McCone and Friends

by Marcia Muller

Or for any more self-help books, I thought, if there are any left that you don’t already have.

  The Conway house made me damn twitchy, and not just because there wasn’t a book in it that didn’t have the words “relationship” or “self” in its title. It was in San Francisco’s Diamond Heights district—a place that looks like some alien hand has picked up an entire suburb and plunked it down on one of our southeastern hills. The streets are cutesily named—Jade, Topaz, Turquoise—and the Conway’s, Goldmine Drive, was no exception. The house, tucked behind its own garage and further hidden from the street by a high wall, was pretty much like all the other houses and condos and apartments around there: white walls and light carpeting and standard modern kitchen; skylights and picture windows and a balcony with a barbecue that could hardly ever be used because the wind would put icicles on your briquettes up there. The view was nice enough, but it couldn’t make up for the worn spots on the carpet and the cracks that showed where the builder had cut corners. When Donna Conway told me—for God knows what reason—that the house was the sum total of her divorce settlement, I started feeling depressed for her. I didn’t get much myself when I got divorced, but a VCR and half the good silverware were at least hockable, and from the rust on the FOR SALE sign out front, I gathered that this house was not.

  Anyway, Adrian Conway had been missing for two weeks by the time her mother turned for help to the firm where I work, All Souls Legal Cooperative. We’re kind of a poor man’s McKenzie, Brackman—a motley collection of crusaders and mainstream liberals and people like me who don’t function too well in a structured environment, and one of the biggest legal-services plans in northern California. Donna Conway was a medical technician with a hospital that offered membership in the plan as part of their benefits package, so she went to her lawyer when she decided the police weren’t doing all they could to find her daughter. Her lawyer handed the case to our chief investigator, Sharon McCone, who passed it on to me, Rae Kelleher.

  So on a Monday morning in early November I was sitting in Donna Conway’s drafty living room (God, didn’t she know about weather stripping?), sipping weak instant coffee and wishing I didn’t have to look at her sad, sad eyes. If it weren’t for her sadness and the deep lines of discontentment that made parentheses around the corners of her mouth, she would have been a pretty woman—soft shoulder-length dark hair and a heart-shaped face, and a willowy body that made me green with envy. Her daughter didn’t look anything like her, at least not from the picture she gave me. Adrian had curly red-gold hair and a quirky little smile, and her eyes gleamed with mischief that I took to be evidence of an offbeat sense of humor.

  Adrian, Donna Conway told me, had never come home two weeks ago Friday from her after-school job as a salesclerk at Left Coast Casuals at the huge Ocean Park Shopping Plaza out near the beach. Turned out she hadn’t even shown up for work, and although several of her classmates at nearby McAteer High School had seen her waiting for the bus that would take her to the shopping center, nobody remembered her actually boarding it. Adrian hadn’t taken anything with her except the backpack she usually took to school. She hadn’t contacted her father; he and his new wife were living in Switzerland now, and the police there had checked them out carefully. She wasn’t with friends, her boyfriend, or her favorite relative, Aunt June. And now the police had back burnered her file, labeled it just another of the teenage disappearances that happen thousands and thousands of times a year in big cities and suburbs and small towns. But Donna Conway wasn’t about to let her daughter become just another statistic—no way! She would pay to have Adrian found, even if it took every cent of the equity she’d built up in the house.

  I’d noticed two things about Donna while she was telling me all that: She seemed to harbor the usual amount of malice toward her ex’s new wife, and an even larger amount toward Adrian’s Aunt June.

  On Monday I went by the book: talked with the officer in Missing Persons assigned to Adrian’s case; talked with the classmates who had seen her leaving McAteer that Friday; talked with her supervisor at Left Coast Casuals and the head of security at Ocean Park Plaza. Then I checked out the boyfriend, a few girlfriends, and a couple of teachers at the high school, ran through the usual questions. Did Adrian use drugs or alcohol? Had she been having romantic problems? Could she be pregnant? Had she talked about trouble at home, other than the obvious? No to everything. Adrian Conway was apparently your all-American average, which worked out to a big zero as far as leads were concerned. By nightfall I’d decided that it was the old story: gone on purpose, for some reason all her own; a relative innocent who probably hadn’t gotten far before becoming somebody’s easy victim.

  Sad old story, as sad as Donna Conway’s eyes.

  It was the memory of those eyes that made me go back to take a second look at Adrian’s room on Tuesday afternoon—that, and the thought that nobody could be as average as she sounded. I had to find out just who Adrian Conway really was. Maybe then I could locate her.

  I started with the collage wall. Dark purple paint that had stained the edges of the white ceiling and splotched on the cream carpet. Over that, pictures cut from glossy magazines—the usual trite stuff that thrills you when you’re in your teens. Sunsets and sailboats. Men with chiseled profiles and windblown hair; women in gauzy dresses lazing in flower-strewn meadows. Generic romance with about as much relationship to reality as Mother Goose.

  But over all that were the words. They leaped out in bold type: black, white, red and other colors. GO FOR IT! HOT. GONE FOREVER. STOLEN MOMENTS. FEAR. YES, NO, MAYBE. LOST. THE RIGHT STUFF. WHAT’S IN/WHAT’S OUT. FLASH, COLOR, CURVES, SPLASH, JUST DO IT! And many more…

  Words as typical as the pictures, but interesting because they seemed important to a young woman who lived in a house where there wasn’t a single book, unless you counted her school texts and her mother’s stacks of mostly unread paperbacks on self-improvement.

  Now, I’m no intellectual giant. I scraped through Berkeley by the skin of my teeth, and for years afterwards all I could make myself read were shop-and-fucks. I still don’t read what passes for literature these days, but I do get mighty uncomfortable in a place where aren’t any old dust-catchers—as my grandmother used to call them—lying around. Apparently Adrian was fond of the written word, too.

  Tacked, nailed, and glued to the words—but never completely covering them—was the junk. A false eyelash, like the hairy leg of a sci-fi spider. A lacy red bra, D-cup, with the nipples cut out. A plastic tag like the stores attach to clothing to prevent shoplifting. A lid from a McDonald’s carry-out cup, Coke-stained straw still stuck through the opening. Broken gold neck chain, pair of fake plastic handcuffs, card with ink smudges on it that looked like fingerprints. Egret feather, dismembered doll’s arm, syringe (unused). Lottery ticket with 7s rubbed off all in arrow, $2.00 value unclaimed. And much, much more…

  Not your standard teenage memory wall. A therapy wall, as Adrian’s mom had put it? Maybe. I didn’t know anything about therapy walls. The grandmother who raised me would have treated me to two years of stony silence if I’d trashed my room that way.

  Donna Conway was standing in the door behind me. She must have felt my disapproval, because she said, “That wall was Adrian’s only outlet for her pain. She adored her father. After he left us, she needed a way to begin healing.”

  So why didn’t she hire out to a demolition company? I thought. Then I scowled, annoyed with myself. Next thing you knew, I’d sound just like my boss, Sharon McCone. The generation gap wasn’t something I needed to leap yet.

  Donna was watching my face, looking confused. I wiped the scowl off and said, “Just thinking. If you don’t mind, I’d like to spend some time alone with the wall.” Then I started to blush, hearing how truly stupid that sounded.

  She didn’t seem to notice. Maybe because her daughter had put a private part of herself into the wall, it had become a sort of being to her. Maybe people who were “rediscovering and healing” themselves,
as she’d said she was, were either too sensitive or too vulnerable to make fun of other people who expressed sudden desires to commune alone with inanimate objects. Whatever, she just nodded and left, closing the door so the wall and I could have complete privacy.

  I sat down on Adrian’s brass daybed, kicked off my shoes, and drew my legs up on the ruffly spread. Them I took a good look at the mess on the wall. It had been a long-term project. Adrian started it, Donna had told me, the day the divorce papers were served. “We made an occasion of it,” she said. “I had champagne and caviar, Adrian had coke and a pizza. We painted. I guess it was the champagne that made me paint the edges of the rug and ceiling.”

  Now I replayed that. She hadn’t painted the rug and ceiling because she was drinking champagne; the champagne had made her do it. So perfectly in tune with the philosophies of some of the books I’d glimpsed in passing. This was a household where little responsibility was ever assigned or acknowledged. Not healthy for an adult, and definitely bad for a teenager.

  Back to the wall, Rae. You should be able to decipher it—after all, you were a psych major.

  First the purple paint. Then the layer of pictures. Idealized, because she was trying to look beyond the bleak not to a better future. Next the layer of words. She was trying to talk about it, but she didn’t really know how. So she used single words and phrases because maybe she wasn’t ready for whole sentences. Hadn’t worked through her feelings enough for whole thoughts.

  Finally the layer of junk. Pretty ordinary stuff, very different from the pictures. Her feelings were more concrete, and she was trying to communicate them in concrete form. Unconsciously, of course, because doing it deliberately would be too sophisticated for a kid who’d never been in therapy. Too sophisticated for you, Rae—and you have been in therapy. Too bad they didn’t encourage you to make a wall like this. Now, that would’ve given them something to eyeball at All Souls…

  Back to this wall. She’s gone through a process of sorts. Has piled concrete things and real words on top of idealized pictures and vague words. And then one day she’s through. She walks out of this room and goes…where? To do what? Maybe if I knew what the very last thing she added to the wall was…

  I left the room and found Donna in the kitchen, warming her hands around a cup of tea. “What were the last things Adrian put up on her wall, do you know?” I asked.

  For a moment she looked blank. Then she shook her head. “I never looked at the wall before she left. It was her own private thing.”

  “You never talked about it?”

  “No.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Oh…” she stared down into the teacup. “I don’t know. About the healing process. About everyone’s potential to be.”

  I waited for her to go on. Then I realized that was it. Great conversational diet for a kid to sink her teeth into: healing process, potential to be.

  What happened when Adrian was worried about an exam? When she hurt because her favorite guy didn’t ask her to the dance? When she was scared of any one of all the truly scary things kids had to face in the city, in this world? Where did she retreat to lick her wounds?

  I was getting mad, and I knew why. Like Adrian, I’d grown up in a home where everything was talked about in abstractions. In my case, should and shouldn’ts, what-will-people-thinks and nice-girls-don’ts. I knew where Adrian Conway retreated: not to a nest of family affection and reassurance, but into a lonely lair within herself, where she could never be sure she was really safe.

  I wasn’t mad at Donna Conway for her arm’s-length treatment of her daughter, though. I was mad at my dead grandmother, who raised me after my parents were killed in a car wreck. Donna Conway, even though she wasn’t able to deal with emotion, had said she was willing to spend her last dollar to get Adrian back. Grandma wouldn’t have given two cents for me.

  I wanted to go back to All Souls and talk the case over with Sharon, but when I got to Bernal Heights, where the co-op has its offices, I made a side trip to our annex across the triangular park from our main building. Lillian Chu, one of the paralegals who worked our 800 line, lived in Diamond Heights, and I thought she had a kid at McAteer. Maybe there was something going on with Adrian Conway that the classmates the police and I had questioned couldn’t or wouldn’t tell.

  Lillian was just going off shift. Yes, she said, her son Tom was in Adrian’s class, and he was due to pick her up in about five minutes. “We’re going shopping for new running shoes,” she added. “The way he go goes through them, I should have bought stock in Reebok.”

  “Could I talk with Tom for a few minutes?”

  “Sure, I’ve got to run over to the main building and check about my payroll deductions. If you want, you can wait here and I’ll send Tom in.”

  I sat in Lillian’s cubicle, listening to phones ringing and voices murmuring on the 24-hour legal hot line. After a while a shaggy-haired young guy with a friendly face came into the cubicle. “You Rae? Mom says you want to talk to me?”

  “Yes, I want to task you about Adrian Conway. Her mom’s hired me to find her.”

  Tom Chu perched on the corner of the deck. His expression was still friendly, but a little guarded now. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you want to tell me.”

  “You mean like dirt.”

  “I mean anything that might help me locate her.”

  Tom looked uncertain.

  “This isn’t a game,” I told him. “Or a case of a mother trying to find out more than her daughter wants her to know. Adrian’s been missing for over two weeks now. She could be in serious trouble. She could even be dead.”

  “Yeah.” He sighed heavily. “Okay, I don’t really know anything. Not fact, you know? But…You talk with her boyfriend, Kirby Dalson?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d you think of him?”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “Bad news.”

  “Why?”

  Tom drew one of his legs up on the desk and fiddled with the lace of his sneaker; from the looks of the shoe, Lillian should have invested in Reebok. “Okay,” he said, “Kirby’s…always into something. Always scamming. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Drugs?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think they’re his main thing.”

  “What is?”

  He shrugged. “Just…scams. Like a few times he got his hands on some test questions beforehand and sold them—for big bucks, too. And for a while he was selling term papers. Scalping sports and concert tickets that you knew had to be stolen. He’s always got a lot of cash, drives a sports car that everybody knows his folks didn’t buy for him. He tells his parents he’s got this part-time job in some garage, but all the time he’s just scamming. The only job he ever had was cleaning up the food concession area at Ocean Park Plaza, but that didn’t last long. Beneath him, I guess.”

  “What about Adrian—you think she was in on his scams?”

  “She might’ve been. I mean, this past year she’s changed.”

  “How?”

  “Just…changed. She’s not as friendly anymore. Seems down a lot of the time. And she’s always with Kirby.”

  “Did this start around the time her father left?”

  He shook his head. “After that. I mean, her old man left. Too bad, but it happens.” His eyes moved to a photograph on Lillian’s desk - the two of them and a younger girl, no father. “No,” he added, “it was after that. Maybe six months ago.”

  “Do you remember anything that happened to Adrian around that time that might have caused this change?”

  He thought. “No—sorry, I know Adrian okay, but she’s not really a good friend or anything like that.”

  I thanked him and asked him to call me if he thought of anything else. Then I walked across the park to the freshly painted Victorian where our main offices—and the attic nest where I live—are.

  The set-up at All Souls is kind of strange for a l
aw firm, but then even the location is strange. Bernal Heights, our hillside neighborhood is the southeastern part of the city, is ethnically mixed, architecturally confused, and unsure whether it wants to be urban or semi-rural. At All Souls we’re also ethnically mixed; our main building is a combination of offices, communal living space, and employees’ separate quarters; and most of us don’t know if we’re nineties progressives or throwbacks to the sixties. All in all, it adds up to an interesting place to work.

  And Sharon McCone’s an interesting person to work for. That afternoon I found her behind her desk in the window bay at the front of the second floor—slumped spinelessly in her swivel chair, staring outside with that little frown that says she’s giving some problem a work over. She’s one of those slim women who seem taller than they are—the bane of my pudgy five-foot-three existence—and manages to look stylish even when she’s wearing jeans and a sweater like she had on that day. When I first came to work for her, her dark good looks gave me attacks of inferiority because of my carrot top and freckles and thrift-shop clothes. Then one day I caught her having her own attack—mortified because she’d testified in court wearing a skirt whose hem was still pinned up waiting to be stitched. I told her she’d probably started a new fad and soon all the financial district power-dressers would be wearing straight pains around their hemlines. We had a good laugh over that, and I think that’s when we started to be friends.

  Anyway, I’d just about decided to stop back later when she turned, frowned some more, and snapped. “What?”

  The McCone bark is generally worse than the bite, so I went in and sat in my usual place on her salmon-pink chaise lounge and told her about the Conway case. “I don’t know what I should do next.” I finished. “I’ve already talked with this Kirby kid, and if I come back at him to soon—”

  “Aunt June.”

  “What?” I’d only mentioned Adrian’s favorite aunt and Donna’s apparent dislike of her in passing, and Sharon hadn’t even looked like she was listening very hard. She’d been filing her nails the whole time—snick, snick, snick. Someday I’m going to tell her that the sound drives me crazy.