“Shit, man!” Gary said. “You brought a runaway here? Somebody the police want?”
His housemates glared as if he’d deceived them, put them in jeopardy.
“She’s eighteen,” he said. “She left home. Nothing illegal about it.” He didn’t want to explain his loose relationship with her, the rescuer fantasies that had gotten him into this mess. Not with her right here, ready to become hysterical if he implied she was less than everything to him.
“Besides,” she said, breathing hard as if she’d been running, and facing him, eyes riveted on him. “You saw my mother run after the car. She’s pretending to be crippled, committing fraud. I can’t involve the police in my life. They’ll arrest her, and then what? What happens to Wesley?”
He shouldn’t even have tried. Surely shouldn’t have mentioned honesty. Penny didn’t understand it. All she understood, or thought she did, was that if her mother the insurance-scammer went to jail, then nobody would take care of Wesley. Not her father, who, she was positive, was already living a double life. And that left only Penny, and how could she make a living, do any of it? And if she couldn’t, Wesley would be sent to foster care. He knew the drill and its circular form by heart, she’d said it so often. She’d built herself a trap and nailed boards over its exit.
The housemates looked at each other silently, but he heard their unarticulated questions, objections, fears in four parts as clearly as if they’d been singing a madrigal.
He tried to think his way out of this. “Let me get through this,” he said. “It isn’t the idea of telling the cops that worries you, it’s your telling them, right?”
She frowned, took a deep breath, shrugged, then nodded. He didn’t think she meant it, but it would have to do.
“Then don’t take it in. Mail it with a letter explaining what happened. A computer-written and printed letter they can’t trace.”
“What if they come here, man, and pull the file out of the computer?” Gary asked. “Even if you erase it, it’s there, you know, and if they bring good-enough technicians—”
He was going to punch Gary out, stitch shut his mouth. “Right,” he said. “Like they’d want to, or care, or know which machine she—” He shook his head and took a breath. The girl was paranoid. Why give her extra ammunition? “Okay, we’ll rent time at Kinko’s, use their machine, okay? Then I’ll mail it from the other end of the county.” Jesus, this was stupid, kids playing spies. “And I’ll write out a script, word by word, of what you could say on the phone to your next-door neighbor.”
“Don’t forget the one who got hers at a Christmas party,” Alicia said. Penny flashed her a furious look. He didn’t try to figure it out. He merely nodded.
Penny still glared at Alicia. She hated anybody he liked, and he’d liked Alicia—as a friend, mostly—since the eighth grade. “Pen?” he prompted.
She looked at him from behind a volcanic mountain. “Oh,” she said, “you mean Mrs.…Mrs….” her eyes darted from one to the other of the housemates and he couldn’t help but see that each in turn dropped their glance to their hands, or the table. He wondered if they, like he was, were suspicious about this, thought she might be lying. “Mrs.…Matterson. Sure. Same script.”
“Fine. So you won’t say a single thing about what’s on the script, and you’ll see if they can help the police find out anything about the hearts. Maybe they were only made in one place, even if a lot of them were made. Maybe that limits something. Or they have a cheap alloy that was only made for a year. I don’t know—but it’s wrong not to try and find out if you can. It’s not like you were a witness to a crime and you’d be afraid the killer would come after you. You found a trinket near where people were secretly buried and you’re providing help. And after you mail the heart and make the calls—you’re done. When it’s all settled out, you’ll even get your amulet back.”
He’d presented a good case. Maybe he should have been a lawyer after all, made himself miserable, his parents happier about him. He watched her face, could almost see the stages of thought pass over her features. Hmm. Yes? No. Okay. Maybe. But… What stupid, immature counterargument would she find? How long would the rest of the household put up with this crap?
After what felt like too long, Penny’s muscles unclenched, her shoulders lowered, her hands loosened out of the fists by her side, and she smiled so that he could remember why he used to find her appealing.
“Good plan,” she said with a nod. “We’ll do it first thing in the morning.”
His housemates applauded and Penny made a mock bow and beamed at them, looking like a happy child. He himself felt a rush of joy and ease. They were not going to blow each other up and away this particular evening. He was not imminently homeless.
Although… They didn’t know her. They couldn’t see that there was something wrong with that smiling girl at the table. The Penny that had come home with him was filled to the brim with fears, both semi-sane and irrational, with erratic moods, rock-hard stubbornness, an ability to always choose the dramatic but destructive option.… She did not change her mind, did not give in.
This sudden, sunny and complete capitulation did not compute. But peace and Penny coexisted in his home for the first time, so he’d be damned if he’d question it. Instead, he smiled back, poured himself a beer and forced himself to believe for as long as he could that all was well and going to get better still.
Seven
Emma heard the outside office bell ring and went out to play receptionist yet again. It was time to put pressure on Zack—either he was able to come back, or he was not. She had cut him more than enough slack but she had a business to run, and enough was enough of trying to make do. “I’m sorry,” she said as she entered the outer office, “our receptionist is on sick leave and…”
A man who looked polished for an event more ornate than a visit to her office stood with one manicured hand on the shoulder of a woman in a wheelchair.
She knew that frizzy hair, or a picture of it, the one clear part of the tape. She’d seen that face over and over, screaming.
Sophia Redmond, suffering a relapse of insurance-scam paralysis, looked at a newspaper she held, then at Emma, and seemed to find the match satisfactory. “You’re Emma Howe,” she said.
Emma nodded agreement.
“You own this agency, don’t you?”
Emma was sure she was about to be slapped with something. Billie had done her in, screwed up so badly that now they were being sued. She nodded again.
“Good,” Sophia said. “I want to hire you. I read about you in the l.J. and that gave me the idea to hire somebody like you—to hire you. I knew you were the right person—and right here, in San Rafael!” She waved her copy of the article, as if it were proof of something.
The power of PR, Emma thought. A human interest story can spark a little human interest. Even in the burbs where there wasn’t a PI on every corner, it didn’t hurt to get your name out, generate business.
“I like that you’re a woman detective. I think that matters,” Sophia said. She swivelled her neck to watch her husband as she spoke the words with an air of defiance.
He shrugged and yawned, barely bothering to cover his mouth. “I figure a woman’s just as good,” he finally said. “For snooping, that is.”
Emma said nothing. They were not announcing or threatening a lawsuit.
“We’re here about a missing person. A kidnapping,” Sophia said.
So much for new business. They shouldn’t have come to her at all. “Missing or kidnapped, either way, that’s a police matter,” Emma said. First Miriam, then the Redmonds bypassing free and available public servants. People were nuts.
“The girl ran away,” Mr. Redmond said.
“She was kidnapped—taken by a cult!” Sophia said.
The man waved his hand dismissively. “She cut out, is all,” he said. “She’s on drugs. Or knocked-up.”
“The thing is, even though she’s a senior at San Rafael High, she’s a li
ttle older than some, eighteen, because we moved a lot when she was a child and also her birthday comes so late in the year, the kindergarten teacher thought—”
“Sophia,” the man said.
Sophia closed her eyes. Time out. Then she opened them and continued. “I don’t want you to think she’s stupid because she’s older. She’s not. And not even that much older. There are other eighteen-year—”
“Sophia.” He didn’t raise his voice, but the tension in his throat as he said her name was audible.
“But even though she’s still in school, her age makes her legally an ‘emancipated adult.’ Which means she can leave home if she wants to, so it wouldn’t be a police matter, especially the way my husband puts it. As if she just plain ran away and wasn’t brainwashed first.”
“Sophia.”
It was interesting, Emma thought, how easy it was to ignore somebody in a wheelchair. They were literally below notice, with all the unconscious contempt the expression implies. This man—the father and husband?—hadn’t acknowledged a word Sophia said, not to refute or confirm it except to squelch her. All without looking her way. Not that the woman didn’t need levees for her word flow, but if she’d been standing next to him, would he have treated her more like his equal?
Emma beckoned them into her office, then excused herself to knock on and open Billie’s office door.
The younger woman looked like a child being summoned to the principal’s office. Emma took a grim satisfaction in it. “Something you should sit in on,” she said. “Ask questions if you have them. Follow my lead.” She waited a beat. “And don’t faint.”
Billie’s skin and features seemed wired to her central emotional core as if there were nothing in between. She wore a gauge on her face as easily viewed as her straight nose. Now, it registered clumsy, forgiven-puppy delight. She wasn’t being punished for the mess she’d made and she seemed to want to run in circles, wagging her tail. And then as Emma’s final phrase made it through the relief zone, her face-ometer changed, and registered anxiety.
Billie grabbed a notepad off her desk and followed Emma into the larger office. Despite her normally transparent emotions, when Billie saw Sophia Redmond there was a sliver of a second—imperceptible to anyone not waiting and watching for it—less than an eye-blink of recognition, confusion, and fear, and then it was gone, so quickly it hadn’t happened, replaced by a blandly professional mask. She must have been a good actress, Emma thought as Billie nodded to the couple with no sign of recognition and took a discreetly placed seat to the side and slightly behind Sophia. Not obtrusive, but not out of the loop.
“This is my”—Emma tossed her a cheap thrill—“associate, Billie August. I want her involved in this.”
“Does that mean we have to pay double?” the man asked.
“You’re hiring our firm,” Emma said. “All our resources are available to you. You’re billed as we use them, and we’ll surely consult you on that.” All our resources, she thought, and they’re right here in this room. One rapidly aging and short-tempered woman and her idiot hire, and a computer, the only resource that functions properly. “And you are…”
“Arthur Redmond.”
“And Sophia Redmond,” the woman added in a rush.
The man sighed before he spoke. He had a thin, thirties-style moustache that echoed the pout of his mouth. “We’re here because our daughter—”
“She’s my daughter, actually. She’s from my first marriage, although Arthur here has been as good as any natural father would be to her, and she was seized by a cult. Brainwashed. She has to be saved.”
“Ran away,” Arthur said.
“I was there,” Sophia said. “I know what I saw.”
“If your daughter was kidnapped, no matter her age, the police should be informed. Kidnapping is a crime,” Emma said. “A federal offense. And it’s best if it gets immediate attention. When did this happen? Do you have the ransom note? Was there forced entry? Abduction? Did you see something?”
“I saw enough,” Sophia said.
“But not those things, is that it?”
“There’s no note,” Sophia whispered. “No forced entry.”
“When did this happen?”
“Three days ago. In broad daylight. Well, it was a dark day, rainy, but it was in the afternoon.”
“And you waited till now because…?”
Sophia Redmond twisted a button on the cuff of her blazer. “We weren’t sure what was happening. Or that she was really gone. I mean she could have…I mean…”
“What are we hemming and hawing about? Do you find people or not?” Arthur Redmond asked.
“My husband’s busy.” Sophia was seemingly talking to her own lap. “He had to take the day off…. I would have come alone except I can’t do much of anything because I have this weakness and back pain and these terrible dizzy spells from a fall that hurt my head and ripped muscles and my equilibrium—my head’s all—”
“The detectives don’t want to know that,” Arthur said. “Get on with what you have to say.”
Emma considered his attitude. His natural arrogance seemed intensified by his wife’s being wheelchair bound. But given that her condition was a fraud, he didn’t seem her partner or cohort in it. He seemed to believe she was actually, and annoyingly, disabled. This was interesting. Who was Sophia Redmond scamming?
Sophia pressed her hand against her temple, as if locating a headache. “Maybe kidnapping isn’t the exactly right word. Maybe there’s no word that fits the situation exactly. She’s under the influence of an unstable man. Preys on the young. He’s part of a group of weird people, a cult. She’s lost the ability to think for herself.”
“You know the young man’s name, or the name of the group or their whereabouts? Or what the cult is?”
“If we knew those things, would we need you?” Arthur asked.
“Not even the name of the man?”
“We never saw him. She never met him at our house, the way a proper date would do. Always somewhere else. She didn’t talk about him directly, either, but she mentioned his friends, this group that believes they can travel back into the past. They live together, too. Bunches of them.” Sophia straightened in her wheelchair. “Does that sound sane to you? They’re sick, all of them, and my daughter’s in their grip now!”
Emma calmed the woman down, pondering the ethical issues here. The surveillance was a bust, all over but the death rattle. Client vamoose. So given that was finito, a declared failure, was there a reason she couldn’t accept this completely different case and different issue? She surely didn’t feel a conflict of interest and she did feel the cold breath of overdue bills. Insurance cheat or not, Sophia Redmond had the right to look for a daughter she considered in danger. “Let’s get some facts down, then, all right?” Emma asked. Ethical questions sufficiently addressed.
“Then you’ll help?” Sophia Redmond looked tearfully relieved. Arthur glanced over at Billie. “Which of you is going to do it?” he asked.
“We both will,” Emma said. “Plus other associates.” Not exactly a lie. If other associates should magically appear, they’d work on it, too. “As I explained.”
“Does she have any experience? She’s pretty young, isn’t she?” Arthur jerked his head in Billie’s direction.
Emma could feel the irritated vibrations coming off Billie, who was being discussed as if she weren’t sentient. But what was she going to say? Billie had experience, yes—one—and she’d botched it all to hell. “Her youthful appearance is the main reason I’d like Ms. August on this case,” Emma said. “If we’re searching for a missing teenager, there will be situations where she’d obviously be much better than I would at…”
Billie, combed and tucked and carefully made-up, sat, her eyebrows lifted, her expression amused but intent as she focused on Emma, waiting. At what was she better?
“…looking young. Fitting in. Less obtrusive. She is not underage, I assure you.”
Billie retur
ned her attention to the Redmonds.
Arthur Redmond grunted. Emma assumed that indicated assent.
They made note of the few statistics that Penelope Susan Redmond had managed to accumulate in eighteen years. Grades that depended on her level of interest, a level that had bottomed out of late. College plans lost in a fog. Increasingly withdrawn, sullen, vague, and nobody could think of a reason.
One sibling, Wesley, ten years younger. Mrs. Redmond rushed to overexplain the reproduction gap. “Like I said, Penelope is from my first marriage. I was young, like her. Stupid, like her, and then I was single for many years before I married Arthur. We had Wesley.”
Penelope had a standard teenage résumé. Nothing exceptional or idiosyncratic that might provide leads to special-interest groups. Emma detested searching for runaway teens. They were larval creatures with no form or parts to grab. Not humans yet. Billie would do this one.
Penelope baby-sat a lot all year, and in the summer, she added working in fast-food places. “A nice, average girl,” Sophia repeated several times. “A good girl.”
Arthur Redmond snorted.
“And since I’ve been…incapacitated, she’s been extra good. Drives me to the appointments and every single day to United Market. The one right off the freeway? I like fresh vegetables, you see, and they—”
“For God’s sake, Sophia!”
“She told you about his cult?” Billie asked. “What did she say?”
Sophia shook her frizzy hair. “She didn’t. Wesley, my son, told me. She told him about the time-travel. That she’d met her knight in shining armor. Her rescuer. They’re very close, Penny and Wesley. Ten years apart and only half related by blood, but they’re like that.” She held two fingers together. Her other hand still clutched the I.J. article about Emma.
Arthur said, “Sophia!”
“She didn’t tell Wesley his name?” Emma asked.
Another head-shake. “I’ve told you everything we know.”
“This young man took her away without ever calling or visiting her?” Billie asked. Emma approved of both the question and its timing. “Where did they meet, make contact? Did he go to her school?”
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