“Sorry, doesn’t work that way.”
I studied my hands.
“However,” she said, “aside from any deal you have in mind, I was going to suggest a gradual return to work.”
“Gradual? What does that mean?”
“Part-time.”
“I’m not sure the Express will go for that.”
“Leave that to me. Between now and next time, I want you to think about Parzival.”
“Parzival?”
“Yes. Why do you suppose you chose the story of Parzival?”
“Ben asked for that one. I’d been telling it in installments.”
“No, I meant, why did you choose it the first time?”
“In the mountains?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Because I had I read it recently, I suppose.”
She waited, but this time she waited in vain.
“Give it some thought,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, standing up.
“Not so fast — about the Sayres . . .”
I tried calling Gillian first, since she had been trying to contact me, but she hadn’t left a number when she talked to Frank, and the one I had for her was disconnected. I didn’t have any luck with the boutique she had worked in, either.
“The media, man,” the owner said.
“The media?”
“Yeah, she didn’t come into work after all those dudes got whacked in the mountains — you know, the guys that were looking for her old lady? So finally she calls me and says she ain’t comin’ in and she’s gonna look for new digs, ’cause the media is, you know, making her crazy. They were always tryin’ to interview her and shit, you know?”
Yeah, I knew.
I called Mark Baker at the Express and asked him if he had been in contact with the Sayre family since Julia’s body had been brought back.
“I saw Gillian once, a couple of weeks later,” Mark said. “I had asked the owner of that shop she worked in to tip me off if she called to say she was coming in for her final paycheck. I wasn’t the only one waiting — the guy must have called half the press in the area, hoping to get free publicity, I guess. She met all the reporters outside, said that she wished we’d look for Nick Parrish as hard as we had looked for her. And that was it.”
Despite my pointing out my recent poor track record with vehicles, Ben loaned me his Jeep Cherokee, saying he would use David’s pickup truck in the meantime. Jack did the driving. We nearly drove past the Sayres’ large home — it used to be gray and white; it had been painted peach since the last time I had seen it.
I thought back; that had been just after Gillian had told me that Nick Parrish had lived on this street. I had spent a fruitless day interviewing neighbors — either they said he was pleasant but kept to himself, or they said they had always thought he was an odd duck. No one in this latter group could say why — leading me to believe that they had been influenced by what they had already read about him. No one in the neighborhood had any real insight into Nick Parrish, or could say where he had lived next, or what had become of his sister.
During the first year after Julia disappeared, the Sayres and I had seen one another fairly often. I had met Jason, and Giles’s mother, a woman who was clearly not prepared to cope with a rebellious teenager like Gillian. I was shocked to realize that although I had spoken to Gillian in person on any number of occasions since then, and had seen her father a few times as well, I had never again talked to her brother or grandmother.
Months earlier, when Parrish had first made his offer to lead police to Julia Sayre’s grave, I visited Giles at the company he owned. The moment I had arrived, he said, “He’s told them where to find Julia, hasn’t he?”
In the privacy of his office, I told him what I knew. He took it calmly, but asked, “Is there a chance he might be lying? A chance that it isn’t her?”
Yes, of course there was, I said, having seen this sort of denial before. He asked me to keep him informed.
“Have you told Gillian?” he asked.
Dismayed, I said, “No, I thought I’d leave that to her father.”
He fidgeted.
“She told me Parrish used to live on your street,” I said.
“Did she?” he said absently. “I don’t know. I never have kept track of the neighbors. The police did ask about it. I suppose that’s how they were able to bring pressure on him.”
“Did Parrish know Julia?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, frowning.
“She never complained to you about someone staring at her?”
“Perhaps she did,” he said vaguely. “Listen, Gilly doesn’t have much to do with us these days. I think she’d rather hear this news from you.”
Reluctantly, I agreed to be the one to tell her.
But Gillian, in her usual manner, had revealed nothing of her feelings to me. She simply said, “Have you told my dad yet?”
I told her I had.
“He doesn’t like to deal with anything unpleasant. Was he the one who asked you to tell me?”
“Yes.”
She smiled, not at all cheerfully, but in the tight-lipped way a person smiles if she’s right about something she doesn’t want to be right about.
“You’ll go with them, won’t you?” she asked. “To find out if this woman in the grave is my mother?”
In one minute flat, she had broken down the resistance that neither the D.A. nor my bosses had been able to breach.
I rang the doorbell of the Sayres’ house. To my surprise, it now played “Dixie.” I heard someone scampering down the stairs, shouting, “I’ll get it!”
Jason pulled the door open, seemed taken aback, then looked sullen. His hair was now cut fairly short and dyed a mix of black and blond. He was wearing a long, loose T-shirt and very baggy pants. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice cracking.
“Jason, honey?” a voice called from upstairs. A voice too young to be his grandmother’s.
Jason rolled his eyes. He was thirteen now, and much taller.
He seemed to make a sudden decision, quickly shut the door behind himself and said to me, “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I asked, startled.
“Just go!” he insisted in his half-man, half-boy voice. He started moving off the front porch. “That your Jeep?”
“The one I’m using, but—”
He came to a halt when he saw Jack sitting in the driver’s seat. “Who’s that?”
“A friend of mine.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Looks kind of old, but cool,” he said, starting to move toward the jeep again.
“It’s all relative,” I said. “The age part, I mean. Look, Jason—”
“Jason!” a voice screeched from an upstairs window.
“Oh, shit!” he said, glancing back at the house, then running toward the Jeep.
“Who is that?” I asked, running to keep up.
“Jason!” the voice screeched again.
He yanked the back passenger door open and jumped into the Jeep. “Dude!” he said to Jack. “Get me out of here!”
“Don’t even turn the key, Jack,” I said. “We are not going anywhere until he tells me who the banshee is.”
“What’s a banshee?” Jason asked.
“I’ll explain that as soon as you tell me who this is that’s coming out the front door of the house,” I said, indicating a stylishly dressed, thin blond woman in her mid-fifties, whose noticeable efforts to turn back the hands of time hadn’t even bent its pinky.
“That,” Jason said grimly, “is Mrs. Sayre.”
45
THURSDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 14
Las Piernas
“Jason, are you trying to kill your father?” the new Mrs. Sayre called out.
Jason’s back went rigid.
Not noticing, she went on. “Do you know what he’d say if he knew you were getting into a Jeep with total strangers?” She stood back a little from us, eyeing Jack’s scarred face, leather outfit, earring, and tattoos with disapproval.