Thin Air

Fogarty hesitated again.

'Pretend I'm a student, and I want to take his class. Do I stand outside and yell, `Hey, Leighton?''

'Her office is in Bradford, second floor.'

'Thank you very much,' I said. 'Is there anything in Ms. St. Claire's folder that would shed light on where she went?'

Fogarty didn't hesitate a moment.

'Absolutely not,' he said.

He'd have probably said that if there were a ransom note in there.

'And you have no thoughts on the matter?'

He shrugged in a worldly way.

'Marriages sometimes flounder,' he said.

I nodded thoughtfully.

She lay on the bed in the darkness and thought about her situation. Despite the eroding intensity of her fear, she was still all right. He had not touched her. And except for tying her up when he took her, he hadn't harmed her. She wasn't home. The ordinary life rhythms she had, perhaps for the first time in her life, established, were cacophonously disrupted, but she was still whole. She was still Lisa St. Claire. She thought of her husband. She knew he would find her. Sooner or later, no matter what, Frank would come. She missed him. She wanted more than she had ever wanted anything to see him. To see the door to this black room open and to see Frank walk through it. She had never been altogether sure she loved him. She liked sex with him. But she liked sex. If she were to be totally objective, she would probably say it wasn't better with Frank than others. With Luis, before, in fact, the wildness of it, the adventure of it, might have made sex with Luis a little better than sex with anyone. Frank had been the one she fled to after she fled Luis. And more than Luis, when she fled all that she had been. Frank had been calmness and stability and probably above all else safety. A tough cop. He would keep her secure. He would keep her whole. He would protect her from what she had been and from what she always feared she might be again. In his calmness and his clarity and his strength he was a stay against disintegration. It was ironic really, if she could detach herself, that the kidnapping had dispelled the last of the romantic vapors that had clung retrospectively to Luis. Now and then at breakfast in their upscale kitchen, quietly, ready to go to work, she would remember Luis and wonder if there might be something there that she shouldn't have abandoned-infinite possibility, maybe, music from beyond a distant hill, something like that. There had been an I-don't-give-a-damn excitement about Luis that Lisa occasionally remembered with nostalgia as she watched her husband eat the same breakfast he always ate. She liked him. He was good for her. But she had sometimes wondered, as her mind rolled over her life before him, if she had made a mistake. She knew she hadn't. She knew what Luis was, and even more, she knew what Luis represented for her. But often, in a sort of visceral way, she wondered about Luis. Now I do not, she thought. Now more than anything I have ever wanted, I want him to find me, and take me home. It was more than the corrosive fear that made her long for her husband. It was what he, was and what he represented-a life to be, lived, a connection to be nurtured, a full chance to be Lisa St. Claire. He'll come, she thought. He'll find me. And alone in the dark lying on the alien bed she cried for the first time since Luis took her.

Chapter 9

Rowena Leighton was small and slender and dark, with her dark hair pulled back in a French twist, and her big dark eyes made darker with mascara, and bigger by the lenses of her large round glasses. The glasses had blue and gold frames. She wore a loose yellow pants suit with a wide black belt, and black high-heeled shoes with laces and clunky heels like the Wicked Witch of the West used to wear. There were rings on most of her fingers, and large ornamental earrings in her ears. Her face was thin and her jaw line firm. Her lipstick was very loud and generously applied to a mouth that seemed as if, in its natural state, it would be kind of thin. It was an intense, intelligent face and at the moment it was nearly buried in a book titled Modes of Being: The Tactical Personae of Men and Women in the Modern World. Professor Leighton was carefully marking things with a yellow highlighter. I waited. She continued to mark.

I smiled courteously and said, 'My name is Spenser. I'm a detective, and I'm looking for Lisa St. Claire, who appears to be missing.'

She kept marking and I held the courteous smile until she finally looked up and saw it.

Charmed by the smile she said, 'Dean Fogarty called to say you might come by. What's this about Lisa?'

'She a student of yours?' I said.

'Yes. Very gifted.'

The office was cluttered with the detritus of scholarship. There were books piled everywhere, and manila folders spilling papers on the top of a long mission oak table under the windows. A Macintosh word processor sat on the corner of her desk, hooked to a laser printer on a small end table beside her.

'And you teach a class in self-actualization?' I said.

'A workshop, actually, for women in process,' Professor Leighton said. 'It's based on some of the transactional theories I've developed in my work.'

She gestured slightly with her head to indicate a cluster of five books on one shelf of her bookcase. They had been set aside and held upright by a pair of used bricks. I could see her name on the spine of each. I couldn't read the titles without turning my head parallel to the floor. That position is never my best look, so I passed on the titles.

'Tell me about Lisa?' I said.

'You're a detective?'

'Yes.'

'A police detective?'

'No, private.'

'Really? How fascinating. Have you always been a private detective?'