rugs.”
“Odd,” said Emily. “Why there? Why not the family home?”
“He had his reasons. He seemed to feel that it was likely she was going to make a scene about being snatched off the street like that, and that she would probably raise hell and fight. He didn’t want the house staff and visitors to know all about it. He said he couldn’t think of a way it would do anybody any good, and he didn’t want her to become the staple of local gossip. I could agree with that.”
“Were there other people there?”
“I didn’t meet them, but there certainly were. This was a big place. When you got past the gate, there was a gravel road that wound a bit to get around a hill and past some old oak woods. The house was there. And beyond it there was a stream that looked as though it might have some trout in it. You need people to keep a house that size from turning musty and dusty. It was just private. He wanted to spend time with her and talk to her and see where he had messed up, and begin to fix it. He had always planned to have her go east to an Ivy League school. He said that running off in her junior year had probably blown that for good. But he said he had learned that it didn’t really matter. She was home and she seemed to be all right, and that was all that mattered.
“We were still there when she started to come around. She was healthy, all right, and strong. She started to struggle right away, and make sounds. She was beginning to swear at him, but he said she would calm down as soon as she didn’t have an audience. Phil and I offered to stay or fetch help, or whatever, but he said he was already in touch with a psychiatrist who’d had lots of success with runaways-he’d deprogrammed kids who had joined cults, and was part of some institute that helped kids get off drugs and so on. The doctor and three or four members of his staff would be there within a couple of hours. He said he didn’t care what it cost or how long it took, he was going to save Allison. We drove home feeling pretty good about what we had done.”
Emily waited. Sam seemed to leave her for a moment, his eyes staring out at the wall of mist that was moving into the sound from the open ocean. “It goes to show you,” he said.
“To show you what?”
“Everything I just told you was a lie.”
“A lie?”
“That’s right.”
“Everything?”
“All of it. Nothing was true.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sam lifted the box with the maroon cover, pulled out a file folder, and set it on the table between them. Emily picked it up. It was a packet of plain sheets of paper, typed in single-space paragraphs with a line skipped between them. “Read that.”
She began to read. “My name is Philip R. Kramer, and I am the owner and principal investigator of Kramer Investigations, Van Nuys Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. I swear on penalty of perjury that everything in this statement is true …”
35
As Emily read Phil’s file, she recognized the pseudo-authoritative language he had often used in constructing statements for clients when she was still serving as typist for him.
In certain instances I have included photographs, copies of official documents, audiotapes, and newspaper accounts. I think they are sufficient to corroborate this assembly of facts. But these are not the only ones I have. If there are gaps or discrepancies between this account and other versions of the story, I can make available other documents, photographs, recordings, or independent narratives by others to verify what I say here.
I first met Theodore Forrest on October 23 eight years ago. He called my office at 9:15 A.M. and made an appointment to speak to me about a missing-person case. My colleague Samuel Bowen and I met with Mr. Forrest at 1:30 P.M. that day in my office. He told us he lived on a country estate outside Fresno, and that his sixteenyear- old daughter, Allison, had been missing since late July.
She recognized that what she was reading was the same story that Sam had just told her. But it wasn’t, because it was Phil who was telling it. She pictured him as she read, and then she reached the end of the story Sam had told her. He and Sam delivered the girl to Theodore Forrest at the Espinoza Ranch, received their payment in the form of a cashier’s check, and drove home.
Our business was concluded, and that was the last time I saw or spoke with Theodore Forrest for eight years. I did not initiate any contact with him, nor did he with me or my employees.
On the fourteenth of June this year, I was engaged in a project intended to increase the income of Kramer Investigations. Over the previous twenty years, the Kramer agency had served a great many satisfied clients. Some clients had been assisted in a oncein-a-lifetime matter: a divorce, a lawsuit, a search for hidden assets, a defense against criminal charges. But it seemed to me that it might be useful to compile a mailing list of former clients and remind them that the agency was still there to fulfill their needs.
Emily could hear Phil’s voice saying the words, as though he were dictating them. She had been hearing him since she had begun to read, but now she could see him, too. It was June 14, only a few months ago. Phil was sitting in the office. He was behind his desk in the glassed-in room. She saw him through the clumsy, overly formal narrative he was typing on the computer, and then without at first expecting it or wanting to, she began to supply the other parts Phil had left out. Part of what she was seeing was memory, and where memory was not enough, her imagination supplied the rest, and he was alive again in her mind.
In her imagination, Phil was wearing the light gray super-100 wool pants that she had bought him around Easter. He had on a blue oxford shirt, and hanging on the spare chair at the side of the room was his navy summer-weight blazer. He wore a coat only when he was with a client or in court. It had been hot since the tenth of May, even though May and June were usually cool and overcast in Los Angeles. This year it had seemed to Phil that the climate had changed, and the little break that the June weather brought had been revoked.
Emily pictured him looking out through his glass wall toward the doorway. What was there to look at but April? She was so far away on the other side, and as he watched her, she must have seemed unreachable. Phil loved to touch, to put his hand on a small shoulder or around a thin waist, but he couldn’t right now. She was probably talking on the telephone, reminding clients to pay on time. Emily had noticed she had a pretty voice, like a singer, and it seemed to disarm deadbeat clients and make them send in a check here and thereoften it was just a token payment-as though they were giving her a little present.
Phil must have had a feeling of cynical amusement whenever he saw the smile appear on her face and knew that she had gotten one of them to agree. He would have said, “The stupid bastards.” That would describe him, too, more than any of them. She knew now he was as susceptible to a pretty woman as any fourteen-year-old boy. He was a man who made resolutions, but these had probably all been broken when the first temptation presented herself. The resolutions undoubtedly never lasted long enough to include him actually turning a woman down and watching her walk away forever. She imagined that he had watched April through the glass for a few more seconds, and then forgave himself. He would have said it didn’t really do any harm unless Emily found out, and he had always taken precautions to keep Emily from suspecting. He had kept her ignorant and resigned to a life she didn’t really understand.
Emily stopped herself. That was a false note. Phil would never have called her ignorant in his thoughts. He would have fooled himself long ago into believing he was protecting his wife from being hurt. He would have said male promiscuity was an inevitable force of nature, but that there was no reason to hurt Emily’s feelings.
But probably he wasn’t thinking about Emily at that moment, only about April. She was sweet and loving, and when she looked at Phil, he must have felt young again, and attractive. It had been a long time since Emily had looked that way at him. Pete’s death had been the major moment of her life. Since then she had looked at Phil as a partner in her hopes and disappointment, an old friend suffering with her.
Phil did a lot of brooding during the past year. Emily guessed that he had been getting ready to make a change in his life. He was coming up on his forty-fifth birthday, and for some reason, it was affecting him more than any earlier one had. Maybe for him it was Pete, just as it was for Emily. It was going to be five years since the crash, a big, round number.
Phil had always been intellectually and emotionally involved in his work, but not long ago, he had told her he
