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“She’s a head trauma,” Kent said. “Fell off a bike near UCLA. Bad year for coeds. Raves, suicides, drownings, cars wrapped around trees…”

“How do people die at raves?” I said.

“Ecstasy, usually. This year we’ve seen fentanyl. It’s an analgesic, highly toxic. Had a kid last summer try to get high drinking Goo Gone, a cleaning solvent. Mind gone.”

After a while we thanked him and walked out to the parking lot, into a Saturday afternoon full of traffic and sunshine and the noises of life.

I felt giddy with relief, but Joey was uncharacteristically morose. “What’s that expression about someone walking on your grave?” she asked. “Anyhow, I have to get home, I’m driving the BMW to Oxnard, but I want you to know-” She paused, looking toward the freeway. “I’ll help. With Annika. I want to find her.”

She’d been helping all week, I was about to point out, but she was already heading to her car.

I called Germany from my own car while still in the parking lot. It crossed my mind that my cellular bill was going to equal the gross national product of a small country, but when I told Mrs. Glück that it was not her daughter lying dead in the morgue and heard the ecstatic weeping that ensued, I decided it was a Christmas present to myself, a month early.

15

I spent Saturday afternoon in the Valley with my mural, resisting the urge to enlarge the West African goliath by keeping my focus near a wall-mounted microwave, where I painted a small Central American red-eyed leaf frog, Agalychnis callidryas.

On my way home I stopped at a Ventura Boulevard newsstand. Fredreeq had insisted I check out the winter issue of International Celeb, featuring a story on Savannah Brook that, while fiction, was the kind of press she felt I needed. I flipped through the magazine until the clerk barked at me, pointing to a sign that said “No Free Reads.”

Half annoyed, half embarrassed, I took my place in line. If I walked away in a huff, I’d have wasted time, a great parking place, and a quarter for the meter, but if I paid six ninety-nine for what turned out to be a one-paragraph article, I’d feel like a loser. I resumed my page flipping, determined to read and run. What could the clerk do, shoot me?

It was a three-page article. I forked over seven dollars to learn from my Biological Clock competition that beauty and brains were not incompatible, nor were a successful business and budding television career impediments to romance, cocooning, and baby making. Having lived in five countries in her nearly three decades, Savannah said, she was now eager to put down roots. An accompanying full-page photo showed her in a bikini, a faraway look in her eye, and was captioned with a quote: “Whether traveling the world or in my own backyard, I live life to the fullest, in every way.”

And just how, I wondered, did Fredreeq expect me to be an International Celeb, I, who’d barely been north of Highway 118? I sat in my car, using up my meter minutes, feeling desperately provincial. Obviously I now had to read the damn magazine cover to cover, having invested so much money in it, having looked at nothing but books on frogs for weeks. No wonder I had no repartee. Grimly, I caught up on Britain’s royal family, an Iraqi boy band, and unexpected volcanic activity in Hawaii, then came to a dead stop on a page called “Hard News.” A grainy photo caught my attention, a man with a look so salacious I blushed. Bedroom eyes. So I was not, after all, dead to sexual feeling. I should move to whatever country he was from. I read the caption under the photo. Vladimir Tcheiko, fugitive, murderer, head of a notorious eastern European drug cartel. Well. Nice to know that crime was no impediment to international celebrity. At least I’d heard of this guy, which was more than I could say about trends in Muslim head scarves, the news that only 9 percent of Vancouverites were obese, and the sudden celebrity of political wives in France.

I went back to Savannah’s article and a detail I’d missed on the first reading, because, of course, it had to do with math. Her “almost three decades”? Savannah was well into her thirties, unless she’d lied on her B.C. application. Talk about a discrepancy. I looked up from International Celeb and remembered another application, another discrepancy, then realized I was on Ventura Boulevard, just east of Encino. I picked up my cell phone.

Maizie Quinn met me in her driveway, talking before I was out of the car. “God, you’re a trouper, doing this. Have you found out anything?” She was wearing jeans tonight, tight ones, with a pink spandex turtleneck and her usual heels. Maizie had curves I’d never guessed at, hidden as they’d been before under work shirts and aprons.

“Not much,” I said. “And I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday night, but I just now thought of it.”

“I should’ve thought of it the other day when you stopped by.” She led me down the path to the artist’s studio. “Gene, my husband, says I’m always out to lunch.” She laughed. “In my dreams. With Alain Ducasse, discussing chiffonade versus julienne.” I was about to ask who that was and what that meant, but Maizie was already far ahead, surefooted on the flagstone pathway, even in the dark, in high heels.

The studio was warm and well lit. Gone were the leaves and wires from the center worktable, replaced by a turkey on a cutting board. It seemed early to be doing a turkey, five days before Thanksgiving, but maybe this was a rehearsal bird.

“I’m trying to think what else might help us.” Maizie crossed to a distressed-wood file cabinet. “This sounds awful, but Gene checked Annika’s computer, to see if we could find… well, anything. About where she might’ve gone. Gene says a stranger could re-create his whole life from what he downloads from the Internet.” She pulled from a drawer a pink file. “But no luck. Gene says it would take a hacker to get in there.”

I was barely functional on my own computer, but maybe Cziemanski had access to hackers. I’d ask him.

Maizie held the pink file in both hands, as if picking up vibrations. “Here it is. Letters and cards she sent us, little mementos. I’d like it back eventually-there are things I want to keep for Emma.” She opened the file and took out some stapled pages. “I found her au pair application in her room. As soon as she came, she wanted to see it, to read her letters of recommendation, and how she did on her interview-” She turned the pages over and frowned, then smiled. “There’s another girl’s application on the back. We download them from the Internet, and Gene uses both sides of every sheet of paper in the house. Annika too, but she was a recycler. Gene’s just cheap.”

“Maizie, did you ever notice discrepancies in the application?”

“Discrepancies?”

“Things that turned out not to be accurate, or…” I couldn’t repeat what I’d heard at the au pair agency. Why make her worry in retrospect about the girl she’d entrusted her child to for a year?

She moved to the worktable. “Only in the positive sense. Her grades were average, except for math, but she turned out to be so intelligent in person. Always reading. What are you hoping to find?”

“Personal data, mostly. Height and weight, medical records, for the police report. I don’t suppose they’ve been in touch?”

“No. Not yet.” She glanced at her watch, then grabbed an apron from a wall peg and put it on. It was stained, like my paint clothes, with the evidence of countless projects. “Will they, do you think? I’d really like to be more proactive in all this-”

“Don’t hold your breath,” I said. “But at least they’ll have accurate information for the database. I’ve been trying to learn about Annika through other people, but everyone I talk to has a different story. She was into drugs, she wasn’t into drugs, she was boy crazy, she wasn’t boy crazy… maybe I haven’t talked to the right people. Do you know any of her friends, besides the au pairs?”