“What happened to your knees and elbows, Matt?”
He makes up a brief story about Saturday night, meeting up with a friend for a late dinner, catching a pothole at high speed on Carmelita and going down.
“My fault.”
“As a mother I worry about boys on bikes in the dark.”
“I’m pretty careful.”
She looks like she’s about to say something but doesn’t. Looks around again.
“How angry was Jasmine at her mother?”
“I wasn’t there for the argument. They argue sometimes but usually forget pretty fast.”
“Sometimes or often?”
“Sometimes.”
A nod. “I see she likes music and clothes.”
Matt follows her blue-eyed gaze to Jazz’s closet, all the way open as always and packed with clothes. The boots and shoes are piled two layers high across the closet floor. Matt knows that some of them haven’t fit Jazz for years but she won’t throw them away.
“I’m surprised by the Tim Leary poster and her books,” says Darnell. “Not just how many books, but the subjects. Your average eighteen-year-old doesn’t read The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Psychedelic Experience. Or The Doors of Perception. Or the Upanishads. Do you read these books too, Matt?”
“No.”
“Have you met Timothy Leary?”
“I’ve talked to him at Mystic Arts World.”
“Has he offered you LSD?”
“No. Never.”
“Does Jasmine know him?”
“I don’t believe so.”
She studies him flatly. “Did she take anything unusual with her, the first night she didn’t come home?”
“I don’t know what she took. I was out delivering papers when she left in the van.”
“Nothing is obviously missing?”
Matt looks around the small, disheveled room, trying to be of help.
“I just don’t know. It’s hard to see what’s missing.”
“Boy, that’s the truth.”
But something bothers him.
Darnell’s smile is generous and uncomplicated. She goes to Jasmine’s dresser and looks down on the bottles of perfume and tanning potions, a small round mirror on a stand, jewelry boxes, a small woven bowl that contains inexpensive bead necklaces and earrings and anklets.
“You know,” says Matt. “There is something missing. Her ukulele. It’s usually in the corner.”
His first thought: she takes it sometimes for parties and cookouts. She’s good on it and she has a beautiful clear voice. She makes up her own songs and her friends play and sing along. His second thought: she took it to play for Austin Overton. He tells the officer as much.
Darnell considers. “I talked to Overton yesterday after I took your report. He said what you said. That he played the Sandpiper and slept with Jasmine Thursday night. She took off in the morning around eight and he hasn’t seen or talked to her since. I don’t like Austin Overton, but I believe him.”
Matt doesn’t understand exactly why, but he likes and trusts Darnell. From the card she gave him earlier, he knows her first name is Brigit. She doesn’t seem out to get everybody, like Furlong. She seems more like an ally than an enemy and she seems to care about his sister. And the truth about his Saturday night has been bellowing to get out.
“I went to one of those Sapphire Cove parties Saturday night,” he says.
“I knew it. I knew you would. Tell me everything.”
He does. The obscene, exciting scenes flood back on him. He’s slightly proud to tell Darnell that he flipped off the guard, but also slightly ashamed that he crashed his own bike.
Darnell stands with her hands on her hips and a slight frown on her face.
“We have trouble with Sapphire Cove security too,” she says. “They won’t even let us in except to clean up a mess or cite a vehicle. They’re not city of Laguna, so we have no authority. Matt, are you willing to make a statement I can take to a judge? About that orgy?”
“No. I just want to find my sister.”
She nods briskly. “I understand. I can require you to make a statement, you know.”
“Haven’t I already, just now?”
“I can use what you gave me. But it has more warrant weight coming from you.”
Gear and weapon clanking softly, Officer Darnell goes to the open closet, then to the window, then to a Beatles poster. Comes to a stop in front of Matt. She’s close enough he can see the gray flecks in her blue eyes.
“Matt Anthony, I’m going to go out on a limb with you. Right now. This is only between us, but Bonnie Stratmeyer went to at least one of the Sapphire Cove parties while she was officially missing.”
“That’s bad news.”
“It gets worse. Your mother’s hippie van has been towed to our impound yard from Sapphire Cove. It was parked overnight without a permit, and Sapphire Cove security called us to have it towed. We’re processing it now. The ukulele is in it.”
“Parked when at Sapphire Cove?”
“We’re working on that.”
“But nothing about Jasmine herself?” asks Matt. He feels as if a dark shadow is crossing over some remote plain in his mind. Jazz abandon her own van? And her uke? No, clearly, she was planning on coming back for them. Clearly. So, why didn’t she?
“Nothing about Jasmine herself,” says Darnell.
“Terrible news.”
“That’s why I need your statement.”
“I want the van back.”
“You’re not old enough to drive it.”
“I’ve got my learner’s permit. And the van is sitting there at the station, less than a block from here.”
She considers him. “You need an adult in the car to drive with a learner’s permit. We can get the van here together, if you’ll sign a statement about what you saw in Sapphire Cove Saturday night.”
“Cavore said he could find me.”
“All the more reason to provide the statement. I’ll write it up and you’ll sign it.”
Matt nods unhappily. “We have to do it now. I’ve got papers to fold and deliver. Can I have forty-eight of those posters of Jazz?”
Darnell’s dubious look gives way to a smile. “To go with your newspapers?”
“Yes, please.”
“Of course you can. And the rest are for your mom. Get the spare key and we’ll be on our way.”
Matt angles the posters into the window light. Studies his sister’s portrait and his own drawing of her, side by side on the letter-sized sheet. The photo captures her conventional beauty, and his art catches something of her confident humor.
A cold, foreign feeling settles over him.
His sister on a missing-persons poster.
The next thing Matt knows he’s at the helm of his mother’s sputtering tangerine-and-white van, Officer Brigit Darnell riding shotgun. He signals and swings the van from the little LBPD impound yard behind City Hall onto Third Street. The van is agonizingly slow. It coughs roughly. His house is right there; he could have walked it faster.
Pulls into the driveway and parks in front of his garage.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Come to the station after your paper route. I’ll have the statement ready. And Matt? Say nothing about you-know-who and Sapphire Cove parties. Nobody knows that but us cops and you.”