The Disappearance (26 page)

He begins sobbing soundlessly behind his hands.

“How old?” she asks again.

He moves his hands from his face, staring up at her with red eyes. His complexion is red and blotchy. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “Fourteen.” He pauses. “Maybe not quite.”

Riva rocks back onto her heels. Jesus. “Were you the first?”

His sigh is an Old Testament lamentation. “I think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Her hymen was broken,” he says. “She said it was from riding horses.”

“Did you believe her?”

He nods. “I did.” He buries his head in his hands again.

Riva stares at him. She knows what Emma must have gone through. She was involved with a drug dealer, she’s seen the dark side from several angles. But this is plumbing the depths. “Why would you do such a thing?” she can’t help asking. “How could you be so craven as to seduce a thirteen-year-old girl?”

The first time was at his store. He and his wife had returned earlier than expected—they didn’t like the movie—so Emma wasn’t due home for another hour. The store wasn’t far from his house, and he needed to check on his walk-in refrigerator, make sure it was running at the right temperature, he was worried about his meat. They had installed some new coils that afternoon, and he wanted to make sure the unit was working properly.

“It’ll just be a few minutes,” he told her. “You can wait in the car.” She had her schoolbooks with her, she had been doing homework when they came home.

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I’ve never been in your store.”

They went in through the service entrance. He flipped on a few lights. The empty store glowed, light and dark areas casting long striped shadows on the walls.

“Take a look around,” he said. “I won’t be long.” He had pulled the heavy refrigerator door open and gone inside.

The refrigerator was humming along smoothly. He walked along the rows where haunches of meat hung from hooks in the ceiling, running his hands along sides of beef, pork, lamb. Perfect.

“It’s freezing in here.”

He turned with a start. She had come in behind him; he hadn’t heard her. “You shouldn’t be in here,” he said. “You hardly have anything on.”

She was wearing a light top, shorts, and sandals. Her breath was coming out smoky, rimming her pretty young face. She looks like a Botticelli, he thought. Something otherworldly. The perfection of youth.

Her hand was on his forearm. He too was in short sleeves, but he was used to the cold, for brief periods.

“You’re cold too,” she said.

He felt the erection forming
—
suddenly, violently, rush of blood-gore. “Time to go,” he said with forced lightness. “Your parents’ll be waiting for you.” He could feel goose bumps forming, and not from the coldness of the room.

“They’re out,” she said. “They won’t be home till late. They’re never home” she said. “I could be gone for a week and they wouldn’t miss me.” She shivered. “I really am cold.”

He hustled her out of the cold room, shouldering the heavy door shut. “I’m still cold,” she said as they stood in the rear of the store, where it was dark. Her face was close to his. He could smell her breath. It smelled like peppermint chewing gum.

“The only one who cares about me is our housekeeper, Maria,” she told him in a soft, wistful voice. “You care about me more than my parents do. A lot more.” And then she kissed him
—
a woman’s kiss, full on the mouth.

She was too beautiful, too impossible to resist. He kissed her back. When the kiss ended, she said, “You’re a cool guy, Mr. Fourchet.” She giggled. “I mean cool, not cold.”

They kissed again, his hand going to her breast under the light shirt. She was braless. Her small breasts hardened at his touch.

They’d done it on the couch in his office. Once they got started she was all over him, scratching, biting, screaming. She bit down hard on his shoulder when he started to enter her, clawing at his back.

His office, after hours, had been their assignation spot of choice, but they went to motels and other places as well. Never in his house, or in hers. A few times, when he brought her home and there was no one around, they did it in the gazebo at the back of her property. There were chaise cushions there, but sometimes they did it on the bare wood floor.

They made love as often as they could, until his wife pulled the plug. After that, he’d seen her at school occasionally, when he went to pick up his son, but they were never together again.

“How did she react when you told her you couldn’t see her anymore?” Riva asks. Her head is swimming.

“It was like nothing had ever happened,” he says. “There was no feeling at all, no sadness.”

“What about you?”

“I missed her,” he admits. “That was an out-of-this-world experience—which I’ll never do again,” he adds hastily.

“Does your wife know?”

“She has no proof, but …” He lets the rest go unsaid.

“Did you use contraception?” she asks him.

He lowers his head. “Not that first time. I wasn’t prepared. But every time after,” he says firmly. “Christ, I was in terrible trouble already, I wasn’t going to chance getting her pregnant.” He’s shaking, from the rekindling of memory and the fear of being exposed.

Riva picks up her bag of groceries from where she’s set it on the floor. It feels heavy, cumbersome. She isn’t going to eat this cheese tonight. “How many months after you and Emma stopped your affair was she murdered?” she asks, hitting hard on the word “murdered.” She hates saying “affair” to describe the relationship this man had with Emma. It was a betrayal.

“Four.” He gets up. “I’ve got to go.”

Four months not screwing her, and he has a solid alibi. This man wasn’t the father of Emma’s never-to-be-born child. And he wasn’t the killer. He was a way station, a launching pad. But she isn’t going to let him know she thinks that. He doesn’t know Emma was pregnant, that the killer could have been the man who knocked her up. He mustn’t be told that.

She walks to the door. “If I were you, Mr. Fourchet, I wouldn’t tell anyone we had this conversation,” she says, her voice a dire warning.

He nods, eager to agree. “We’ve never talked.”

The clinic is crowded: women, mostly, several in various stages of pregnancy, but there are men too. To Riva’s untrained eye, the majority of the men look like they’re in various HIV-positive stages, with the look in their eyes of abandonment before death. Some of them wear surgical masks to ward off infectious contact that could come from anything on the street. Riva read in one of the local papers that the only AIDS hospice had closed, because there were fewer people now with full-blown AIDS—the medicine combinations being administered to combat AIDS are giving HIV-positive people a chance to live longer and healthier lives. These men, obviously, are beyond that.

The Free Clinic is on the east side of town, sandwiched between a doughnut shop and a cut-rate tire store. It was a house in a previous incarnation, a two-story small-scale bungalow of no particular charm. Now it’s a city/county/state-run agency, funded by taxpayer dollars and voluntary donations. Some of the city’s wealthy philanthropists contribute money and sit on the board. For the past few years the building has been slowly going to seed, in need of a fresh coat of paint, its creaky porch floor dangerously rotting. The old house, like some of the patients it serves, is slowly dying: men about to lose their lives in the world, and girls fearful of bringing new ones into it, who need to find out if they’re pregnant but don’t want their families to know, or do know about their pregnancies and haven’t yet decided when they’re going to have their abortion. The clinic maintains a confidentiality policy, so most of the unwed girls in town, especially the underage ones, come here for their testing and counseling.

The rest of the clients are people, families mostly, who don’t have health insurance and can’t afford regular doctors and managed-care facilities. Children sit on their mothers’ laps waiting to have ears examined, throats swabbed.

Riva lost her way coming over, making her late for her appointment, so she has to wait to see the doctor. She sits on one of the plastic-coated kitchen chairs leafing through an old
National Geographic.
A little boy across from her, perched on his mother’s lap, smiles at her. She smiles back. He turns away, suddenly shy.

A Birkenstock-shod female aide calls Riva’s number. Riva follows her into a small office that looks like it used to be a kitchen pantry. “The doctor’ll be in in a minute,” the aide says. She leaves Riva alone in the room.

Finding this doctor and making the connection was an incredible stroke of luck. Riva hopes the doctor will be able to help her.

The doctor, a Latina in her thirties, comes in and closes the door behind her. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says warmly but warily. “My brother says you’re good people.”

“It’s nice to meet you, too.”

The doctor’s brother had been in trouble with the law up where Riva and Luke live. A drug charge, selling to an undercover DEA cop. Luke was the man’s attorney, and through a combination of good lawyering and bad police work—the buy and arrest resulted from a sting that didn’t play by the rules—he had gotten his client off, sentence suspended. Now Riva, having learned that the man’s sister is a doctor at the Free Clinic, is calling in her chits.

“What you’re asking,” the doctor says, “is against our rules.”

“I know.”

The doctor stares at her, torn. Then she makes a tortured decision. “What do you want to know? Maybe there’s some way I can help you without violating my oath.”

“Did Emma Lancaster come here for a pregnancy test?”

The doctor looks away “I can’t tell you that,” she says.

This is going to require some finessing. “Okay. Let me ask you this. If Emma Lancaster thought she was pregnant and wanted to find out without her parents knowing, is this where she could come? Is this where girls like her would come?”

The doctor nods. “Yes.”

“And if she was pregnant, you would tell her?”

“Yes.”

“And offer her counseling?”

“Yes.”

“Do you give her options? Adoption, keeping the baby, abortion?”

Another yes.

“In the case of a girl like Emma—young, from a family that will freak out if they find out, whatever—is the usual choice to have an abortion?”

The doctor hesitates. “The girl makes that choice. We never make it for her. We give her all the options, and what the pros and cons of each one are.”

“If she chooses to have an abortion, is it performed in the clinic?”

“It depends on how long she’s been pregnant. We only do first trimester procedures. Anything beyond that, we refer her to an outside physician who makes arrangements to have it done at a hospital.”

“So if Emma Lancaster was pregnant and wanted to have an abortion, and wanted it done here because she was afraid that going to a doctor would mean her parents would find out, she would have to make the decision within the first three months of her pregnancy.”

“Yes.”

Riva thinks about how to finesse this last part. “You can’t tell me specifically that Emma Lancaster came here to be tested for pregnancy.”

The doctor nods. “No, I can’t tell you that.”

“Would you tell me if she
hadn’t
come here to see you?”

“If she hadn’t been my patient, I’d tell you that, sure.”

“So you won’t tell me she wasn’t your patient.”

The doctor thinks. “I won’t tell you that, no.”

“And you won’t tell me that you didn’t counsel her on having an abortion.”

“I won’t tell you that, that’s correct.”

“So if she had been your patient, and had tested positive for pregnancy, and had wanted an abortion, and wanted it performed here, you would have told her that for you to do that, the abortion would have to be done within the first thirteen weeks.”

“Yes. That’s what I would have told her.”

According to the coroner’s report, Emma Lancaster was about three months pregnant when she died. If she had been planning on having an abortion done here, with this doctor she trusted not to tell anyone, especially her parents, she would have had to have it done almost immediately.

“One last question,” Riva says. “You’re
not
saying Emma Lancaster was
not
your patient and she
didn’t
come to you to do an abortion.”

The doctor nods solemnly. “Yes. I’m
not
saying that.”

It’s the end of the day. Luke and Riva meet in the office to exchange information. Outside in the corridors, students are getting ready for evening classes to start. In the past few weeks, as his presence has become more commonplace, a few of the bolder ones have tried to initiate conversation. Politely but firmly he’s rebuffed them—they can’t help him, they’d only be a distraction. And he’s paranoid that one or more might be a plant, either by Doug Lancaster or Ray Logan, to find out what he knows and where he’s going. He’s friendly, but he keeps his own counsel. Riva follows his course, although she’s gregarious by nature and would like to make some friends here.

She fills him in on her visit to the clinic.

Luke smiles at her in appreciation. “You’re an incredible sleuth, Riva, the way you get people to talk to you, to open up. I’d be lost without you.”

“I’m glad you’ve figured that out,” she says, feeling almost shy at his praise.

All the new information has energized Luke. “This is one dysfunctional family,” he declares. “I’ve seen some pretty amazing cases in my day, but the Lancasters take the prize.”

“But does their behavior make a difference to your case? Directly,” she asks, playing the devil’s advocate.

“How much more evidence do you need before you think there’s something rotten at the core of this?” he grouses.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s not my decision, you’re his lawyer. I’m worried that all this muck will ooze to the surface, and it’ll turn out that none of it is relevant to this case, and all these people, including this dead girl, will be crucified.” She’s much calmer than he is. “And I dispute that they’re dysfunctional. It’s only sex. Men and women having extramarital sex. In our society, that’s not dysfunctional, it’s normal.”