“Okay, Mark would not benefit in a major financial way from her death, but if the clients who place their trust in him were to hear that his wife was behaving irrationally, that he couldn’t control her, it might have a negative effect on his professional life.”
Rae almost ran the red light at Seventh and Howard. She slammed on the brakes, throwing both of us forward against the seat belts, and turned to me, blue eyes wide. “You think that Mark engineered this disappearance?”
“I don’t
Someone beeped behind us. Slowly Rae put the car in gear. “Mark loves Jen,” she said.
“According to whom? Jen? Ricky? You? How well does anybody know what anybody else really feels?”
Rae was silent.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it from my bag, answered. Terry Wyatt, calling from her sister’s house in Atherton.
“Any progress on locating Jen?” she asked.
“I’ll know more after my staff meeting at five. You’re staying at the Aldins’?”
“Yes, but my husband’s at home, in case Jen tries to contact me there. I don’t think that’s likely, however; we argued when we spoke yesterday.”
“About…?”
“This obsession of hers, of course. She was carrying on about Mom’s cousin who died when we were little, Josie Smith. Said she thought Josie had something to do with Mom’s disappearance. When I told her it was a ridiculous notion, reminded her that Josie died a full year before Mom left, she got very dramatic and secretive. Said there were things I couldn’t understand because I hadn’t been there.”
“Been where?”
“That’s exactly what I asked her. When she wouldn’t explain, I kind of-no, I
I tried to recall the death date for Josie Smith that Derek had supplied me. It had indeed been a full year before Laurel’s disappearance. “Maybe Jennifer meant that the shock of losing Josie prompted your mother to disappear.”
“Realize life is too short, dump everything and everyone, start over, you mean? I don’t know; I was too young to gauge how much or how little Josie’s death affected her. But if it was traumatic enough to make her want to bail on us, why would she have waited a year? And why all the drama on Jennifer’s part?”
Good questions, both of them. I told Terry I’d phone her after the staff meeting and ended the call.
Rae had been glancing anxiously at me as I’d been talking. She said, “That was the sister?”
“Yes. Apparently Jennifer has concocted a conspiracy theory involving a dead woman.”
Nearly ten that evening. I was on the couch in my sitting room, the box of Laurel Greenwood’s possessions open at my feet. I had a fire going against the chill of the fog and a cat slumbering on either side of me. Ralph and Alice, happy to have me home. A vase of orange gladiolas, a card reading “Congratulations!” propped against it, sat on the cedar chest I used as a coffee table. Michelle Curley, teenaged neighbor and guardian of the pets and premises in my absence, knew how to win points with her clients-even if her mother was going to give her hell about picking the flowers from her carefully tended garden.
I sighed and closed my eyes. They felt dry, tired. Maybe I should try some of those drugstore reading glasses for close work…
The staff meeting I’d called for five o’clock had run over two hours. Charlotte had come up with no activity on Jennifer’s credit cards and bank accounts. The field interviews with her friends and clients had proved inconclusive; all they really accomplished was to confirm that Jennifer had been out of touch with everyone except Rae. As I listened to the verbal reports, I was struck by the similarities between what people had said about Jennifer and her mother: both were described as talented, professional, reliable, a good friend, and by all appearances as having an excellent marriage.
After I’d shifted some assignments and adjourned the meeting, Patrick, Rae, and I called out for a pizza and held a brainstorming session. We concluded that Rae should look into the particulars of Jennifer’s renting the flat on Fell Street and Patrick should continue coordinating our findings.
I called Derek at home and asked him to dig further into the backgrounds of the two men who had lied to me in Paso Robles, Jacob Ziff and Kev Daniel. I would continue to delve into Laurel’s past, flying back to the central coast for follow-up interviews with Ziff and Daniel later in the week, and also try to see the Magruders upon their return to Morro Bay.
Tonight I’d begun looking through Laurel’s possessions: handmade birthday, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day cards from Jennifer and Terry; a fifth-wedding-anniversary note from Roy, saying it was redeemable for “one hot screw” at the bearer’s request; Laurel’s diploma from San Jose State and other professional certificates; a framed photograph of Laurel, Sally Timmerman, and an attractive redhead who must be Josie Smith, all in their late teens and posed in front of a small Airstream trailer-the infamous “bordello.” There were dozens of letters from people whose names had not come up in the background on Laurel, but which seemed innocuous and had made for uninteresting reading. She’d saved programs from church and PTA events she’d helped organize. A newspaper picture of the Greenwoods on the occasion of the tenth-wedding-anniversary party Sally and Jim Timmerman had given them at the Paso Robles Inn showed a handsome couple; Roy was very lean, with chiseled cheekbones and wavy brown hair and a brilliantly white smile-a good advertisement for a dentist. And then there were the usual souvenirs: playbills and ticket stubs from productions that had run here in the city over twenty years ago; programs from sports events; a map of Yosemite National Park with a Tuolomne Meadows campground circled in red; mementos of various family-oriented tourist destinations. And photographs, dozens of them, of the four Greenwoods on those vacations.
What was interesting to me was what was
Well, maybe Laurel hadn’t been a letter writer. Or kept a diary or journal. Maybe Anna had held back the family and school mementos. Maybe, as he had her paintings, Roy had destroyed anything from her former lovers.
Or maybe, if Laurel had deliberately disappeared, she had taken the important things with her, leaving behind what didn’t matter.
Cards from her children and family photographs didn’t matter?
Cold, extremely cold.
Of course, if she’d deliberately disappeared, she
I made a note to ask Anna Yardley if there were any more things of Laurel’s in existence, and then turned my attention to the last item in the carton, her postcard collection.
It was contained in a small wooden file box, the kind that women with more domestic inclinations than me use to store recipes. A bundle of cards nearly three inches thick. I took out the first, saw it was addressed to Laurel in a bold, slanting hand at the Greenwoods’ home in Paso Robles. Just an address, no message. Its postmark was five years before her disappearance, roughly a year after Terry was born. I checked the postmark on the last card: two weeks before her disappearance; they must be arranged in chronological order. Then I began examining them from front to rear.
First mental health day: Cayucos. Ironic that it was the same as her final destination. Second: San Simeon. Third: Cambria. Fourth: Morro Bay. Then she’d ventured inland: to Santa Margarita Lake, San Miguel, and Guadalupe. And on it went, with no seeming pattern, the destinations ranging farther and farther away. After four years the mental health days came closer together, from once or twice a month to once a week. I wondered if Roy had noticed the increased frequency; certainly the girls’ babysitter had. And I wondered why Laurel hadn’t sent postcards from here in the city when she came to visit her cousin Josie. Maybe the cards were only allowed on her solitary getaways.
