Moonlight & Vines (39 page)

Laura appeared disappointed. But they always did, when it was put out in front of them like this. They thought you'd pulled back the curtain and shown the Wizard of Oz, working all the levers of his machine, not realizing that you'd let them into a deeper piece of magic than something they might buy for a few dollars in a place like the Pier.

“I. . . I thought it might be different,” Laura said.

“You wanted it all laid out for you, simple, right? Do this, and this'll happen. Do this, and it'll go like this. Like reading the sun signs in the newspaper, except personal.”

Laura shook her head. “It wasn't about me. It was about my brother.”

“Your brother?”

“I was hoping you could, you know, use your cards to tell me where he is.”

Cassie stopped shuffling her pack and laid it face down on the table.

“Your brother's missing?” she said.

Laura nodded. “It's been two years now.”

Cassie was willing to give people a show, willing to give them more than what they were asking for, sometimes, or rather what they were really asking for but weren't articulating, but she wasn't in the business of selling false hopes or pretences. Some people could do it, but not her. Not and sleep at night.

“Laura,” she said. “Girl. You've come to the wrong place. You want to talk to the police. They're the ones who deal with missing persons.”

And you'll have wanted to talk to them a lot sooner than now, she thought, but she left that unsaid.

“I did,” Laura told her.

Cassie waited. “And what?” she asked finally. “They told you to come here?”

“No. Of course not. They—a Sergeant Riley. He's been really nice, but I guess there's not much they can do. They say it's been so long and the city's so big and Dan could have moved away months ago. . . .”

Her eyes filled with tears and voice trailed off. She swallowed, tried again.

“I brought everything I could think of,” she said, holding up her knapsack for a moment before clutching it tightly to her chest again. “Pictures.
His dental records. The last couple of postcards I got from him. I. . .” She had to swallow again. “They have all these pictures of. . . of unidentified bodies and I. . . I had to look at them all. And they sent off copies of the stuff I brought—sent it off all over the country, but it's been over a month and I know Dan's not dead. . . .”

She looked up, her eyes still shiny with unshed tears. Cassie nodded sympathetically.

“Can I see one of the pictures?” she said.

A college-aged boy looked back at her from the small snapshot Laura took out of her knapsack. Not handsome, but there was a lot of character in his features. Short brown hair, high cheek bones, strong jawline. Something in his eyes reflected the same mix of loss and hopefulness that was now in his sister's. What had
he
been looking for?

“You say he's been missing for two years?” Cassie asked.

Laura nodded. Showing the picture seemed to have helped steady her.

“Your parents didn't try to find him?”

“They never really got along. It's—I don't know why. They were always fighting, arguing. He left the house when he was sixteen—as soon as he could get out. We live—we
lived
just outside of Boston. He moved into Cambridge, then maybe four years ago, he moved out here. When I was in college he'd call me sometimes and always send me postcards.”

Cassie waited. “And then he stopped?” she said finally.

“Two years ago. That's when I got the last card. I saw him a couple of months before that.”

“Do you get along with your parents?”

“They've always treated me just the opposite from how they treated him. Dan couldn't do anything right and I can't do anything wrong.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

“I. . .” Her features fell. “I just kept expecting to hear from him. I was finishing up my master's and working part-time at a restaurant and . . . I don't know. I was just so busy and I didn't realize how long it had really been until all of a sudden two years have gone by since he wrote.”

She kept looking at the table as she spoke, glancing up as though to make sure Cassie was still listening, then back down again. When she looked up now, she straightened her back.

“I guess it was pretty crazy of me to think you could help,” she said.

No, Cassie thought. More like a little sad. But she understood need
and how it could make you consider avenues you'd never normally take a walk down.

“Didn't say I wouldn't try,” she told Laura. “What do you know about what he was doing here?”

“The last time I saw him, all he could talk about were these horses, wild horses running along the shore of the lake.”

Cassie nodded encouragingly when Laura's voice trailed off once more.

“But there aren't any, are there?” Laura said. “It's all. . .” She waved her hand, encompassing the Pier, the big hotels, the Williamson Street Mall further up the beach. “It's all like this.”

“Pretty much. A little further west there's the Beaches, but that's all private waterfront and pretty upscale. And even if someone would let him onto their land, I've never heard of any wild horses out there.”

Laura nodded. “I showed his picture around at the racetrack and every riding stable I could find listed in the Yellow Pages, but no one recognized him.”

“Anything else?” Cassie asked.

She hesitated for a long moment before replying. “I think he was getting into drugs again.” Her gaze lifted from the card table to meet Cassie's. “He was pretty bad off for a few years, right after he got out of the house, but he'd cleaned up his act before he moved out here.”

“What makes you think he got back into them?”

“I don't know. Just a feeling—the last time I saw him. The way he was all fidgety again, something in his eyes. . . .”

Maybe that was what she'd seen in his picture, Cassie thought. That need in his eyes.

“What kind of drugs?” she asked.

“Heroin.”

“A different kind of horse.”

Laura sighed. “That's what Sergeant Riley said.”

Cassie tapped a fingernail, painted the same purple as her jeans, on the pack of cards that lay between them.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“The Y. It's all I can afford. I'm getting kind of low on money and I haven't had much luck getting a job.”

Cassie nodded. “Leave me that picture,” she said. “I'll ask around for you, see what I can find out.”

“But. . .”

She was looking at the cards. Cassie laid her hand over them and shook her head.

“Let me do this my way,” Cassie said. “You know the pay phone by the front desk? I'll give you a call there tomorrow, around three, say, and then we can talk some more.”

She put out her hand and Laura looked confused.

“Um,” she began. “How much do you want?”

Cassie smiled. “The picture, girl. I'll do the looking as a favor.”

“But I'm putting you to so much trouble—”

“I've been where you are,” Cassie said. “If you want to pay me back, do a good turn for someone else.”

“Oh.”

She didn't seem either confident or happy with the arrangement, but she left the picture and stood up. Cassie watched her make her way back through the other vendors, then slowly turned over three cards from the top of the deck. The first showed a set of works lying on worn blue denim. A jacket, Cassie decided. The second had a picture of an overpass in the Tombs. The last showed a long length of beach, empty except for a small herd of palominos cantering down the wet sand. In the background, out in the water, was the familiar shape of Wolf Island, outlined against the horizon.

Cassie lifted her head and turned to look at the lake. Beyond the end of the Pier she could see Wolf Island, the ferry on a return trip, halfway between the island and the mainland. The image on her card didn't show the city, didn't show docking facilities on the island, the museum and gift shop that used to be somebody's summer place. The image on her card was of another time, before the city got here. Or of another place that you could only reach with your imagination.

Or with magic.

Cassie and Joe had made arrangements to meet at The Rusty Lion that night. He'd been sitting outside on the patio waiting for her when she arrived, a handsome Native man in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, long black braid hanging down his back, a look in his dark eyes that was usually half solemn, half tomfool Trickster. Right now it was concerned.

“You don't look so good,” he said as she sat down.

She tried to make a joke of it. “People ask me why I stay with you,” she said, “and I always tell them, you just know how to make a girl feel special.”

But Joe would have none of it.

“You've got trouble,” he told her, “and that means we have trouble. Tell me about it.”

So she did.

Joe knew why she was helping this woman she'd never seen before. That was one of the reasons it was so good between them: Lots of things didn't need to be explained, they were simply understood.

“ 'Course you found Angie too late,” he said.

He reached across the table and took her hand, wanting to ease the sting of his words. She nodded and took what comfort she could from the touch of his rough palm and fingers. There was never any comfort in thinking about Angie.

“It might be too late for Laura's brother, too,” she said.

Joe shrugged. “Depends. The cops could be right. He could be long gone from here, headed off to some junkie heaven like Seattle. I hear they've got one of the best needle-exchange programs in the country and you know the dope's cheap. Twenty bucks'll buy you a 30 piece.”

Cassie nodded. “Except the cards . . .”

“Oh, yeah. The cards.”

The three cards lay on the table between them, still holding the images she'd found in them after Laura walked away. Joe had recognized the place where the horses were running the same as she had.

“Except I never heard of dope taking someone into the spiritworld before,” he said.

“So what does it mean?” Cassie asked.

He put into words what she'd only been thinking. “Either he's clean, or he's dead.”

She nodded. “And if he's clean, then why hasn't he called her, or sent another postcard? They were close.”

“She says.”

“You don't think so?”

Joe shrugged. “I wasn't the one who met her. But she waited two years.”

“I waited longer to go looking for Angie.”

There was nothing Joe could say to that.

It was a long time ago now.

Cassie shows them all, the white kids who wouldn't give her the time of day and the kids from the projects that she grew up with. She makes top of her graduating class, valedictorian, stands there at the commencement exercises, out in front of everybody, speech in hand. But when she looks out across the sea of mostly white faces, she realizes they still don't respect her and there's nobody she cares about sitting out there. The one person who ever meant something to her is noticeably absent.

Angie dropped out in grade nine and they really haven't seen each other since. Somewhere between Angie dropping out and Cassie resolving to prove herself, she and her childhood best friend have become more than strangers. They might as well never have known each other, they're so different.

So Cassie's looking out at the crowd. She wants to blow them off, but that's like giving in, so she follows through, reads her speech, pretends she's a part of the celebration, but she skips the bullshit parties that follow, doesn't listen to the phony praise for her speech, won't talk to her teachers who want to know what she plans to do next. She goes home and takes off that pretty new dress that cost her two months' working after school and weekends at McDonald's. Puts on sweats and hightops. Washes the makeup from her face and looks in the mirror. The face that looks back at her is soft, that of a little girl. The only steel is in the eyes.

Then she goes out looking for Angie, but Angie's not around any more. Word on the street is she went the junkie route, mixing crack and horse, selling herself to pay for her jones, long gone now or dead, and why would Cassie care anyway? It's like school, only in reverse. She's got no street smarts, no one takes her seriously, no one respects her.

She finds herself walking out of the projects, still looking for Angie, but keeping to herself now, walking all over the city, looking into faces but finding only strangers. Her need to find Angie is maybe as strong as Angie's was for the drugs, everything's focused on it, looking not only for Angie but for herself—the girl she was before she let other people's opinions become more important than her best friend. She's not ready to say
that her turning her back on Angie pushed her toward the street life, but it couldn't have helped either. But she does know that Angie had a need that Cassie filled and the drugs took its place. Now Cassie has a need and she doesn't know what's going to fill it, but something has to or she feels like she's just going to dry up and blow away.

She keeps walking further and further until one day that jones of hers takes her to an old white clapboard house just north of the city, front yard's got a bottle tree growing in the weeds and dirt, an old juju woman sitting on the porch looking at her with dark eyes, skin so black Cassie feels white. Cassie doesn't know which is scarier, the old woman or her saying, “ 'Bout time you showed up, girl. I'd just about given up on you.”

All Cassie can do is stand there, can't walk away, snared by the old woman's gaze. A breeze comes up and those bottles hanging in the tree clink against each other. The old woman beckons to her with a crooked finger and the next thing Cassie knows she's walking up to the porch, climbing the rickety stairs, standing right in front of the woman.