A Thousand Steps

12

Darnell observes Jasmine’s room through the open door, then steps inside. Turns slowly in place in her heavy-looking black cop boots, taking in the three-sixty view around her.

“What happened to your knees and elbows, Matt?”

He makes up a brief story about Saturday night, meeting up with a friend for a late dinner, catching a pothole at high speed on Carmelita and going down.

“My fault.”

“As a mother I worry about boys on bikes in the dark.”

“I’m pretty careful.”

She looks like she’s about to say something but doesn’t. Looks around again.

“How angry was Jasmine at her mother?”

“I wasn’t there for the argument. They argue sometimes but usually forget pretty fast.”

“Sometimes or often?”

“Sometimes.”

A nod. “I see she likes music and clothes.”

Matt follows her blue-eyed gaze to Jazz’s closet, all the way open as always and packed with clothes. The boots and shoes are piled two layers high across the closet floor. Matt knows that some of them haven’t fit Jazz for years but she won’t throw them away.

“I’m surprised by the Tim Leary poster and her books,” says Darnell. “Not just how many books, but the subjects. Your average eighteen-year-old doesn’t read The Tibetan Book of the Dead or The Psychedelic Experience. Or The Doors of Perception. Or the Upanishads. Do you read these books too, Matt?”

“No.”

“Have you met Timothy Leary?”

“I’ve talked to him at Mystic Arts World.”

“Has he offered you LSD?”

“No. Never.”

“Does Jasmine know him?”

“I don’t believe so.”

She studies him flatly. “Did she take anything unusual with her, the first night she didn’t come home?”

“I don’t know what she took. I was out delivering papers when she left in the van.”

“Nothing is obviously missing?”

Matt looks around the small, disheveled room, trying to be of help.

“I just don’t know. It’s hard to see what’s missing.”

“Boy, that’s the truth.”

But something bothers him.

Darnell’s smile is generous and uncomplicated. She goes to Jasmine’s dresser and looks down on the bottles of perfume and tanning potions, a small round mirror on a stand, jewelry boxes, a small woven bowl that contains inexpensive bead necklaces and earrings and anklets.

“You know,” says Matt. “There is something missing. Her ukulele. It’s usually in the corner.”

His first thought: she takes it sometimes for parties and cookouts. She’s good on it and she has a beautiful clear voice. She makes up her own songs and her friends play and sing along. His second thought: she took it to play for Austin Overton. He tells the officer as much.

Darnell considers. “I talked to Overton yesterday after I took your report. He said what you said. That he played the Sandpiper and slept with Jasmine Thursday night. She took off in the morning around eight and he hasn’t seen or talked to her since. I don’t like Austin Overton, but I believe him.”

Matt doesn’t understand exactly why, but he likes and trusts Darnell. From the card she gave him earlier, he knows her first name is Brigit. She doesn’t seem out to get everybody, like Furlong. She seems more like an ally than an enemy and she seems to care about his sister. And the truth about his Saturday night has been bellowing to get out.

“I went to one of those Sapphire Cove parties Saturday night,” he says.

“I knew it. I knew you would. Tell me everything.”

He does. The obscene, exciting scenes flood back on him. He’s slightly proud to tell Darnell that he flipped off the guard, but also slightly ashamed that he crashed his own bike.

Darnell stands with her hands on her hips and a slight frown on her face.

“We have trouble with Sapphire Cove security too,” she says. “They won’t even let us in except to clean up a mess or cite a vehicle. They’re not city of Laguna, so we have no authority. Matt, are you willing to make a statement I can take to a judge? About that orgy?”

“No. I just want to find my sister.”

She nods briskly. “I understand. I can require you to make a statement, you know.”

“Haven’t I already, just now?”

“I can use what you gave me. But it has more warrant weight coming from you.”

Gear and weapon clanking softly, Officer Darnell goes to the open closet, then to the window, then to a Beatles poster. Comes to a stop in front of Matt. She’s close enough he can see the gray flecks in her blue eyes.

“Matt Anthony, I’m going to go out on a limb with you. Right now. This is only between us, but Bonnie Stratmeyer went to at least one of the Sapphire Cove parties while she was officially missing.”

“That’s bad news.”

“It gets worse. Your mother’s hippie van has been towed to our impound yard from Sapphire Cove. It was parked overnight without a permit, and Sapphire Cove security called us to have it towed. We’re processing it now. The ukulele is in it.”

“Parked when at Sapphire Cove?”

“We’re working on that.”

“But nothing about Jasmine herself?” asks Matt. He feels as if a dark shadow is crossing over some remote plain in his mind. Jazz abandon her own van? And her uke? No, clearly, she was planning on coming back for them. Clearly. So, why didn’t she?

“Nothing about Jasmine herself,” says Darnell.

“Terrible news.”

“That’s why I need your statement.”

“I want the van back.”

“You’re not old enough to drive it.”

“I’ve got my learner’s permit. And the van is sitting there at the station, less than a block from here.”

She considers him. “You need an adult in the car to drive with a learner’s permit. We can get the van here together, if you’ll sign a statement about what you saw in Sapphire Cove Saturday night.”

“Cavore said he could find me.”

“All the more reason to provide the statement. I’ll write it up and you’ll sign it.”

Matt nods unhappily. “We have to do it now. I’ve got papers to fold and deliver. Can I have forty-eight of those posters of Jazz?”

Darnell’s dubious look gives way to a smile. “To go with your newspapers?”

“Yes, please.”

“Of course you can. And the rest are for your mom. Get the spare key and we’ll be on our way.”

Matt angles the posters into the window light. Studies his sister’s portrait and his own drawing of her, side by side on the letter-sized sheet. The photo captures her conventional beauty, and his art catches something of her confident humor.

A cold, foreign feeling settles over him.

His sister on a missing-persons poster.

The next thing Matt knows he’s at the helm of his mother’s sputtering tangerine-and-white van, Officer Brigit Darnell riding shotgun. He signals and swings the van from the little LBPD impound yard behind City Hall onto Third Street. The van is agonizingly slow. It coughs roughly. His house is right there; he could have walked it faster.

Pulls into the driveway and parks in front of his garage.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Come to the station after your paper route. I’ll have the statement ready. And Matt? Say nothing about you-know-who and Sapphire Cove parties. Nobody knows that but us cops and you.”

Matt bobs his head obediently and Darnell heads down the sidewalk for the station.

He opens the side doors of the van. It’s a Westfalia camper van, two-tone tangerine and white, a 1958 model with windows along both sides, a pop-up top, a framed side-awning that stows along the ceiling, cabinets, a fold-out table and padded seats that convert to a bed, an ice box and sink, and curtains sewn by Julie from bongo drum and palm tree — print cotton. Matt has never quite understood how they fit this many features into a small space, but it’s all functional, more or less.

He pulls a sleeping bag over Jasmine’s ukulele on the bed. Remembers his sister, playing the little instrument down at Crescent Bay one evening last summer around a campfire that threw orange shadows across the faces gathered around it. Matt, lurking behind the fire and the older teenagers, watching. Jazz pretty and sweet-voiced in firelight. Seems much longer ago than just a year.

His paper route, counting the folding and rubber-banding, is four hours of zinging pain, with his raw knees and elbows and his bruised palm heels, which have turned pale blue since Saturday night.

Having Jazz’s “missing” poster folded inside each and every Register makes him feel useful, deflecting the pain. Some. That’s forty-eight subscribers who might see her and call Darnell, he thinks.

He lands the Coiner’s Register in the sprinklers again, has to wade through those knee-high sprayers to fetch the paper and hobble with it to the porch, Gigi shrieking from behind the screen door, old Coiner hollering at the dog and Mrs. Coiner yelling at him.

When he gets home, landlord Nelson Pedley is standing in the middle of the tiny dried-out front yard, examining the sparse crop of fruit on the centerpiece avocado tree. It’s a brown Fuerte, sun-starved and dehydrated because Pedley won’t water it, so it produces small fruit. Pedley does not allow the Anthonys to pick any — it’s an actual condition of the lease agreement. When he comes to collect the monthly rent, he sometimes brings a small paper bag into which he puts two or three skinny avocados as a gift for his valued tenants.

As he does today, handing it to Matt with a smile.

“She’s not home so don’t even knock,” Matt says. “She’s out trying to make some money if that’s okay with you.”

“Well, of course, young man, certainly it is.”

“Okay, good. I have an errand to run, Mr. Pedley.”

“It’s late again, Matt. The rent.”

“It’s on the way. Don’t worry.”

“I do worry, about your mom.”

Matt shrugs and walks off toward the cop house half a block away.

When he’s done signing Officer Darnell’s almost verbatim report of his Sapphire Cove adventure, Matt hurries back home for something to eat. He’s starved, as usual, after three hours of peddling the hills and heaving papers.

The pantry has nothing but peanut butter and a can of beets, and his mother is still not home from the Jolly Roger with possible leftovers. Matt’s got almost fourteen dollars, which can buy plenty at the market, but he’s saving money for another expensive sketchbook and some good pressed charcoal, and something for Laurel’s birthday next week. His next route collection is almost two weeks away. So he rides to the Assistance League Food Exchange, his stomach grumbling hopefully. Last time it was milk, bread, eggs, cereal, rice, and...

Today it’s closed.

He settles for the peanut butter, the beets, and all three of Pedley’s scrawny avocados. He eats in front of the TV, watching the news. Walter Cronkite has been suggesting the war will not end in an American victory, but a “stalemate.” Cronkite had left his CBS studio in February and traveled to Vietnam to see firsthand how the war was going. He looked funny in his helmet. This evening he suggests that the American president has been overoptimistic about the war, in spite of the first five months of 1968 being exceptionally bloody, thanks to the Tet Offensive in January.

This evening’s battle footage shows helicopters landing under fire from communist Viet Cong gunners hidden in a misty forest. The bullets zip into the choppers but you can’t hear them over the rotors. The American troops come spilling out, running hard, crouched and heavily zig-zagging. Some pull up, kneel and shoot. No Kyle.

He takes his dishes to the sink. Looks out the kitchen window past the GTE building and sees that this will be a dramatic evening: blue skies, dark clouds blowing in, an orange-and-black sunset made for photography. Sunset just after eight. It’s going to be warm tonight, too, for June.

Matt still feels hungry, but lucky, too, like he’s going to see Jazz soon. Going to get her back where she belongs, safe from bad people and the things they do.

He loves beets. And avocados. Hates the thought of another long bike ride with his knees and elbows dipped in acid. He considers the lumpy tangerine-colored van in the driveway.

Figures the best driving route to Thousand Steps without getting caught.

Hopes to catch a glimpse of what Laurel saw there two days ago.