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Authors: Stephen R. Donaldson

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“All right,” I said at Ginny’s back. “Spill it.”

She stopped, then turned around, looking blank. “Spill what?”

But she couldn’t fool me with that. Her face has more than one kind of blank, and this wasn’t the right kind. Besides, she’d turned around too quickly—like she was expecting me to say something.

“You know what I’m talking about.”

She came back toward me a couple of steps. “When you’ve been drinking I never know what you’re talking about.”

That was a cheap shot, and she knew it. As soon as she
said it, she winced in regret. But I sloughed it off. It just confirmed she knew something she wasn’t telling. So I said, “The hell you don’t. You’re scared of this case, Fistoulari. You’re scared of it because of me. You’re afraid something about it is going to get to me. I want to know why.”

“You heard her.” Ginny nodded at the house. “She didn’t tell me any secrets.”

“Yeah,” I growled. “First you’re worried about me, and then you won’t tell me why. If you’ve got so goddamn little confidence in me, why didn’t you just leave me out of it? You don’t need me to find a runaway.”

Now she came close and looked right up at me. “She’s your niece. You’ve got a right to be involved. Besides, I thought you’d want—”

“Don’t say it. Of course I want to help find her.” For a minute I glanced around the neighborhood, looking for suggestions. Then I locked on to her again. Something about that broken nose of hers did funny things to my insides. Sometimes I wanted to kiss it so bad I had to grit my teeth. Now I wanted to hit it. “Maybe I’m asking the wrong question. Let’s be professional about it. It’s just a case. Like any other case. There’s just one thing wrong with it. You don’t do missing persons. Why start now?”

“She’s your—”

I didn’t let her finish. “Don’t do me any favors.”

That got through to her. All of a sudden, her eyes went cold and narrow, and her nostrils flared. Just for a second, her voice had the soft hot sound of an acetylene torch. “That’s cute, Axbrewder. All right, you want it? You got it. I read the papers, too. I read about Carol Christie. There’s one little fact your sister-in-law neglected to mention. According to her parents, Carol Christie was an excellent swimmer.”

An excellent swimmer. Oh, hell. You don’t have to be an excellent swimmer to be safe in the Flat River. If you’re half as tall as I am, you don’t have to know how to swim at all.

“When a reporter asked the cops if they had any reason
to think she might’ve been killed,” she went on, “they didn’t deny it.”

I scanned the neighborhood one more time. It still looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happened. It was too tidy, and there was too much sunshine.

I turned my back on it and followed Ginny to the Olds.

W
hile she started the engine, I pulled down the sunshade to give my aching head a little protection. Then, more to let her know I was still with her than to satisfy my curiosity, I asked, “Where do we go from here?”

She glanced over at me. “How long has it been since you had a full meal?”

That was the kind of question she usually asked me. I shrugged. She didn’t need an answer.

As we pulled away from the curb, she muttered, “You ought to be more careful. If you don’t get regular meals, it’ll stunt your growth.”

I suppose I should’ve at least grinned. She was just trying to clear the air. But I didn’t have the energy for it. The little strength I had I was using to think about thirteen-year-old girls who end up dead in the river for no good reason. As far as I knew, there was zero connection between Carol Christie and Alathea, but just knowing something like that could happen to my niece gave me a cold pain in the stomach.

And maybe there was a connection. In this business, things like that happen all the time. Accidents happen by themselves—crimes have a way of tying themselves together. I was in no mood to grin at bad jokes, even when I knew why Ginny was making them.

We didn’t have to go far to find food. In a few blocks, we were in one of those small business sections that looks like someone just dropped a bunch of white concrete bricks out of the sky and ran away before anybody could catch him and make him clean it up. Pawnshops, grocery stores, insurance offices, and gas stations stood facing every which way. With all that sun on them, they were blinding—I could
hardly tell them apart. But Ginny’s eyes handle brightness better than mine, and after a couple of minutes she pulled into a Muchoburger that was just opening up. We went inside, ordered cheeseburgers and about a gallon of coffee, then sat down at one of the tables.

We didn’t talk while we waited for the food, and after that I was too busy eating half-raw hamburger and the vitamin pills that Ginny handed out like my life depended on them. When she’d had enough to eat, she got down to business.

“We need to talk to this Sergeant Encino. But he probably doesn’t come on duty until midafternoon, so we’ve got five or six hours to do our homework. I suppose we could start with this list of Alathea’s friends, but I’d rather wait until they get home from school, so they can’t check what they’re saying with each other—just in case there’s something going on that they want to keep secret.”

I nodded. My stomach didn’t much like what I was putting in it. But I liked it better than the dread.

“Any suggestions?”

She was just being polite. She knew what our choices were as well as I did. But she was usually polite when we were just starting a case. That was generally the only time when she wasn’t way ahead of me. As soon as she had a handle on what was happening, she wouldn’t waste time being polite.

Anyway, I owed her some politeness myself. And if she was giving me a choice, I wanted to use it. There were some things I wasn’t ready for yet, so I said, “We might as well go to the school while we’re out this way. It’s closer than your office.”

That must have been what she wanted to do herself. She said, “Good enough,” and went to pay the check. I finished up, drank down as much of that coffee as I could stand. Then we got in the car and drove to Mountain Junior High over on the corner of Mission and Natividad.

It wasn’t the best junior high in the city—the best ones are called middle schools—but it was far enough from the old part of town to be better than the worst. It didn’t look
like a converted warehouse, and it wasn’t cramped into a plot of ground too small to hold that many kids, and it didn’t have a chain-link fence around it. In fact, it had several buildings built around one another, and there was a small gymnasium and a ragged playing field. It was the sort of place where some kids would be perfectly happy—and some would get started on drugs.

We went in and found our way to the main office, where Ginny showed her ID to a secretary and asked to see the principal. The secretary informed us the principal was “out.” But when she heard why we were here, she told us the vice-principal was really the person we ought to talk to. Vice-principal Rumsfeld was “in.”

She was a taut little woman with a severe hairstyle and an air of terminal fatigue, worn out by burdens. You could tell by the tension compressing her lips that she was responsible for “discipline” and had long since used up whatever tolerance she was born with.

Her office suited her. It was stark and forbidding, and the chairs were uncomfortable. Probably in her career she’d seen thousand of kids squirming on those chairs. Probably Ginny and I didn’t look much different to her than those kids.

“You want to know about Alathea Axbrewder.” She sounded like a blunt instrument. “There’s nothing I can tell you. She came to school last week Tuesday, but didn’t attend any of her classes after fifth period. That was physical education. She hasn’t been here since. In the old days, we had truant officers who tracked down runaways, but now the police are supposed to handle it. They do a poor job.”

“What about Alathea herself?” At times like this, Ginny was a model of diplomacy. She could be firm, even insistent, without sounding pushy or irritating people.

“What do you want to know about her? She was a good student, bright and pleasant. Her teachers liked her, and she didn’t get into trouble. She seemed more grown up than most girls her age. That happens quite often when a child loses a parent. The added pressure forces them to mature more rapidly.”

“She doesn’t sound like the kind of girl who runs away.”

Vice-principal Rumsfeld’s lips got tighter, and her hairdo suddenly seemed even more severe. “What kind of girl is that, Ms. Fistoulari? All kinds of children run away.”

“At thirteen?”

“They run away because they are in pain. No one is immune to pain—not even children.”

The stiffness in her voice made me revise my opinion of her. She wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the West. She was tired because she was the school’s disciplinarian, and she didn’t like her job. I said softly, “That bothers you.”

“It
concerns
me, Mr. Axbrewder. A society that can’t care for its children is in very serious trouble. I do what is in my power here, but I’m a poor substitute for a healthy family or a constructive sense of life. When a child like Alathea runs away, she places herself entirely beyond my reach.”

“Ms. Rumsfeld,” I said, “Alathea didn’t run away.”

She looked at me sharply. “Do you have some reason to believe that?”

“She’s my niece. I know her pretty well.”

“Your confidence is misplaced. Alathea isn’t the first young girl to run away, and won’t be the last. I admit that in the past most runaways were boys. Perhaps as boys they believed they were expected to be adventuresome. But in recent years, more and more girls have done the same. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, Mr. Axbrewder.”

“How recently is that?” Ginny asked.

“I can’t say—I’ve only been aware of it for the last year or so. Fortunately, Alathea is the first from our school, but other junior high and middle schools have had more than their share.”

“Can you give us any details?” Ginny was groping—but that’s normal. At the beginning of a case, you have to look under every rock you find.

“I don’t have any,” Ms. Rumsfeld said. “I don’t see what possible use they could be to you, but if you feel compelled to look for them, the school board may be willing to help you.” She was dismissing us. “In a case as serious as a runaway, the board receives copies of all reports as a matter
of course. In fact, they have copies of all our files on every student.”

Ginny and I stood up. Ginny thanked her for her time and turned to open the door. I said, “When we find out what happened to her, we’ll let you know.”

“Don’t find out what happened to her,” the vice-principal snapped. “Find her. Bring her back.”

“We’ll try,” Ginny said. She ushered me out of the door, and we went back to the Olds.

Sitting in the car, she said, “Maybe she did run away.”

“Maybe none of them ran away,” I countered.

After a minute she said, “Right.” She put the Olds in gear, and we headed in the direction of her office.

Fistoulari Investigations is in the Murchison Building, one of the three buildings in Puerta del Sol that stands more than five stories tall. It’s on the other side of the city from Mountain Junior High, but the new freeway makes it fairly easy to get to. We had the Olds parked in the basement garage and were on our way up in the elevator before noon.

We hadn’t been working on it very long, but so far I had the distinct impression that we weren’t getting anywhere. If something had happened to Alathea, it was a secret, and we didn’t know who could tell us what it was. So we had to start trying to eliminate the obvious.

The Murchison Building isn’t cheap, but it isn’t as expensive as it looks. It sits in what used to be the business center of Puerta del Sol, a good three miles down Paseo Grande from the ritzy real estate where the banks live these days. The owners have always had trouble attracting tenants, and the place is never more than two-thirds occupied. Which is why Ginny can afford to operate there, along with a handful of half-reputable lawyers, some chancy doctors, and a few insurance companies that may or may not have any assets. The elevator and the halls are carpeted, but the lighting is bad so you can’t see that they don’t clean very often. Too many of the walls have the kind of smudges you would expect to find in places where people get arrested regularly—the kind sweaty palms make while the rest of the body is being frisked.

But Ginny’s office is in good condition. FISTOULARI INVESTIGATIONS is neatly lettered on the door, and inside the air-conditioning works. The waiting room has a plastic potted plant, a side table covered with old magazines, and only three chairs. But three chairs is about all it needs—most people won’t even bother to wait in a private investigator’s office if someone else is already there. And the office itself is at least comfortable. It holds Ginny’s desk and files, a large sofa, a couple of roomy chairs, two phones, and a picture window looking out toward the valley of the Flat River. The carpet is clean because I keep it that way. The walls are bare except for a couple of framed diplomas and the display copy of Ginny’s license—all part of making the place look “professional.”

Fortunately, there was no one in the waiting room, so she didn’t have to juggle clients. We went into the office, and I started up the electric coffeepot while she went through her mail. After she’d read it all—and thrown most of it into the wastebasket—we went to work.

On the phones.

Ginny called the school board and set up an appointment to see the chairman the following afternoon. Then she went down the list of Alathea’s friends, asking their parents’ permission to visit their homes and talk to their kids. Calling for permission is a nice touch, when you can afford it—forestalls a certain number of complaints to the commission. I used the other phone to eliminate at least some of the obvious.

Didn’t take either of us very long. I’d never worked on a runaway before, but I knew a place that was in the business of telling people like me where to look. Tel-a-Help. Basically, it’s a referral agency for all the social services in San Reno County, including state and federal bureaus. They gave me five different numbers—The State Bureau of Children’s Services, the National Runaway Hotline, the National Drug Abuse Hotline, the San Reno County Crisis Hotline, and the police. I thanked them politely before crossing the police off my list.

I wanted to cross off the National Drug Abuse number,
too—but I didn’t. Couldn’t afford to. It was one of the obvious possibilities I had to check, and I had a sick feeling about it. So I did that number first. It’s one of those toll-free 800 numbers. The way my head felt, you’d have thought I was about to pass out from anoxia—but I gave them my spiel and listened to their answer. “We’re a confidential information service, Mr. Axbrewder. We can’t give out the names of the young people who call us. But we always urge runaways to call their parents, and no reputable drug treatment facility or social service agency in the country would accept a thirteen-year-old girl without making some effort to contact her parents.” When I hung up, I was practically gasping for breath.

The Bureau of Children’s Services and the Crisis Hotline gave me variations on the same answer—confidentiality, always urging the runaways to get in touch with their parents, etc. In five minutes I was starting to understand Lona’s outrage at the new laws and the public machinery that exist for the “benefit” of runaways—which seems to mean, “protect them from their parents.”

But the National Runaway Hotline—another 800 number—was an improvement. Part of their business was to pass messages back and forth between kids and parents. And whenever possible they got the name of any runaway who called so that they could at least assure the parents their child was safe. All the names and messages were fed into a computer so that they could be retrieved instantly.

No one named Alathea—or Thea—Axbrewder had ever called the National Runaway Hotline.

I almost hung up—but snatched back the receiver and asked, “Did you ever get a call from a girl named Carol Christie?”

BOOK: The Man Who Killed His Brother

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