“Are any of you reporters?” she called to us.
Never slow to grasp this sort of opportunity, my friend Stuart Angert pointed at me and said, “Only this lady here. The rest of us just finished an interview with her, so she’s free to talk to you.”
The others laughed, and the words “call for an appointment” were on my lips, but something about her made me hesitate. Stuart’s joke had not gone over her head — I could see that she was already expecting me to disappoint her, and she looked as if she was accustomed to being disappointed.
“Go on,” I said to the others. “I’ll catch up to you.”
I put up with another round of chiding and some half-hearted protests, but before long I was left standing alone with her.
“I’m Irene Kelly,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“They won’t look for my mother,” she said.
“Who won’t?”
“The police. They think she ran away. She didn’t.”
“How long has she been gone?”
“Since four o’clock yesterday — well, that’s the last time I saw her.” She looked away, then added, “She went to a store. They saw her there.”
I figured I was talking to a kid who was doomed to learn that her mom was throwing in the towel on family life. But as I let her talk, I began to feel less certain of that.
Julia Sayre was forty years old on the night she failed to come home. Gillian’s father, Giles Sayre, had called his wife at a little before four that afternoon to say that he had obtained a pair of coveted symphony tickets — the debut of the symphony’s new conductor was to take place that evening. Hurriedly leaving their younger child, nine-year-old Jason, in Gillian’s care, Julia left the house in her Mercedes-Benz to go to a shopping mall not five miles away from her affluent neighborhood, to buy a slip.
She had not been seen since.
When he came home that evening and discovered that his wife hadn’t returned, Giles was more anxious about the possibility of being late to the concert than his wife’s whereabouts. As time went on, however, he became worried and drove over to the shopping center. He drove through the aisles of the parking lot near her favorite store, Nordstrom, but didn’t see her blue sedan. He went into the store, and after questioning some of the employees in the lingerie department, learned that she had indeed been there — but at four o’clock or so — several hours earlier.
When Giles Sayre reported his wife missing, the police gave it all the attention they usually give an adult disappearance of five hours’ duration — virtually none. They, too, looked for Julia Sayre’s car in the shopping center parking lot; Giles could have told them it wouldn’t be there — he had already made another trip to look for it.
“Sometimes, Gillian—” I began, but she cut me off.
“Don’t try to give me some bullshit about how she might be some kind of runaway, doing the big nasty with somebody other than my dad,” she said. “My folks are super close, happily married and all that. I mean, it would make you want to gack to see them together.”
“Yes, but—”
“Ask anybody. Ask our neighbors. They’ll tell you — Julia Sayre only has trouble with one person in her life.”
“You!”
She looked surprised by my guess, but then shrugged. She folded her arms, leaned back against the building, and said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
She shrugged again. “You don’t look like you were some little sweetcakes that never stepped out of line. Didn’t you ever fight with your mom when you were a teenager?”
I shook my head. “No, my mother died when I was twelve. Before I was a teenager. I used to envy the ones—” I caught myself. “Well, that’s not important.”
She was silent.
“If she had lived,” I said, “we probably would have fought. I got into all kinds of mischief even before I was a teenager.”
She began studying one of her fingernails. I was wondering how my memories of my mother might have differed had she lived another five years, when Gillian asked, “Do you remember the last thing you said to her?”
“Yes.”
She waited for me to say more. When I didn’t, she looked away, her brows drawn together. She said, “The last thing I said to my mother was, ‘I wish you were dead!’ ”
“Gillian—”
“She wanted me to watch Jason. She wanted me to cancel all my plans and do what she wanted, so she could go to the stupid concert. I was upset. My boyfriend was upset when I told him I couldn’t see him — so I yelled at her. That’s what I said to her.”
“She may be fine,” I said. “Sometimes people just feel overwhelmed, need to take off.”
“Not my mom.”
“I’m just saying that she hasn’t been gone for twenty-four hours yet. Don’t assume that she’s—” I stopped myself just in time. “Don’t assume that she’s been harmed.”
“Then I need you to help me find her,” she said. “No one else will take me seriously. They’re like your friends.” She nodded in the direction Stuart and the others had walked. “Think I’m just a kid — no need to listen to a kid.”
I pulled out my notebook and said, “You understand that I don’t get to decide if this story runs in the paper, right?”
She smiled.
Once I argued my editor into letting me pursue the story, I drove over to the Sayres’ home, a large two-story on a quiet cul-de-sac. Giles answered the door after scooping up a yapping Pekingese. He handed the squirming dog off to Gillian, who took it upstairs. Jason, he told me, had been taken to stay with his grandmother.
When I first approached Giles Sayre, I thought he might resent Gillian’s recruitment of a reporter for help with what could turn out to be an embarrassing family matter. But Giles heaped praise on his daughter, saying he should have thought of trying to enlist the Express himself.
“What am I going to do if anything has happened to Julia?” he asked anxiously.
Like Gillian, he was tall and thin and had pale blue eyes, but his hair was a much more natural color, a dark auburn. He had not slept; his eyes were reddened from tears which, by this point, could come easily, and which he didn’t try to hide.
He hurried to hand me several recent photographs of his wife. Her hair was dark brown, her large eyes, a deep blue. An attractive, self-possessed woman, she appeared to be perfectly groomed in even the most casual photographs. Gillian did not resemble her so much as her father, but Jason, I saw from a group photo, took a few of his features from each — her dark hair and aristocratic facial structure, his pale blue eyes.
“Which of these is the most recent?” I asked.
Giles selected a photograph taken at a Junior League event.
“Can I keep it? I can try to get it back for you, but I can’t make any promises.”
“No, that’s all right, I have the negative.”
This level of cooperation continued throughout the day. He met my involvement with a sense of relief, anxious to do whatever he could to help me with the story. The benefit was mutual — I gave him a chance to take action, directed some of the energy that up until now had gone to pacing and feeling helpless; his help made much of my job easier. It occurred to me that his anxiousness to spread the word was not something you’d be likely to find in a man who fears he has been cuckolded.
So I talked to neighbors and friends of Julia Sayre. I talked to other members of her family. The more I heard about her, the more I was inclined to agree with her daughter — Julia Sayre wasn’t likely to disappear of her own volition. Julia seemed fairly content with her life, content with just about everything except her relationship with her daughter. The universal opinion on that matter was that Gillian’s hellion phase was bound to come to an end soon — according to friends, no one was more sure of that than Julia.