I said, “To the best of my knowledge, this has nothing to do with another man. Nothing.”
“Thank you. I had to ask.”
“Raoul? The Rachel you’re looking for? It’s Mallory Miller’s mother. That’s who Diane went to Vegas to try to find.”
He was silent. I hadn’t lost him; I could still hear the Sinatra and the fountains and the impatience of the traffic on the Strip, but Raoul wasn’t speaking. As the interlude grew longer, I immediately flashed back to the night before and Diane’s abrupt disappearance from the conversation I was having with her in the casino. My heart accelerated like a teenage driver with a lead foot chasing after a pretty girl.
“Raoul? You there?”
“I’m here.”
“I was afraid I lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me; I’m thinking. Diane went to see the missing girl’s mother?”
“If you’ve followed Mallory’s story in the news, you may also know that Rachel Miller suffers from mental illness. That might be important for you to know when you finally find her.”
“I don’t read that kind of thing. Diane tells me, but she didn’t tell me that. What kind of mental illness?”
I wasn’t sure what the tabloids had reported. “I know the answer to your question, Raoul, but I shouldn’t say. It’s something serious. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Is she dangerous?”
“Rachel? Unlikely, highly unlikely.”
“Why did Diane want to see her?”
“I found a way to rationalize telling you who Rachel is. Giving you the why part is much harder. I’m sorry. And I’m not sure it will help you to know the answer. If I think it will, I’ll tell you, I promise.”
The fact that Mallory’s mother lived in Vegas, even the fact that she lived in Vegas and suffered from a severe mental illness, had been reported in the news media. I wasn’t telling Raoul anything new by telling him that. If a patient tells a psychologist that the sun came up that morning, the news isn’t necessarily confidential. The psychologist can share the revelation with others.
Raoul asked, “Is Diane mixed up with whatever happened to Mallory Miller?”
“I can’t”-I fumbled for a word that seemed to fit-“address that.”
“You could if your answer was no.”
To myself, I said, Thank you. Raoul was absolutely right. I could tell him if the answer was no. But the answer wasn’t no, and he knew exactly what that meant. “I can’t argue with your conclusion, Raoul.”
“This mess-whatever this mess is-it started with Hannah’s death, didn’t it?”
I thought for a moment about what I could say in reply. “Hannah’s death started a lot of balls rolling.”
He responded with, “Si ma mare fos Espanya, jo seria un fill de puta.” From the cadence and tone, I assumed it was profane, and from the reference to Espanya I guessed that a Spaniard wouldn’t be thrilled to hear the phrase cross Raoul’s Catalonian lips.
36
I hadn’t been on the University of Colorado campus for a while. January wasn’t my favorite time for a visit, and the Duane Physical Laboratories wasn’t my ideal destination. But when my 11:15 appointment canceled on Thursday, I recognized that if I added the newly freed time to my midday lunch break, I had a seventy-five minute hole in my day. I decided to make the short trip from my office to the university.
The physics building is a large, angular, modern complex on the east side of the Boulder campus, segregated by roadways and by design from the cluster of lovely brick or flagstone structures that form the Mediterranean architectural core of the original university. The newer academic buildings surrounding Duane were, like Duane itself, looming, cast-concrete forms faced with just enough flagstone and roofed with just enough red tile to pay wink-wink homage to the Tuscan soul of the place.
I’d been aware of Duane for years; the tallest structure on campus, situated right across Colorado Avenue from the Muenzinger Psychology Building, it was hard to miss. But, given my arm’s-length relationship with the physical sciences, or at least my arm’s-length relationship with the study of the physical sciences, I’d never had reason to go inside Duane. Once I did make my way into the building looking for Bob, my initial impression was that Duane was state-university big and anonymous and that the notices on the bulletin boards were mostly about things I didn’t understand and, more to the point, until that moment didn’t even know that I didn’t understand. A professor was looking for a research assistant to study femtosecond optical frequency combs. Another lab needed help developing microcalorimeters and bolometers based on superconducting thin-films cooled to 0.1 K.
I didn’t know what any of it meant, not even close, but I was almost one hundred percent confident that I wasn’t their man. The students wandering the flavorless hallways-students who likely deserved my respect because, unlike me, they might have a prayer of being able to translate the bulletin boards-seemed a bit more serious than those I was accustomed to running into in my usual haunts on campus.
A big, anonymous building full of serious students? I suspected that Bob had gravitated to the physics department by unconscious design and had ended up burrowing into an environment where he could survive-thriving for Bob wasn’t really an option-for the many years he’d been putting in his time waiting for whatever would come next.
After a few false starts going to the wrong offices, I learned that Bob was actually a clerk/secretary in the office/lab where plasma physicists did their incomprehensible things. It turned out that Bob’s boss, a middle-aged woman named Nora Santangelo who was shaped like a chunk of water main, was as curious as I was about Bob’s whereabouts, and had a terrific intuitive sense of the parameters of Bob’s peculiarities.
When I introduced myself I omitted the doctor part. I told Ms. Santangelo-she didn’t strike me as the type of supervisor that a subordinate, or a visitor like myself, should call “Nora”-that I was a friend of Bob’s and that he had missed a rendezvous we’d planned for the previous evening and wasn’t answering his phone.
She responded suspiciously, “You’re his friend? I didn’t know he had any.”
Point, Ms. Santangelo.
It had taken some effort on my part to refocus her on the fact that I didn’t know where Bob was. “I called here this morning. The person who answered his phone told me he was out sick. But he’s not at home, either. I’m concerned.”
“Well, to be honest, I am too. I hadn’t called his home-that’s not the sort of thing that Bob… appreciates. He missed a day of work back during the spring blizzard in 2003, but that’s the only other time I can remember.”
Bob’s previous absence was undoubtedly excused: The infamous March 2003 blizzard had dropped almost four feet of snow on Boulder. “He didn’t call in today?”
She shook her head. “Or yesterday. Bob usually eats lunch at his desk. Puts his nose in a book or plays games online. Scrabble. Sometimes chess. He never hangs with the rest of the staff. Never. But Monday? Around eleven in the morning he told me he was going out for lunch. Came right up to my office, walked right up to my desk, and said, ‘Mrs. Santangelo, I’m going out to lunch.’ I was so surprised-and so pleased, really-that I told him to enjoy himself, to take a whole hour.”
“Did he?”
“Sure as heck did. He never came back at all. Didn’t call in. I still don’t know where he is.”
“Well,” I said, while I digested the news that Bob’s vanishing act had started even earlier in the week than I’d suspected.
Ms. Santangelo and I were standing in her office and I was finding myself increasingly distracted by the tubular shape of her. I would swear that her thighs, hips, waist, bosom, and shoulders were all the exact same measurement. She wasn’t particularly heavy; she just looked like she’d been forced to spend her formative years hibernating in a sausage casing.