TWENTY
Kate woke up shortly before eight o'clock that evening, disoriented by waking to darkness, but rested. She wasn't hungry, there was nothing of interest on the television, and there was no reason for her to stay here. She threw her things back into her bag and checked out - to the mild consternation of the young desk clerk - got back on the freeway, and drove north.
At ten o'clock, she was checking into another hotel room, this one in downtown Seattle. She called Lee to give her the address, received Lee's assurance that Jon would drive down and drop the packet of photographs off that very night so she would have them tomorrow, and then pulled on her down parka, hat, gloves, and scarf and went out to prowl the streets.
This late at night, and without even a photograph in her hand, there would not be much point in cruising for the truly homeless, who would be under roofs or underground by now. However, she could get an idea of where young people would congregate and what part of town the squats were in, and return the next day armed with photograph and daylight.
She began with Pioneer Square and worked her way up past the Pike Place Market and down along the waterfront. She went into every coffeehouse and cafe, not bothering with the bars or the restaurants with linen on their tables. Jules might have an adult-sized brain, but she had neither the face nor the money for adult entertainment. If she was here, she would be with young people.
So Kate explored, entering a coffeehouse with a roaring espresso machine and a clientele that made her feel middle-aged, ordering a cup of decaf and nursing it, her eyes unfocused and her ears alert to conversation. Then, leaving the coffee half-drunk, she wandered along a few doors down to a vegetarian restaurant, where she ate some tasteless but undoubtedly nutritious soup and listened to a long and technical discussion about the growing of marijuana beneath artificial lights. She didn't finish the soup either, just left her money on the grimy plywood table and went on down the street to a bookstore that had a coffeehouse tacked on the side.
In and out, uphill and down. Eventually, the doors began to close, the people moving on to nightlife in more private venues. Kate walked under the raised freeway, saluted the lights of the city's space needle, and went back to her room, where she half-watched a violent movie on the television and tried not to think about the generous supply of alcohol in the minibar.
On Sunday morning, Kate was out early. In her pocket was a paper with several addresses, copied from the telephone book's listing under 'Housing and Emergency Services,' and a map from the front desk with those addresses x-ed in. A call to the city's shelter hot line had given her the places most likely to be chosen by a teenager; those places were circled, and Kate went to them first.
It was a long, cold, and dreary morning among the outcasts, and when a listless snow began to fall a little before noon, Kate gave up and took a taxi back to her hotel. A hot, plentiful lunch helped thaw her out, and when the packet of photographs arrived at one o'clock, she decided that it was feeble of her to be chased home by some snow, which had more or less stopped anyway, and besides, she'd feel a real idiot when Jon asked her if his efforts to get her forty pictures of Jules Cameron had done any good. With a marker, she wrote, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? along the top of each photograph, and along the bottom, CALL COLLECT, with her San Francisco telephone number. She drank the last of her now-cold coffee, slid the envelope into an inner pocket, and took herself back out onto the slick streets.
She posted ten of the one that looked like Jules now, and seven of the long-haired Jules, putting them on bulletin boards in busy coffeehouses and in the shelters. No one told her that they had seen Jules. She took a bus north through the city to the university district and spent a couple of hours there, asking questions, showing the pictures, posting a few. Two or three people thought the girl in the picture looked vaguely familiar, but it never went beyond vague.
The gray sky dimmed into dusk and the snow started up again. Kate took refuge in a restaurant and ordered a bowl of soup, sitting near the window and watching the flakes come hypnotically down, illuminated by the headlights of cars and the pools of light beneath the streetlamps. She was in the heart of the university district, and the people walking past looked like the students of any other university she'd ever seen, only more warmly dressed: backpacks and parkas, boots and woolen caps, an occasional foolhardy soul riding a bicycle and a number of others walking their bikes through the rapidly collecting layer of white on the ground. A young woman walked by with a dog, he trotting with a Frisbee in his mouth, she striding in knee-high boots under several thick skirts and wearing a colorful patchwork jacket and a loose rolled cap from Afghanistan. All she needed to complete the picture was a —
'Oh shit,' said Kate aloud, looking at the woman and seeing another. 'Oh my God.' A camera. All she needed was a camera. There had been a whole busload of Afghan gypsies, one of them with a camera, at the rest stop, with Jules, just as that fateful headache had been coming on. A camera… taking pictures.
Kate stood up violently and went for the door, shrugging her way into her damp parka. She stopped, turned back to drop some money on the table, and headed back toward the door, where she halted a second time, stood with her head down thinking for a moment, and then turned to search for the waitress. The entire restaurant had fallen silent and was watching her, with expressions ranging from amusement to apprehension. The waitress was one of the latter, and Kate's words to her did not soothe her much.
'Do you know the name of that bus company, the one that transports you but stops at places along the way?'
The waitress was looking positively alarmed by the end of the question, and it dawned on Kate that she'd been less than comprehensible.
'Sorry, I'm not making much sense.' She tried a smile out on the woman. 'There's a sort of hippie bus company, if you want to go to Los Angeles, for example, but they'll stop on the way to visit hot springs or the beach, things like that.'
'You want to go to L.A.?' the woman asked hopefully.
A young man with matted blond dreadlocks and the face of a bearded angel cleared his throat. 'You mean the Green Tortoise?'
'That's it. Do you know if they have an office around here?'
He shrugged. 'Probably.'
'How could I find them?'
He glanced sideways at his companion as if suspecting a trick question, then ventured, 'The phone book?'
'Ah. Of course, the phone book. Thanks,' she said. 'And thank you,' she added to the waitress, then let herself out into the snow, heading to the phone booth she'd spotted across the street.
It was, of course, Sunday night, and there was no answer at the local number listed for the alternative bus company. Possessed of a raging impatience, Kate slipped and slithered her way around the district, showing off her pictures, to absolutely no avail. Eventually, she went back to the hotel, and a long time later she fell into a few hours of shallow sleep.
The snow had warmed and turned sloppy during the night, sloppy and wet. Kate's shoes, once waterproof, were no longer, and her feet were frozen as she stood on the sidewalk, hugging herself and rubbing her hands, waiting for someone to come and open the Green Tortoise office. She'd been there for half an hour, and the office should have been open twenty minutes ago, at nine.
At half past nine, she spotted a longhaired couple making their slow and affectionate way down the street, and she was not much surprised when they stopped in front of the door. The man extricated an arm and dug into a pocket for a key ring, kissed his companion a long good-bye, and opened the door. Kate followed on his heels.
It was not much warmer inside than out. The man went around the room switching on lights, heaters, and a computer, and finally he took off his scarf and gloves, indicating that he was open for business.
'Can I help you?'
'I hope so. I'm trying to trace one of the passengers on a bus of yours that went through Portland just before Christmas.'
He unbuttoned his coat, revealing a thick green fisherman-knit sweater beneath.
'Why?'
Reluctantly, Kate took out her ID and showed it to the man. He looked at it carefully and took off his hat. His hair was not actually long, she noticed; in fact, it was surprisingly neat.
