“Like we were going to argue with him, even though I saw the whole thing, too.” Emma stood across the counter and surveyed the scene. She liked Oliver, but she could feel what was coming next. Some girls have a kind of sixth sense about when a guy is going to hit on them. Emma did.
“You want to hang out some time?” Oliver asked. It was a question that he’d wanted to ask for weeks, but until that moment he just hadn’t had the nerve. He’d even asked his manager what he ought to do and she’d told him to go for it. He stopped what he was doing and looked over at her.
She lifted a shoulder and shrugged. Oliver wasn’t bad looking. He had a lean build, nice features, dark, expressive eyes magnified through horn-rimmed lenses. So the physical side wasn’t bad. Neither was his personality. One thing bugged her, however, and she couldn’t get past it. He was a video game developer and graphic novel geek who lived at home with his mom and splurged once a year for a trip to Comic-Con. She lived in the real world-and she wanted to fix it. The T-shirt she wore under her work blouse said it all.
She wasn’t really interested, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, either. Emma Rose simply didn’t want to live in the world of geekdom. She didn’t even want to visit it. Oliver was too, too into it. He’d once brought everyone out one at a time to look at his latest purchase in the trunk of his car.
“What is it?” Emma had asked. “Looks like a lamp.”
“Are you shitting me?” Oliver had looked at her like she didn’t know what day it was.
“Er, no,” she’d said. “Not shitting you at all.”
“This is a lamp used on the set of the Green Lantern movie.”
“Oh,” she’d said, looking at the ordinary desk lamp with some feigned interest. “I heard that movie got terrible reviews.”
“It wasn’t a masterpiece, but this is genuine movie history. Got it online. Paid a lot for it.”
As she played that memory over in her head, she tried to find the right words to let him down easy. A lie seemed to be the best course of action.
“I’m seeing someone,” she said.
Oliver nodded, his face turning pink with embarrassment. Right then he wanted to kill the manager who had told him to go for it. Some great advice.
“Oh,” he said, looking down. “I didn’t know.”
Emma didn’t like to hurt anyone’s feelings. “It’s kind of new,” she said quickly. “He lives in Seattle. Goes to the U.”
“Cool,” he said, lying through his teeth. He watched Emma as she went to fetch her coat.
“Yeah, don’t know where it’s going. I mean, I know it isn’t serious, but it is kind of new and I want to focus on hanging out with him.”
Oliver finished what he was doing and he gave the restaurant one last once-over. It was clean, ordered, and, he thought, perfectly bland. Just right for the customers who started the next day’s shift. He dimmed the lights and the pair exited. Emma went toward the bus stop and Oliver left on foot to wherever it was that he’d parked his mom’s car.
He stood still a moment and watched her, wondering why it was that no one had told him about her boyfriend.
Before turning in for the night, Dan Walton and Diana Rose checked all the locks on the windows and doors in their two-story Craftsman on Proctor in North Tacoma. It was a lovely neighborhood of fine old homes, a couple nice restaurants, and antique shops, but there had been a series of break-ins in the neighborhood over the past few months and caution had segued into routine. It wasn’t that the Roses were the kind of family to leave the front door unlocked at night, but neither were they the paranoid type who insisted on doing a perimeter sweep every time the sun dipped down behind the Olympics to the west.
Lately everyone was feeling a little uneasy. Tacoma neighborhoods had been experiencing a rash of violent crime-including the murder of a man who’d simply posted an ad for his late wife’s diamond tennis bracelet. He’d been robbed and bludgeoned five blocks away from the Roses’ house. Another case that had made headlines in the News Tribune was the story about a missing Pacific Lutheran University student, Lisa Lancaster. The last time anyone had seen the slender brunette had been in a campus parking lot.
Dan was an engineer with the city and Diana taught music at Annie Wright, an ivy-clad private girls’ school not far from their home. Diana had been depressed the past few weeks as her fiftieth birthday was approaching. She’d had breast cancer three years prior and had more cause to celebrate her half-century milestone than most, but Diana Rose was vain enough to try to thwart any semblance of advancing age. She readily admitted to friends that she’d had Botox treatments a time or two, but lately she’d been contemplating something a little more extreme than having toxins injected into her face. She wanted something more permanent. At least as permanent as could be, given the fact that no matter what anyone did, time did not stand still.
“You are as beautiful as the day I met you,” Dan said to his wife when she ruminated on getting older, losing their daughter to college in the fall, being empty nesters. Dan was a heavyset fellow, with stout arms, grey eyes, and hair that he combed over with such meticulousness each morning that many people who noticed it wondered just how it was that he’d managed to stretch so little so very far.
Diana, who was rail thin with angular features and wiry black hair, looked at the clock with a fixed gaze. Much longer than needed to determine it was ten-thirty.
“Emma must be out with friends,” she said. She’d always been a worrier, which, of course, accounted for the lines she wanted erased from her face.
“She’s fine,” Dan said, touching her shoulder gently. “She’s nineteen and you can’t control every minute of her life.” The words were said with more love than harshness and Diana quickly nodded. He was right. Emma was very, very responsible.
“Usually she texts me,” she said, “when she’s going to be late.”
Dan turned off the dining room light. “Ten-thirty isn’t late and she is-hate it or not-a grown woman.”
“Yes, but…”
“Let’s go to bed,” he said. “You’ve got an early day tomorrow.”
Diana knew Dan was right. She did have an early day. She was helping their church get things in order for a big fund-raiser, an auction. She had no one to blame but herself for the fact that she’d worked countless hours on the project. When no one wanted to take the lead on getting everything organized, Diana Rose raised her hand. Nearly from the minute she did, she remembered why it was she hated to lead anything at church or school. Leading meant doing all the work and getting all the blame when things went the slightest bit off course.
Diana picked up her phone and started to text a message.
“You need to give her some space,” Dan said.
“Just a minute.” She pushed the buttons on her phone and sent a message.
Be gone early for the auction setup. See you tomorrow night. Love you.
Diana followed Dan upstairs, passing by Emma’s shut bedroom door. Emma had become allergic to cats and Mocha, a brown and white Persian mix, had been banished from her bedroom-something neither Mocha nor Emma really liked. She loved their cat.
Diana set her phone on her bedside table just in case Emma texted back.
The next morning, Dan and Diana left the house in tiptoe-like fashion. Emma’s door was still shut. She had probably gotten in very, very late. Mocha was curled up in the downstairs bathroom sink. The house was quiet and very peaceful.
Diana made a mental note to remind Emma that while she was a grown woman, she still needed to be a courteous one. Throughout the day, Diana texted her daughter four times. Each time the note was a short missive about what to put out for dinner, to remember to feed the fish in the tank in the sunroom, and finally, a simple I love you.
When Emma didn’t respond, Diana figured that she’d probably forgotten to charge her phone.
She’d talk to her about that later, too.
At 7:40 AM, that same morning, a parking lot maintenance crew cleaning that section of the Lakewood Towne Center recovered a small black purse. Inside were a set of house keys, a tampon, a pack of Life Savers, and a wallet containing twenty-one dollars. The wallet also held a Target credit card imprinted with the name D IANA L. R OSE. The crew collected the purse and put it in a locked box along with a pair of glasses and a dog collar they’d
