Gracie laughed. On Friday mornings, until she needed a nap, I was almost always funny.
I spent the next mile or so trying to explain the concept of triplets to my daughter. For a moment, I actually thought she got it. But when she started squealing, “Three me, three me,” I was pretty sure that she was still in need of a hands-on demonstration.
I hadn’t called Mary Black to tell her we were coming by, mostly because I thought she would tell me not to bother, but partly because I was ninety-nine percent certain I would find her at home and that announcing my visit in advance would give her time to get her thoughts in order, which was something that wasn’t necessarily in my best interest. The reason I was so certain I would find her home was that, considering the energy it took to get one small person out of the house in near-zero January temperatures, I thought it was a safe bet that Mary would need a damn good reason to layer up her three bundles of six-week-old joy to lug them outside.
Mary, her husband Gordon, an anesthesiologist, and their triplets lived in a sprawling contemporary ranch in a tony enclave off the Foothills Highway just south of the mouth of Lefthand Canyon. The house hadn’t been built for a family with three infants, and its out-of-town, almost-in-the-mountains location wasn’t the most convenient for schlepping multiple kids to pediatricians, preschool, and soccer. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a FOR SALE sign out front. Babies change things. They just do.
Triplets change everything.
Before I left the car I tried to check my voice mail for word from Raoul but I couldn’t get a cell signal in the mountain shadows. Yet another reason for parents of triplets to move closer to town.
I was relieved the Chinooks that the weather people had been forecasting hadn’t yet started blowing. Chinooks are fierce winter down-slope winds, cousins of California’s fabled devil winds, the Santa Anas. Chinooks warm as they descend from the tallest peaks of the Continental Divide, the gusts compressing and accelerating as they squeeze through mountain canyons before they ultimately rupture out of the foothills onto the communities of Colorado’s Front Range in fifty- to one-hundred-mile-an-hour bursts.
A wise man once said that there is definitely a place not to stand when an elephant has gas. In a similar vein, the mouth of Lefthand Canyon was one of the places not to linger in Boulder County during a serious joust with Chinooks.
It took Mary a moment to respond to the doorbell, but my guess was right-she was home.
“Alan, what a surprise.”
She looked surprised. That much was clear. Pleased? That would have been a stretch. Mary had a well-rounded son curled in each arm and the third member of the newly born trio was screaming somewhere in one of the back rooms of the house. Mary seemed inured to the wail.
“Hi, Mary, this is Grace. Gracie, this is Dr. Mary Black.”
“Hello,” Grace said.
“The babies are lovely, Mary,” I said.
Mary sighed and forced a smile. “They are. Thanks for reminding me. Come in,” she said wistfully as she led us into a living room that had been transformed by necessity into a day nursery. The grown-up furniture-a lot of leather and stone and glass-had been shoved to one end of the long room and most of the remaining space was consumed with infant paraphernalia, including three immense boxes of Huggies from a warehouse store and two matching, side-by-side changing tables.
The memorable aroma of stale diaper pail lingered in the air.
“Let me hand these guys off to the nanny. Hold on a second. Grace? Would you like to come back with me and see all the babies?”
Grace was thrilled. She looked to me for permission-I nodded-before she took Mary’s hand and followed her toward the back of the house.
“Sometimes I’m convinced that no one is ever going to come, ever,” Mary said when she returned to the living room.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
She shook her head, but I thought her expression said otherwise. Was I misreading? I thought Mary looked beat up. Her hair was ragged, her face hadn’t seen makeup in a long while, and the fleece clothing she wore was spotted with some of the fluids that were either intended to go into infants or with some of the fluids that naturally and copiously came back out. Sleep? Not recently, I suspected.
“Triplets are a handful, I take it.”
“A handful? A puppy is a handful, Alan. A baby changes everything. You know that. Three? You wouldn’t believe what it’s like. Entire weeks pass and I don’t even notice. Christmas was a blur.”
“You know why I’m here?” I asked again.
“No, not at all.”
I thought her response was wary, and just a little defensive. “Believe it or not, I’m here for a consultation.”
She gave me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “I’m really on… an extended leave from my practice. I was originally thinking six months, but that no longer feels like a maximum. I have no idea how long it’s going to take for life to feel under control again. My consultation is that you go talk to somebody else.”
I no longer had any doubt: She was chary. I wondered for a third time if she’d somehow expected my visit and knew what was coming.
Mary and I were colleagues, not friends. We’d already exchanged condolences at Hannah’s funeral, and I decided that I didn’t need to squander any more time on social niceties. She hadn’t exactly concurred with my desire for a consultation, but she hadn’t overtly refused, either. I said, “Mary, do you know that Hannah saw Mallory Miller for an intake session not long before she died?”
From the flash in her eyes, I knew instantly that Mary had not known. Her “No” was absolutely superfluous. “You’re sure?” she added.
“She consulted with Diane about it right after the session. Diane didn’t know who the kid was at the time, but she’s put things together since. It was Mallory.”
Mary’s brain was full of infants and infant things and she seemed to be struggling to shift gears to contemplate the weight of my news. “Anything that relates to what happened to her?” she asked.
“No, not directly.”
She changed her expression. “About what happened to Hannah?”
“Diane suspected there was. She went to Las Vegas last weekend to talk to Rachel Miller about Mallory. Diane thought that Rachel might be able to fill in some pieces.” I paused. “You knew Rachel was living in Las Vegas?”
“Of course. Why didn’t Diane just talk to Bill?”
Not “Mallory’s father.” Not “Bill Miller.” Bill. “Let’s say that because of what Hannah told Diane about the session with Mallory, it wasn’t an option.”
That got her attention. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Alan.”
I didn’t want to give Mary any more information than I had to. “Diane disappeared on Monday evening in a casino and nobody’s heard from her since.”
“What?”
“She walked out of the casino with two men and she… vanished.”
“Diane went to Las Vegas because of a discussion she had with Hannah about a single intake session with Mallory?”
“Within two weeks of that intake, Hannah was dead and Mallory was missing. Diane felt she had a responsibility to try to figure out what had happened. You know Diane.”
“God.” Mary turned her head as though she couldn’t bear looking at me. “What do you think I might know that would be… pertinent?”
“What do you know, Mary?”
She walked away and began folding a pile of recently laundered sleepers and impossibly small T-shirts. “I wish it were that easy, Alan. I wish it were that easy.” She looked back at me. “You know the rules we play by. Did Diane ever find Rachel? I wonder how she’s doing sometimes. She was so resistant to treatment.”