“That’s wonderful,” I said, eager to go now that I’d found what I needed. There was just one, last thing. “Did she ever mention Arlo Pelz?”
“No,” she replied.
I showed her a picture of Arlo, a close-up I took that day on the pier.
“Ever seen him before?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Who is he?”
“A drug dealer.”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Mrs. Harper stood up, clearly angry. “Lauren escaped from that world. From the day she stepped into our home, that life ended and her new one began.”
“Apparently not,” I replied.
Mrs. Harper marched over to the wall of family photos and pointed at one of them. “Here she is getting the honor roll. Here she is on the swim team. The debate team. The school newspaper.”
She pointed at photo after photo to prove her point. “Does this look like a woman who has anything to do with drugs?”
I looked at the picture. Six teenage girls standing around a printing press, their aprons covered with ink. Not one of them was Lauren.
In fact, Lauren wasn’t in a single one of the photos on that wall. I turned to Mrs. Harper and studied her. This crazy woman had created an entirely false, perfect world and inserted her vision of Lauren into it. She’d even gone so far as to put up fake childhood photos on the wall. I could only imagine what Lauren’s teenage years had really been like.
“Mrs. Harper, I don’t know who that girl is, but she isn’t Lauren,” I said. “Why don’t we start over, with the real story?”
Mrs. Harper looked at the photo, then back at me, then started to speak again, stammering, talking so fast, the words tripped over themselves. “Oh, no! You’ve got it wrong. You didn’t know. This is her. This is Lauren. It’s her before.”
“Before?”
She grabbed my arm and dragged me over to another photo, of herself, a man I presumed was Mr. Harper, and a teenage girl, taken in front of an old Ford Mustang. I looked into the girl’s eyes and I shivered.
“This is a picture of us, a few weeks after Lauren graduated from high school,” she said. “Brock bought that car for her as a graduation gift, but it was really more for himself. He’d always wanted a sports car.”
She sat down on the couch again. I stayed where I was, looking at the photo again. The same girl was in all of them. I’d never see her before. But I knew her.
“Brock used any excuse to drive that damn car. He was always going on a quick trip to the grocery store for things we didn’t really need and asking Lauren if he could borrow her car. Lauren always went with him,” Mrs. Harper wiped away fresh tears and struggled to continue. “The police say he was driving fifteen miles over the speed limit when a station wagon pulled out in front of him. He swerved, lost control of the car. It rolled over a dozen times. Brock was killed. Lauren was thrown clear, but she broke her arm, her ribs, and smashed up her face pretty bad.”
I stared at the family portrait. Lauren’s eyes stared back at me from another person’s face, the girl in all those photos.
I took out my picture of Lauren and held it beside the framed photo. It was the same person, only one of them was wearing a mask. I looked Lauren’s picture, her face finally revealing its meaning to me.
No wonder I thought Lauren’s beauty looked sculpted. No wonder Carol looked at the pictures and saw a woman who’d had a lot of work done.
We both saw through one of Lauren’s secrets and blew it off. How many other secrets had been revealed to me that I’d ignored?
Suddenly, a strange thought occurred to me.
My hand started to shake. To hide it, I put my picture of Lauren back in my pocket and left my hand there.
“Mrs. Harper,” I asked, hearing a tremble in my voice, “You wouldn’t happen to remember which high school Lauren went to?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Marcus Whitman.”
The same school Jolene went to. The school that had a reunion the day Arlo suddenly disappeared.
People, places, and events were colliding in ways I could never have imagined and had an even harder time trying to understand. But all I could do was my part, to connect the obvious dots as they appeared, even if I couldn’t see the shape I was creating.
“Do you know if Lauren ever went to one of their reunions?” I asked.
“She got an invitation, but wasn’t able to make it,” Mrs. Harper said. “Since she wasn’t going to attend, the reunion people asked me for a recent picture of Lauren and some news about her life to put in a newsletter they were going to give out at the party.”
“Did you give them a picture?”
“No, that wouldn’t have been right. I just told them how well she’d done, and how she’d raised so much money for charity in Los Angeles,” she replied. “What does this have to do with Lauren’s suicide?”
Everything—I just didn’t know how yet. A few more questions might have helped me, but I didn’t get a chance to ask.
The phone rang.
I immediately headed for the door. “I better be going now, Mrs. Harper; you’ve been a tremendous help.”
“Wait, that could be Cyril,” she said, rising from the couch.
“Tell him I’m on the case.”
I was out the door and running down the hall by the time she answered the phone.
Chapter Seventeen
I went to dinner at a Home Town Buffet off the freeway between Seattle and Snohomish. I piled my plate high with fried chicken, macaroni, chow mein, tater tots, and corn on the cob and took it back to my booth.
While I ate, I looked at the people around me. They all looked suspicious. They all looked like people with secrets.
And when they looked at me, they probably thought I was one of them. Just another average person trying to eat as much as he could for six dollars and ninety-nine cents.
They didn’t know that I was a private detective. They didn’t know it was my job to see through them, to find out what they didn’t want anyone else to discover.
I wondered what they would do if they knew.
I felt like the hero of one of those old World War II movies where a rugged soldier, like Jose Ferrer or Alan Ladd, parachutes into occupied France to carry out a deadly mission. I wasn’t sitting in Home Town Buffet, I was in a small café in Bordeaux, and all the other tables were filled with German soldiers. When I talked to the waitress, would subtle mistakes in my French reveal me? Would I die at the table, doomed by a flawed past participle, before I even began my mission?
“Are you done with your plate?” the waitress asked. Her name was Dede. A sticker on her shirt told me to ask about the senior citizen specials.
I saw the Nazis at the next table eyeing me over their Teriyaki chicken wings and tacos. I tried to remain casual.
“Are you serving the mini-corn dogs tonight?” I asked Dede.
“Only on Tuesdays,” she replied. “May I take your plate?”
I nodded. The people at the next table looked away, uninterested.
I would live, at least for the moment. They thought I was one of them. Only I knew that I wasn’t any more and I was damn happy about it.
I grabbed a fresh plate and got myself some cinnamon buns while they were still hot.
***
I called Carol as soon as I got to the motel room. It was a good thing I did, because she was about to call the police.
I told her what I’d learned, hoping that since Carol was smarter than me, she might see stuff that I’d missed. I left out the part in my story about telling Jolene which motel I was staying at, and the idea I stole from a book I’d read. I figured there was no sense getting Carol worried. She didn’t know yet how cool and professional I’d become, though I hoped telling her about my day at least gave her a hint.
I told her my theory, that Arlo and Lauren were both involved with drugs, and that he knew her before she ran away from home, disappeared, and got a new face. Arlo probably forgot all about her, until the fateful day his ex-wife Jolene got invited to her high school reunion and showed him her yearbook. He must have seen a photo of Lauren and shit himself. Then he read the “Where Are They Now?” newsletter, saw how she’d married a wealthy man and become an active fundraiser for charity, and saw a way to make himself some quick cash.