The Last Place You Look Read online

  Cass turned back to me. “Sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry. “If this is about the car, you’ll have to come back later. Like, next week. And definitely call first. My father just ran out on her and it’s, you know, a bad situation all around.”

  I wondered what had happened to the car, but I didn’t ask. “It’s not about the car,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to her about your cousin, Sarah.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t think so.”

  She started to close the door. I took a guess that the recent exodus of her father and, also, the car thing might be a cash-flow situation, so I quickly adapted an old gimmick of mine. “I work on a show about missing-persons cases in the Midwest. I was hoping it’s in our budget to get an interview on camera with Sarah’s family.” No doubt Sarah’s family had been offered money for their story at some point, but it looked like maybe they needed it now.

  “A show?” Cass said. She looked interested. “A television show?”

  “Yes,” I said, opening my wallet to look for a business card. I hoped I still had some of the ones that identified me as Roxane Smith, production coordinator for a PBS affiliate in Chicago. It was amazing, the things people would tell you when they thought fame or money could be involved. I found one of the cards and handed it to her while I spun through possible titles for this television show in my head.

  Cass looked at the card. “You’re making a show about Sarah?”

  Usually the scheme didn’t require much detail. I started to feel a little bit bad for the lie. “We’re still in pre-pro but we’re interested. I’m authorized to offer five hundred dollars per day of shooting, if we decide we want to move forward,” I said.

  She glanced over her shoulder but the slurred voice was silent. Then she looked back at me. I could see her weighing the pros and cons, but finally the hint of money won out. “Here, why don’t you come in for a few minutes?”

  She led me through the kitchen, which was missing the stove—a power cord abandoned in the gap it left like a dead snake. Everything in the house looked like it had been recently zapped with a shrink-ray: a small tube television on top of a footstool in the place where a large entertainment stand should have been; the telltale impression where a sectional sofa had once gone beneath a small love seat. Through the doorway, I could see that the woman sprawled on it was blond and curvy, good-looking in a mature, highly engineered kind of way that could have put her anywhere from sixty to seventy-five. But I knew from my research that Elizabeth was fifty-six. The fifteen years since she had her picture in the paper had clearly been rough ones. She appeared to be asleep now.

  “Um, let’s go into the dining room,” Cass said, quickly steering me away from the spectacle of her mother. The dining room was missing a light fixture in the ceiling, but still had the table. Elizabeth’s daughter sat down and got out a pack of Parliaments. Her left hand sported an engagement ring with the world’s tiniest diamond. “So how does this work?”

  “I’m just going to ask you a few questions,” I said, “to see what you might be able to offer.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you know Sarah’s boyfriend, Brad?” I said.

  Cass lit a cigarette. “Nope, I never met him. None of us did.”

  “Were you close to your cousin?”

  She nodded. “Pretty close. I mean, she was five years older than me. And we didn’t see them a ton, because my mom was such a bitch.” She looked at me as if waiting for me to be shocked, but I wasn’t. “My mom was just always in this one-sided competition with Elaine, like, about who had the nicer stuff. Then she and my dad would fight about it. It got to the point where we barely went over there. But I always liked hanging out with Sarah.”

  “So they weren’t close either,” I said. “Your mom and your aunt.”

  Cass shrugged. “They’d talk on the phone sometimes. But I just remember, when it happened and suddenly my mom was acting like they had been so super close all their lives. I know she was upset, we were all upset. But she was just making shit up.”

  I crossed my arms. “You thought she was lying.”

  “Not lying, really. You know how it is, when you’re a kid and your parents do something,” she said, “and it’s just like, whatever, but then later, when you grow up, you’re like, wait, that was actually really fucked up?”

  “I sure do.”

  “It’s like that, I guess. All that stuff she said at the trial about that kid, Brad?” She shrugged again. “I always thought that was so weird. But she wanted to help, which I get. And they had the guy, he had that, you know”—she lowered her voice—“knife. In his car.”

  “Do you know if anyone has heard from Sarah recently?” I said, the coup de grâce.

  “Heard from her?” Cass said slowly. Her expression turned wary, like she suspected I might be insane.

  “Yes,” I said. “So have you?”

  “No.”

  “Your mom?”

  “No. Sarah—they told us she was dead. I mean, she has to be. She wasn’t the kind of person to just disappear and not tell anyone. Why are you asking if I’ve heard from her? I don’t understand.”

  “Sorry, there are just certain things I’m supposed to ask.” I breezed past it. I certainly didn’t want to tell her that Brad’s sister was trying to get him out of jail, not when I was already here under false pretenses. “Did you ever hear Sarah talk about running away?”

  Her eyes flicked down to my business card on the surface of the dining table. “No.”

  “She get along with her parents?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Uncle Garrett was pretty strict. Not mean strict, but, like, she was supposed to get all A’s all the time in school. And there was a list of words Sarah wasn’t supposed to say, like heck and that sucks and shoot. And if she said one of the words on a list, her allowance got docked a quarter.”

  “Shoot?” I said.

  “I guess because it’s like shit?”

  “That’s nuts,” I said, and we both laughed a little.

  “And I remember this one time, she was showing us this boy collage she made—you know, like pictures from those dumb teen magazines, how girls used to put them up on the wall. But Sarah had hers on a poster board that she kept hidden behind the headboard of her bed—she said she had to hide it because she wasn’t allowed to put boy pictures up. But I always kind of felt like Sarah was lucky. Her parents loved each other, and she loved them, and their house was happy.”

  Cass looked uneasy again, like she didn’t want that sentiment repeated in the television show. I smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way. “What was she like as a person?”

  Cass got a faraway look in her eyes. “She was really lively. A little bossy. She was always writing these stories and songs and scripts and trying to get us to perform them with her. But she was also really cool.” She stabbed out her cigarette against the side of a pumpkin-scented jar candle. Then she looked at the filter for a minute like she wasn’t sure where it had come from. “You’re asking these questions like you think she’s still out there and it’s really weird.”

  I reached into my coat and pulled out Catherine’s sketch. “I’m going to show you a picture. A drawing. Tell me what you think.”

  Cass looked down at the sketch. “What is this?” she said.

  “Does it look like your cousin?”

  She picked it up and studied it carefully, but there was no emotion or recognition in her face. “It just looks like a drawing,” she said.

  SEVEN

  I went back to the gas station, where I found the same pair of employees that I’d talked to yesterday peering into the open front of the soda machine. “Hi again,” I said. I held up my sketch. “This is the woman I’m hoping to find on your security tapes.”

  The girl put her hands on her hips. “We talked about you at our staff meeting,” she said. She paused, so I nodded like I was flattered. “Dave said we only keep the video for seven days. Then it records
over itself. Was it less than seven days ago?”

  It was not. So much for that. “Forget the tapes,” I said. “Can you just look at this and tell me if you’ve seen her?”

  The girl glanced at it briefly. The guy gave it a more thoughtful once-over, but he shrugged. “We see a lot of people,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  There was no way I was going to find the maybe-Sarah like this, whoever she was.

  I thanked them both and went across the street and stood outside the Greek restaurant where Danielle and Kenny had met that night. It was midafternoon and the sun was high, though hidden behind gauzy November clouds. I squinted at the faces of people pumping gas on the other side of the street, and I could barely make them out in broad daylight. Danielle’s encounter had taken place well after sundown. I made a mental note to check what the weather had been like. “It’s not looking good,” I said to myself.

  In the lot beside the restaurant, there stood a small plaza offering a tanning salon, a title loan outfit, a pizza carryout, and a liquor store. I went into each shop with the drawing of the woman.

  I got nowhere at the tanning salon and the pizza place. At the loan shop, the attendant offered, “Looks sort of like, what’s her name. From Iron Man.”

  I looked at the drawing and thought. “Gwyneth Paltrow?” I said.

  “Yeah!”

  “Maybe a little,” I said. It didn’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow. “But have you seen her?”

  “In my dreams.”

  At the liquor store, I did somewhat better: a half pint of Crown and one nibble at the sketch. A partial nibble. The old guy who worked there squinted hard at it. “Yeah, she kinda looks familiar.” But then he added, “The lady with the dog?”

  “The dog,” I said, raising an eyebrow. That made her sound like a regular in the area. I hadn’t considered the fact that Sarah might never have left Belmont. It wasn’t impossible, but it seemed like someone would have recognized her way before now if this was the case.

  “One of those, what do you call ’em, doodles? Something-doodle? Kinda curly and brown?”

  “But what about this woman?”

  “Right,” he said. “I think I’ve seen her walking the dog before. Maybe. Labradoodle, is it?”

  “Do you know her name? Or where she lives?”

  “Sorry,” the old guy said.

  “How about when you saw her last?”

  He shook his head. “What did she do?”

  “I just need to talk to her,” I said. I gave him a card and asked him to call me if he saw her.

  I spent another hour knocking on doors on the residential streets next to and behind the gas station. I didn’t see any curly brown dogs. No one else recognized the sketch or did anything to encourage me except for the teenage punk girl who told me she liked my jacket. Then I got back into the car and squinted at the sketch. The more I stared at it the more it did look like Gwyneth Paltrow, if Gwyneth Paltrow lived in Ohio and had never been happy.

  I took the sketch back into the gas station. The duo from earlier had been replaced by a middle-aged guy whose name tag pegged him as the famous Dave. He looked at me with suspicion. “I was wondering if maybe you’ve seen this woman in here,” I said, placing my sketch on the counter. “She might live in the area, might sometimes walk a, a”—I was not going to say Labradoodle—“brown, curly dog?”

  Dave’s face brightened. “Sadie.”

  “Sadie?” I said. “That’s her name?”

  “The dog,” Dave said, and I sighed. He shrugged. “I have a goldendoodle, myself.”

  I asked if he knew the woman’s name or where she lived, but he didn’t. “This does look a lot like her,” he said. “The lady I’m thinking of, she comes by a few times a week. But I wouldn’t put money on it. Too bad you don’t have a sketch of Sadie!”

  “Indeed,” I said. I thought about what Kenny had said, that Belmont was a small place, lots of people look familiar. Either the woman wasn’t Sarah, or Sarah hadn’t gotten very far fifteen years ago. Either way, it seemed like keeping an eye on the area was the only possible way to find her.

  It was after five, and I was due at my mother’s house for dinner at seven. But as I pushed outside, I saw that I wasn’t going anywhere just yet: a Belmont police cruiser was parked diagonally behind my car. The cruiser door opened and a uniformed cop got out, young, with gym-rat muscles and a smug expression.

  “How are you doing, ma’am?” he said. The pin on his uniform shirt said C. Pasquale.

  “I’m all right,” I said slowly.

  “Because we got a couple calls. About you, hanging around here all afternoon. What’s going on?”

  “Just a routine inquiry,” I said, wondering which of the unhelpful Belmont residents had called the police on me. I got my license out. He frowned at it, tilting it in the light like it was a lenticular from a Cracker Jack box.

  “What kind of inquiry?”

  A routine one, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “I’m looking for an individual who has been seen in the area.” I reached for my license but he held on to it. So I showed him the sketch. Maybe he had a something-doodle too.

  “Who is she?” Pasquale said.

  “An old friend of my client,” I said.

  “Who’s your client?” he said next.

  “That’s confidential.” It wasn’t, but he was annoying me. Some small-town police forces were full of good people who believed in their community. Some were full of glorified crossing guards who had nothing to do but run speed traps near the edges of town and revel in their tiny bit of power. I was getting a pretty good idea of which Belmont’s was.

  “Well, next time,” he said, finally letting go of my license, “give us a heads-up that you’re out here. Professional courtesy.”

  “Sure, of course,” I said, trying to sound contrite.

  “Have a good night, ma’am.”

  I got into my car and he got into his, but neither of us went anywhere. After three minutes, he got back out and rapped on my window.

  “Do you need directions or something?” he said after I had rolled it down.

  “I’m good,” I said, and rolled the window back up.

  But he tapped on it again and I rolled it back down.

  “That’s not an open container,” he said, nodding toward the whiskey on my passenger seat, “is it?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, and I put the window up and shifted my car into reverse.

  * * *

  Dinner was steak and fried onions, potatoes, and one of those coconut cakes that you store in the freezer. Although there were four of us at the table, my mother, Genevieve, did most of the talking. She never ran out of things to say. She talked about how she and her neighbor Rita were taking a tai chi class at the Conservatory on Tuesday nights. She talked about the week’s excitement in the neighborhood: a traffic accident, a glum kid selling wrapping paper from a catalogue. Outwardly, she was back to herself, more or less: all smiles and the fluffy ash-blond curls she wore to compensate for her diminutive height. But I was still anxious for her, the way she seemed wound more tightly than before behind that layer of bulletproof niceness, the way things could upset her out of nowhere. I wondered what her nights were like, in the house alone. I hoped they were nothing like mine.

  “I think I need to call a plumber, for that sink,” she was saying when I came back from getting another round of beers for Andrew and me. The booze situation in this house was getting dire. Andrew and I had drunk everything in the once-formidable liquor cabinet. It felt tacky to restock it now, as if my mother needed one more reminder that Frank was gone. So we had since moved on to the beer stored in the garage, but even that was dwindling. “It’s leaking again, and it always acts up when the weather gets cold.”

  Matt set his fork down on his dessert plate, eyes flicking briefly to the beer cans. He was bearded and gruff, stocky as Andrew was wiry, and he’d quit drinking about five years ago. Back then he was a disaster zone. Now he was
just a self-righteous prophet of sobriety most of the time. For a second I thought he was going to concern-troll me about the beer, but instead he said, “You know, Mom, we can get you a new sink, that one’s as old as the house. You should have a nice new one.”

  Andrew glanced at me as if to say suck-up.

  “Oh, no, honey,” my mother said, even though she’d been asking my father to replace the sink for years, “that’s okay.” Something in her expression had changed.

  “It’s just silly,” Matt went on, unwisely, “to pay a plumber to come out again, for a sink that barely works anyway—”

  “Matthew, I told you it’s okay. I don’t want a new sink. I want that sink to work right.” My mother stood up abruptly and began clearing the plates. Even without my father, or maybe especially without him, every gathering inside this house devolved to an argument. But if there was anything my family was good at, it was not talking about what was really going on.

  Andrew got up too. “Mom, let me help with those.”

  She stopped clattering the dishes around and smiled at him. “Thank you, honey,” she said, her features relaxing. Matt glared at both of them. It had always been like this with my mother, Matt trying too hard in unspoken competition to be the favorite, Andrew not trying at all but somehow coming off better. Me staying the hell out of it.

  But Matt couldn’t leave it alone. He played with the tab on his can of Coke and said, “Would you go in on the sink with me?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “I’m steering clear of that hornets’ nest. You should too.”

  “Come on.”

  “No.”

  “You owe me,” Matt said. “For Danielle.”

  “I knew that was part of your long game to screw with me,” I said, and he rolled his eyes. “Thanks, though. She seems nice—how do you know her?”

  Under his beard, he blushed a little. “She lives in my building. We talk sometimes in the laundry room.”

  “Ooh,” I said, “like a little laundry-day love affair.”

  “No, like adult conversation.”

  “About what, your spin cycle?”