Second Chance (2 page)

A peal of feminine laughter rang out somewhere in the
house. It made Phil Pearson start in his chair. He glanced toward the
hall almost desperately, as if he longed to be near his wife again—to
make it up with her.

"I may be overreacting," he said, looking
quickly back at me, looking to see if I'd caught his mind wandering.
"Still I'd feel better if you could find Kirsten?

"I can try," I told him.

"
Good," he said, rubbing his hands together
nervously. "Good."

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After finishing with the Pearsons I went to my
apartment on Ohio Avenue, packed an overnight bag, called the
airport, and booked a seat on Delta for two p.m. I would gain an hour
on the flight, so I figured on arriving at O'Hare about the same time
that I'd left Cincinnati. Pearson had promised to call Kirsten's
roommate, a girl named Marnee Thompson, to let her know I'd be
coming. He said he'd contact the university too, although I didn't
expect him to find anyone home on a Sunday afternoon during Christmas
break. Before I left his house, he gave me duplicate keys to
Kirsten's apartment in case the roommate was out.

In spite of the Brent Spence traffic and the
inevitable slowdown at the cut of the Ft. Mitchell hill, I managed to
get to the Delta terminal by one-thirty. The snow had stopped falling
by then, and the temperature had risen enough to turn the roadside
ice to slush. I'd been worried that the bad weather might delay the
flight, but the attendant at the Delta booth said the only delay
would be on the Chicago end—at O'Hare.

With a half hour to kill I walked down to one of the
boarding area bars and ordered up the usual round of artillery. It
was a short flight, so I settled on two double Scotches, straight up.
If they didn't kill the preflight jitters, I promised myself a third
shot on the plane.

"You said two doubles?" the bartender
asked.

"I don't like airplanes," I told him. "I
don't understand them. And I don't want to discuss it."

He served up the booze and left me alone.

Pearson had given me a
photograph of his daughter, a high school snap. I dug it out of my
coat pocket and took a look at it between swallows of Scotch. Kirsten
was a studious-looking, half-pretty girl with dark brown hair and her
father's blue piercing eyes. If I'd known more about her, if Pearson
had been more forthcoming about her "problems," past and
present, I might have been able to make something specific of the
vaguely hostile, vaguely damaged look of those eyes. But Phil Pearson
had kept his daughter's history to himself—at least enough of it to
make it next to impossible for me to personalize her. The girl in the
photo could have been anyone's troubled daughter. Given the fact that
I hadn't liked the man, I decided it was better that way.

* * *

The flight to Chicago was mercifully short. We
arrived at O'Hare about forty minutes after we took ofl: and were
backed up on the ground for another forty minutes. I didn't
understand the guy sitting next to me, who kept complaining about the
long wait on the runway.

"We're on the ground!" I finally said to
him. "What the hell's the matter with you?"

It was two-thirty central time when I got out of the
terminal and caught a cab to Hyde Park. It had been snowing heavily
in Chicago, and the traffic on the Eisenhower was bumper-to-bumper
all the way to the Dan Ryan. By the time we got to the 51st Street
exit it was a quarter of four.

I said to the cabbie, "It took longer to get
from O'Hare to the south side than it did to fly from Cincinnati to
Chicago."

"What are you going to do," he said
philosophically. "It's Christmas, and this ain't Cincinnati."

Kirsten Pearson's apartment was on 54th Street near
Blackstone. The building was a three-story brownstone tenement, the
third in a dismal block of brownstones. The stained facades of the
tenements, the dirty snow, the bare bent maples planted in the
sidewalk boxes, reflected the raw grey of the winter sky. A few
months of that kind of weather would have left me feeling just as
raw.

The outer door of the Pearson girl's apartment house
opened onto a tiled vestibule. The framed-glass inner door was
locked, but I could see through it into a wainscoted lobby with a
dark wood staircase leading to the upper floors. The vestibule
smelled like dust and heat and cat piss. I could have used one of the
keys that Pearson had given me, but I didn't want to startle anyone.
So I pressed an intercom button on the side wall.

A girl answered in a sharp, distracted voice. "Yes?
Who is it?"

"My name's Harry Stoner. I'm working for Phil
Pearson, Kirsten Pearson's father."

"I know who you are," the girl said
ominously.

A moment went by then a buzzer went off, unlocking
the door. I stepped into the dark foyer. A red-haired girl with a
pale, starved, willfully unhappy-looking face appeared at the head of
the stairs. She held a book in one hand and a pair of tortoiseshell
glasses in the other. It was obvious that she was annoyed by the
interruption.

"Marnee Thompson?" I said to her.

She nodded. "You're the detective?"

"I'm the detective."

Marnee Thompson studied me for a moment, bouncing the
glasses in her hand. "Kirsten isn't here, you know. I told Phil
that last week."

"Have any idea where she's gone?"

"No. I'm not in charge of her."

"No one said you were."

"Tell it to Phil," the girl said bitterly.
"You realize this is ridiculous, don't you? And borderline
illegal? Kirsty's almost twenty years old. I mean, why do they have
to send
detectives after her? It's
humiliating?

"Her father's worried."

"Her father's an asshole. Everyone else knows
it. Now you do, too."

"Miss Thompson, I'm just trying to do a job. If
you'll let me come up and look around, I can be out of your hair in a
few minutes."

The girl glanced behind her, toward an open door at
the top of the staircase. "All right," she said, turning
back to me.

"But make it quick."

I started up the stairs.

The apartment was spare, functional, serious as all
hell. Board-and-brick bookshelves stuifed with books and weighted
down on top with more books, an easel-desk with a gooseneck lamp
clamped to it, a stool in front of the desk, a Camus poster on one
wall, a Vermeer print on another, a Goodwill chair with claw legs and
a silk throw over it, a gas hearth with a droopy asparagus fern in
the fireplace, a tatty rug. No other furnishings. Through an archway
I could see a bedroom, with a mattress lying on the floor and a
mirror full of grey winter sky propped against the inner wall.

The bare utility of the place was like an
advertisement for Marnee Thompson, for her own seriousness and
respectable student poverty. But Kirsten Pearson had lived there,
too. And I couldn't help wondering where she had fit in. There was no
second desk in the front room, and when I thumbed through several of
the books on top of the bookshelf they all had Marnee Thompson's
bookplate in them.

"Her room was at the end of the hal1," the
girl said, as if she'd read my mind. "She preferred it that
way."

"Preferred what?" I said, putting down a
green-and-black paperback copy of
Dubliners
.

"The privacy."

Marnee Thompson walked over to the armchair and sat
down. The girl had a style of her own—that early in life—a blunt
self-assertiveness that was snotty but impressive, too.

If Kirsten Pearson had identity problems, I figured
this one'd probably been good for her.

"How long have you and Kirsten lived here?"

"Since September." She put on her
tortoiseshell glasses, tilted her head, and studied me with pale blue
eyes. "She could have lived anywhere, you know. Phil has plenty
of money."

She said it like a boast, as if she were telling me
that, instead of Phil's money, Kirsten had chosen her.

"Where did you two meet?" I said, sitting
down on the desk stool across from her.

"We were in several classes together, last year.
We hit it off so well we decided to set up this place during the
summer, but . . . Kirsty couldn't move in until the fall."

"Kirsten had some trouble last year, didn't
she?"

The girl didn't say anything.

"She had to leave school?"

"She was taken out of school, yes," Marnee
Thompson said.

"By her father?"

She nodded.

I studied her grave young face, softly shaded by the
fading window light. Her pale hollow cheeks, her high brow, her blue
lashless eyes, reminded me of the Vermeer on the living room wall—a
woman counting pearls. "If Kirsten's having trouble again, I
might be able to help."

"How? By taking her away again?"

"I've been hired to find her, Marnee. Not to
bring her home."

The girl gave me a wary look.

"Think about it." I got up from the stool
and walked down the hall to Kirsten's bedroom.

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The door at the end of the hall was closed but
unlocked. Kirsten, or someone who had lived there before her, had
tacked a little handwritten warning to it: NO SECOND CHANCES. I went
in anyway.

It was life on a different block in Kirsten's room.
Dirty clothes hung from the open drawers of an oak dresser and
dribbled out the door of a closet. Books, stacked like old
newspapers, climbed in crazy towers four feet up each wall. Typed
papers, dozens of them, were scattered thickly across the top of a
desk, on the desk chair, and the floor. A portable TV with a
brassiere dangling from its antenna sat on a stool across from an
unmade bed. An ashtray full of cigarette butts, Winstons, was lying
on the pillow of the bed. A Soap Opera Digest nestled in the blankets
at its feet. A urinous smell of mildewed paper, cigarette smoke, and
unwashed flesh hung heavily in the air.

After the strict order of Marnee Thompson's life, the
rank clutter of Kirsten Pearson's bedroom startled me. I knew it was
just a messy college kid's messy room, but it still startled me—the
way a crime scene can get to you. I had the unmistakable feeling that
violence had occurred there.

I did my job anyway, going through the closet first,
sifting the soiled clothes on the floor, searching the pockets of the
blouses and jeans left on the hangers. I didn't find anything but
loose change and wadded-up tissues.

I tried the top drawer of the desk next and found an
address book in the rubble of pencil stubs, coins, paper clips, and
linty ballpoint pens. None of the names meant anything to me, except
for Phil Pearson's. I found what looked like a manuscript in the side
drawer, boxed and sealed with tape. Someone had written "We have
to talk about this!" on top of the box and underlined the words
twice to show he meant it. I put the box aside with the address book.

There were some postcards under the manuscript—a
dozen of them from a dozen different midwestern towns. Yellow
Springs. Madison. Antioch. Columbus. College towns. The postcards
were the sort of things that motels give away, along with letterhead
stationery and embossed pencils. Each one pictured a mundane motel
facade with the words "Greetings From" printed in a comer.
Each one was signed "Ethan." Whoever Ethan was, he had
moved around over the past year. The oldest card, from The Green
Gables Motel in Forest Park, Missouri, was postmarked November 16,
1988. The latest, November 5, 1989, from The Bluegrass Motel in Ft.
Thomas, Kentucky.

I put the postcards with the manuscript and the
address book and moved on to the dresser. A vanity mirror and a glass
dish were sitting on top of it. The dish had held makeup judging from
the traces of face powder on the glass, but I cou1dn't find a makeup
kit in the drawer. I did come across an empty birth control pill
dispenser, however, stashed among some underwear.

I also found an old photograph of Papa Pearson,
facedown in the panties. Or half a photo. The picture had been torn
lengthwise, indicating that someone else had been photographed along
with Pearson—someone Kirsten apparently hadn't liked.

I left the photo where I'd found it and took the
postcards, address book, and manuscript with me back into the living
room. Marnee Thompson was still sitting silently in the Goodwill
chair. When she saw the booty I was carrying, she looked dismayed.

"You can't have that," she said, leaping to
her feet.

"That's Kirsty's."

"I don't want to take it, Marnee. I want to talk
about it."

I put the stuff on Marnee's desk and sat on the
stool. The girl sat back down slowly on the chair. It was almost dark
outside, and the gooseneck lamp, lighting the desktop and Kirsten's
belongings, was the main light in the room. Marnee Thompson stared
forlornly at the little pile of spotlighted things—her friend's
things.