Time and Trouble

by Gillian Roberts

  Normal people would have said something to the effect of, “How’s it going?” But Emma wasn’t the norm.

  Billie decided it was out of bounds to ask Emma what she was working on, how things were going for her. Emma set boundaries without saying a word.

  The car smelled of stale cigarettes although Emma didn’t smoke. The front seat’s upholstery apparently had been used as an auxiliary ashtray and dump. And the backseat was no better. It looked clawed by something gone berserk and was strewn with bags, duffels, and empty Styrofoam cups.

  The scenery dissolved and reshaped itself as they drove out Sir Francis Drake, beyond San Anselmo’s antique shops to Fairfax, a town clinging to as much of the sixties as it could, back farther in time to the central valley where the conveniences and abominations of civilization were less visible, houses nestled in clusters off-road and out of sight. Woodacre, San Geronimo, Forest Knolls. She and Cameron had looked, but hadn’t found anything there when they were house-hunting, and she liked the mix of old and neglected, and brand-new and stunning homes, the privacy and yet the closeness of houses running up the hills or nestled at their base. She liked horses in front yards, the tiny library and post offices and the pleasant oddness of pure unspoiled country, with a city still only minutes away. And a golf course straddling the highway.

  She understood why Stephen Tassio would have felt safe there when he needed to disappear.

  “This might be where Stephen lives,” she said. “I found two messages on the Internet that mentioned the area, and one was from a woman named Alicia Malone—that’s her real name, what they call her ‘mundane’ name. But there was only an office number. No address.”

  Emma nodded. “Give me the number. If we don’t find Penny tonight, I’ll make a call. Guy owes me a favor. But who is she?”

  “Stephen’s mother said she was the one who lured him into the group, so it seems too much to be a coincidence.”

  “You think the girl’s with him still?”

  The girl. She kept making her secondary. It was for the sake of Penny that they were on this chase, but it was Stephen, not Penny she felt close to. She knew his parents, the receptionist at his place of work, his crazed ex, and as little as each had provided, it was more than Penny’s people seemed to feel or know. Billie had a rough idea of his life, interests, what made him unique, while Penny remained a shadow figure.

  She’d all but forgotten her, and not for the first time. Penny Redmond, the girl nobody knew. How lonely she had to be. “I can’t imagine where else she’d go.” Billie felt an ache as the adolescent took up residence in her brain.

  “Assuming we reach Stephen in time, Penny will either be with him, or he can probably tell us where she is. We can deliver her mother’s message and we’re out of there. Then it’s up to the girl to contact her mother or not.”

  There was an angry, hurt undertone to Emma’s words, as if she had a stake in which option Penny would take.

  “I hope she makes contact,” Billie said. “That mother’s falling apart.”

  Emma shrugged. “Either way, it won’t be our problem anymore.”

  Her voice had returned to its normal level of impatience as the conversation once again dragged to a halt. There were just so many trees and grasses one could study through the windshield. “Did you get the message about the woman who called?” Billie asked after an awkward pause. “Miriam, with the blood in her trash can?” Cocktail-party chatter without the cocktails. This was too hard.

  “It’s sad,” Emma said. “The woman is losing her mind piecemeal. She was once the smartest woman I knew.” She sighed heavily. “She was a rebel when I met her. Way ahead of her time liberating herself, if anybody still uses that term. In fact, speaking of time, if we have any on the way back, would you mind if I—well, it would be both of us, of course—detoured to her house? She lives in Mill Valley, on Mount Tam. If we take Panoramic Highway back instead of this road, she wouldn’t be more than a minute or so out of the way, and maybe I can calm her down.”

  Whatever minutes they spent detouring or soothing Miriam’s fears were minutes lost with Jesse, but this was as close to collegial as Emma had ever been. “No problem,” Billie said.

  “Funny what life does to you,” Emma murmured. “Or not funny at all.”

  They passed the small valley towns and headed toward the sea, through Samuel P. Taylor Park, a place Billie considered close to holy. Like stained-glass windows, the late-afternoon sun broke through the redwoods making green prism into gold, lime, emerald, and dark mossy shadow, landing on ground carpeted with rust-and-maroon redwood needles. This was the tapestry and geography of peace, a place of solace, serenity and insight—if only she could find time for contemplative solitude.

  They were not necessarily following Yvonne’s dark hatchback. They had seen a car like it on Fourth Street when they left the office, but had not caught up with it, and then had lost it as it raced down Sir Francis Drake, and their hope that the police would stop the speeding car and ease everyone’s worries was not realized. Now, there were only occasional glimpses of the little wagon as it sped around the twists and turns of the roadbed. They had seemed on a logical course of action when they raced out of the office. Now, on this verdant country road, Billie felt as if she’d left the clear sense of urgency back at the office.

  They reached Olema, the T-junction with Highway One, and Emma idled indecisively. “You think he went—she went…which direction?”

  Billie shook her head. “It seems irrational for him to return to the scene of his and Yvonne’s last time together. Or does it even register for him that way? Maybe it’s just his friend’s place to him, so I can’t tell. But I kept hearing how much he loved camping. Point Reyes, maybe? It’s so large, so many campgrounds, the odds would be against her finding him.”

  “Which is to say, who the hell knows?” Emma shrugged and turned to the right, toward the National Seashore. They reached the visitors’ center and went in to ask a few questions.

  The last time Billie had been out here had been with Jesse. They’d stood directly on the infamous San Andreas Fault and she’d showed him the fencing that the 1906 earthquake had yanked in two, relocating the pieces several feet apart. Explained about the odd Point Reyes peninsula which geologically belonged in Monterey, but had moved north on its own and was continuing up toward Alaska. Of course, he didn’t understand. Nor did she. But she felt it was sufficiently amazing to bear repetition.

  And before that, she remembered driving here alone a month before Jesse was born because she thought a long walk on Limantour Beach would clarify her thinking about the future of her marriage. She could still picture herself, enormous in a blue denim tent of a dress, walking barefoot on the hard sand, hemline drenched by surprise waves. She could still hear the chorus of seabird colonies in the surf and those in the ponds and estuaries a few yards inland, the pelicans flying in formation above all of it. She had looked to the timeless elements around her for answers, but had gotten none. Days later, two teenage boys wrongly thought they’d snuffed out a campfire, and the Mount Vision inferno roared through the park, consuming an acre every five seconds at its worst, more than twelve thousand acres before it was contained. Shortly after Jesse was born, she’d put him in a sling and gone to see the spectral grayness leading down to the ocean, and had taken it as a belated but sufficient answer.

  As her next visit had been when she was heartened by the multitude of tiny bishop pines sprouting under their burned progenitors. Their seeds had required blazing temperatures to be released. The land was restoring itself, starting over. She thought, perhaps, that she was beginning to catch on, that if she kept returning, this place would keep teaching her.

  The ranger was shaking her head, looking patiently amused by the idea of anyone’s getting a legal campsite at this hour. “They’ve been reserved for a long time now,” she said. “You know that myth—or maybe it’s real—that it’s always hot and pretty on Presidents’ Day weekend. We’re boo
ked even now, before the weekend starts. ’Specially because of this break in the weather. We keep some slots open, but people were lined up for them when we opened this morning.” She shook her head again. “If your friend didn’t have a reservation, he isn’t here.”

  “Illegally, then?” Billie asked.

  The ranger shrugged. “I always tell ’em it’s a whole lot cheaper getting a room around here than paying the fine.”

  Back in the car, they followed an increasingly dusky, then dark Highway One along a shore spotted with weathered homes and country-style restaurants until they approached Stephen’s other seaside haven, the single downtown street of Stinson Beach. “Maybe we were wrong,” Emma said.

  We. Emma’s first “we.” Billie savored the word and moment.

  “But let’s look for ‘their place,’” Emma said. “Maybe leave a warning for him. Meanwhile, he’s probably warm at home while we chase around.”

  There was actual camaraderie in the line, companionship and ease. Billie felt the frozen wasteland between them melt at its edges. Only the smallest of puddles, but a warming trend, at least.

  She scanned the few options at the sleepy beach town. A bookstore, cafe, a market—and a shingled house with a small sign, halfhearted, reading, The Bar. “Their place, maybe?” Billie said.

  Emma pointed. Halfway hidden by the building, the dark hood of a car. But it wasn’t Yvonne’s. When they parked and inspected it, it turned out to be missing its front tires.

  The house was tiny, the “bar” almost a dollhouse-sized affair, albeit fully stocked. Two men sat at a small pedestal table near the window, playing chess and drinking dark beer. The man behind the bar had been on a tall stool, reading. He closed his book and stood up as Emma and Billie entered. “Welcome,” he said. “Help you?”

  Billie was acutely thirsty and ready to appreciate anything wet. She also thought buying something was fair trade for information, but most of all, she felt she should follow Emma’s lead.

  “I’ll have a beer,” Emma said. “What’s on tap?” She glanced at Billie, who nodded and said, “Make it two.” Beer wasn’t her favorite, but there it was. She wanted to belong, and suddenly, wine seemed potentially effete, coffee too abstemious, soda immature.

  She had to stop thinking this way, as if she were preparing to play a role, as if she were always deciding what this character Billie would do in a situation. But she accepted her beer and sat down on one of the five stools in front of the bar, as did Emma, and waited for a cue from her employer.

  “Stevie here yet?” Emma asked.

  The bartender tilted his head, then shook it. “Who?”

  “Stevie Tassio.”

  “Stevie?”

  Emma laughed and her features reacted as if she’d put a softener over them. “I’m the boy’s aunt and this here’s his cousin, my sister’s child, and I guess Stevie’s too grown-up for that nickname now, is that it? Stephen, I mean.”

  “You’re relatives?”

  Billie nodded and smiled. “Aunt Emma and cousin Billie Jo. From near Ukiah. He mentioned us, then?” she asked brightly.

  The bartender shook his head again. “Did he know you were coming out?”

  “Oh, yes. We’re meeting here. I admit I get things jumbled if I don’t write them down, and I didn’t. But he said a house with the word ‘Bar’ outside. There isn’t another one, is there?” Emma the Stern had blurred her edges and become a flustered, worried generic woman of a certain age.

  “Is Stevie—I mean Stephen—still with that dark-haired girl with the fancy name?” Billie asked. “Something foreign, although, of course, she wasn’t.”

  “Yvonne?” the bartender asked, and when Billie nodded and said, “Yes!” he shook his head anew. “Broke up a while back.”

  “What a pity! I thought we were about to be invited to a wedding,” Emma said.

  “Maybe there’s somebody new,” Billie said, poking Emma with her elbow.

  The bartender shrugged. “Wouldn’t know. He didn’t say.”

  “Well, now, I’ll ask him myself—what else is the point of meddling relatives, right?” Emma laughed at her own weak joke. “So—where is my bachelor nephew?”

  “Left a while ago. He didn’t say anything about meeting anybody. We touched base, that’s all.”

  “He left? Why would he be out this way if he wasn’t meeting us? He’s too young to be as forgetful as I am! Or did he have a hot date, is that it?”

  “Didn’t say. He was alone when he was here. See, I’m kind of voice mail for people passing through. People leave him messages here. He comes by to check.”

  Alone, Billie thought. Then Penny was where? Had this search been in the wrong direction from the start? Penny wasn’t with him. She might never have been, and she could be anywhere on earth.

  “Aha! Maybe he did have a date,” Emma said.

  The bartender shrugged. He seemed more pragmatic than romantic. “Or something came up, change of plans. There were messages. Two. No, wait—one hung up. Didn’t leave her name, although I have my suspicions.”

  Her. Crazy Yvonne probably, behaving less impulsively and more thoughtfully than they had. She’d called to find out if Stephen was there, had verified his presence, and hadn’t wasted gas and more important, time at Point Reyes.

  “And the other phone call? Some kind of emergency?” Emma asked after downing the last of her beer.

  The bartender shrugged. “Doubt it. He was here when that call came, too, and he took it. All’s I know it was a man who said something like I should tell him it’s about jewelry. That doesn’t sound like an emergency to me.”

  Emma glanced at Billie, who shook her head. Jewelry?

  The bartender wiped at an imaginary speck on the small bar. Billie wondered how he filled his days. “I think…” he began. “Don’t be offended—but I think he’s got a whole lot on his mind these days, and I think he just plain forgot about your date. I’m real sorry. He will be, too.”

  “Oh, dear. This is a…I’m not sure what we…” Emma, anything but the “oh, dear” type, dissolved herself into pure confusion. “Young man, could we leave a message for when he checks in with you?”

  “Could be awhile,” the man said. “Days, even.”

  “Understood, but will you leave word that Aunt Emma and Billie Jo were by as planned, and now I guess we’ll head back to Ukiah. Beat the storm.”

  “There won’t be a storm. Presidents’ Day is coming up.” The bartender grinned. “Always nice that weekend.”

  Emma nodded. “Fine, but tell him to give us a ring. He knows the number. Unless he’s forgotten that, too!” And with an incredulous, politely upset little-old-lady laugh, she was up and off the stool, walking to the door with a slight hesitation, residual bewilderment in her stride.

  “You’re good,” Billie said when they were outside. “Did you ever act? Onstage, I mean?”

  Emma looked sideways and up at her sharply, as if grossly offended. “Of course not!” she snapped as she unlocked her car door. “So what do we know? Apparently Yvonne didn’t come here, maybe just made that call to find out if Stephen was here. He’s not camping and there’s no threat, and Penny Redmond is not with him, unless she was outside waiting in the car, but what sense would that make? No reason for us to hang around. Is there?”

  What the hell did Emma have against acting onstage?

  “We’ll go down Panoramic and take a jog by poor Miriam’s, and still get home early, okay?”

  Like her approval mattered. “Fine,” Billie said. By all means take the longer, harder, foggier, more dangerous route so we can waste time with a loony.

  “Two birds,” Emma said, even though one of their birds had flown the coop. Miriam’s trash can hardly seemed worth the time.

  Somewhere off the road that wound over and down the mountain were spectacular vistas of deep valleys, lush vegetation, waterfalls in this rainy season, and always, wildlife. But none of that was visible in the combination of night and the ever
-increasing white swirls. Emma said nothing but sat straight and at the ready behind the wheel. The narrow road twisted and the headlights of oncoming cars flashed onto trees a second before the cars themselves appeared. “We all love this, don’t we?” Emma muttered. “The near-wild at our back door. Nature’s splendors left unspoiled. But every so often, don’t you secretly wish they’d pave the damned mountain or put a freeway ramp over it or a tunnel through it so getting to the beach would be easier? Not that I’ve ever said it out loud before, for fear of being reported to the tree-huggers.”

  Billie allowed herself a small laugh of acknowledgment, but she swallowed the end of it as she saw flashing lights and a cluster of cars directly ahead. “Roadblock.”

  Emma had seen it in time and was braking. “Accident.” She exhaled dramatically, loudly, out of exasperation with the delay, or sympathy for the unlucky driver who hadn’t seen the next curve.

  The other stuck drivers had turned off their ignitions and were milling around the scene, dark shadows in the fog. “Ghouls,” Emma said. Then she leaned closer to the windshield and tilted her head, squinting. “I know that guy.” She gestured to where three highway patrolmen stood. “Excuse me a sec.”

  So much for ghoulishness, Billie thought. The scene through the windshield was like a surrealistic silent film. Everything in motion and nothing clear-edged through the veil of fog. Drivers, hugging themselves in the chill, relieved it wasn’t them this time. A tow truck raising an oversized crane, its back aimed toward rescue in the brush. An ambulance, motor idling, exhaust rising and joining the gauzy air. A fire truck. The Highway Patrol’s motorcycles. And all lit by overbright lamps braced against trees and on car hoods, their light bouncing back from the wild dark beyond the slender paved ribbon.

  This could last forever, Billie thought, wondering if they should attempt a U-turn on the narrow and congested mountain road, then backtrack to Sir Francis Drake. Couldn’t stop at Miriam’s, then, but who cared? Miriam’s fears were imaginary. Billie’s were real. Penny Redmond was still missing. Crazy Yvonne was still hellbent on proving something awful.