The Disappearance (57 page)

“Haagen-Dazs. I’ve got a craving for strawberry ice cream. I may stop at the market and get some pickles, too.”

“I thought that was an old wives’ tale.”

“Even cliches were fresh once.”

“Don’t be long getting back. I worry about you.” He touches her swelling stomach. “And Junior.”

“I’ll be fine. You worry about you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

No protection. That’s not good. She needs to know where Nicole Rogers is.

She goes into the bedroom to get a sweater. Making sure Luke isn’t eavesdropping, she gets in touch with her technician friend. Nicole’s Pathfinder is on the move, even as they speak. He gives her some streets to coordinate by, and wishes her luck.

Jumping into the truck, she barrels down the narrow, dark road. Please don’t let this be happening, she’s praying.

The woman pulls into the Von’s shopping center parking lot on Coast Village Road. Her pharmacy is there. Since this trial started she’s been on medication, Prozac, a heavy daily dose. Her prescription’s run out, and she needs it refilled, right now.

The druggist hands her the container. She twists the top off, takes out a couple of pills, dry-swallows them. Feeling better, even before it actually takes effect, she walks back out to her car.

As she’s unlocking the door, a man approaches her. He’s holding a large legal-sized envelope in his hand. “Hello,” he says cordially. But he isn’t smiling.

She starts to shrink away from him, but he’s got her pressed up against the door of her vehicle. “What do you—?” she starts to ask.

He hands her the papers, literally forces her to take them. “You have been officially served,” he tells her. He turns on his heel and walks away.

She opens the envelope. She knows what it is before she reads the first line, but the dread and terror grab her by the throat anyway.
“You are hereby …”

She crushes the subpoena in her hand, her heart pounding. No way is she going to testify, expose herself, be made an object of ridicule and hatred. Joe Allison had made it clear that their lives were going in separate directions. Now he’s reaching out for her, from his jail cell. To help him, be there for him. What a bastard.

Trembling, she manages to drive home, pour herself a drink, turn on the television. Doug Lancaster’s press conference is being replayed on all the channels, not only his own. She watches in fascination, horror, and revulsion as he reveals his secret life. What kind of man would do that to his family, keep something so important a secret? She feels for Doug, because he’s lost his daughter, but otherwise she couldn’t care less about him and his problems, including his retarded bastard son. He’s a man with a massive ego, full of himself. And that woman with him, his “former” mistress. Had he stopped their affair after she gave birth to a retard, or when she had gotten married? Everyone who knew Doug knew of his promiscuity. He wouldn’t stop seeing that woman unless
she
stopped
him
, and it was obvious, from her appearing with him, that she hadn’t. A woman doesn’t put her marriage, or any deep relationship, in jeopardy unless she’s in love. Which she knows, all too well.

It has all gone too far. It has to end.

The sun is almost down as Riva drives to the location where the Lo-Jack had indicated Nicole Rogers’s Pathfinder should be. And there it is, parked in the upper Village parking lot. She puts her hand on the hood—it’s still warm. It hasn’t been here long.

Nicole is easy to find. She’s seated on the outside veranda of Pane e Vino, a popular and expensive Italian restaurant. Sitting opposite her is Stan Tallow, a senior partner in Nicole’s law firm.

Riva edges closer. She doesn’t want Nicole to see her.

Nicole and Tallow seem to be enjoying each other’s company. Her hand on his, eyes on his face as she listens attentively to what he’s saying. Riva catches snatches of the conversation: something about county zoning ordinances.

A waiter is at their table now, bringing them drinks, taking their dinner orders.

Nicole isn’t going anywhere, Riva thinks with relief, except maybe to bed with her firm’s rainmaker. For tonight, at least, she can rest easy.

Now the night has set in. The woman stands on the ridge across the canyon from Luke Garrison’s rented house, sighting it through the high-powered telescopic lens attached to the rifle with which she terrorized the defense attorney at the ranch up north. She only comes here when it’s night, when she can hide under cover of darkness. Through the infrared lens she sees him, sitting at the dining table in full view. He’s alone in the house. The woman who lives with him isn’t around.

His police guard is gone too. It was mentioned on the news, in passing: the sheriff had pulled his men from their surveillance. The county couldn’t continue to keep their vigil up, it was costing the taxpayers too much money. And besides, the incident is well in the past now. Luke Garrison doesn’t need the protection anymore.

Good. Let them think that. He’s alone. She’s alone, only her rifle keeping her company.

Now’s the time.

She had been to the clinic to discuss a fund-raiser she was going to chair. The meeting went all right, but there was an undercurrent. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but the doctors seemed uneasy around her—both of them, the man and the woman, but especially the woman, Dr. Lopez, who was normally very friendly with her. Dr. Lopez almost shrank from her when they encountered each other in the hallway before the meeting. And they seemed cool to her, both Dr. Lopez and the other doctor.

The meeting ended and she rushed out to her car: she was on a busy schedule, she had a lot to do, she always had a lot to do. Reaching for her keys, she realized that in her haste to get going she’d left her purse inside, under her chair in the meeting room. She went back in, through the back entrance, she didn’t like going through the front door, there were always so many poor, sick people in the waiting room, it depressed her to look at them.

The two doctors were still in the meeting room. She heard them talking as she approached. She didn’t know why, to this moment she doesn’t know why, but she didn’t go in. She hung back and eavesdropped on their conversation.

They were talking about a girl who had been in earlier to get the results of her pregnancy test. The girl was young, fourteen. There were so many of them these days. This one was different, though. She wasn’t poor, or working class, or Latina, or black. She was white, rich, privileged. She had only two things in common with the others like her. She was pregnant, and she didn’t want her parents to know.

The girl was going to have an abortion. It was getting late, she was almost beginning her second trimester. If the clinic was to perform it, it had to be right away. She
—
Dr. Lopez
—
was going to do the procedure next Friday.

There was a gnawing in the woman’s stomach, listening to this. She looked around furtively. No one was in the hallway.

“Thank God she wasn’t here when her mother showed up,” the male doctor said. “Can you imagine?”

“It’s okay,” Doctor Lopez said. “They didn’t cross paths. The mother didn’t find out.”

She leaned against the wall, feeling like she was going to faint. Then she snuck back outside to her car, where she smoked a cigarette in the parking lot behind the building.

Five minutes later, she went back in again. This time through the front door, in plain sight. She spotted Dr. Lopez behind the counter, talking to a volunteer. “Forgot my purse,” she said with a smile.

The doctor nodded, turned away from her. She fetched her purse from the meeting room where she’d left it and took off.

She went home and had a stiff drink, a bourbon on the rocks. Then she threw up.

Her daughter was pregnant. Who was the father?

Now it was the dead of night, hours after midnight. Lying alone in bed, unable to sleep. Her heart pounding, racing. Her husband a hundred miles away, fucking God knows who, her daughter pregnant, fucking God knows who, she’s fourteen years old, still wearing a retainer. She was going to have an abortion.

Forget sleep. She needed a drink.

It was too late for bourbon. It was too late for anything, closer to morning than to night, but so what? Standing in the dark, empty study that overlooked the backyard, barefoot, wearing a flimsy nightgown, she poured herself a stiff cognac, knocked it back. It burned going down. It mellowed her out immediately. One more for the road, then she’d try to sleep.

The movement outside caught her eye. A man carrying something in a blanket in his arms, moving across the lawn.

They traversed the length of the lawn, down to the gazebo at the far end. She followed them. She didn’t have anything on except her nightgown, she had nothing on her feet, but she didn’t feel the cold. The blanket slipped a bit, and there was her daughter. Carrying her daughter, the man climbed the stairs to the gazebo. She followed, keeping to the shadows. She crouched at the foot of the structure, listening as they settled themselves above her.

As soon as they began talking, she knew that the man was Joe Allison, and she felt a knife going into her heart, into the center cut of her heart. She crouched there, shaking, listening to them above her.

They talked. She was pregnant, she was going to have an abortion next Friday, he was the father. She was matter-of-fact about it, she didn’t want him accompanying her, she would take care of it herself, thank you very much. But she wanted him to know, which is why she’d forced him to come see her now.

Crouched at the bottom of the gazebo, underneath them, she could make out pieces of their bodies through the wooden slats of the floor. She was shivering, quietly hysterical. Quietly coming apart.

She heard her daughter say, “I’m going to have an abortion.” And then she heard her say, “We might as well.” And the sounds of lovemaking.

She cried silently, hating herself for crying, wanting to stop, unable to. She listened as they finished their lovemaking, listened as he pulled on his clothes.

He came down the stairs alone, looking back up at the girl, as if to say something, but saying nothing. She shrank back under the cross-structure of the struts that held the gazebo up. He didn’t see her. He wasn’t seeing anything.

Her daughter was smoking. She was humming a tune, some old show tune from the play her school had put on that fall. She had a sweet young voice. She loved to sing.

Go back, she told herself. Go back and pretend this never happened. Go back.

She didn’t realize she had climbed the stairs until she was at the top. Her daughter’s back had been to her. She was smoking the last drag on the cigarette butt she had found.

“What did you come back for?” her daughter had said, her back to her. “I don’t want to do it again tonight. We’re not going to anymore, that was the last time.”

She stood there, trembling, and her daughter Emma knew it wasn’t Joe Allison who had climbed up the stairs. She had turned, slowly, her face registering who was there
—
her mother, shivering with cold and fear and astonishment and anger.

“Oh, God!”

“How could you?” was all she could think of saying. “How could you?”

“How could I fuck your lover? Or how could I fuck anyone? Or how could I be smoking a cigarette at three in the morning?”

“You’re pregnant.” She felt like she was having an out-of-body experience.

Her daughter stared at her with hostility. No, not hostility. Hatred. “You were listening to us. You were spying on us? You were listening to us fucking, you sick bitch! How sick can you get?” She was on her feet. “Did you get off on it? Did it turn you on?”

She was whimpering, crying. “You’re fourteen years old, for God’s sake.”

“I’m not the only one, Mom,” her daughter had said, so matter-of-factly. “There’s plenty of girls my age. You’re on the board of the clinic, you know that.”

“Not like you.” The words were coming out of her mouth, she didn’t know what they were, or why.

“You mean, not ‘nice girls’?” She had laughed. “Maybe I’m not so nice. Aren’t you always telling me to be my own person?”

“I didn’t mean this.”

“Sorry, Mom. This is how I’m my own person.”

She had failed her daughter. She hadn’t been there, she hadn’t seen it coming, and she should have, it wouldn’t have been hard to see. If she had been there. Instead of being consumed in her own world, her own selfish life.

“It’s Joe, isn’t it?”

“What?” The words from her daughter snapped her out of her reverie.

“Joe. It’s Joe being my lover that has you so bent out of shape, isn’t it? Not that I’m having sex, but who I’m having it with.” She walked up to her mother, stuck her face right in her mother’s face. “You’re jealous, aren’t you? That I’m having an affair with your lover.” She taunted her deeper. “Did you think you could keep him all to yourself?”

“Emma …”

“He doesn’t even like you. He just takes pity on you.”

The rage took over. All-encompassing, all-overwhelming. She reached back and threw a punch at her daughter, threw it as hard as she could, and it caught Emma flush on the face, and she fell from the force of the blow, fell off the edge of the platform where they were standing next to the stairs, and she fell straight down, fifteen feet, her head hitting the ground below with a dull thud, like a sack of potatoes. She twitched for a moment. Then she was motionless.

“Emma …”

There was nothing. She had caught her daughter with her lover and she had killed her.

She had killed her daughter, the fruit of her womb.

She couldn’t leave her here. Not out here, in the cold and the dark. She tried to pick her up. Her daughter was too heavy, the ground was too slippery under her feet.

She couldn’t leave her here.

She needed traction. She ran to get something for her feet. Her car was the closest thing. Her running shoes were in her car. She grabbed them out of the backseat and pulled them on, then ran back to the gazebo.