Chance (18 page)

At exactly five thirty-five, the late light growing ever longer and Chance still at his desk, there was a call on his personal line. He saw that it was from his soon-to-be ex-wife. He did not like seeing this and, not liking it, took the call.

“Is Nicky with
you
?” Carla asked.

He heard the fear in her voice, as in answering to the negative he could feel it in his own.

W
ITHIN AN
hour he was at the house. It was the first time he’d actually been inside since moving out and he was shocked to find the place in such disarray. Boxes filled the living room. Closet doors opened upon empty spaces, gutted and boned. Nothing was as it had been. Carla had apparently made the decision that while continuing to look for buyers, the house should be leased. “We can’t afford to live here,” she told him, in response to his taking the place in, her manner accusatory.

A mountain bike, its tires caked in dried mud, sat in the nook off the living room that had once housed his piano. He took this for the dyslexic personal trainer’s but found little point in going there. Nicky had been expected more than three hours ago. She had been seen at the school talking to some friends, none of whom seemed able to say when exactly she was last seen or where she was. Calls to friends’ houses had proven fruitless. And of course there had been no calls in on the part of Nicky. Carla, never a model of restraint, had called both Nicky’s school and the San Francisco Police Department to file a missing persons report.

Chance was at a loss. There was a voice at one shoulder saying surely there was some simple explanation for all of this. They would learn it
at any moment. The phone would ring. Nicky would check in. The call to the police was certainly an overreaction on the part of his ever overreacting soon-to-be ex-wife. The voice at his other shoulder said things he didn’t want to hear, the stuff of any parent’s darkest imaginings, and that was only the beginning as the voice of bad tidings morphed into that of Raymond Blackstone, looming above him in the restaurant, lit by party lights. “A predatory species,” Raymond Blackstone had said, and said again now in the ruins of Chance’s former house that was like visiting the scene of a wreck on the high seas, the water swirling with the flotsam and jetsam of a life come to ruin. He had never felt more impotent or more driven by murderous unfixed rage. “What did the police say?” he asked.

“Who was the last to see her? The names of friends . . . They wanted to know if she had a boyfriend. They wanted to know if she uses drugs.” Carla began to cry. She was a slight, energetic woman, in one former incarnation an aspiring yoga instructor before abandoning that to become an aspiring marriage counselor and then on to the aspiring photographer that, to the best of Chance’s knowledge, she was today.

He circled her with an arm. She leaned briefly into him then pulled away, her eyes puffy, ringed in red, her face framed in the light brown curls Chance had once found so attractive. “Do we even
know
?” he asked. “Who was the last to see her?”

“Shawn. But all Shawn said was that she had seen her walking near the marina, that she was by herself and that she assumed she was on her way home.”

“Do we have Shawn’s number?”

“I already called. So did the police.”

“Then we
do
have a number.”

“Are you even listening to anything I’m saying?” Carla asked.

“Yes, but I’m not going to just sit here. I can’t. If there’s someone to talk to I want to talk to them.”

She was looking for the number when the call came in. It was Nicky. She was alive, less than a mile from home, but she was also in tears, in need of a ride. Someone had punched her in the face and taken her purse.

Chance went. Carla stayed to make the appropriate calls. He found
her at a gas station on Lombard. She had no money. The owner, a Pakistani gentleman of perhaps fifty with scant English, had let her use the station’s phone. She was seated just outside the office in a metal folding chair, looking fairly stoic as Chance drove up. It was a moment or two before she spotted his car and him getting out, walking to meet her. At which point she more or less broke down. She’d fallen to sobbing in the time it took for Chance to reach her.

He pulled her to his chest then held her at arm’s length to look at her face. There was some redness on one side, the beginning of a slight bruise at the edge of her right eye. Her pupils were round and symmetrical. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“How do I look?”

“Like someone slapped you. Do you have any pain, is what I’m asking.” He raised his hand. “Follow my finger.”

“Daddy . . .”

“Indulge me for one second.”

She made a point of looking away. “Can we just
go
? Please.”

He was aware of the owner watching them from the open doorway. “Thank you,” Chance said. “Thank you for letting her use your phone.”

The man nodded and raised a hand, as if to say it was nothing.

“Okay,” Chance said. “We will
assume
your pupils are reactive.” They started toward the car. “I
will
look more closely at home.”

“I’m fine,” she said. She’d stopped crying, exasperation and what she seemed now to have taken for some public humiliation at the hands of her father having apparently trumped whatever else she’d been feeling when he drove up.

They were by now on their way home, passing among the trees of Golden Gate Park—the route she had always favored. “Will you tell me about it?” he asked.

“Some asshole hit me and took my purse.”

“With his fist or an open hand?”

“Open hand,” she said, her voice reduced to the point of being nearly inaudible.

“Where did this happen?”

“I was on my way to the yogurt place.”

“On Chestnut Street?”

She nodded. “Do we have to talk about all of this right now?”

“We have to talk about it at some point, Nicky. We need to know what happened. You were three hours late.”

No response.

“Your mother was calling all over, the school, the police . . .”

He could hear her groan. “How are you feeling?” he asked. “I want to know that at least.”

A moment passed. She reached to touch his arm. “I’m fine, Daddy. Really. Thanks for coming.” They rode another two blocks in silence. “It’s just so gross,” she said.

“What?” Chance asked.

“Everything.”

They found on arrival a disturbing number of cars parked before the house, including one black-and-white patrol car, the words
SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT
in gold lettering across its door. “Jesus Christ,” Nicky said, with a weariness that cut to the bone. It was, given the enormity of the world’s sorrow, a small thing, yet it cut him all the same. If the Almighty could note a sparrow’s fall, why should not a father lament the signs of a child’s passage from innocence, however incremental? They parked half a block down and trudged back up the hill together.

The police wanted a signed report on the mugging. As Nicole and Carla sat down at the dining room table to give them one, Chance moved to the front porch in hopes of being alone. He very much needed to collect his thoughts. What he got was Holly Stein, the principal of Havenwood, rushing to join him.

Holly Stein was an impeccable woman of perhaps fifty with the air of a Berkeley professor. “I’m wondering,” she said, “if we might have a moment alone.”

It felt to him that they were already alone but Holly Stein seemed to have other ideas, indicating by way of a head nod toward the open doorway, toward his wife and daughter seated at the table with a uniformed officer, that some further removal was yet required.

“We can use the study,” Chance told her.

The study was, like the house, full of ghosts and cardboard boxes but missing furniture. “It’s been a while since I was called before the principal,” Chance said, closing the door behind them. The missing furniture in this particular room was that sold to the Russian under false pretexts.

“You’d be surprised how often I hear that one,” she said.

“Not original, you’re telling me.”

Holly smiled. “We’re concerned about Nicole,” she said.

“Yes, it’s been a rough day. Thank you for being here.”

“It
has
been rough. I’m so sorry. How is she?”

“Shaken. I think she’ll be fine.”

“Who wouldn’t be shaken? My God.”

They stood for a moment in silence, during which time Chance noted a number of what appeared to be exercise books piled along one wall, those and a rather sleek gym bag, half open. The fucker’s taken my study, Chance thought. He nearly said it aloud.

“There is another matter we need to discuss,” Holly said. “I’m sorry it has to be now, but maybe now is as good a time as any.”

Chance was only half listening. He was still thinking about the dyslexic personal trainer prowling about the premises. The word
marijuana
caught his attention.

“It was only a stem. In her art box . . .”

“Someone was going through her things?” The question was more or less reflexive.

The principal of Havenwood stiffened noticeably. “She left it in her last-period classroom,” she told him. “Under the circumstances . . .”

Chance nodded. He’d taken to chewing on the inside of his lip.

“As you know, the school’s policy is zero tolerance when it comes to drugs of any kind.”

“I am aware of it,” Chance said.

Holly nodded. A moment passed.

“I guess I’m not quite sure what you’re saying,” Chance said. “Are you telling me this because you wanted me to know? Or are you telling me she’s being kicked out of school?”

“Zero tolerance is just that,” Holly said. “We’re still talking about it, but yes, expulsion is a very real possibility.”

They stood with that, the very real possibility of things.

“And of
course
I wanted you to know. Whatever happens with the school . . . you need to know what’s what.”

Chance nodded. He was thinking about what was what.

She affected a look of deep concern. “All of this that’s going on . . .” she added, treading lightly but treading nonetheless, “. . . it can be very hard on a child . . .”

“The divorce.”

“Yes. And I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But we may see things from our end not so obvious at home, especially when there are
two
homes. You may not be aware that Nicole’s grades have dropped. Classes she was getting A’s and B’s in last year . . . If things continue apace, she’s on track for C’s and in one case something less.”

“I’m sorry. I was
not
aware of that.”

She allowed herself a deep breath. “What I’m seeing is that there may be a pattern developing—falling grades, signs of drug use . . .”

“I would hardly call a stem in her art box ‘signs of drug use.’ ”