She's Not There (8 page)

Saturday morning Lisa spent more time than usual—for a Saturday—on her appearance. Her hair, newly shaded by Roland to a soft ash-blonde with pale platinum and golden blonde highlights, fell to her shoulders in loosely curved layers. The gray slacks and white Irish knit sweater she wore complemented her figure. She donned a pair of mid-heeled boots, high enough to be fashionable but not too difficult to walk in.

When she arrived at the diner to meet Eric, she glimpsed her reflection in the window as she walked toward the door. She looked damn good. She’d seen a photo of Eric’s wife. The woman’s beauty was startling. Lisa suspected that was what had intimidated her into fussing over her appearance.

Waiting for her at a table near the back, Eric had a newspaper opened in front of him. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt with thin blue stripes covered by a pale blue sweater that contrasted with his dark hair. When she joined him, she noticed he wore a pleasant, woodsy cologne—must not have had his first cigar of the day. A waitress hurried over to pour her coffee, asking if they wanted breakfast. They ordered omelets with side orders of pancakes.

Lisa brought out their list and told him she’d made three appointments for the day and explained that she planned on using her book on abused women as a cover story for interviewing the friends and relatives of the missing women. The book was a textbook for clinicians on treating abused women, and had been in the planning stages for nearly a year.

“I’ve enlisted Shannon’s help. She’s the assistant to the attorney I share the first floor with. She’s good at computer research and is going to look up the women’s spouses and boyfriends to see if any of them are currently in jail.”

“I suppose if any of them are, they’ll need to be interviewed, too.” He sipped his coffee. “I should probably be the one to do that. I think they’d open up to me because of my background.”

He was making decisions already. “That may be true, but we’ll need to discuss it with the others when we meet tomorrow.”

“You’re right. I already irritated TJ when I insisted that the two of you don’t do interviews without Jeff or me. She thinks of this as her project, you know. I do like to humor her. Although I can’t deny it’ll be hard for me to sit back and act like a worker-bee.”

Lisa had to respect his openness. “You’re right about TJ, but I’m sympathetic to her resistance to our agreement of never going out alone. I made these appointments Thursday night. One of the women I called lives close to me in Oconomowoc. She was eager to talk. It was hard not to just run over there and meet with her right away. We have an appointment with her at one.”

“Good. That’ll give us time to devour all that food we ordered.”

As if on cue, the food arrived, and they tucked into it with no more talk of missing women, jailed spouses, or interviews.

Lisa rode with Eric in the old fifty-two Cadillac that had been his father’s.

“I try to take it out at least once a week,” he explained.

The car looked like new. Riding in it, Lisa felt like she’d drifted back in time and should have been wearing a full skirt fluffed with crinolines, topped by a perky, ducktail hairdo a la Doris Day.

They drove to the first address, located in an old section of Waukesha. It turned out to be an aging apartment building on a street lined with mature elm trees that had somehow escaped the Dutch Elm scourge.

After a jerky ride to the fourth floor in a tinny old elevator, they entered a dim corridor reeking of bacon, coffee and used diapers. The muffled sounds of voices, cartoons, and laughing children emanated from the thin walls.

Elaine Blume appeared hastily dressed in tan slacks and a white blouse. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, was tied back into a ponytail, and her sockless feet were shod in a pair of red moccasins. Her daughter, Colleen Hamill, had been missing for nearly three years.

“You must be Lisa,” she said, and asked them to have a seat. Like the rest of the apartment, the brown velveteen sofa they sat on was worn, but clean. The well-used furnishings looked like they had come with the apartment and barely survived all the years of tenant turnover.

Lisa introduced Eric and explained why they needed the information about her daughter. “What I have to ask you first is whether you’ve heard from your daughter since she went missing or if you know whether anyone else has.”

Eyes shiny with unshed tears, Elaine said, “It’s still hard to talk about. She and I were so close, and my life fell apart after she disappeared. Her father left me about a year later. Not that I blame him, I was depressed for a long time. But then he hired an expert divorce lawyer who made sure I was left with nothing. I never saw it coming. Now I work second shift at the plastics plant down the street for ten dollars an hour and can barely pay the rent on this crummy apartment.” She pulled out a rumpled tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

“I’m so sorry, you didn’t come here to listen to me go on about my problems. No, I haven’t heard from Colleen, and . . .” she stopped for a few seconds to wipe her nose, “I know I would have if she was still alive.”Feeling terrible about adding to the woman’s pain, Lisa asked, “Do you have any idea what could have happened to her?”

Elaine sniffed, drying her eyes. “Well, her husband was a terrible man, but I never thought he did anything to her like the police suggested. I knew he hit her sometimes, and she always forgave him. I don’t think he would have caused her any serious injuries, at least none bad enough to keep her from working. Colleen was his meal ticket. She worked as a dental hygienist and made good money. Joe worked construction and he was always happiest when he was laid off. I suspected he chose jobs that would be as temporary as possible. I never understood what she saw in him, but he was good looking and charming when he wanted to be.”

“Elaine, do you know where Joe is now?” Eric asked.

“I haven’t heard from him in years. But I did hear a rumor that he’s living in Milwaukee with a divorcee and her two kids. She gets big alimony payments; that’s right up his alley.”

Lisa noted the source of the rumor and asked Elaine for a photo of her daughter.

“We won’t take up any more of your time.” Lisa handed Elaine her card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

An unscheduled stop was in Elm Grove, an upscale area north of Brookfield. The street they turned into was lined with homes that were not quite mansions, brick and elegant, with mature trees and professional landscaping. The house they stopped at had a curved brick pathway leading to a heavy stone step in front of an oak door with windows of leaded glass.

A tall brunette wearing gray sweats opened the door to them. She was out of breath and panted, “What can I do for you?”

Lisa said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for anyone who knows the whereabouts of Deanna Knowles.”

She exclaimed, “Whereabouts? I’m Deanna Knowles. Who’s looking for me?”

Lisa, in an effort to finesse their way back to the car as quickly as possible, said, “I’m writing a book on women who’ve gone missing. Your name came up on our list. I’m sorry. There must have been a mistake.”

Deanna Knowles frowned, her mouth pressed into a straight line. A tense moment passed. “My husband and I had some problems in our marriage a couple years ago. I stayed with my sister in California for a few months while I decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was gone for about two weeks before I called my husband and told him where I was.”

Eric and Lisa thanked her, apologized again for interrupting her workout, and returned to the car.

“One down,” Eric said, moving ahead of Lisa to open the car.

She turned to face him. “Not really. Did you notice her neck?”

“I didn’t. Women wearing sweats don’t have much appeal to the male eye. Sorry.”

Lisa gave him a sharp look. “She had a nearly healed bruise below her jaw line and another above her collarbone. There’s probably still trouble in paradise.”

A few minutes of silence passed.

Eric asked, “We have an hour till the next appointment. Do you mind if we stop at the showroom? I’ll give you a free, three-dollar tour.”

Eric’s business remained Kristie’s Classics, its name since the seventies when George Kristofferson opened it with six cars badly in need of repair and a dream of making classic car sales profitable. For a small admission, the showroom was open to the public.

The old cars, showroom new, dazzled Lisa with their bright colors that gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Eric explained the muscle cars from the sixties and seventies were the most popular and most lucrative models. Lisa decided they weren’t her favorites; what she really loved were the old coupes from the thirties. They reminded her of the black-and-white gangster movies she liked. She could just see Al Capone leaning out a window, machine-gun in hand.

Quite a few people milled about the showroom, among them a striking young woman being shown the cars by a man who appeared to be giving her a sales pitch for an old sports car Lisa couldn’t identify.

The woman, resplendent in tight, chocolate-brown jeans, low-cut orange sweater and impossibly high heels, called out, “Eric! I’m so glad you’re here.” She did a little teeter-shuffle toward Eric, which was probably all she could do in her ice pick heels.

“Hello, Danielle. Glad to see you came back for a second look.” Eric turned to Lisa. “Excuse me for minute. I need to take care of this.”

Terrence Young, Eric’s general manager, a tall, slim, man with silver hair and a faint European accent, came over to Lisa and continued her tour while Eric and the young woman laughed in the background.

Peeved at being set aside, Lisa thought the woman didn’t look more than thirty years old, and she was obviously putting the moves on Eric. He wasn’t exactly batting her off with a stick. But then, it wasn’t any of her business what the man did. She couldn’t point fingers after all—Tyler was much nearer her daughter’s age than her own.

By the time Eric tore himself away Lisa was seriously angry. They’d only come here at her agreement, and he’d rolled her aside like an old tire. She’d noticed he’d even taken time to light up a cigar in his office before joining her again. From the look of things, they were going to be late for their one o’clock appointment.

“Sorry about that. But I had to get a sale lined up.”

Before Lisa could stop herself, she muttered, “Yeah, it looked like she had something to sell.”

After leaving the showroom, Eric and Lisa arrived at their meeting in Oconomowoc fifteen minutes late. Helen Mueller, the woman Lisa had talked to on Thursday, was the mother of an Emma Fischer, who‘d disappeared about a year ago. Helen lived in a small, ranch-style house located a few blocks off the lake close to the downtown area. The house looked well maintained and had an arrangement of pumpkins on the porch. A late model SUV sat in the driveway in front of an attached garage.

Helen Mueller greeted them with a strained smile as she invited them in. They turned down her offer of refreshments, but the coffee table in the center of the tiny living room held a plate of cookies. Lisa noticed Eric grab one as he sat down in a chair at the far end of the room. Helen chatted about Halloween and the weather, while Lisa wondered at the change in her manner since she’d spoken to her the other night.

She was about to remind Helen of the point of the meeting, when a man entered the room. He was short with thick reddish-brown hair and narrow lizard-like, green eyes that seemed to see everything without noticeably scanning the room.

“This is my son-in-law, Stephen Fischer. He came over to help me with the windows. When I told him about your visit, he offered to be here too.”

“Mom says you’re writing a book about missing women.”

“Yes,” Lisa said, “
abused
women.” Like all the women on their list, Emma Fischer had a 911 call on record. Fischer ignored the comment.

Something about Stephen Fischer set off Lisa’s warning bells. “Right now we’re trying to establish how many abused women reported missing are truly missing. Have either of you heard from Emma since she disappeared?”

Stephen answered. “No, and we don’t expect to. Emma cleaned out her checking and savings accounts before she left and took her coin collection. There’d been signs that she was seeing another man. I couldn’t get her to talk to me about it and then one day she was just gone.”

Lisa had been watching Helen’s face during his speech and it was oddly expressionless, her eyes examining the carpet.

The son-in-law, in khaki pants and a green polo shirt with sleeves stretched tight to accommodate muscular arms, looked like he spent a lot of time working out.
Small Man Syndrome
, Lisa thought. Odd that he was dressed to play golf but was supposedly here to help with storm windows. Also strange that Helen, who’d been so eager to talk to Lisa when she’d called her, now had nothing to say.

Lisa stood. “Well, thank you for seeing us. Sorry to have intruded on your afternoon.” Lisa handed Helen her card and asked her to let her know if anything changed, making eye contact with Helen on the word ‘anything’. Helen walked them to the door. When they were out of range of Stephen’s reptilian eyes, Helen pulled a photo of Emma out of her pocket and slipped it to Lisa.

As they drove away, Eric said, “It wouldn’t be too hard to make it look like Emma Fischer took her money with her.”       

“That man sent up red flags for me. I thought it was odd that he didn’t comment on the abuse, or at least make light of the 911 call.”

“Maybe he couldn’t—guilty as charged.”

“No doubt. But I’m wondering why Helen would have said anything to him about our visit.”

“He must have found out about it somehow, but that would mean he keeps real close track of her.”

“I don’t know why he’d do that unless he thinks she suspects he had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance. Which might indicate that he did.”

Eric frowned. “Something isn’t right in that house. We have to drop by again sometime when we know Helen’s alone.”

They struck out at their next two unscheduled stops. At the first, no one related to or knowing the missing woman was living at that address. At the other, a For-Sale sign was in the yard and the house looked vacant.

It was after four when Eric dropped Lisa off. She got out of the old Cadillac with an abrupt goodbye and hurried to her car. If today was any indication of how much their interviews would accomplish, things weren’t going to move very fast. Lisa drove home, discouraged.