I was calling from a phone on the street and I didn't want to relinquish possession of it. After he rang off I stood there still holding the receiver to my ear so that I would look as though I were using the phone. I allowed a little time for Hoeldtke to reach his wife and another few minutes for her to thumb through her file of paid phone bills. Then, still holding the receiver to my ear, I hung one hand on the hook so she'd be able to get through to me when she called. A couple of times someone would linger a few yards away, waiting to use the phone when I got off it. Each time I turned and said apologetically that I expected to be a while.
The phone rang, though not before I'd begun to tire of my little exercise in street theater. I said hello, and a confident female voice said,
'Hello, this is Betty Hoeldtke, and I'm calling for Matthew Scudder.' I identified myself and she said that her husband had told her what I was trying to determine. 'I have the July statement in front of me,' she said.
'It shows three calls to Paula. Two of them were two-minute calls and one was three minutes. I was just now trying to imagine how it could have taken three minutes to leave a message asking her to call us, but of course first we would have had to listen to her message, wouldn't we?
Although I sometimes think the phone company's computers bill you for more minutes than you actually stay on the phone.'
'What were the dates of the calls, Mrs. Hoeldtke?'
'July fifth, July twelfth, and July seventeenth. And I looked up the June calls, and the last time we spoke with Paula was June the nineteenth. That's on our statement because she would call us and we would call her back.'
'Your husband told me about the code you used.'
'I feel a little funny about it, although we weren't really cheating the phone company out of anything. But it always seems—'
'Mrs. Hoeldtke, what was the date of the last call to Paula?'
'July seventeenth. She usually called on a Sunday, and July fifth when we first called and got the machine was a Sunday, and then the twelfth was a week later, and the seventeenth, let me see— twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen, Sunday Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday Friday— the seventeenth would have been a Friday, and—'
'You reached her answering machine on the seventeenth of July.'
'We must have, because that was the three-minute conversation. I probably left a longer message than usual to tell her that we were leaving for theDakotas the middle of next week, and to please call us before we left.'
'Let me make some notes,' I said, and jotted down what she'd told me in my notebook. Something didn't add up. All it very likely meant was that somebody's records were wrong, but I would spend as much time as I had to ironing out the inconsistency, like a bank teller working three hours overtime to search out a ten-cent discrepancy.
'Mr. Scudder? What happened to Paula?'
'I don't know, Mrs. Hoeldtke.'
'I've had the most awful feeling. I keep having the thought that she's—' The pause stretched. 'Dead,'
she said.
'There's no evidence of that.'
'Is there any evidence that she's alive?'
'She seems to have packed up and left her room under her own power. That's a favorable sign. If she'd left her clothes in the closet I'd be less optimistic.'
'Yes, of course. I see what you mean.'
'But I can't get much sense of where she may have gone, or what her life might have been like during the last few months she lived onWest Fifty-fourth Street . Did she give any indication of what she was doing?
Did she mention a boyfriend?'
I asked other questions in that vein. I couldn't draw anything much out of Betty Hoeldtke. After a while I said, 'Mrs. Hoeldtke, one of my problems is I know what your daughter looks like but I don't know who she is. What did she dream about? Who were her friends? What did she do with her time?'
'With any of my other children that would be a much easier question to answer. Paula was a dreamer, but I don't know what it was that she dreamed. In high school she was the most normal and average child you could imagine, but I think that was just because she wasn't ready yet to let her own light shine. She was hiding who she was, and maybe from herself as well.' She sighed. 'She had the usual high school romances, nothing very serious. Then atBallState I don't think she had a real boyfriend after Scott was killed. She kept—'
I interrupted to ask who Scott was and what had happened to him.
He was her boyfriend and unofficial fiance during her sophomore year, and he'd lost control of his motorcycle on a curve.
'He was killed instantly,' she remembered. 'I think something changed in Paula when that happened.
She had boys she was friendly with after that, but that was when she got really interested in theater and the boys were friends of hers from the theater department. I don't think there was much question of romance. The ones she spent the most time with, my sense was that they weren't interested in romance with girls.'
'I see.'
'I worried about her from the day she left forNew York . She was the only one who left, you know. All my others stayed nearby. I kept it hidden, I didn't let on to her, and I don't thinkWarren had any idea how I worried. And now that she's dropped off the face of the earth—'
'She may turn up just as abruptly,' I offered.
