She had sensed danger to Erin. A premonition, irrational and no doubt groundless. Yet even now she couldn’t shake it.
And Erin was late.
The two of them had made a lunch date for twelve o’clock. Annie had been waiting fifteen minutes already, and she’d arrived ten minutes late to begin with.
Her sister was maniacally punctual, always had been. Whichever gene was responsible for tardiness had been omitted from her complement of chromosomes. For her to be this far off schedule was simply unheard of.
Possibly an unexpected crisis had come up in her practice. Suicidal patient, say.
Or maybe something had… happened to her.
Traffic accident.
Random violence.
Medical emergency.
Hell, anything. Anything at all.
Really, though, it was silly to get all worked up. The simple truth was that Annie had almost certainly misunderstood the arrangements she and Erin had made. Probably she’d gotten the time, the date, or the location wrong-very possibly all three. She’d done it before.
Her sister could remember every detail of her schedule without strain. Annie had trouble enough just remembering to get up in the morning.
Most likely Erin was still at her office, expecting to have lunch at one o’clock-or she was waiting at a different restaurant entirely and wondering how scatterbrained Annie had managed to screw up again.
Of course. It had to be something like that.
I’ll just call her office, Annie thought, and “Still waiting?”
The male voice startled her. She looked up from the menu held indifferently in one hand, and her waiter was there, a blond kid with Malibu surfer looks, incongruous in the desert.
“Uh, yeah.” Annie put down the menu. “I may have been stood up. Is there a phone around here?”
“Right outside the rear entrance.”
“Thanks.” She pushed back the tubular chair. “If a woman comes in-redheaded like me, but a lot better looking-please tell her I went to make a call.”
“I’ll tell her. But she won’t be better looking.”
The compliment lifted a surprised smile to her lips. The smile lingered as she left the cafe.
Nice to be admired by a younger man. Of course, he probably had no idea how much younger he was. Most people took her to be about twenty-five, but she and Erin had both turned thirty last month and had commiserated together.
Erin. The smile faded.
A telephone kiosk, fortunately not in use, was just where the waiter had said it was.
Though she had dialed the switchboard at Erin’s office countless times, the number was gone from her memory. Hardly an unusual occurrence-she had no head for figures, and she wasn’t good with names and faces either.
The number was in her address book, and her address book was somewhere in the chaos of her purse. She pawed through a clutter of key rings, tissues, cosmetics, coupons, scribbled notes to herself, Life Savers, breath mints, pens, business cards, loose coins, and out-of-date lottery tickets before she found the booklet.
Then she fed a quarter into the phone and punched in the number.
The receptionist answered. “Sonoran Psychological Associates.”
“Hi, Marie, this is Anne Reilly. Is my sister-”
“ Annie. I’ve been calling your shop.”
Tension in the words-alarm, even. Fear pounced on her like a tiger. “You have? Why?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
“No, I’ve been out, I’m still out, what message, what’s going on?”
“It’s Erin. We can’t find her.”
“You can’t find her?” She felt stupid repeating the words.
“No one knows where she is. She missed her ten-fifteen, and her eleven o’clock, too.” A truck rattled past the pay phone, and Annie had to strain to hear. “I’ve called her home three times; her machine keeps answering. Tried calling you forty minutes ago, left a message with your assistant-”
“I was already on my way downtown. For lunch with Erin. She hasn’t shown up here either.”
Unthinkable for Erin to miss even one appointment with a patient, let alone two. The world would end before she would permit herself that kind of irresponsibility.
Could she have had a seizure? Terrible thought. Erin’s last epileptic episode had occurred in high school; since then the prescription medicine she took had kept that problem completely under control.
Still, it was possible. If she’d suffered convulsions while driving to work-or fallen in her apartment and struck her head…
“Okay,” Annie said, holding her voice steady. “I’ll take a run over to her place and see if she’s there.”
“Let us know-”
“I will, I will. Thanks, Marie.”
She hung up and drew a shallow, shaky breath. For a panicky moment she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t recall where she’d parked her car. Then she remembered-the county parking structure, a couple of blocks from here. Yes.
She walked swiftly to Alameda Street. The main branch of the public library rose on her right, a handful of taller buildings assembled behind it. None stood higher than thirty-five stories.
For the most part, downtown Tucson could have been downtown Des Moines or Tulsa or Toledo, any small city that had begun as a few square blocks of brick and concrete. Outside the small historic district, there was little in the town’s business section that was distinctive. The area retained none of the Wild West flavor of Tucson’s outlying horse ranches and saguaro forests; it owned no particular charm or glamour, save perhaps for one evocative street name, Broadway, said to have been the inspiration of a visiting New Yorker at the turn of the century.
Though big-city magic was absent here, so were the worst excesses of urban blight. A few transients slept in El Presidio Park, and some spidery graffiti clung to alleyways and street signs, but otherwise downtown remained remarkably orderly and clean.
Whitewashed walls gleamed in the strong sunlight. Patches of grass made squares and crescents of green. Mulberry trees sighed, lovesick, in a gentle breath of breeze.
Annie barely noticed any of it. Her mind replayed the phone conversation, hunting among Marie’s words for some overlooked clue, finding none.
This was bad. Really bad.
Erin was in trouble. Might be injured.
Even… dead.
Ugly thought. A shiver skipped over her shoulders.
“No way,” she said firmly, drawing a stare from a vendor at a sandwich cart.
Erin couldn’t be dead. Annie refused to so much as consider the possibility.
People died all the time, but not her sister.
15
The radio came on when her car started, a blast of Billy Ray Cyrus exploding from the speakers.
Annie punched the on-off button, silencing Billy Ray, and swung the red Miata out of its parking space. At the exit-ramp gatehouse, money and a receipt changed hands, and then she was on the street, hooking north on Church Avenue and east on Sixth Street, heading for Erin’s apartment complex at Broadway and Pantano.
The little sports car was fun to drive, but Annie was too agitated to have any fun now as she cut from lane to lane, bypassing slower traffic, running yellow lights. Normally she didn’t drive like a maniac-well, not this much of a maniac, anyway-but the apprehension that had been building in her for the past twelve hours had reached fever pitch. She had to know if Erin was all right.
Tension set her teeth on edge. She rolled down the window to feel the rush of air on her face.
At Campbell she cut over to Broadway. Vermilion blooms of mariposo lily and purple owl clover blurred past on the landscaped median strip. Despite worry and preoccupation, she greeted the spring blossoms with a smile.
The sight of flowers always pleased her. Flowers, she often thought, had saved her life.
For weeks after that night in 1973, she had been lost, disoriented, a seven-year-old girl with the face of a shell-shocked soldier. The flowers in Lydia’s garden had brought her back. Watering them, plucking weeds, tending to each bud as if it were her precious child, she had found a way to ground herself, to reconnect with reality.