When Flo came to the door I apologized for bothering her. She said it was no bother. I asked if Georgia Price was in.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she said. “Didn’t you get to talk to her yet? Though I don’t know what help she could be. I couldn’t hardly rent her the room before Paula was out of it, so how would she know her?”
“I spoke to her. I’d like to talk to her again.”
She gestured toward the staircase. I walked up a flight, stood in front of the door that had been Paula’s.
There was music playing within, with an insistent if not infectious beat. I knocked, but I wasn’t sure she could hear me over the noise. I went to knock again when the door opened.
Georgia Price was wearing a leotard, and her forehead glowed with perspiration. I guess she had been dancing, practicing steps or something. She looked at me, and her eyes widened when she placed me. She took an involuntary step backward and I followed her into the room. She started to say something, then stopped and went to turn off the music. She turned back to me, and she looked scared and guilty. I didn’t think she had much cause for either emotion, but I decided to press.
I said, “You’re from Tallahassee, aren’t you?”
“Just outside.”
“Price is a stage name. Your real name is Prysocki.”
“How did you—”
“There was a phone here when you moved in. It hadn’t been disconnected.”
“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to use it. I thought the phone came with the room, like a hotel or something. I didn’t know.”
“So you called home, and you called your father at his store.”
She nodded. She looked terribly young, and scared to death. “I’ll pay for the calls,” she said. “I didn’t realize, I thought I would get a bill or something. And then I couldn’t get a phone installed right away, they couldn’t send someone to connect it until Monday, so I waited until then to have it disconnected. When the installer came he just hooked the same phone up, but with a different number so I wouldn’t get any of her calls. I swear I didn’t mean to do anything wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.
“I’ll be happy to pay for the calls.”
“Don’t worry about the calls. You were the one who ordered the phone disconnected?”
“Yes, was that wrong? I mean, she wasn’t living here, so—”
“That was the right thing for you to do,” I told her. “I’m not concerned about a couple of free phone calls. I’m just trying to find a girl who dropped out of sight.”
“I know, but—”
“So you don’t have to be afraid of anything. You’re not going to get in trouble.”
“Well, I didn’t exactly think I was going to get in trouble, but—”
“Was there an answering machine hooked up to the phone, Georgia? A telephone answering machine?”
Her eyes darted involuntarily to the bedside table, where an answering machine stood alongside a telephone.
“I would have given it back when you were here before,” she said. “If I even thought of it. But you just asked me a couple of quick questions, what was in the room and did I know Paula and did anybody come looking for her after I moved in, and by the time I remembered the machine you were gone. I didn’t mean to keep it, only I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was here.”
“That’s all right.”
“So I used it. I was going to have to buy one, and this one was already here. I was just going to use it until I could afford to buy one of my own. I want to get one with a remote, so you can call from another phone and get your messages off it. This one doesn’t have that feature. But for the time being it’s okay. Do you want to take it with you? It won’t take me a minute to disconnect it.”
“I don’t want the machine,” I said. “I didn’t come here to pick up answering machines, or to collect money for calls to Tallahassee.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I want to ask you a few questions about the phone, that’s all. And about the machine.”
“Okay.”
“You moved in on the eighteenth and the phone was on until the twentieth. Did Paula get any calls during that time?”
“No.”
“The phone didn’t ring?”
“It rang once or twice but it was for me. I called my friend and gave her the number here, and she called me once or twice over the weekend. That was a local call so it didn’t cost anything, or if it did all it cost was a quarter.”
“I don’t care if you called Alaska,” I told her. “If it’ll put your mind at rest, the calls you did make didn’t cost anybody anything. Paula’s deposit came to more than her final bill, so the calls were paid for out of money that would have been refunded to her, and she’s not around to claim the refund anyway.”
“I know I’m being silly about this,” she said.
“That’s all right. The only calls that came in were for you. How about when you were out? Were there any messages on her machine?”
“Not after I moved in. I know because the last message was from her mother, all about how they were going to be out of town, and that message must have been left a day or two before I moved in. See, as soon as I figured out it was her phone and not one that came with the room, I unplugged the answering machine. Then about a week later I decided she wasn’t coming back for it and I might as well use it, because I needed one. When I hooked it up again I played her messages before I set the tape to record.”
“Were there messages besides the ones from her parents?”
“A few.”
“Do you still have them?”
“I erased the tape.”
“Do you remember anything about the other messages?”
“Gee, I don’t. There were some that were just hangups. I just played the tape once through trying to figure out how to erase it.”
“What about the other tape, the one that says nobody’s home but you can leave a message? Paula must have had one of those on the machine.”
“Sure.”
“Did you erase it?”
“It erases automatically when you record a new message over it. And I did that so I could leave a message in my own voice when I started using the machine.” She chewed at her lip. “Was that wrong?”
“No.”
“Would it have been important? It was just the usual thing. ‘Hello, this is Paula. I can’t talk to you right now but you can leave a message at the sound of the tone.’ Or something like that, that’s not word-for-word.”
“It’s not important,” I said. And it wasn’t. I just would have liked a chance to hear her voice.
9
“I’m surprised you’re still on it,” Durkin said. “What did you do, call Indiana and shake some more dough out of the money tree?”
“No. I probably should, I’m putting in a lot of hours, but I’m not getting much in the way of results. I think her disappearance is a criminal matter.”
“What makes you think so?”
“She never officially moved out. She paid her rent one day, and ten days later her landlady cracked the door and the room was empty.”
“Happens all the time.”
“I know that. The room was empty except for three things. Whoever cleaned it out left the phone, the answering machine, and the bed linens.”
“And what does that tell you?”
“That somebody else packed the stuff and carried it off. A lot of rooming houses furnish bed linen. This one didn’t. Paula Hoeldtke had to supply her own linen, so she would have known to take it with her when she left. Someone else who didn’t know might have assumed it was supposed to stay with the room.”