That was tough to answer. His politeness gave me more trouble than almost any amount of hostility. After groping for a minute, I said, “It works better if I don’t tell you. If I told you what I’m looking for, I’d be putting ideas into your head, and anything you said after that might not be completely candid. Naturally you’ll react to whatever I say.”
“I see.” He folded his arms across his chest and considered me gravely.
“That policeman”—Magda Larsen was talking to her husband—“that Lieutenant Acton. He told us not to speak to anybody.”
Bjorn nodded. “You see our problem, Mr. Axbrewder.”
“Yeah.” I saw it, all right—and I didn’t much like what I was seeing. “But that was fifteen months ago. We know things now that Acton didn’t know then. Look.” My voice was rougher than I intended, but I had to appeal to them somehow. “I didn’t find out about this from the papers. I know exactly how miserable and senseless Ruth Ann’s death was. What I’m trying to do is prevent the same thing from happening again to another vulnerable little girl.”
Again Larsen looked at his wife. She’d produced a Kleenex from somewhere and was using it to wipe her eyes. “Ah, Bjorn,” she sighed, “tell him. Of all people we should be willing to do whatever we can to prevent such things.”
Larsen accepted that without argument. “Very well, Mr. Axbrewder. Ask your questions.”
“Thanks. I won’t take much of your time.” But then I had to pause for a few seconds, pull my scattered brains together. The living room was starting to get hot, but neither of the Larsens looked like they felt it. Both of them watched me, curious to see what sort of questions I’d produce. I took a deep breath.
“When Ruth Ann didn’t come home from school that day, you were very concerned.”
“That’s true,” Larsen said. “She was always a very responsible child. If she were going to a friend’s home after school, if she were to be late for any reason, she was very faithful about letting us know.”
“So when you realized she was missing, you called the police and filed a complaint.”
“Yes. We were reluctant to file the complaint. But we were very concerned, and the police didn’t appear to take the situation seriously enough. We filed the complaint in an effort to produce action.”
“Then four days later you withdrew the complaint.”
“Why, yes.” He seemed momentarily confused. “Yes, we did.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, you see—” He faltered. “As I say, she was a very responsible girl. We knew that she wouldn’t run away without very good reasons. Four days after she disappeared, we received a letter from her. Really, it was just a short note. She assured us that she was all right, and said that she would come home as soon as she had dealt with some problem bothering her. Under the circumstances, we felt it would be a violation of her privacy if the police were to bring her home against her will. We withdrew the complaint.” He said this with such dignity that I couldn’t argue with him. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that twelve-year-old girls have more important needs than privacy. But I didn’t.
He must have seen some of what I was thinking on my face, because he added, “Children have the same rights as any other person. So many children grow up to be spoiled, irresponsible, or unproductive because they are treated ‘like children,’ which means that their parents are more interested in their own desires for power than in their children’s autonomy.”
That shook me up. Ruth Ann Larsen had turned to prostitution to support her drug habit, and her parents hadn’t even tried to look for her. But my expression didn’t make a dent on her father. He believed in his own integrity.
For some reason, so did I. Instead of shouting at him, I just said, “All right. There’s only one thing that really matters. Do you still have her note?”
“I will get it,” Mrs. Larsen said. She rose out of the sofa, left her husband and me staring at each other. I didn’t much care for the view, so I spent my time looking around the room until she came back.
She handed me an envelope. It had a clear Puerta del Sol postmark. Inside I found a half sheet of good twenty-pound bond, neatly torn along one edge. The handwriting scrawled all over the place.
It said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I have to be away for a while, but there’s nothing to worry about. I’ll be fine. I have a problem to work on. I’ll be back when I’m done. Love, Ruth Ann.”
Sure enough, the paper had the same watermark as the other notes.
All of a sudden, my throat was so dry that I could hardly swallow. I needed a drink. It took me a moment to work enough moisture into my mouth to ask, “Is—is there anything about this that—seems unusual to you? Out of place? Does it sound like her?”
Larsen said immediately, “Of course. It’s her writing.”
But his wife didn’t hesitate either. “No. It isn’t like her. It says, ‘Dear Mom and Dad.’ Our children don’t call us by those names. Since she was a little girl she has called us ‘Bjorn’ and ‘Magda.’”
I was cold and shivering inside. Whoever had dictated those notes hadn’t even bothered to get them right.
I didn’t ask the Larsens if I could have their note. I just took it and left. What else can you do with parents who trust their children too much to protect them?
8
I still needed a drink. Sometimes being sober is like drowning. After a certain point, you know you’re going to have to breathe, no matter what. But you don’t—not until you pass out. I didn’t go to a bar, I went to meet Ginny.
It was a long drive back to the middle of town, but when I got near Central High, where the school board has its of fices, I was still a bit early so I stopped to grab a quick lunch. That made it twelve forty-five when I pulled into the Central High parking lot.
Central isn’t the newest high school in the city, but it is sure as hell the biggest and most bewildering. You could hide a football field in there and never find it again because the school was built in huge square sections that interlock and form a maze. They had to make it a high school because nobody younger than a freshman could find their way around in it. I was lucky I hadn’t gone to school there. I’ve never been very good at mazes.
A couple of minutes later, Ginny wheeled her Olds into the lot and parked it a few spaces down from my rented Torino. I was glad to see her. The sun on all those parked cars gave the day a glare of futility. Everybody in the whole city could go crazy, rape each other, and drop dead, and it wouldn’t make one damn bit of difference to the sun. Ginny was a good antidote for that kind of thinking.
I walked over to join her. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought she looked glad to see me, too. I caught her making a sneaky effort to check my breath. Then her face relaxed into a smile. For a second there, I almost hugged her. Sometimes her smile does funny things to me.
Then she said, “What’ve you got?” and we were back to business.
I showed her the Larsens’ note and told her about my morning. I didn’t leave anything out. Talking about good old Detective-Lieutenant Acton didn’t do my blood pressure any favors, but I’ve never worried much about my arteries anyway.
She absorbed what I had to say, considered it briefly. Then she told me what she’d come up with.
“Mrs. Swift is a real charmer. I must’ve gotten her out of bed. She came to the door looking like the wrath of God, wearing one of those polyester bathrobes, turquoise and pink paisley. Gave me a headache just to look at her. She acted like she’d invented bitchiness all by herself. All she could say about her daughter was that she was ‘no good.’ Ungrateful little slut, running off and leaving her poor mother all alone like that. I had to lean on her to get anything else.”
I grinned. “Wish I’d seen that.”
“It wasn’t fun. And hardly worth the effort. She finally admitted getting a letter, though, sometime after her daughter ran away. She doesn’t remember when, and she doesn’t remember what it said. She tore i
t up as soon as she read it. She does remember the cops coming to see her, especially after Rosalynn turned up dead. But she claims she doesn’t remember who they were or what they wanted.”
She paused, then said, “I don’t know, Brew. Maybe Rosalynn Swift doesn’t fit the pattern. If I were her, I’d run away from that woman seven days a week.”
“Yeah, but don’t cross her off the list yet. She went the same route as the others.”
Ginny thought a minute before she said, “Right.”
“What about the Hannibals?”
“Better.” She made the transition with a jerk. “Much better. I caught them both at home. He works the evening shift down at the paper mill, so he was just having breakfast when I got there. He’s a feisty little man who likes to fly off the handle, but his heart’s in the right place. Mrs. Hannibal is as steady as a rock, so she keeps him in line. At first they didn’t want to talk. Some cop told them not to, they don’t remember his name. After all, it was a year and a half ago. But after I explained what we were trying to do, they changed their minds.
“Judging from what they told me, I’d say that when Esther disappeared they were nearly paralyzed with anger and fear. Furious at her for running away, and at the same time terrified that something had happened to her. It was all they could do to report her missing. They just couldn’t bring themselves to swear out a complaint. Mr. Hannibal probably spent half his time shouting and the other half in a cold sweat. Then they got a letter from her telling them not to worry, she was all right. That gave them an out, an excuse to do nothing.
“Looking back on it, they’re pretty bitter about themselves. Esther’s death gave them a real shock, which probably explains why they were willing to help me in the end. They say they’ve changed their whole attitude toward their other children. To prove it, they gave me Esther’s letter.”
Ginny handed it to me, envelope and all.
It had a local postmark. The handwriting was barely legible. The note was on a half sheet of good twenty-pound bond, neatly torn along one edge. It said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m not going to be coming home for a while. Maybe for a long time. I’ve got something to work out. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. Love, Esther.” The watermark matched the others.
While I studied it, Ginny went on, “I asked them if there was anything about this that bothered them. At first they couldn’t think of anything, but then they said there was one thing. One of the many things that made them ashamed of themselves. Esther always came home from school for lunch, which she always complained about because her friends ate in the school cafeteria. But the Hannibals only live three blocks from the school, and anyway they couldn’t afford school lunches.
“The day she disappeared, she didn’t come home for lunch. The Hannibals didn’t think much about it. They assumed a friend gave her lunch, or she bought her own out of her allowance. Now they feel like they failed her by not realizing something was wrong. As if there was anything they could’ve done.” Abruptly Ginny’s voice went stiff with anger. “Heaven help the bastard who’s responsible for this when I get my hands on him.”
I knew how she felt. But we have a reciprocal relationship—when one of us gets mad, the other tries to stay calm. I said, “If Ted doesn’t get to him first.” Which wasn’t much of a contribution, but it was all I had. “How’s he doing, anyway? Has he called in?”
She calmed down again so fast it was almost scary. “He called while I was at the Hannibals. He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, he just wanted me to give him more to do. I told him to check out May-Belle Podhorentz and South Valley Junior High. He’s supposed to meet us back at the office in a couple of hours.”
It was one o’clock when we headed into Central High’s monster building and began hunting for the school board wing. The kids must’ve all been in class, because we saw only one or two. As we walked along the hollow corridors, I asked Ginny if she’d learned anything at Matthew Pilgrim Junior High.
“It probably doesn’t mean anything,” she said, “but both Rosalynn Swift and Esther Hannibal disappeared at times when they were routinely alone. Esther was there for her last period before lunch, and gone afterward. As for Rosalynn, apparently she had a tendency to get in trouble. Nothing serious. Just trying to get attention. So as a form of punishment she was assigned to clean up the math classroom every day right after lunch, while the other kids were free. Alone. She’d been doing it for about a month—and doing a good job of it, according to the math teacher—when she disappeared. Just didn’t show up for her next class. Nobody saw her leave, which isn’t surprising since the math room is in the corner of the building farthest away from the playground and the cafeteria.
“The people I talked to were fairly helpful, but they made it clear that I ought to be talking to the school board instead of bothering them. They kept assuring me the board had all the information I needed. I got the impression they want the board to decide for them whether or not we have any legal right to pry into all this.”
“Sounds familiar,” I muttered. At Alathea’s school, Vice-principal Rumsfeld had given me pretty much the same impression.
Then we found what we were looking for, a frosted-glass door in the middle of a blank wall. The lettering on the glass said,
PUERTA DEL SOL BOARD OF EDUCATION
PAUL M. STRETTO, CHAIRMAN
JULIAN Z. KIRKE, SECRETARY
Ginny pulled open the door, and I followed her in.
The rooms inside reminded me of the Municipal Building—no windows, no comfortable colors, everything artificial. Beyond the counter in front of us was a room that looked too small for the ten or twelve desks and thirty or so filing cabinets squeezed into it. At the desks, women in various stages of energy or desperation hacked away at typewriters, scrawled on files, answered phones. Two or three of them in particular had a frightened air, as if someone I couldn’t see stood over them with a cat-o’-nine-tails.
We found out why. Before we had time to introduce ourselves to the secretary who did double duty as receptionist, a man came out of an office at the back of the room. He had light blond hair, sleepy eyes, and a mouth so sharp and strong that it looked like he ate steel for breakfast every morning. He wasn’t in a hurry, but somehow he gave the impression that he was pouncing.
He said, “Sondra.” Although he didn’t raise his voice, it cut through the work noise in the room, and a woman two desks away from him flinched. She was young and pretty. After I’d noticed that, I realized that all the secretaries who looked particularly miserable were young and pretty.
The man went over and held a sheet of paper in front of her. He handled the paper gently enough, but in some strange way his manner made the movement look like an act of violence. “Type it again,” he said. “This time, get it right.” His tone held enough sarcasm to draw blood.
He’d started back to his office when he noticed Ginny and me standing at the counter. He turned toward us. “It looks like Sally is asleep on the job again.” The secretary-receptionist flushed and bit her lip. “What can I do for you?” the man asked.
“I’m Ginny Fistoulari,” Ginny said. “This is Mr. Axbrewder.” If you didn’t know her, you would’ve thought that she hadn’t felt a thing. But I could hear the underlying bite in her voice. “We have an appointment with Mr. Stretto.”
“He’s expecting you,” the man said. “This way.” We passed around the counter and followed him toward a door in the opposite corner. As we crossed the room, I caught a look at the nameplate on the door of the man’s office. It said, “JULIAN Z. KIRKE, SECRETARY.”
Then we were in a corridor that ran between more offices and ended up in a big place that looked like a corporate boardroom. Long dark wood table, heavy matching armchairs. Soft indirect lighting. Picture window along one wall overlooking the glare of the parking lot. It was a far cry from the sweatshop where those harried secretaries worked. Kirke guided us into the room and introduced us to Chairman Paul Stretto.
He looked like the kind of man the Republicans run for president—strong lines in his face, a mane of silver hair, resonant baritone voice, just a hint of well-earned fat on his tall frame. He sat at the head of the table as if he’d been born there. At first I couldn’t figure out what he was doing in a lowly job like board of education chairman when he could’ve been elected mayor tomorrow—with a little help from TV. But as we shook hands I got a closer look at him. He was younger than he seemed, and the fine silver of his hair came out of a jar. Probably he was saving mayor for later. After which he’d take a crack at governor.
He gestured Ginny and me toward chairs as if he were offering to knight us. He asked Kirke to stay. “Things always run better around here,” he explained, “when Julian knows what’s going on.”
No doubt. I was already sure that Paul M. Stretto was just office-sitting on his way to better things. Kirke was the man who actually ran the school board.
When we were all seated around the head of the table, Stretto said, “Now, what can we do for you?” He sounded full to the gills with professional bonhomie.
“Mr. Stretto,” Ginny began, “we’re private investigators.” She showed him the photocopy of her license. “We’ve been retained to find two young girls who ran away from home early last week. In the process, we’ve learned that quite a few girls of junior high age have run away recently—in the past two years, to be more exact. Some of those cases bear a striking resemblance to the ones we’re working on. It might help us find these girls if we could see some of your files.”
“I see.” She’d taken him by surprise—most people don’t expect visits from private investigators—and he made a great show of thinking hard about it. Which led him to the unsurprising conclusion that he was out of his depth. “What do you think, Julian?”
Before Kirke could answer, however, Stretto said to us, “Julian is the expert on our files. We’re in the process of a major overhaul of our record system. Our goal is to computerize the files completely so that Puerta del Sol’s entire school system will share a network linked to a central server here. Everything will be available by computer anywhere in the system.