Hungry Ghosts (9 page)

I didn't dare offer to go down for her.

“Oh, and remember, I wanted Grace's phone number? I need to talk to her. Not about this,” she added with a dismissive glance at her hips, as if to dispel any thought of possible angling for free medical advice.

“Sure. She's living at home. I'll write it down for you.”

“Then how about serving up the lunch? Feel free to start. Pretend it's the freshman trough!”

I didn't look at her as she made her way to the front door and on outside. Had she always had that self-control, or was it a side benefit of learning to hide pain? I remembered her at that long freshman lunch table in school,
tossing back food like everyone else to grab a few extra minutes to gossip, flirt, or take a last scan at test notes—and before the hard and important tests, I remembered her laughing.

The serving bowls were ready so I shifted them to the table and began scooping out salad. It would be hard for her—for anyone—to understand my family's attitude toward Mike's disappearance. I could remind her that John was already a patrol officer at the time and his colleagues had interviewed us all. And then there was the reporter. I added a slice of garlic bread to each plate. But still, there were always reasons. At first Mike's being gone was unbelievable, an alternate universe that had settled on ours and would certainly lift any minute, leaving us crowded in the kitchen like always. It wasn't possible at first that he could be gone.

Then possibility seeped in and I felt like the biggest traitor in the world. I couldn't mention it; I couldn't be near anyone who mentioned Mike's name. I couldn't read, study, hold a conversation, do anything but run track, take gymnastics classes because they were so hard with my tight track muscles, and try out for basketball, soccer. I never rode the bus in those days, but bicycled or roller-bladed. I moved fast, as if I could outrun the truth. I was too busy avoiding to wonder how anyone else was handling things.

But John had been thorough enough to find an acquaintance of Mike's as distant as Tia. And, years later, Gary had been looking, double-checking. I sank back into one of the padded dining chairs. It let out a
huh!
The briny smell of calamari mixed with the overly sweet freesias. In the kitchen the refrigerator groaned on. My stomach roiled and I thought I wouldn't be able to eat and that that would be so rude after all the trouble Tia had gone to. Learning my brothers had been looking for Mike for years, I should have been relieved, but I wasn't. What did it mean and how could they be doing more than I had when I was the one who cared the most? Sweat
coated my face. How could they have searched for Mike and not told me? Gotten leads, hopes, and not let me have them?

I saw John sitting at the dining table holding out his plate for a slice of ham the Easter after Mike's disappearance, asking about the traffic detour on 46th Avenue; Gary showing off his new Mustang when I came home at Christmas my freshman year in college. Now they seemed to me entirely different men, as if strangers had hijacked my memories. Rational explanations, common sense were way above me and I could only feel the small, poorly weighted anchor of my family being hoisted out of the water and flung aside. Thoughts swirled, emotions, recriminations, more emotions. I felt fifteen years old, not thirty-nine. I wanted badly to get out of here, and I was equally desperate to know what Tia had recorded in her diaries.

Finally, I got up, went into the bathroom, and flung cold water on my face, leaving a great circle of damp on Tia's yellow towel. I saw my watch face: 12:35. I'd gotten here exactly at noon. Tia and I couldn't have talked more than ten minutes. What had happened to her? Had she gotten distracted by a neighbor? Fallen in the garage? I opened the front door and raced down the steps. “Tia? Tia, where are you?”

No response. “Tia!” The garage doors were closed, locked. The courtyard was empty. I spent the next five or ten minutes pulling at the garage doors, running down the walkway between buildings, poking behind the shrubbery. But all along, I knew that she was gone.

Just like Mike, she had walked out the front door and vanished.

C
HAPTER
9

“I'
M IN A TIME WARP
. Tia was about to tell me about Mike. And then, just like he did, she walked out the front door and vanished.” I'd finally managed to get through to my brother, John, at the police station.

“She's been gone half an hour? Darcy, she could have gone to the store for milk, got caught in the line, forgotten her phone, and be on her way home right now.”

“She walks with a limp now, John. We're on the top of Pacific Heights. There aren't mom-and-pop stores on the corners here.”

“Maybe she got sick of you!”

“She invited me for lunch. The food's still waiting on the table.”

“Darcy, we can't take missing persons calls from acquaintances. Even from family there's a required waiting period of—”

“She said”—I suddenly remembered that this call could be recorded and made my comment more vague—“she had a diary she kept in high school, a thorough diary.”

“I'm on my way. I'll call you back.”

“My number is . . .” I was talking to myself. How was he going to get back to me? Of course, my number would have come up on his screen, would be recorded in the police log: start time, end time, location. Knowing John, even though I'd never called him on my cell phone or given him the number, he already had it.

For a moment I sat on the steps, watching the traffic on Broadway burst forward an instant before the light turned green. Obviously John remembered Tia Dru. And something she might have noted in a diary got him moving. Right now he'd be headed to his car. Which meant I had five minutes to find that diary before he grabbed it and dangled it out of reach as he had dolls when I was five, letters a decade later.

The side-by-side garages comprised the ground floor of the duplex. Breaking into Tia's would be bad enough, entering the neighbor's—a stranger's—worse. It would be made lots worse by the arrival of a police detective.

I peered through the windows, hoping for an indication of which one was Tia's. One unit held boxes, plastic bags covering lumpy things. In the other sat a white Volkswagen bug. If you live this close to downtown, you're better off without a car. There's always a bus or a trolley or a cable car within a couple of blocks. To most folks in this gentle climate garages are storage rooms, driveways home to cars.

For Tia, a couple of blocks up the steep San Francisco hills would be like me scaling the Transamerica Building. I pulled out a tiny skeleton key and stuck it in the U-lock. In his speedy departure from the location set, Duffy's former owner abandoned not only Duffy but what we all assumed to be Duffy's dog bag. I figured I had inherited balls, blanket, dog shampoo, dog treats; instead I got a tiny skeleton key, larger skeleton keys, and other items for which I couldn't guess the use and didn't dare ask about. The smallest key I had dubbed the universal skeleton. It had yet to fail.

I slipped inside the garage. My five minutes was down to four. If John caught me, he wouldn't throw me in jail for being inside a friend's garage, but he might well create the kind of aftershock that would reverberate through family dinners for decades.

A window in the back gave just enough light to show that this garage was neater than any I had ever seen. The little car was parked inches from the right wall, leaving its owner, who undoubtedly was Tia, ample space to get in and out of the driver's seat. In front of it were ten cardboard banker's boxes, in two rows one atop the other. They were even labeled. If the diary was here, she could have been back upstairs with it in two minutes. She also could have grabbed it and left.

My phone rang. “Hello?”

“Darcy, I'm on my way.”

I shouldered the phone and pulled open the first box. It was labeled Taxes, and that's what it held. “John, how come you interviewed Tia about Mike disappearing?”

He was silent so long I wondered if he'd hit a dead spot. But when he spoke, his voice cracked just slightly—but hugely for a police detective. “I did what I could.”

“But why Tia? What even made you think of her?” I opened the next box—books—and the next—dishes.

“He mentioned her.”

“Mike?” Saying his name, forcing John to respond, made the thread to Mike seem real in a way it hadn't in years. “What did Mike say about Tia?”

“He was thinking of asking her out.”

“Really?” I yanked open the last of the top boxes—folders of bank statements, phone bills, printed documents. “Did he talk about girls with you much?” John was the last person to whom I would have mentioned a boyfriend. Rigidity and sarcasm are not appealing traits in a confidant.

“He only told me about the girls who'd impress me. It's not unnatural for a boy to want to impress a father figure.” His voice had taken on its familiar tone of righteous defensiveness.
John, the Enforcer, a father figure!
He must be delusional. I clamped my teeth together and kept searching Tia's boxes.

As soon as I could conceal my own sarcasm, I asked, “And what did you say about her?”

“Reminded him she was sixteen years old.”

I shoved a box over and peered into a collection of sweaters, scarves, two stones with circles on them, and a couple of perfume samples. “What did she say when you saw her?”

“Darcy, it was ages ago. I can't remember.”

This from a man who'd remembered my most venial sin long after I'd forgotten it. This from a sib who'd searched for Mike for years and never once mentioned it, never talked of leads, hopes, never let on that he, too, was living a half life till Mike came home. I swallowed hard; now was not the time to be vomiting out recriminations. Rather, it was a moment to choreograph as I would a stunt, to give the illusion of . . . “Doesn't matter, John. I'll just read what Tia said.”

“You have no business—”

“I'm here, John, with the diary. I'm just giving you a chance to offer your version first.” I looked into the last box—blankets. No diary.

“Darcy, you're in someone else's house. I can't condone you reading her private material.”

“I know, I'm ‘putting you in a very awkward position.' That threat worked better on Mike than me, remember? Last chance, that's what I'm offering you.”

“Listen, I'm not kidding—”

“Never mind. I can read for myself.” I hung up, checked the car through its closed windows, and tried the trunk. When has a trunk ever sat unlocked while the doors are locked?

I was out of the garage and headed back up Tia's steps when the phone
rang, as I knew it would. John had had time to give in without admitting defeat. In our family, defeat was never admitted; setbacks were merely sustained and guerrilla attacks continued long after the enemy had forgotten the war.

“I'm going to save you the trouble of reading trash,” he said. “Whatever Tia said doesn't matter, because she's a liar.”

“Really?” Liar was the last thing I would have called her. Charming and in control as she was, Tia had never needed to lie. “A liar then, or now?”

“She was then. No reason she'd change.”

I barely caught myself before snapping back. I liked Tia. I'd liked her in high school. Her utter gutsiness racing so fast into the dead black of the tunnel impressed me. And, maybe most of all, her taking her injury in stride had me in awe.
Think like you're choreographing a gag, dammit! Keep your eyes on the landing spot, and your mouth shut!
I swallowed, and waited.

“Darcy, when I interviewed her, I already knew Mike'd seen her three times total. He'd told me. At the track, at our house, and once on the bus when he couldn't get a ride downtown. She pretended there was more, that they had dated. I can tell when a girl's looking to make herself important. It's what she was doing.”

“That's crazy! She was already popular. She didn't need to lie. And she was too smart to lie to the police.” What she had told me about not wanting John to think her a silly high school girl made a whole lot more sense.

“She did!”

“Prove it!

“Darcy, you're very defensive—”

“Prove it, John.”

The unmarked car screeched to a stop. He was out the door before it was still. “The proof is,” he said into his phone as he climbed the steps, “that she had no proof.” He clicked off his phone and stood, hands braced
on hips, as they had been braced against his equipment belt all those years he'd been on patrol. His clipped black hair topped suspicious hazel eyes. Over the years, he had squinted and pursed his lips till permanent lines bisected his forehead, dug in beside his nose and mouth, and channeled over his chin. Now he leaned against the porch pillar and said, “She said Mike had a Celtic cross tattooed on his groin, as if she'd seen it, as if there had been plenty between them. But I saw Mike coming out of the shower the week before and there was nothing on him. The girl was a liar.”

“Maybe she just wanted to be rid of you. Why else would she tell you something so easily disproved, that disgusted you, and made you think she was lying?”