’bout anyone wanting to lay a hand on me.
“Can you imagine?” she said, offended.
“That’s uncalled for,” Hicks said. “Some people have no manners.”
“None whatsoever,” she said, perching reading glasses on her nose. “I told him he could kiss my puckered old arse. Here it is. Scum Lord Eddard.”
Mendez jotted down the number and name in his spiral notebook.
“He said it weren’t his job to keep an eye on Ballencoa. That was up to the police.”
“Were they around much?” Mendez asked. “The police?”
“At first they came ’round, but then the perv threatened to sue, and that was the end of that. Never mind if he makes off with some young lady from the high school or kills his cranky old neighbor. God forbid he should sue the city.
“It’s a sad day when the criminals have more rights than the rest of us,” she said.
“But as far as you know, Mr. Ballencoa never got into any trouble?” Hicks asked.
She frowned, clearly disappointed. “Not that I’m aware. Although he might have been up to something before I went away to Australia.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because there was a strange car in the neighborhood a week or so before I left,” she said. “I didn’t like it. I thought maybe it was some thief casing the neighborhood. The car was sitting at the curb across the street one day, so I marched right over to it and asked the man what his business was.”
“What did he say?”
“Told me he was a special investigator with the police.”
Mendez shared a glance with his partner. According to Detective Neri, the SLOPD hadn’t been watching Ballencoa at all. As far as Neri had known, Roland Ballencoa was still living next door to Mavis Whitaker.
“Did he show you a badge?” Hicks asked.
“Not a badge,” she said. “But he opened an ID.”
“What did it say?”
“I couldn’t say,” she admitted. “Didn’t have me readers on. I figured it was all right or he wouldn’t have shown it to me. Right?”
“You didn’t happen to get a license plate number on the car, did you?” Mendez asked.
“Of course I did.” She set her address book aside on the desk and took up a purple spiral notebook. “I wrote it down the first time I saw the car, of course. A strange car in the neighborhood—that’s the first thing I do as part of the watch. I write it all down in my book here.”
She turned through the pages, looking for the right one. Each page had the date written at the top in spidery old-lady handwriting. Notes were jotted down on each page, with the time of day noted beside each entry.
“Here it is,” she said, and she read off the tag number aloud.
Mendez put it in his notebook.
They thanked Mavis Whitaker for her time and her diligence and left the house.
“Why wouldn’t Neri have said they had started watching Ballencoa again?” Mendez said as they walked back to the car. “After all the shit I gave him?”
“I’ve gotta think he would have,” Hicks said. “If he’d had a way of not looking like a slacker, I think he would have taken it.”
“Me too.”
They got back into the car and sat there for a moment, both of them letting the wheels turn in their brains.
“He wasn’t a cop,” Mendez declared, starting the car. “Let’s go find a pay phone.”
12
From the corner of her eye, Leah watched her mother come into the kitchen. She said nothing, just kept her head down as she brought food to the breakfast table. Hard-boiled eggs, orange juice, a bowl of sliced melon.
Her mother looked terrible. Leah knew why.
Her own eyes had been puffy and red when she got up. She had held a cold cloth over them for a long time before coming downstairs. If her mother had done the same, it hadn’t worked.
Leah remembered when her mom had been beautiful. She could have been a model or an actress. Her eyes were so blue, her dark hair as smooth and shiny as hair in a shampoo commercial. Now there was gray in her hair and lines beside her eyes and around her mouth. Her skin was pale and dull. Her hand was trembling as she reached for a coffee cup.
“Mom, do you want juice?”
“No,” she said without looking over.
“Do you want an egg?”
“No.”
“Do you w—”
“I just want coffee,” her mother snapped, then touched a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, staring down at the coffee cup. “I’m just going to have coffee and some toast.”
Nerves crawled around in Leah’s stomach. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, sweetheart.”
“You don’t look fine. You look sick.”
Her mother pretended not to hear her as she poured a splash of cream into the coffee and added sugar. She closed her eyes again as she used both hands to raise the cup to her lips.
Leah took her seat at the table and chose an egg from the bowl.
“You should have an egg or something,” she said, though she didn’t crack her own. She just played with it, turning it this way and that on her plate.
Her mother set the cup down and put a slice of bread in the toaster.
“You always used to tell Leslie and me that breakfast was the most important meal—”
“Leah, please!” her mother snapped. “I don’t want a lecture. I want a piece of toast.”
“Did you sleep last night?” Leah asked. “You look like you didn’t.”
“I went back to work for a while.”
It didn’t seem to occur to her that maybe Leah hadn’t slept either. Sometimes Leah thought it didn’t even register with her mother that she had gone through the same experience her parents had when Leslie was taken.
They had lost a daughter. Leah had lost her sister. They had at least been able to try to do something about it. Daddy had gone out on every search, but Leah hadn’t been allowed to go out with the search parties. Her mother had thrown herself into the volunteer center, making flyers and posting them all over the place. Leah thought she could have helped put the flyers out, but no one would let her.
She had been sent to her grandparents’ house to stay out of the way. She had hardly seen her mother or her father for the first month Leslie was gone. It had been as if the only daughter they had was the one that was missing, and they forgot about the one right there, the one that hadn’t broken the rules, the one that hadn’t been grounded and gone out anyway.
Her mother came to the table with her coffee and a small plate with a piece of dry toast lying on it. She sat down and stared at the toast. She probably wouldn’t eat it. Or she would take two bites and leave it. Leah silently slid the jar of apricot preserves over to her. Her mother didn’t seem to notice.
“Are you having a lesson today?” her mother asked, but not in a way like she was really interested. It was more like she was just saying something to fill the silence, and maybe she wasn’t even paying attention or listening for an answer.
It made Leah feel uneasy.
“Yes,” she said. Of course she was having a lesson. She had a lesson every weekday but Monday, when the barn was closed. Her mother knew that.
“How’s Bacchus doing?”
