Missing (25 page)

"I don’t need to know," she said softly.

"Maybe you don’t. But they’ve gotten in the
way of my relationships in the past."

The phone rang suddenly, making her jump. I went into
the living room and picked up the receiver. It was Nancy Grandin.

"Why did you tell my father about Paul?"
she said with such anguish in her voice that I felt ashamed.

"Nancy, I had to. I have to talk to Paul."

"Dad’s just crazy with thinking about it. He’s
so upset. I don’t know what to do." She sobbed. "I don’t
know what to do."

"Meet me and let me explain. Then decide."

"You said you were going to go to the police."

"Not if I can talk to him first."

"I don’t believe you. Everyone’s against
him, and he’s got such terrible problems."

"I’m going to come to your house."

"No!" she cried. "Not here. I don’t
know what Dad would do if he saw you here."

"Then where?"

"I don’t know. I don’t know."

"Calm down," I said. "I just want to
talk to him. I won’t go to the police if I can talk to him. There’s
a Frisch’s in Kenwood—near your house. You know what I’m
talking about?"

"Yes."

I glanced at my watch. "I’ll meet you there in
the parking lot in half an hour. You let me explain. I won’t make
you do anything you don’t want to do."

I said it. But it wasn’t true. We both knew it.
 

26

BEFORE leaving the house, I told Cindy I’d call her
when I had the chance.

"I’ll probably go back to Finneytown,"
she said, as if the novelty of being in my house had worn off
quickly. It didn’t surprise me, as I had brought all the troubles
she’d been trying to escape, and some new ones, home with me. We
kissed good-bye at the door.

"I didn’t mean to cut you off before,"
she said, resting her head on my chest. "About your work."

"It’s not for you," I said.

"You ought to be able to talk about it—to
somebody."

"Maybe when we know each other better."

"You’ll be careful, right‘?" she said,
putting her hand on my cheek. "Because this is still scaring me.
This kid’s scaring me. People seem to die around him."

She wasn’t wrong about
that.

***

Because of the rain, it took me a little over a half
an hour to drive out 7l to Kenwood Road. I wasn’t sure Nancy
Grandin was going to be there when I pulled into the restaurant
parking lot, but she was there, sitting in the gold Mercedes, chewing
on her knuckles and looking red-eyed and miserable. I parked beside
her car and got out, walking over to her window.

"Let’s go inside. I’ll buy you coffee."

"I don’t drink coffee," she said. "I’m
just seventeen."

"Then I’ll buy you a Coke."

She opened the car door and got out into the rain.
She was dressed jauntily in jeans and a pearl silk blouse. But all
frightened kids look alike. And she was terrified. I took her inside,
back to a vinyl booth looking out through a picture window on the
rainy lot. A waitress in taffeta brought her a Coke and me a coffee.
Nancy Grandin stared at the drink as if it were poisoned.

"God, if Dad knew I was here."

"He still loves your brother, doesn’t he?"

"Of course he does," she said, her eyes
flashing.

"Then he wants what’s best for him."

"He doesn’t understand Paul. No one does."

She sounded exactly like her mother. Only, when her
mother said the same words, they had a hollow, self-serving sound. I
didn’t have a doubt that Nancy Grandin meant them from the bottom
of her heart.

"Mason Greenleaf tried to help him."

"Sure," she said with a snort. "Because
he was guilty for what he did to him."

"Did Paul tell you that?"

"No. He’s brainwashed. That man cast a spell
on him."

I had the feeling it was the other way around, but I
didn’t want to argue with her.

"Paul loved him," she said grudgingly. "He
doesn’t realize how his life was ruined by him."

"How did he ruin his life, Nancy?"

"I can’t tell you. But he did."

It was a little late in the day to be keeping Paul
Grandin’s homosexuality secret. But I could understand her
reluctance to talk about it. And I didn’t want to force her into a
betrayal that would scare her off completely.

"He tried to help Paul," she conceded. "But
it was too little, too late."

"Does Paul know that Mason is dead?"

The girl sucked in her breath. "He tried to kill
himself when he read about it. It made the newspapers up there, too."

"You mean in Columbus."

"Oh, fuck," she said, angry at herself for
giving it away.

"Look, I already know he’s in Columbus."

"How do you know that?"

"Because a friend of Mason’s went to look for
him there."

The girl put a stubbornly blank look on her face. "I
have no idea what you’re talking about."

"Nancy, you do know what I’m talking about.
Your brother was in a bar with Mason on the night he died, along with
another man. They had an argument, and after that argument, Mason
killed himself."

"You’re wrong. Paul doesn’t know anything
about it,"

"Then let me talk to him."

"He can’t see people."

"Why not?"

"Because he can’t." She glanced out the
window and threw a hand to her mouth. "Oh, my God."

I looked through the plate glass and saw another
Mercedes pull into the lot. Paul Grandin, Sr., was behind the wheel.
He searched for Nancy’s car and, when he spotted it, skidded to a
stop.

"You gotta go," she said hysterically. "If
he sees you here, he’ll do something crazy. Please."

"You tell me how to get in touch with your
brother, and I’ll go."
"Please,"
she said desperately. "I’ll call you. I promise."

She brushed around the side of the table and ran up
the aisle toward the door. I watched through the window as she ran
out into the lot. When he spotted her, her father got out of his car.
She went up to him, and he grabbed her by the arms, shaking her. I
could see him talking angrily to her and glancing, right and left,
looking for me.

Maybe she told him I’d left. Maybe she told him
some other story. But after some more shaking and violent talk, he
calmed down. I could almost see the flow of power reverse itself, as
if it was draining out of him and into her. She kept talking to him,
gently, reassuringly. It came to me that Nancy Grandin was the real
emotional center of that family. After a while she led her father
over to his car. She kissed him on the cheek as he got in. Then she
got into her car.

Grandin drove out of the lot. Nancy stared after him
through the windshield, then glanced quickly through the plate-glass
window at me. I threw a couple of dollars down on the table and got
up as she started the Mercedes. I made it to the front window in time
to see her turn onto the expressway, heading north—away from her
Indian Hill home.
 

27

I DIDN’T know whether Nancy Grandin eventually
planned to call me or not. But I couldn’t take the chance that she
would try to warn her brother off before I’d talked to him. From
the letter he’d written to Greenleaf, it didn’t look as if he had
ready access to a phone. Which meant that he would have to call her
on some sort of prearranged schedule—or she would have to drive to
him.

That, and the fact that she was a frightened child,
was what I was counting on. She was no fool, but between me and her
father, she’d been terrified enough to bolt to her brother in
Columbus. Columbus was the general direction she’d been headed when
she left the restaurant. And it was the direction I headed as soon as
I got the Pinto started, following her onto north 7l.

I wasn’t sure I had her until I got to Wilmington—a
good twenty minutes beyond Kenwood. Up until then, I was wondering
how far I was willing to push it before going back. Nancy Grandin
could have turned off at any number of exits without me knowing it.
But as it happened, she hadn’t turned off. I topped a rise and
spotted her gold Mercedes in the distance—still running due north,
running scared. After that, it was just a question of hanging back
and waiting for her to get to wherever it was she was running to.

An hour and a half went by, full of flooded
cornfields and solitary trees standing like gibbets in the hazy
distance. A few miles south of Columbus, she turned off the
expressway onto a state road.

I almost missed the exit in the monotony of rain and
flat, dripping fields. I managed to edge over to the ramp just as she
turned west, crossing an overpass above me and heading into a short
commercial strip. Golden arches and Pizza Huts and the usual skeletal
plazas of gas stations and convenience stores. I lost her for a
moment, then caught her again where the little stretch of Quonsets
died off over a hump of railroad tracks into a pleasant, middle-class
neighborhood: large frame houses, trim yards, an inviting look of
prosperity even in the pouring rain. About a mile in front of me, I
saw her turn left into a driveway. There was a sign posted on the
side of the road where she turned off I couldn’t see it clearly
until I was almost on top of it: EAST VIEW NURSING HOME.

When I got to the sign, I turned onto the short
drive, following it down to a low brick building with a canopied
entrance. I saw Nancy’s Mercedes parked in a slot near the door. I
found an empty slot of my own and parked.

I walked through the rain down the drive to the
canopied entranceway. There was a reception counter inside the door,
manned by a nurse. Hallways with numbered doors on them led away from
the nurses’ station to the right and left. The place looked spruce
and clean on the surface, but the hallway smelled of incontinence,
old age, and death.

"Can I help you?" the nurse said.

I didn’t know how Paul Grandin had disguised
himseli as an employee or a patient. I tried employee first, thinking
it made the best sense. "I’m looking for a friend who works
here—Paul Grandin, Jr."

The nurse gave me an odd look. "Paul doesn’t
work here. He’s a patient."

"I’m sorry," I said. "I haven’t
seen him in a while, and when I found out he was at East View, I just
assumed, because of his age, he was an employee."

The woman made a concerned face. "You obviously
haven’t seen Paul in a while, have you?"

I told her what she expected to hear. "No."

"Then you better prepare yourself for a bit of a
shock. "He’s . . . not well."

Her look and her tone of voice left no doubt that his
condition was serious. I began to have a very unsettled feeling about
Paul Grandin, Jr., And Mason Greenleaf.

"What room?" I asked.

"Down the hall to your right. Number one twelve.
I believe his sister is with him just now. I saw her come in a few
moments ago." I went down the hall, past doors opening on empty
rooms. Men and women sitting in wheelchairs, staring vacantly at
televisions, at the rainy windows. Room 112 was around a corner, a
little way down another long dreary corridor. I could hear the girl
talking as I got closer to the door. She was talking about me.

"He said he’d go to the police."

"What difference does it make‘?" a man
said in a listless tenor voice “I'm not going anywhere."

I came to the door and looked in. The sister was
sitting with her back to me. The young man sprawled on the bed in
front of her was wearing a blue hospital gown. His handsome face was
drawn and heavily circled under the eyes. He saw me in the doorway
and smiled.

"You’re the one, aren’t you?" he said.

The girl whirled around in the chair. When she saw
me, she flushed. Leaping to her feet, she whirled and came at me as
if she wanted to claw my face.

"Nancy, stop," the boy said to her.

"You tricked me! " she said to me between
her teeth. "You have no right! No right! Goddamn you!"

"Nancy," her brother said again in a calm
voice. "Leave us alone—I Want to talk to him."

She turned her head, glancing at her brother, then
pushed past me, her head averted, out into the hall.

"Come closer," Paul Grandin, Jr., said. "I
can’t wear my contacts anymore, so I don’t see worth a damn."

I went over by the bed.

"You’re the detective, aren’t you?"

I nodded.

He pointed to the chair his sister had been sitting
in. His wrists were bandaged with gauze and tape. When he saw me
staring at them, he smiled, showing yellow teeth. "When I heard
about Mason, I went a little . . . crazy."

"When did you hear about him?" I asked,
sitting down on the chair.