Bones

“You!”

She looked surprised by my guess, but then shrugged. She folded her arms, leaned back against the building, and said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

She shrugged again. “You don’t look like you were some little sweetcakes that never stepped out of line. Didn’t you ever fight with your mom when you were a teenager?”

I shook my head. “No, my mother died when I was twelve. Before I was a teenager. I used to envy the ones—” I caught myself. “Well, that’s not important.”

She was silent.

“If she had lived,” I said, “we probably would have fought. I got into all kinds of mischief even before I was a teenager.”

She began studying one of her fingernails. I was wondering how my memories of my mother might have differed had she lived another five years, when Gillian asked, “Do you remember the last thing you said to her?”

“Yes.”

She waited for me to say more. When I didn’t, she looked away, her brows drawn together. She said, “The last thing I said to my mother was, ‘I wish you were dead!’ ”

“Gillian—”

“She wanted me to watch Jason. She wanted me to cancel all my plans and do what she wanted, so she could go to the stupid concert. I was upset. My boyfriend was upset when I told him I couldn’t see him — so I yelled at her. That’s what I said to her.”

“She may be fine,” I said. “Sometimes people just feel overwhelmed, need to take off.”

“Not my mom.”

“I’m just saying that she hasn’t been gone for twenty-four hours yet. Don’t assume that she’s—” I stopped myself just in time. “Don’t assume that she’s been harmed.”

“Then I need you to help me find her,” she said. “No one else will take me seriously. They’re like your friends.” She nodded in the direction Stuart and the others had walked. “Think I’m just a kid — no need to listen to a kid.”

I pulled out my notebook and said, “You understand that I don’t get to decide if this story runs in the paper, right?”

She smiled.

Once I argued my editor into letting me pursue the story, I drove over to the Sayres’ home, a large two-story on a quiet cul-de-sac. Giles answered the door after scooping up a yapping Pekingese. He handed the squirming dog off to Gillian, who took it upstairs. Jason, he told me, had been taken to stay with his grandmother.

When I first approached Giles Sayre, I thought he might resent Gillian’s recruitment of a reporter for help with what could turn out to be an embarrassing family matter. But Giles heaped praise on his daughter, saying he should have thought of trying to enlist the Express himself.

“What am I going to do if anything has happened to Julia?” he asked anxiously.

Like Gillian, he was tall and thin and had pale blue eyes, but his hair was a much more natural color, a dark auburn. He had not slept; his eyes were reddened from tears which, by this point, could come easily, and which he didn’t try to hide.

He hurried to hand me several recent photographs of his wife. Her hair was dark brown, her large eyes, a deep blue. An attractive, self-possessed woman, she appeared to be perfectly groomed in even the most casual photographs. Gillian did not resemble her so much as her father, but Jason, I saw from a group photo, took a few of his features from each — her dark hair and aristocratic facial structure, his pale blue eyes.

“Which of these is the most recent?” I asked.

Giles selected a photograph taken at a Junior League event.

“Can I keep it? I can try to get it back for you, but I can’t make any promises.”

“No, that’s all right, I have the negative.”

This level of cooperation continued throughout the day. He met my involvement with a sense of relief, anxious to do whatever he could to help me with the story. The benefit was mutual — I gave him a chance to take action, directed some of the energy that up until now had gone to pacing and feeling helpless; his help made much of my job easier. It occurred to me that his anxiousness to spread the word was not something you’d be likely to find in a man who fears he has been cuckolded.

So I talked to neighbors and friends of Julia Sayre. I talked to other members of her family. The more I heard about her, the more I was inclined to agree with her daughter — Julia Sayre wasn’t likely to disappear of her own volition. Julia seemed fairly content with her life, content with just about everything except her relationship with her daughter. The universal opinion on that matter was that Gillian’s hellion phase was bound to come to an end soon — according to friends, no one was more sure of that than Julia.

If she was conducting an extramarital affair, Mrs. Sayre had been extremely discreet about it. I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that she had left Giles Sayre for someone else, but it was no longer my pet theory.

I asked Gillian to tell me again what her mother had been wearing. A black silk skirt and jacket, she said. A white silk blouse, a pair of black leather pumps and a small black leather purse. Her only jewelry had been a simple gold chain necklace, a pair of diamond earrings, and her wedding ring.

“Not her wedding ring, really,” Giles said. “On our fifteenth anniversary, we had new rings made.” He held his up. “Hers is gold, like this one, and it has three rubies on it.”

He drove me to the mall where she had last been seen. With his help, I got the Nordstrom manager to look up