A Seahorse in the Thames (12 page)

“Oh.”

Lisa seems nice enough. She’s the mother of three kids. She knows how to show gratitude. I decide to trust
her. “The thing is, Rebecca ran away from the Falkman Center last Friday night. No one has heard from her and I have been trying to find out where she might have gone.”

“Oh my! I am so sorry to hear that,” Lisa says, genuinely concerned.

“I have been going through the things she left in her room to see if there is a clue to what her plans were and I came across something that I think would be of interest to Gavin McNeil.”

“Really? To Gavin! Kevin’s father?” Lisa is astonished. “Well, what is it?”

I instantly decide I want to leave Kevin with the impression that I can be discreet. I am trusting that he will find my discretion comforting.

“I wish I could tell
you,” I say. You seem like a very nice person, Lisa. But I don’t think I should say it at this point. “I was wondering if you could just give that message to Kevin for me. That I have found something. And perhaps he could relay it to Gavin. Gavin is still living, isn’t he?”

“Yes… yes,” Lisa says, stammering. “He and Lenore live in Palm Springs.”

Poor thing. I have probably ruined her day. After so recently making it.

“Could you just ask Kevin to call me at home? I live in
Mission Beach. And here is my number.”
I take out a scrap of paper from my purse and write my landline number on it. I hand it to
her.

“Is this about Leanne?” Lisa ventures, taking the piece of paper from me.

“To be truthful, Lisa, I really don’t
know. I think it probably
is.”

“All right, I’ll
give it to
Kevin.”

I sip my coffee.” It’s nice to see your family living in this house,” I say.

She smiles weakly. “At first I didn’t want to move in here. For the first couple years of my marriage I hated coming here. Gavin was so preoccupied with his work and Lenore slipped in and out of depression so much I never knew what she was going to be like when we came to visit. But Gavin really wanted us to have the house when he retired. He bought a condo in Palm Springs about five years ago and moved Lenore out there. He thought maybe getting away from this house and the memories would be good for her, but she just took it all with her. All the grief. She packed it as surely as she packed her good china…” Lisa trails off, realizing she is sharing more than she meant to. “I beg your pardon,” she says quickly.

“No need
to. I know the road you’ve been
on.”

“Yes. I bet you do,” she says softly.

“Thanks for the coffee,” I say, rising from my chair. “I’ll be home tonight if Kevin wants to give me a call.”

“Are you sure there is nothing else you can tell me?” she asks.

“I don’t think it’s my place to,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” Lisa says, shrugging her shoulders and rising, too.

We walk to the front door.

“Thanks again for what you did today for Chase. I can’t imagine what might have happened if…” but she doesn’t finish. She and I can all too easily imagine what might have happened.

“You’re welcome. Goodbye.”

I get into my car and drive away, glad to have met Lisa McNeil. She is kind, thoughtful. Normal. I don’t know what Gavin McNeil was up to seventeen years ago when he wrote out a check to my sister for $50,000, but I feel that Lisa is someone who might take my side, if sides need to be taken.

I get back on the Interstate and head west for the beaches. Priscilla will no doubt be up by now. If she is still in the mood for fish tacos, I’ll take her and Isabel to Seaport Village in San Diego’s harbor. While we eat, Isabel can watch the people who bring their kites to the grassy knoll by the yacht club to fly them, seemingly without a care in the world.

W
hen I get back to the triplex in Mission Beach, Priscilla is sitting in a lawn chair in the backyard watching Isabel blow bubbles. A cat that belongs to the retired couple that live on the other side of our backyard is chasing the bubbles, much to Isabel’s delight.

“Mom called,” Priscilla says when I reach her. “She’d like us to come over for dinner tonight.”

“Well, I hope you don’t mind if we make it an early one. I need to get back here before the evening gets too old.”

“You expecting company?” she says, looking up at me.

“I am expecting a call.”

“From?”

I look away, watching Isabel frolic. “From Kevin McNeil.”

I turn my head back to her and I see that Priscilla regards me with a mixture of awe and disapproval. It’s as though she is proud of me for taking such a bold step as contacting Kevin McNeil. But she still has reservations about my poking around in this at all.

“Kevin McNeil,” she says.

“I met his wife, today, Priscilla. I wasn’t planning on it. It just happened.” I quickly tell Priscilla about stopping the car for Chase McNeil, of being invited in by Lisa McNeil and my belief that she seems like someone I can trust.

“Well, I guess it can’t hurt to have someone else in the loop,” Priscilla says, turning her head back toward her daughter. “Someone who can vouch that you were alive and well on Wednesday morning.”

“Priscilla, you don’t really think I am in any kind of danger, do you?”

She shakes her head. “No. I don’t know. I just wish you had more than an uncashed check to go on; something that would let you know if you should go to the police with this or just let it go.”

“But that’s what I am doing. I’m finding out which I should do.”

We are quiet for a few moments.

“So, are you still in the mood for fish tacos?” I ask.

“Yep. Let’s do it.”

Priscilla calls for Isabel and she runs to us with the open bottle of bubbles. The liquid sloshes onto her hand and wrist.

“Uh-oh!” Isabel says, handing Priscilla the little pink wand she holds in her hand.

“Let’s get washed up, love. We’re going out to eat.”

“I want an Orangina!” Isabel declares.

“I don’t know if they sell Orangina in America, Izzy. You can have a Sprite instead.”

They begin to walk inside.

“Is it orange?” Isabel asks.

“No.”

“Is it fizzy?”

“Yes, love. It’s fizzy.”

Their voices taper off as they head down the hall to the bathroom to wash the bubble liquid off Isabel’s hands. A few moments later, they return and we start to head out the door to my car.

“Wait!” Isabel suddenly yells as we begin to file out. “I forgot Clement!”

Isabel runs back to my bedroom and reappears seconds later with the shiny seahorse in her hands.

“He’s a regular fixture, isn’t he?” I say softly.

“Don’t I know it,” Priscilla whispers.

We head for Seaport Village, talking about lots of little things. But Priscilla never asks me more about my morning, like what does our old house looks like now, and I don’t volunteer to tell her.

We are at Mom’s by two-thirty and she reluctantly agrees to an early supper so that I can get home by seven. I don’t tell her whose call I am expecting, only that I need to be home for an important call. I believe it is on the tip of her tongue to ask me who will be calling me but I think her aversion to telephones in general wins out. She doesn’t ask.

Isabel asks to see the ocean again, so we pack a few beach chairs, a blanket, and cans of soda and head back into my car. We drive the few miles to Silver Strand State Beach, a thin peninsula of land that connects Coronado Island with the mainland just a few miles north of the Mexican border.

Kite-surfers are spread out over the tumbling waves, enjoying the ever-present gusts on the Strand. Isabel is transfixed by their almost ballet-like acrobatics. She begs for Priscilla to walk her closer to the shore so she can watch them. They start to walk away and then Isabel runs back to me, dropping Clement in my lap.

“Can you hold him?” she says, but she skips away before I can answer.

I finger the delicate sequins on Clement’s stuffed body and I decide this is a good time to tell Mom that we will be going up to see Dad tomorrow evening.

“Priscilla and Isabel, too?” she says, a trifle perturbed.

“Well, yes, Mom.”

Mom frowns a bit, and then her features soften somewhat. “I suppose it’s best that they bury the hatchet. I never would’ve dreamed your father and Priscilla could have kept up this war for as long as they have.”

“Me, neither.”

“I used to be flattered by Priscilla’s hostility toward your father’s leaving me for another woman. But it seemed a little overboard after awhile. It was like she was mad at him for other reasons.”

“They have both been incredibly stubborn.”

“Yes. A Poole trait I have tried to forget I once found intriguing.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes as we watch Priscilla and Isabel a hundred yards a way, hand-in-hand, at the water’s edge.

“I wonder what made her change her mind about your dad,” Mom says, rather absently, like she is not expecting me to answer.

“I think maybe it’s because of Isabel. I think she wants her daughter to grow up with a family,” I venture.

“Even one as flawed as ours?”

Mom kind of smiles when she says this. It makes me smile.

“I guess so,” I say.

“Alexa, would you let Priscilla and Isabel stay with me Friday and Saturday night? They leave on Sunday, and I feel like… like I… I want that little girl to know her grandma.”

I, too, feel the pull of Sunday, knowing it is the day Priscilla and Isabel will fly back to London. My first response is to say I don’t like this idea. But that would be selfishness talking. “Sure, Mom.”

We turn our attention to the kite-surfers and the two figures far off that are also watching them. Clement sparkles in my lap as the sun catches his spangled fabric.

Priscilla agrees to the plan to stay with Mom Friday and Saturday night, though I think she does it more for Isabel’s sake than her own. It’s comforting to think she would rather spend the last two nights with me.

The three of us head back to Mission Beach after eating crepes at a sidewalk café near the Hotel Del Coronado, a place—to Isabel’s delight—that has Orangina on its menu.

When we get back to my place I check my answering machine. There is nothing from Kevin McNeil. Nothing from the Falkman Center, either.

Priscilla, Isabel and I spend the next hour looking at photo albums from my childhood, books I put together the year I turned fifteen, when I began to finally understand the family I grew up with was gone. Isabel recognizes a few of the pictures.

“Mummy! You have this picture!” she says of a photo of Priscilla and I wearing matching Minnie Mouse outfits, taken one Halloween when life was still relatively normal at our house.

She turns the page. The 8 x 10 photo on this page is a JC Penney shot of Rebecca, Priscilla and I. Rebecca is ten and Priscilla and I are three. She is holding us both in her lap, one on each side.

“Who’s that?” Isabel asks, pointing to Rebecca.

“That’s your Aunt Rebecca when she was a little girl,” Priscilla says.

“Oh. Aunt Rebecca. I know her. She’s visiting friends, right Mummy? I’ll see her next time we come.”

I look over to Priscilla and she just shrugs. It’s as good an explanation as any. Isabel closes the book and Priscilla tells her it’s time for a bath and then bed.

I put the photo albums away and just as I close the cabinet door where I keep them, the phone rings. I nearly run to the kitchen to pick it up.

“Hello?” I say.

“Is this Alexa Poole?”

A man’s voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Kevin McNeil. I understand you were at my house today.”

He sounds a bit peeved.

“Yes. Yes I was.”

He waits. And so do I.

“Well, are you going to tell me what this is about?” he says curtly. “My wife says you found something in your sister’s room that you think would be of interest to my father.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Well?”

I swallow. He sounds
very
peeved. I don’t like it. “Kevin, I think maybe you know what I found.”

Silence.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” he finally says.

I can’t tell if he is lying or not. My guess is he is lying. I wonder if Lisa is listening to how he is talking to me.

“Okay, I found a check,” I say calmly, though I do not feel calm. “Do you want me to tell you how much it’s for and who signed it?”

“Now you listen to me,” he says after a moment’s pause. “I don’t know what game you and Mindy are playing here, Ms. Poole, but I won’t play it. You understand me? My father was a fool for falling for these tricks, but I won’t play the fool’s game. And I swear to God I won’t let him keep falling for it. So you’d better just watch it!”

Mindy? Leanne’s and Rebecca’s other high school chum and college roommate? What has she got to do with this check? What tricks?

“Okay, now I don’t know what
you
are talking about,” I say, trying to match his angry tone. “What does Mindy have to do with this?”

“I told you I will not be played a fool.”

“And I am telling you I don’t know what you are talking about!” I say and I find that I am shaking a little.

“Are you making this call for Rebecca?” he says evenly. “Is she with you? I want to talk to her.”

“My sister Rebecca is missing. She has been gone for five days and no one knows where she is. I found an uncashed check, Mr. McNeil, in her room at the Falkman Center, dated one month before
the accident, in the amount of fifty thousand dollars, signed by
your
father. I want to know why she has it. That’s why I came to your house today. I want the truth. You either tell me why my sister had this check or I will call the police. I swear I will.”

A few seconds of silence follow and I am glad for them because I am trembling with anger and fear. I had not planned on threatening to go to the police. I am not even sure they would bother to look into this. There is nothing illegal about writing a check, even one for $50,000, to your daughter’s nineteen-year-old best friend.

“Who else have you talked to?” he finally says.

My heart begins to race. It sounds like a threat.

“I have told a number of people.” I don’t know if Stephen and Priscilla count as a “number of people” but I feel safer with him thinking there are several people who know about the check.

“And have they advised you to go to the police?” he says, challenging me.

“That is none of your business,” I reply hotly.

“And neither is this any of yours. This conversation is over.”

Click.

He has hung up on me.

I hold the phone for several seconds before replacing the handset in the cradle. When I do, I notice that Priscilla is standing at the entrance to the hallway by the bathroom door with her arms crossed over her chest. I am sure she has heard at least every word I have said.

“Guess that didn’t go over very well, did it?” she says.

“No. It didn’t. He’s furious. But Priscilla, he knows. I can tell he knows. Whatever deal Rebecca made with Gavin McNeil, Mindy Fortner was also in on it. And I think Mindy kept after McNeil, asking him for more money. I think maybe she moved on from accepting a simple bribe to blackmail.”

“Lex—”

“I can’t just let it go, Priscilla. I still think if Gavin McNeil hadn’t written that check, Leanne and Rebecca never would have been in the car that night.”

“You can’t change what happened to them.”

“But maybe if we can understand
why
it happened, it will be easier to live with the fact that it did.”

“Or it might make it harder. Did you stop to consider that?”

“Priscilla, what could be harder than this? The way we have all ended up? Don’t you think knowing the truth, hard as it is sometimes, is better than believing a lie?”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t,” and she turns and walks back into the bathroom, leaving me to ponder which of us is right.