After they had ordered the food - yellow curry, Pad Thai and fried tofu - her mother had smiled in a disarming manner, before reaching appropriately for Vicki’s hand.
‘Your father and I are getting a divorce,’ she had said, in a deliberately calm manner.
‘A what?’ Vicki had felt like she’d been punched.
‘It’s fine, honey.’ Her father smiled softly. ‘We've been planning it for years.’
Vicki’s mother shot him a bitter look.
‘What?’ He shrugged casually. ‘We agreed to tell her, so let’s be honest about the whole thing.’
‘We haven’t been happy for some time,’ her mother said, returning her attention to her daughter.
As they were speaking, Vicki had gotten the distinct impression the people sitting with her were pretending to be her parents. As it had transpired, that feeling was not too far from the truth.
Over the course of an uneaten lunch, it was revealed her parents had decided to divorce while their daughter was still in high school. They had also decided this shift in family stability would possibly have a detrimental effect on her education. After some discussion, they had taken the mature decision to remain together, if only superficially, until Vicki had graduated from college. The irony was they had taken this bizarre decision in the interest of their child, leaving her unable to criticise their madness, without appearing ungrateful. Their decision, however, had left Vicki utterly debased.
As the fragmented family had left the restaurant that day, Vicki felt all sense of reality melt away. The sun was too bright in the sky above the parking lot. Everything she had known as familiar now seemed untrustworthy and impermanent.
In the months that followed, Vicki had remained in the Oceanside beach house while her mother and father had hastily relocated to the security of their birthplaces in Vegas and San Francisco, respectively. Her parents had mutually agreed they would not sell the beach house on the basis either party would be allowed equal access to it. Two weeks after the arrangement was signed, Vicki’s mother had the locks changed.
Despite having a nice home in a beautiful part of the country, Vicki felt nothing – not sad or suicidal – just nothing. It was not even the reality of divorce that floored her; it was the simple fact her parents were equally conspicuous in their absence – as if after years of over-involvement in Vicki’s life, they had identified graduation as their cut-off point. They had freed themselves from the complication of being parents. Sometimes, Vicki thought perhaps each was assuming the other would take on the burden of main parent. At darker times, she believed she was too dissimilar to both parents to be a worthwhile investment of time, or energy.
Her parents, sensing they had somehow contributed to this, took predictably polarised courses of action. Her mother had sent her several packets of mood lifting pills in long white boxes, while her father paid for a cognitive therapist (possibly even the same one he had used to cope with his mock marriage).
Neither of these methods had made any real impact on Vicki, who grew increasingly detached from the world. She remained living entirely in the beach house, and generated a meagre income from simple web design, and providing online support to several businesses. This allowed her to work from home, and, therefore, maintaining her appearance or mood was not a necessity. Some days, she would lie curled on the balcony, watching the waves for hours, growing lost in the sparkle of the sun shaping and reshaping reality in infinitely changing patterns. The pattern seemed as temporal and shifting as her sense of her past.
In their final support session, the therapist had very calmly suggested it would be helpful for Vicki to reconnect with old friends. The idea was not an attractive prospect. Like most people experiencing depression, Vicki felt she had nothing to offer any friend – old or otherwise. She was, in essence, a ghost; disconnected from the bright world around her, and haunting a beach house devoid of the life it had once known.
But, that evening, she had sat and stared at the phone, until she couldn't stand it any longer. So, she had made contact with Laurie, and invited her down to Oceanside. Of course, she had assumed Laurie would have no recollection of her former roommate, or, if she did, might have no interest in travelling for three hours to visit her. She was wrong on both counts. Her friend had sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her, and said she would organise a bus ticket in no time.
The last thing she had heard from her friend was in the form of a text message, which came in just as Vicki was drifting off to sleep. The undulating melody of the cell phone drew her back from the edge of darkness. Her scrambling hand reached for the slim phone in the darkness. Finding the device, she held it aloft in her arm, squinting her eyes against the fierce glow like a lighthouse in the night.
Hi V. bkd amzngly cheap tickt on a Route King bus. Due in2 terminl at apprximtly 4.30pm. C u thn. xxx
Vicki had smiled to herself when she read the message, and slipped easily into her dreams.
The sun was high in the sky, as Vicki eventually reached Victorville Avenue. She pulled off the freeway and parked in the lot behind the bus terminal. Despite the fact that she had arrived in Escondido twenty minutes early, she was now - as always - late.
As she hurried through the terminal doors, she could see the silver bus pulling in to stand twelve. Negotiating her way through the crowd, she kept her eyes eagerly on the bus doors. She was perhaps ten metres away from the vehicle, when the bus slowed to a stop. A smile was already starting to form on Vicki’s face in anticipation of seeing her friend.
However, it was not her friend who exited the vehicle. The bus stop came to a brief stop - pausing just long enough for an elderly man to step off on to the hot pavement. Almost as soon as the man cleared the bottom step, the pneumatic door hissed shut, and the bus began reversing.
Vicki hurried along the terminal, moving parallel with the vehicle, while craning her neck to see if her friend had fallen asleep, but the tinted windows were too dark to give up their secrets. She called out Laurie’s name, but her words were drowned out by the roar of the engine.
Within seconds, the Route King bus had rumbled across the oil-stained lot, and moved out into the busy stream of traffic. Vicki anxiously unclipped her handbag, took out her cell phone, and called Laurie’s number. Holding the phone to her ear, she glanced anxiously from side-to-side. Within a couple of seconds, the phone rang. From somewhere nearby, she heard the sound of “Smoke on the Water” playing in a looped ringtone. It was the same ringtone her friend had used for the last five years.
Vicki turned around, expecting to see her friend grinning at her. Instead she found herself looking at a strange-eyed young man, who vanished into the crowd. She still held the phone hopefully to her head, but the line died.
5
Oceanside Police Station was housed in an attractive sandstone building. The entrance, hidden between large, peach coloured arches, looked more like the façade of a Mediterranean restaurant than the strategic centre of policing in the San Diego area. However, the cream interior, housing numerous wooden desks and grey metal cabinets, was a busy and highly effective centre of law enforcement.
As he filled up the plain cardboard carton with various items from the bottom drawer of his desk, Detective Leighton Jones found an old photograph. He smiled at the image of a young officer with a gleam in his eyes, as he leaned, arms folded, against a cruiser.