I didn’t answer her question about being an old bag who wouldn’t give me a son or daughter. I sensed the ocean of unsaid things welling up around us, splashing over the sides of our rickety little boat, the sea swells in the distance high and black and frothing at their tops, advancing. I yearned for tequila but I quit carrying the flask two months ago.
After tennis we all went to a bluff-top café on Coast Highway where the food is good and cheap and you can sit on stools overlooking the Pacific. The ocean was flat and shiny as lacquer, but I still kept seeing those waves heaving up toward us.
That night Melinda came to bed in a salmon-colored slip I’d never seen before with lipstick freshly applied and a bit of dizzyingly sensual perfume coming from her. She was assured and eager, even a little greedy.
It was one of those times when you make love without words because you understand that you are either continuing something or ending it, and you don’t want to know which.
Eleven
He took his third girl sometime that night or early morning, though we didn’t know it until 6:30 A.M.
Her name was Brittany Elder and she was five. Irvine PD called me shortly after the girl’s mother had dialed 911. She had gone in to awaken her daughter and found the bed empty. Empty of her daughter, that is. One pane of the bedroom window glass had a hand-sized hole neatly cut in it; the other pane of the slider was open and the screen was down. I requested an all-points alert for any late-model red Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge van and headed out.
Johnny was the only other CAY deputy at work that early, and we hit the scene twenty minutes later.
Abby Elder, the mother, was still in a blue terry bathrobe when she answered the door. Johnny walked in ahead of me and I saw him eyeing the front doorknob sadly — God knew how many times it had been touched by now. Abby’s eyes were red and puffed and her hair was still messed from sleep.
Two Irvine PD officers stood in the bedroom. They looked at me, then down at the bed. I followed their eyes to the thrown-back sheet and covers and the long translucent snakeskin lying lengthwise down the bed. It was papery and wrinkled and its two jaws lay loose and open. It was probably five feet long and four inches wide. I looked at the hideous thing, then back at Abby Elder, who stood with her arms around herself and a big piece of her bottom lip locked under her teeth. Fat clear tears rolled down her cheeks.
“What does he do to them?”
“Nothing, Ms. Elder,” I said. “He dresses them and lets them go.”
“He should be in prison.”
“He will be.”
“She’s my life. Brittany is my whole life.”
“We’re going to do everything we can to get her back to you.”
I told Johnny to start his crime scene work and took Abby into the living room. I wanted to hear every word she had to say. I told her to take it slowly, tell me the details as she remembered them.
While she talked she looked at me with eyes begging me not to fault or blame her. Parents blame themselves for everything bad that happens to their children. I can vouch from experience. So I interrupted her several times to assure her that this was not her fault in any way, but other than that I kept silent, took notes and let her tell me about the night that was, she said, easily the worst of her life.
“This is every worst nightmare I ever had,” she sobbed at one point.
“People wake up from nightmares,” I said. “You’re going to. So is Brittany.”
At the mention of her daughter’s name, a fresh river of tears poured down Abby Elder’s face. I said nothing.
Instead, I looked at the pictures hanging on the living room wall. They were school portraits of Brittany — a pretty, dark-haired girl with brown eyes and a mischievous grin. There was a pink ribbon in her hair. In another photograph she was posed with her mother. They both looked happy and healthy, like they had nothing but good things to do that day. I wondered again at the courage and energy it must take for a mother to raise a child alone. Or a father. A single parent, I thought. Like Pamela’s mother. Like Courtney’s. I realized something then, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was. So I listened.
Her story was actually quite brief and clear: she had awakened at 6 A.M. as she always did on workdays, to her alarm. She liked waking up to a reggae station. She put on her robe, got a cup of coffee — the machine timer had it brewed up by five-thirty because she loved the smell of coffee in the morning. She poured in some milk and took the cup with her to peek in on Brittany. Usually, she said, Brittany would sleep until Abby was done with showering and dressing, around seven. But Abby always checked on her, first thing, or almost first thing, after she had that first cup of coffee going.
“And,” she said, blinking and looking down at the carpet She took a deep breath but didn’t look at me. “And when I opened the door and looked... she wasn’t there. She just... wasn’t there. Instead, that... thing was in her bed. Where she was supposed to be.”
The room was still fairly dark and it felt different, she said, so she turned on the light and overrode her shock a little, thinking that Brittany might be way under the covers, down by the foot of the bed, as she sometimes was. She wasn’t. Abby had pulled the bed away from the wall and looked under it. She’d flung open the closet, then run to the child’s bathroom. When she went back into the bedroom she felt the breeze and saw the window slid open and realized the screen was gone. She had screamed. Then she had raced to the kitchen and dialed 911.
“The room felt different because the window was open?” I asked.
“Yes. The wind coming through? I didn’t register it until I came back in.”
“Did it feel different for any other reason?”
She brought her red-laced eyes to me. “It felt like a room that something bad had happened in.”
I made a note of that. Abby said she’d looked through Brittany’s room again after calling 911. Then she looked on the patio and in her own bathroom, and, for reasons not rational, under the big cream sofa in the living room. She looked in the garage. She looked in the washer and dryer. She said she was standing in the living room crying when the Irvine officers arrived, and when she answered the door she was too distraught to even speak. Her gaze shifted to the floor again and I knew that Abby Elder was punishing herself for what had happened. She shook her head and buried her face in her hands.