Dressed in dark colors, Charlie and Claire sat in the borrowed Firebird and watched the Lieblings’ house, hoping for a glimpse of the girl who lived there. They had rolled the windows down a crack to keep them from steaming up. Anyone glancing out would only see a car, not an obviously occupied car. A steady drizzle kept even the most motivated joggers indoors. At six-thirty, a woman in a baseball cap and rain coat appeared at the end of the block. Whenever the wolfhound on the end of her leash stopped to sniff a hydrant or bush, the woman jerked it forward. As the pair crossed by on the other side of the street, Claire and Charlie held themselves absolutely still, but neither the woman nor the dog noticed them.
When both garage doors rattled upward, Claire realized she had almost dropped off to sleep. First a bright red BMW backed out, with the sharply angled styling of the latest models. A dark-haired man was at the wheel, and he pulled out onto the street without seeming even to pause to check traffic. Then a second car began to back down the driveway. Claire blinked. It was another BMW, identical in color and style, down to its fancy wire-rim wheels. The only difference was that a woman sat at the wheel, her blonde hair pulled back into a perfect French twist. In the back seat sat a dark-haired child. The woman’s BMW was two blocks away by the time the garage doors had finished closing. The camera was still lying on Claire’s lap.
The sun had finally struggled up above the horizon, making any contrast between artificial light and daylight less obvious. Still, Claire thought the Lieblings’ house was now dark. Lights out, nobody home. Charlie and Claire stayed where they were for another hour but no curtains moved, no lights went on, no doors were opened.
Finally Charlie voiced the question that was hanging in the air. “If these people have a ten-year-old girl, then where is she?” Claire could only shake her head, as mystified as her friend. Because the child sitting behind the woman had looked closer to Max’s age than a ten-year-old. And he had definitely been a boy.
Chapter Fourteen
“Thanks for the loan of the car.” Claire dropped the keys into J.B.’s hand. She had found him outside, a cigarette clenched between his teeth as he moved back and forth between a faded green Mercury in the driveway and a battered blue Dodge on the street, both with their hoods open. He appeared to be doing some sort of transplant. “I even filled the tank and took it through the car wash.”
J.B. patted the Firebird’s fender. “Been a while since this baby’s seen the inside of one of those. Let’s hope it didn’t wash off the rust. I have a feeling that might be the only thing holding it together.” He dropped his cigarette onto the driveway and ground it out with the square toe of his heavy black boot. Then he bent over, picked up the butt and slid it into the pocket of his motorcycle jacket. Catching Claire’s surprised look, he shrugged. “If you’re not careful, kids will pick up anything and put it in their mouths.” He walked up the cement stepping stones to the front door and pushed it open. “Hey, Susie, look who’s here.”
Claire followed him inside. The house was scented with cinnamon and yeast, and her mouth began to water. Eric and Susie sat at the Formica table in the tiny dining room, each with an oversized cinnamon roll in front of them.
“Want a cinnamon roll, Big Sis? J.B. just took these out of the oven about an hour ago.”
Normally, Claire didn’t mind Susie calling her Big Sis, given that she was two years older. But this morning, Claire had had to lie down on the floor to put on her jeans. Still, the cinnamon rolls smelled wonderful. “Sure,” she said. J.B. went into the kitchen. She heard the sound of the sink running as he washed the grease from his hands.
Susie asked, “So how did it go at the clinic? Did you pass as a pregnant woman?” Eric, who had been busy uncoiling his cinnamon roll, stopped his work to eye Claire’s belly with suspicion.
Instead of answering, Claire pulled up a chair and asked a question of her own. “Suse, do you remember anyone from Minor named Kevin or Cindy Sanchez?”
Susie closed her eyes for a second, giving Claire an unobserved moment to study her sister. It was like seeing herself in a subtly warped mirror. Thanks to two packs a day, Suzy had cheekbones even more sharply defined than Claire’s. Their hands were almost identical - long with squared-off fingertips - only Susie’s were stained with nicotine. With just twenty-two months separating them, they should have shared a similar outlook as well as a general body type, but they did not. Ever since she had moved in with Charlie, Claire had been trying to distance herself from the more embarrassing elements of her childhood. Sometimes Claire felt guilty for judging her sister, for being glad not to be her.
Susie blinked open her eyes and Claire looked away. “Sanchez? No, I don’t think I know anyone by those names. But I’ve never been back since I left.”
“I didn’t know that,” Claire said. “I thought I was the only one who felt like that.”
Susie shook her head. “Oh, I’ve been past it a lot of times. Any time we go to the coast we drive past the exit. But why would I want to go there? The last time I saw Minor was in my rearview mirror. Or J.B.’s sideview mirror, to be exact.” She gave her husband a playful pat on the rear as he set a cinnamon roll and a glass of milk in front of Claire. “I never saw the point of going back, either. It’s such a tacky little town.” Claire found this last comment ironic, since Susie lived off 82nd Avenue, the armpit of Portland. Eighty-second was a long stretch of failing businesses, lesser-known fast food franchises, used car lots, and places where a man could pay one-hundred dollars to have a woman “model” lingerie for him after she handed him a box of Kleenex. Still, Claire had her own memories of Minor and knew what Susie meant.
“I think it was a tacky little town. I hear it’s all new now.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet that underneath it’s still the same old Minor.”
J.B. pulled up a chair. “So why are you asking Susie about those Sanchez people? Did you get the records from the clinic? Are they the ones who adopted Lori’s baby?”
Claire spoke around a mouthful of cinnamon roll. It was amazing how something basically made out of sugar, butter and flour could be so heavenly. “Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t know.” With pauses to lick her fingers, she sketched out for them what had happened. “So now I’ve got the names and addresses of four families who adopted girls at the same time Lori’s was born. Charlie and I already found one child. She’s pale and blond, so we know she’s not Lori and Havi’s. One girl is supposed to be with the Sanchezes. One family that’s on the list doesn’t seem to have a daughter at all, at least not that Charlie and I have seen. And one girl might be the daughter of some famous people.”
Susie straightened up, her face becoming animated at the thought of a secret. “Who?”
“Yeah, who, Claire, who?” J.B. waggled an eyebrow at Claire.
Claire hoped to put Susie’s encyclopedic knowledge of celebrities to work, but she didn’t want her sister telling the Prices’ secret to every customer who came in for a perm. “I can only tell you guys if you promise not to tell. No gossiping at the Curl Up and Dye.”
Susie shook her head. “That’s kind of a moot point, since I’m not working there any more. I got a new job.”
“Doing what?” Claire asked.
“Same thing, only without the chatty clients. So you don’t have to worry about me spilling the beans to anyone.” Susie and J.B. exchanged a look that Claire couldn’t quite interpret.
“What do you mean? Are you styling wigs or something?”
“Not exactly. I’m working at Moyter’s.”
“The funeral home? You’re a hairdresser for the dead?” Claire couldn’t help glancing at Susie’s hands. Didn’t it bother her to touch dead people? Didn’t it bother J.B. when Susie came home and touched him with those same hands?
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I’m embalming them or anything. I just go in and make them look nice. Brush their hair out, use a curling iron, put a little makeup on, maybe some fingernail polish. So people can se
e their mama looking the way they remember her, which is a lot better than the way she did before she died.”
“That kind of thing gets done just for women, then?” Claire suddenly remembered how their grandmother had looked in her casket. At her request, she had been dressed in her faded Hormel Girl uniform, a reminder of her youth when she had risen from being Yakima’s Dairy Princess to the big league, one of only a couple of dozen Hormel Girls in the nation. She had spent the best year of her life marching in parades and autographing cans of Spam. Thanks to cigarettes, Grandma had still been thin enough to fit into her old uniform the day she keeled over from a heart attack in front of a slot machine in Reno. In her casket, she had looked like a shrunken cheerleader, dressed in spangles and fringe, her cheeks rouged in harsh red ovals.
“I’ve only done a couple of men. There are kids sometimes, too, but I’ve already told them to call the other gal in town for that. I can’t do a child.” Claire guessed she must have still been staring at Susie’s hands, because her sister abruptly put them under the table and changed the subject. “So who are the famous people?”
“There was a woman who signed in as Mandy Price.” Susie and J.B. still looked blank. “I think it’s really Amanda and Kurt Price.”
“Ooh,” Susie squealed, “I love her!” She lifted her chin haughtily and put on a bad British accent. “‘I’m sorry, Milord, but I cannot accept your offer of marriage. I would much prefer to hang.’ I loved that scene! And her husband can still play a hunk, even if he has been doing it for twenty-five years. I’m always hoping I’ll see one of them around Portland sometime, but I’ve never known any one who has. J.B. and I even drove past their estate one time. All we did was slow down a little and then all of a sudden there was a cop behind us with his lights going.” She twirled her index fingers in circles over her shoulders, mimicking the lights. “He asked us our business, and when we said we were out for a drive, he said then maybe we had better just keep on driving.”
“What I need to do is find out more about their daughter,” Claire said. “After all, if their kid’s blond, then she’s not going to be Lori’s and Havi’s child. Do you know anything about her?”
Susie looked at the ceiling and began reciting facts. She reminded Claire of some of the men she knew, who could recite baseball or football stats for hours. “Amanda Price is either thirty-two, thirty-four or thirty-eight, depending on whose information you want to believe. Looking at her neck, I would believe thirty-eight at a minimum. Plastic surgeons can do a lot these days, but it’s very hard to hide an aging neck. Now as for Kurt, I have it on good authority that that hair of his is really a very, very good weave and that he is really fifty-six. Every time he makes a movie they subtract a few more years off his age. They don’t want people thinking this buffed stud is ready to join the AARP.”
“But what about their child?” Claire asked, a little impatient. She had a feeling her younger sister was padding, wanting to show off how much she knew without admitting what she didn’t know.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen any pictures of the kid. In fact, the only thing I do remember is that one time Amanda decked that tabloid guy for taking her daughter’s picture when they were leaving the airport. They got back at her by running the picture of her in mid-swing with this real ugly pissed-off look on her face. And judging by the photo, she has a mean right hook.”
Claire had forgotten that little tidbit, which revealed how far Amanda would go to protect her daughter’s privacy. “So you don’t know what her daughter looks like?”
Susie was finally forced to admit defeat. “No.” She pushed her chair back and began to clear the dishes.
“Pretty much everything’s on the Internet now,” J.B. said. “Have you tried looking there to see if there are any pictures of the daughter?”
“We don’t have a computer. I’ve never even surfed the net.” Claire felt silly using the words “surf” and “net.” She hoped J.B. couldn’t hear the quotes her voice put around them.
“Come into my office,” he said, “and let’s see what we can find. We’ll type Amanda’s and Kurt’s name into a search engine, let it dig around a little bit.” He cleared a chair of catalogs offering stainless steel sinks and other kitchen items.
The phrase “Amanda and Kurt Price” yielded thousands of hits, as J.B. told Claire they were called. When he refined his search to specify only sites that contained images, dozens of hits were still returned. On “The Official Unauthorized Amanda and Kurt Price Home Page” they watched as several photographs began to draw themselves on the screen line by line. “I need a faster modem,” J.B. apologized. “Twenty-eight-point-eight crawls nowadays, especially if you want to do something that’s graphically intensive.”
J.B. spoke knowledgeably, and Claire smiled to herself at her biker semi-brother-in-law (or out-law, as Jean liked to call him) who was nothing like he seemed. The smile slid from her face when she realized that what the computer was reproducing for them were pictures of a nude man and woman. As a set of perky nipples appeared on the screen, J.B. said “Oops” and hit the “stop” button.
Susie overheard and came into the room to look over their shoulders. “She’d be getting a bit long in the tooth to do that, wouldn’t she?” Claire was glad that Eric was otherwise occupied in the living room, building a block tower.
“I don’t think it can be her,” said J.B., clicking on the “back” button. Even though Amanda Price didn’t shy away from wearing sweaters so tight that everyone knew her perfect breasts must be implants, she was famous for never baring them.
Claire and J.B. spent several hours methodically searching, but the nude photos, even if they weren’t of Amanda Price, proved to be the most interesting. They surfed official sites written by PR flacks who didn’t need to be constrained by the truth, as well as dozens put up by Amanda and/or Kurt Price groupies. But nearly all of the pictures proved to be publicity stills from their movies. Amanda in over-sized dark glasses, a scarf wrapped around her dark hair, offering an enigmatic smile from behind the wheel of a Triumph roadster. Amanda in period costumes ranging from Elizabethan to punk. In his photos, Kurt brandished a knife, a huge handgun, a grenade launcher or simply his meaty fists. In every shot, his clothing was strategically torn to display his bulky biceps or the chiseled lines of his abdomen. Every now and then a web-site revealed a few blurry amateur photographs of a couple who could have been anyone, hiding behind a baseball cap and dark glasses, walking fast with their eyes focused on their feet. But only one showed what could have been the actors with their child. A man with his head down walking through an airport alongside a woman and a girl who both wore dressed in sunglasses and scarves. But they could have been any man, any woman, any girl.
###
Not having driven the Mazda for several days, Claire had new ears for her own car’s eccentricities. Compared to the deep purr of the Firebird’s engine, her ten-year-old Mazda 323 sounded like an asthmatic squirrel. Someone else seemed to have been driving it, too. There were two or three empty Skittles wrappers on the passenger seat that she didn’t recognize. Whoever had eaten them had probably thought they would blend in with the empty Cheetos bags, crumpled tissues, and gas station receipts that Claire was always intending to clean up. But Claire wasn’t a Skittles fan. After she parked behind Charlie’s car, she spent a few minutes picking up all the litter from the Mazda, starting with the Skittles bags.
She found Charlie in the living room, needlepointing a cushion. The design was of Charlie’s own devising - a spray of red, orange and pink flowers that she made up as she went along. The older woman cocked an eyebrow. “Was your sister able to help?”
Claire shook her head. “Susie knew lots about the Prices, but nothing about what their daughter looks like. J.B. even helped me look them up on the Internet, but we didn’t find anything useful.”
The two women talked about what to do on and off throughout the evening, but they continued to be stymied by the seclusion the tw
o stars had surrounded themselves with. It was Charlie who hit upon the obvious solution. “The answer is on your photocopy. We will call them.”
“Why would they want to talk to us?
“Because we know a secret of theirs. And from what you say, they are very private people. We could offer them a trade - we will not reveal where their child came from if they agree to have the girl tested for a possible match. That is assuming she looks to be a likely child.”
Claire couldn’t think of a better solution. So finally she picked up the phone and pressed the buttons for the number listed after Amanda Price’s name. One, two, three rings, and then there was a faint click.
“Leave a message.” A woman’s voice, the same voice Claire had heard issuing from the speakers in two dozen movie theaters, followed by a beep. Claire took a deep breath.
“This is Claire Montrose. I am calling for Amanda or Karl Price. I would like to set up a meeting with you. I don’t want to harm you or intrude on your life in any way, but I do need to talk to you about your daughter and how you got her. Please call me at 555-2854.” She put the phone down, thinking now all the they had to do was wait.
YW84NE1
###
When the phone rang the next morning, Claire picked it up on the first ring, thinking it might be Amanda or Kurt. Instead, she heard her sister’s voice on the line.
“I didn’t ask when you were over the other day - but have you seen or talked to Mom lately?”
“Not really, Suse.” For the past week, she had been so caught up in finding Lori’s daughter that she hadn’t had time to worry that her mother seemed to be on a first-name basis with the UPS delivery guy.
“I think she’s in trouble.”
“Trouble? What has she done now?” Claire already knew the general outline, even if the details remained to be filled in. Jean was a sucker for Kirby vacuum cleaner salespeople. She sent twenty-dollar “processing fees” to strangers who called claiming she had just won the Sri Lankan lottery and then spent months wondered why her winnings hadn’t yet arrived in the mail. During Girl Scout cookie season, green-costumed girls were lined up at her door three-deep, knowing that Jean could be counted on to buy one box of each flavor, plus at least a half-dozen of Samoans, her favorite kind.