take a while, but Jen… patience has never been her long suit.” He ran his fingers through his disheveled hair, flopped onto the sofa opposite me.
“Sharon, I’m afraid for Jen. I thought launching an investigation would give her some peace of mind, but instead it’s made her even more disturbed. It’s as if she’s become caught up in her mother’s insanity.”
“I’ve found nothing to indicate that Laurel Greenwood was insane.”
“Isn’t it crazy behavior to lie about where you’re going, run off God knows where to do God knows what, and leave the people who love you in limbo?”
“Laurel didn’t lie; she went exactly where she said she was going. After that, we don’t know what happened to her. And Jennifer hasn’t been gone all that long. There may be a reasonable explanation why you haven’t heard from her.”
“Nevertheless, I’m afraid that Jen is replicating her mother’s behavior for some skewed reason that only she can understand.”
With a chill I thought of the possibility that had occurred to me on Friday: that Laurel Greenwood had killed herself. Had that possibility also occurred to her daughter?
Mark added, “I think you’ll agree that for the time being you should drop your investigation into Laurel’s disappearance and concentrate on looking for Jen. We need to get her professional help.”
“I’m not sure that’s the best course of action.”
“Why not?”
“Because I think it would be better if I work both cases concurrently. Like you, I have the feeling that Jennifer’s disappearance is bound up with whatever happened to her mother.”
“So that’s where we’re at,” I said to my employees. It was two in the afternoon, and they were all assembled around the table in our conference room, casefiles in front of them. “And it means even more overtime for us.”
No one protested. They all loved a challenge, even if it meant canceling personal plans.
“The key here is to prioritize,” I added. “Do all you can for clients with urgent work, shift the non-urgent jobs to our usual subcontractors.”
Charlotte said, “I tried to give the Ames job to Tamara Corbin, but her agency is swamped, too.”
Tamara Corbin. The young, enterprising woman had recently become a full partner in my friend Wolf’s firm, and already it seemed natural to think of it as hers.
“Dunlap and Dunlap are very good,” I told Charlotte, “and there’s also the Newell Agency. Now,” I went on, “Mark Aldin doesn’t want his wife’s disappearance to become public knowledge yet. She hasn’t been gone long, and there may be a perfectly good explanation for her absence. He’s contacted the police in Atherton, and while they- and most other official agencies-are bound by the seventy-two-hours rule for missing persons, they’ve asked the highway patrol to put out a BOLO on Jennifer. I’ve talked with my various contacts at other departments in the Bay Area, and their people will also unofficially be on the lookout. But those of us in this room are going to have a head start on any official investigation. Something triggered Jennifer Aldin lying to her husband and her unexplained absence. It’s up to us to find that trigger.”
While I was handing out assignments and Kendra was passing around copies of the photograph of Jennifer that her husband had provided me, Rae slipped into the conference room and sat on an extra chair by the wall. I finished with Charlotte, asking her to get a list of Jennifer Aldin’s bank accounts and credit card numbers and check for activity on them, and then ended the meeting.
Rae stood up and came over to the table. The fog had swept in around noon, enveloping the city in cold and damp, and she was bundled against it in a blue sweater that matched her eyes, her red curls disheveled by the wind off the bay. The sweater fit loosely, and I realized that she’d lost the five pounds of extra padding she’d always complained about. All that hiking, I supposed.
I asked, “What’re you doing here?”
“I want to help you look for Jen.”
“You’re supposed to be home writing your novel.” She’d told me she had an October deadline.
“It’s not going well. In fact, I’m blocked. They say that happens with second books sometimes. Ricky’s down in L.A. for a couple of days, and I need a distraction. Better to be doing something to find Jen, rather than sitting around worrying about her.”
I considered. Rae had been a damn good investigator, and I could use all the help I could get. “Let’s sit down and kick some ideas around, then. From what Mark tells me, you’re one of the few people Jennifer’s remained in touch with.”
“I am. Her other friends… well, I guess they just got tired of hearing about her obsession with her mother.”
“But you’ve stuck by her.”
“I don’t give up when a friend’s in trouble. You know that.”
“Yes, I do. The two of you talked on Friday?”
“Yes. She called in the morning, concerned because she hadn’t heard from you. I told her that the investigation would probably take time, assured her that you’d be in touch when you had something to report. But frankly, I don’t think she listened to me.”
“How did she seem?”
“Frustrated. Overly emotional.”
“I’ve got Patrick, Craig, and Julia interviewing her other friends and clients. Charlotte’s checking on her credit cards and bank accounts. But this doesn’t feel like one of those situations where she’s just checked into a motel to brood. You have any idea where she might’ve gone? A special place, maybe?”
“She and Mark have a second home near Tahoe-”
“He asked a neighbor who has a key to check it; she hasn’t been there.”
“His sailboat? It’s berthed at the St. Francis Yacht Club.”
“One of the first things he thought of. No.”
An uneasy look crossed Rae’s face.
“What?” I said.
“Well, there’s the flat. But I called there last night and went by first thing this morning and again before I came over here. No sign of her.”
“What flat?”
“Jen has this place that Mark doesn’t know about, here in the city, where she sometimes goes to be alone. It’s in one of those big old Victorians on Fell Street, across from the Panhandle.”
The narrow wooded strip that extends some eight blocks from the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park. “She goes there to be alone?”
“Yes,” Rae said firmly. “To be alone. Not to meet men, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t. But can’t she find space to be alone in that big house in Atherton? Or at their Tahoe place?”
“Shar, to understand her, you’ve got to understand Jen and Mark’s relationship. He’s a nice guy and he loves her, but he has a big ego, big needs. Sometimes it gets to be too much for her and she has to escape.”
“Explain these big needs.”
“Nothing unusual for a high-powered guy. He just wants her to be there for him twenty-four seven. Ricky can be like that, but it’s okay for us because the record-company business and his performing keep him away from home a lot of the time, and I can work then. But Mark does most of his work out of his home office, and Jen has her studio on the property; when Mark wants attention, he feels free to interrupt her whether she’s working or not, and she feels she has to drop everything. They also have a busy social life-exhausting, I’d call it. So, once a week she tells him she’s taking a class or meeting a friend or a client, and goes to the flat to work on her textile designs in peace.”
Just as her mother had gone on day trips to paint.
“And she told you about this place that she keeps secret from her husband. Why? So you could cover for her?”
Rae frowned. “You sound so judgmental.”
I guessed I did. I liked Mark Aldin, and the idea of Jennifer deceiving him that way bothered me. But I’d learned long ago that you shouldn’t attempt to judge a relationship that you don’t live inside of. “Sorry,” I said. “But
