He tried to put himself inside Wendy’s mind. The name Ann Wiggett sounded like Wendy Harper looked. Wendy was white-blond, with fine hair and very light skin that sometimes seemed transparent. She could easily be the sort of woman whose ancestors all had names like Wiggett and Hemsdale. But would Wendy choose that name?
Ann Mercer sounded like a practical name for Wendy Harper. Mercer was common enough to be unsurprising to the people she met, and it was the same length as Harper, easy to fit into documents she wanted to alter.
He swiveled in his chair and looked at the cop behind him, a young detective who was reading something that looked from a distance like an autopsy report. Till said, “Excuse me. I’m Jack Till, from Los Angeles. Kohler is helping me on a case.”
“I figured,” said the cop. “I’m Dave Cota.”
“I wondered if you had a phone directory I can use.”
“Sure. It’s up there on the table.”
“Thanks.” Till had intentionally not said he was a private investigator. He stood at the table and leafed through the book quickly. Regular telephone books had been useless for years because most people paid to keep their numbers unlisted. He had to use the special police directory that listed everybody while he was here in the station. He started with the name Wiggett.
There were three numbers, all under the name Howard Wiggett. He dialed the first Wiggett number, and a man who was probably Howard Wiggett answered. Till said, “May I speak with Ann Wiggett, please?”
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “Mrs. Wiggett has already retired for the evening. May I help you?”
Till decided to go for complete verification. “I’m calling from United Airlines. I have a record that on August 30 six years ago, Mrs. Wiggett flew from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Was there a piece of luggage belonging to her that was misplaced?”
The man hesitated. “Six years? That’s a long time. It’s quite likely that she was on the flight. She used to visit her parents in New York, and the flights usually stopped in Los Angeles. But I can’t recall her ever losing any luggage. Can I take your number and call you back tomorrow?”
“Certainly,” Till said. “800-555-0600. I’ll make a note that we spoke. Thank you.” Then he hung up.
He tried Mercer. There were four Mercers, including one Ann. He dialed her number and when a woman answered, he said, “Is this Ann Mercer?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m calling from Southwest Airlines, and there’s something I’d like to check with you. If you don’t remember, we’ll certainly understand. On August 30, six years ago, did you fly from Santa Barbara to San Francisco?”
“Wow. That’s a long time ago. Let’s see. I probably did. I fly up there a couple of times every summer. What’s the problem?”
“No problem at all, ma’am. We’re cross-checking our reservation system right now to match it with our security system, and using old flight information as a test. Thank you for your cooperation.”
“But what—”
Till hung up. He called long-distance information for Las Vegas, and asked for Ann Delatorre’s number. A recording came on: “We’re sorry, but that number is not listed.”
He stood up, gathered his passenger lists, waved good-night to Detective Cota, and walked out of the office to the lobby and the street.
He felt pride in Wendy Harper. She had done well.
11
SYLVIE TURNER had been staring at the lighted display on her laptop computer screen for two hours, watching the line of bright blue dots appearing on the map in their predictable progression, and her eyes were getting tired. She closed them for a moment, then turned her head to watch Paul drive. She still felt lucky whenever she looked at him. He was tall and slim and graceful, but he was also strong, the perfect dance partner, and for Sylvie, the dance was the sign and physical expression of all of the complex relations between a man and a woman. It was flirtation, shyness, flattery and affection, celebration, sharing, demand and compliance, and even possession by force. Dance projected all of her feelings, and let her act them out. She owed that to Paul, too. Dance was something she had lost, but he had restored it to her life.
Long before she met him, she had been a good dancer. Her mother had taken her to ballet class from the time when she was three until she was sixteen. She had loved it, but the discipline had been inhuman, an exercise that seemed to punish her body rather than build it. The toe shoes deformed her feet, and there was the look. A dancer was not a personality, but a fiction that had to do with the idea of perfection. Nobody had ever told Sylvie that she could not be a dancer if she ate, but it was obvious even to a small child that she shouldn’t eat. She stayed so thin that she had not begun her period when she was fifteen.
It had not bothered her particularly. Her slender flat-chested body had made her seem more like a dancer. She had kept training, practicing, dancing. She had outgrown four ballet schools by then, each one farther from home. Her mother had been driving her from Van Nuys to Santa Monica every day after school for her class at the latest and best school for nearly a year when Madame Bazetnikova had subjected the girls to her annual evaluation.
The first few girls who had gone into Madame’s office had come out smiling and crying at the same time, hugged each other and then collapsed. Madame was a difficult woman. She had been a dancer in Russia, not for the Kirov, but for a lesser company in Minsk. Her dancing career had ended in the 1960s, and by the time she defected she had been only a chaperone in a company touring Norway, and her government didn’t bother to protest her loss. But she had moved to Los Angeles and built a fanatical following among the ballet mothers of the city. As she reached old age, she had begun to look dramatic, the way they thought a ballet mistress should look. Each year she took a corps of twelve girls from all of her classes and toured the state for a week during Christmas break, presenting them in excerpts from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
After most of the other girls had been called into the office and come out, she called Sylvie. By then Sylvie expected to hear that she would be Odette in Swan Lake, or Clara in The Nutcracker. The others had come out happy, but none of them had said anything about being the lead. When Madame Bazetnikova had said, “Sylvie, come sit by me,” she had been certain. Madame had never spoken so kindly to her, or to any of the other girls in her hearing. She had been particularly fond of showing contempt with the mere raising of an eyebrow. This time her voice was soft and motherly. “Sylvie.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“You are a serious, hardworking girl. You have studied your labanotation, learned your steps, and practiced.” She stared at Sylvie for a second. “How long do you practice at home each day?”
“Two hours, sometimes more.”
“I’ll bet a lot of times it’s more. I’ve watched you, and so I know. And you know that in each girl’s fifteenth year, I make a decision about her. You are over fifteen now, but I needed more time for you. Now I’ve decided. You will never be a ballet dancer. It’s not your fault. You tried as hard as any girl, but your body is wrong. You don’t have the look. You’re nothing but bones, but you’re still too big.”
“I’ll try harder,” she protested. “I’ll practice. I’ll stop growing and—”
But Madame was shaking her head. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Stop trying. Dance for pleasure, for the joy of it. Eat. Or don’t eat and go be a model. I know the world of dance, and I can tell you that you have gone as far as you can go.”