“I agree.”
“He saw her. Or he knew something about her. He knew something!”
“Could be.”
“You think he’d act like that if he knew nothing?”
“I think,” Ray said, steering the Porsche west as they turned back onto the highway, “we have to go back to L.A. ”
“Did he see her or not? It’s a simple enough question.”
“He said she wanted to disappear,” Ray said. His jaw clenched. “As if he knows she’s alive.”
“Not exactly. Maybe we should keep going until we find her.”
“Where should we go?” Ray said. “ Palm Springs? Vegas? Salt Lake City? Albuquerque? St. Louis? Cleveland? Owego, New York? We have to go back now, Kat.”
“I’m angry at that old man,” Kat said. “He could have helped us.”
“Don’t think about him. Get mad at Leigh,” Ray said. “I know I wasn’t a great husband to her. But here I am, ready to change, and she’s not here to see it. And she wasn’t a great wife to me. I knew she was still sad about your brother. But years passed and she stayed just as sad. I wonder if she ever loved me. Maybe I was just the guy between Tom and Martin.”
“She loves you,” Kat said. “I read the poems.”
For a long time into the night, heading up toward the stars that shone so brightly, they drove in silence. The desert, yellow, gold, ochre, mustard, whipped by.
Ray drove too fast for another couple of minutes, then asked, “What was he like?”
“Who?”
“Tom.”
“You never asked her?”
“Why would I? I’d only start comparing myself to him. But it doesn’t matter now, I suppose.”
She found herself telling him about Tom. She told him about how he was the glue that kept their family together, how he kept them laughing, how he didn’t have an enemy in the world. Surprisingly, she didn’t get choked up like usual. To be able to talk about Tom without descending into utter grief was a new thing for her.
Ray listened intently, while dodging the semis and the road hogs trying to make it to their destinations before dark.
“She still loves him,” he said finally.
“She had broken up with him before he died. She left him for you, Ray! Why are you so stupid! Of course she loved-loves you!”
“You don’t understand. She-” He fell silent.
“Look, what she did with your partner-I don’t excuse that,” Kat said. “I can’t explain it, and I doubt she can explain it. Let’s find her. That’s all I know.”
“I don’t know where else to look,” Ray said.
“She took out some cash. We’ll find her.”
“Someone used her card. Not necessarily her. Like you said before.”
“Was Leigh’s PIN hard to guess?”
“No idea.” They talked about that. Leigh had apparently never told Ray her PIN or for that matter any of her computer IDs, facts Kat found telling. Now she was glancing at him again.
The shirt in the back was like a funereal shroud and they were just a couple of hearse-drivers. Her mind was like a Ping-Pong match. It was too late. No, it wasn’t. Yes, it was.
No, it wasn’t! “The police have to get right on this!” Kat cried.
“As soon as we get back, I’ll go straight to Rappaport. No more phone calls. I just hope they don’t clap me in jail when I do.”
Kat rifled through her purse for a brush. She knew how bad she looked from the tiny mirror under the sunshade in the car that revealed all in the unforgiving glare of the map light. She pulled a brush through her hair and discreetly tossed loose spikes out of the car window when she thought Ray wasn’t looking. Let the birds make nests.
She vowed to take more vitamins, meditate properly, love the people in her life, because you never knew how long they might be there. She considered calling Jacki. Checking her watch, she saw that it was late and decided to wait. Jacki and Raoul, and with luck, the babe, would be snoring away.
They had dropped into the L.A. Basin into light traffic. Thank God for Sunday, the one day you could still drive here. Full dark had come on. Sandwiched between sound walls on this strip of blacktop, they could be anywhere.
Kat, looking out the window at nothing, realized that she was very low, so low she could feel tears coming on. Every once in a while she needed to have a long talk with Tommy, and it felt like tonight would be another one of those nights. Where was Leigh? She just wanted to be in bed now, safe, even if she couldn’t sleep, even if she’d spend the night thinking about the losses and the pain…
But then she bit her lip and smiled to herself. Her sister had a new baby. Good things did happen. There was a chance for all of them still.
“Did you notice what she did as we were leaving the store?” she asked Ray.
“Who?” Ray passed in the left lane, doing ninety, headlights in front flashing by, headlights behind eating his dust. Kat held on tight.
“The woman at the register. The one with the big hooters.”
“She looked good.”
“She looked at the old man.”
“So?”
“I don’t know. I might be imagining this. But I thought she gave him a signal, sort of a wink. As if she’s not worried about Leigh, not taking this seriously. Would they really have shined us on like they did if they didn’t know Leigh is okay?”
“Yeah, sure, she’s fine,” Ray said. And Kat managed not to look at him this time, but she was wondering again, wondering what was really in his mind, whether he knew exactly where Leigh was. She remembered a California murder case in which an adulterous husband, Scott Peterson, killed his pregnant wife and threw her body into the Berkeley harbor. In the absence of much direct evidence, the jury had been mightily influenced by his conduct during the subsequent search, his calls to his girlfriend, his purchase of new toys.
Was Ray just making a case for himself, using her?
Kat, exhausted, barely spoke to him when they finally pulled into the driveway in Topanga. “Rappaport,” she said, fished out her car keys, climbed into her tin can of a car, and drove off, buckling her seat belt for another stretch before she’d be home in Hermosa.
Ray pulled the Porsche into the garage, watched the door lower, and went through the inside garage door into his house, beat through and through.
Something felt strange. The door led into his laundry room. He couldn’t see anything out of place there, but he had an instantaneous impression that something was not right. A smell? A peculiar air, not his.
Setting his jacket gently down on the floor instead of on its usual hook, he made his way slowly toward the darkened living room. “Who’s there?” His voice reverberated hollowly along the hard surfaces.
Nobody answered but the clock his mother had given him for his mantel. It chose this moment to let out its muffled chime.
Midnight. How perfect. He remembered Kat’s scare at Idyllwild and told himself to get a grip.
Rather than march directly into the living room, he sidestepped into the kitchen, where he had a view of the front room but some protection if he needed it, and flipped on the overheads: he chose a low counter to hide behind. He took his big chef’s knife out of its special place in a drawer, taking care to keep the drawer quiet. Stopping to see anything he could view from the kitchen, he moved silently into the living room and fumbled for the light on his Palmetti lamp.
Vomit desecrated his custom bamboo floor. The mess had been hastily wiped, with ugly gobbets left behind. Ugh. A throw had been moved from his bed to one arm of the sofa, and dragged sloppily on the floor.
Ray moved in closer. Who? Who would invade his home then sleep there? Certainly no typical burglar. Not the police?
Leigh?
Martin?
Now he walked rapidly through the house turning on lights, holding the knife tightly-but he wouldn’t need it, there was nobody there, not even an open window, no other signs of major disturbance.
Back in the living room he examined the pillow on the couch, silk, that had been taken from a nearby chair. A hair, mid-length, gray-rooted, lay at the center.
He drew a final conclusion easily when he spotted her favorite sweater draped over a chair. His mother had come, crashed in his living room, and left again. She had thrown up. She was sick.
After Ray cleaned up the mess, placing the rags he used directly into the washing machine with copious amounts of detergent and bleach, he drank coffee he probably didn’t need in spite of his lack of sleep.
His mother had slept here, tossed her cookies.
She never drank. Could she be ill? But he wasn’t quite ready to call her.
A quick perusal of the kitchen told him that she had invaded the cupboard above his refrigerator and the mirrored bar. A bottle of vodka Leigh had bought months ago that had gathered dust was less than one-fourth full. Last time he had noticed, the bottle had been three-quarters full. Even if Leigh made several of her favorites, cranberry and vodka, she hadn’t drunk that much that fast in all the time he had known her.
Had he driven Esme to this?
They had always had such a reliable relationship, loving in the way a mother and son had to love, superficially distant with an understood undercurrent. Now, the real nature of their relationship nagged at him like sinister whispers. What went on in her heart? What went on in his?
He tried to put himself in his mother’s position. He had risen up like a cobra hiding behind tall grasses, awaiting the right moment, attacking, determined to tear to bits her hard-won privacy. He had been very hard on her recently, denigrating the effect of all those years of love. Regret stabbed at him.
Afraid, he picked up the phone and called the house on Close Street in Whittier. She didn’t answer. He would have to drive over there, but he was too damn tired.
He left the shirt and the peanut shells in the trunk of the car and lay down just for a second on the living room couch.
And then it was Monday morning.
Esme still didn’t answer.
He called the office. “Denise, my mother’s ill.”
“You have Mr. Antoniou at one!”
