“Are you going to lose the business as well?” I asked.
She shrugged. “George has been working on a deal. These things take time, though. So until it’s final, we’ve been just hanging on, selling off what we found buyers for, scraping together every nickel we could find.”
“He had gambling debts to pay?”
“Not this time.” There was fierce certainty in her voice. “He swore to me this time it was bad investments, some real estate we couldn’t dump in a bad market. Negative amortization and a high vacancy rate were eating us alive. He knows I would throw him out on the street if he ever placed another bet. I figured that’s why he went out on the boat, to get clean away. When he gets real upset, he tends to want to go place a bet.”
“He didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “I chased him down the street in Belmont Shore this afternoon, and he returned the favor tonight, not fifteen minutes ago.”
She rose, involuntarily like a marionette on a string. “Then where the hell is he?”
“I don’t know. And as long as he isn’t here, I don’t care.” I began pulling pages out of the album and lining them up on the towel so they wouldn’t start sticking together. “Maybe he’s holed up in one of your vacant rentals.”
“Could be.”
I glanced at her. “So, how long has he been working on this deal?”
“Couple of months.”
“Like, since February?”
She thought before she nodded. “About then. He went back East somewhere for a couple of weeks. Around Valentine’s. I remember, because he mailed me a card.”
“Where was he this past Thursday?”
“Thursday? We went down to San Diego for a Bingo Burgers sales meeting, stayed overnight.” She looked over at me. “Is that when the girl died, Thursday?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought George did it?”
I nodded. “Her throat was slashed, just like Randy Ramsdale’s was two months ago. I caught George today slashing my tires.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Sometimes. But not this time.” I sat down on the other folding chair, because my knees shook. I was exhausted. And running out of time.
Leslie was staring at me.
“You told me you didn’t know the Ramsdales,” I said. “But it seems George worked for them for a while. He was working for them up in Pasadena at the time Amy disappeared. Does that ring any bells?”
She shook her head. “George did jobs for a lot of people back then, anything he could pick up. He went around the harbor, the marinas, getting what he could. And he did some handyman work, too. Anything.”
“You don’t remember him working for the Ramsdales?”
“I was pretty busy. Five kids and a job, that kept me occupied, all right.”
“You didn’t see the name on a paycheck?”
“I’m ashamed to say it, but George took his pay in cash so we could get out of paying taxes on it. We just used up every bit of it for essentials. I do remember him working in Pasadena, though. He did some boat work for a man, and the man asked him to come work around his house. The job was supposed to last a couple of months, but our old car conked out and George couldn’t get up there. So they loaned him a real nice little pickup with a camper shell. When he finished the job, they gave him the truck as part of his pay.”
She blinked rapidly, all of a sudden holding back tears. “If they hadn’t given him that truck, we couldn’t have gone up to the mountains that day with Amy.”
I was reminded how thorough Randy was.
Leslie swiped at her nose with the cuff of her robe. “But the name wasn’t Ramsdale,” she said.
“Was it Sinclair?”
The name caught her up short. “Yes, it was. Sinclair. I hadn’t thought about that for a long time.”
“I bet it was tough for George,” I said. “Being out of work and having a big family. Feeling like a failure. That situation can make a lot of tension in the house.”
“Yes, it can,” she agreed, smiling just a little. “‘Course, I always said George was more interested in making babies than raising them. He’s just a big baby himself. I can’t tell you how losing his little girl turned that man around, let him see what was important to him. Everyone always used to tell me George would never be able to hold down a job, never amount to a hill of beans. But I knew he had it in him. Then after Amy was gone, well, he just knuckled down. He sure proved them all wrong.”
“That was a hard way to learn a lesson,” I said. “Losing a child.”
She looked around the empty room, seeming overwhelmed, depressed. Her eyes brimmed again. “I used to think getting thrown out of your house and living on the streets was the worst thing that could happen to people. But I was wrong. I would live on the streets any day to have my baby back for even one minute.”
“Detective Flint tells me results of the DNA comparison tests they did on you and the girl will take another couple of weeks.”
“I don’t need the tests to know the child in these pictures is mine. You know, there hasn’t been a day in the last ten years when every time the phone rings, or someone comes to the door, or I see a blond-headed girl go by, that I don’t think, oh, it’s Amy come back to me. Now I finally do find her, and it’s too late.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
“I know,” she sighed.
“I have to go,” I said. I stood up and began gathering the album pages together. “I don’t want to be here if George comes back.”
“Why?” She was helping me.
“I don’t want to be the one to tell you.”
“Tell me what? After what I’ve been through in my life, Maggie, there’s not one thing you can say that I can’t handle.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“You’d damn well better finish what you’ve started.”
I stood there, knees knocking harder, imagining footsteps across the tile entry. “I don’t have the sort of evidence a court would ask for – police will take care of that – so you can believe me or not. That’s up to you. I told you how I got involved, trying to find out why a kid got lost. Not Amy, but the girl I knew as Hillary. This is what I believe happened.”
“I want to hear it,” she said, encouraging.
“A rich, spoiled man wanted a child for his wife; she was sick and couldn’t have one of her own. He thought a baby would be too much trouble, so he found a little girl that was already housebroken, knew about please and thank you, and was ready to start school so she wouldn’t be underfoot all day. He paid a lot for her. He dyed her blond hair brown, surgically he gave her a cute dimple in her chin. He called her his own.”
“You’re saying he bought Amy from her kidnappers?”
“How much does a Bingo Burgers franchise cost?”
Leslie didn’t answer. She also did not rise up in righteous denial. Or defense of George. All she said was, “Go on.”
“From there, it gets murky,” I said. “I don’t know everything yet, but the basic equation is: George was in debt and had a daughter, plus Randy was rich and wanted a child, equals George became solvent minus the daughter. The corollary is: George was in debt again, plus Randy was dead and he had a daughter, equals… what? That’s as far as I can go with it. You’re a businesswoman. You must be pretty good at math. That’s why I came here.”
“I think you should go,” she said.
“I think you’re right.” I picked up the pages, left the empty cover on the towel. I padded toward the door.
Leslie was still at the table in the empty room, staring at the empty album.
“Goodbye, Leslie,” I said. “Lock the door after me.”
She looked up. “I know I should hate you for saying all those things.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I could spare you.”
“One thing,” she said. “Can I have one of those pictures?”
I held them out to her. She came to me, both of us standing on the cold tile of the entry in bare feet. With tentative hands, she found the one she wanted, Hillary in a life vest in the bow of a sailboat, smiling, showing missing front teeth.