“I’ll see what I can work out. I don’t want to let her leave Oliver yet if I can help it. I’d like to pass her through town and see if she can remember anything before she turned up in the park this morning.”
“Like recognize where she was held?”
“Exactly. I’m going to take a few shots of her as she is now. Then I want you to take the camera to Sergeant Ketcham and tell him what’s in it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then run a blood sample up to the IU Med Center. The doctor will tell you where.” If they drag their heels up there, I’ll get Camila’s father to sic the Brazilian ambassador on them.
She nodded, and headed for the door.
Dressed in clean clothes, but with her hair still oily and matted, Camila put up only a little fuss about being photographed as she was.
Root jollied her along. “This is one time you don’t need to smile, because if anyone saw you during the past day or two, you wouldn’t have been smiling.” That evoked a smile, but then Camila looked worried, and Fred clicked rapidly.
“What time is it?” Camila asked.
Fred checked his watch. “Almost noon.” His stomach growled. He wondered when Camila had eaten last. She had said she was a little hungry. Could it be that whoever had been holding her had missed feeding her breakfast, and that’s why she had been drug-free enough to escape?
“How far are we from Indianapolis? Maybe I could play for the judges this afternoon.” Her earlier agitation had faded.
“It’s not far, but are you in any condition to play? The doctor says you were drugged, and some of the drug may still be in your body. Everybody will understand if you can’t play yet, but if you play badly, won’t that eliminate you from the competition?”
Camila quickly translated for her mother, who was tugging at her sleeve. Then she said, “Can you take me back to Joan’s house? Bruce will let me try his violin.”
“Good idea. And I don’t think Joan would mind if you used her bathroom to clean up.”
Her face lit up. “Oh yes! I’m so dirty. I smell bad even to myself.” Another improvement. Earlier, she hadn’t seemed to notice.
“I’ll call and ask her, but I’m sure she’ll be glad to let you bathe there.” And I’ll be glad for you to recover that much more while you’re still in Oliver, Fred thought.
He debated briefly whether to leave her at Joan’s before picking up her father. With her mother as chaperone, could even that angry father object to her spending time in the same house as Bruce? Yes, he could. Better take the women by the station to pick up the men. And give Bruce a few more minutes of practice time. Bad enough that they’d all land on him at all. He called Joan from the hospital.
“Sure,” she said. “Give her the blue towels in the linen closet. The shampoo’s on the shelf inside the shower curtain. There’s a clean hairbrush on my dresser, too, if her mother didn’t bring one.”
“We’ll manage. And thanks.”
The Lincoln followed him to Joan’s little house. At the sound of Bruce’s violin through the open windows, Camila’s father stopped dead on the sidewalk. Fred didn’t need a translation of his angry words.
“You tell Mr. Pereira that this is an opportunity for Camila to test her ability to play the violin,” he said to Rodrigo. “I personally guarantee her safety.”
His back stiff and his jaw tight, Mr. Pereira subsided.
With violin and bow hanging from one hand, Bruce opened the door to them and stood back to let them file into Joan’s modest living room. Trying to look at what would soon be his home through their eyes, Fred thought they must think they were slumming. At least it was clean; had Joan charged through the house in preparation for Bruce’s visit? Or Uwe’s, more likely.
“How do you feel?” Bruce asked Camila.
“Much better, thank you.” She smiled. “But dirty. I’m going to take a shower, and then I’d like to borrow your violin. Maybe I still can compete this afternoon if I have one good practice first. I’ve played that Mozart concerto for years.”
“Sure. You know you’re welcome.”
Camila’s father’s eyes were boring holes into Bruce, but he held his tongue.
“Camila? Mrs. Pereira?” Fred led the way up to Joan’s bathroom. Obediently, he sorted out the relatively new blue towels from the other, more worn colors in the linen closet and pointed out the shampoo. Then he left them to it.
Downstairs, Bruce had laid the violin in its open case and was standing beside it, near the front door. The two Brazilians, Moacir Pereira on the sofa and Rodrigo Machado on the big upholstered chair that was Fred’s favorite, were speaking Portuguese.
Ketcham had reported that they’d said separately they had no idea who might have abducted Camila. She’d been all but engaged to Rodrigo for a couple of years. Both her father and Rodrigo claimed that the relationship was happy. Remembering Camila’s rush to Rodrigo’s arms, Fred was inclined to believe it. As for the violin, Ketcham said it had been insured for approximately half a million dollars. According to her father, it was underinsured and they’d been planning to have it reappraised. In an insurance fraud scam, they would just have taken out another million on it.
The violin was the IPD’s worry. For all Fred knew, it had no connection to Camila’s disappearance except to shout to the world that she was the daughter of a wealthy family.
“Did Camila tell you what the doctor found?” he asked her father and Rodrigo now.
“No. What?” Rodrigo didn’t bother to translate.
“She was not physically injured. And there were no indications of rape.”
When Rodrigo translated, Mr. Pereira’s face crumpled, and he buried it in his hands.
“Thank God,” Bruce said quietly.
Pereira’s head jerked up. He said something soft to Bruce.
“He asks if you were worried, too,” Rodrigo said. His tone sharpened. “You care for Camila?”
Bruce’s face flamed. For a little too long, he was silent. Then he said, “Only as a friend. She didn’t deserve all this.”
Camila’s father, looking suddenly old, held out his hand to Bruce and said something.
“He believes you.” But from the stiffness in his voice and face, Rodrigo did not. “He wants to apologize for thinking that you would hurt his daughter.”
Bruce took the hand and held it. The young man and the older man stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then both nodded and smiled.
By the time Camila and her mother came downstairs, peace reigned. Bruce had been persuaded to play and had chosen a sweet, haunting tune Fred didn’t know. Eyes closed, Mr. Pereira was leaning back against Joan’s sofa, beating time with his right index finger. When the women entered the room, Bruce lowered his violin, and Mr. Pereira opened his eyes and beamed.
Camila, dressed in yet another fresh outfit, ran to her father and embraced him. Still visibly damp, her hair already waved down her back, with a few dry tendrils curling around her face.
“I feel so much better now that I’m clean! But I’m starving.” She translated for her parents.
Her mother shook a finger and scolded her. Fred didn’t need a translation. She sat down next to her husband, crossed her ankles, and folded her hands in her elegant lap.
“My mother says first I must practice. I sometimes think the violin competition is even more important to her than to me.” Camila smiled and held out her hands for the violin.
Bruce took it carefully from its case, quickly checked the tuning with his thumb, adjusted the shoulder rest, and tightened and rosined the bow for her. “Here you go.”
She tucked the violin under her jaw competently enough, but when she aimed the bow at the strings, its tip caught on the edge of the bridge. Extricating it awkwardly, she lifted the bow onto the G string and played a simple G-major scale. Fred winced. Camila’s own dismay showed on her face. It wasn’t that the notes were wrong, exactly. But she wasn’t pulling any tone out of the violin. She sounded like
a beginner playing a school rental instrument, not a budding virtuoso on the fine violin they’d heard through the window. Her mother made soothing sounds.
Camila tried again, this time a bit of Mozart Fred recognized, though he couldn’t name it, but with equally discouraging results. Her puny tone wobbled as the bow skittered along the strings, and many of the notes were sharp, as if she couldn’t control the fingers of her left hand. She probably can’t, Fred thought, much less her bow arm.
A big tear ran down her left cheek into her mouth. “This sounds terrible!” Lifting her head, she held the violin out to Bruce, who took it from her. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s not the violin,” Fred said gently. “It’s the drug, the one that made you forget. We talked about it, remember?”
“I didn’t forget the music!”
“No. But the drug has affected your coordination.”
“I will never play again?” She was horror-struck.
“I’m sure you will. But you’ll have problems until the rest of the drug leaves your body.”
“When?”
“In a day or two, maybe. We don’t know how much you took.”
“I didn’t take any drugs!”
“I should have said we don’t know how much someone gave you. Or how many times you were drugged since you disappeared.”
She wiped her cheek and dabbed at her eyes. For the first time, Fred noticed that she had taken the trouble to make up her face. On the sofa, Mrs. Pereira broke down in sobs. Bruce, ever resourceful, handed her a clean cloth handkerchief from the pocket of his sweats. She sat up, blew her nose loudly, and began laying down the law, her eyes flashing. But she was no longer scolding her daughter.
Rodrigo had been translating for the Pereiras. Now he turned to Fred.
“She says we must telephone to tell the judges that they must let her play both the Mozart and her big concerto on Saturday night.”
Bruce tried to speak, but Rodrigo waved him to be silent. “You will tell them why they must allow it, she says. Camila is a wonderful violinist. This American crime must not be allowed to take the prize away from her. If necessary, we will call the Brazilian ambassador.”
A tigress defending her cub. Maybe all mothers were stage mothers at heart.
Camila’s father drew a neat leather case from his inside jacket pocket and took out a card. He spoke quietly to Rodrigo.
“He will pay for the telephone. He has the number for the competition, but he asks you to place the call and speak to them.”
Nodding, Fred accepted the telephone calling card from Pereira’s manicured fingers. They were going to have to hear it from the official source. When he said he was with Camila Pereira and her family, he was put through to the director of the competition’s sponsoring organization. By all means, the director said, they wanted to give Camila every opportunity to recover from her ordeal.
“Please convey to her and her family our deep shock at what has happened to her, and our great joy at knowing that she is safe. As soon as we knew she was missing, we met with the judges to discuss what would be fair to her. We decided to allow her to compete last, and to perform both the Mozart and her other concerto together on Saturday night, if she is able to do so at that time. If, by Saturday night, Camila is still unable to play, she will receive the award for the sixth-place finalist and any other awards she may have earned along the way.”
When Fred explained and Camila translated, her mother accepted the decision as fair. One hurdle out of the way. Now he had to keep them in Oliver long enough to see what Camila could remember of her captivity—if it had even taken place in Oliver. But if not, why would she have shown up in the park this morning?
His stomach complained again, this time with more reason. It was well past noon. If he could persuade them to eat lunch in Oliver, Camila would have another hour of recovery. Would it make her more or less likely to recognize where she’d been held? He’d heard of state-dependent memory, and had even seen it work once, when he’d had to get a man drunk again to help him recall the details of a murder he’d witnessed while under the influence. Still, Camila had been almost completely blank when she’d surfaced in the park, and there was no way he was going to feed her more roofies, if that’s what she’d had. His only hope was that she’d still been relatively clearheaded in the car that brought her to Oliver. If so, she might eventually remember where she’d been driven.
He explained what he wanted to do, and recommended Wilma’s Cafe for lunch. “It’s plain food, but it’s clean, and Wilma makes a good cup of coffee.” Not that he knew what kind of coffee Brazilians liked.
“No!” Rodrigo exploded. “We’re getting out of this town.”
And away from Bruce, Fred thought. He thinks Bruce is beating his time with her.
“But I want to eat,” Camila said. “I was hungry all morning, and now my stomach hurts.” She hugged her middle and translated what was going on.
They all talked at once. Camila’s father overruled Rodrigo’s objections. He spoke in the quiet voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Camila embraced her father and smiled up at Fred. “He says if his daughter is hungry, we will eat. And we will all cooperate fully with the police investigation. From now on, we will do what you say.”
“Good. Your driver can follow my car,” Fred told them. “But Camila will ride with me. If she recognizes anything on the way to the restaurant, I don’t want to miss it.”
No longer resisting, they loaded into the two cars. Bruce stayed behind to practice. At the last minute, Fred picked up the program booklet of the competition from the table at the end of Joan’s sofa, and, feeling like a heel, lifted a recent snapshot of Andrew from the stack of family pictures that Joan kept promising to put into her album.
“Keep your eyes open,” he told Camila as he turned the key in the ignition. “If you see anything that looks even a little familiar, speak up.” Could she? he wondered.
They drove for a few blocks.
“This park!” she cried, pointing suddenly in front of his nose. “I remember this park.”
“What do you remember?”
“I was … lost. And Bruce and Joan found me there.”
“Good. That happened this morning. And before that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re doing fine. Keep watching.”
But she was silent. He left them at the restaurant to go back to the station and have copies made of the pictures. When he returned on foot, they all seemed less tense than before. Food will do that for you, Fred thought, his own stomach protesting. Again he drove, giving Camila the front window seat. This time her parents and Rodrigo crowded into the back. The driver stayed behind with the Lincoln.
“This won’t take long,” Fred promised. “Oliver is a small town. We’ll start with the campus area.”
They rode in silence past academic buildings with beds of red and gold chrysanthemums, Oliver College colors, and wound through the campus and back out onto fraternity row. Fred held his breath, but Camila said nothing, although he could see that she was paying close attention to buildings on both sides of the street. At the edge of campus, he turned toward the road that would take them back to Indianapolis and the most likely route for Camila to have traveled on her way into town.
Then he felt, rather than heard her tense beside him. He stopped. “What is it?” he asked her.
“Nothing. We were going so fast. A dog … I think it was a big dog.”
“Here? Chasing you?” Any of these homes could have a dog, he thought. In this older residential section at the edge of the campus, no two houses looked alike. A frame two-story with peeling paint rubbed shoulders with a neat brick bungalow trimmed in limestone, and next door neat flower beds were outlined with geodes, ugly rocks that Fred had learned hid beautiful crystals inside. Near the far end of the block, window shades pulled to the sills closed the eyes of an old house with a FOR SALE sign in a scruffy yard that must have b
een a trial to the neighbors on both sides, whose lawns were lush and manicured. All along the block, mature maple and sweet gum trees tinged with fall color met across the shady street. The tornado hadn’t touched down here.
“I don’t know.” But her agitation increased. She was staring at the houses, as if she could force her memory to come.
“Do you recognize a house? Were you held here? Was there a dog in the house where you were held?” He paused between questions to give her a chance to respond, but she was silent.
Finally she sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. You just keep watching.” He could hear Rodrigo translating softly behind them. He crisscrossed the neighborhood a few more times, but Camila didn’t respond again. At least he knew where to begin circulating those photographs. Not because they were necessarily his most likely suspects, he thought—the money still had to be on the fraternities—but because the number was small enough to deal with, like the old joke about the drunk crawling around under the streetlight looking for the watch he lost halfway down the block, because that’s where there was more light to see it by.
And if that does as much good as looking in school for the kids who saw Pruitt’s killer, we’ll be 0 for 2.
21
When Joan returned from the adult day care after feeding Charlie, a message to call Fred was on her desk.
“Had lunch yet?” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
“I’m about to grab a bite. I was hoping for some company.”
“It’s really quiet around here. I can take an hour.” And I can tell you what I’ve figured out.
They met at Wilma’s and sat in Fred’s favorite booth, where he could sit with his back against the wall. Joan sipped Wilma’s good coffee and watched him light into a burger and fries, loading on the mustard and spearing kosher dills between bites. She couldn’t help wondering whether Charlie had ever enjoyed his food like that. Probably. The way his clothes hung on him, he hadn’t always been so gaunt. She shook her head.
“What’s the matter?”
The Vanishing Violinist Page 14