The Silent Sister

  * * *

  I didn’t wake up until nine the next morning, and I lay in bed, stretching for a while, glad to have the house to myself. It was so quiet with nobody rummaging through the rooms. I planned to go through more of my father’s papers that morning, searching for something—anything—that might lead me to Lisa. But I suddenly had a different idea.

  I got up and carried my laptop back to the bed with me. Surfing to one of the travel sites, I plugged in “New Bern to San Diego,” and a few minutes and seven hundred dollars later, I was booked on a flight for that evening.

  42.

  It was tourist season and all the hotels near the San Diego beaches were packed. So, after I arrived, I picked up my rental car and drove east through the darkness to reach a hotel in Mission Valley, where I’d been able to make a reservation. It was ten at night by the time I got there—one A.M. New Bern time—but I was wide awake. I sat in my room, staring at my phone, realizing I had no one to text that I had arrived safely. I’d left a phone message for Danny, telling him I was going out of town for a few days to see a friend, and now I felt sad and lonely. I missed Bryan. I missed Sherise. No one knew where I was and the one person I’d told I was going away, I’d lied to.

  As usual, I couldn’t sleep. Why should a change of coasts make any difference in my insomnia? I was anxious to do what I’d come here to do. I surfed the Internet on my laptop in bed, trying to make myself tired. At two in the morning California time, I gave in, took a Benadryl, and finally drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  Most of the shops in Ocean Beach seemed to be on the main road, Newport Avenue, and I managed to find a parking place a couple of blocks from the beach. I had a few pictures of Lisa with me in my tote bag and my plan was to go from shop to shop asking anyone over the age of thirty if my sister looked familiar to them. A long shot, but it seemed like the only shot I had.

  I’d never been to California before and it felt like another world. The sun was unnaturally bright as I walked along the sidewalk, and the palm trees that lined the avenue looked like tall skinny pompoms. The sidewalk was packed with people of all ages. A lot of students, I thought. Young mothers with kids in tow. Aging hippies. There were all sorts of shops. Antiques. Surf shops. Jewelry. A Pilates studio. Had Lisa walked on this same street? I wanted that to be true. I knew decades had passed—and maybe Sondra was wrong and she’d never been in Ocean Beach at all—but I felt oddly close to her here.

  After talking to people in fifteen stores, I took a break in a coffee shop, feeling discouraged. I’d quickly discovered this was a young town, full of people who were barely walking when Lisa would have lived there. In each store, I’d shown the framed picture of Lisa, Danny, and myself, telling whoever I spoke with that the girl in the photo was my sister who had run away when I was two. I’d selected that picture because she was close to the age she would have been when she’d worked in Ocean Beach … if she’d worked in Ocean Beach … and she wasn’t holding a violin. I’d worried that the violin might give her away as the famous prodigy she’d been, but I quickly realized that was a pointless concern. Twenty years was a very long time. None of the shopkeepers recognized my sister, and I began to wonder if I should be speaking to the straggly old hippies instead.

  After my break, I resumed my hunt. I was about to skip the Pilates studio—had anyone even heard of Pilates twenty years ago?—but at that point I thought I had little to lose.

  The ponytailed blond woman behind the counter in the dimly lit studio was no more than twenty-two, and she shook her head when I showed her the photograph. But an older woman, her gray hair in braids, stood next to me at the counter and she touched the edge of the carved frame with her fingertip.

  “Oh, I remember her,” she said. “Only her hair was darker.”

  I felt my heartbeat kick up, but I was afraid to get too excited. “That would fit,” I said. “I’m sure she dyed it. Where do you remember seeing her?”

  The woman leaned her elbows on the counter to study the photograph. “She worked at this music store that used to be across the street.” She pointed through the window. “Grady’s. I went in there a lot. I wish it was still there. I’d rather support an indie shop than buy all my music online, you know? She had a funny name, I can’t remember what it was.” She looked at the receptionist. “What was it?” she asked, as though the young woman could possibly know.

  “Got me.” The receptionist laughed.

  My brain had perked up as soon as she said music store. That fit. It fit perfectly. The funny name did not.

  “Her name was Ann Johnson,” I said.

  “Really?” The woman looked at the picture again. “Maybe I’m wrong, then. I don’t remember her name, but I know it wasn’t Ann.”

  “Well,” I asked, my hope fading a bit, “do you have any idea where she is now?”

  “Oh, God, no. I haven’t seen that girl in”—she looked toward the ceiling, thinking—“I don’t know how long. You should try to find Grady,” she said. “The owner of the store.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?” I asked.

  “There’s a jewelry store a block up.” She pointed east. “On this side of the street. The jeweler Sal was good friends with him.”

  I’d already been in that jewelry store, but I hadn’t met a Sal.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, and I slipped the photograph back into my tote and headed out the door.

  A funny name, I thought as I walked the block toward the jewelry store. That worried me. But the music store fit so well, and that gave me hope. I wanted to hold on to that hope as long as I could.

  * * *

  The young guy in the jewelry store told me Sal would be working the next day, and I decided to wait till then to resume my search. Funny how I could run a half marathon without a twinge, but my feet ached from the stop-and-go walking through Ocean Beach.

  I drove back to my Mission Valley hotel, took a long soak in the tub, and then spent the evening Googling “music store,” “Grady,” and “Ocean Beach.” On various music Web sites and blogs, I found people reminiscing about Grady’s Records from back in the day. The shop apparently closed down in the late nineties. I searched for any reference to a female employee, with a “funny name” or not, but no one mentioned anyone from the shop other than Grady himself, and I finally went to bed for another long and restless night.

  * * *

  Sal was not a very trusting guy.

  When I arrived at the jewelry store the following morning, the gray-haired, bearded jeweler sat at the worktable in the window, and he wore a blank expression as he looked at the picture of my sister through his safety glasses.

  “Never seen her,” he said, resting his soldering iron on the table.

  “Someone told me she might have worked at Grady’s Records years ago,” I said. “And that you might know where I can find Grady.”

  “Rad shop,” Sal said with a nod. “Grady closed it down around 2000 when vinyl officially tanked. He could open it up again now, though, and have customers lined up for blocks.”

  “Can you tell me where I can find him?”

  He looked suspicious as he slipped his safety glasses to the top of his head. “You going to cause him any kind of grief?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. I just want to see if he remembers my sister.”

  He stroked his beard, considering the request. I thought I looked pretty straight and innocent in my blue capris and black T-shirt, my hair in a ponytail. Apparently, he thought so, too. “He’s a sound engineer at the stadium,” he said.

  “Where’s the stadium?”

  He gave me directions back to Mission Valley, and I remembered passing a stadium not far from my hotel.

  I thanked him for his help, then walked slowly to my car, reluctant to leave the beach. I was so sure I felt the vibrations of my sister in this town.

  * * *

  It took a lot of walking around the aging circular stadium and many questions of
many custodians before I found the guy named Grady, but I did finally find him. He sat in a small room in the middle of a half circle of monitors of varying shapes and sizes. His back was to me, his hair in a curly gray ponytail.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  He swiveled his stool around to face me and I was mesmerized by his see-through green eyes.

  “You lost?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m looking for you if you’re Grady. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  “Depends on who’s asking,” he said, but he smiled warmly.

  “My name is Riley MacPherson.” I waited to see if my name meant anything to him, but he looked at me blankly. “I think … there’s a very small chance you might have known my sister,” I said. “Did you ever have a girl working for you by the name Ann Johnson?”

  He lost his smile and stared at me. “No,” he said, but the look in his eyes told me he knew that name, and I felt my own eyes fill with tears.

  “Please talk to me,” I pleaded. “I don’t want to hurt her. I promise.”

  He was still looking hard at me, but I saw something inside him begin to bend. “You’re too young to be her sister,” he said.

  Oh, my God, I thought. He knew her.

  “My family was very spread out in age,” I said. “But I promise you. I am.” I wiped the corners of my eyes with my fingertips.

  “Why would you think I know her?” he asked.

  “I’m pretty sure that a private investigator talked to you about her long ago. Do you remember?”

  He shrugged. “Some guy came in with a picture of a girl and I said I didn’t know her,” he said. “And that’s what I’m saying to you, too.” He swiveled his chair around so his back was to me again.

  “I flew all the way from North Carolina to try to find someone who knew her,” I said. “Please.”

  I saw his shoulders sag and heard him sigh. He turned back to me.

  “Why do you want to find her?”

  “I thought she killed herself when she was seventeen,” I said, and his pale eyes widened, “but I recently found out that she faked her suicide. That she’s probably still alive. I never got to know her. Our parents are both dead. She and my brother are my only family.”

  He was frowning at me now, gray eyebrows nearly knitted together. “When’s the last time you saw her?” he asked.

  “When I wasn’t quite two.”

  “Shit.” He ran a hand over the thinning hair at his temples. “Well, it seems to me if she wanted to see you, she would have found you instead of you having to look for her.”

  I winced. The same thing Tom Kyle had said to me, almost word for word.

  “I think she was afraid of hurting me or our family by being in touch,” I said. Or, more likely, I thought, she was afraid of us hurting her.

  “Convince me you’re her sister,” he said. “You don’t look like her.”

  I reached into the tote bag hanging over my shoulder and pulled out the framed picture of Lisa, Danny, and me, all of us dressed in white.

  He held it on his knee and let out his breath. “Wow,” he said. “This is your brother?”

  “Yes. Danny. He doesn’t know I’m here. He … he was in Iraq,” I added. “His life’s kind of a struggle.”

  A whole array of emotions passed over Grady’s features, and he looked down at the picture awhile longer in silence.

  “Please help me,” I said.

  After a moment, he stood up. “Not sure I can.” He handed me the photograph. “But let’s get out of this claustrophobic room and talk.”

  He led me out of the room and we walked down the wide corridor and then out into the bowl of the huge stadium itself. The brown plastic seats were completely empty, and we sat down high above a sunlit green field.

  “What’s your name again?” he asked.

  “Riley,” I said. “You knew her, right?”

  “Did she really kill someone?” He looked at me. His green eyes were startling in the sunlight.

  “Is that what the PI said?” I asked.

  “Yes. Was that bullshit?”

  I shook my head. “She shot a man, but it was an accident. I think she got scared then and faked her suicide.” I’d leave my father out of the story. “I didn’t know about the shooting. My whole life, I grew up thinking she’d killed herself because she was depressed.” I told him about finding the box of newspaper articles and my conversation with Sondra Davis. “Which is how I found out that she’d worked in Ocean Beach. And then I met a woman who recognized her and she said she worked for you.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Did she? Work for you?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, my God.” A chill ran across my arms. “I can’t believe it. A week ago I thought she was dead. Thank you! Can you tell me about her? What was she like?” My words came out in a rush. “Do you have any idea where she is now?”

  “I don’t know where she is,” he said. “I haven’t seen her since she left, which was the same day that PI came into my shop. I knew she was running from something, though, and I have to tell you,” he said, “I don’t think she’ll want to be found.”

  I turned my face away from him, afraid I was going to cry again. “I won’t hurt her,” I promised. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “She was an awesome girl,” he said, as if trying to console me, and his words did give me some comfort. I needed to hear them. I didn’t know my sister at all.

  “Thanks for telling me that,” I said.

  “She knew everything there was to know about music, but I didn’t realize till that private investigator showed me her picture that she was a serious violinist.”

  “A child prodigy,” I said.

  “How have you tried to find her so far?” he asked.

  “All I know is that her name was Ann Johnson,” I said, “which is not much to go on.”

  “She always went by Jade, though.”

  “Jade?”

  “It was her nickname.”

  “So … maybe I should be searching for Jade Johnson instead of Ann?” I asked.

  “I’d definitely try that.” He looked far below us, where two men had appeared on the field, kicking a soccer ball back and forth between them. “Was Ann Johnson her real name?” he asked. “I always wondered.”

  I shook my head. “Please don’t ask me to tell you her real name. I just can’t.” I stared down at the men, one of them heading the ball toward an invisible goal. “I’m so scared for her,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked. “Is something going on now that’s making you afraid? I mean, I’m assuming if she’s still on the run, she’s been safe for a long time.”

  “What’s going on now is that I’m trying to find her,” I said, “and I don’t want to screw up her life in the process.”

  “All right,” he said. “I get it.”

  “Do you still have records on your employees from back then?” I asked. “Is there a way to get her Social Security number?” A Social Security number would be like gold, but he shook his head.

  “Sorry. Those hit the dustbin a long time ago.”

  “Do you have any idea where I should look?” I asked, point-blank.

  He hesitated, but not for long. “As far as I know, she went to Portland to stay with her girlfriend, Celia,” he said. “Whether that lasted or not, I don’t know.” He looked at me. “You know she was gay, right?”

  My look must have told him I’d had no idea. “I’d never heard a word about that,” I said. “But then, there was a lot I never heard about in my family.” It took me a moment to recover from the surprise, only then realizing that he’d given me two new pieces of information: “Portland” and “Celia.”

  “Do you know Celia’s last name?”

  He shook his head. “I knew her grandfather, Charlie, really well. His last name was Wesley, but he was on her mother’s side.”

  “Can I talk to Charlie?”

  He shook
his head. “He passed away years ago,” he said. “Good man. He left me all his vinyl, but I’d closed the store by then. He never talked about Jade after she left, and I never asked questions. I figured the less I knew, the better.”

  “I’m trusting you to keep this quiet.” I pressed my finger to my lips.

  “You can trust me,” he said. We looked down at the bright green field for a long moment. “Here’s what I think,” he said finally. “I think if Jade’s made a new life for herself, you should leave her alone.”

  My eyes stung. He was probably right, but I couldn’t do that.

  “I need my sister,” I said, when I thought I could trust my voice. “I thought she was dead. I just want to…” What did I want? Was I going to hurt her by finding her? I felt my lips tremble. “I need my sister,” I said again.

  He rested a big hand on my shoulder then, nodding. “I think you’ll do the right thing,” he said. “And if—when—you find her, tell her Grady says hello.”

  43.

  I was able to get a standby flight out of San Diego the following morning. I’d considered flying to Portland, but what would I do once I got there? Portland was a big city and I had so little to go on. I stayed up half the night searching the Internet for a Jade Johnson, thinking that would be much easier than finding Ann, but I was wrong. There were over eighty Jade Johnsons on Facebook alone. I studied their pages until my eyes ached and I finally fell asleep with my computer wide open.

  * * *

  I had to change planes in Charlotte, and as I waited for the puddle jumper to New Bern, I checked my phone for messages. Only one, and it was from Jeannie. “I’m concerned about you,” she said. “I’m stopping over tonight to check on you. Don’t worry. I won’t be staying and I won’t be doing any work there, but I don’t feel good about the way we left it the other day—a lot of hard feelings on both sides, I think—and I just need to make sure you’re okay.”