Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  “What I wondered— Well, now that it turns out those people—the skeletons—were murdered and the police are trying to find stuff out, I wondered whether you remembered anything about the one you had that could help the police. We thought it was just a design, then we thought it said ‘Vux,’ but turns out, it’s Greek. Script, not print. Maybe a sorority thing.” He sounded lamer with each word.

  “My sorority—most sororities I knew of—had pins, not anything like that,” Sunny said. “And they had those nice blocky letters.” She smiled again. “I’m not much help, am I. But does this mean you really didn’t give it to Penny?”

  Stephen shook his head. “Found it.” All he wanted was to find a dignified, nonhumiliating way out of here. A way that wouldn’t erase that light in Sunny Marshall’s eyes, wouldn’t make her realize what an ass Stephen Tassio was.

  “Why didn’t Penny come here herself if that question’s so important to her?”

  “Actually—”

  “I’m sure she was nervous, with her parents so close,” Sunny said. “Although that isn’t to say I approve. Not at all. Things can be worked out. Have to be. Running away doesn’t solve anything.” The twins, each in a high chair, smeared apple sauce over the trays and onto their faces, crooning and giggling as they drew swirls and runnels. He felt a peculiar stab of pain and loss seeing that nobody shouted at them to stop, or rushed to douse them, take away the mess.

  These were tolerant people. Honesty was the way to go. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I was the one who pushed about it, and now it seems pretty dim of me. Penny thought it was ridiculous to try and track it. She said those hearts were common.”

  Sunny nodded. “Mine was a Sweet Sixteen favor, I think.”

  “I apologize, sir. I watch too much TV. Trying to be a good citizen, but I probably sound like a jerk.”

  Talkman smiled and shrugged. “I can understand. We all want to be heroes.”

  He was humoring dumb Stephen Tassio who wanted to be a Hardy Boy. “It seemed worth pursuing,” Stephen murmured. “I’m not sure why, anymore.”

  “Well,” Talkman said, lifting the chain and heart again, “since this doesn’t indicate your taste in jewelry, let me say that it’s a pretty poor piece. Look—the plating’s so thin it’s all but gone over here. Man to man, here’s my advice.”

  His white-chocolate voice was getting into it, becoming even lower and more majestically rich. You had to listen to that voice, really hear it. “Buy your girlfriend something newer and better and chuck that.”

  “Harley!” Sunny said. “He never said he was Penny’s boyfriend—did you? Are you?”

  Stephen shook his head. If they only knew how unfriendly he felt toward her. And how stupid. He’d done this out of anger. Out of disgust with her lies and evasions, with how she did and didn’t spend her time. He’d done this to prove something to her, and instead he’d made a fool of himself in front of these two incredible people.

  “Hey—how’d you know that thing was near the skeletons?” Harley looked at Stephen appraisingly, then he grinned. “You found the skeletons, didn’t you? You’re being modest. Paper never said who or how, as I recall. No wonder you’re involved in it—you were a hero—don’t need to become one. A modest hero. Very nice.”

  “No, sir,” Stephen said. “Not exactly. I didn’t find them both. Just the first one. Part of it. And not just me.” He knew he shouldn’t have said that the second the words were out.

  “Penny, you mean,” Sunny said. “Is that how she found the heart?”

  Stephen shrugged acknowledgment. “Kind of.” He looked from one Marshall to the other. “So do you think it’s worth turning the heart over to the police?”

  Talkman smiled. “‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.’ Whatever you think is right.”

  Translation, Stephen thought: Go ahead, be as oafish with the police as you were here. Stephen would have blushed if he ever did. He nodded, stood, scooped up Penny’s lavaliere, and apologized for wasting time.

  “I’ll bet you’re that boy she went away with,” Sunny said, looking as if she’d discovered gold. “Her boyfriend. The one the detective’s looking for. Otherwise, how’d you know what’s going on with her now? You’re the boy with the yellow hearse, aren’t you? I’m so glad you’ve turned out to be such a nice person.”

  Stephen didn’t know how to react. Why was a detective tracking him?

  “You’re the one,” Sunny said.

  “I get the distinct impression you are making the young man uncomfortable, Sun. Glad to have met you, though, Stephen,” Talkman said. “And good luck.”

  Get a life, he probably meant to add. Get a life and stop playing games.

  “One thing,” Sunny said. “Whatever your plans are—first, please, tell Penny to come home and work things out. Please?”

  “I’ll try. I really will,” Stephen said. “There’s nothing I want more than that.”

  Twenty

  They weren’t exactly panic attacks. If they were, Billie told herself, she couldn’t objectively evaluate them this way. But even after reading Jesse every word of The Velveteen Rabbit and going over the events of his day again, and knowing that Ivan would check all locks and call 911 the second he heard anything suspicious, and even after starting a healthy, balanced dinner for Jesse—which should have alerted her son to the fact that things were nothing like normal—she still felt sudden “what if” churns of emotions on the way back to work.

  Good thing the office was so close, counting parking, because even that amount of time stretched to include flashbacks—history she not only saw, but felt, as if new—things she had buried clawing again on her nerve ends. Jesse kidnapped. Her mother’s drunk seesaws from rage to silent depression. The repeated shocks of relocation, all the lost alliances and sense of security. Her father’s abrupt departure one afternoon while his kids were in school and his wife at the club, all signs of him—clothing, sports equipment, and books—removed without so much as a note. “I hate scenes,” he later said. “You know there would have been one.” He considered that both explanation and defense.

  Bad surprises and danger. Always. She’d vowed to never, ever, let her life, her parenting, be that way.

  By the time she’d reached the office and parked across the street, she was ready to admit she wasn’t up to the needs of the job. Part of what she loved about the very title of “private investigator” was its intimation that competency was a given. You knew something or could find it out. But you needed more than a job description and title to be competent, and Billie wasn’t going to make the grade unless she was more careful, more observant, more aware of occupational hazards.

  She entered the small, marble-tiled elevator lobby of the old building, but took the stairs—they were at least dependable—and continued, nonstop, with her mea culpas.

  She had to behave like an investigator. Starting now. Better late than…

  She pushed open the glass-and-wood door of Howe Investigations.

  Zack looked up from his computer. His left cheek bulged.

  “Malt balls now?” Billie asked.

  “That took deductive skill.” It sounded more like “Ba tooga didugdiv skih.” He gestured to the crystal bowl, filled to overflowing with the dark candies as he crunched and chewed.

  “How the hell do you answer the phone sounding like that?”

  He swallowed. “Emma wants to see you.”

  “About?”

  Zack shrugged. “She’s on the phone, but I’m to buzz her when you called in. Beeper not working, is that it?”

  “I—” Sweet Jesus, where the hell was the thing? She’d forgotten all about it. She dug into her pocketbook and found it trying valiantly to reach her, silently vibrating against her wallet, calendar, and tissue container. She looked at it, saw the office number, and bit at her bottom lip while she exhaled in exasperation through her nose. “It didn’t fit who I was saying I was….” At dawn, at ILM when she was sheepish Audrey Miller
. What about the hours since then? “I forgot all about it.”

  Zack shrugged. “You’ve only had it a few days. I’ve seen a couple or three newcomers in this office. It’s like learning to drive. They remember to turn on the signal, but not how to also check out the new lane before zooming into it. Or if they remember that, they forget about not slowing down then. Or if— You get the idea, right? Don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “You’ve been here two years and something,” she said. “How many new ones did you observe?”

  “Seven of you guys. She isn’t great at keeping associates.”

  Even less good at it than Billie had imagined. An apprentice had to put in six thousand hours at slave wages, which translated into one hundred fifty weeks if the newcomer worked eight-hour days, five day a week. Three years, give or take, but in two and a half years, seven people like her had walked in and out of this office. Her own odds of enduring felt shaky.

  “Don’t listen to statistics,” Zack said. “Numbers lie. I can think of two who were here at the same time and then together, decided to become Chippendale dancers instead. Male stripping pays better than this. Another one developed an ulcer—”

  “Because of her?” Billie whispered.

  He shrugged. “Who can say? Anyway, he moved to Pennsylvania.” He popped another malt ball into his mouth while he did further calculations. When it was swallowed, he continued. “Dobson worked here the whole time. Left right before you appeared, from what I can see on the records. So we’re up to four of the seven—and you’re one of them, so it was just two who said, in essence or in fact, ‘Life is too short to spend another minute working for her,’ and slammed the door. She fired one of them for incompetence and he became a security guard and the other one—that one was kind of mutual, like a divorce, that one moved to Mexico, from what I hear. You don’t look like a quitter—are you?”

  “Stay tuned. This is where I’ll find that out.” Billie walked toward her cubicle and told him he could let Emma know she was here. She was working on a computer search on the net. That sounded pleasing and professional and might mitigate her other offenses.

  What had Yvonne said—“Society for Creative Assassins”?

  Life wasn’t overgenerous when your best lead was a madwoman. She was sure Stephen Tassio wasn’t an assassin, but given that she had no good alternatives, she’d look for an organized society of assassins, at least until she was summoned by Emma and fired.

  She hit the keys lightly, afraid, she knew, of offending the peevish brains inside the machine. She envisioned byte-sized but testy spirits, sneering at her ineptitude and gaffes. The Internet was incomprehensible. She didn’t understand how there could be an infinitely-expanding anything. It hurt to think about it, the way it had hurt as a child to think about infinity itself, about what was just beyond it, outside it.

  Instead, she tiptoed on the keyboard and searched for the Society for Creative Assassins. An interesting concept. The Assassin Elite. No tawdry gunshots or garroting. Instead, something inventive and new that required imagination. Like perhaps boring somebody to death. Taking someone out via a defective bungee cord on a jump.…

  For God’s sake! Eight thousand three hundred and sixty documents under assassins! What was going on in this world?

  Her fingers tiptoed toward the entries. And found video games. Role-playing games. Nothing about actually murdering someone for gain. She wasn’t sure if it was a relief or a further irritation.

  She tried to narrow the field by typing in the entire title Yvonne had said—Society for Creative Assassins—and now the machine told her there were one million three hundred eighty-one thousand, seven hundred and… This was incredible. Terrifying! She scrolled down and found odd entries whose connection to assassinations was vague at best. Entries about cremation. Gilbert and Sullivan. A science fair. Training Latin American militaries—at least that bore some relationship. Apparently, anything that contained the words Society or Creative or Assassin qualified.

  But surely Stephen Tassio wasn’t involved in any of them, and none of them required medieval garb and titles.

  The next entry was: Society for Creative Anachronism. Subtitle: Living in the Current Middle Ages.

  Of course.

  For a long time, she sat reading and learning. There were formal guides, explanations for newcomers. She was intrigued by the world these people had created, but frustrated as well, because there seemed no way in these files to find Stephen Tassio. Or Lucan the Steward. Only the world in which they sometimes dwelled.

  She clicked onward, moving around until she found a map of the U.S. divided into segments. Kingdoms, they were called. She clicked on the Bay Area, part of the Western Kingdom, The Principality of Mists, for a close-up. Then she tapped in her zip code, looking for nearby groups, and there it was, in Novato.

  She felt as if she were getting closer to Stephen himself. She could go to a meeting of the Novato group, could meet Stephen—if he wasn’t afraid to go where Yvonne might find him—without arousing suspicion.

  But when? What month? What year? Her spirits deflated again.

  She found mention of the “Rialto” newsgroup, a site where members talked online to one another about SCA issues, and, feeling like an outer-space explorer, she headed there with great hope.

  The addresses of the message-senders were sometimes cryptic, based on their SCA names, but then—her pulse did the equivalent of a bloodhound’s alert sniff—often their “mundane” twentieth-century name was in parentheses next to it.

  “Stephen Tassio,” she murmured as she searched. “Put in a message. Say something. Yvonne can’t get you on here.”

  But she couldn’t find a Stephen Tassio, S. Tassio, Stephen, Steve T.…

  Anything. He was the strong and silent type of knight. Not even a Luke. A Lucan. A Steward. Who would have thought a computer could provide such a wild and emotional roller-coaster ride?

  The messages were in the order received, not alphabetized. There was a good chance she’d missed him. She scrolled the list again.

  Marcia, Louis, Miranda, Andy, Brooke, Esmeralda, Susan, Alicia, Anne…

  She had the feeling of having missed something, and scrolled up. But there was no Stephen anybody. No S.

  Zack knocked on her door and simultaneously opened it. “Emma’d like you to come into her office,” he said with a grin. “Now.” He headed for the copy machine.

  “This is the neatest thing,” she said, pointing at the computer. “You can’t believe what you can—”

  “Please,” he said with a dismissive wave. “I would have never befriended you if I’d suspected you’d turn into a Net zombie. I’ve lost more perfectly good people when they entered that machine, and mutated.” He turned his back and set the pages for duplication.

  She whispered a promise to return, and took a series of deep breaths. She would fight for this job if Emma were as displeased as she might have a right to be. Or maybe this meeting was to be their first mentor-apprentice session. Maybe Emma would tell her the sort of insider thing she’d expected to hear and learn all along.

  With a final deep breath and five strides across the reception area, she tapped Emma’s door and entered, ready for the worst.

  Sophia Redmond sat across from the desk. She turned when the door opened, and Billie had to work to control a gasp. The woman’s face was patched with deep purple. Her bottom lip looked as if it had split and was only now beginning to heal.

  “Fell,” Sophia said before Billie managed greetings. “Looks worse than it is.”

  Emma waved Billie into the other chair.

  “What have you found out?” Sophia asked.

  “Mrs. Redmond phoned several times today,” Emma said in a voice bleached of all emotion. “She feels this matter is rather urgent. We tried to reach you.”

  Billie willed the heat rising in her to stay away from her cheeks, to keep itself hidden. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize my pager wasn’t working corr
ectly until a few minutes ago. It’s fine now, but…” She worked at looking repentant, humble, sorrowful.

  “Where is my daughter?” Sophia asked.

  Emma leaned back in her chair, waiting, taking no responsibility for her associate’s incompetence.

  “We’re making good headway,” Billie said. Accent on the “we.” “I now know the name of the young man she left with—the one with the hearse. And I know where he works and some of his special interests. Unfortunately, he’s on vacation right now, he lives with other people and everything’s in their names, his parents do not know his address or current phone number which he’s keeping secret because of an ex-girlfriend who’s harassing him, making life unpleasant. But I’m on the track of a group he belongs to.” That sounded like much more than it was. Maybe Sophia Redmond wouldn’t realize it was nothing. That it had all been about Stephen Tassio with whom Penny might or might not have remained. Sophia’s daughter was as far away and invisible as ever. “I realize every minute must feel endless to you,” Billie said, “but it has only been a few days, and I expect to find her very soon.”

  Sophia stood up and walked to the window. What was wrong with that picture?

  Emma followed Billie’s sight line and smiled wryly.

  “Mrs. Redmond,” Billie said, “you were in a wheelchair last time I saw you. This is very…exciting. You look quite comfortable walking.”

  “My words precisely,” Emma said.

  Sophia turned, looked down at her legs, then at Billie. “It’s partly why I’m here.” She pointed to her swollen cheek, the black eye, the lip. “I…didn’t tell the truth.”

  Which time did she mean?

  “I wasn’t…I could always walk. The man’s becoming— He’s vicious. He always had a short fuse. But he’s worse. I thought if I could collect disability money, you know, and a settlement from the city, I could afford to leave him. Even if I had to stay in a wheelchair forever. When Penny’s father walked out, I was so poor, and with a child…”

  Tell me about it, Billie thought. And, she suspected, Emma was having precisely the same thought with the same inflection. Sophia’s voice dripped self-pity. She obviously thought her story was unique.