Juno's Daughters (28 page)

“Maybe she went to see Ariel? She said he invited her.”

“She's trying to get to New York?”

“New York? She said Ariel lived in Seattle.”

Jenny reached for her sweatshirt and hung up the phone in one fluid motion. She hoisted her pack onto one shoulder.

Mary Ann's expression held the question: What next?

“Frankie doesn't know that Ariel is in New York, and she's gone to Seattle to see him. I'm going to go get her.”

“I'll stay here.” She put her hand on Jenny's shoulder. “Do you want me to call the police?”

Jenny paused, picturing Frankie getting off the boat at Pier 69, where
The Clipper
docked, and asking directions to Ariel's apartment. Finding it empty and dark. She imagined her sitting on the floor outside his door, wondering what she should do. Perhaps she would call Jenny then, and ask her to come pick her up. Perhaps not.

“Yes. Call the police.”

T
he first ferry left San Juan Island at six in the morning and was scheduled to arrive in Anacortes just after seven. Jenny put her truck in line and leaned against it while she waited, smoking one cigarette after another. The clerk in the gas station, some kid who had arrived on the island the year before, had raised his eyebrows when she asked for a pack of Camels. She had lifted her gaze from her purse and whatever he saw in her eyes made him look away. He slid the cigarettes to her over the counter.

She ground a butt under her boot and flipped open her phone. Reception could be spotty on some parts of the island. It wasn't unusual for her to miss a message every now and then. There was a call from David, she saw, and three missed calls from a number she didn't recognize with a 718 area code. She knew all the Seattle/Bainbridge area codes, and 718 wasn't among them. Before this summer, she hadn't known to recognize 212 as Manhattan, but now her heart lifted every time she saw it. 718? Most likely a wrong number, but she called it anyway, just to make sure. A woman's voice invited her to leave a message for Marcie or Rebecca. She flipped it closed again. Down the hill by the gift shop entrance a pair of seagulls fought over a discarded sandwich.

Frankie was five, maybe six, and they were reading fairy tales at school. The Pied Piper and Rumpelstiltskin, and the one about Henny Penny and the Fox. Her little eyes shining in the dark, she was starting to understand how vulnerable she was. No one bad is coming to our house, Jenny had said, and smoothed the hair on her forehead, and anyway, all the doors and windows are locked.
Go check
, said Frankie, before flipping over on her other side and secretly, as if Jenny couldn't see, sticking her thumb in her mouth.

What if someone hurt her? Jenny tried not to allow it, but her mind kept creeping back to the edge and peering over. She could see Frankie's beautiful long limbs, dusted with sand on Lopez beach, twisted and broken. Jenny's stomach wrenched and the nicotine taste mingled in the back of her throat with the coffee Mary Ann had forced her to drink before leaving. What if someone killed Frankie? She wondered if Lilly would forgive her if she decided to kill herself, too. Lilly was stronger than they were. Ariel had said so. She flipped her phone open again and tried Andre's number. She left her third message.

“Jenny.”

She looked up from her phone to see a neighbor standing in the lot in front of her. “Hello, Stan.”

“What are you doing up so early this morning?” Stan looked like a man who had fished his whole life and lurked in dark bars, but really he had been an investment banker. Seventy now and with blue hands from poor circulation, he had retired and bought a place in Snug Harbor and a Carolina skiff.

Jenny swallowed. “I'm going to Seattle to pick up Frankie.” Her voice sounded rough in her own ears.

“Well, say hello to her for me.”

Jenny nodded and then climbed back behind the wheel of her truck. She would not get out of it again, not even on the ferry, until she had parked it on Boylston in Seattle, a block from Harvard Avenue. She was walking toward La Salle, a four-story brick box with an arched doorway, when her phone rang. She saw the 212 area code and her heart leaped into her throat. It had to be Andre. Finally, he was calling! She would pour her fears out to him and he would tell her that everything was going to be all right. He was a fine actor and he would make her believe it was true. He was a fine jester, too, but she didn't think even he could make her smile.

Instead, it was Ariel. “Jenny! Mary Ann called and said you were trying to get in touch with me. She said you'd left some message about Frankie running away. What's happened? Where did she go?”

“Oh, God, Ariel. I think she went to see
you
. I mean Lawrence. Sorry.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck. I shouldn't have said all that stuff about her coming to visit. She seemed so sad, though, the crazy kid. I thought it would cheer her up.”

“I'm standing outside your apartment building.”

“You're in
Seattle
?”

“Yes. At your place. Did Frankie know the apartment number?”

“Oh, my God. Oh, dear.” Lawrence's voice trailed off. “God, I am such an utter fool.”

“Stop it. Just tell me. Which one is it?”

“224. It's locked, though. There's no one in it.”

“I'm going to go up and look anyway.”

“Knock on the door at 227. The guy that lives there, Rufus, is a poet. He's an appallingly bad poet, and he's usually in there moping around. The walls are as thin as Madonna's panties, and so he hears
everything
that goes on in the apartments around his.”

“Okay. Thanks.” The door was propped open with a cinderblock. Jenny slipped in and found herself facing a row of rusty mailboxes packed full of advertisements for cheap sex and cheap food. “I have to go,” she said. “Did Andre . . .”

“I haven't been able to get a hold of him,” said Lawrence quickly, “his place in the city was broken into and he's been staying in Queens. I'll keep trying, though.”

“Right. Okay. Thanks.” Worry for Andre flitted through her mind and she pushed it away. There was no time for that now.

She reached the second floor and turned down the hall. “Please be there,” she whispered.

There was a dim overhead light in the hallway outside of 224 but no girl sitting on the floor with her backpack on her lap. No Frankie. Jenny let out a moan of anguish. She felt like a passenger on a plane in the middle of a big storm. Falling from unimaginable height to unimaginable height.

Slowly, the door across the hall cracked open. A young man with heavy blond curls and a little soul patch under his bottom lip stuck his head out.

“Rufus?”

He opened the door wider. “Who are you?”

She stepped toward him and saw him step back into his apartment with alarm in his eyes. How must she look, she wondered? How wild and how desperate?

“I'm looking for my daughter. Her name is Frankie and she's just thirteen years old. She ran away from San Juan Island yesterday afternoon. Tall and skinny, with long black hair? Have you seen her?” Jenny's mind kept spiraling onward: She makes deviled eggs, she did her eighth grade history report on the Chelan tribe of the Salish Sea, she has a scar on her left knee from a roller-skating accident when she was nine, she . . .

“Yeah. I saw her.”

“When . . . where is she . . .” It was all Jenny could do to keep from grabbing the young man and shaking the information loose.

“She was out here last night. Eight, maybe nine o'clock? Here to see Larry, I guess. I told her he wasn't around. He's in L.A. or New York or somewhere like that. She was pretty busted up. Apparently some street kid ripped off all her shit on the way over here.”

“And you let her go?” Jenny's voice rose in disbelief.

“Was I supposed to keep her prisoner? Call the cops? I didn't know she was from somewhere else.” His lower lip jutted out in a persecuted sulk. “I gave her twenty bucks. Twenty bucks is a lot of dough.”

Jenny closed her eyes and forced herself, before opening them again, to unclench the fists at her side. “Did she say where she was going next?”

“Nah. When I went out to get some grub later, she was gone.”

Jenny wasted no time getting from Lawrence's apartment building and the hapless Rufus to a place she thought might be able to offer some real help: the Seattle PD. She gave her name and reason for coming to the receptionist and then waited on a bench under fluorescent lights. She took the opportunity to, once again, check her phone. It was dark. She pushed the button to test and see if it still had any juice, and the time lit up. It was already two in the afternoon. She touched the time button again to make sure. Then she flipped open the phone and dialed Andre's number.

It rang three times and then the ringing was followed by click, and . . . quiet. She waited for the message directing her to voice mail and heard instead a wide-open-sounding silence with a background of... was that shuffling?

“Hello? Andre?”

More muffled noises. Then a deep voice that was clearly not Andre's. It sounded like a young person trying to seem older. “This is Andre. Who may I ask is calling?”

“Is your, um, father . . . ?” Jenny could not finish the question. It had occurred to Jenny suddenly to wonder if Trinculo might not have children of his own. The idea of him as a parent was intriguing. But could it really be possible that he had a son and had not told her about him? Maybe the person on the phone was a stepson from a much earlier marriage? She felt she knew Andre well after their weeks together on the island, but how could she be sure? They both had things in their past they had not discussed.

“Excuse me?” the voice asked. “
Excuuuuse
me?”

Jenny lifted the phone away from her ear. She could hear laughter on the other end.

“Mrs. Alexander?”

The officer standing in front of her had blond hair that was combed carefully to the side and a lightly freckled, boyish face. When he held his hand out to her to shake she saw that his nails were short and clean. A wedding ring gleamed on his finger.

He led her down the hallway to a desk and motioned to the squat wooden armchair beside it. “Please sit.” He sat in the swivel chair and lifted a pad off the desk. “Florence tells me you have a missing child to report.”

Jenny swallowed. “She's been gone overnight. She's somewhere in the city, without any money or anyone to . . .” Her voice broke.

The cop lowered his pad and looked at her with compassion. “I know this must be very, very hard. How old is your daughter?”

“She's thirteen.”

He nodded.

“The first thing we'll do is enter her name and description into King County and national databases. We can put out an AMBER alert, and they'll show her picture on the news and to officers around the county. Do you have a photograph of your daughter with you, Mrs. Alexander?”

“Oh, God no, I . . .” Jenny's mind whirled. She could call Mary Ann and ask her to get one from the shoebox under her bed. She thought there was a recent school photograph in that pile. The drugstore had a fax machine. No wait, David had some photographs on his computer. He could e-mail one of them. “Let me call a friend. What e-mail should he send it to?”

The police officer reached for one of the business cards in his desk and handed it to her. She glanced at it. The name said Skip Arnold.
Skip
? Her baby's life depended upon a guy named Skip? She dialed David's number. He answered on the second ring.

“Jenny! Have you found her?”

“No. David, I need you to send a picture. The one you took of Frankie on Jasper's boat last spring.” Jenny read the address off the card. Frankie had caught a thorne shark that day, she remembered. And the boat had been followed by a pair of Dall's porpoises halfway back to the harbor.

The cop nodded again. “Good. In the meantime, you can tell me about her. Distinguishing characteristics? Does your daughter have any visible piercings or tattoos?”

Jenny shook her head no.

“Does she have a history of being involved in drugs? Prostitution?”

“No,” Jenny whispered.

The officer's tone was matter-of-fact. “If she left them behind, you'll want to confiscate your daughter's BlackBerry, cell phone, computer, anything that might give a clue as to whether she was planning to meet up with someone here in the city.”

Jenny pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her boots on the edge of the chair. “She doesn't have any of that stuff. And I know who she came here to see. A friend of ours. Only he's out of town and now she's just . . . lost.”