“This is the eighth day, Ray. No, something is still very wrong.”
“Look, whoever took the money that day would have to know her personal identification number, her PIN. That’s not something Leigh would give out freely.”
Kat thought about her friend. Leigh hated trivia and even more hated math. At Cal High, she had almost flunked trigonometry, in fact had relied on Kat to cheat on her homework. “She might have written the number down in her wallet.”
His compressed lips confirmed her hypothesis.
Kat jumped up. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Where?”
“Idyllwild. Bring a picture.”
“Idyllwild-wait-”
“Come on, Ray. Grab whatever you need to grab. Her parents had a cabin there years ago.” Up in the mountains that fringed the Los Angeles Basin, Idyllwild was a few hours away. “Uh, the street was called Tahquitz Lane. They called the place Camp Tahquitz, that’s why I remember. That was so long ago. I wonder if they still own it?”
“I never went there, but she mentioned it a few months ago. She said that her parents had some run-down old shack that they never went to anymore and were trying to sell.”
Kat ran out to her car to get her laptop, tapped into his AirPort, and pulled up Realtor.com to have a look at multiple listings for Idyllwild. The town was too small to have a separate set of listings, but she called up the area listings and very quickly found a cottage for sale on Tahquitz Lane.
“Two bedroom,” she said. “Sixty-five years old. They’re only asking two-twenty for it. How refreshing. Cheap these days.”
“She described it as a dump.”
“The description matches. I’m going to call the realtor up there.”
“We could just call her parents. But then they would-”
“It would be out of our control after that,” Kat said. They looked at each other.
“Go on. Call the realtor,” Ray said. “You will with or without my permission.”
The lady handling the cottage wasn’t in but her broker was, and Kat, using her appraiser credentials, managed to get the owner names.
Hubbel. No bites had come into the office after more than a year. The cottage had sat there unsold for months, in desperate need of updating, but the owners refused to fix it up.
Kat hung up. “She’s either dead, abducted, or on the run,” she said. Ray put a hand over his eyebrows, as if seeing something in the distance he didn’t want to see. “But she went through Idyllwild,” Kat continued inexorably. “I bet she left you that charge on your bank statement in case you were looking for her, just like those people leave signs of who they are in the homes I appraise. She’s smart-she didn’t want you to know right away where she was going, but she didn’t want to be completely cut off from you, either.”
Ray said, “I’ll be right back.” He left the living room. Kat took out the notebook and read some more of Leigh’s love poems. In five minutes he returned, loaded down. “A couple sweaters,” he said. “Two sleeping bags. It might get cold up there at night, even in summer, and I sure don’t expect sheets. Bring another bottle of that French stuff from the fridge.”
“Yessir,” Kat said, scrambling up from the floor. “Don’t forget toothbrushes.”
19
I ’m outta here,” Eleanor Beasley said, walking past Esmé’s station. “See you tomorrow.”
“Wait a second, Eleanor.”
Eleanor waited while Esmé finished checking through a big shopping cart, whizzing through the bar-coded items and bagging them with efficiency born of long experience.
“Thanks for shopping at Granada Market,” she told the customer, who nodded. Esmé swiftly fastened the chain to her station. While she finished her closing-up chores, Eleanor talked to the bagger at the next register about his new Prius. Eleanor wasn’t a hurrier; this could be a problem in a grocery store, but the customers liked how she noticed when they were tired and asked how they were doing.
Granada Market had started out as a small specialty health food store in the seventies. Over the years, as people became educated about the virtues of healthy food, the store had tripled in size. Granada gave Safeway and even Trader Joe’s a run for their money. The store had twelve full-time clerks, but since it was open until midnight, they all worked long shifts during extra-busy times or vacation times. Esmé most appreciated the ten percent employee discount on food items.
“Where are you going tonight?” she said as they pushed open the double doors and entered the cool, dim rear of the store.
“Jackstraps,” Eleanor said, “same as every Friday night.” She pulled her scrunchie off and her blonde hair stayed put until she ran her fingers in and out a few times. She had the thin, hard-living face of a smoker and drinker and had been divorced for decades from her rodeo-rider husband. She pulled lipstick out of her bag and ran it over her lips without checking a mirror, then traced her work with a finger.
They punched out. “I thought-maybe I could join you?” Esmé said.
Eleanor’s eyebrows went up and she smiled. “You changing your ways, Esmé? It’s pretty rowdy there.”
“I feel rowdy,” Esmé said. She felt like exploding, was how she felt, after the latest call from Ray. Something had torn between them like the tear on a piece of fabric that continues straight across, all the way across the cloth until the piece is neatly halved. If she went home now she would call him, apologize, say things she shouldn’t, anything to try to mend this tear.
And besides, she couldn’t stand the thought of going home right now. She couldn’t contain all she felt right now. She had to get out, right now, but not alone. She didn’t want to be alone.
Their boss, Ward Cameron, a small man who liked to cut a big swath, sneaked silently up behind them. “Not so fast,” he bellowed, startling them. He chuckled at their reaction as they turned to face him. “Rotation tomorrow, Saturday morning. You two, eight a.m. Don’t be late.”
They both maintained smiles for as long as he was looking, then Eleanor rolled her eyes.
“We oughtta unionize.”
“He beat back a union vote twice.”
“Then I oughtta quit. I hear they might open a new Safeway across the street from the Whitwood Center.”
“Ellie, you love it here. You’re so sociable. I admire how friendly you are with the customers. You love getting people laughing.”
Eleanor smiled, appreciating the compliment. “I love the money.” They walked into the employee lunchroom, where each employee was allowed a small locker for personal items. Eleanor pulled off her work shirt, a modest blouse, replacing it with a green tank top and hanging a string of beads around her neck. “Voilà,” she said, and laughed.
Esmé wondered at her changing in this room, but no men arrived to applaud her.
“Ward likes me,” Eleanor was saying. “Have you noticed? Whenever he gets a little bored, he drops something just so he can watch me bend over. What would he do without me?” She already knew the answer. “Hire another one. I guess that’s why I’ve gone through two husbands already. I think I’m special but they think different. You ever married, Esmé? I always wondered.”
Although she had worked at the store for many years, Esmé had always kept her distance. She never went out with the other clerks, and kept to herself at lunch. She preferred to walk somewhere, to the dollar store to browse for little household things, or to a nearby park where she could escape the store, which had no windows, no natural light, and a lot of talk about very personal things.
“I’m a widow,” she said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Long time ago,” Esmé said, changing out of the thick-cushioned shoes she wore to protect her feet from the day of standing. Everything important in her life had happened so long ago, but Ray was now on a rampage through the past. She remembered the phone call again and this uncontainable anger returned-against Ray, for his pigheadedness, and against Leigh, who had dealt him a massive and destabilizing blow and set him on this course.