Chance

CHAPTER 32

Fairhaven is on the old Route 6 in southeastern Massachusetts across the harbor from New Bedford. There's a long bridge that sets down on an island in mid-harbor and then continues on to Fairhaven. If you keep going on Route 6 through Mattapoisett and Marion and Wareham and Onset, after a while you're on Cape Cod.

The high school had been built during a time when people thought learning was important and the buildings in which it was supposed to take place reflected that view. There were a lot of libraries scattered around Massachusetts that had been built during the same period and had the same British Imperial look. The high school, like so many of the libraries, had gotten a little shabbier, as if to reflect current attitudes.

There were a few teachers there who'd been there eighteen years ago, but no one remembered any student named Bibi. A tight-jawed English teacher told me that she tried to forget them as soon as they left her room. And the principal told me he only remembered the bad ones.

"Yearbooks?" I said.

"We keep them in here," the principal told me.

"If we keep them in the library, the students will deface them."

"Students are great, aren't they?" I said.

The principal was a cautious man. He didn't commit himself on that. But, once he had assured himself that I wouldn't deface it, he gave me the 1977 Fairhaven High School yearbook, and allowed me to sit on a straight chair in the school secretary's office to read it. I found Bibi's picture easy enough. Except for the acquired scar tissue she still looked like seventeen-year-old Beatrice Costa had looked. Most Congenial. Drama Club 2,3,4. Yearbook Staff 4.

Newspaper 2,3,4. Cheerleader 3,4. Ambition: television news reporter. Quote, "Hey, Abbey, where's the party." There was nothing there about marrying Marty Anaheim and getting her nose busted.

I kept looking at the pictures until I found Abigail Olivetti, whose quote was, "Bibi and I…"

I read the yearbook through for another hour and found nothing else to help me. The school had no record of Beatrice Costa's address or Abigail Olivetti's. The secretary told me that in a way to indicate that the question was stupid.

"We are not running a clearinghouse here," she told me.

"Probably more of a warehouse," I said.

"May I use your phone book?"

She handed it to me, and turned back to her desk work with an audible sigh. It was clear that I had no real understanding of her importance, and the pressing nature of her work. Not everyone can file detention slips.

There were seventeen Costas listed in Fairhaven, and one Olivetti. I wrote down the phone numbers and addresses and gave the phone book and the yearbook back to the secretary, and gave her my full-voltage smile. It was the smile that normally made them take off their glasses and let down their hair. I waited. Nothing happened. The woman was obviously frigid.

"Are you through here?" she said finally.

"No more pencils," I said.

"No more books. No more teacher's dirty looks."

"Really!" she said.

As I left the building, classes were changing and the students were milling about in the halls. They seemed inconceivably young to me. Full of pretense, massively other oriented, ill formed, partial, angry, earnest, resentful, excited, frantic, depressed, hopeful, and scared. When she was this age, Beatrice Costa had pledged herself to Marty Anaheim and nothing after was ever the same.

I sat in my car with the motor running and looked at my lists of names. It made more sense to start with the one Olivetti than to work my way through all seventeen Costas. I dialed the number and a woman answered.

"My name is Spenser," I said.

"I'm a detective trying to locate a woman named Bibi Anaheim, whose maiden name was Bibi Costa."

"I remember Bibi," the woman said.

"She's a friend of my daughter's."

"Your daughter is Abigail Olivetti?"

"Yes. Where did you get her name?"

"From the high school," I said.

"Does your daughter still see Bibi?"

"Oh, I should think so, they've been best friends since they were little," the woman said.

"Does your daughter live in town?" I said.

"No, she's up in Needham."

"Mass.?"

"Un huh. She's all grown up now of course. Married and kids and all. And she waited, thank God, until she was old enough."

"Who'd she marry?" I said.

"Carl Becker. He's got a big job with the phone company and they had to move up there. But she calls home every week, and sometimes the kids get on."

"Isn't that nice," I said.

"Is she a housewife?"

"No, she works in a bank. I think it's too much, with the children and all, but she's very modern, I guess. Things are different now."

"Ain't it the truth," I said.

"Can you give me her address and phone number? I'd like to get in touch with her."

"About Bibi Costa?"

"Yes."

"Is Bibi in some kind of trouble?"

"I don't know," I said.

"She's missing and I'd like to find her."

"I don't think I should give out Abbey's number," the woman said.

"Well, just the address then."

"No, I think you should talk with my husband. You can call back tonight if you'd like to. He gets home about six."

"Thank you," I said.

"That won't be necessary. Can you tell me if any of Bibi's family lives in town?"

"No, there was just Bibi and her mother. Her mother remarried and moved away years ago."

"You don't know where?"

"No."

"Do you remember who she married?"

"No."

"Well, thank you very much," I said, "for your time."

We hung up.

It goes that way a lot, conversation often dries up as they start thinking about how they don't actually know you, and don't quite know what you're up to. It's always wise to get as much as you can as soon as you can. If I couldn't find Abbey Becker in Needham, Massachusetts, I'd turn in my file of Dick Tracy Crimestopper tips.

As I started back across the bridge toward New Bedford, I was calling information on my car phone.