Vanished

CHAPTER 13

My mother was on the terrace, practicing a complex yoga pose when I arrived. She looked like a scarlet pretzel wrapped in green energy tissue. She untied herself as I entered with the box on my hip.

“I’ll be done in just a minute, sweetie. You can put that on the kitchen counter and sit down out here.” Then she wriggled into a more tortuous position than before and became very quiet.

I put the box down on one of the empty chairs—petty rebellion, that—and sat down on another, surveying the table for signs of lunch. It was just on two o’clock according to my watch, so her lack of preparation wasn’t due to me. She just wasn’t ready, which was no different from my childhood; if we had an appointment that furthered her ideas for my life, she’d be sure to have me dressed and prepped at least an hour before we needed to be gone. I would sit or stand, careful not to muss my audition clothes, until she was ready, which would always be in the nick of time, or just past it. We would rush to auditions and photo shoots in a flurry of shouting and speeding and narrowly missed traffic accidents. If we were too late, the drive home would be a misery of recrimination.

I shook off the urge to grind my teeth and put my booted feet up on the empty table while I waited. Ten minutes later, my mother unwound herself and trotted over to glare at me as she wiped her face on a designer towel.

“Really, Harper, I taught you better manners than that. Get your feet off the table. Now.”

I left them where they were. “I thought we were having lunch.”

“We certainly won’t be having anything if your feet are on the table, Snippet.”

I wanted the things from the box too much to tell her off. Narrowing my eyes in annoyance, I lowered my feet back to the ground.

My mother gave me a plastic smile and headed into the house. “Come on inside. Bring the box.”

Shaking my head at myself in disgust, I picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen. She pointed to the end of the spotless granite counter.

“Just put it there. You can make a salad while I take a quick shower. Be right back, sweetie,” she added, and whisked off, leaving me standing in the middle of the kitchen, too stunned to shoot her.

I was still trying to decide if I should make the salad or dump the entire contents of the fridge on her terrace when a round, black-haired woman about my age bustled into the room.

She stopped and blinked at me. “Oh. Hello. You’re. Veronica’s daughter, right?”

I blinked back. “Yes. Are you a friend of hers?”

The woman laughed. “No, I’m the maid! I’m Venezia—Vinny. She was in such a hurry to get me out of the house today, I left my bag, so I came back for it. I think she’s too excited about you coming to see her.”

“She doesn’t act like it. She just told me to make salad while she takes a shower. ”

Vinny snorted. “Salad! Feh! Rabbits eat salad! Crazy woman. Here, I’ll make the salad. You sit down.”

“No, you’re off duty. You shouldn’t do that,” I protested as she headed for the gleaming steel fridge. I followed her.

She turned to give me a deprecating snort over her shoulder and pointed at the dining table. “You’re the guest. You don’t make lunch! Sit down. Crazy woman. ” she added, shaking her head and piling food on the counter. “Five years, I never see her eat anything but fruit and mineral water and crackers and drink wine. Today she has salad—proper damn salad.” She flung the refrigerator door wide and pointed at the full racks. “You see all this? This is not for her. This is for that man,” she added. She rolled her eyes. “Crazy!”

Vinny slammed the fridge door and grabbed a decorative glass bowl from the counter. She paused to wash it and her hands before shredding lettuce into the bowl and starting in with a knife on the fruit, cheese, and meat she’d pulled from the fridge, mincing it all furiously into tiny bits. “Salad,” she muttered. “Crazy.”

She finished up and doused the bowl with a hearty slosh of balsamic vinegar before putting it on the table. “There! Now, she’ll have to eat.”

“Oh, no, she won’t. If she doesn’t want it, she’ll just push it around the plate and nibble on the lettuce,” I said, remembering my mother’s famous food avoidance routine. She’d rather eat the parsley garnish than gain an ounce by eating the actual food on a plate.

Vinny rolled her eyes and plopped down in a chair by the table. “She’s so crazy! People have to eat!” She picked a bit of fruit out of the bowl and popped it into her mouth. “It’s good—for salad.”

I opened the fridge and peered in. “You want a drink, Vinny?”

“I don’t want mineral water!”

“There’s milk. and beer. ”

“Beer? That man might not be so bad. But I’m not supposed to. ”

“Are you driving?” I asked, glancing back at her over my shoulder. Vinny shook her head. I grabbed one of the tall brown bottles and handed it to her. “I’m her guest. You’re my guest. Here.”

Vinny laughed and twisted off the bottle cap and then toasted me with the bottle. “Thank you! You have one, too.”

“I am driving, so I’ll stick to the mineral water.”

She made a face. “Your choice. ”

I sat down with one of the small green bottles of water and we both drank while the salad sat on the table and wilted. Mother was taking her time with the shower. My phone vibrated, but I poked it into silence, not willing to lose someone else’s perspective on my mother.

“You’re not the sort of woman I’d have expected my mother to employ as a housekeeper.”

“I’m not the housekeeper. I’m the maid. I just clean once a week. I come with the house.”

“With the house? I thought she owned it.”

“Leased. The owner lives in Dubai right now. He wants the house taken care of properly, so the tenant gets me and my husband with the house. Tahn does the garden and fixes things. I keep it clean. And I keep an eye on the tenants.” She shook her head. “Your mother. She’s not a bad tenant, but she’s so. ”

“Crazy?”

“Yeah! If she doesn’t have a man around, she’s sad. When she does, she’s scared he’s going to leave.” She shook her head. “Why a rich woman like her is worried about having a man, I don’t know. I love my husband, but I wouldn’t be worrying myself into a skeleton if I didn’t have him.”

Something she’d said earlier had just worked through my brain. “Vinny, what time did you leave here?” I asked.

“When I forgot my bag? About a quarter to two. She said you were coming at two and she needed to change.”

“She wasn’t doing her yoga when you left, was she?”

“I’ve never seen her do yoga. I think she goes to the studio down the hill.”

“Oh,” I replied, thinking. Mother hadn’t been struggling with the moves, so she wasn’t faking, but it sounded like her routine didn’t normally include yoga at two p.m. And she didn’t own the house, as she’d led me to believe. I wondered if she owned the car. How much of her facade was false?

“Has she ever. seemed in financial difficulty?” I asked.

“Your mother? No. She pays on time, in full. Never a problem. The lease term is up soon, but I don’t think she’s too worried about it, now that her man is making with the matrimony.”

“They’re engaged?”

Venezia would have answered, but we both heard my mother’s clippy little heels approaching and turned our faces toward her as she entered the kitchen.

“Vinny. Dear. Did you forget something?” she asked, casually brushing her hair back from her face to hide a momentary scowl.

“Yes. My bag. When you chased me out. Your daughter was so nice,” she added in a pointed tone, “that we just. got to talking. And there’s salad. So now I’ll get my things and get out of your way.” She stood up and walked to the door, sweeping a tan Gucci purse off the tiles. She slung it over her shoulder and came back to offer me her hand. “I enjoyed meeting you. I hope you’ll be back down for the wedding—it should be nice.”

Then she bustled out past my mother, who glared at her, and disappeared toward the front door. I heard the door close and silence fell for a moment.

Then my mother said, “Well. I was hoping to surprise you with that little tidbit, but I guess I won’t be doing that now.”

“It’s not that much of a surprise, Mother.”

Mother made an aghast face I didn’t buy for a minute. “Don’t you like Damon?”

“That’s irrelevant. Do you love him?”

“Marriage is not a matter of love—that’s just a fairy-tale idea. It’s about security. You may be perfectly content to gad about and take whatever comes, but when you’re my age, you want to know you won’t end up in some. old-folks ghetto.”

I was rolling my eyes so frequently around her, they might as well have been marbles. “Please, Mother. Security I understand, but you’re being melodramatic. You’re not going to end up in a Medicare home. You’re wealthy and you’re only sixty years old.”

“Fifty-nine!”

“Fifty-nine,” I agreed, putting my hands up in a placating gesture. “I’m just saying, you’re not old and you’re not going to be cast into the street. You don’t need to marry anyone. Unless there’s something you haven’t told me. I’d like to think that you’re getting married to someone you actually like and want to spend time with, not someone you think you need for financial reasons.”

“When did it become any of your business, Snippet?”

“You’re my mother.”

“That hasn’t made you care what I want in the past.”

I didn’t want to argue with her. I just wanted to return the box, take a few things, look at the family photos, and leave. I didn’t care to admit it, but I was feeling a little sorry for her. I’d always thought of her as mercenary, selfish, thoughtless, and pushy, and here she was challenging my prejudice. It was annoying.

“Let’s try this again. You’re getting married? Congratulations! I’m happy for you! Better?”

Mother pouted. “Yes.”

“Then let’s have lunch.”

We ate the salad, which was tasty but not what either of us really wanted. Mother ate more than I’d expected, but she still ended up picking out the fruit and leaving most of the meat and cheese behind. Neither of us was satisfied, but we didn’t say so.

Afterward I opened the box and asked to keep the Grey items—including the puzzle and the journals.

Mother waved them away. “Keep what you like. As you said, it’s your father’s junk and I realized I don’t really want it. You might as well have it.”

I put them aside and closed the box up before I glanced at her again.

“What happened to Dad’s receptionist?”

“Who?”

“Christelle LaJeunesse. Dad had a note in his journal that you thought he was having an affair with her. Then she just seemed to disappear. What happened to her?”

“Oh. Her. She just took off one day out of the blue. I never really thought Rob was. up to anything with her, but I think I may have said so once when I was mad at him. When he. died it was a nine days’ wonder, and the police did think he might have killed her, but they gave that idea up. It just didn’t fit, so they dropped it.”

“But what happened to Christelle?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea, nor do I care. I suppose she ran off with some man or changed her name and became a movie star—who knows? Does it matter?”

Only so far as determining if my father was a murderer. But I doubted that mattered to anyone but me. Was it better for him to have killed someone because he was deranged or for him to merely think he had, because he was slightly less deranged?

“No,” I lied. “I guess it doesn’t matter, really.” I picked up the box and carried it back down to the storage room. Mother followed me downstairs and perched on her ladder again as I replaced the box and pulled out the two Grey twinkling cartons of photos. They weren’t very large, but they were dense and heavy for their size, so I didn’t want to take them far. I also noticed my jeans and T-shirt were smeared with dust. I swatted the worst of it away and sneezed. Then I looked up and caught Mother’s eye.

“Is there someplace we can go through these that’s more comfortable?” I asked. “And not so dusty?” I’d forgotten how irritating the pollen-laden dust of Los Angeles in spring could be.

She hopped down from the ladder with her face alight. “Let’s take them to the living room! We can look at them on the coffee table.”

Back up the stairs and through the kitchen, I slogged with the boxes. Mother trotted ahead of me and turned through an arch that led away from the carport end of the house. I followed, still sneezing and humping boxes.

The living room was filled with flattering, cool light filtered through pale aqua curtains. The sheer panels over the windows moved in the breeze entering through the open French doors and turned the blue canyon light into rippling motes of color on the white walls. The furniture was all light and soft-looking also, made of curling gray metal and puffy overflowing cushions in pale watery colors. The coffee table looked like a mermaid’s forest of silver seaweed holding up a floating slab of sandblasted aquamarine glass. My mother scooped an arrangement of seashells and beach glass off the table and put it in the hearth of the small, white-plastered fireplace. It looked like a magical blaze of blue and green cold flames.

“Put the boxes here while I find a pencil and some towels,” Mother ordered.

She scampered back to the kitchen and returned with a handful of writing implements and yet another pile of clean white hand towels. She didn’t seem to own paper towels—at least I hadn’t seen any in the kitchen. Maybe she held stock in a laundry.

I had to give my mother credit: She wiped down the boxes herself to remove the dust and plunged into the project of shuffling through and identifying the photos with relish.

Most of the photos were just family and friends stuff that meant nothing to me or my current quest. Dad’s family seemed to have no talent or luck with cameras. There were a lot of wedding and baby photos contributed by them with the tops of heads, hands, legs, or other bits out of frame, or with dust spots and lens flare, or with color problems as well as the usual lack of focus and composition. There was even one of me as an infant double-exposure, apparently the child of a headless mother.

She held a photo in front of my face. “I didn’t know we had this! This is your father and your uncle Ron—his brother—when they were kids. Oh, my God, look at that hairstyle! Did we all have no taste at all?”

“Do most teenagers have any?”

She laughed. “Well, I did!”

I fished out a high school photo of her with an overteased Jackie Kennedy hairstyle lacquered into shape with enough hair spray to make a small hole in the ozone. She was wearing a horrendous striped dress that made even her Twiggy-thin figure look bloated. “Sure. ”

“It was very trendy.”

“My point, exactly.”

But I wasn’t paying as much attention to her and the photo as I seemed. I was peeking at the discarded photo of my father and uncle from the corner of my eye. There was an odd smear on the picture next to my dad. Most of his family’s photos were bad, but this one was particularly messed up. I picked it up again and looked harder. There seemed to be a bit of light damage or water vapor right behind his shoulder. It wasn’t on the photo, though; it was in it.

I pointed it out to Mother. “What’s this?”

“I have no idea. Probably cigarette smoke—your uncle smoked like a chimney. Probably still does,” she sniffed.

I put it down and went back to shuffling. Mother would identify anything I stopped at—I had to wonder how she knew or remembered all of those faces and details, especially when the photos were of Dad’s family or her short-term second husband and his equally short-term friends. Once IDed, the photos were carefully marked on the back with soft pencil if they hadn’t been marked before. Then she put them aside to rebox later.

We worked through the first box and got into the second, which seemed to have a lot more photos of me as a child and fewer of friends and family. There was one particularly funny picture of me at about three years old, wearing a white dress with a red sash and an incongruous brown cowboy hat and matching boots. My posture, with elbows bent and hands near my hips, seemed to imply I was challenging the photographer to a gunfight. My father was just in the corner of the picture, out of my sight, smothering a laugh. The photo was well-framed, but had been disfigured by a constellation of fingerprints and water spots on the lens.

“Which one of Dad’s family took this and why am I wearing that silly outfit?”

Mother glanced at the photo. “Oh, I took that. You loved that ridiculous hat and boots your grandfather gave you for Christmas. He said you were a real little cowgirl and you decided to wear them all the time. I never could understand it: You hated the ranch—a girl after my own heart—but you loved that stupid cowhand hat.”

“Cowboys are cool. Cows are not. At least when you’re three.”

“Trust me, sweetie. Cowboys may remain cool but cows never get better.”

We both giggled, which was very odd to me; when you’ve gotten used to despising someone, sharing a joke with them feels weirder than bathing in gelatin.

A few pictures later I stopped and stared at a snapshot of a bunch of teenagers and younger kids goofing off in bathing suits on a river-bank. Yet another execrable Blaine family photo complete with spots and smears, except that this one showed me and a pretty blond girl with a long ponytail—longer than mine had been when it was caught in the doors of my fatal elevator—standing off to the side with our arms over each other’s shoulders in the classic Best Friends Forever pose. We were thirteen or fourteen in the photo, and she was the girl whose watery specter had accused and harangued me through my flight to Los Angeles.

I held the photo out to my mother. “Who’s this? With me?”

Mother took the photo and glanced at it. Then she put it facedown on the table and frowned at me. “That’s your cousin Jill. You don’t remember her?”

“No.” Well, at least not from that photo or that age. I could recall a younger girl named Jilly who I’d liked, but not this living version of a dead teenager. And yet the photo indicated a close friendship. How could I forget that?

My mother sighed. “This is so painful. Jilly drowned. About three days after that picture.”

“What happened?” I demanded.

Mother recoiled a little from my tone. “I just told you: She drowned.”

“How?”

She put her hands over mine and squeezed a little. “Oh, baby, I know you don’t want to remember this—maybe that’s why you made yourself forget Jilly. Are you sure you want to hear this.?”

“Yes, Mother. Tell me what happened.”

She swallowed, looking down at the concealed picture. Then she licked her lips and drew a long, slow breath. “Well. You and Jill. wanted to swim in Danko Pond, down at the bottom of your uncle Ron’s property. Do you remember that?”

“I think I remember the pond—it had a little dock someone had built for a sailboat no one ever sailed.”

She looked up and met my gaze with hers, her brow puckered in concern and unhappiness. “Because the pond wasn’t safe. There were snags and holes down there and current from the river that came in underground to feed it. But you girls wanted to prove to the boy cousins that you were as tough as they were, so you two wanted to swim in the pond. We all said no—the parents, I mean—so of course you and Jilly snuck off to do it anyway.”

“And Jilly drowned.”

“Baby. You almost drowned, too. If it hadn’t been for Jilly’s hair floating on the surface, they wouldn’t have known where to look. Ron and your cousin Grant got you both out from under the snag, and you were both not breathing, and it was so horrible—” She started crying but she didn’t take her eyes off me. “You started coughing up the water as soon as Grant picked you up, but Jilly. She didn’t.”

“Was it my fault?”

“Oh, no, baby! No! It was just a stupid, stupid accident. If we’d all just not made such a big deal about that stupid pond, you wouldn’t have cared and the boys wouldn’t have cared and it would never have happened. Now you see why I get so worried about you and your crazy job? You’re my only baby and I almost lost you once!”

Under any other circumstances her melodramatic hypocrisy would have made me indignant—she hadn’t shown any such concern while I was in the hospital after having my head knocked in—but right then I was too stunned. “How many times has this shit happened to me?” I muttered.

My mother stared back at me with tear-reddened eyes, her makeup running down her face. “Just the once, honey.”

I grabbed the photo. She tried to resist my pulling for a moment. Then she gave up. I stared at the picture, studying it closer than I had the first time.

The spots and smears weren’t all just dirt. Some of them looked like tiny blurred faces. Ghosts.

Cameras sometimes caught the images of ghosts as they literally passed through the thick material of the glass lens. Some odd property of glass slowed them down enough to make a kind of shadow on the film beyond. I’d learned this on a case almost two years earlier. The picture was busy with phantoms—although it was also just a plain crappy photo full of dust and sunspots.

I started pawing through the photos we’d already looked at, searching for more signs of ghosts. In the cowboy hat photo, I saw more of them, but they were clustered around my dad. The photo of Dad and Uncle Ron didn’t have a wayward column of cigarette smoke: It had a ghost. Picture after picture showed something weird hanging around the Blaine family—mostly around my father and me. Or rather, I realized as I looked again, it hung around my father and only incidentally around me until after he died. Then it was all mine. Was my Greywalking ability some kind of. legacy? It still just didn’t make sense, but it sent a chill through me.

I needed confirmation, evidence. “Do you have more pictures of me after Dad died? I mean just ordinary photos, not the pro headshots from my resume.”

“Well, of course, sweetie.” She seemed happier that I wanted to indulge in some vanity and move off the subject of dead cousins.

We dug through the second box in haste, unearthing every photo we could find of me after age twelve. Every one had a spot, a smear, or an impossible streak of light at the least. Several had unexplainable faces peering from the edges. They had become more common as I’d gotten older. I felt sick. Only the professional photos were clear and I’d have bet large sums the photographers had spent a good deal of time in their darkrooms or computer suites removing inexplicable anomalies from my headshots and dance poses. Even candid photos of me at rehearsals and in shows had odd blurs and “tricks of the light” near my figure.

I’d been unwittingly haunted most of my life, and now those things from long ago—forcibly forgotten—were coming back.