Time and Trouble Read online

  Billie grinned. “I am currently working at The Final Touch—we sell scarves, belts, and earrings. Accessories. I can also type. Clean houses. Sell shoes at Nordstrom, get my broker’s license or perform telephone sex. The thing is—this is what I want to do.”

  Emma sat back and steepled her fingers.

  “I am able-bodied, intelligent, cooperative, adequately creative, and not particularly afraid,” Billie said. “Did I forget anything?”

  “Loyal, steadfast, never planned to overthrow the government…”

  “And I can program my VCR.”

  “Mechanical aptitude duly noted.”

  “Miz Howe.” Billie’s voice pitched low, her head tilted and her eyes narrowed. “I sense reservation on your part. I trust you do not suffer from pigmentation intolerance.”

  “From…? Not that I know—” Emma put her hand to her cheek. Was something wrong with her coloring? Was this some goddamn new politically incorrect offense? “What are you talking about? What’s ‘pigmentation intolerance’?”

  “A critical inability to believe that blondes have brains.”

  Emma gave a half-nod of acknowledgment. “Touché,” she said.

  Billie wasn’t smiling. “I do not put Wite-Out on the computer screen.”

  “Why is it that you never hear jokes about gray-haired women? At least not about our IQs.” Emma ran her fingers through close-cropped silvery hair at the nape of her neck. “Never heard of a ditzy… There isn’t even a word for us. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, and…old ladies. Not so great in the world at large, maybe, but a plus in this business. We go unnoticed. Even if we color our hair.”

  “But if you’re thinking a young woman—I can be invisible, too. Honestly. I’m kind of a blank without makeup. I can make myself look lots of ways, including barely noticeable.”

  Emma understood what the other woman meant, although she knew that no female in her twenties—no well-built, pretty blonde, no matter how much makeup she left off or put on, no matter what she did with her dress and no matter how bad a hair day she had—could comprehend just how invisible, even fully bedecked and trying her best, a middle-aged woman could be.

  Time would teach her that. Emma didn’t have to. “So you think this job is creative. You think you’ll be reinventing yourself a lot, wearing disguises, shooting—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “It isn’t like that. It’s not like in the movies.”

  “I know that.”

  “You’re mostly checking records, accessing databases, surveilling rotten husbands or crooked employees or insurance fakes, or finding the addresses of poor dummies who never heard of The Maltese Falcon.”

  Billie sat straighter. “I’d be good at that. I’m an excellent researcher. Good enough to have already read everything I could find about what it is you do. And to be computer-literate. And to have at least a rudimentary idea of accessing information online.”

  The sugarplum fairy had a solid core. Wonder if she would last. Wonder if the agency would last. Her research skills weren’t foolproof—look, she applied for a job with a company everybody else quit. But let her find that out for herself.

  “Here’s something you should know,” Emma said. “This may be the Bay Area and all, but what we are is hired investigators. Our job is to find information for our clients—and deciding whether clients deserve it is none of our business.”

  “Why would you—”

  “Because there is a local geographical imperative to be outraged, to protest and picket and have opinions. Something in the air, maybe. But even if you’re an animal rightist and we have a furrier who needs to know who’s threatening him, or you’re hell-bent on saving the black-antennaed slug from extinction, and a developer needs information about its breeding ground, or if we’re getting information to help the defense of a sadistic child-abuser, or doing corporate investigation for a company you think is the very definition of oppressive or sexist, or—”

  “I believe I catch your drift.”

  “Then what else?”

  “Meaning?”

  “What else should I know about you? Tell me about yourself.”

  “You have my résumé.”

  Emma waved the air above the application, dismissing it. “Statistics. Schools, jobs, acting roles, marital status. So you’re twenty-eight, you can act, you’re smart, you’re divorced, and you have a son. You’ve lived at your current address for four years. Is that it for who you are and why I should hire you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Tell me whatever you think I should know. Bearing in mind, of course, that I am a detective.”

  “And you will find it out, anyway,” Billie murmured.

  “Whatever.” There were so many damned regulations about interviews, about what you could and couldn’t ask. Emma had found that if she simply did nothing, stayed unresponsive longer than was socially acceptable—too long—people felt impelled to fill the vacuum and reveal more about themselves than she could have gotten through a dozen interviews.

  She folded her hands and waited.

  Two

  Emma Howe was a boulder. As gray as rock and just as impervious in a rough-wool sweater the color of steel, baggy dirt-colored slacks, and shoes that looked like prosthetic devices.

  The woman on the other side of the desk was not what Billie had expected. The I.J. photographer had found so many kind angles he must have been a contortionist. Not that she was ugly—she had a good face and a strong, compact body—and not that Billie had expected a fluffy, maternal woman, but the photo had suggested a warmth and spark that turned out to be conspicuously missing. Or deliberately withheld.

  Emma Howe was stony as a mean-spirited Buddha, wanting Billie to blather, to nervously provide ammunition that could be used to shoot her down.

  She had to say something, but it was easier to think of what she would not tell the hummock. She wouldn’t say that The Final Touch had been renamed The Final Gasp when it was locked shut this afternoon. And good riddance. Billie could not, for the life of her, generate enthusiasm for what her now-bankrupt employer called “the magic of inspired accessorizing.” She had been working on an escape plan for months, but the store had staggered and died too soon. There was a sickening uncertainty as to whether her employer had paid Unemployment Comp for her and meantime, Billie had precisely two more weeks of working capital. Enough for one mortgage, PG&E, and telephone payment, ten days of extended nursery school, five jumbo jars of peanut butter, and a large box of dry milk. As little as this job would pay, and as long as her apprenticeship would be, this was nonetheless her ticket to eventual independence. To a life. And if she didn’t get it, she’d have to scramble for another dead-end job, and with a little boy and a mortgage, she wouldn’t have further options for a dozen years.

  Let Supersleuth find that out for herself.

  “I grew up all over the map,” Billie said. “New York, Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and California. And for a brief stint, Germany. My father was—still is, in fact—an executive with what’s been nicknamed the ‘I’ve Been Moved’ Corporation. We were transferred every few years. My parents were in Santa Monica when they divorced. I was in boarding school in Connecticut.”

  “Your parents still alive?”

  “Yes.” What did that have to do with anything?

  Emma Howe sipped greasy-looking coffee and relapsed into silence.

  The rain and fog coated the window glass. Billie felt submerged with this unyielding woman. She was tempted to lean across the desk and poke at her. Why should you be disappointed by me? she’d demand. Did you expect Sherlock Holmes to show up, eager to do scutwork for next to nothing? This place doesn’t look thriving—and why was she supposed to believe in that suddenly ill receptionist? There wasn’t a nameplate for her, or any evidence of work left half-done on the desk.

  The boulder waited.

  “There’s this,” Billie said. “I always did well in school. But I found out I was smart—or I found out
what smart was—when I worked as an office temp in college; family finances took a nosedive after the divorce. Wherever I’d go, no matter what piece of fancy electronic equipment or word-processing program or machine they asked about, I said I knew how to use it. Once I had the job, I’d say the last fax or computer or whatever had been a little different, could somebody take a second to show me how this gizmo worked so that I didn’t hurt anything? The point is that if I’d been honest, I wouldn’t have gotten any of the jobs—and they wouldn’t have gotten a good worker.”

  “This agency isn’t exactly the equivalent of a copy machine,” Emma said.

  Bitch! Would it hurt to give a little? “I’m smart enough to think on my own and to pick up whatever’s learnable. Whatever you’re willing to teach me.”

  The boulder very slightly nodded.

  “And you’re probably worrying about my son,” Billie added. “I know you’re not allowed to ask how I’m going to work child care, but of course you’d think about it.”

  “Our hours do tend to be erratic,” Emma said.

  There was the slightest whiff of victory in the air. “That’s why I was so impressed,” Billie said softly. “You had two children and managed.”

  “They were older.”

  “A student at Sonoma State lives at my house rent-free in exchange for baby-sitting. Classes are scheduled for when my son’s in nursery school. But in case of emergency, or conflict of any kind, two backup students with different class hours are on call. I’m covered twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Impressive,” Emma said. “Ambitious.”

  Damn close to a compliment. Billie moved in for the kill. “I should mention this, too. I found my son.”

  “A foundling? As in Charles Dickens?”

  “No. When he was two, my ex-husband disappeared with him. The police couldn’t find Cameron or Mr. Macdougal. It took me seven months, but I found them.”

  “Excuse me, but Mr. Macdougal is your ex?”

  “My ex-husband is Cameron Jay Smith. Mr. Macdougal is the name of a little man in a children’s book, and what my son—whose name is Jesse—called himself when he turned two, which is right before he was taken. It was a short phase, but it lasted long enough to help me find him.”

  “How’s that?”

  Was she actually interested? Billie controlled the urge to smile. “Cameron’s an artist. Makes money on the side doing housepainting, carpentry, general handyman work. He has no union, no rep, no normal job, nothing constant. No trace. He could work under another name, get all-new ID. But Cameron was raised by an aunt who is his entire family and maybe the one thing in the world he’d never betray. She didn’t have a lot of loves—Cameron, quilting, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and a single beer of an evening. That was about it.

  “Problem was finding her. When I met her, she was already retired, driving an RV around the country, deciding where she’d settle. She loved it out here, but it was too expensive and we couldn’t really help. That was the last I knew of her. Location unknown—along with whether she was still alive.

  “I rented out my house and lived in the garage, and worked as a temp and searched. I found Grace Smith by gridding off the country, then checking every single Evangelical Lutheran congregation and every quilting association.”

  Billie was silent a moment, remembering the map on her garage wall, the big open kind kids crayon state by state in elementary school. She’d colored in her states after she’d exhausted their possibilities. Morning after California morning, she’d dialed, knowing she was insane, knowing there were faster, better methods to search if she’d had money or power, knowing she had neither and no alternative but to dial another number.

  “I’d say I’d contracted for a quilt from Grace Smith, a member of their congregation, and could they help me reach her so I could pay her the money I owed.”

  “You did this for the entire United States?”

  “I would have. But Grace has arthritis. I figured—I hoped—she’d be as kind to her fingers as she could. So I started in the south and worked north, leaving cold places like New England or Minnesota for last and never did get to them. Found her in North Carolina, my eighth state, in a retirement home, and I went there. Got a job on the custodial staff and cleaned Grace’s room when the quilters met, and I found it. It wasn’t even hidden. Right there, in one of those little Hallmark date books by the phone. She only had about ten numbers—doctors, her pastor, the pharmacy, some woman named Milly and one for a ‘C’ in Arizona.”

  Billie was surprised that you could hide in Arizona. Its sky was too open and wide, its landscape too rugged.

  Emma shook her head. In admiration, Billie hoped—if not for brains or technique, then for tenacity.

  “I hired a detective. I could afford two hours of his time, max. But he had access to a reverse phone directory, and I got Cameron’s address. He was calling himself Jay Cameron. I visited every day care, preschool, and nursery school around his area. Said I was moving there and needed to find a place for my little boy.

  “None of them had a Smith, a Jesse, a last-name Cameron. But one had a little boy with dyed black hair and his name was Mack—short, he told me he was supposed to say, for Mackenzie, last name, Dougal.” She shrugged. “So I took him home.” She put her hands up and out, signifying that was the end of the tale, although for her, the story never stopped, and almost a year later, every time she picked her son up from day care, or found him safe at home with the sitter it felt like a fresh victory. Cameron had disappeared again before the police reached his apartment.

  Her euphoria was always short-lived, including now, followed by the bleak heaviness of what a burden the happy unending represented. Finding her son. Keeping her son. Finding a way to keep her son. This job.

  With that, Billie’s cards were on the table and she had nothing left to play.

  The chiseled face across from her had no expression.

  Game over.

  Billie tried to control disappointment so fierce she could taste it. Life would go on, she reminded herself, even if not as hoped for. She’d find something else. With less allure, maybe, no challenge except not falling asleep on the job, but she would not let herself be defeated.

  It nonetheless hurt.

  “Pretty creative of you.” Emma nodded agreement with her own words. “But there are easier ways. Like finding out where the aunt’s social-security checks were being sent. Her social-security number—the place she’d retired from would have it on record.”

  “I didn’t know how to get it, though.”

  “You will.” Emma’s voice was flat and matter-of-fact.

  It took a while for the words and their meaning to make it across the cluttered desk, then Billie, who had been trying hard to control all emotions, gave up the effort. “Really?” she said, sounding so incredulous that she was sure she’d queered the whole thing. “I have the job?”

  Emma raised her eyebrows. “Long as you realize that it is not very dramatic most of the time. Doesn’t generally have a payoff like yours. Most of the time you’re stuck with the calling-every-Lutheran-Evangelical-church-in-the-country part, but it’s for a lawyer who’ll take the information and never tell you what he does with it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good,” Emma said. “Except…”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you say that to me, and you even mean it. You have a grip on reality. But somewhere in the back of your brain, a little voice is saying, ‘Oh, but sometimes it must get involved and tricky like in the movies.’”

  Billie looked down at her hands.

  “Be honest. If we’re going to be in this together, we have to learn to be honest with one another. You’re thinking, ‘Sometimes it must be your brain against another brain and it must get scary and set the adrenaline running till you can’t believe you’re involved in the whole thing. Sometimes.’ Am I right?”

  “Well…yes. You are.”

  Emma smiled. “Damn rig
ht I am. And damn right it does. Sometimes. Just barely often enough. Just like in the movies.”

  Three

  Today I am Gwyneth, the girl thought. Or I can try to be.

  She put her backpack on the damp earth as a cushion, then leaned against the rough comfort of a rock face as she considered how to get out of her life. Five days from turning eighteen and she felt frayed and used.

  On the meadow in front of her, weekend lords and ladies replayed the Middle Ages. She’d been invited to join in, re-create and relocate herself in their world. They had even put together a makeshift costume for her, but she still felt too lost to start out in any direction. She wanted to watch for a while.

  Serious rains had begun early this winter, making this clear day precious. The gold-brown meadow of summer now blazed green. She was amazed by how the earth repainted itself after the first downpour. She thought of the seeds buried below the surface, capsules of greenness, and envisioned them curled like fetuses through dry seasons and drought, waiting to be born and rain-baptized.

  And then to dry into brown ghosts that blew and burned in the winds of summer fires.

  She shook her head, physically dislodging the image and concentrating on the present, on the sunny field filled with furled banners, silvery shields, and chiffon scarves.

  People called these games make-believe. The same people called what she’d left ten miles away real. By sleight of hand, “home,” a rotting container tottering on barren ground—by some dark magic, that place passed as a quaint Queen Anne Victorian with shining bay windows edged with boxes of petunias, and veiled by camellias, fuchsia, and flowering plums.

  Inside, her so-called family was mottled and dark, gangrenous from the pressure of secrets and rage beneath their skin.

  The biggest lie was that they were a family. Not because of the steps and halfs before their relationships, but because family meant you were connected, had something in common. This group on the field had different last names and mostly lived apart one from the other. But they were family. The people in the house in San Rafael were boarders who swept their secrets into corners until they piled so high, they stained the walls.