I fetched my car, went to the Times , and got my package.
It was a cassette tape, wrapped in a single piece of copy paper. A cryptic four-line note was handwritten on the paper.
If you’d like to stay at my house, consider it yours. I have no reason to believe you’d be unsafe there. The key’s in the flowerpot. Don’t mind the dogs, they’re both big babies.
Trish
A postscript told her address, on Ninetieth Avenue Southeast, Mercer Island.
I put it back in the bag and slipped it under my seat, then moved on to the main business of the evening.
I wanted to be well out of the downtown area when I made this call. I drove south, got off the freeway near Boeing, and looked for a telephone. Phones are like cops: there’s never one when you need it.
At last I stood at a little lean-in booth and made the call. It was a hard quarter to drop.
I heard it ring three times in North Bend.
“Hello.”
“Crystal?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Janeway.”
You could eat the silence, it was that heavy. I didn’t know how to begin, so I began by telling her that. But she already knew.
“The police were here. They’ve been here off and on since noon.”
Good for the cops, I thought: good for them, not so hot for me.
I was getting nervous. It already seemed I’d been on that telephone a long time.
“Are the police there now?”
“No. They may come back tonight.”
The funny thing was, she never once stated the obvious: she never said, “They’re looking for you, you know,” or anything like that. Still, she wasn’t going to give me what I needed unless I could move her that way.
“I’m going to ask you for something. I wouldn’t blame you if you told me to go to hell. I haven’t done much right so far.”
She was listening.
“I guess I’m asking you to trust me. I’d like you to believe that everything I’ve done, at least after that first night, I’ve done for Eleanor.”
She punished me with silence. I endured it till I couldn’t anymore.
“Crystal”
“Yeah, I hear you.”
“I’m trying io find your daughter.”
“I guess I knew that. And I don’t know why, but I do believe it.”
The wall between us crumbled. Whatever she’d been telling herself with the logical part of her brain gave way to instinct.
“Even when we were talking to the police, I kept thinking of you,” she said. “Kind of like an ace in the hole.”
“That’s what I am. It may not be much…”
“I get feelings from people. Not psychic, nothing like that, but people hit me either warm or cold. When I hugged your neck on the porch that first night, I felt the warm between us. Sometimes people just connect, you know what I mean? I could see that between you and Ellie right from the start. It was warm, but not the kinda thing a mother needs to worry about…except maybe on her side.”
She gave a little laugh. “That’s why I never really gave up on it, even when it came out why you were really here.”
“I’m going to find her if I can. I don’t know how and I’m starting pretty far back. I need your help.”
“Tell me what you want.”
“Are the cops taping this call?”
“They talked about doing that. There was some doubt about whether it’d be productive. Just a minute.” She put the phone down and blew her nose. Then she said, “They’re not exactly expecting a ransom demand.”
“When will you know?”
“They may come back tonight and put it on. Or they may not.”
“If they do and I call back, could you let me know?”
“How?”
“Clear your throat when you answer the phone. I’ll try to find a way to let you know if I’ve got anything new.”
“Or you could call Archie. He wants what we all want.” “A couple of questions. Do you know a guy named Pruitt?“
“He’s the one the cops are looking for. They think he took Ellie with him.”
“Had you ever had any contact or dealing with Pruitt before this came up?”
She paused as if groping for words. “I knew who he was.”
“Tell me about it.”
“A crazy man. He seemed to think we had something…”
“A book.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. He wouldn’t go away, though, wouldn’t leave me alone. I’d go to town and see him watching from a car. Then he started bothering us on the telephone. At night he’d call, play music. Just a few notes, but we knew it was him.”
“He was stalking Eleanor too.”
She expelled a shivery breath.
“Listen, did you get a letter from Eleanor in yesterday’s mail? It would’ve probably been on Hilton Hotel stationery.”
“It never came here.”
“It may come tomorrow. What time is your mail delivered?”
“Whenever he gets here. Early afternoon as often as any.”
“I’ll try to call then.”
“What’s in the letter?”
“That’s what I need to find out. It might be her laundry bill. For our purposes, think of it as some dark secret she’d rather not tell the world. Is there anybody else she might send something like that to?”
“Amy Harper,” she said immediately. “Nobody but Amy.”
I remembered the name. “Eleanor mentioned her once. Said she’d gone to see Amy but Amy wasn’t there.”
“Amy moved into Seattle, I coulda told her that. Her life out here’d turned to hell the last six months, especially after her mom died. I worry about that child, don’t know what’s gonna become of her. She’s made some wrong choices in the last few years. But really a sweet kid. She and Ellie were like sisters all through school.”
“I seem to remember there was some kind of rift between them.”
“They had a falling-out over Coleman Willis. That’s the fool Amy let knock her up when she was still at Mt. Si High. Then she made it worse: married the fool and quit school and had a second kid the next year. The trouble between them was simple. Ellie had no use for Coleman Willis, couldn’t be in the same room with the man. Amy was still trying to make it work. You can see what happened.”
“Sure.”
“But Amy’s no fool. There came a time when even she’d had enough of Coleman and his bullshit, and she took her kids and left him. She and Ellie got together once or twice after that. I really think they’d fixed things up between ‘em, I think they were good as new.”
“Is there a phone number for Amy?”
“God, Amy can’t afford a telephone, she’s lucky she’s got a roof over her head. I’ve got an address if you want it…it’s a rooming house on Wall Street. Are you familiar with the section they call Belltown?”
I wasn’t.
“It’s easy, right off downtown. Just a minute, I’ll get it for you.”
34
It was just fifteen blocks from the Hilton, about as far as Oz is from Kansas. It made me remember myself as a kid, bouncing around for a year of my life in places not much better than this. Now I go through these neighborhoods and the memory of rank and scummy beds hits me like a shot of bad whiskey. It’s a chilly reminder of what life hands out to those who slip and can’t climb up again. The young seem unbothered by the lack of elegance: time, they believe, will see them through it, and time when you’re twenty is a thing you’ll never run out of. You can sleep anywhere when you’re running on your rims, and you don’t give too much thought to the dripping tap or the cracked and faded walls or the mice that come tearing across your landscape. The young endure and hope, until suddenly they’re forty and time isn’t what it once was. The old suffer and save their hopes for the real things in life—a high, dry present and a quiet place to die.