The Mysteries (16 page)

“I assure you,” she said, mocking me. “Totally! Even your name is English!”

“Please! It's Scottish.”

“But you're not Scottish?” She looked uncertain.

“No, I'm American, born and bred. Uh, could I do something with this?” I waved the bottle.

She bit her lip and her brows drew together in an anxious little line. “There isn't any popcorn.”

“Hell, I
hate
popcorn. I don't care; I was just kidding.”

“You thought we were going to have dinner,” she declared.

Nervous again, I didn't dare speak. I walked over to the breakfast bar and put down the bottle. “All we need's a couple of glasses and a corkscrew,” I said.

“It's my fault; I'm so stupid,” she said. “Of course, if you invite somebody over for sometime after seven, you've got to give them a meal. I'm just so out of the habit; I've never entertained here, and I don't cook just for myself. A lot of times I don't get home until eight or nine. And if I've had a big lunch, I don't want anything else. Maybe a bowl of cereal before I go to bed. But I should have thought—”

I stopped her. “Look, it's OK. I wasn't expecting anything, honestly. I work unsociable hours and I eat on the hoof. I can pick up a take-away after I leave. Now, do you want me to open this wine or just leave it?”

“I'll get the corkscrew.” She moved past me into the kitchen and dug in a drawer. “And then I can order us a pizza.”

“Only if you want it, Ms. Lensky.”

Her head jerked up at that, and as she handed me the corkscrew she was smiling again. “
Ms.
I should have realized you were American when you called me that. British guys don't say ‘Ms.'”

“They don't know how to pronounce it,” I said. “Me, I was taught by my mother.”

She put two wineglasses down on the counter. “Anyway, since you're not a proper English gentleman, I think we are definitely on first-name terms by now.” She picked up the phone. “What do you like on your pizza?”

“Anything but anchovies.” I don't think much of pineapple or sweet corn, either, but didn't think I needed to mention that to a fellow American.

“Pepperoni and mushroom?”

“Sounds perfect.”

I walked away from the counter, letting the wine breathe while she ordered the food, and amused myself by inspecting her collection of books and videos. Among the books were hardback novels by Larry McMurtry, Toni Morrison, and Carol Shields, some classics in Penguin paperback editions, as well as a bunch of recent travel writings. The videos were mostly undemanding fluff like
Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill,
and
Bridget Jones's Diary.

“Put on some music if you want,” she called to me across the room.

I hadn't even looked at the CDs. Music doesn't play much of a role in my life, and I don't know enough about it to interpret other people's tastes.

“I thought we were going to watch a movie?” Turning to look, I saw that she was pouring the wine.

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Her voice was steady enough, but I remembered Peri's image from the Web site. If those few frames had moved me, who didn't even know her, how much more powerful the effect it must have on someone who did. “Look, it's all right if you don't want to . . . I can take it away and watch it later, on my own.”

“No, I'll watch it with you. We might as well wait until after the pizza. It's not very long, anyway.” She brought the glasses across to me.

I held mine up. “To families happily reunited.”

She managed a small smile and clinked her glass against mine. “Come and sit,” she said, going to perch on one of the sofas.

I sat down beside her.

“Where are you from?”

“Milwaukee.”

She frowned a little. “I don't think I know anyone from there. Where did you go to college?”

I knew what was coming, because it's a national habit. Whenever two Americans meet abroad, a certain amount of time is always spent winkling out possible points of past contact, acquaintances, or even mere landmarks held in common. It's as good a way as any of getting to know someone, but right then I decided to pass. This was not a cocktail party. I'd already blurred the boundaries with my bottle of wine, but if that had been a mistake, it wasn't irretrievable. I had a job to do, and even though she was the one who had hired me to do it, that didn't mean I could trust her unreservedly. She might have her own reasons for keeping me away from the truth, and I couldn't risk letting myself be swayed by the irrelevant fact that I found her attractive.

As gently as I could I said, “Why don't you tell me what happened that night after Hugh brought your daughter back here.”

The sparkle in her eyes went out. “I don't know.”

I waited, but she didn't expand upon her flat reply.

“Hugh said that the last time he saw Peri she stood in that window there, with you, waving him good-bye. You can confirm that?”

She shook her head, eyes downcast, mouth a tight line.

I frowned. “No? What do you mean? Are you saying Hugh was lying?”

Her eyes came up to meet mine. “No! I don't think so. I believe him.”

“But?”

She took a hasty sip of wine. “But I don't remember.”

“You don't remember standing at the window?”

She shook her head. “Not that. Not anything.”

“So what do you remember?”

She took another drink of wine. Watching her closely, mirroring her movements, I did the same.

“I remember that Hugh came over to pick Peri up that evening, after dinner. After they'd gone, I had some ironing to do. Peri had brought back a whole load of dirty clothes—well, never mind. Anyway, after I'd finished my chores I sat down, here, on this couch, to watch TV.”

I followed her gaze across the room to the blank eye of the television screen.

“After the program—it was
Jonathan Creek,
you know, that mystery show?—after that was over, I just channel-surfed. I wasn't really watching anything, I wasn't interested in anything else that was on, but I felt too tired to read or do anything else, and there didn't seem any point to going to bed, because I knew I wouldn't be able to get to sleep while listening for her. I was still too excited about having her home again, and I guess I wanted to hear how her date went, just to be able to spend a little more time with her, you know? So, I was waiting for her, and then, all of a sudden, I woke up.

“I knew immediately that it was very late, and I was surprised to see the TV was off. I got up and looked around.” She half turned, gesturing toward the door. “The first thing I saw was Peri's purse, on that table by the door, with her set of keys lying on top. And then I noticed that she'd put the chain on the door.”

She made an odd little sound, half laugh, half sigh. “Well, that did it for me. Seeing that, I just
knew
Peri was home. She had to be, right? I thought she must have come in, dumped her purse, come over and seen me asleep on the couch, and turned off the TV without disturbing me. And then she must have gone up to her room. She couldn't have gone out again, not without taking the chain off.”

Laura paused to take a drink of wine. This time, she held the glass with both hands, seeming to need them both to guide it steadily to her lips.

“Anyway, that's what I thought. And yet, I
felt
like I was alone in the flat. You know the feeling? So, I went up to her bedroom. She had been there, her coat was lying across the bed, and the light was on, but she'd gone.

“She wasn't in the bathroom, and she wasn't in my bedroom, and there wasn't anywhere else for her to be. She just wasn't here.” Laura stared at me, baffled and haunted. “I called her name, I even yelled at her like she was a five-year-old playing a silly game. I raced back down here thinking she had to have been hiding from me, but—her purse was still there on the table, and in the kitchen I found her watch lying on the floor; she must have dropped it. She had been here, but she was gone. Yet the chain was on the door. It was locked from the inside. There was no way out.”

“Fire escape? Anything like that?”

She shook her head. “The windows all have bolts on them so they won't open more than a few inches. I mean, you could take the bolts out from the inside if you wanted, but they were all still in.”

“Is there an attic?”

“There isn't one. The bedrooms are upstairs—I guess that was the attic, before the house was done over.”

“Could I see?”

She got up. After putting her glass down on the counter, she went to a door to the right of the one by which I'd entered. It opened onto a narrow hallway and a steep flight of stairs.

“Bathroom's here,” she said, opening a door beside the stairs. “There was just enough room for the two bedrooms upstairs. You want to go first?”

I did, then waited for her on the small landing. It was warm and stuffy up there, with a faint smell that made me think of hot plastic. Then her scent came to me, fresh and somehow green, already surprisingly familiar, and my pulse speeded up as she squeezed past me to open one of the two doors.

“This was Peri's room.”

It was obvious at a glance that although Peri had not been there long enough to impress her personality upon it, the room had no other purpose now than to be a sad little shrine to her loss. It had been cheaply furnished with twin beds, a pine dresser, and matching wardrobe. On one of the beds was a battered, almost shapeless stuffed animal that might have been a dog. On the bedside table two other toys were perched in front of a short stack of paperbacks: a purple plastic pony and a slightly walleyed teenage fashion doll wearing a shiny purple dress long enough to hide her legs, or the lack of them.

“The Guardians,” I said.

I heard Laura gasp. Then she said, rather flatly, “Oh, yes. They were in the story.”

“Anything else in that story taken from life? That you know of?”

“Well, the neighborhood we used to live in, and the neighbors . . . she changed their names, but anyone who knew us would have recognized them from the description. But none of that actually
happened
.”

“You're sure about that?”

“I know the—the people concerned. Anyway, it's an obvious fairy tale.”

“Yes. You don't happen to know when she wrote it? Or why?”

“No. She never showed it to me—and she always showed me her school essays and things. I only found it after she disappeared.” She turned away. “My bedroom is just here, across the way—you can see, there's no way out, and really nowhere to hide.”

Her bedroom was the same size as Peri's, but had far more in it: neatly organized ranks of toiletries and cosmetics on the dressing table, a couple of large square woven baskets full of sheets and towels, and, beside the book-piled bedside table, a two-drawer filing cabinet.

“I even looked behind the door and under the bed and in the wardrobe,” Laura said in a sad, small voice. “But she wasn't anywhere.”

I followed her back down the stairs to the living room.

“What did you do when you realized she was gone?”

“I called Hugh. He was asleep.”

“What time was it?”

“Almost three o'clock. He told me he'd brought Peri home before midnight. He told me he'd watched her go inside and that he'd seen her there in the window with me. According to him, I wasn't asleep. And, I have to admit, I didn't see how I could have been. I don't sleep that deeply anyway, and if I'd fallen asleep sitting up on the couch, I'd wake up as soon as she came in.” Moving almost like a sleepwalker, she crossed the room to reclaim her wineglass, then stood and slowly drank.

I stood watching her. I didn't like this story, but I believed her.

“Sounds like a classic blackout,” I said. “Missing time.”

She gave the faintest shrug, then threw her head back to drain the glass.

I thought of Hugh's goblet of wine in the disappearing nightclub, and of his speculation that Peri had been drugged. It sounded as if something similar might have been done to Laura. The same class of drug used to make someone acquiescent also affected the memory: The victim would wake up with no idea of what had happened. Maybe Hugh really had seen Peri and her mother, arm in arm before the window—but maybe not from the
outside.

A sudden harsh buzzing noise cut into my thoughts. I cast a startled glance at Laura.

“Pizza man.” Moving toward the door, she stumbled slightly. It was only a moment, and she recovered almost instantly, but my protective instincts were aroused.

I caught her gently by the arm and steered her to the couch. “I'll get it.”

As I went downstairs, the idea that Laura could have been drugged, her daughter abducted before her vague and uncomprehending eyes, put me on high alert. But when I opened the heavy street door, it was, indeed, only the pizza man. I paid and tipped him, and made sure the lock had snicked into place before carrying the warm cardboard box upstairs.

Laura was at the bar, setting out plates and flatware and refilling our glasses with wine.

“Do you want a salad? I could make one. There might be some lettuce in the fridge—I don't know how fresh it is—and some tomatoes . . .”

“Don't bother, just pizza's fine for me.”

“Are you sure?”

“Real men don't eat salad.”

That won a smile. She shook her head. “I must be a bad influence.”

“What do you mean?”

“You sound more American by the minute.”

“Really? That crack about salad? I thought American men were all into healthy eating nowadays.”

“Not that I've noticed. Not in Texas. Ever been to Texas?”

“Sure. I lived in Dallas for years.”

“Really! So did I, in the seventies.”

“Before my time,” I said. But that didn't stop her from rolling out a list of names, none of which I recognized. We were back to where we'd been at the beginning, but she was so much more comfortable with it that I didn't have the heart to drag her back to the night her daughter disappeared. We'd have to go there again soon enough. For now, let her have a break. I ate my pizza and drank my wine and shook my head at every name she trundled out.

“Polly Fruell!” That one name came out with particular force, like a cry of triumph, but it meant nothing to me, and I shook my head again.