The Truth About Delilah Blue (28 page)

Victor hauled himself out of the cab, dropped his overnight bag onto the sidewalk, and pulled a handful of bills from his wallet. The fare said $17.50. He stared at the bills in his palm, trying to make sense of the math, then crumpled them into a ball and dropped them into the passenger seat. “Ah, take the whole bunch of it. I don’t need it where I’m going.”

He shuffled across the sidewalk in the dense shade of the trees lining the front of the redbrick building. Birds chattered at him from the smooth, mottled gray branches as he made his way past the dirty silver letters of the sign.

LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
.

HOLLYWOOD STATION
.

Inside, he marched up to the first desk he saw, slapped his bag on top of it, and said, “Put down the stapler, honey. You’re going to want to lock me the fuck up.”

She’d checked the entire house twice. She’d checked behind shower curtains, inside large closets, and behind the big armchair in the living room. Idiotic. It wasn’t as if the man was playing hide-and-seek and would jump out once she called “Ollie Ollie oxen free.”

The phone rang from the kitchen and Lila rushed to pick it up. When the female voice on the other end announced it was 911 calling, Lila felt her chest tighten.

“What happened to him?”

“To whom, ma’am?”

“My father. You’re calling about my father.”

“No, ma’am. We received a silent nine-one-one call from your address. Did you call for assistance?”

“No. No one called nine-one-one.”

“Someone did. Could it be the father you mentioned? Could he be in trouble?”

“He’s not here. I’ve been thinking of calling you, but no, he didn’t use the phone. Can I report to you if he’s gone missing?”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. An hour. Maybe a bit more. He’s fifty-three, but he sometimes lapses into memory loss.”

“How often does he have these lapses?”

“Not often. Not every day. But he had a bad morning. He’s gray-haired, has a short beard, is probably dressed in a shirt and tie and—”

“Let’s give it another half hour, honey. If you haven’t heard from him by then, call us and we’ll send out a car. But you’re sure no one called for help? Is there anyone else in the house?”

Kieran’s question rang through her mind.
How do you call 911?

“K
IERAN
?” L
ILA MARCHED
from room to room, furious. It was something a toddler would do—call 911 as a joke. A seven-year-old—nearly eight—should definitely know better.

“Kieran?” Following the same route she’d taken not three minutes earlier, Lila searched the house. “Are you hiding?”

The girl was nowhere to be found. Damn her hide-andseek. As if no one had anything better to do than drop everything whenever the whim struck that little blond head.

“Kieran, you come out right this minute, you hear me? This is not funny!” Loud voices rang from up on the street again. Ignoring them, she checked the bedrooms one last time, this time peeking under beds. When she got to her own room, she got down on all fours to check behind the dusty boxes and stacks of art paper. No giggling child underneath.
As she climbed to her feet, she noticed the nail scissors splayed open on the bottom bunk just waiting to pierce the flesh of the next person who plopped down for a rest. She set them on the night table and, for the first time, noticed the carton of milk.

Of course.

It was why Kieran wanted art supplies: to add another face to her growing collection.

Angry at Kieran, angrier still at her mother for encouraging this macabre hobby, she snatched up the empty carton.

This one wasn’t cut apart at all. This one had a four-color photo of a child taped on one side. At the top, carefully printed in black marker, was the word missing on torn masking tape. Beneath it was,

NAME: KIERAN SCARLETT LOVETT
-
MOORE
.

AGE
: 7–9/10.

And sure enough, the child fixed to the carton, the child under the word missing, was a smiling Kieran, draped in strand after strand of necklaces from the jeweler down on Sunset.

“KIERAN!”

A
FTER CHECKING EVERY
inch of the property, Lila pulled open the shed door. It wasn’t likely Kieran would have dared enter; she’d seemed fairly repulsed by it earlier in the day. The door croaked its annoyance and Lila poked her head inside. It was dark, but missing planks allowed a few dusty shards of light to crack into the blackness, allowing her to see there was nothing inside but the broken lawnmower and a few unused rakes and shovels. A freshly oiled child’s bike.

She slammed the door.

More loud voices from up on the street. Kieran maybe. Or Victor. Or both.

Lila raced up steps two at a time to find no sign of her sister. Instead, she found herself staring face-to-face with Keith Angel, red-faced and spitting mad. He took one look at her and waved toward his Prius. His deeply scratched, heavily keyed Prius.

“That crazy-ass father of yours! He thinks he can mess with me? Thinks he can go around hacking up my property?” The guy pulled a golf club out of his backseat and whacked it against his palm. Lila saw the deeply etched line wrapped around his car and took a step back, unsure what he might do.

“Keith, stop,” said Corinne, trying to pull the five iron from his hand. “Remember
you
manage your anger—it doesn’t manage you.”

“Shut up, Corinne.” He stormed the 240Z, raising his club in the air and bringing it down square on the rear bumper with a crash.

“Don’t!” said Lila. “We’ll pay for your damage. Don’t do this.”

“Crazy old prick!”

“Please stop!”

“With his pompous-ass notes!” Whack.

Crack.

Smash.

Pieces of Victor’s shattered taillights pelted Lila’s shins. He hacked and sliced until the rear bumper broke loose and the back windshield shattered. With his wife hanging from his arm, he cracked off the license plate.

Finally, sweating and heaving with exertion, he gave in to his wife’s pleading. She took him in her arms and
held him a moment, murmured something in his ear, and started to guide him back toward the house. After three or four steps, he spun around, roared like a plane about to take off, and ran at the car one last time, this time hoofing the tail end with his foot.

A clunk.

The sound of gravel.

The car shifted, creeped forward an inch or two in the shattered glass, then paused before crawling forward again. Toward the road’s edge. Toward the front yard. With the back bumper dragging in the dirt, the car started to roll.

It had popped out of gear.

Because of her terrible driving, the car was now creeping toward the ridge. There was no barrier. Nothing to stop it from going over.

She lunged at the door handle. Locked. She slapped her pockets. Empty. She’d dropped the keys onto the porch railing earlier.

There was no way to prevent what was going to happen.

Lila looked down at the shed below. Her mother’s voice rang in her mind:
Make it your magical playhouse, Kieran
. Lila’s own shush.
Her bike’s inside
.

But she’d checked the little shack. There’d been no sign of Kieran.

Lila watched the front grille creep closer to the edge. The car was going over. Right over the cliff. Onto the shed.

When Lila was younger, smaller, she used to climb up to the rafters of the shed. The walls didn’t quite meet the roof and it left a nice gap and made her perch the most perfect place to spy on whoever might be wandering about in the yard.

The perfect hiding place for a little sister who might be feeling ignored.

Because she’d grown up with a missing sibling.

And watched people hunt.

Saw posters being made.

She became obsessed with missing children.

So much so, she became one herself. A child on the back of a milk carton.

Lila bolted down the steps.

Tearing into the shed, Lila looked up and saw the blackened outline of a figure crouched on a fat beam. Frantic, she screeched for her sister, pulled her down into her arms. She pressed Kieran to her chest, stumbling out into the daylight as bits of debris pelted the cedar rooftop from the cliff’s edge above.

Just as the girls tumbled onto the solid steps of the cabin porch, the nose of the car started to tilt downward. Dirt and rocks careened downhill in miniature avalanches as the tires rolled over the edge, spinning uselessly in the air. For a moment the car teetered there and seemed as if it might hold, but with a mighty groan, with the Angels looking on, horrified, the 240Z tipped over the slope and smashed down onto the little green shed.

They watched as a huge cloud of dust and debris mushroomed up the hill, billowed outward toward them. Scrambling, coughing, they both ran to the far end of the porch and squatted down again to gawk at the flattened shed, the mangled car, the spinning wheels.

Lila pulled Kieran onto her lap. “What were you thinking, Kieran?” she whispered, pressing her face into the dust-covered softness of the child’s neck. “What on earth were you thinking?”

Kieran didn’t speak.

Lila hugged her hard, holding her until she squirmed to get away. “You wanted to be a milk carton kid?”

Kieran grew still. For the first time since Lila met her, she looked like the child she was. “People miss them. Everybody looks for them.”

“That’s what this is about? Because we forget to look for you?”

“Mummy talked about you all the time. Every night we sat on my bed and asked the universe to find you.”

“Not because I was loved more than you. Just because the whole thing was terrible and sad and Mummy missed me. Kieran Scarlett, you are adored. Don’t you know that?”

The girl tugged on her bangs and Lila reached up to stop her. “I love your bangs off your face. And I love your school uniform that isn’t a school uniform. I love that you care about all these lost children and quote scientists so you can get to bed on time. If you were gone, a part of me—a
huge
part of me—would die. Is that what you want?”

Silence.

“Do you need any more proof than me risking death to save you?”

Kieran stared at the crumpled car, upside down with steam leaking from its great belly. “Delilah?”

“Yes?”

“How come you never call me Kiki like Mummy does?”

“Doesn’t really seem like you like it.”

She rested her head on Lila’s shoulder and tapped her small fingers on her sister’s neck. “I don’t.”

The neighbors, the firefighters, and the police stood around staring at the morass, while plaid-shirted men with heavy chains in their hands made grand plans to extricate the demolished vehicle. It was more commotion and intrusion than Lila could take just then. She hadn’t thought they’d tow the car up and away so fast. You’d have thought, with such a mess of twisted metal and such a difficult slope to impede rescue, the city would have let the car sit a few days. But damaged gas tanks were nothing if not persnickety, and the Hollywood Hills were nothing if not flammable, so specialized towing operators were busy chaining up the Datsun to haul it up and out of the front yard.

Elisabeth was back. Lila hadn’t asked how it went at the lawyer’s office. At this point she didn’t really care.

“I can’t believe no one was hurt,” gushed Elisabeth as
the three of them sat cross-legged on the porch. “It’s a miracle. Plain and simple.”

“Delilah saved me,” Kieran bragged from where she was twirling in the grass, holding a long twisted stick like a wand, granting wishes to the clover heads, the bumblebees, the dead leaves.

Lila watched her sister. Kieran might not have been abducted, but she was every bit as needy and insecure as Lila. With Elisabeth, a child could never just be a child. To protect herself from a mother who was still a child herself, that child either becomes a wild thing, bold and feral and impulsive, the sort of being you’d imagine being found at the side of the road, the kind of child like Delilah Blue Lovett, who chugs rum-laced backwash in bars and throws herself down in parking lots and begs for fancy bicycles that would—just days later—wind up getting her abducted. And grows up to strip bare for an invisible degree, scribble on her shoes, and steal bracelets.

Or that child hurtles straight toward her adult self, like Kieran. She becomes her own little parent, the exact opposite of her mother. She takes no risks at all, unless it is to prove she’s worth risking everything for.

Either way, the outcome was the same. Both girls lost out on childhood. Elisabeth lived it for them.

A meaty cop with mirrored sunglasses and a rusty goatee wandered over to where Elisabeth and Lila stood on the verandah. He grinned at Kieran.

“You’re one lucky lady.”

Elisabeth pulled the child onto her lap. “And I’m one lucky mother.”

“Would have been a terrible day for this city if it weren’t for her big sister. You have two very special daughters.”

A smile was in order, but Lila didn’t have the energy.

“That I do,” said Elisabeth, reaching out for Lila’s hand.

“All right.” He looked at Lila. “The removal crew has everything under control. You’ve given your statement, so I’m going to head next door. Get their story. Like I said, I would recommend you press charges. It’s never good when people become vigilantes. You’ll let me know?”

“I will. Later, when I can think straight.” She was starting to sound like her father.

“I’m off then. Everything seems okay here for a bit.”

No, Lila wanted to say.

Nothing is okay here.

Instead, she said, “My father has been having episodes of dementia. He’s been out wandering for I don’t know how long. Maybe two hours. Maybe more.” The cop took down Victor’s description and the house phone number, told her to stay at the house to wait for information, and walked up to the road promising to notify all officers in the area.

Elisabeth let out a quick sigh. “Doesn’t that just figure. Just when I make all my arrangements and the police are set to arrive, he isn’t here. Trust Victor Lovett to screw this up for me too.”