Good as Gone (16 page)

“Ah,” Alex says. “Maybe that’s why the name sounds familiar. Shouldn’t be hard to find out what’s up with her.”
And if she’s seeing your husband.
“Oh, and do you want me to keep tailing Julie? I found out where she’s going.” Before I can ask, he says, still in that maddeningly offhand voice, “She goes to church.”

“What? What church?”

“The Gate.”

I’m speechless. The Gate is the megachurch whose billboard I pass at the 610 flyover on my way to work every day. They meet in the goddamn Astrodome.

“She doesn’t go in,” he says. “She just sits in her car. Your husband’s car,” he corrects himself. “In the parking lot.”

“What is she doing?”

“I don’t know. It’s a freaking compound, there’s a lot going on in there. Three Bible study groups around that time, a singles bowling league, and something called the Circle of Healing.” He sounds amused. “You never went to that church?”

“We never went to church at all,” I say. “I mean, Julie went with a friend once in a while after a sleepover. Trying it out, the way kids do.” I think of the televangelist’s enlarged grin on the billboard.
Faith every day, not everyday faith.
“I just can’t imagine Julie wanting to go someplace like
that.
”

He’s silent for a moment. “Did you watch the video, Anna?”

“Yes, I watched it. Gretchen Farber. That band in—Portland, was it?”

“And?”

“And—yes, it looks like her. Maybe. But the image is so fuzzy, it’s not like you can say for sure.” It feels like honesty, because I watched it only once, in the middle of the night, with the sound off. And because I can hardly be sure of anything these days.

“Cell-phone video,” he concedes, but I get the uneasy feeling he’s humoring me. “Not a great image.”

“Exactly,” I say. “And Portland—”

“—is not Mexico,” he finishes.

There’s a pause, so I go on the offensive. “May I ask why you were looking in Portland?”

“I wasn’t,” he says. “I’ve been checking police reports filed all over around the time Julie arrived, anything involving a woman her age, hoping something might turn up. There’s a missing-persons report out on this Gretchen Farber—not in Portland, actually, but in Seattle. It’s from a couple days after Julie showed up—”

“After she came home.”

“You have to wait three days to file a missing-persons report for an adult, especially if it’s the husband or boyfriend filing—in case it’s what they call a lover’s quarrel. This was filed by a boyfriend, Calvin something. Anyway, I got lucky”—
Lucky
, I think—“because there’s a video of her. Don’t worry, I’m looking into it, calling the bars, trying to nail the ID.” He pauses, and I can hear papers shuffling. “There’s one other possibility I’m exploring.”

“You mean for identifying the impostor?” I ask, attempting to sound sarcastic, but Alex doesn’t skip a beat.

“Charlotte Willard,” he says. “Same age as Julie, ran away from her home in Louisiana shortly after Julie—uh, disappeared. Maybe it’s nothing, but there’s a Charlotte from seven years ago—going by a different last name, of course—picked up in San Francisco, spends a while in foster care, and then sort of falls off the map. Switched up her name again or something.”

“So?”

“So, I’m not sure,” he admits. “But I think Charlotte may be Gretchen. And Gretchen may be—well, Julie.”

“And why would this Charlotte or Gretchen or whoever she is be posing as my daughter?” I hear my voice climbing to a higher pitch and try to wrangle it back down, unsuccessfully. “What could she possibly want?”

I push the Julie Fund out of my mind, though Alex surely hasn’t forgotten why I called him in the first place.

“Honestly, Anna, I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know when I find something else.”

His tact annoys me. “Say what you’re thinking. You think it’s the money, don’t you? The money in the fund?”

“I won’t know what to think until you get me that DNA sample.”

I hang up without saying goodbye and open the browser on my desktop.

The Gate’s website features an elaborate series of Flash animations, which I click through impatiently until I find the Circle of Healing. When I click on the link, an animated drop of water falls into the middle of the words, pushing them out into concentric circles that ripple over the whole screen. When the screen goes smooth again, this description appears:

We invite to the Circle of Healing all who feel broken.

When we ask forgiveness in the Circle of Healing,

God will show us that we have already been healed.

At the bottom of the screen, a series of faces fade in and out, each with a testimonial: an elderly woman blinded by cataracts until the Circle of Healing taught her she could already see. An African American teenager saved from dropping out of school by the Circle of Healing. A man, once homeless, discovered the path to financial security through the Circle of Healing.
God’s plan is for abundance,
the quote says.
The Lord makes His Kingdom great!

I scribble the meeting times on a Post-it note and go back to the search screen, where another listing is a link to a recent magazine profile of Reverend Chuck Maxwell, the man whose face looms over our local urban landscape on billboards at every bottleneck. The article is called “‘It Ain’t Luck, Chuck’: How Rev. Chuck Maxwell Landed the Biggest Pulpit in Texas”:

Chuck Maxwell is handsomer in person than on the billboards for his Houston megachurch, The Gate. The 42-year-old pastor with the grizzled beard and piercing stare is 6 foot 2 and unexpectedly graceful. It’s easy to see how this man has built a spiritual—and financial—empire.

Oh, it’s going to be one of
those
profiles.

Maxwell has never been ordained in any denomination, nor does he hold degrees in religion or philosophy; indeed, he never finished college. Yet every week he stands in what was once the Houston Astrodome and delivers a sermon to 30,000 parishioners and up to 10 million remote viewers via his television and Internet ministries.

I skip down a few paragraphs.

After dropping out of Texas Christian University, he snagged a production job for Houston’s fire-and-brimstone televangelist Jim Wilton. It was there that Maxwell says he began to have strong ideas for a Christian message he felt uniquely suited to deliver.

“I wouldn’t say I had a falling-out with the Baptist Church,” he says. “But the message was so negative: ‘You’re messing up! Get right with God!’” He laughs. “But God doesn’t want you to focus on your sins of the past! God says, make it new!”

My English-professor eye snags on
make it new
, Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan, and I enjoy a brief moment of imagining the elitist, anti-Semitic old creep rolling in his grave. I keep skimming, and Maxwell keeps preaching endless reinvention, spreading the word that nothing matters but the present moment. Could that be what Julie’s after? The profile goes on for three more pages, covering Maxwell’s massive donations to a nonprofit for missing children—that, of course, catches my eye—but I can’t stomach reading to the end. The thought of Julie needing Maxwell’s message—
Erase the past, live in the now!
—is too repellent to dwell on. Jane and Tom and I are, after all, Julie’s past. Or we’re supposed to be.

Which brings me to my final call.

I get out the piece of paper Jane gave me, still wadded up in my pocket, and stare at it. The area code looks familiar, but I can’t quite place it until I look it up: Seattle.

Jane must be playing some kind of trick on me. This is the phone number of a friend of hers, her roommate, somebody she’s put up to this. I feel a hot rush of anger, followed by a guilty twinge. I’ve neglected Jane—willfully ignored her, at times—over the past eight years. Every time I looked at her, all I could see was her failure to scream in the closet that night, the three hours she spent huddled among her shoes with tears and snot streaming down her face while Julie—I know it wasn’t Jane’s fault, but I couldn’t help it. Casting doubts on Julie’s identity would be a particularly cruel way to get back at me, but effective. My hand is shaking.

I dial the number and wait. It rings half a dozen times, as if someone on the other end is staring at the caller ID, deciding whether to pick up. Then someone does.

“Stop this,” Julie says.

I’m shocked into silence.

“Well, say something, Cal,” she says, her voice weary. “I finally picked up one of your mystery numbers, so say something. I know it’s you. Calling from every stop on your grand tour of my life, aren’t you?” She pauses. “Well, you found me. You’re here. So what is it you want to say?”

I hold my breath.

“What dirty little secret have you found out about me now? I guarantee, no matter what it is, there’s something worse about me you still don’t know.”

I know nothing, absolutely nothing.

On the other end of the connection, Julie says, “Fuck you, Cal. I left. It’s over.
Go home.
” The call ends.

sat in a dingy room with the social worker and a bearded man who kept trying to get her to tell him the name of her pimp. Officer Pete used that word too, but she didn’t know what it meant, just that there was a thrill of secrets around it, like a curse word. It made her think of pimples, but she wasn’t telling the bearded man that.

“I don’t have one of those,” she said, unable to make herself repeat the word.

“Come on, what did he tell you?” said the bearded man. “He told you you were special, he’d treat you right?”

The only person she could think of who fit that description was John David. Was he a pimp?
Her
pimp? She wasn’t sure. There was no way this bearded man could know about John David, was there? But a deep black well hovered just under that thought, waiting for her to slip and fall in. She shook her head.

“He convinced you to start trading it for money, right? Only he gets all the money.”

Now she understood, and a wave of heat exploded just under her jaw. “I’ve only done that a couple times,” she mumbled.

“Okay, just once or twice,” he said in a too-nice voice. “Just to help him out. So you want to protect him, because he protects you, right? You think he’s your friend? Maybe your boyfriend?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, the heat spreading up from her jawline until even her eyeballs felt hot. She pushed all her hate out through her eyes and straight into his bushy brown beard. At least Officer Pete believed her. She drew a breath to say so but realized she didn’t know Officer Pete’s real name.

“He bought you things at first?” the beard continued to prompt her. “Maybe he got your nails done.”

She pulled her hands off the table self-consciously. There were lines of black beneath the ragged nails, and one had a red, puffy bump of skin around the corner where it was torn. She noticed the social worker, a brown-skinned woman with a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck, shake her head and roll her eyes quickly, then look away.

But the bearded guy went on for another five or ten minutes before finally standing up. He flipped a card onto the table in front of her, pressing one finger down on its corner as he said, “If you remember anything, call me at this number. Just remember, he’s a predator. You’re the victim here.” As he lifted his hand away, his sweaty finger tugged the corner of the card just enough to knock it out of its perfect alignment with the fake wood grain on the table. She watched the card settle into its skewed position in front of her, memorizing the angle to keep from reading the name. When she looked up, the man was gone, and the social worker had taken his seat across the table from her with an expression of clear relief.

“I’m Wanda, Charlotte.”

She almost jumped. Although it was the name she’d put on the paperwork, the first one that popped into her head, nobody had called her that yet—the cops who’d shuffled her from room to room had said “you” or “young lady” or, when they were talking about her like she wasn’t there, “the juvenile.” Hearing the name said out loud for the first time, she realized how weak and stupid she had been to use it just because it made her feel brave to claim it as her own. Now it sounded like an accusation.

“Charlotte,” Wanda went on, as if determined to damn her as often as possible, “I was told you’d like to be in foster care. We call it out-of-home care these days. Do you have a safe home?”

She tried to think of home, but instead she saw a pair of blank, staring, upside-down eyes. Their un-wet opacity.

“No.”

“You don’t have a home?” Wanda prodded. “Or you feel it’s not safe for you there?”

It sounded like a trick question. This Wanda wasn’t like Officer Pete, mouthing off after a long day, or the asshole with the beard, drilling down in hopes of finding something in her he could use. No home, or not safe? She stared at the corners of Wanda’s mouth, watching for a flicker to tell her which one the social worker wanted to hear, but Wanda only waited, her face relaxed and expressionless.

“I’m. It’s.” Where to begin? “Not safe.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie.

Wanda just nodded, an expression not so much of approval but of completion, a box ticked off. “And Charlotte, are you hoping to be in out-of-home care for just a short time or for a longer while?”

Multiple choice again. She’d been good at tests, once. “I want an emergency placement,” she said, remembering what Officer Pete told her to say.

“I’d like that for you too, Charlotte,” the social worker said. “Unfortunately we have a shortage of options just at the moment. Child Protective Services will handle all that, I’m just making the referral. But I have to tell you something. If you’re entering out-of-home care right now, you’re very likely going to have to stay in a group home for a time while they look for a placement for you.”