This is the first time Laurel has been in his house, and he’s aware of its age and smallness. When Matt walks toward her with her plate she’s like a vision of paradise here at the yellow chrome dinette for four. Gauguin’s vision, maybe. She seems inordinately large. Her sleek black hair moves upon her brown shoulders, her red lipstick matches the red in her cherries-on-white dress.
“I have some very good news for you, Matt,” says Julie. She smiles at Laurel, too. “We’ll be moving from here to somewhere better, out in Dodge City. It’s got enough rooms for you and Jazz and Kyle. Just one bath, but the neighbors will let us use theirs when we need to. Lots of very cool people around. As you know, my first room in Laguna was there, in 1946! The neighborhood wasn’t called Dodge back then. It was mostly colored people. So, this will be like a homecoming for me. Roosevelt Lane. Pretty name, isn’t it?”
Matt feels like a housefly flicked off a table by a giant finger. Today of all days, Julie announces they’re moving? With Jazz kidnapped and Kyle on his way home and the fridge always empty and her sucking on the opium pipe like some kind of oxygen bottle?
He also wants to throttle his mother for bringing this up in front of his girlfriend. His first girlfriend. He’s been to Dodge City and he doesn’t like Dodge City and he doesn’t want to live in Dodge City, his own room or not.
Matt can’t believe his mother is selling the house out from under her own daughter. “What about Jazz?”
“What do you mean? We’ll have a nicer home to welcome her back to!”
“I hope she knows where to find it, Mom.”
A look from her. “Please try to be okay about this, Matt.”
“I’m sick of being okay with everything,” he says, looking away.
“That is exciting news,” Laurel says quietly.
“And that’s not all,” Julie says. “No more of me being a serving wench! I’ve got myself a job right in Dodge. I’ll be canning tomatoes they grow in the community garden. I still have my canning skills from being a farmer’s daughter. Remember the jam I used to make? We use organic tomatoes grown in the canyon, right off the vine. They sell them at the roadside stand and farmer’s markets. Doesn’t pay a ton, but enough. We’ll finally have enough for all of us, Matt. Enough.”
“When’s all this going to happen, Mom?”
“Soon,” she says, with a smile. “I’m not sure exactly.”
He wonders how to let Jasmine know where her family has gone. Tack a message to the front door? Run a classified ad in the Register or the News-Post and hope she sees it? What are the chances that a kidnapped girl even sees a paper?
After dinner they spend a few minutes with Walter Cronkite, looking for Kyle on the snowy black-and-white RCA. This report comes from Cu Chi in South Vietnam. Matt watches with a clenched gut as two medics rush a soldier toward a waiting helicopter. The soldier’s torso is wrapped in a bloody white bandage the size of a bath towel. His helmet is off and his face is a grimace. He looks enough like Kyle to send a jolt of adrenalin through Matt. His breath catches and his eyes are locked on the screen.
“It’s not him,” says Julie, digging her nails into his upper arm, hard. “It’s not, Matt.”
“No, it’s not.”
Heart pounding.
Laurel looks up at him with a pity that embarrasses him.
“Mom, Laurel and I are going to take the van and drive around before the Pageant. Look for Jasmine. I know it’s a long shot but, well, she’s out there somewhere. Somewhere close. We could use another set of eyes. You want to come?”
“You bet I do.”
20
Laurel votes Thousand Steps. It’s the last place she’s seen Jasmine so why not? But, after going down all 219 steps, then all the way past the pools to the flooded cave, there’s no Jazz and no artsy Camera Man or Robe Giant or Duffel Guy. No flock of pretty young people cavorting about with peace-sign flags, pink skateboards, or plastic sundaes. Brooks Street is a bust, so is Main Beach and Crescent Bay. No photo shoots; no Jazz, no late-model white-on-green VW vans.
Detouring from the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts grounds — and Laurel’s gig at the Pageant — Matt putts through downtown and drives very slowly the same route he was walking last night when he saw Jasmine.
He describes the kidnapping in detail again to Laurel and Julie, pointing out his exact footpath, right down to cutting across Third and jumping the curb to keep from getting hit. Drivers are honking and shouting at him now, but Matt ignores them.
He details Jasmine’s frantic, weakening run for escape, her billowing orange dress with the lilting wing-like sleeves, the sudden headlights, the tire-skid cloud and the two husky men — he remembers them now as husky — yanking his sister off her bare feet and carrying her toward the waiting van. He remembers also that both men were wearing dark, long-sleeved shirts, or maybe jackets. And curtains! The van had curtains with a pattern of some kind...
He tells Laurel and Julie his new memories. “Details are important,” he says. “I’m remembering better now.”
Matt parks in their driveway and Julie scrambles out.
“You two have fun,” she says. “Nice to see you again, Laurel. Be safe and don’t go anywhere alone.”
After the show Matt takes Laurel and Rose out for sundaes at the Sunshine Inn. Watches a buck-fifty disappear. Drives them home, walks them to the porch, wants to kiss Laurel but the older sister seems to be daring him.
Laurel pecks him on the cheek and follows Rose inside.
Matt is turning to go when Laurel bangs back out, runs and throws her arms around him, kissing him hard.
Her pupils are large in the porch light. “Thanks, Matt. Jazz is close to us. I can feel her and she’s going to be home soon. I’m sorry you’re moving to Dodge City but it might be really nice out there. Rose is jealous that I like you so much. Bye-bye.”
Then she’s gone again and Matt is headed for the van, his heart beating hard and strong.
Too strong for him to go home and to bed, so he gasses up at the Union 76 on PCH and heads north to Sapphire Cove, where he makes a sweeping turn into the guarded entrance. He sees the same security guard, getting up to slide the booth window open. Pulls up to the lowered gate arm, concentrating on his story.
“Yes,” says the guard. His nameplate says MALAPANIS.
“I’m Jim Sloan and I’d like to visit the Johnson family on Oceanfront, by the park.” Mikey Johnson being a friend from school.
Malapanis sits back down, checks something on his desk, stands back up.
“You’re not on the list. You can back up and U-turn out of here.”
“Fred and Florence Johnson said I could visit anytime.”
“Not without a call to me you can’t. Aren’t you the kid who flipped me off and crashed your bike last week?”
“I don’t have a bike.”
Malapanis sizes up the Westfalia. “Didn’t we tow that thing out of here a few days ago?”
Matt hadn’t thought of that. Shit.
“I still don’t have a bike,” he manages.
“You have the Johnsons call security if you expect to get in here. That’s how it works.”
Matt hands the guard one of the Jasmine Anthony missing-persons flyers, which he takes, examines, and hands back.
“You can’t post it here without homeowner association approval.”
“I don’t want to post it. I want to know if you’ve seen her.”
“She looks like everyone else.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Back up and get out.”
Matt punches the Westfalia south on PCH and back into town. It’s after midnight and Laguna is quiet for summertime. He slowly cruises Mermaid and Third streets, and Forest and Ocean avenues, where the green van had outrun him last night. He’s trying to deduce Jazz’s starting point. She was running south on Third Street, toward home. Meaning she’d come from the north, and probably the east. Which left half a city from where she may have come.