Then it hits her: Detective Burns hasn’t shifted gears at all.
“You think . . .” Landry shakes her head in disbelief, even as a forgotten thought tries to barge back into her head. “You think Jaycee is really Jenna Coeur?”
She pauses for the inevitable response—“Do you?”—but receives only a shrug.
Jaycee . . .
J.C. . . .
Jenna Coeur . . .
An elusive thought flits at the edge of her consciousness. There’s something she should remember . . .
“Can I take a quick look at her blog page?” she asks the detective, gesturing at the laptop. “I just want to see . . . maybe there’s something there that will give her away if it’s her.”
“Be my guest. I don’t think there is, though.”
Landry clicks over to Jaycee’s blog, noting that there have been no new entries all week. That’s not unusual—none of them have been posting. She’d assumed everyone is, like her, too shell-shocked by Meredith’s death—not wanting to put the loss into words yet, but not able to write about anything else, either.
“She usually writes about general topics related to breast cancer—usually political stuff, criticizing spending, encouraging lobbying . . . that sort of thing.”
“Jenna Coeur was one of Hollywood’s most vocal political activists.”
“That’s right. I remember.” Truly, she knows her movie stars. Reads about them, follows them online, watches those gossipy infotainment shows on television . . .
And there’s something . . .
Something else . . .
“It’s not a stretch to think that if she wanted to pose as a blogger,” Detective Burns is saying, “she’d cover topics that might actually mean something to her.”
“No, that does make sense.”
Landry scrolls down the page, tap, tap, tapping the down arrow key, knowing there’s something she should be remembering.
Frustrated, she flips over to her own blog and clicks to the archived entry about brushes with celebrity, wondering whether Jaycee contributed to the barrage of comments. As she scans them, finding nothing, the detective continues to question her.
“When you spoke to her on the phone this week, did she—”
“Oh my God! That’s it! That’s the thing I was trying to—when she called me, it was from a California area code. She said she was at a hotel in L.A.”
“Do you still have the number? Was it on your home phone, or—”
“No, it was on my cell . . .” Landry is already pulling it out of her pocket. “And at the time, I thought there was something familiar about her voice . . . I kept thinking she reminded me of someone. No wonder.”
She quickly scrolls through the call log, hoping the number is still there.
It is.
She reads it off to Detective Burns, who jots it down, then grabs the laptop and enters it in a search engine. “She wasn’t lying about where she was. The number belongs to a hotel off the Sunset Strip. Do you have a phone number for her in New York, or her cell?”
“No—yes!” Landry remembers. “She gave me her cell, then hung up before I could get the home number.”
“Do you have it in your phone contacts?”
“No, I wrote it down somewhere at home.”
“Do you think you can get it?”
“I can try.”
Detective Crystal nods and gestures at the phone in Landry’s hand.
“Oh—you mean right now?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ll just call home and . . .” She dials the house, trying to remember where the number might be. For all she knows she scribbled it on a napkin and then mistakenly threw it away.
Rob answers. “What’s up? Everything okay? How’d it go with the detective?”
“I’m still . . . listen, can you do me a quick favor? I need you to find a phone number I wrote down a few days ago. I might have put it on the bulletin board like I did the insurance cards.”
“I’ll check.”
He does, and reports that it’s not there. Hearing voices in the background, Landry asks, “Is that the kids? Can you put Addison on the phone?”
“Sure. Tucker’s here, too. You can talk to them both. But don’t you want that phone number first?”
“I do want it—that’s why I need Addison. She’s a lot better at finding things than y’all are.”
“Ouch,” he says mildly, and hands the phone over to their daughter.
“Mom?”
A new wave of homesickness washes over her with the sound of her daughter’s voice. “Hi, sweetie. I need your help. I wrote down a phone number the other day, probably on scrap paper, and it’s around there somewhere. Can you look for it? I was in my bedroom, I think, when I talked to her, so you might want to start there.”
“Sure. Hang on a second.”
Landry nods at Detective Burns. “My daughter’s looking.”
“Gotcha. For what it’s worth, my husband can never find anything either. Men, right?”
Caught up in the unexpected moment of female bonding, and forgetting all about why they’re here, Landry shakes her head with a smile. “Right. My son is the same way. Do you have kids?”
“I had a son.”
Had means she lost him—and Landry can see it in the sorrow in her dark brown eyes.
Before she can figure out what to say—what else is there, besides I’m so sorry?—Addison is back on the line. “I think I found it. Is it written in blue Sharpie on the back of a supermarket receipt?”
“That’s it. Can you read it off for me?”
Addison does, repeating it twice to make sure Landry gets it right as she relays it to Detective Burns, who immediately Googles it.
“Thanks, sweetie. I’ll call back a little later to talk to you and to Tucker, too.”
“Okay. I miss you. I love you.”
“I miss you and love you, too. I’ll be home tomorrow.”
Hanging up, she’s pretty sure she glimpses a fleeting bittersweet expression on Detective Burns’s face, and she wonders again about the child she lost.
But the moment is gone; the detective is frowning at the computer. “That’s the phone number for a sushi place in New York. Unless your daughter got it wrong.”
“She wouldn’t. But I’ll make sure.” She quickly texts Addison, asking her to double-check the number.
The response is, predictably, prompt and efficient. The number was right—as in wrong. As in, it looks like Jaycee deliberately withheld her real number.
“I’ll call it”—Detective Burns is already dialing— “just to be sure.”
Landry is sure even before she hears the detective say into the phone, “I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” and hang up.
She looks at Landry. “That was Wasabi Express asking me for my take-out order. Looks like your friend Jaycee had no intention of letting you find her.”
Diagnosis: Trypanophobia
That’s the official name for this crippling lifelong affliction of mine. Trypanophobia, otherwise known as fear of needles.
Not just needles prodding into me, but into anyone at all. I’m ashamed to admit it, but when my kids were little, I used to have my mother—and then, after she passed away, a friend or neighbor—come with me to the pediatrician’s office on days they needed shots or to have blood drawn. I’d sit in the waiting room while someone else held my children’s hands as needles poked into their arms. I’ve always felt guilty about that. But I couldn’t help it.
I have thin veins; it’s never been easy for a nurse or doctor to tap into one without a whole lot of painful poking around. And if my phobia didn’t ease up with pregnancy or motherhood, then it sure as hell didn’t happen after my cancer diagnosis. If anything, it became worse than ever.
That was why I ultimately opted to have a port implanted to deliver chemo medication—not that I could avoid the needles even then. There were plenty of other reasons for doctors and nurses to jab me, sometimes repeatedly, with every office visit.