The Gold Coast

59

Lucy returns to the duplex and wanders the rooms aimlessly. Dennis is due back from Washington late that night. Jim’s got class. Briefly she cries. “Oh, Lillian—”

Then she goes to put on her shoes. “Got to get organized, here.” She calls the Keilbachers. No answer. She’s got her sweater on, ready to go—but where? She calls the church. Reverend’s out on call, she gets his answering machine. Everyone’s gone! What is this? Vicar Sebastian, ineffectual as always, answers his phone and is reduced to speechlessness by Lucy’s news. He and Lillian were good friends, it may be he even had a crush on her. So he’s no help. Lucy finally says she’ll come pick him up. He agrees. Then she calls Helena, who thank the Lord is home, and tells her the bad news. Helena can’t believe it. She agrees to meet Lucy at the church.

Lucy drives to the church without seeing a thing. She just had lunch with Emma Keilbacher that day, and Emma didn’t mention any plans to go out that evening, did she? So hard to remember at a time like this. And she just worked with Lillian yesterday—

She forbids herself to think along those lines, and collects herself before going in to the church offices. Helena is already there, bless her. The vicar, pale and red-eyed, slows them for a prayer that Lucy has no patience for. They’ve got to find Emma and Martin.

So they get into Lucy’s car, and she drives to the Keilbachers’ house. Still no one home.

“I suppose they could have gone out to eat when Martin came home.…”

“They usually just go to Marie Callendar’s during the week.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Between them Lucy and Helena know every restaurant that Emma and Martin might frequent. So Lucy drives them to Marie Callendar’s, but they’re not there.

“Where next?”

They try the El Torito on Chapman. No luck there. They track to Three Crowns, and then Charlie’s; the Keilbachers are nowhere to be seen.

They return to the house. No luck. It’s really very frustrating.

After that it’s a matter of friends they might be visiting. Vicar Sebastian feels telephoning around is a bad idea, so there follows a nightmarish interval of visits to all the friends of the Keilbachers they know: finding they aren’t there, pausing to give the friends the news, driving on.

Lucy begins to feel more and more strongly that they should find them, it strikes her as terrible, somehow, that so many people should know and Emma and Martin still be unaware. They’re all getting frustrated, vexed, upset; it’s hard to agree on what to try next.

“Do you suppose they already heard from the police?” Sebastian asks.

Lucy shakes her head. “Abe came straight to me, there wouldn’t have been time, I don’t think.”

They track all the way to Seal Beach where the Jansens moved, then into Irvine, back to the house, over to the church, then to the Cinema 12 theaters down in Tustin.… No luck, they just aren’t to be found.

“Where are they?” Lucy demands angrily. Helena and the vicar, cowed by Lucy’s determination to find them, are out of ideas.

Defeated, Lucy can only drive back to their house, frustrated and mystified. Where in the world are they?

She parks on the street in front of the Keilbachers’ duplex. The three of them sit in the car and wait.

There isn’t much to say. The whole neighborhood is still. The streetlight overhead flickers. Street, gutter, curb, grass, sidewalk, grass, driveways, houses, they’re all flickering too, leeched of color by the mercury vapor’s blue glow: a gray world, flickering a little. It’s strange: like holding watch for some mysterious organization, or performing a new ritual that they don’t fully understand. So strange, Lucy thinks, the things life leads you into doing.

Headlights appear at the bottom of the street, and Lucy’s heart jumps in her, like a small child trapped inside, trying to escape. The car approaches slowly. Turns into the Keilbachers’ driveway.

“Oh, my God,” says Helena, and begins to cry.

The vicar begins to cry.

“Now wait a minute,” Lucy says harshly as she opens the door and begins to get out of the car. “We’re doing God’s work here—we’re his messengers, and it’s God speaking now, not us,” and sure enough it must be true, because here’s Lucy McPherson crossing the lawn toward the surprised Keilbachers, Lucy who gets teary if she’s told the story of someone’s suffering or sacrifice, Lucy who waters up if you look at her sideways—here she is just as calm as can be, as she stands before Emma and Martin and gives them the news—as steady as a doctor, as they help Emma off the lawn and inside. And all through that long horrible night, as Emma is racked with hysterical grief, and Martin sits on the back porch staring at little handprints in the concrete, at nothing, it’s Lucy that they turn to to make coffee, to fix soup, to hold Emma, to deal with the police, and with the mortuary, and with all the business that the others cannot face, shaken as they are; it’s Lucy they turn to.