McCone And Friends

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh…” she stared down into the teacup. “I don’t know. About the healing process. About everyone’s potential to be.”

I waited for her to go on. Then I realized that was it. Great conversational diet for a kid to sink her teeth into: healing process, potential to be.

What happened when Adrian was worried about an exam? When she hurt because her favorite guy didn’t ask her to the dance? When she was scared of any one of all the truly scary things kids had to face in the city, in this world? Where did she retreat to lick her wounds?

I was getting mad, and I knew why. Like Adrian, I’d grown up in a home where everything was talked about in abstractions. In my case, should and shouldn’ts, what-will-people-thinks and nice-girls-don’ts. I knew where Adrian Conway retreated: not to a nest of family affection and reassurance, but into a lonely lair within herself, where she could never be sure she was really safe.

I wasn’t mad at Donna Conway for her arm’s-length treatment of her daughter, though. I was mad at my dead grandmother, who raised me after my parents were killed in a car wreck. Donna Conway, even though she wasn’t able to deal with emotion, had said she was willing to spend her last dollar to get Adrian back. Grandma wouldn’t have given two cents for me.

I wanted to go back to All Souls and talk the case over with Sharon, but when I got to Bernal Heights, where the co-op has its offices, I made a side trip to our annex across the triangular park from our main building. Lillian Chu, one of the paralegals who worked our 800 line, lived in Diamond Heights, and I thought she had a kid at McAteer. Maybe there was something going on with Adrian Conway that the classmates the police and I had questioned couldn’t or wouldn’t tell.

Lillian was just going off shift. Yes, she said, her son Tom was in Adrian’s class, and he was due to pick her up in about five minutes. “We’re going shopping for new running shoes,” she added. “The way he go goes through them, I should have bought stock in Reebok.”

“Could I talk with Tom for a few minutes?”

“Sure, I’ve got to run over to the main building and check about my payroll deductions. If you want, you can wait here and I’ll send Tom in.”

I sat in Lillian’s cubicle, listening to phones ringing and voices murmuring on the 24-hour legal hot line. After a while a shaggy-haired young guy with a friendly face came into the cubicle. “You Rae? Mom says you want to talk to me?”

“Yes, I want to task you about Adrian Conway. Her mom’s hired me to find her.”

Tom Chu perched on the corner of the deck. His expression was still friendly, but a little guarded now. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you want to tell me.”

“You mean like dirt.”

“I mean anything that might help me locate her.”

Tom looked uncertain.

“This isn’t a game,” I told him. “Or a case of a mother trying to find out more than her daughter wants her to know. Adrian’s been missing for over two weeks now. She could be in serious trouble. She could even be dead.”

“Yeah.” He sighed heavily. “Okay, I don’t really know anything. Not fact, you know? But…You talk with her boyfriend, Kirby Dalson?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you think of him?”

“What do you think of him?”

“Bad news.”

“Why?”

Tom drew one of his legs up on the desk and fiddled with the lace of his sneaker; from the looks of the shoe, Lillian should have invested in Reebok. “Okay,” he said, “Kirby’s…always into something. Always scamming. You know what I’m saying?”

“Drugs?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think they’re his main thing.”

“What is?”

He shrugged. “Just…scams. Like a few times he got his hands on some test questions beforehand and sold them-for big bucks, too. And for a while he was selling term papers. Scalping sports and concert tickets that you knew had to be stolen. He’s always got a lot of cash, drives a sports car that everybody knows his folks didn’t buy for him. He tells his parents he’s got this part-time job in some garage, but all the time he’s just scamming. The only job he ever had was cleaning up the food concession area at Ocean Park Plaza, but that didn’t last long. Beneath him, I guess.”

“What about Adrian-you think she was in on his scams?”

“She might’ve been. I mean, this past year she’s changed.”

“How?”

“Just…changed. She’s not as friendly anymore. Seems down a lot of the time. And she’s always with Kirby.”

“Did this start around the time her father left?”

He shook his head. “After that. I mean, her old man left. Too bad, but it happens.” His eyes moved to a photograph on Lillian’s desk – the two of them and a younger girl, no father. “No,” he added, “it was after that. Maybe six months ago.”

“Do you remember anything that happened to Adrian around that time that might have caused this change?”

He thought. “No-sorry, I know Adrian okay, but she’s not really a good friend or anything like that.”

I thanked him and asked him to call me if he thought of anything else. Then I walked across the park to the freshly painted Victorian where our main offices-and the attic nest where I live-are.

The set-up at All Souls is kind of strange for a law firm, but then even the location is strange. Bernal Heights, our hillside neighborhood is the southeastern part of the city, is ethnically mixed, architecturally confused, and unsure whether it wants to be urban or semi-rural. At All Souls we’re also ethnically mixed; our main building is a combination of offices, communal living space, and employees’ separate quarters; and most of us don’t know if we’re nineties progressives or throwbacks to the sixties. All in all, it adds up to an interesting place to work.

And Sharon McCone’s an interesting person to work for. That afternoon I found her behind her desk in the window bay at the front of the second floor-slumped spinelessly in her swivel chair, staring outside with that little frown that says she’s giving some problem a work over. She’s one of those slim women who seem taller than they are-the bane of my pudgy five-foot-three existence-and manages to look stylish even when she’s wearing jeans and a sweater like she had on that day. When I first came to work for her, her dark good looks gave me attacks of inferiority because of my carrot top and freckles and thrift-shop clothes. Then one day I caught her having her own attack-mortified because she’d testified in court wearing a skirt whose hem was still pinned up waiting to be stitched. I told her she’d probably started a new fad and soon all the financial district power-dressers would be wearing straight pains around their hemlines. We had a good laugh over that, and I think that’s when we started to be friends.

Anyway, I’d just about decided to stop back later when she turned, frowned some more, and snapped. “What?”

The McCone bark is generally worse than the bite, so I went in and sat in my usual place on her salmon-pink chaise lounge and told her about the Conway case. “I don’t know what I should do next.” I finished. “I’ve already talked with this Kirby kid, and if I come back at him to soon-”

“Aunt June.”

“What?” I’d only mentioned Adrian’s favorite aunt and Donna’s apparent dislike of her in passing, and Sharon hadn’t even looked like she was listening very hard. She’d been filing her nails the whole time-snick, snick, snick. Someday I’m going to tell her that the sound drives me crazy.

“Go see Aunt June,” she said. “She’s Adrian’s closest relative. Mom disapproves of her. Go see her.”

If it didn’t save me so much trouble, I’d hate the way she puts things together. I stood up and headed for the