Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  So that was it for Harold. She should have known Billie wasn’t going to rescue anything.

  Maybe she’d sent the girl out too soon. Maybe she should teach her something else, start her where she couldn’t hurt much.

  “Hey,” she said after knocking on Billie’s open office door. The girl looked up, startled. She’d been tidying a desk that needed no straightening, that had nothing on it except the regulatory book, opened, and a small, fabric-framed photograph of a little boy in overalls and a peaked cap. Emma never had understood the need for family photos at work, as if people were afraid they’d forget their kids between nine and five, or stop working if they didn’t have those hungry-looking relatives watching them.

  A radio played softly, a man’s rich voice talking about Presidents’ Day and U.S. patriotism.

  “How about learning what’s available on the databases?” Emma said. “It’s the only way to go, to a point. Save you so much time, you’ll do fifteen cases at once.”

  Billie smiled brightly and nodded, turning to snap off the small radio. Before the sound stopped, Emma heard the words “hardworking, decent—” and recognized the rich voice. “You listening to Talkman?” Her shock, hidden, she hoped, was real. Of course she believed in freedom of speech and freedom of listening, but the man was a pain-in-the-ass advocate of “moral values.” He was very popular, the current number-one radio personality, but only because he played to the lowest common denominator. She’d expected Billie’s taste to be on a higher plane.

  “Who? What?” Billie stood up to follow Emma.

  “That radio guy. The one you were listening to. Isn’t that who it was?”

  Billie looked at the small radio as if waiting for it to answer the question. Obviously, she’d been lost in a daze. Emma wondered where she’d been, what could have so absorbed her thoughts. Surely not memories of her excellent performance with her first assignment.

  “Program must have changed,” Billie said softly.

  “We’ll use my computer,” Emma said.

  “I don’t particularly like him,” Billie said.

  “I don’t get what he’s doing here. This isn’t back country.”

  “Seems to appeal to city folk as well,” Billie said.

  “That ‘lad from Nevada’ crap?” Emma said. “What’s that supposed to mean? I never got it.”

  “I think it’s supposed to make him sound folksy.”

  “Who needs right-wing folksy—in the Bay Area?” Once in her office, she gestured for Billie to pull up a chair and settled herself at the computer, talking all the while. “When he moved here, they made a fuss about his being the number-one radio personality in Vegas. As if that meant something. Who listens to the radio there?” She hit keys on the computer while she spoke. “I used to keep that station on all day, till they changed format when he arrived. I’ve waited half a decade for him to fail and go back to Nevada.” She shook her head in mild disbelief as she put a CD ROM in the computer. “So, supposing you want background on somebody,” she began. “Say…who?”

  Billie shrugged. “Is everybody in there?”

  “As long as they’ve had some interaction with the law or the state, like getting married or divorced, being arrested, buying or selling property, taking out a license to hunt, own a business, own a gun, being drafted…you get the drift.”

  Billie nodded.

  “So name somebody,” Emma said. The girl wasn’t going to play passive-aggressive in her office.

  “Okay,” Billie finally said. “Audrey Miller.”

  “You have a specific Audrey Miller in mind?”

  Billie nodded. “This girl I knew in tenth grade. Actually, I didn’t know her. There didn’t seem to be anything to know. She had no personality. You forgot her the minute you met her.” She looked at Emma quizzically. “Maybe not the sort anybody would ever search for. She’s sort of a generic female.”

  Emma put her hands up, palms out. “Interesting choice. You know anything we could work with? Where was that high school?—what year would she have been born?”

  Billie dithered, wasn’t even sure which of her many relocations this had been. “Boston,” she finally said. “Framingham, actually.” She didn’t know much beyond that, except to estimate that colorless Audrey would be around her own age of twenty-eight—“unless, of course, she’d been left back. Or skipped.” She shook her head. “Audrey couldn’t have skipped.”

  Emma was on to the Social Security records. “We can find out if she’s dead,” she said. “That would save time.” No Audrey of Billie’s vintage was on the list. “Let’s see if she’s married. Or has a license for a business.”

  “Under her birth name, right?” Billie asked.

  “As a starter—until we find a husband’s name.”

  They didn’t. They discussed the chance that Audrey had moved away and married years earlier. “You remember her parents’ names?”

  Billie shrugged and shook her head. “I’m surprised I remember Audrey.”

  “Remember whereabouts in Framingham they lived? We could check property records. There’s a chance they’re still there and we’d have a contact with which to find her. There’s also the high school’s alumni association. The reunion committee tracks most grads down.”

  Audrey had apparently not married, at least not in Massachusetts. But she was, as they backtracked, registered to vote in the next town over. And, once they’d checked licensing, Audrey fleshed out into the owner and proprietor of Audrey’s WeCare Pet-Care, Inc.

  “I’d bet that’s your girl,” Emma said. “We can find out more, but the thing is—you’ve done it, located her. You found somebody. So maybe we should look at somebody else, start somewhere else. Suppose we didn’t know the high school, or year of birth. Maybe we know something else, like what she does or where she does it. See how you can go about it differently. Give me a new nominee.”

  Billie looked around Emma’s office, as if seeking inspiration. “Him, then,” she said. “Talkman, the guy I wasn’t listening to. We know his job and that he does it and lives in the Bay Area.”

  Emma sighed. She’d asked for it. “In Marin, actually. You’d think his views would violate zoning laws, wouldn’t you? Don’t get me started on what used to be a good radio station. Let’s get some background. We can start with what we know—last name is Marshall and he moved here from Nevada five years ago. Trying to give you a sense of the scope of this, the possibilities. We don’t really need to know about him, so I’m going to move fast. Next time, we’ll take it step by step, when it’s for an actual case. But let’s do a search for his name and…”

  She meandered through driving records. “They’re not public records in California, but I have an account, so once you get a license number, we could find it out. In other states, there’s no hassle. You pay a fee, you get your guy’s name. The good news is we know he’s from Nevada. The bad news is, if you were really looking for the guy, Nevada addresses wouldn’t help you find him ’cause he’s not there anymore. But old addresses can be a lead, or a suggestion that somebody wasn’t where he says he was, for example. Or where he used to live. And see, look here—his birth date, height, weight. Who knows what could be useful?—the birth date can help get other records, sometimes.”

  She could feel small gusts of air when Billie remembered to exhale after a long spell of holding her breath. She felt like a performer boosted by applause and heard a new enthusiasm in her voice. “Lots of data depends on the state. For example, marriage records are not public in New York City, but here they are, and presumably in Nevada. Let’s look.”

  Which they did, accompanied by Billie’s soft puffs of breath and they found seven Marshalls, most of whom were too old, too young, or female. Harley was their man, they decided. “So you see,” Emma said, “the records keep feeding into each other. Here’s Harley’s marriage license. Married Genia Ann Christophe. Wonder if he stayed married? Should have, he’s such an advocate of the ‘nu cleer’ family.” She moved
to divorce records, searched, shrugged. “Practices what he preaches,” she said, not at all pleased at learning that.

  “Or he divorced her in California,” Billie softly suggested.

  Emma swiveled around in her chair. She tended to forget what the girl looked like when not facing her, imagined her a faceless marshmallow. And then the girl would say something intelligent and Emma would be surprised by the precise features and the cleverness in the eyes. “Could be,” she said. “Divorce records can be good—find out lots of things. Not about him, per se, but they can include things like allegations of abuse, or third parties involved, or a sense of what happened to the assets. Lots of stuff. They’re filed by county.”

  Meanwhile, she moved through voter registration files.

  “To know their politics?” Billie asked.

  Emma thought she was joking, but didn’t turn around to verify it. “More like addresses, Social Security number.” She loved shifting around the databases. Snooping at its easiest, a boon to her aging bones. “You still have to get your ass in gear and go outside, however.” She wasn’t sure if she meant that remark for Billie or herself. “Amazing the things you find. People put phone numbers on pet licenses which are public records. Your friend Audrey could help you there with her client list. You can check for ownership of assets—tell you something about somebody. Automobiles, trucks, RVs, airplanes—who knows? Then there’s property records, there’s licensing records if the guy’s, say, a carpet cleaner or a beautician….” She swiveled around again and faced Billie, who seemed delighted by the potential in the box. “Let’s do somebody else. He wasn’t a great choice,” she said.

  Billie’s face fell.

  “Not your fault!” If she was going to have to watch every damned word… “He’s a public figure. We should look at somebody harder to find, way less known, at least to us.”

  “Like who?” Billie now sounded like a student afraid she’ll be called on.

  Emma sat back in her chair and steepled her fingers under her chin. Then she smiled and sat up straighter. “Why—how about you?” she said and felt a thrill when Billie’s neon eyes opened wide with undisguised fear. “You’ll be all over the place—birth, marriage, divorce, property files, neighborhood-worth rating…”

  “But—” Billie said. “Why? I mean, I know about me. I know all about me.”

  “Perhaps,” Emma purred as she swiveled back to face the computer. “But I don’t.” She didn’t turn around to delight in the younger woman’s discomfort. She wasn’t a sadist.

  Six

  She thought that maybe she hated them. All of them.

  She’d expected them to welcome her, make her a part of their group, so she’d have a new, better family. Instead, they looked at her as if she were an alien.

  It wasn’t really new or better here, except for being with Luke. They wouldn’t even let her be Gwyneth, and that had been the point of it, that she could stop being Penny and become somebody new. Start over.

  “Look here,” Kathryn purred at Luke. Kathryn had invented that voice, probably practiced that throaty purr until it sounded sexy no matter what words floated in it. “There’s more about it in the paper.” She made the news sound like a secret for their ears alone.

  Penny kept her back to all of them and looked out the window of the kitchen’s Dutch door. She liked this part of Marin, the valley between the Bay and the ocean. You couldn’t see the edges of land, the way you could in other parts of the county. She felt safe here in the soft foothills of Mount Tam. Cradled. In the distance, silhouetted against the sinking sun, a dog barked at a horse grazing on a green hillside. The way Luke’s house was situated at the back of its lot, you didn’t really see its neighbors. She could look out and see a barely touched slice of landscape and pretend the world was all new and she was the first person to see these soft hills, that she was nestled and protected in a green palm of land. Except that when she heard their cold voices and saw their icy eyes, she knew she wasn’t safe anywhere.

  Penny heard the newspaper rustle. “They’ve found another one,” Kathryn said in a whisper, like a lover.

  Penny sighed and turned, saw Luke raise his eyebrows. Kathryn, her big boobs practically on him as she leaned his way, pointed at the newspaper.

  Did she think he was illiterate? It was enough to make a person gag, the way she pressed her pudgy finger on the newsprint, like it was something she’d prepared. She acted like he was a superhero for finding bones in a meadow. Which, of course, he hadn’t really done. Or known he’d done. Penny was the one who’d understood what they were, but she couldn’t be mad at Luke about that—he was doing as she’d asked, keeping her out of it.

  Big, sloppy Kathryn drooled over him. If she knew what a fool she looked like…Penny had half a mind to tell her.

  Half a mind. That’s the kind of thing her mother said. Stupid. On the other hand, Kathryn did seem to have just half a mind.

  And why did she act like Luke was up for grabs? He’d brought Penny here to live with him. Sure, the half a mind Kathryn had was stuck in the Middle Ages, but even back then, wasn’t three considered a crowd?

  Actually, nobody noticed her, even if the rest didn’t make moony eyes at Luke. They didn’t make any eyes at Penny. They pretended she wasn’t there. There was Gary, the gigantic computer genius who looked like a scarecrow, and Alicia, a CPA who was too serious and acted like she was in charge, and Toto. She didn’t know Toto’s real name or what he did. He was cute and funny, always cracking jokes, but not with her.

  Their big ideals of chivalry. And kindness. They said they tried to bring those ideals into their mundane lives, but that obviously didn’t extend to her mundane life.

  They acted like she was something ugly they should look away from, like it bothered them she was here, that she was a problem, not a person. They were too polite to say those words, but they made sure she knew it all the same.

  She’d asked them to call her Gwyneth, but they refused. She hadn’t researched it, they said, and before she could officially use it, she had to prove it was used in the period and place she chose, and she hadn’t even picked a country or time. Besides, they didn’t use those names here in the mundane world. They sounded like kindergarten teachers. The name she’d eventually take—if, indeed, Gwyneth was a European name before the seventeenth century—would be for her Medieval life, and did she understand the difference between the two? They were all members of the group—except for her, of course—and they lived together, too, because they liked each other, but this wasn’t the Middle Ages. This wasn’t a reenactment. This wasn’t their other personae.

  All as if she were retarded, or barely spoke the language.

  Her so-called new life was turning out to be just as chilly and unsatisfying as the one she’d left, with the older people still dumping on the younger ones. Even Luke—except she wasn’t supposed to call him that, either, or his actual other name, Lucan, the duke who’d died protecting King Arthur, even though that’s who he was to her.

  Look at them sitting around, drinking coffee and tea and beer, and not one person—not even Luke—saying she should join them. She didn’t like the mundane world.

  The house was nice enough, with rooms for everybody and an office for Alicia, and a big living room and kitchen and a sort of “whatever” feeling to where things belonged. Paint peeled on high kitchen cupboards and the dusty rugs, loose nails, creaky risers, threadworn upholstery and unmade beds that would have driven her parents insane relaxed her. Or would have, if it weren’t for the people.

  “Read it out loud, whatever it is, would you?” Toto said to Luke.

  Luke grimaced. “Blah, blah, blah, blah…okay, here goes.

  “‘The county sheriff’s office who have once again resumed digging following the recent storms have discovered a second burial site fifteen feet from the spot where a toddler’s remains were recovered last month. At this stage of the investigation, deputies said only that the newly unearthed gravesite’s uni
dentified adult is female and appears to have suffered a fractured skull. However, they could not say whether it was the cause of death. Preliminary testing suggests both bodies have been buried for approximately the same length of time. Police in California and continuous states are checking all open missing-persons records.…’

  “One with a skull fracture, one a baby, probably buried same length of time,” Luke said. “Why not come out and say these people were murdered?”

  “A mother and her baby, is what I think.” Kathryn sounded as if her idea were a stroke of genius. “Right where we had the tourney.” She shivered, as if she’d come close to being killed herself.

  “Abducted first, probably,” Gary said. “Else how’d they wind up in that field? There’s nothing but cows around there.”

  Alicia pulled the newspaper closer to her and scanned it. “A fractured skull. If it happened before she died, wouldn’t it show signs of mending? Wouldn’t it look different than a new, never-healed split?”

  Toto held an imaginary magnifying glass up to his face and squinted at the paper. “I thought CPAs only understood numbers. In a minute, your brilliant deductive powers will reveal the name of the killer who is right here in the kitchen with us!”

  “Common sense.” No one else seemed to mind Alicia’s “I am so superior” voice.

  “Did they question you when you reported the skeleton? Do they suspect you?” Kathryn’s attention was still on Luke.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “They asked what I was doing there, where exactly I’d been, why I was poking at it—” He glanced at Penny then just as quickly looked away from her. “And they asked who all of you were, and the others who’d been out on the field, but they didn’t suspect me. They suspected us. They thought the idea of restaging medieval events was seriously weird. I had to explain that twenty thousand members all over the world couldn’t all be crazed killer deviants, and that we were a handful out of thousands in the Kingdom of the West alone. He still thought we were crackpots.”