"Been busy?" Holly asked Mickey.
"Are you kidding me? Those missing women are driving me nuts."
"No leads?"
He shook his head. "We still don't know for sure if they're in any way connected. I know they were all successful professional women, all four of them, and they all disappeared without telling their husbands or their friends where they were going. But until at least one of them shows up "
"Any theories?"
"Personally, I think they all decided that their family responsibilities were holding them back and that the simplest thing to do would be to walk out the door and never come back."
"You think theyalldid that, independently of each other? That doesn't seem very likely."
"Why not? One walks out, the others see it on the news and think,What am I doing here with this Homer Simpson of a husband and these snotty ungrateful kids?Icould do that."
Holly shook her head. "I'm not so sure. I knowmenwalk out on their families sometimes."
"Why not women? Sarah Hargitay ran a very successful real estate business; Jennie McLellan had a thriving patisserie; Kay Padowska was a senior manager at First Portland Bank; and Helena Carlsson was a big noise in the Port Authority. All dominant, single-minded women."
"I'm a dominant, single-minded woman, but I wouldn't just walk out on my life."
"That's because you'd miss me too much."
"Are you kidding? I'd miss you like I miss hay fever when it starts to rain."
Ahead of them they caught sight of three burly women in red, blue, and yellow cheongsams, with high collars and slit skirts, tottering arm in arm along the mall together. Mickey put down his window and called, "Hey, girls!"
They came tripping over in their little silk Chinese slippers. Their faces were caked with thick layers of dead-white rice powder so that their five-o'clock shadows were covered, and their eyebrows were plucked into thin, startled arches.
"LieutenantKavanagh!What a wo-oh-onderful surprise!"
"Did you get that job atEmbers Avenue ?"
"Are youkiddingme?" shrilled the girl in the blue cheongsam.
"They were so cruel to us, you don't have any idea," added the girl in the red cheongsam. "They werebeasts."
"They said, 'Who are you supposed to be,The Three Stooges Meet Fu Manchu?'"
"Hey, you'll get over it," said Mickey. "You know you've got talent. When I saw you three singing 'Getting to Know You' that time what can I say? Whoa, unforgettable."
"Who's the car candy?" asked the girl in the blue cheongsam, nodding toward Holly.
"Oh, I'm sorry. This is a good friend of mine, Holly Summers. She's a caseworker for the Portland Children's Welfare Department. One of the city's finest. Holly, this is Lotus Flower, August Moon, and Bruce."
"Good to meet you, honey," said Lotus Flower, reaching into the car and gripping Holly's hand. "You just watch this guy: He's got a reputation with us women."
They drove on. "Some characters, huh?" Mickey remarked. "Portland, City ofRoses ? More like the City ofFruits ."
A Birthday Wish
Daisy was already in her pink Barbie pajamas when Holly turned the key in the door. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of hot chocolate, watching television. Marcella, the nanny, was standing at the sink, washing dishes.
"Hi, Ms. Summers. You came back early."
"I guess I was a little tired, that's all."
"Hi, Mommy. Did you have a good time?"
Holly kissed Daisy on top of her head. Daisy was eight and a half, both pretty and gawky at the same time, all arms and legs, with long blond hair and a snubby little nose. She had her father's eyes: blue as bellflowers and with the same sparkle of suppressed mischief. For Holly's birthday, Daisy had made her a scrapbook crowded with pictures cut from magazines, recipes, poems, and Polaroid photographs that she had taken of places they had visited together, like theJapaneseGarden and the Oregon Zoo andMultnomah Falls . It must have taken her hours and who could guess how many bottles of glue, and Holly had been so touched that her eyes had filled up with tears.
"You want a hot chocolate?" asked Marcella.
"No, thanks, Marcella. I think I could use a glass of wine. I have some work to do on the computer."
"Won't you be able to test me, then?" said Daisy brightly.
"I have some work to do on the computerafterI've tested you."
"All right I go now?" said Marcella, hanging up her apron.
"Oh, sure. And here's your money for last week. Sorry it's late."
"You don't worry, Ms. Summers. I would look after Daisy free and for nothing, you know that."
Finding Marcella had been a godsend. She was forty-five, Italian, small and plump, with sweet, doll-like features and tiny hands and feet, like a Madonna figure from a church altar. Her three sons had all grown up and leftPortland and her husband Luigi had been taken by lung cancer. ("He smoke likeMount Saint Helens .") Holly had met her when she moved into her third-story apartment on top of the Torrefazione Restaurant in the Pearl District. Marcella had been working in the restaurant kitchen, and she had offered to keep an eye on Daisy while Holly struggled up and down the stairs with cardboard boxes and suitcases and clothes. After that she had agreed to look after Daisy every afternoon, after school. She called Daisymia bomboletta, meaning "my little fritter."
Holly opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Duck Pond chardonnay. She poured herself a large glass and then sat at the kitchen table and kicked off her shoes.
"Did you have a cake?" asked Daisy.
"Uh-huh. I had bread-and-butter pudding with three candles in it."
"And did you make a wish?"
Holly took hold of Daisy's hand. "Sure I made a wish. But I can't tell you what it is or it won't come true."
Not only that, she didn't want to tell Daisy what her wish had been: that five-year-old Daniel Joseph wouldn't have to suffer anymore. Daisy knew all about Holly's work, but she wasn't yet old enough to understand the mundane horrors that parents are capable of inflicting on their own children. Yesterday afternoon at four forty-five Holly had been called to a house inHappyValley where a mother had pressed her six-year-old daughter's hand onto a sizzling skillet and kept it there for over ten seconds. The reason? "She said wicked things. She said my brother kept touching her under her nightdress and she didn't like it. My brother would never do a thing like that." Her brother was twenty-nine, with two convictions for theft and aggravated assault.
Portland's Most Wanted
Like Holly, Daisy had always found math difficult, and it took over an hour for her to answer all the questions in her test paper. Holly felt sorry for her, because she could remember sitting alone at the back of the class when everybody else had finished their tests and gone out to play, tearfully trying to understand why 248 and 507 didn't add up to 779.
The trouble was, numbers didn't look like numbers. She thought that 2s looked like swans and 4s like sailboats and 8s like hourglasses, and how could you possibly add up swans and sailboats and hourglasses?