Rosemary Remembered (25 page)

pany was concerned, there was no such person as Sally McQuaid.

"She's probably gone unlisted." Ruby pushed the plan-chette toward me. "Smart Cookie's too skeptical to do any good with Ouija. You try, China."

"Yeah, China." Sheila laughed shortly. "Ask Ouija for Sally's phone number."

"I'm no good at right-brained things. Ruby," I said. "I'm a left-brain person."

Ruby was patient.
"Everybody's
brain has two halves, China. Even yours. Give it a try. You might not get anything, but it'll be good for your right brain to get a little exercise."

I did get something, though. It was odd, the sensation of that flimsy little plastic thing tugging, almost, against my reluctant fingers. I didn't for a minute believe that there was anything to it, of course. But Ruby believed. She started writing down the letters the minute the plan-chette veered toward one.

"G,"
she said excitedly. "You're onto something! You're connecting!"

Sheila scowled. "Stop pushing that thing, China. You'll just get Ruby all worked up."

"I'm not pushing," I said. "It's moving by itself."

Ruby sat forward on her chair, eyes wide, pencil poised over her notepad. Her orange hair seemed to be charged with electricity. "What's that? A [/? Way to go, China!
G,U.
What's next?"

"Guppy?" Sheila guessed. "Gullible?"

Ruby's excitement ran out pretty quickly, because the silly little plastic piece was only interested in three more letters, an
R,
a
P,
an
S,
and then it quit. Or I quit, or something. The whole thing was stupid, anyway. I shouldn't be wasting time with something as foolish as a

Ouija board, when Brian was out there in the dark somewhere, held captive by a man who'd already killed two people and had nothing to lose.

"G-U-R-P-S," Ruby muttered, squinting at what she had written. "Gurps. It must be a clue to Brian's whereabouts. Maybe it's a town."

"Maybe Ouija doesn't know how to spell," Sheila said. She pushed the board away and stood up. "Or maybe that first letter was supposed to be a
B,
which would make it burps, which is exactly what I feel like doing. Who wants coffee?"

"I'll make some herb tea," I said. "I'm wired enough already. And maybe I'll have another cup of that cucumber soup."

"Sheila," Ruby said, "you are even more left-brained than China, if that's possible. We're going to have to work on you." She looked at me. "Where's your atlas? I want to check out Gurps. I'm sure it's a town."

But there wasn't any such town in Texas or Louisiana or Oklahoma. When Ruby looked in the dictionary and the encyclopedia, there wasn't any such word. And the telephone directory offered Gurny and Gurski, but no Gurps. So she trailed after us back to the kitchen, where I got the soup out of the refrigerator, put the kettle on the Home Comfort stove, and made chamomile and catnip tea, sweetened with honey, for Ruby and me. Sheila made coffee for herself.-

The doorbell rang a little after eleven, sending my pulse into double time. But it was only the telephone technician, who had made the appropriate connections in the telephone company's computer and had come to install the caller ID box. A little later, the phone rang and Blackie's number appeared on the Band-Aid—sized LCD panel. He was phoning to say that he was turning the office over to the night shift, but he'd stick close to the phone. His voice sounded weary.

"Go to bed and get some sleep, China," he said. "It'll make the time go faster." It sounded like a good idea, if oversimplified.

Ruby took the Missing Child flyer, promising to drop it off at Quick Copy the next morning. She also promised to pick up my photos of the herb conference, which I'd left at Fox Foto, next door to the copy shop.

"Try meditating," she instructed as she headed for the door. "Count your breaths. It'll calm your mind."

"Which side of my mind?" I asked. "Right or left?"

"Both." She hugged me. "When Brian calls," she added, with her normal optimism, "give him my love and tell him to come home safe. When Ondine relays something from La Que Sabe, I'll let you know." And then her optimism failed and the tears came to her eyes. She hugged me again. "I've got some Saturn incense that I keep for emergencies. Sandalwood and myrrh and dittany of Crete and borage, with cypress oil and patchouli oil. It's supposed to help you banish demons and bad spirits—you know, Saturn stuff. I'll burn some and visualize Brian being free."

Sheila headed upstairs to take a shower. "Forget all that shit about meditation and incense," she said. "It's worth about as much as that Ouija board nonsense. Try a good stiff shot of that Jack Daniel's I brought."

I turned off the lights, opened the window, and sat in the rocker, my hands in my lap, my eyes closed, trying to follow Ruby's instructions. Inhale-exhale, one-two. After a while I realized that my monkey mind wasn't going to stop swinging from tree to tree in the clamoring jungle of my thoughts, so I took Sheila's advice instead.

I climbed the stairs with a strong nightcap in one hand and the caller ID box in the other, to plug into the telephone by my bed in case Brian called during the night.

He didn't. La Que Sabe didn't call, either. And in spite of the whiskey, I lay wide awake for a long time, my eyes staring and gritty. My brain told me that guilt and sorrow wouldn't accomplish anything, that I should just do what had to be done minute to minute and let go of the wish that I'd done things differently. But my heart wouldn't let that happen.

And so I lay awake in the dark, wishing I hadn't evaded the truth so often with McQuaid, wishing I'd told Brian I loved him, wishing I'd hugged both of them a little harder, a little more often.

Chapter Seventeen

I Borage bring alwaies courage.

John Gerard

John Gerard's Herbal, 1633

Blackie woke me at seven with another no-progress report. I answered groggily, brushed the sleep out of my eyes, and carried the caller ID box downstairs to the kitchen, where Sheila was making coffee. She was dressed in white shorts and a red shirt with the tail out — hardly her work costume.

"I'm not going to work," she said in answer to my question. "I called in and told them I'm taking a personal day."

"Thanks," I said. She had turned on the portable television, and Channel Seven in Austin was broadcasting Brian's and Jacoby's photos and a plea for information. I turned away, not wanting to look. "What do you suppose iguanas and tarantulas eat?"

We debated the question and decided to experiment with raw hamburger and lettuce, which I took upstairs and left in a saucer near Einstein's drape and on the floor of Ivan's terrarium. Einstein no longer looked malevolent, just lonely. Tarantulas are even more inscrutable than iguanas, but I thought Ivan looked lonely, too. Just being in Brian's room made my heart hurt, and I didn't linger.

It was a morning for telephoning, on McQuaid's fax line so I wouldn't block incoming calls. Just after eight, I called Matt and reported what Sheila and I had found the day before. He didn't seem surprised.

"I guess none of this is important any longer as far as you're concerned," he said. "After what happened to your kid, I mean. I saw it on the TV news last night." His voice was tight. "I wish to hell I'd never sent McQuaid off on that wild-goose chase. If he'd been here, this might not've happened. You tell him to hightail it on back."

Blackie and I had talked about this. After my wakeful, remorseful night, I'd voted for calling McQuaid first thing this morning. Blackie wanted to hold off until evening, and I had finally given in.

"The sheriff says to give it another twelve hours," I said. "If Brian hasn't turned up by tonight, I'll ask McQuaid to get the first plane out tomorrow morning."

"Fair enough," Matt said. "Anyway, I've about decided that Jeff s gone for good. We'll probably never hear from him again."

My second call was to McQuaid's hotel in Acapulco. I breathed much easier when he didn't answer the phone in his room, and left a message with the switchboard. I hung up, feeling glad that I hadn't had to talk to him and guilty for feeling glad.

The third call was to Justine Wyzinski, a lawyer in San Antonio. Justine and I had been friends at law school at the University of Texas. Well, not friends, exactly —more like friendly enemies. The other law students called her The Whiz because she always came up with the right answer faster than anybody else. They called me Hot Shot because I tried like the very devil to beat her. After a couple of years of this competitive craziness, we both made Law Review, which blunted our rivalry and allowed us to relax into a wary friendship. I called on The Whiz a few months ago when Dottie Riddle got into trouble over her cats. I called her now, when / was in trouble, and sketched out what had happened. With The Whiz, you don't have to fill in a lot of details. She gets the picture very fast.

"I need you to locate Brian's mother for me," I said. "I have to talk to her as soon as possible." I gave her Sally's name and the only address I had. "Her home phone's disconnected, and she's quit her job."

"The news has been on TV, I take it."

"Yes," I said. "It's probably in the newspaper, too. But she'd call me the minute she heard, and she hasn't called. See what you can do, would you?"

"No sweat, Hot Shot," The Whiz said briskly. "I'll find the mom, you find the kid. Fair trade, no charge. Okay?"

"Okay," I said, and hung up with a sigh, wishing I could be more like The Whiz. She has the great knack of reducing the problem to its simplest terms and making the solution seem easy.

By the time I finished with this string of telephone calls, Ruby had arrived with the Missing Child flyers from Quick Copy, my herb conference pictures from Fox Foto, and a bag of jelly doughnuts from the Doughnut Queen.

"Did you hear anything from Ondine?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Did you?"

"Not a word," she said. She held up the bag of jelly doughnuts. "Breakfast, anybody?"

Ruby and Sheila and I installed ourselves at the kitchen table and plotted the morning's strategy. It was not quite as complicated as the landing at Normandy, but almost. Ruby would drop off flyers at the newspaper and radio stations and with a dozen friends, who had agreed to post them in all the small communities in the area and take them to the local radio stations. Sheila would use Mc-

Quaid's computer to go on-line with Internet's Missing Child network. I would stay by the other phone, which had only rung once in the last hour, with a call from the
Enterprise.

It rang again and I grabbed for it, my heart pounding. Jacoby wasn't the kind of man who would just
take
Brian. He'd have to call and brag about it, have to make it hurt even more. But when he called, he'd give away his location. Surely this was him. Please, God, make it be him.

But the number on the LCD was the shop's number and it was Emily on the line, calling to say she was sorry about Brian and to ask what to do about the air-conditioning.

"Work it out with Laurel, would you?" I said. "I really can't think about it right now."

I hung up the phone and tuned back into the kitchen-table conversation. Sheila was telling Ruby that she had a friend who worked with the Runaway Hotline, who might know something about the best way to search for missing children. Ruby was telling Sheila that her cousin JoAnne once coordinated a search for a little girl whose father took her to Canada instead of to the circus, where the mother thought they were going.

As they talked, I reached for another jelly doughnut, and was momentarily distracted by one of the photographs Ruby had brought back from the photo shop. It was the picture I'd taken on Saturday morning: a group of smiling herbalists standing between the new fountain and a very crooked rosemary. The photo was perfect for a "What's Wrong With This Picture" caption in a gardening magazine. The rosemary had been stuck into the ground at an angle, so hastily and incompetently planted that the burlap root wrap was still intact. It could even be seen above the surface of the soil, bunched around the

plant's trunk and held in place with a wire. Somebody really ought to dig up that poor rosemary and straighten it. I tucked the photo into my purse, with the thought that it would remind me to ask Matt to have it replanted.

"Well," Ruby said finally, "I guess I'd better get going." She looked at me. "You'll be all right?"

"I'll be fine," I said. "As fine as I can be, anyway." I hugged her as she headed out the door, the flyers under her arm.

"Have courage, China," she said, and touched my cheek. "We'll get these posters up this morning. Somewhere, somebody's got to have seen them. Maybe we'll get some news this morning."

But the morning wore on, and there wasn't any news. Sheila and I cleaned house (a woman's antidote for worry), made a batch of Brian's favorite cookies, and listened for the phone. Every time it rang I rushed to answer it; every time it rang I was disappointed. At noon, we fixed sandwiches and ate a few of Brian's cookies. I was washing up the dishes when the phone rang again. I looked at the LCD. It was not a number I recognized, so I started copying it as I reached for the receiver. I almost didn't recognize the voice, either, because it was so tense and raspy. The caller was Carol Connally.

"I need to see you." I could hear the clamor of children's voices in the background, and she raised hers over the din. "I've been talking things over with my sister. She's convinced me that I can't go on with my life until I get this thing settled."

"We've got a family emergency here," I said. "I need to leave this line open. Let me hang up and call you back on another line." I went into McQuaid's office and dialed the number I had copied down. Carol picked it up immediately.

"I can't go into this over the phone," she said, when I asked her why she'd called. "You'll have to come to Austin."

"I can't," I said bleakly. "My son's been kidnapped. I have to stay by the phone."

"Kidnapped!" she exclaimed. "You mean that was your kid I heard about on TV this morning?" She paused, suspicious. "Wait a minute. I thought you said you didn't have any kids."

"I live with his father," I said. "That makes him my son.

It was an epiphany for me. For the four years McQuaid and I had been together, I'd always thought of Brian as
bu
son, a kind of weekend rent-a-kid whose antics livened up the picnics and kept things from getting too serious. But now he was
my
son as well, and the recognition brought raw, sharp pain. I loved him, I was responsible for him, and I didn't know where he was or even whether he was still alive. All my muscles were knotted up, and my throat hurt.

She sounded resigned. "Well, I guess if you can't come here, I'll have to tell you over the phone. The thing is, it sounds so unreal, like I'm making it up. Sometimes I think maybe I am. Like maybe I dreamed it, and it didn't really happen." Her voice was thin, reedy. "Maybe you don't want to hear it anyway, with this kidnapping thing. You must be crazy with worry. I know I'd be, if somebody grabbed one of these kids. Maybe they're not technically mine, but I love them like — "

"Please, Carol," I said. "I don't have a lot of time."

She cleared her throat, seeming to pull herself together. "It's about Jeff."

"You don't have to be afraid of him," I said patiently. "I told you. He can't hurt you. He's in Mexico."