Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (5 page)

"So she moved to the city with your blessing?"

"Well. Neither of us was exactly delighted with her decision. It's a
rough world for a young single woman with no marketable skills, and
show business is even rougher. But it was what she wanted, and I knew
what it was like to have parents who pressured me to succeed
academically. In the end it turned out well for me, but there was a lot
of pain along the way. I didn't want to do the same thing to my
daughter— particularly when chances of it working out were slim—so I
persuaded George to let her have her way."

That, I thought, might have been one of the causes of the breakup of
the Kostakoses' marriage; perhaps he blamed her for sending their
daughter to her still-undetermined fate. I said, "I recall reading
somewhere that you subsidized Tracy's income with an allowance. Does
that mean that she couldn't have supported herself on what she made at
Café Comedie?"

"Not at first. We gave her the allowance and use of our credit cards
so she could afford a decent place to live and a few luxuries from time
to time. She never abused the cards; she isn't that kind of girl."

"Has there been any activity in those accounts since her
disappearance—activity that could be attributed to her?"

"No. During the year before she disappeared, she established her own
credit. She didn't need our cards anymore."

Mrs. Kostakos sounded faintly mournful. "A few weeks before she
disappeared, she told me that soon she wouldn't need the allowance
anymore, either. I told her it wasn't necessary to push herself to be
self-sufficient. We have plenty of money; we both have good positions,
and George inherited a substantial amount of money. But Tracy needed to
be her own woman in every respect."

"The reason she wouldn't need the allowance anymore was that her
career was taking off?"

"That's what I assumed."

Or her declaration of impending financial independence might have
some connection with her disappearance. I made a note on my pad. "You
and Tracy were close?"

"Yes. We had a weekly lunch date, on Fridays. We were to have lunch
the day after she vanished. I'd planned a drive across the hills to the
coast. We often did things like that—going for long drives, taking
picnics."

"What kinds of things did you talk about?"

"The usual things a mother and daughter talk about, I suppose."

"Could you be more specific?"

"Well. My work, my students. Her career, how it was going. People we
knew. What we'd done in the past week, books we'd read, movies we'd
seen."

"Did she ever talk about problems? Ask your advice?"

"Tracy has always been capable of solving her own problems. And as
far as I know, she had none at that time."

"She never gave any indication that she might be unhappy—with her
work, her living situation, her boyfriend, perhaps?"

"No."

"Mrs. Kostakos, I've studied the news accounts of Tracy's
disappearance, as well as the Foster trial transcripts. All along
you've firmly stated that you believe Tracy disappeared voluntarily."

She nodded.

"Yet you say she gave no indication of unhappiness, never mentioned
anything that was troubling her."

"… That's right."

"Then why are you under the impression that she would just vanish of
her own free will?"

Laura Kostakos shifted on her chair. She brought her hands together
in her lap.

"Why, Mrs. Kostakos?"

Silence.

"You continue to pay the rent on her apartment. Even though you have
plenty of money, that strikes me as the sort of thing you wouldn't do
unless you had a reasonable expectation that one day she'd return."

"I have never for a moment doubted that she will return."

"But why? And what about the ransom note, the car that was found in
the mountains? How do you explain them?"

She rose from her chair so quickly that it startled me. I watched as
she moved in her old-woman's walk to the center window seat and stood
with her back to me, one knee resting on the cushion. The afternoon had
darkened beyond the glass; the black lava rock pool made me think of a
lagoon teeming with alien life forms.

"Mrs. Kostakos?"

"There's a hummingbird feeder hanging on that pine beyond the pool,"
she said. "Can you see it?"

I looked, spotted a smear of red. "Yes."

"I put it there last summer. I wanted the hummingbirds to come
around, so I'd be less lonely. But there's one that is vicious. Every
time the others come to drink, he swoops down and chases them away. It
reminds me of how people have swooped down and chased away my hopes."

I couldn't think of an appropriate comment.

"Do you know what I'm going to do about that bird?" she went on.
"I'm observing him, learning his habits. I've found a stone, a nice
flat one that will skim through the air. As soon as
I'm sure I'll get the right bird, I am going to kill him."

The words were delivered dispassionately, but there was a disturbing
undercurrent of rage. I chose not to respond to it, said mildly, "If
you kill him, one of the remaining birds will take up the role of the
aggressor."

"I'm going to do it anyway."

Maybe it would help her, but I doubted that. Probably she'd end up
trying to murder the entire hummingbird population of Palo Alto. "Mrs.
Kostakos, let's get back to Tracy—"

"People think I'm crazy, you know."

I was silent again. She seemed to be approaching the subject in her
own way, and I was content to let her do so.

"My husband left me because he couldn't stand living with a crazy
woman anymore. He considers me dangerously obsessed with Tracy's
disappearance. My students and colleagues in the math department began
handling me with kid gloves, as if they were afraid one wrong word
would send me screaming into the streets. Of course, anything deviating
from the statistical norm is unsettling to mathematicians. You can
understand why I had to take a leave of absence."

"Are you working on anything now? Articles or a book—"

"No, nothing. I can't concentrate. I hardly ever go out of the house
anymore." Her words were coming more swiftly now. "The neighbors have
mostly stopped speaking to me; they look at me strangely. When I do go
out, people in the stores, in the street… it's as if I radiate an aura
that frightens them. Do I frighten you, Ms. McCone?"

"No."

"Do you think I'm crazy?"

"I think you're lonely, and under terrible strain."

She took her knee off the bench and turned toward me. "Thank you for
saying so, even if it's not true."

"I meant it. Do you think you're crazy?"

The question made her sink onto the window seat. "I honestly don't
know."

"Perhaps you should see a therapist."

"I was, but I just can't anymore. It doesn't help. The only thing
that would…"

"Would be finding out what happened to your daughter."

She nodded, bending her head so her hair fell against her high
cheekbones. The walls of the recess cast shadows over her that made her
hair more gray than blond, and totally lifeless.

"Mrs. Kostakos," I said, "please help me. You'll be helping
yourself. And Tracy."

"How?"

"Tell me what makes you think that Tracy vanished voluntarily."

She didn't speak. I let the silence spin out into minutes. The gray
year's-end day was drawing to a close; already the crimson of the
hummingbird feeder had faded into the background of pine needles.

Finally she said, "All right. There was one thing, the week before
she vanished. At lunch that Friday she asked me if I thought she was a
good person. I said yes, of course—the way you do when someone catches
you off guard with an important question. She seemed to sense it was a
reflexive response, however, because she said maybe she once had been,
but she didn't think she was anymore."

"Did you ask her what she meant by that?"

"Naturally. But she refused to be specific. She merely said that
circumstance changes people, leads them to do things they never would
have, as well as not to do things they know are right. When I pressed
her, she said she'd done a number of things that were hurtful to
others, but that her worst sin was one of omission—of not correcting a
situation that was sure to harm someone she cared about. After that,
she refused to talk anymore. Later when she disappeared, I assumed
she'd gone away to escape whatever circumstances were making her
feel she was a bad person. I've always believed she would eventually
work it out and return."

I noted the approximate date of the conversation on my pad, then
wrote in block letters: BAD PERSON/OMISSION/ HARM. I studied them for
over a minute, then said, "This may have a great deal of bearing on
what happened, but it still doesn't explain why you seem to dismiss the
ransom note you received, as well as the bloodstained car that was
found in the mountains."

She sighed deeply. "I'd hoped I wouldn't have to… Ms. McCone, this
may sound horrible coming from her mother, but
Tracy isn't the… paragon the newspapers made her out to be. She is, as
I said, self-reliant and conscientious and loyal to those she loves,
but she is also very ambitious and…"

"And?"

"She can be quite… ruthless when it suits her purposes. She is an
achiever, and people who wish to achieve a great deal often can be
self-centered and cruel. My daughter had already achieved a great deal
in a very short time. It had whetted her appetite, the way the taste of
blood will whet a predatory animal's."

It was an odd and disturbing comparison. "So you're saying that the
note and the car are evidence manufactured by Tracy to misdirect anyone
looking for her?"

"Yes."

"Would she actually let Bobby Foster die in order to keep anyone
from finding her?"

Laura Kostakos raised her eyes to mine. They caught faint glimmers
from the lamp beside me, seemed cut of the same lava rock as the pool.
"I cannot believe that. She must be planning to return before that
happens."

And in the meantime she was putting Bobby Foster—her supposed
friend—through a living hell. If her mother's theory about her
disappearance was correct, Tracy had chosen a strange and
contradictory way of working out problems that were making her feel she
was a bad person.

I said, "Can you think of anyone—a friend or a relative, perhaps—who
might be hiding her?"

"I've contacted everyone I could think of. No one has heard from
her, and given the circumstances, I'm fairly sure they wouldn't lie to
me."

"What about a place outside the Bay Area? Someplace she has a
connection to or knows well?"

She considered briefly. "We had a summer cottage on the Mendocino
coast, but it was sold years ago. Otherwise, no, I can't think of any
other place."

Of course, she couldn't have known of all the places Tracy might
have visited after she moved away from Palo Alto. Nor could her
inquiries have covered any number of people she wasn't aware her
daughter knew.

I had one more question. "Why do you suppose she felt she had to
disappear to work out these problems?"

"I don't know."

"But you must have speculated on it."

"Of course I have!" It was a cry of pain. "I've scarcely thought of
anything else since it happened. I've gone over the conversation we had
at lunch, time and time again. I've reexamined everything that she told
me for weeks and months before that. But I don't have a single,
solitary idea."

Her glimmering eyes moved away from mine, to a point somewhere in
the encroaching darkness. The fear in them was almost a palpable
presence. I came close to turning my head to see what or who stood
there. But I didn't have to. I knew.

It was the amorphous shape of dread—that chimera that, once
glimpsed, forever waits implacably in the shadows.

The icy wind gusted across Upper Market Street. It sent litter
swirling along the gutters and plastered sheets of discarded newspapers
against the iron bars of the fence that guarded the edge of the east
sidewalk. Beyond it the hill dropped off precipitously. The lights of
the flatlands below were fog hazed, the usually panoramic glitter of
the Bay Bridge and East Bay barely discernible.

Traffic rushed by me on the downhill slope. The vehicles' headlights
washed over me, then their taillights disappeared around a sharp curve.
I hunched against the capricious gale and walked along, hands stuffed
in the pockets of my pea jacket. Parking was at a premium here on the
overpopulated east side of Twin Peaks; I'd had to leave my MG a long
block from Tracy Kostakos's former apartment building.

The row of apartment houses that clung to the lower part of the hill
started about a hundred yards from where I'd parked. When I reached
their shelter, the wind was not so severe. On the west side of the
pavement the buildings rose in tiers, crammed side by side on the
smaller streets that snake their way toward the radio transmitter and
the overlook crowning the third
and fourth highest of San Francisco's forty-three hills.

The architecture on Twin Peaks is mostly rabbit-warren modern: lots
of postage-stamp-sized balconies that people seldom use because of the
wind; picture windows that afford spectacular views and cause the
residents' heating bills to rise; standard thin walls and bland decor;
too few garages and too many cars. If it wasn't for the views, the area
would probably have gone the way of the "desirable" part of East Palo
Alto many years ago, but the vistas keep the apartments filled and the
rents high.

Of course, I thought as I walked quickly downhill, not all the
buildings on Twin Peaks were tacky or overpriced. My former lover Greg
Marcus owned a tasteful little redwood-sided house on a cul-de-sac off
Parkridge Drive. Perhaps I should stop by there after talking with Amy
Barbour. I could persuade Greg to let me look at the files on the
Kostakos investigation tomorrow, rather than waiting until next week…