As fall next returned, the missing man’s granddaughter sat on a pleasantly cool Saturday morning at a creek side table on the grounds of the Topanga Commune Organic Restaurant. The table was a half-mile upstream from the Forest. Cadence Grande smiled at the clusters of birds that sang in accompaniment to the low burble of Topanga creek. She had a bright, happy face, framed with shiny black hair bobbed pixie-fashion. A face attractive, if not beautiful, as much for what it said as for its features. A tailored nose and a wide mouth quick to smile, but it was her green eyes that truly spoke. They were arresting, settling firmly on whomever was talking to her, not flitting away. Normally, they said that here was a studier, a person of confidence and resolve. If they now flashed an occasional beacon of cynicism, it was because nothing had been normal since her arrival in Topanga last fall.
As she arranged her table, a tall pony-tailed waiter approached, doing his best Billy Jean dance steps along the flagstone pathway.
“How’s Miss Pixie today”? He wiped his hands on his apron already floured and spotted with the morning’s bread making. “The usual?”
“Good morning, John. That would be great. How’s business?”
“Not bad, unless you got bills.”
She thought for a second. “Ah, do I know that one. Can’t pay them, can’t ignore them.”
He laughed, left, and returned quickly. He presented her with a scone and the signature coffee procured, so the menu boasted, from a tiny Zapatista village deep in Chiapas.
She sat and had her breakfast. It dawned on her, as it often did these days, that she was sitting alone. Not for lack of friends, great and true friends. Not even counting the seventy-plus on Facebook. Not for lack of men either. She had been in a serious relationship, but it hadn’t worked out. Now she was seeing a pragmatic young man named Bruce.
No, the alone part was a deeper feeling, something that lurked beneath and unbalanced her confidence, like a giant squid brushing the keel of a becalmed sailboat.
The truth was, like many arrivals in Los Angeles (or, in her case, re-arrivals after a long absence), Cadence had begun to see her life as a movie. Ridiculous but true. And it helped. Helped to put into perspective the main scenes. Her father dead since she was fourteen, his interrupted presence somehow still around here in Topanga. A man whose own death he would imagine as an ongoing journey of the soul. Her mother, gone two years now. A woman whose own demise she would hold to be an unaccountable accident disrupting a practical plan. The dreamer and the to-do lister. They couldn’t have been more different.
Of course, at this point, Cadence didn’t get to ask them any more questions.
She let the movie roll to the next scene. Every time it played, it was shocking. Her mother reaching out with shrunken, bird-claw hands. Sitting bedside, Cadence could feel the hot malignancy, loose and raving, burning through the last timbers of her mother’s life. A conflagration so extravagant, so unconscionable, as to be beyond reckoning.
And it wasn’t the first fire to scorch Cadence’s psyche. The truth was, deep down, Cadence hated fire. As surely and profoundly as Ahab abhorred his whale.
She combed her hair back with her fingers. It was a new habit, impatient as if trying to sweep away the mental haze that intruded on her since returning to Los Angeles. A brume with a faint tang of burning, like the acrid tinge of smoke from an over-the-horizon inferno. She knew exactly when her inner nose first detected it.
She let the last real of her movie play.
Scene Six. Cadence, the orphan, arrives in Los Angeles. She is filled with hope. She finds a big surprise. Her grandfather Jess, her last known family member, is inexplicably gone. It isn’t the shock, or the guilty moment of bitterness. It is the empty feeling. No, a chasm. Hell, it is the Marianas Trench, the Challenger Deep, the Valles Marineris of empty feelings. Maybe melodramatic, but when she looks over that straight-falling edge into the abyss it eats up everything. Just at the moment she found a reason, a foothold, in her grandfather’s urgent telegram, the ground beneath her had fallen away. The owner of so many answers to so many unanswered questions … vanished. Only that tinge of mental smoke hanging in the air.
Thank God for the inner voice of her mother’s mops-and-brooms wisdom. That would carry her past all this. She took a deep breath and looked at the table.
Before her lay her folio sketchbook, along with something new in her life: a pile of fifth graders’ papers. This was good. She relaxed into a smile, thinking of the quirky innocence of her students.
She picked up her green marking pen (red was so last century and so, well, inflammatory). She wrote a gentle correction in the margin: “Abominable Snowman, not Abdominal Snowman.” Some of her girl students were taller than she was. Cadence was barely five feet, but her stature disguised much. Men and boys liked her, always deferring to her and sensing a coiled strength in her movements.
She graded papers for a solid hour, but her thoughts kept flowing to the fate of the Forest. The shop, just up the road, was shuttered. It looked neglected from the accumulating roadway detritus of dust, beer cans, and fast- food wrappings. Twice a week she dutifully raked and swept it up, but the road never quit spewing its debris.
Tomorrow she would be back there again. It was like tending a misbegotten memorial for a lost seaman, a place of vigil with no capstone to a life gone without a trace. Her vigil for Jess had elongated without clear reason, one month following another. She wasn’t going back home to Indiana. Her mother’s ghost, newly-formed and restive, was too close back there. Her grandfather — wherever he was — sure as hell wasn’t coming back here. She sensed that, finally, the waiting part was over.
“Missing person, consistent with prior history,” was the way the police report had put it. She knew better but couldn’t prove it because the very essence of her grandfather had been a magician’s coin trick. Now you see him, now you don’t. Mostly don’t. Like the same venerable coin, marked and dated, that the illusionist gives to one audience participant and pulls from the ear of another selected at random so that there could be no trick. But the trick, as the magician tells the audience, is the coin; it chooses its destination; the magician is only the emcee.
She frowned as she recalled the detective talking to her amid the yellow police tape and the fingerprint techs cluttering up the Forest.
“This is the only picture of him you have?” The detective was holding up a curled and faded little Polaroid, brittle and ancient specimen from a vanished technology. The man in the picture was blurred and distant, tall with a Fedora hat and beard. His face was shadowed. He was standing next to a road.
“Would you recognize him if you saw him?” he asked.
“I’m … I’m not sure.”
The detective stared hard at her.
“Not really. OK, no.”
“So you came here right after you got this?” The detective reached over and picked up the sender’s flimsy copy of a telegram. “We found this beneath a chair.”
“Yes. Three days.”
“Uh humm.”
“But what about the blood? Prints? DNA? This!” She walked over and put her hand on a three-inch deep cleft in the doorframe.
“That could’ve been something he did. Sometimes these old loners wig out. I’ve seen it before. Man goes ape and lights out. Anyway, we didn’t find any weapon.”
She stopped and just looked at him.
“Look … uh, Ms. Grande, sure there are matching prints and some blood drops down the hall, but then they just stop. It could just mean he cut his finger. There are maybe a hundred different fingerprints in here. Retail scenes are tough.”
She walked over and crossed her arms, standing next to the now-open trap door in the floor. It opened into a four-foot drop down to the creek side.
“Look, Miss, a door’s a door. It doesn’t matter which one he chose to leave by. This was closed when we got here. Ms. Grande, let me be candid with you. I’ve seen these cases before. Sometimes a, well, hobo-type never gets it out of his blood. Roadsong. White-line fever. Call it what you want. This man has absolutely no driver’s license history. No fingerprint record. Anywhere. There’s not much for us to work with”
He paused, thinking, and then went on. “You know the next step on a missing person investigation? When
