Missing Persons

48

Grace was usually all mine on Friday mornings, my day off. That morning Lauren was in a trial and Viv had a chemistry class from ten until noon. Viv had kindly agreed to watch Grace while I saw Bill Miller but I had to rush back home to pick up my daughter so Viv could get to class on time.

Grace and I often used our Friday time for outings or errands, but on cold winter mornings we sometimes tossed “usually” out into the snow and snuggled up inside with hot cider, good dogs, and a warm fire. And books.

The temperature had dropped into the single digits overnight and snuggling seemed like a marvelous plan. But my discomfort over Diane and Bob and Rachel and Mallory wouldn’t allow me that kind of leisure, so I covered my daughter in multiple layers of cotton, fleece, and Fiberfill, shuttled her out to the Audi, powered up the seat heater, and began motoring west around 9:30. Grace was a good traveler; she seemed cool with our inclement adventure.

In front of us the vertical planes of the Flatirons were draped in a thin fog, as though a designer had decided that a gauzy covering was just what the foothills needed that morning. As we angled closer to the hogbacks north of the city, tiny glistening crystals descended from the frozen mist. “Look, Gracie, it’s raining diamonds,” I said.

Gracie laughed. On Friday mornings, until she needed a nap, I was almost always funny.

I spent the next mile or so trying to explain the concept of triplets to my daughter. For a moment, I actually thought she got it. But when she started squealing, “Three me, three me,” I was pretty sure that she was still in need of a hands-on demonstration.

I hadn’t called Mary Black to tell her we were coming by, mostly because I thought she would tell me not to bother, but partly because I was ninety-nine percent certain I would find her at home and that announcing my visit in advance would give her time to get her thoughts in order, which was something that wasn’t necessarily in my best interest. The reason I was so certain I would find her home was that, considering the energy it took to get one small person out of the house in near-zero January temperatures, I thought it was a safe bet that Mary would need a damn good reason to layer up her three bundles of six-week-old joy to lug them outside.

Mary, her husband Gordon, an anesthesiologist, and their triplets lived in a sprawling contemporary ranch in a tony enclave off the Foothills Highway just south of the mouth of Lefthand Canyon. The house hadn’t been built for a family with three infants, and its out-of-town, almost-in-the-mountains location wasn’t the most convenient for schlepping multiple kids to pediatricians, preschool, and soccer. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a FOR SALE sign out front. Babies change things. They just do.

Triplets change everything.

Before I left the car I tried to check my voice mail for word from Raoul but I couldn’t get a cell signal in the mountain shadows. Yet another reason for parents of triplets to move closer to town.

I was relieved the Chinooks that the weather people had been forecasting hadn’t yet started blowing. Chinooks are fierce winter down-slope winds, cousins of California’s fabled devil winds, the Santa Anas. Chinooks warm as they descend from the tallest peaks of the Continental Divide, the gusts compressing and accelerating as they squeeze through mountain canyons before they ultimately rupture out of the foothills onto the communities of Colorado’s Front Range in fifty- to one-hundred-mile-an-hour bursts.

A wise man once said that there is definitely a place not to stand when an elephant has gas. In a similar vein, the mouth of Lefthand Canyon was one of the places not to linger in Boulder County during a serious joust with Chinooks.

It took Mary a moment to respond to the doorbell, but my guess was right-she was home.

“Alan, what a surprise.”

She looked surprised. That much was clear. Pleased? That would have been a stretch. Mary had a well-rounded son curled in each arm and the third member of the newly born trio was screaming somewhere in one of the back rooms of the house. Mary seemed inured to the wail.

“Hi, Mary, this is Grace. Gracie, this is Dr. Mary Black.”

“Hello,” Grace said.

“The babies are lovely, Mary,” I said.

Mary sighed and forced a smile. “They are. Thanks for reminding me. Come in,” she said wistfully as she led us into a living room that had been transformed by necessity into a day nursery. The grown-up furniture-a lot of leather and stone and glass-had been shoved to one end of the long room and most of the remaining space was consumed with infant paraphernalia, including three immense boxes of Huggies from a warehouse store and two matching, side-by-side changing tables.

The memorable aroma of stale diaper pail lingered in the air.

“Let me hand these guys off to the nanny. Hold on a second. Grace? Would you like to come back with me and see all the babies?”

Grace was thrilled. She looked to me for permission-I nodded-before she took Mary’s hand and followed her toward the back of the house.

“Sometimes I’m convinced that no one is ever going to come, ever,” Mary said when she returned to the living room.

“Do you know why I’m here?”

She shook her head, but I thought her expression said otherwise. Was I misreading? I thought Mary looked beat up. Her hair was ragged, her face hadn’t seen makeup in a long while, and the fleece clothing she wore was spotted with some of the fluids that were either intended to go into infants or with some of the fluids that naturally and copiously came back out. Sleep? Not recently, I suspected.

“Triplets are a handful, I take it.”

“A handful? A puppy is a handful, Alan. A baby changes everything. You know that. Three? You wouldn’t believe what it’s like. Entire weeks pass and I don’t even notice. Christmas was a blur.”

“You know why I’m here?” I asked again.

“No, not at all.”

I thought her response was wary, and just a little defensive. “Believe it or not, I’m here for a consultation.”

She gave me a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. “I’m really on… an extended leave from my practice. I was originally thinking six months, but that no longer feels like a maximum. I have no idea how long it’s going to take for life to feel under control again. My consultation is that you go talk to somebody else.”

I no longer had any doubt: She was chary. I wondered for a third time if she’d somehow expected my visit and knew what was coming.

Mary and I were colleagues, not friends. We’d already exchanged condolences at Hannah’s funeral, and I decided that I didn’t need to squander any more time on social niceties. She hadn’t exactly concurred with my desire for a consultation, but she hadn’t overtly refused, either. I said, “Mary, do you know that Hannah saw Mallory Miller for an intake session not long before she died?”

From the flash in her eyes, I knew instantly that Mary had not known. Her “No” was absolutely superfluous. “You’re sure?” she added.

“She consulted with Diane about it right after the session. Diane didn’t know who the kid was at the time, but she’s put things together since. It was Mallory.”

Mary’s brain was full of infants and infant things and she seemed to be struggling to shift gears to contemplate the weight of my news. “Anything that relates to what happened to her?” she asked.

“No, not directly.”

She changed her expression. “About what happened to Hannah?”

“Diane suspected there was. She went to Las Vegas last weekend to talk to Rachel Miller about Mallory. Diane thought that Rachel might be able to fill in some pieces.” I paused. “You knew Rachel was living in Las Vegas?”

“Of course. Why didn’t Diane just talk to Bill?”

Not “Mallory’s father.” Not “Bill Miller.” Bill. “Let’s say that because of what Hannah told Diane about the session with Mallory, it wasn’t an option.”

That got her attention. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Alan.”

I didn’t want to give Mary any more information than I had to. “Diane disappeared on Monday evening in a casino and nobody’s heard from her since.”

“What?”

“She walked out of the casino with two men and she… vanished.”

“Diane went to Las Vegas because of a discussion she had with Hannah about a single intake session with Mallory?”

“Within two weeks of that intake, Hannah was dead and Mallory was missing. Diane felt she had a responsibility to try to figure out what had happened. You know Diane.”

“God.” Mary turned her head as though she couldn’t bear looking at me. “What do you think I might know that would be… pertinent?”

“What do you know, Mary?”

She walked away and began folding a pile of recently laundered sleepers and impossibly small T-shirts. “I wish it were that easy, Alan. I wish it were that easy.” She looked back at me. “You know the rules we play by. Did Diane ever find Rachel? I wonder how she’s doing sometimes. She was so resistant to treatment.”

“Diane tracked her down, yes. At a wedding chapel in Vegas, not surprisingly. Had she talked with her? I’m not sure about that.”

The triplets were quiet. Grace was singing them a Raffi song-“Down by the Bay.” From which parent she’d inherited the ability to carry a tune wasn’t at all clear. It was a recessive gene, though. Guaranteed.

“What do you want from me?” Mary asked. The question wasn’t particularly provocative; Mary seemed sincerely curious.

“I’d like to know what Bill Miller was up to. His daughter told Hannah that he was up to something. I’m worried that Diane has gotten herself in the middle of whatever that was.”

“The police?”

“In Las Vegas? No help.”

“Up to?” she said. Her breathing had changed. “What do you mean, what Bill was ‘up to’?”

“I’m not sure. Bill seems to have access to money he shouldn’t have. He’s spending a fortune to support Rachel in Las Vegas. I’d like to know where it comes from.”

She reacted physically to my words: She stepped back. “Alan, I-”

“Do they have family money?”

“No. They don’t. I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

She was right; she shouldn’t be talking with me.

It was her problem, one I didn’t want to give her time to contemplate. “What do you know about a guy named Canada?”

“Oh God,” she said. “You know about Canada? How do you know about Canada?”

“Raoul is in Vegas looking for Diane. He found Canada.”

I wasn’t about to tell Mary that I was treating Bill Miller. But I found it interesting that Mary knew about Canada, too. Was that good or bad? I couldn’t decide.

Was Canada good or bad? I didn’t know that either.

“What do you know about him?” I asked.

“Bill asked for some advice about him once. About trusting him. His motives. That’s all I know.”

“When?”

“Years ago. Not too long after Rachel moved.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that, given what he knew about the man’s background, it would be hard to predict how reliable a… Canada would be. Whether he could be trusted with Rachel’s welfare. I told him I could argue it either way, psychologically speaking.”

“Background? What do you mean?”

“Canada grew up with a schizophrenic mother. She left him when he was young, like eleven. Took off with a guy she met in a bar. He’s haunted by it.”

“Makes sense.” But in my business, hindsight almost always makes sense. Foresight is the more valuable, but much rarer, commodity. “Which way did you end up arguing it with Bill?”

“Alan, please.”

“Help me find Diane, Mary.”

“I argued against it. I suggested that Bill use social services to help him with Rachel if he couldn’t afford a home health care agency.”

I changed tactics. “Do you know why Hannah was in your office the morning she died? Not in her own office?”

“No.”

She’d answered quickly, maybe too quickly. It’s not that I didn’t believe her reply; it was that I wasn’t sure if I believed her reply.

“But you’ve wondered?”

“Of course I’ve wondered.”

“Is there any reason Hannah would have been in your office?”

“I didn’t think she’d ever been in there without me. Ever.”

“But she had a key?”

“Yes, we each had a key to the other’s office.”

Diane and I had keys to each other’s office, too. “Why would she have left her purse in the middle of her office floor?”

Mary opened her eyes wide and shook her head at that question. “She left her purse on the floor?”

“Yes. Right in the middle of her office. That’s where it was when Diane and I got there.”

“That’s too strange. The police didn’t tell me that. It’s so not Hannah. She kept it in the back of a drawer in her file cabinet.”

“Are your records in your office? I didn’t see them the day that I found Hannah.”

“What records?”

“Practice files. Specifically, your case file for Rachel Miller.”

“I have cabinets built into the back wall. They look like wainscoting.”

I’d been distracted by other things that day. The image of Hannah splayed over the leather cube, hitchhiking her way into death, continued to intrude on my thoughts with some regularity.

“Rachel’s chart is there?”

“I assume it is. Why would Hannah’s death have anything to do with the Millers, Alan? I still don’t see the connection.”

I could have told her that I didn’t see the connection either. Instead, I tried the truth. “Hannah met with Mallory a couple of weeks before Christmas. Before too long, one of them was dead, the other one was missing.”

She pondered for a moment before she said dispassionately, “Correlation doesn’t imply causality, Alan.”

Ah yes, science.

“I think we both know it doesn’t rule it out either, Mary.”