“What was it?”
“Nothing special-a story we’ve all heard about a thousand times. Sometimes I think a third of my working life was spent with daughters looking for their fathers, and another third with fathers looking for their daughters.”
“That was the case?” Emily asked. “He was searching for his missing daughter?”
Sam nodded. “He had a lot of land in the San Joaquin Valley, and he lived in a big house on an enormous piece of land-the sort of place where if you want to gossip over the back fence, you have to drive there.”
“What was his name?”
“Theodore Forrest, the Something. Maybe the fourth or fifth.”
“And the daughter? What did he say about her?”
“Her name was Allison. He said that she had been a terrific kid at first, the sort of little girl who was always happy-maybe a little smart-ass, even-and who lit up a room as soon as she came into it. He brought a couple of old pictures of her at about age five and ten along with the others, and I could see what he meant. She was a really pretty kid, with a lot of intelligence behind the eyes.”
“You said `at first.’ What was the problem later?”
“He said that around age thirteen or so, troubles started. She had a kind of personality change. All of a sudden she wasn’t interested in the family anymore, just wanted to stay in her room. Her grades went all to hell. Her old friends seemed to move on, and they were replaced by a different kind of kid.”
“That doesn’t sound unusual. What kind of kid?”
“The kind that skips school, does drugs, and so on. This wasn’t exactly a new story to me, but it was to him, so we listened. He said the girls were the worst in his eyes. They were the kind that gave a father a lot to think about, for sure. He said that he’d heard stories about a couple of them. They were promiscuous in that scary selfdestructive way that girls are sometimes, kids who don’t seem to give a damn whether what they’re doing kills them or something else does. The more he tried to get rid of them, the more Allison liked them. She would sneak out to meet them. He moved her to a private school, and she would slip out at night to go out with them. Then she was gone.”
“How old was she at that point?”
“Sixteen. By then she was looking very grown up. When her father came to see us, we saw the pictures, and I remember thinking she would be hard to find because she could pass for twentytwo or so in the right clothes.”
Emily sensed something withheld. “Tell me more about the pictures.”
“There are a few in here.” Sam opened the box and pulled an envelope from a pharmacy’s photo lab out of a file. He set the envelope on the table in front of her, and she began to shuffle through the photographs.
One showed an athletic-looking man in his early forties in a fancy cabin or ranch house-possibly some kind of resort-sitting at a table with his arm around the girl. They were both grinning at the camera with similar expressions, and Emily looked closely at the two faces, trying to detect a family resemblance. There was nothing obvious. The girl had long chestnut hair and big green eyes and a pretty face, but it was the sort of wide-cheeked, fair face with Cupid’s-bow lips that she associated with Irish women she had known. The father had the long face with pointed, narrow nose that made her think of Englishmen. She found herself forming theories about Allison’s mother.
She kept going, looking at each picture, and then noticed a similarity. There were lots of places-a houseboat on a lake in a treeless landscape that had to be Arizona, a white sand beach on the ocean, a redwood grove, a place that looked like a restaurant on a balcony above a lagoon, outside an apartment or condominium-but just the two of them. In some shots Allison was alone, and in others she was with her father, but there were never any friends, either her age or his. And there was never anyone who could be the mother. She said, “Was the mother the one who took the pictures?”
“I think she was out of the picture, literally. There was no mother I ever saw, and no shots of her, either, even in the pictures of the girl as a toddler. I think they were all taken by strangers, people he handed the camera to and asked to press the button.”
Emily found one of Allison in a bathing suit, and understood what Sam had said earlier. The girl had an exceptional figure, like an hourglass, and it made her seem older than sixteen in spite of her smooth, untroubled face. “She was very pretty.” Emily returned the photographs to the envelope and put them back on the table.
Sam said, “He gave us the pictures. He showed us the girl’s birth certificate and a black-and-white photocopy of her driver’s license. After the first meeting, we asked for things. Anything we asked for, he would send by overnight mail. Phil wasn’t easy on him, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a father from up north comes to you and says his sixteenyear-old daughter disappeared two months ago. He’s already had the local cops on the case, and he’s hired detectives up there. They’ve talked to all her friends and relatives, searched her room and her school locker, and every place she went regularly. Now he comes down to L.A. and hires a detective to find out if that’s where she went. It’s got to occur to you that most likely what you’re looking for is a corpse. Phil went up and got fingerprints off some things she touched in a ranch the family owned that nobody had visited since she left.”
“To identify her body?”
“Well, if the cops find a Jane Doe somewhere, they generally fingerprint her if they can. Our theory was that we might be able to end this guy’s uncertainty just by a records check. It didn’t pan out.”
“What did you do after that?”
“We started to search for a live girl, thinking we probably would find a dead one. It was one of those stories you wish you hadn’t heard. He grounded her because of her grades. She slipped out of the house on a school night in the middle of the week, and spent the night with a few friends of both sexes. There was drinking and, he suspected, some drugs. He got stricter. He said she couldn’t go out for the rest of the year, and that she would have to earn his trust if she was even to go out during her senior year.”
“Isn’t that going a bit far?”
“He thought he might have laid it on a little thicker than he needed to. After we talked to him for an hour or two, he mentioned that maybe he called her a few names, used words he might not have used if he had it to do over again.” Sam paused. “Only he didn’t. They kind of coexisted for a week or so. They didn’t talk much. His story fit one of the things I’d noticed a few times in this business. It’s a lot easier to avoid people if you’re rich. They lived in a big house with a lot of out-of-the-way rooms, and servants who would serve the girl a meal by herself so she didn’t have to eat with her father. And just having servants around all the time makes the house too public to hold a big confrontation that will clear the air. Then she was gone.”
“Gone? Just gone? No message?”
“That’s what he said. He was out all day as usual, and he got home late at night and figured she was asleep. When he got up the next morning around ten, he figured she was at school. While he was at lunch, the phone rang, and it was the math teacher asking whether Allison was going to be sick another day and needed the homework assignment. He said it took him a day and night to realize that she wasn’t just skipping school, and then to find out that she had probably been gone since at least the morning of the day before, or even at the end of school the day before that. She didn’t take the car, didn’t even take credit cards, so he wasn’t ready to panic just yet. Then he discovered that she had taken out three thousand dollars from a savings account her grandmother had started for her. She was gone.”