Later that afternoon, the office phone rang. To Emily’s utter surprise, it was Mitch Crawford. He was huffing and puffing mad, but she was glad for the call.
The more you talk, the more you’ll hang yourself, she thought.
“How can I help you, Mitch?” she said.
“Help me? You have to be kidding. You could stop harassing me, for one.”
Emily swiveled her chair and looked out the window. Cars passed by. “You’ll need to be more specific. No one here is intending to harass you.”
“My insurance guy just called me saying that you put out a goddamn alert on me. Like you think I killed Mandy for insurance money. What a laugh!”
“I’m sorry you think this is so funny.”
“You know what I mean. I know that you sent out a bulletin to everyone in the country asking if I had policies on Mandy’s life. Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“You haven’t exactly been cooperative, Mitch.”
“I’ve done what you wanted me to do. Nothing more. I think you’re wasting my time. You’re wasting Mandy’s time, too.”
“You don’t happen to know where she is?”
“You know I don’t.”
She thought he’d hung up, but he was only gulping a breath of air to fuel his rage.
“I’m so sick of you and your office. If you had asked me, I would have told you that she only had one stupid policy from that cheap-ass county. There would be no windfall in Mandy’s death.”
“I don’t know. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”
“To you maybe, but not to me. I haven’t done anything wrong and you’ve been treating me like trash. What’s with you? I know you’re single. Man-hater? I’ve heard some things about you.”
From Cary, no doubt.
Emily hated losing her cool. It took some doing, but she held it.
“This isn’t about me, Mitch. This is about you and your missing wife. Let’s remember that. All right?”
The phone went dead with the sound of a thunderclap.
Imagine that, Mitch Crawford, mad enough to slam down his phone. Nice.
Chapter Fifteen
Garden Grove
They were a beautiful young couple, by any measure. Michael Barton, almost thirty, had an athletic build with penetrating brown eyes and dimples that never looked childlike or silly. Only disarmingly handsome. He was more reserved than shy, though he could come into his own when the situation demanded it. The only problem with Michael was that he was only able to reflect the moods of others. He seldom seemed comfortable enough to make the first move when it came to displays of warmth or charm.
Olivia Barton was a stunning Latina with smoky brown eyes that never needed shadow or mascara, and full lips that she enhanced—when she had time—with a pretty plum-colored gloss.
When Michael and Olivia bought their house in Garden Grove, they knew the first bit of remodeling would be the basement that the previous owner had outfitted with a cheesy, knotty-pine bar and air hockey table. Olivia saw the bulk of the dingy downstairs real estate as a potential playroom for the kids. Michael knew that he needed a home office.
Yet they had a son, Danny, and shortly thereafter, a daughter, Carla.
So of course, he and Olivia compromised. The bar was ripped out; the space that housed the air hockey table was replaced by a playhouse and the other side of the room was set up with a desk, PC, fax, printer, and telephone. Two slits of glass let in the sunlight of the outside world. Whenever Michael worked, he did so with the chirpy noise of the children and their friends. He didn’t mind. In fact, their little voices, their happy little voices, seemed to make his day.
Laughter like that was completely unknown after he and his sister had been abandoned by their mother. Certainly, he had been miserable in Portland. As his own kids played, little Lego-like pieces of his past would snap into place and he’d remember a few of the things that led to his desertion by his mother.
With the perspective that comes with time, Michael began to see that his mother, Adriana Barton, had probably done the best that she could. He didn’t even call her “Mom” in his mind when he thought of her anymore. It was always just Adriana. It was like she was some mythic, albeit vile creature. She was colored in his memory as the darkest shade of evil, a woman worse than Snow White’s wicked stepmother, or any of the Disney bitches.
Die, Adriana, die. I hate you.
When he was being abused by the adult who’d preyed on him when he was only a child, he wondered where Adriana had been. She should have been there. With him. With his sister. Had she left him and Sarah to endure this kind of an existence?
An existence like her own? Had she left them so she could be free?
Sometimes tears came when he thought about Portland and how Adriana had been beaten by Sarah’s father so badly that everyone thought she’d die. He remembered the time she came to see him at school and the teacher told her she had to leave.
“You’re scaring the other children,” the teacher had said.
Adriana had black-and-blue eyes that day. She’d tried to cover them with makeup, but she was never really good at such subterfuge. Her flinty eyes were incapable of lying. In fact, the only time she was ever successful in making up a story was the one about the ride to Disneyland.
“We are going to have the best time there,” she said. “I haven’t been there in a long time, but I’ve wanted to go on Space Mountain.”
“The Haunted Mansion and the pirate ride, too,” Michael said.
“All of that. Just us three.”
Later, when he revisited the trip from Portland to L.A., he remembered how they hadn’t brought any luggage. He remembered how Adriana had only thought to bring a carton of cigarettes for herself, and nothing for him or for Sarah. She cracked the window an inch as they drove over the snow-coated Siskiyou Mountains. The icy air reached inside the car.
“Mom, we’re cold,” he told her.
She just stared straight ahead.
“Mom!”
She pulled the cigarette from her lips and jabbed it at him. He pulled back, whimpering.
Adriana turned on a Dolly Parton tape and the little girlish voice of the country singer kept them company the rest of the way there.
He looked at the small circular scar on the back of his wrist. Adriana had left him with more than memories. She had left him with her mark. It was faint, but it never tanned, so it never really went away.
Down in his basement office so many years later, the PC whirled as it booted up. The screen rolled and a desktop messy with Word files, jpegs of the kids, came into view. Michael pulled down the Favorites tab and hit the bookmark named: Jenna’s BZ Blog.
An icon of a little yellow face with a frown advertised her mood. Her latest entry had been made earlier in the day.
Michael’s anger swelled; his brown eyes were pools of incontrovertible anger. He knew that he’d screwed up badly, but somewhere along the way he thought that just maybe the news reports were wrong. That he’d truly done what he’d set out to do.
Danny came from around the partition.
“I need new batteries,” the boy said, holding up a laser gun.
Michael opened a drawer. Paper clips, staples, even masking tape. No batteries.
“Sorry, pal. Better tell your mama. I’m all out.”
The little boy shuffled up the stairs and Michael returned his gaze to the computer screen. The mask that he fashioned for his son’s benefit melted from his face. It was like a shade that he could pull up and put down. He knew there was falseness to half of what he did. It was mimicry. Sometimes, he’d look over at parents with their children, knowing that the connections they felt were different than his.