Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  She folded the I.J. for the last bit of print left in her car, the bottom half of the front page.

  POLICE RESUME SEARCH ON NICASIO FARM the headline said.

  In a windswept West Marin pasture, with only cows as observers, police resumed digging for a possible answer to the mystery of the unknown person who has come to be known as the “Meadow Child.” In January, the buried remains of a child estimated to be two to three years old were found in dairy farmer Earl Blankenship’s pasture by participants in a mock medieval pageant being held on the property.

  A preliminary forensic report hypothesized that the child had been dead for approximately five years. Stopped from search attempts for over two weeks by inclement weather followed by an injunction by Blankenship who feared disruptions of the terrain would endanger his cattle, police resumed excavations this morning in a fenced-off area.

  “At this time, we have no reason to suspect further burials took place at this spot, but we can’t eliminate that possibility without some investigation,” the Sheriff’s Office said. “Meanwhile, we have no leads to the child’s identity and no open cases matching this child’s description. Anyone with information is encouraged to call us.”

  Meantime, the Blankenship cows watch from behind their fence as the digging continues.

  Billie read every word of the account, with the prickly sensation that she had entered an alternate dimension where there was another version of her own lost child’s story.

  Whose child had disappeared so silently, with so little ceremony or respect for his brief life? What possible perceived offense could provoke such violence? When Jesse was missing, no matter how often she told herself that Cameron wouldn’t harm his own son, she’d at the same time known how tenuous and shallow her self-assurances were. Out of displaced rage, for a perceived desertion, for love turned inside out, people did the unimaginable.

  Jesse could have disappeared as completely and irrevocably as this child had. Five years somebody had been waiting. Five years counted in minutes, seconds. The cul-de-sac suddenly grew noisy with the arrival of both a gusty cloudburst and a long yellow car. Almost a limousine, an ancient one with unfamiliar contours, but it had blind sides in back and tinted windows. An old hearse, she thought, painted the color of butter. A pet hearse.

  It passed Billie, then slowly made its way down the street, as if unsure of its destination, finally braking and honking three times in front of the Redmond house. Billie dropped the I.J. onto the seat beside her and sat up straight. The rain was fast and sharp, beating a tattoo on the car roof, pelting the windshield.

  Seeing anything except the exhaust of the waiting car was difficult.

  The front door of the house opened. Billie scooted over to lower the side window for better visibility. It wouldn’t budge. She’d locked those controls against car-pool explorers.

  She climbed to the driver’s side and opened the door, crouching halfway out of it to watch.

  The redheaded girl slammed the door behind her after she dragged a suitcase free of it, then clunked down the steps, one at a time, bracing the case against her so that it didn’t plummet.

  When she was three stairs down, the door opened again, this time by none other than wild-haired Sophia Redmond, she who formerly could not stand upright without assistance.

  Sophia’s screaming ability was unimpaired, but the younger woman continued her bumpy descent. Behind the open car door, Billie patted the rear seat for her camera, cursing until she located it on the floor.

  She was already half drenched. Would have worn her raincoat except that Ivan had laughed at the sight of her this A.M., when it was still dry out. “Good!” her six-foot-three Russian nanny said. “Is very Humphrey Bogart uniform but would be better with slanty hat, too. Is very subtle.” The fact that he pronounced the b in “subtle” didn’t make his barb less sharp. She’d left the raincoat home.

  She pointed the video camera at the ready. So far, Sophia was inert except for her mouth.

  The girl reached the sidewalk, turned back toward the house, ran up the stairs, gesticulated, then retrieved a bicycle from the porch. The hearse’s driver, an agile-looking male in a hooded wind-breaker, jumped out of the car to put the suitcase and bike inside. The young girl turned her back to the house and opened the passenger-side door.

  Which produced a burst of movement as Sophia Redmond erupted out of her house and down the front stairs, her balance intact even in the slippery rain, her agility remarkable, particularly when she jumped the last step and raced to the street.

  “Yes!” Billie softly shouted, aiming the camera. “Go for it, Sophia! Gotcha, baby!” The camera whirred. She felt like a sports narrator. “See, Emma? I’ve got what it takes—I got her. The blonde got her. And praise the Lord—she’s totally recovered. A miracle—look at that! A leap, a levitation, for God’s sake, she’s Olympic gold!”

  At that moment, Billie remembered that videotapes recorded sound along with image. Her cheeks heated, even in the chilly rain, and she concentrated on keeping her mouth shut while she recorded the young man shutting the trunk, the young woman slamming her car door and Sophia’s race to its window, which she pounded with both fists.

  But what if she were too far back for a dear picture in the downpour? That blur of wild woman could be almost anyone. Billie crouched, closed the back door, opened the front and moved forward as far as she could, resting the camera on the car’s roof.

  Sophia’s screams were swallowed by the rain. Her blouse stuck to her back, her wild hair sagged.

  The driver released the brake and was off, shooting ahead until he apparently realized he was on a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac, and with a squeal, U-turned on two wheels and sped out, veering to pass the screaming Sophia.

  Billie ducked, hoping it was an illusion that he was about to plow through her, and indeed, he didn’t. Not through, but into.

  A yellow metallic, glassy crunch as the hearse caught her right front fender and moved on.

  As Billie grabbed for the sliding video camera, the swinging driver’s-side door slammed into her, knocking her down, hard, onto the curbside mud. Her proving grounds, indeed.

  She clutched the still-whirring video camera, now taping a closeup of her left front tire. She took a deep breath, stood up, brushed herself off, managing only to muddy her hands and the camera which she again aimed at Sophia Redmond. The soaked woman stood still and seemed disoriented. Then, she tilted toward Billie, to push her head and neck forward, the better to see what was going on with the white Honda down her street. Billie ducked and cursed, and when she again dared to peek above the car, Sophia Redmond was hobbling toward her house, the image of a dizzy, enfeebled woman. She made her way up the stairs on her hands and knees.

  Billie wasn’t going to win an Oscar for this film. She muttered a prayer to the god of PIs that the videotape had some clear and convincing footage of Sophia’s feet in action. And that it wasn’t only on the part where Billie had babbled like a fool.

  Now the street was empty, disrupted only by the sounds of the rain and wind until Billie, having stashed the camera in the car, felt entitled to finally inspect her fender.

  “Damn it all to hell!” she screamed, kicking the tire. The car was disfigured, conspicuous and illegal with only one working headlight. Knowing squat about cars but enough about the paths her life took, she understood that the estimate for repairs would be within a few dollars of her deductible. And would be many times the amount she’d earned doing this surveillance.

  She sat back down on the muddy grass curb. Last month she’d been occupied with strands of beads, with cufflinks and turbans and demonstrations of special effects with multiple belts.

  Now what? She had battled to be employed by a failing agency, to work for a harpy she’d mistaken for a mentor, and she’d just completed her first Very Private Investigation. And what had she gained from her glamorous new career? Stained and soaking slacks, filthy hands, one probably blurred but definitely embarrassing
videotape, a still-pathetic income, and a looming car repair bill.

  This was not The American Way. This was the opposite of progress.

  She should have stayed where she belonged, behind a counter, demonstrating forty-three ways to tie a scarf. At least that place had rest rooms.

  Five

  I’ve adopted a pet, Emma thought. A cute but clumsy stray, a well-meaning pain in the ass.

  She sat in her office, door closed, and watched the tape again, shaking her head. Shouldn’t photography have been part of Billie’s artsy-fartsy course work?

  “It, uh, isn’t too good,” Billie’d said when she handed over the tape. “I hope there’s a way to take off the, um—my voice. I accidentally… It isn’t something that’ll ever happen again, but I think maybe I’d have to go back, except of course this event—the running away—won’t happen again, so I don’t know if she’d ever be this way again and…”

  Emma, unable to bear the stammering apologies, sure the girl was being overmodest, prepping the boss for extravagant praise, waved her out. “Give me a chance to look at it,” she said.

  Now she had. And she thought Billie should have entered the office on her knees, banging her head on the floor as she approached. Point and shoot, that’s all it took. But in addition to pointing the wrong direction half the time, in addition to problems of dark sky and inadequate light, her focus was all wrong. The rain was clear and fierce, the human figures a background blur, fuzzed and featureless, useless for purposes of identification.

  And the situation had indeed been perfect. A lucky one-time-only break. And it was recorded, more or less—as long as nobody wanted to identify the dark little figures who flickered through, always unrecognizable. One of them—obviously Sophia, but only because Emma knew the players—raced down the front steps of the Redmond house, leaping off the last one like an aging gazelle, then taking off after the car. No sign of being wheelchair-bound or suffering vertigo. Could have been good. Very good.

  Then for a few seconds the tape grew focused, gained clarity so that Sophia was recognizable. Unfortunately, she was also standing still, shouting, demonstrating no mobility, except of her vocal cords. Nonetheless, the segment was entertaining for its loud voice-over. “See, Emma? I’ve got what it takes—I got her. The blonde got her.”

  Emma pressed her front teeth into her bottom lip, reminding her mouth that this was not funny. This was expensive and worthless. This time, she feared, Harold would be well and truly sick of her agency. Bye-bye client. The six thousand hours of training required of novice PIs were not going to be enough for this Billie girl. She’d need to repeat the course, get outside help. A brain transplant, maybe. Look what she did. Look what she did next!

  Because just as the tape’s clarity gave the viewer hope that this was going to work since Sophia was down there on the sidewalk and would need to get back inside on her own—at that precise moment, the lens suddenly veered up to the treetops, to the leaden sky, around into a whirlpool of blur and down. As if Billie had decided that rather than film these people she’d set a mood.

  But that obviously hadn’t been her intention, or why say, “Shit!” Why repeat it twice, just in case Harold and the entire insurance company hadn’t heard it the first time.

  Billie’s car had been hit by the careening yellow thing. Slapstick surveillance, a new specialty of Howe Investigations.

  Emma reversed the tape again. Maybe this time she’d see a way through the blunders to get usable, not laughing, stock. She was back again to the “blonde got her” soliloquy, finding it less amusing with each replay, when her phone rang and she lifted it to hear a wavery voice say, “Emma, there’s a criminal in my neighborhood and I’m scared.”

  As if Billie weren’t enough. “Call the police, Miriam,” Emma said. “Immediately.”

  “He’s not here now. This happened last night. In the dark.”

  “Did you call them then?”

  “Well, by the time I realized what the noise was—I mean, I thought it was a car backfiring, if they still do that. Do they?”

  “You heard a gunshot?”

  “It took me awhile to realize that’s what it must have been. It took me until right now, in fact. When I heard more noise, I thought it was a raccoon into the garbage at first—the can was full, you see, and even though I try to have nothing attractive to raccoons in there, sometimes… This morning was collection day and—”

  “Miriam? I’m really rushed this morning.”

  “—it was too late. The noise stopped. He was gone. What would I have told the police? They’d think it was a raccoon. Besides, I went and asked my neighbors if they’d heard a shot and they said no. But they listen to their TV so loudly. In the summer, you could go deaf living next door! And then I thought—maybe the noise was on their TV, but I didn’t know how to ask them that.”

  “It probably was a raccoon and a backfire, so why are you scared?” Miriam was a relic of Emma’s past, the barely remembered Emma, as out of place in her life now as a miniskirt. But the older woman was tenacious, and failing, and Emma had so far been unable to find an uncruel way to dislodge her.

  They’d met when they both had children climbing all over them and they’d taken their collective offspring over the mountain to the ocean, into the city to the zoo, on easy trails, and to library story hours. They’d sat at totlots and over coffee. Emma’s standards for companionship in those days were that you spoke English and didn’t need your diapers changed. And back then, Miriam was well above the water line. She was older, had been a botanical researcher, and hadn’t had children until her late thirties. At the time, before women’s lib and delayed parenting, that made Miriam seem seriously different, a bohemian in suburbia. Miriam had been freewheeling for years, way ahead of any cultural swings or permissions. She was funny, artistic, and sufficiently quirky to be entertaining.

  But as her children moved on, Miriam lost her way and her personality, growing increasingly querulous, pathetic, and tedious. And when she was widowed, three years after Emma’s husband screwed himself to death, Miriam began a decline that now seemed permanent.

  Somebody had once told Emma that the Sanskrit word for widow meant “empty.” She’d been vastly annoyed by the demeaning definition. She felt filled to the brim, sometimes overflowing. So she didn’t have a husband—she still had a life, a job, friends, and, in fact, a man for when she wanted him. Children, too, to the degree they wanted her. But Miriam had indeed emptied out. Her husband dead, children scattered, the once super-involved and creative woman was now devoid of resources, and she’d designated Emma as the replacement team for all that was gone. Calls such as this were commonplace.

  Emma looked at the videotape, frozen now on an unintelligible shot that made more than half the screen black. The tire of Billie’s car, she decided.

  “There’s blood.”

  “What? Where? Mir— Call the police!”

  “Inside my garbage can. Wouldn’t they laugh at me?”

  “Should they? Did you toss out bloody meat? Is it really blood, or beet soup or tomato sauce?”

  “How would I know? I didn’t taste it! I didn’t touch it! It’s a garbage can! I know about AIDS and bodily fluids. Besides, beet soup would go in the compost.”

  “Okay, so you heard noises last night around the garbage can and you thought it was a raccoon. And one of the noises seemed like a shot—”

  “Earlier. That was an earlier noise.”

  “Okay. An earlier noise sounded like a shot.”

  “Well, it did once I found the blood this morning.”

  Nothing quite like retroactive hearing. Besides, who inspects her trash can interiors?

  “I wasn’t looking for the blood, Emma,” Miriam said as if she’d read her old friend’s mind. Her voice was aggrieved and suddenly fully aware of and sensitive to the nuances of her surroundings and self. That happened, and made dealing with her still more difficult. “Like I said, the trash men came this morning so I was putt
ing the can back where it belongs and I saw it.”

  Emma looked at her watch. First the worthless video, now Miriam with a bloody trash can. Bloody nonsense. Miriam was seventy, which seemed way too soon for sporadic senility. Emma constantly found herself doing math—if Miriam decayed at seventy, did that mean Emma had only fifteen years until her brain developed potholes?

  She worried how any of the army of aging single women, including her, would know they were losing it, each of them living alone in a large or small container. How could they tell when their hardwiring went bad and they were on Disconnect with the world?

  She should try to reach Miriam’s kids, tell them their mother needed attention. Talk to Miriam about giving up the house, moving to a supervised facility. “Call the police, Mir,” she said. “They’ll be able to tell you if it’s really blood.”

  “And where will I put my trash meantime? On the floor?”

  Emma gave up. “I’m being buzzed,” she lied. “A business call. Let me think about what you should do.”

  “I’m frightened,” Miriam said before hanging up.

  “You’re not the only one,” Emma muttered. About lots of things—business, bills, about whether we’re individualists or demerited, about why the only person willing to work with me is an idiot. At least Miriam’s husband had left her enough money to allow her to tiptoe in and out of a fogbank.

  She’d watch the video one more time. This time, she’d discover the salvageable part and the Redmond investigation would be done, the insurance company pleased and ready to hand over more work.

  She reached her favorite part: “See, Emma?… The blonde got her.…” and repeated it three times before she moved on to Billie’s exuberant “she’s Olympic gold!” shouted so loudly it was hard to believe the Redmonds hadn’t heard. They were moving toward the collision and there seemed no point in further viewing. The tape was worth zero, and Sophia Redmond was not likely to perform in that style again. The case would go to court, the insurance company would settle and decide to forget about Emma, whose bills would pile up further.