Vanishing Point

by Marcia Muller

  A uniformed maid-Latina, with a thick accent-answered the door and showed me to a living room with a beamed ceiling and terra-cotta floors covered with jute area rugs. As she urged me with hand gestures to sit on one of a U-shaped grouping of mission-style sofas in front of a fireplace, she said, “Mrs. Aldin, she will be with you in a short time.”

  “Gracias,” I replied.

  A smile flickered across her lips. “De nada.”

  California: the ultimate melting pot of this already diverse country. Some fluency in Spanish is almost a necessity here-indeed, Latinos are now the fastest-growing ethnic group in our population. For people in my profession, it also helps to understand some Chinese, Japanese, and Tagalog-as well as a smattering of ghetto slang.

  As I waited for Jennifer Aldin, I looked around the room. French doors opened onto a patio with a black-bottomed pool and a scattering of teak tables and lounge chairs. The air that filtered through the doors was faintly scented by chlorine and cape jasmine. Because of the walls’ thickness, the living room remained cool in the afternoon’s heat, and the white cushions of the spartan-looking sofa were surprisingly comfortable. I settled back and studied a framed piece of cloth that hung over the mantel-red, orange, black, and gold, woven in a complex, abstract pattern that might have been a replica of a fire in the hearth below. Jennifer Aldin’s work? If so, even to my untutored eye, she had a good deal of talent.

  I heard footsteps behind me, turned, and then stood. The woman was as tall as I and slender to the point of being emaciated, clad in narrow-fitting white jeans and a matching tunic, her honey-colored hair hanging dull and stringy to her shoulders. Her eyes were deeply shadowed, her skin dry. The smile she gave me was wan, the nails of the long-fingered hand she extended me bitten down to the quick. Jennifer Aldin, I saw, had once been beautiful, but five months of obsessing over her mother’s disappearance had taken their toll.

  “Sharon,” she said, “I’m Jennifer. Thank you for coming.”

  In spite of her fragile appearance, Jennifer had a strong handshake, an open face with a scattering of freckles across her small nose, and direct blue eyes. A straightforward woman. I understood why she and Rae had become friends.

  After the usual pleasantries-“Happy to try to help you; Rae speaks highly of your friendship.” “Congratulations on your marriage. How was the party?”-we got settled on the sofas, a wide glass-topped table between us. Immediately the maid-Alicia, Jennifer called her-appeared with a tray containing a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. After she served us and departed, I took out my voice-activated tape recorder and asked Jennifer if she’d mind if I kept a record of our conversation. She didn’t.

  “I’ve come to this meeting better prepared than at most of my new-client consultations,” I said. “Rae has briefed me on your situation, and this morning I accessed the news reports of your mother’s disappearance. What we need to do now is discuss what you expect of me and my agency, as well as what we can reasonably hope to provide. I take it Rae’s told you she considers the investigation a long shot?”

  Jennifer nodded. “She did say that. And I’ve reviewed every piece of information I could find about… that time, so I know how little there is to go on. But… Sharon, do you know what it’s like to lose a parent?”

  “Yes, I do. My father-adoptive father, actually-died of a heart attack a couple of years ago.”

  “And that was painful, I’m sure; I lost my own dad to cancer only a few months ago. But my mother… What would it have been like if your father had simply disappeared, if you never knew what had happened to him?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Let me try to describe the experience. You’re ten years old. Your mother comes to your bedroom one night and together you read a chapter of the current book-in this case it was The Wind in the Willows-as she’s done nearly every night for as long as you can remember. She kisses you, reminds you she’s going to the coast to paint in the morning, and she’ll be back late, so you’re to mind your father and look out for Terry, your little sister. The next night she is late, but you go to sleep, sure you’ll see her in the morning. But in the morning she’s still not there. You go off to school, expecting she’ll be there when you return that afternoon.” Jennifer paused, took a deep breath. Her face had gone pale, and she’d laced her long fingers together and thrust her hands between her knees. After a moment she went on.

  “When the school bus drops you and Terry off that afternoon, there’s a police car in front of the house. Lots of people are there: your dad, who’s never home that early; your mom’s best friend; the next-door neighbor lady; your Aunt Anna; two men in uniform. You keep asking what’s happened, but they won’t tell you anything, and Aunt Anna takes you and Terry to the kitchen for Coke and cookies. Aunt Anna’s upset, you can tell because she won’t look at you, and when you ask if something’s happened to Mom, all she says is, ‘She’ll be back soon.’ But you know she’s lying, and your throat seizes up so there’s no way you can eat a bite of those cookies or take a sip of the Coke.”

  Jennifer’s voice had slipped into a higher pitch, and her eyes were focused rigidly on the cleanly swept hearth. Going back in time, reliving the incident. I felt a prickling of concern for her, but didn’t interrupt.

  “For two days it goes on like that,” she continued. “Dad stays at home, but he’s not paying much attention to you. Aunt Anna and Aunt Sally-Mom’s best friend-are there most of the time, too. You and Terry are confined to the house, they won’t even let you go to school. Terry’s scared-she’s only six-and she’s afraid to ask questions, so you do. ‘What’s happened to Mom?’ you say. ‘She’s away painting,’ they tell you. ‘She’ll be back soon.’ But you know she’s not away painting; in all the time she’s done that, she’s never been gone this long. And the postcard hasn’t come. When she goes someplace to paint, she always sends a postcard addressed to herself-no message, just a souvenir for her collection. Besides, why were the police at the house that first day? Why do they keep coming back to talk with Dad? And why hasn’t he gone to work?”

  Jennifer shrank back against the sofa’s cushions, crossing her arms, hands grasping her elbows. The singsong, childlike quality in her voice had become more pronounced. She shivered.

  I remained still, sensing she was coming to a critical point in the narrative.

  “Then, on the third morning, your dad’s acting just like he used to before your mom disappeared. He’s dressed for work, and has had Aunt Anna-who came over early-get you and Terry ready for school. But he’s not really the same; he’s too cheerful, and he’s never cheerful in the morning. He’s even made oatmeal, and it’s all gluey, but you choke it down to please him, because he’s been so upset, and now he seems so sad under all those big smiles. When you’re finished, he pushes back from the table and looks at you and Terry and says, ‘I’m sorry, girls, but we have to get on with our lives. Your mother would have wanted it that way.’

  “Terry starts to cry, and you ask, ‘Why, Daddy? Is she dead?’

  “And then his face changes-scrunches up, gets red and ugly. He says, ‘Your mother is not dead. We don’t know what happened to her, but she is not dead. You are never to suggest that again. Never. Someday you will understand why.’

  “Terry stops crying and looks really scared, and you don’t say a word because you know better. There’s that tone in his voice that you’ve heard before when he’s warned you not to do something. It’s a tone that tells you he means what he’s saying, and you obey. Besides, then his expression changes, and he looks so sad that you’re afraid if you say anything more, he’ll start shaking and then maybe break into little pieces. And then you’ll be all alone in the world, with nobody to love you-because Aunt Anna doesn’t really like kids, and Aunt Sally and the neighbor lady have families of their own to look after. You’ll be all alone, except for Terry, who is so little and needs such a lot of looking after. That’s too much for a ten-year-old to bear, so you keep quiet, in order to sav
e your dad and yourself.

  “That night, after you’ve gone to bed, your dad lights a big bonfire in the backyard and throws all your mom’s paintings into it. You run out, crying, and he holds you and tells you it’s for the best, so you can all make a new life without missing her so badly. But after he’s put you back in bed, you cry some more because you loved those paintings, especially the one of the old hotel where Mom told you she and Dad spent their honeymoon.

  “Then, after a while, you realize your dad was right, because things do kind of get back to normal. You go to school and to your ballet lessons; for a while Aunt Anna fixes meals that are actually better than Mom’s; then Dad learns to cook and do the laundry and takes you camping like he always did. When you mention your mom, he sounds kind of absentminded. ‘She loves you,’ he says at first. And then, ‘She loved you.’ Gradually you stop talking about her, and it goes on for years and years like that, but there’s still this… place inside you where something’s not right-”

  “Darling?” a voice said from outside. “You okay?”

  A man in tennis whites stood in the doorway. Medium height, thick gray hair, deep tan. Craggy face, nose that looked like it had been broken more than once; deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He moved quickly into the room, toward Jennifer.

  “Oh, God.” She put a hand to her pale face, leaned forward. “Mark, I didn’t mean to-”

  “It’s all right, darling.” He stepped between us, as if to hide her distress from me, put his arms around her.

  After a bit, he straightened. Jennifer got up from the sofa, saying, “Excuse me for a minute,” and hurried from the room.

  Mark Aldin turned toward me, his rough features drawn into worried lines. Up close I saw that he was much older than Jennifer-at least twenty years. Perhaps she was a trophy wife? The disparity in their ages and appearances would point to that.

  “Sharon,” he said, “I’m Mark. I’ve heard good things about you from Rick and Rae. In the newspapers as well.”

  I smiled wryly. “Don’t believe everything you read in the press.” I motioned toward the archway through which his wife had fled. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “For now.” He sat down in the space she’d vacated. “Telling the story of her mother’s disappearance has a cathartic effect on her. She’ll feel better for days afterwards. Then the downward cycle begins.” He ran a hand over his forehead, pushed thick fingers through his hair.

  “This has been going on since her father’s death?”

  “Yes. Before that, she was matter-of-fact about her mother’s disappearance; it was something that had happened a long time ago. But once Roy Greenwood died… well, you’ve seen her relive the events.”

  “Must be difficult for you.”

  “I don’t care about me. But it’s wrecking Jen’s whole life. She spends hours in her studio out back, not working, just poring over old newspaper clippings and brooding about what happened. Her clients are angry with her for missing deadlines. Her friends-except for Rae-have drifted away. I’m afraid if she doesn’t have some closure on this soon, she won’t have much of a life to come back to.”

  “I have to warn you: I may not be able to provide her with that closure. This is a very old, cold case.”

  “I realize that, but I don’t know where else to turn.”

  “Have you talked to Jennifer about getting professional help?”

  “Of course I have. Psychotherapy is not something she wants to pursue. So…” He smiled, his skewed features transformed so he looked nearly handsome. “You’re the professional help, Sharon. What do we need to do to get this investigation under way?”

  Driving back to the city with a contract signed by Jennifer and a large retainer check from Mark in my briefcase, I was glad that I’d boned up on the events surrounding Laurel Greenwood’s disappearance before I met with her daughter. The facts of the case were rendered dry and brittle by time, but hearing Jennifer speak of her experience in a voice that more resembled a bewildered ten-year-old’s than an adult’s had brought the events fully alive.

  Twenty-two years ago, the Greenwoods had been living in Paso Robles-officially named El Paso de Robles, the Pass of the Oaks-a small town at the intersection of state highways 101 and 46, some two hundred miles south of San Francisco. The convergence of these major east-west and north-south routes makes Paso Robles a natural stopping place for travelers; I myself used to pull off there to gas up while driving between UC Berkeley and my parents’ home in San Diego. About all I remembered of the place was an A &W drive-in where I occasionally stopped for a chili dog, and the Paso Robles Inn, an old-fashioned mission-style mineral-bath spa.

  In December of 2003 a devastating earthquake-6.5 on the Richter scale-had shaken the town, killing two women and sending more than forty other people to area hospitals; a number of the older buildings were seriously damaged, and financial losses soared into the millions. I’d recently read somewhere that Paso Robles had recovered from the San Simeon quake and was undergoing fast growth; wineries had sprung up in the surrounding countryside and were becoming popular tourist destinations. But back when the Greenwoods lived there, it was basically a little town where people led quiet, ordinary existences.

  And up until June of 1983, the family’s existence had been just that. Roy Greenwood, a native of nearby Atascadero, was an oral surgeon with offices in a medical-professional building a block off the main street. His wife, Laurel, whom he had met when they were undergraduates at San Jose State, was a graphic artist who owned a company specializing in greeting cards for children; she worked out of their home. The Greenwoods were comfortably off, but by no means rich, even by the standards of a country town; Roy’s practice suffered because he extended liberal credit to patients who couldn’t afford necessary dental work, and Laurel’s greeting cards, while popular in stores as far north as Monterey and as far south as Santa Maria, turned only a small profit. Jennifer Greenwood and her younger sister, Terry, attended public school, where they were considered exceptionally bright and well adjusted. Both parents were active in the PTA and on various committees of St. John’s Lutheran Church.

  Laurel Greenwood had a ritual that provided a respite from her busy life as a wife, mother, and small business owner: every so often she would take a “mental health day” and travel to some location within an easy round-trip drive of Paso Robles, to paint landscapes. During each of these getaways, she would select a postcard that she felt best represented the area and mail it to herself for inclusion in a collection she kept in a file box in her office. The collection, she would joke, would probably be the only legacy she’d leave her daughters, but at least they’d know where Mom had been.

  An ordinary, uneventful, pleasant family life. Until June twenty-second, when it was forever altered.

  Laurel had planned to paint seascapes at the coastal hamlet of Cayucos, some twenty-five miles southwest of Paso Robles. She was seen doing so at a coastal overlook north of town, and one man, Jacob Ziff, stopped to look at her work and chatted with her for a while. Later Ziff spotted her in the Sea Shack, a restaurant in the center of town; she was at a table on the oceanside deck, drinking wine with a long-haired man in biker’s leathers. Ziff noted that the two left separately, the man walking north on the highway to a liquor store and Laurel getting into her beat-up Volkswagen bus and driving south. The bus later turned up at a waterfront park in Morro Bay, less than ten miles away. According to a pair of dogwalkers who saw Laurel arrive, she got out and walked toward the nearby shopping area. After that no one saw her-or would admit to seeing her-again.

  Roy Greenwood wasn’t aware that his wife didn’t return that night. He’d had a busy day, including two difficult surgeries, and went to bed early. In the morning he wasn’t overly concerned; occasionally if Laurel stayed away too late on one of her painting trips, she would take a motel room and drive back in the morning. But it did puzzle him that she hadn’t called to tell him her plans, so he checked back at the house at
noon. When he found she still wasn’t there, he called the chief of police, Bruce Collingsworth, a good friend and tennis partner; Collingsworth alerted the highway patrol to be on the lookout for Laurel’s van, and later sent officers to the Greenwood house to question Roy.

  When the highway patrol located Laurel’s bus in Morro Bay and she failed to return the second night, the search intensified; the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department stepped in. Television and newspaper reportage prompted a rash of calls from people who claimed to have sighted Laurel, the most promising being those from Jacob Ziff, the staff at the Sea Shack, and the dogwalkers in Morro Bay. Descriptions of the biker she’d been seen with at the restaurant were broadcast, but they were vague at best, and he seemed to have vanished as completely as Laurel. What further alarmed Roy Greenwood was that no postcard from Cayucos appeared in his mailbox. Laurel had never failed to add to her collection before.

  And then, suddenly, the case was back-burnered. Press inquiries were routinely referred to the sheriff’s department’s public information officer, who merely said they were pursuing “various leads.” Roy Greenwood, who had been forthcoming with the media, declined to give interviews, citing the need to “return to normalcy for the sake of my little girls.” A silence settled, and since the press does not feed on silence, interest in the case waned and finally disappeared entirely.

  So what had happened to Laurel Greenwood? Kidnapping? There had been no attempt to collect a ransom. Foul play or suicide? Quite possible. The bodies of many victims of violent crimes-both inflicted by others or themselves-are never found. Voluntary disappearance? Again, possible. Even though the families, friends, and associates of most missing persons insist that they would never desert them, a vast majority of disappearances are just that. Family, friends, and associates aren’t always privy to an individual’s true feelings and inclinations. Laurel Greenwood could have had a secret life apart from them, one she’d finally decided to disappear into-or one that had claimed her life.