“She got the looks in the family,” Julie said. “And the brains.”
We had moved over to the sofa, where the pictures were spread between us. I used Kleenex and scotch to nurse Julie through the tears; then I put a Charlie Parker CD on low and we got to work. I knew she was mind-fucking me, but, hell, I was lonely and it was nice to be needed, if only for the moment and on unreliable terms.
The photos showed a young woman, pretty in a fair, red-haired way that stood out in Phoenix, with its battalions of tanned hotties. Her finely boned face had an intensely direct stare. Her smile had that ironic, mocking quality that reminded me of Julie long ago. And that hair: the natural shade of flame titian. Phaedra was beautiful in a way that would have been dangerous to me, but I was always a sucker for redheads.
Julie blew her nose and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You’re sure this is okay?”
“It was never a problem,” I said, and she lighted it. “If I were more politically correct, I’d have tenure.” I poured two more glasses of McClelland’s and asked her to walk me through the past year of Phaedra’s life.
“She’d been living with a man in Sedona. His name is Greg Townsend. Twenty years older. His father made a fortune in real estate. Very well-off.”
“Takes after her older sister?” I have such a mouth.
Julie smiled unhappily. “Anyway, they’d been living together for about three months.”
“They met how?”
“Oh, who knows,” Julie said. “She just told me she was in love, and that she was moving to Sedona.”
“How did he treat her?”
“Oh, he took her to London, Paris. Mexico every other weekend, seemed like. He had his own airplane. Bought her clothes, Indian art, whatever she wanted, I guess. But who knows what he was really like. Some real bastards can spend lots of money on you.”
“You two talked?”
“She’d call.”
“Did she seem happy?”
“It was always hard to tell with Phaedra. At first, yes.”
“Did he abuse her? Hurt her physically? Make threats?”
“No,” Julie said, leaning forward, seeming to search for the words. “She never mentioned anything like that, although she had been in a relationship like that a few years ago. Greg was-I don’t know, he seemed like a flake to me. New Age. One of these going-to-extremes athletes. Lots of money. But nothing real underneath.”
“Well, you know what they say, ‘No money, no life.’ How’d it end?”
“Let me put it this way, David. Phaedra was always good at making her escape. I think she looked at Mom and Dad together, looked at all my disasters in love-God, what a bunch of role models! — and she decided she was never going to be trapped. Never going to be dependent on a man. She walked. Her relationships always had a short half-life. Greg was no different. Phaedra called me one Sunday and said she was back in Phoenix, asked if she could stay with me a few days.”
“That was when?”
“In the spring. April, I guess.”
Julie said her sister got a job as an assistant to a photographer who had done some work for the Phoenician. I jotted the photographer’s name below Greg Townsend’s on the envelope. Phaedra started seeing a therapist and attending family gatherings again. She found a one-bedroom apartment in Scottsdale. She and Julie talked on the phone almost every night.
“Did she meet anybody else?”
“Nobody serious,” Julie said.
“Flirtations? One-night stands?”
Julie shrugged like an older sister. “She was fairly burned out on relationships. She felt very suffocated by Greg.”
“And nothing struck you as strange in the days or weeks before her disappearance? Nobody new in her life? Nothing about her personality that changed? No sense she felt in danger?”
“No. She seemed to be very healthy about it all. Which was new for Phaedra, because when she’d break up with a lover, she would usually just fall apart for a while. I was very distracted, though. My ex and I were in court. Visitation, custody, all that. Work was a nightmare.”
We talked maybe another half hour. Then I walked her out to her car, just like the other night.
The sun was gone, and the street was deserted except for a few parked cars. I could hear a set of sirens over on Seventh Avenue, running north from downtown.
“I’m not trying to be a selfish bitch,” Julie said. “I just need help. Phaedra is the only family I have really. Dad died five years ago, and Mom is more and more out of it. I just feel so scared about Phaedra.”
“I understand,” I said, and realized I had stepped into something that could have a really bad ending. I pushed the thought away.
We hugged out in the ovenlike heat, and for just a moment, stroking her hair, I felt like I had twenty years ago. Then she kissed me on the mouth, a nice kiss, and she drove away.
Back inside, Charlie Parker had finished and the house felt as if it hadn’t been lived in for a hundred years. I looked around, freshly aware of how odd or brilliant Grandfather’s floor plan was. The high-ceiling living room with bookcases behind a stairway that went nowhere-well, it went to the garage apartment in back, via an open-air passage. The illusion of space, when the house only had two small bedrooms. The quirky charm of a garden courtyard off the little study that connected to the living room. I suddenly missed my grandparents so much. Wished I could walk into the dining room and find Grandmother watching her soap operas. Wished I could get a whiff of Grandfather’s pipe as he paced in his study. Even Patty had loved this house-she’d encouraged me to rent it out after my grandparents died, rather than sell. At times like this, I didn’t know if I could bear to part with it, or if I could bear another night in it.
It was not a good mind-set in which to receive a full-mouth French kiss from an old girlfriend. I poured another scotch, wished it wasn’t too hot to sit in the garden, ended up on the staircase, absently perusing the books that Grandfather, and then I, had stacked onto the old shelves.
Julie Riding was not the great love of my life. But she was my first real girlfriend. “Real” in the sense that I lost my virginity to her, at the shameful old age of nineteen. “Real” in that we stayed together, more or less, for two years and sometimes I felt like I loved her.
We built the kinds of traditions that twenty-year-olds build. I was very proud to have her on my arm. I think she thought I was “smart,” but what did that mean to a young woman like Julie? I remember she never liked books. And I wasn’t at all like the rockstar clones she seemed to moon over.
Did we love each other? Who knows? Who knows anything at that age. Who knows anything now? The heart is such a mystery.
I do remember the first time I saw her, walking away from me on the mall at ASU, all blond straight hair and long legs and youth. We would never know less sadness in our lives than that first time we stayed out all night talking, then spent the morning in each other’s arms in the safe chill of the air-conditioned darkness. Every possibility that life held was open to us. And every mistake.
I dreamed about Julie that night, dreaming in the heavy sleep that comes after a day spent in the desert heat. But whatever we said and did was forgotten in the sudden smashing of bumpers and screeching of tires out on the street. I was immediately awake. The clock read 3:30.
My bedroom fronts the street. I could hear shouts and cursing in English and Spanish. Then threats. Then a gunshot, sharp and deep. Then another two-higher-pitched, maybe a.22.
I dropped painfully to the floor, grabbed up the cordless phone, and dialed 911. Talking to the dispatcher, I crawled over to the window and cautiously lifted one blind. They were gone, not a body left behind, not a trace. Just the vivid white circle of the streetlight. Four minutes had passed. I explained three times to the 911 operator that I hadn’t seen the incident, only heard it. I told her it wasn’t necessary for an officer to make contact.
When I was growing up in this neighborhood, even in the turmoil of the 1960s, it had seemed the safest place in the world. The biggest worry for parents was the traffic on Seventh Avenue. Now there were no safe places. I pulled on some shorts, went into the garage, and pulled a dusty, slender box out of a carton I had brought back from San Diego, along with my books and lecture notes. Inside was a Colt Python.357 with a four-inch barrel and ammunition. When I was a deputy, this had been my pride and joy-“one of the finest handguns in the world,” Peralta had pronounced-and had cost about a month’s worth of paychecks. It had less usefulness for a college professor. I hadn’t seen the revolver for a month, since I qualified at the range to get my deputy credentials and keep Peralta off my back. I took the box back inside, turned out the light, and listened a long time in the darkness until sleep came again.