The mom had left a message three days ago, asking that I come out to her place on Ashbury. She and her daughter rattled around in an old Victorian with gingerbread gables and a front porch the size of Cuba. The place had been in the family for four generations. Theirs had been a big family—once. The mom said that Rashmi hadn’t come home the previous night. She hadn’t called and didn’t answer messages. The mom had contacted the cops, but they weren’t all that interested. Not enough time would have passed for them. Too much time had passed for the mom.
The mom taught fifth grade at Reagan Elementary. Rashmi was a twenty-six year-old-grad student, six credits away from an MFA in Creative Writing. The mom trusted her to draw money from the family account, so at first I thought I might be able to find her by chasing debits. But there was no activity in the account we could attribute to the missing girl. When I suggested that she might be hiding out with friends, the mom went prickly on me. Turned out that Rashmi’s choice of friends was a cause of contention between them. Rashmi had dropped her old pals in the last few months and taken up with a new, religious crowd. Alix, Gratiana, Elaine, and Kate—the mom didn’t know their last names—were members of the Church of Christ the Man. I’d had trouble with Christers before and wasn’t all that eager to go up against them again, so instead I biked over to campus to see Rashmi’s advisor. Zelda Manotti was a dithering old granny who would have loved to help except she had all the focus of paint spatter. She did let me copy Rashmi’s novel-in-progress. And she did let me tag along to her advanced writing seminar, in case Rashmi showed up for it. She didn’t. I talked to the three other students after class, but they either didn’t know where she was or wouldn’t say. None of them was Gratiana, Alix, or Elaine.
That night I skimmed The Lost Heart, Rashmi’s novel. It was a nostalgic and sentimental weeper set back before the devils disappeared all the men. Young Brigit Bird was searching for her father, a famous architect who had been kidnapped by Colombian drug lords. If I was just a fluff doing a fantasy job in the pretend economy, then old Noreen would have crowned Rashmi Jones queen of fluffs.
I’d started day two back at the Joneses’ home. The mom watched as I went through Rashmi’s room. I think she was as worried about what I might find as she was that I would find nothing. Rashmi listened to the Creeps, had three different pairs of Kat sandals, owned everything Denise Pepper had ever written, preferred underwire bras and subscribed to News for the Confused. She had kicked about a week’s worth of dirty clothes under her bed. Her wallpaper mix cycled through koalas, the World’s Greatest Beaches, ruined castles, and Playgirl Centerfolds 2000–2010. She’d kept a handwritten diary starting in the sixth grade and ending in the eighth in which she often complained that her mother was strict and that school was boring. The only thing I found that rattled the mom was a Christer Bible tucked into the back of the bottom drawer of the nightstand. When I pulled it out, she flushed and stalked out of the room.
I found my lead on the Joneses’ home network. Rashmi was not particularly diligent about backing up her sidekick files, and the last one I found was almost six months old, which was just about when she’d gotten religion. She’d used simple encryption, which wouldn’t withstand a serious hack, but which would discourage the mom from snooping. I doglegged a key and opened the file. She had multiple calls. Her mother had been trying her at Rashmi@Ashbury.03284. But she also had an alternate: Brigitbird@Vincent.03284. I did a reverse lookup and that turned an address: The Church of Christ the Man, 348 Vincent Avenue. I wasn’t keen for a personal visit to the church, so I tried her call.
“Hello,” said a voice.
“Is this Rashmi Jones?”
The voice hesitated. “My name is Brigit. Leave me alone.”
“Your mother is worried about you, Rashmi. She hired me to find you.”
“I don’t want to be found.”
“I’m reading your novel, Rashmi.” It was just something to say; I wanted to keep her on the line. “I was wondering, does she find her father at the end?”
“No.” I could hear her breath caressing the microphone. “The devils come. That’s the whole point.”
Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. “That’s sad, Rashmi. But I guess that’s the way it had to be.”
Then she hung up.
The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I’d found the girclass="underline" case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I’d try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I’d attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle’s Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.
And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.
Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick facade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls—our hope for the future.
There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn’t take me to schools very often; I couldn’t remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers’ lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.
Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,
Down in the valley where the green grass grows,
there sits Stacy pretty as a rose! She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,
Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!
Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,
How many kisses does she get?
One, two, three, four, five…
The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.