger both at herself and at him. If she hadn’t let her uncle manipulate her, she would be at home with her daughter now. If she had agreed to marry Carlson, she might somehow have prevented the abduction. The only thing that kept her going was her mother’s support and her academic work: She had enrolled as a graduate student in a prison program in psychology and was hoping to be certified as a therapist upon her release.

  But Rachel had plenty of trauma of her own to work on. Obsessed with recovering Elena, her mother searched endlessly and tirelessly, far beyond the limits of her failing strength. Within the year, she was dead of a massive heart attack. Now there were three victims of the kidnapper’s crime, and Rachel was left to mourn both her daughter and her mother.

  When Rachel was released from prison, she began her own efforts to recover Elena. “I was absolutely driven that summer,” she said quietly. “I finally figured out that when somebody steals your child, you’ve got to take charge of the search. There are too many missing kids and the authorities just don’t have enough people to do what has to be done. But I let the search swallow up my life. It was all I lived for, and that
wasn’t healthy.” She touched her scarred face ruefully. “Then the accident happened, and I was left facing several years of rehabilitation and plastic surgery, and lots of thinking about who I was and what I needed to do. I had to accept the fact that finding Elena was my second priority. Getting well, putting my life back together, finding my right livelihood—all that had to come first.” She had just begun to heal and find some balance, when she learned, quite by accident, that Jim Carlson had died in a house fire in Miami only a few months after he abducted Elena.

  Rachel’s face clouded and she shuddered. “I went into another tailspin, thinking that Elena might have burned to death with him. The Miami police and fire officials said they had recovered only one body—but the house had been completely destroyed. She was so small, just a little over two years old. What if her body had been buried in the rubble and carted off by the heavy machinery they brought in to clear the burned-out site? What if they hadn’t found her because they hadn’t known to look for a little girl?”

  “Dear God,” I whispered. I was awed by the pain this woman had suffered, by the terrifying weight of the tragedies that had been heaped on her.

  “I prayed a lot, too,” Rachel said matter-of-factly. “Then I learned from a family friend that Jim Carlson’s father had been seen in Atlanta some time before. With him had been a little girl who might have been Elena. The friend tried to talk to him, but Dr. Carlson walked away.”

  Rachel attempted to trace the senior Carlson, who had lived in Miami, and discovered that he had sold his house and left his work—a successful dental practice—just after his son died. Convinced now that her daughter was still alive and with her grandfather, Rachel contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and began searching in earnest: not just for Elena, but for Dr. Jack Carlson.

  “Jack Carlson?” I asked, and then, incredulously, put it all together. “Jack Carlson, Carl Jackson! Dr. Carl Jackson, my dentist!”