Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (53 page)

No reply.

"Laura—why?"

She shook her head, rocking harder.

I watched her silently, taking my earlier line of reasoning to its
inevitable conclusion. If Tracy had been involved— either directly or
indirectly—in the killing at the Napa River, she would have good cause
to fear being seen, particularly by Rob Soriano, who had known her. Had
she given her mother any indication of what had happened that night, or
in the intervening years? Or had she merely summoned her? And in either
instance—why now? Because she had heard the case was being reopened?
That presupposed her being in touch with someone who knew about my
investigation.

"Laura," I said, "were Tracy's calls long distance?"

"… I don't know where she was."

"But did they sound like long distance?"

"… No. She couldn't have been too far away, not if she planned to
meet me here in the evening."

I was silent again, assessing what she had told me. Tracy could
really have called, or it could have been someone pretending to be her.
Laura could be lying, or she could have imagined both episodes. I had
no basis for determining which possibility was the truth.

Laura sat up straighter and opened her eyes, glaring defiantly at
me. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "That I'm making it all up
or hallucinating. You're just like George. You don't believe me."

At the mention of his name I felt a stab of guilt. I had slept with
her husband the night before, would probably sleep with him again
tonight. And in the meantime, this woman sat in a dark room waiting for
a daughter who might never come to her. A daughter who, in any event,
would never again be the child she had raised and loved.

"Just like George," she said again, and began to cough.

Alarmed, I asked, "What's wrong?"

She waved an arm at the door and choked out, "Water."

I hurried to the kitchen, found a glass among the welter of objects
on the counter, and rinsed it. I was filling it when I heard a crash.
Startled, I dropped the glass in the sink, shattering
it, and ran toward the bedroom. But partway through the living room I
realized the crash had been the front door slamming; Laura was gone.

I rushed outside and down the stairway. By the time I got to the
sidewalk, Laura was climbing into the Mercedes sports coupe that was
parked in the drive. I ran around to her side, but she had locked the
door. She started the car and it hurtled backward, tires barely missing
my toes. By some miracle, there was no oncoming traffic on Upper Market.

As I watched the Mercedes careen downhill and out of sight, I hoped
Laura had enough control net to kill herself or someone else on her way
back to Palo Alto.

George said, "I'll call a colleague of mine and ask him to look in
on her. If she refuses to see him, though, there's not much I can do."

We were seated in the kitchen of his borrowed house, drinking wine.
The promised pizza was on its way. He had gone ahead and ordered it, I
thought, as a way of maintaining the illusion of normalcy, but my news
about Tracy's purported telephone calls and Laura's behavior had shaken
him badly.

"Maybe you should be the one to talk to her," I began tentatively.

He shook his head. "No, Sharon, I can't. It's over with Laura and
me. Last night affirmed that." To my inquiring look, he replied, "No,
you're not the first woman I've slept with since the separation. And I
confess I wasn't always faithful to my wife. But you were the first
woman since Laura with whom I've shared that essential connection that
makes it the beginning of a relationship, rather than a casual affair.
I can't encourage Laura to think there's still something between us,
no matter how bad a shape she's in."

"Besides," he added, "Laura's a very perceptive woman, even when
she's in a poor emotional state. She'd realize I was only coming round
out of pity, and that would take away her pride. She'll need her pride
if she's going to survive whatever's ahead."

I nodded, twirling my wineglass slowly between my fingers. "Just so
long as someone looks in on her. But what about those phone calls,
George? Do you think they actually were from Tracy?"

His eyes were clouded, their hazel tinged with green. "The phone
calls… I just don't know. The whole thing's so clandestine, spooky—so
unlike Tracy. And yet I have to remind myself that it was also unlike
her to disappear and maintain a silence while her friend was convicted
of killing her. I just don't know, dammit!"

"Is it possible the calls are a figment of Laura's imagination?"

"Yes." He grimaced, then laughed bitterly. "You know, part of me
wants to believe that, because I can't imagine what Tracy's become,
that she would put us all through such an ordeal. But on the other
hand, if Laura's imagining them, she's deteriorated drastically in the
course of a week."

"Do people just suddenly… go like that?"

"Sometimes. It could have been accelerated by the holidays. She
refused to do anything during them, even though some relatives had
asked her to visit, even tried to get her to go to dinner with me on
Christmas Eve, but she wouldn't."

I felt a prickle of jealousy, even though I hadn't so much as known
of George Kostakos's existence then.

He smiled and covered my hand with his. "I only did that because I
felt sorry for her. I should have known better. She saw right through
me, of course." He paused, studying my face, his candid gaze asking me
to believe him. After a moment I lowered my own gaze to the tabletop,
discomforted because
he had seen through me as easily as Laura had seen through him.

He understood that, too, released my hand and rose briskly. "I'll
call my colleague. You listen for the pizza delivery guy."

I remained at the table, sipping wine moodily and staring at a big
bunch of dried red peppers that hung from a black iron pot rack.
Strangely ambivalent feelings were welling up in me. On the one hand, I
wanted George all to myself; on the other, I wanted him to do something
to help Laura. The night before, I had not thought of him as a
still-married man with a badly disturbed wife; tonight it was the only
way I could think of him. Perhaps this relationship would prove to be
more than I wanted to handle—

The doorbell rang. I picked up the money he'd left on the table and
went down to meet the man from Domino's.

We spent the remainder of the evening in tacit agreement not to
discuss either his wife or my investigation. After we ate, we built a
fire and—in lieu of comfortable furniture— piled blankets and pillows
on the floor in front of the hearth. For a while we stared at the
flames and traded past histories and small confidences—the mortar that
binds the bricks of physical desire and runaway emotion into a
structure far stronger than either of those elements alone.

I learned that George had always lived in Palo Alto, except for the
years he spent in college at Harvard and postgraduate work at the
University of Michigan; that he'd turned his back on the family
business—oil exploration and drilling—by entering the Ph.D. program,
and thus became estranged from his father. He met and married Laura,
who was also doing graduate work, in Ann Arbor; unlike many academic
couples, they both managed to secure faculty positions at Stanford.
After Tracy's birth, he and his father reconciled, and when his father
died some dozen years ago, he found himself in
possession of a small fortune.

"But the money never made a difference," he said. "It was nice to
have it, and we lived well, but it just… didn't make a difference."

"How do you mean?"

"Things went along much as they always had. Life fell into a
predictable routine, day to day, month to month, year to year—the way
it does when you're building careers and raising a child. It wasn't
unpleasant, but…" He fell silent, watching the fire for a moment.

"You know," he went on, "there's a whole period in my life that's
gray. I really don't remember much about it. Little things stand out: a
nice Christmas, Tracy's high school graduation, a good vacation. But
it's as if they happened to someone else and were told to me. What I do
remember are things from early on: winter mornings in Cambridge, when
it was so cold you dressed inches from the electric heater and
literally slid to class on ice-slicked snow; autumn days in Ann Arbor,
when the whole Huron River Valley was hazed with leaf smoke that still
didn't mute the fall color; a special evening with Laura shortly after
we moved to Palo Alto, when we walked through the eucalyptus groves at
Stanford after a rain, with that overpowering smell of the trees all
around us and water dripping off them onto our bare heads. For a long
time I thought maybe I'd lived all my real moments and that those
scattered memories were all I ever would have."

"And then?"

"And then Tracy disappeared. The pain was searing, but it brought me
out of it. Surprisingly, what I found wasn't totally bad. At least I
was alive again. At least I could feel."

He turned to me, cupped my face in his hands, and conversation
became superfluous. Making love seemed to have a catalytic effect on
George's worry and pain, transforming it into a force that swept away
whatever residual guilt and
separateness I'd been feeling. Afterward I lay suspended in a warm
satiated state, perfectly secure, all but the most pleasant of senses
dulled.

Sometime after midnight the phone rang. George took the call in the
kitchen; when he came back, his step was lighter. "That was my
colleague," he said. "He's talked with Laura, and she's agreed to see
her therapist tomorrow."

I sat up, pushing my hair back off my face. "What about those phone
calls—does she still claim she received them?"

He crawled under the comforter, pulled me down beside him. "My
friend says yes."

"Then I'll proceed on the basis that Tracy is alive and has been
trying to meet with her mother."

For a moment I felt tension creeping back into his lean body; then
he turned me toward him. For a time we were able to ignore the fact
that a world where death and pain and loneliness are the rule, rather
than the exception, lurked just outside the circle of each other's arms.

At nine the next morning George had an appointment with someone from
Living Victims, the support group for relatives and friends of murder
victims, which he was assisting with grant writing. I asked if I might
stay at the house for a while to view some of the videos of Tracy's
performances; he pointed out the cabinet where they were stored and
went off looking reasonably cheerful.

Before I sat down to watch, I phoned Stan Gurski. The news from
officialdom was what I'd expected: Harbour and Emmons had not yet been
picked up; Larkey had released Mclntyre's dental records but declined
to assist, due to a prior commitment. When I phoned Larkey at his home,
however, he told me that he just hadn't been able to stomach viewing
the remains a second time. I assured him I sympathized with him, and
asked for the name and number of the talent agent he had introduced
Tracy to. I didn't address the issue of Jay's affair with Tracy, merely
set an appointment to talk face-to-face that afternoon.

The agent's name was Jane Stein. I called her office on Wilshire
Boulevard in L.A., and when I mentioned Larkey, was put right through
to her. Ms. Stein was confused when I asked if she had heard from Tracy
Kostakos since her disappearance, and surprised when I said I was
investigating the possibility she might be alive. Coincidentally, she
was about to leave for the airport, to fly to San Francisco for a
meeting with a client. Since she was going on to New York in the early
afternoon, she said, she planned to have lunch with the client at SFO.
Could I meet with her beforehand? She'd like to hear more about the
situation, and perhaps she could offer some insight that might help me.
I agreed to meet her in the main lobby bar at the United Airlines
terminal at eleven-thirty.

That left me with only two hours to spare. I decided to watch only
the tape containing the routine about the lesbian waitress, then go
home, change, and drive to the airport. The tape was still in the
machine. I rewound it and dragged over the least spine-punishing chair
in the room.

The tape had been recorded on extended play; it held six hours of
routines—thirty-some individual performances dating over the two-month
period before Tracy's disappearance. I looked briefly at each,
fast-forwarding through some, examining others with more interest.
After a while I became aware of a pattern that hadn't been apparent
from reading Tracy's sketchbook.

In most of the routines—the bewildered feminist, for example—it was
obvious Tracy was fond of the character she had created. Her wit was
sharp but affectionate; the fun she poked was gentle. But in
others—notably the lesbian waitress—her humor became caustic and
needling, as if she shared Larkey's opinion that comedy had to hurt to
be funny.

Her portrayal of Lisa Mclntyre held particularly malicious
undertones, and I could certainly understand why the waitress had been
enraged. Not only had she been sexually used by Tracy, but then
humiliated in front of the public and her coworkers. I suspected Tracy
might have handled her material that way in angry reaction to her own
guilt over what she'd done to Lisa, or perhaps because she blamed Lisa
for allowing herself to be used. Lisa couldn't have known that,
however, and I now wondered if her own rage had been strong enough to
provoke a violent confrontation.

After a while Tracy's routines stopped being funny to me. Now that I
knew how she had gone about creating them, they seemed trivial compared
to the suffering they had undoubtedly brought many of the women they
were patterned on. I shut off the VCR and stood at the front window for
a bit, staring out at the misted lagoon across the street, then wrote a
brief note to George—lover's nonsense that didn't really fit my
mood—and went home to change.