Just One Look

“Yes?”

No name. No hello. No company greeting.

“This is Grace Lawson.”

“Hold.”

The wait was not long. First Grace heard the static and then, “Grace?”

“Hello, Mr. Vespa.”

“Please call me Carl.”

“Carl, right.”

“You got my message?” he asked.

“Yes.” She did not tell Carl Vespa that it had nothing to do with why she was calling now. There was feedback on the line. “Where are you?” she asked.

“My jet. We’re about an hour outside of Stewart.”

Stewart was an air force base and airport about an hour and a half from her house.

Silence.

“Is something wrong, Grace?”

“You said to call if I ever needed anything.”

“And now, fifteen years later, you do?”

“I think so.”

“Good. And your timing couldn’t be better. There’s something I want to show you.”

“What’s that?”

“Listen, are you home?”

“I’ll be there soon.”

“I’ll pick you up in two, two and a half, hours. We can talk then, okay? Do you have someone to watch the kids?”

“I should be able to find someone.”

“If you can’t, I’ll leave my assistant at your house. See you then.”

Carl Vespa hung up. Grace kept driving. She wondered what he wanted from her now. She wondered about the wisdom of calling him in the first place. She hit the first number on her speed-dial again-Jack’s cell phone-but there was still no answer.

Grace had another idea. She called her friend of the no-menage, Cora.

“Didn’t you used to date a guy who worked in e-mail spam?” Grace asked.

“Yep,” Cora said. “Obsessive creep named-get this-Gus. Hard to get rid of. I had to use my own version of a bunker buster on him.”

“What did you do?”

“I told Gus he had a small wee-wee.”

“Ouch.”

“Like I said, the bunker buster. Works every time, but there’s often, uh, collateral damage.”

“I might need his help.”

“How?”

Grace was not sure how to put this. She decided to concentrate on the blonde with the X across her face, the one she was sure she’d seen before. “I found this photograph…,” she began.

“Right.”

“And there’s this woman in it. She’s probably late teens, early twenties.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s an old picture. I’d say fifteen, twenty years old. Anyway, I need to find out who the girl is. I was thinking maybe I could send it out via spam mail. It could ask if anyone can identify the girl for a research project, something like that. I know most people erase those e-mails, but if a few looked, I don’t know, maybe I could get a response.”

“Long shot.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And wow, talk about creeps coming out of the woodwork. Imagine the replies.”

“Got a better idea?”

“Not really, no. It could work, I guess. By the way, you notice I’m not asking you why you need to find the identity of a woman in a picture from fifteen, twenty years ago?”

“I do.”

“I just wanted it noted for the record.”

“So noted. It’s a long story.”

“You need someone to tell?”

“I might. I might also need someone to watch the kids for a few hours.”

“I’m available and alone.” Pause. “Sheesh, I have to stop saying that.”

“Where’s Vickie?” Vickie was Cora’s daughter.

“She’s spending the night at the McMansion with my ex and his horse-faced wife. Or as I prefer to put it, she’s spending the night in the bunker with Adolf and Eva.”

Grace managed a smile.

“My car is in the shop,” Cora said. “Can you pick me up on the way?”

“I’ll be there right after I grab Max.”

Grace swung by the Montessori Enrichment program and grabbed her son. Max had that near-tears thing going on, having lost several of his Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to a classmate in some dumb game. Grace tried to humor him, but he wasn’t in the mood. She gave up. She helped him get his jacket on. His hat was missing. So was one of his gloves. Another mother smiled and whistled while bundling up her little bundle in color-coordinated knit (hand-knit, no doubt) hat, scarf, and yes, matching gloves. She looked over at Grace and faked a sympathetic smile. Grace did not know this woman, but she disliked her intensely.

Being a mother, Grace thought, was a lot like being an artist-you are always insecure, you always feel like a phony, you know that everybody else is better at it than you. The mothers who doted obsessively on their offspring, the ones who performed their numbing tasks with that Stepford-ready smile and supernatural patience-you know, those mothers who always, always, have the right supplies for the ideal after-school craft… Grace suspected that these women were profoundly disturbed.

Cora was waiting in the driveway of her bubble-gum-pink house. Everybody on the block hated the color. For a while, one neighbor, a prissy thing properly named Missy, had started up a petition demanding that Cora repaint it. Grace had seen Prissy Missy passing around the petition at a first-grade soccer game. Grace had asked to see it, ripped it up, and walked away.

The color was hardly to Grace’s taste, but memo to the Missys of the world: Get over yourselves.

Cora teetered toward them in her stiletto heels. She was dressed slightly more demurely-a sweatshirt over the leotard-but it really didn’t matter. Some women oozed sex, even if dressed in a burlap sack. Cora was one of them. When she moved, new curves were formed even as old ones disappeared. Every line from her husky voice, no matter how innocuous, came out as a double entendre. Every tilt of the head was a come-on.

Cora slid in and looked back at Max. “Hey, handsome.”

Max grunted and didn’t look up.

“Just like my ex.” Cora spun back around. “You got that photo?”

“I do.”

“I called Gus. He’ll do it.”

“Did you promise anything in return?”

“Remember what I said about fifth-date syndrome? Well, are you free Saturday night?”

Grace looked at her.

“Kidding.”

“I knew that.”

“Good. Anyway, Gus said to scan the photo and e-mail it to him. He can set up an anonymous e-mail address for you to receive replies. No one will know who you are. We’ll keep the text to a minimum, just say that a journalist is doing a story and needs to know the origin of the photograph. That sound okay?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

They arrived at the house. Max stomped upstairs and then shouted down, “Can I watch SpongeBob?”

Grace acquiesced. Like every parent, Grace had strict rules about no TV during the day. Like every parent, she knew that rules were made to be broken. Cora headed straight for the cupboard and made coffee. Grace thought about which photograph to send and decided to use a blowup of the right side, the blonde with the X on her face and the redhead on her left. She left Jack’s image-again, assuming that was Jack-out. She didn’t yet want him involved. She decided that having two people increased chances of getting an identity hit and made the solicitation look less like the work of a crazed stalker.

Cora looked at the original photograph. “May I make an observation?”

“Yes.”

“This is pretty weird.”