I could see down the short hallway toward Brittany’s room where Johnny was photographing the bed with the shed skin in it. He’d already set his crime scene ribbon across the beginning of the hall, and stationed the Irvine cops on the other side of it. They stood there side by side, one looking back at Johnny and the other looking forward at me. They both looked spent: graveyard patrolmen on their last hour of the shift.
“When was the last time you checked on her?” I asked.
“Before I turned out my lights. It was eleven-twenty.”
Abby Elder’s words sounded detached and dreamlike now, as if delivered on her behalf by someone next to her.
I asked her if she had any relatives in the area.
She said her mother, up in Fullerton, maybe half an hour away.
“Why don’t you call her? See if she’ll come over and be here with you.”
“I... I think that’s a really good idea. Now?”
“Sure. We’re almost finished with this.”
I asked for a cup of that coffee, both because I wanted it and because I wanted to get Abby focused away from herself a little. For the next twenty minutes we talked about her life, job, habits, haunts, friends, acquaintances, routines, activities. Her family, her ex, her neighborhood. I was trying to find the intersection with Pamela and Courtney. I saw little Pamela in Orange — which was north of here; and I saw little Courtney down in San Clemente — to the south. Brittany was in the middle. None of their tangents crossed in any way that I could find. Until I looked at Brittany’s picture on the wall and began to understand what I’d almost understood just a few minutes ago. This was it: Pamela, Courtney and Brittany looked nothing alike. A blonde, a redhead and a brunette. Their mothers — Jennifer, Bridget and Abby — looked very much alike.
He’s not picking the girls, I thought: he’s picking the mothers. That’s why we haven’t connected the girls. It’s not they who catch his eye. It’s Mommy. That’s where we’ll find the plane of intersection.
“Abby,” I said. “Would you name for me, right off the top of your head, every group you’ve belonged to recently — church group, parents’ group, classes, workshops, seminars, social groups, clubs, unions, affiliations, anything? Everything? Please? Just take off and start naming.”
I’d asked Jennifer Clark and Bridget Simenon the same question, and I had their answers carefully recorded in the case files of Pamela and Courtney. But I knew I had been focusing on affiliations where the girls would be present. Now I knew that the girls came second. The mothers came first, to his eyes. It was a small candle in our room of darkness, but its light was warm and promising.
None of the three women were particularly active, either socially or professionally. They basically did their jobs and went home to take care of their daughters. Abby said she went to church occasionally, but usually not to the same one. It made her uncomfortable to be introduced as a guest, so she tended just to read her Bible sometimes for inspiration. She belonged to no professional associations except a credit union through work. She was an Automobile Club member, but she assumed that didn’t count. She took a junior college class in astronomy seven years ago, when her marriage was on the rocks, before Brittany was born. She said she didn’t belong to any of the “anonymous” programs because she didn’t have an addictive personality.
“I... well... no, that wouldn’t—”
“—Go ahead,” I said.
“Well... I joined a singles club. A dating service? Just recently. Last week.”
I imagined a membership of young men with access to Abby, and my heart sped up.
She gave me the name of the place.
“I mean, it was just three days ago I went on their active membership. I haven’t had a single date or even sent anyone a card. Or gotten one. That’s how it works — you look at pictures and send the person a card that says you’re interested? I would think that whoever did this would have...” Two big tears ran down her face and she looked at the carpet again. “...Would have known about me and Brittany before that.”
“Maybe not. Do the men who look at your pictures get your address or phone number or full name?”
She shook her head and looked down again. “It’s supposed to be confidential. They promise you that. Not until later, you give the guy that information if you want to.”
“You have a nickname, then, or a number so they can send you the card?”
“It’s first names and then a membership number.”
“I want yours.”
She went into her bedroom and came back a moment later. She told me the number and sat back down.
“They always say it’s someone you know, don’t they?”
“It isn’t, Abby. It could be someone you met yesterday. Have any of the Bright Tomorrows members talked to you? Even casually, at the service?”
She shook her head. “I haven’t spent a single minute there, as a member. That’s what I’m saying.”
I considered. “I want you to think back — I know it’s hard, but try — think back to every new male you’ve met in the last month, who’s between twenty and forty years old. In any circumstance, any occasion. Any one you talked to, were introduced to, had a conversation or encounter with. No matter how minor it might seem.”
“Oh, God. How can I—”
“—Just try. You’ll remember what’s important if you just relax.”
“You mean clerks and salesmen and—?”
“—All of them. Go ahead. Don’t edit. Just recall.”
She didn’t do real well. Her heart was heavy for Brittany and herself, and her mind was jammed with worry. She couldn’t recall names, her descriptions were hazy, her sense of time uncertain at best.
So I took out copies of Amanda’s sketches of the reptile fancier who had known so much about rattlesnakes.
“Have you seen a man who looks like this? Even slightly?”
The bearded version was a definite no. So was the unbearded. So was the glasses version, and the one without glasses. I watched her eyes as she studied the sketches, and I could tell that at least half of her mind was elsewhere. How couldn’t it be?
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I mean, he looks kind of familiar. But it’s like... he looks like... everybody else? I’m sorry.”
It was true. Amanda hadn’t been able to pry from Steven Wicks’s memory the details of an image that wasn’t there. And even if it had been there, I knew that The Horridus was changing, shedding, “consolidating,”
as Strickley had said. The old skin in Brittany’s bed said the same thing. I understood it. It was exactly what I would have done if I were him. The old was passing and the new was taking form. He was hatching out — egg to serpent. The only thing we could assume was that he probably didn’t look anything like these pictures.
When her mother arrived a few minutes later Abby Elder collapsed into a fit of sobs, and her usefulness was temporarily over. The last thing I got from her were the name and telephone numbers of her ex-husband, and a surprisingly hostile stare from her mother. I got a recording at the ex’s home and a recording at his work. I called Bright Tomorrows, too, and still another canned message telling me they didn’t open until ten. It was that time of morning — seven-fifty — when everyone is on his way somewhere, but nobody’s there yet. When everyone is changing from who they are at home to who they become at work. Hatching out. Old to new. Egg to serpent.
I went outside and sketched the layout of the condo, trying to see what The Horridus had seen, what might have helped him decide. I stood there in the cool April morning and felt the old thing coming toward me. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten since I was a kid, and it comes at unexpected times. After all these years, I’ve learned to pay attention to it. It’s a feeling of change — rapid, dramatic, unalterable change. The kind of change that leaves you breathless, looking back at the way things were and will never be again. It’s the foreknowledge that a freight train of events from which you cannot get away will soon and suddenly be bearing down on you. I felt it coming, just a few days before Matthew.