“Let’s go,” I said, turning off the light.
There was a telephone in the living room but I couldn’t bring myself to stay here any longer and I didn’t want to report finding my third corpse in four days. I didn’t search the place. I didn’t go into the bedrooms. I knew what I would see. I just wanted to get out. Maybe I would call the police from my office when I was dry and I wasn’t shaking. Maybe I would call and tell them a story. It wouldn’t be the truth, so I needed time to make it up.
The rain was heavier.
I had to move slowly going back to the car where the rising water was now up to mid-hubcap. I wondered if any neighbors had seen us go into the house. I wondered if any neighbors had seen someone go in an hour or two before us. I wondered if anyone in this neighborhood would tell even if they had seen the murder on their front lawn.
Ames and I got in the car and I drove slowly through heavy rain that would move the waste but not wash it away.
My name is Lew Fonesca.
The crumbs of Gretel that had led me to that house had begun to drop four days earlier when…
1
“Hot in here.” She looked around my tiny office, trying not to show uncertainty and disapproval.
“Air conditioner doesn’t work,” I said.
“Then why do you leave it on?”
“Fan makes the air move a little. Your daughter is missing?”
She nodded.
So far all I had from her was that her daughter, Adele, was missing and that the woman’s name was Beryl. She hadn’t given a last name yet. She was holding that back till she decided if she was going to trust me with it. Beryl was about forty, with dark hair cut short, on the thin side, and she was wearing a serious but slightly shabby loose-fitting blue dress with a belt and no style. She kept her purse on her knees and her knees tight and together. She had nice blue eyes and had probably once been very pretty. She also had a blue-yellow bruise on her cheek the size of a large peach.
I had somewhere I had to be in a little over an hour, but I couldn’t bring myself to hurry this woman. She needed to take her time. She needed someone to listen to her story.
“I have a picture,” she said, opening her purse.
I waited. The air conditioner buzzed and I pretended it wasn’t hot.
“Here.”
She handed me a little photograph that looked as if it were taken in one of those automatic camera booths you find in malls.
The girl was definitely pretty. She had blond, straight hair, was wearing a green sweater and showed a fine set of white teeth. She looked grade-school young.
“Adele,” Beryl said, looking toward the window as if her daughter might suddenly appear.
It was my turn to nod.
“How’d you get hurt?”
She touched the bruise on her check and said,
“Fell in the bathroom of the motel.”
“Tell your story, Miss…”
“Mrs.,” she corrected looking down at her purse. “Husband moved out when Adele was little. Driver.”
“His name is Driver?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “His name was Dwight. Tow truck driver.”
“He was a tow truck driver,” I prompted.
“Still is, I think. Few minutes back, I lied.”
“You lied?”
“To you. Said I fell in the motel.”
She started to raise her hand to the bruise on her face and changed her mind.
“He did it.”
“Your husband?”
She nodded and sighed, lips tightly together.
“You live in Sarasota?”
“No, but it looks like he does. Not sure.”
I glanced at my watch, pretending to be considering the situation. I now had less than half an hour to get where I had to be.
“Adele and I live in Brisbane, Kansas. Dwight left when Adele was seven. I can’t say I was all that unhappy to see him go. He sent a letter two months back,” she said. “To Adele. Don’t know what it said. She didn’t show it to me, but I did see the return address. Don’t remember the address, but it was from here.”
I nodded.
“I think she ran off to be with him. I raised Adele alone. Not much to do for a child in Brisbane after school. I worked days and a lot of nights at the restaurant, Jim and Ella’s Good Food. Truckers welcome. Most nights Adele would watch the TV, look out the window of the apartment at the oil rigs in the field. At least till she got older and got in with the crowd.”
“Bad crowd?” I asked.
“Only crowd in Brisbane, if you count four or five kids as a crowd.”
“Go on.”
“Not much more to tell. She’s smart. Good grades, always good grades, but she got into a little trouble once in a while. She’s got a temper like Dwight.”
“Her father,” I said.
“Got on the junior cheerleaders but didn’t go to practice and they cut her,” said Beryl with a sigh. “In a couple of school plays. One she had a lot of things to say. How do they remember all those things to say?”
I ignored the sweat on my scalp.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well,” Beryl went on. “Life is a puzzle.”
“Yes,” I said.
“She ran away a little over three months ago. No note. Just packed up and left a message taped to the TV saying she was going and she would call. I told Josh Hamilton, the sheriff, that she had run and he took a picture just like the one you’re holding and said he’d follow up and maybe get her on milk cartons and paper bags if she didn’t show up in a few weeks. I told him about the letter from her father.”
“And you…?”
“Worked, waited. She didn’t show up. Josh suggested I get one of those things you put on your phone that shows the number someone is calling you from in case she called. I did-couldn’t really afford it-but… but no call from Adele till two weeks ago. I wrote down the number. Adele sounded bad, scared. Wouldn’t tell me why. I told her to come home. She said she couldn’t, that she’d be all right.”
Beryl reached into her purse and came up with a sheet of paper. She handed it to me. It had an 941-area-code number.
“I called her back,” Beryl said, fingering the little silver latch on her purse. “Called back maybe fifteen times. No answer. Little over a week ago a man answered, said I was calling a pay phone outside a motel on Tamiami Trail in Sarasota, Florida. I got a ride from Ellis to Wichita, bus here. Adele is fourteen, just barely. She’s pretty, smart and in trouble. I’ve been wandering around for the last week looking for her, but I don’t know how to do it or what to ask.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Yes,” she said. “First thing. They took a picture of Adele and the phone-booth number and said they’d look into it. Nice man, a sergeant, said it would get it posted and go in the computer. I got the feeling Adele was going in a big box with a thousand or more other lost children.”
“I think you’re right.”
I placed the phone number right next to the photograph of the smiling girl on my desk.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Motel I’m staying at, the Best Western, is just down the street. Came here for a Dairy Queen fish sandwich just maybe fifteen, twenty minutes back. I showed the man who served me the sandwich Adele’s picture. Told him my story. He said maybe you could help.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, looked down and then straightened up. “Who are you?”
“My name is Lewis Fonesca. I used to work for the state attorney’s office in Cook County, Illinois. Investigations. One morning my wife took the car to work. She died in a car accident on Lake Shore Drive. It was winter. I wasn’t going any further up in my job and I’m not ambitious. I was cold and too many places and people reminded me of my wife. Am I telling you too much?”
“No.”
There was more but I didn’t see the need to share it with Beryl. I had come to Sarasota a little over three years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safe in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I drove away from the dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s office. Now I made a sort of living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for court or a divorce hearing. I had a county process server’s license, complete with a full-color card with my photograph on it. It was the same face I saw in the mirror: sad, balding. A short, thin man who definitely looked Italian.