Singer 02 - Long Time No See (40 page)

“Or she found a way to get into the records room,” Nancy said.

“Patients don’t walk into the file room,” Win said. He looked as much confused as disturbed, although in either case, handsomely so. “This new woman was just in for a checkup. Oh, Wendy gave her a cleaning and took X rays.” I took out the photograph of Emily Chavarria I’d gotten off the Web and emailed to Steffi. He studied it and shook his handsome head. “I mean, she’s not really, uh, that memorable, is she? Well, maybe it’s not a great picture.”

“Imagine her all dolled up,” I suggested. “Longer, blonder hair. Makeup. Does she look at all familiar?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, I have no recollection.”

“Well, give us a copy of her X rays, then,” Nancy directed him. I think he was about to explain about doctor-patient confidentiality when she took his hand and led him farther back into the office. I assumed she was taking him to the file room, or (if the good Dr. Gaines was still having compunctions) for a few magical moments on a chair in one of his examining rooms. To while away the time, I sat down at the computer and managed to retrieve Courtney’s record. Good health, it appeared. No allergies. In the four years she had been a patient, she’d only had X rays, cleanings every six months like clockwork, and what I guessed was some sort of custom-fitted gizmo made for teeth brightening.

“I hate to ask what took you so long,” I said to Nancy later.

“Then don’t ask.”

“Fine.” We were sitting at the town dock watching the day wind down before going out to dinner, although the gulls were busy with theirs. They flew, then rode the wind, then zoomed down to the water for their entrée.

“Besides having to work my wiles to get the X rays, do you know what else I got from Win?” she asked.

“I hope nothing that will require medication.”

“Dubious. I got ‘What ride in amusement parks do dentists like most?’ Don’t bother to guess. ‘A molar coaster.’ The man cannot control himself. And his wife: I see her at the club and she always looks vague. She probably punctured her eardrums. Well, in any case ...” She waved a manila envelope. “We have Polly Hastings’s X rays. What are you going to do with them?”

“If he swears to give them back or have a copy made for me, I’ll give them to Nelson. To see if they match Courtney’s childhood and teenage records from Olympia, Washington. I bet they do, because Courtney went and switched the X rays, hers for Emily’s. If Nelson can’t get the information, I’ll give it to Fancy Phil, and maybe Greg or Greg’s lawyer can work out some deal with the Washington dentist.”

“Let me be clear. These really aren’t Polly’s teeth,” Nancy drawled. “Well, Emily’s teeth. These are what you were talking about, from the old switcheroo, so they’re actually Courtney Logan’s. Right?”

“Right. If they aren’t, I’m making a major fool of myself.” Her silence spoke loudly. “I’m not making a fool of myself with him, Nan.”

“Still the same old fire?”

“Still the same. It’s not just fire. I love him.” Way out on the bay, we watched as a sunfish bounced happily through the wake of a grand sailboat.

“This is the strangest relationship.”

“Nancy, loving a man is not strange. Some might say sleeping with so many men that you stopped counting because you couldn’t remember if it was seventy-one or seventy-two is a bit peculiar.”

“It’s not peculiar,” she said somewhat huffily. “It’s promiscuous. What did our man in blue say about his wife?”

“I didn’t want to talk about her.”

“Why not? Afraid he’ll say he’s staying?”

Clearly, although I didn’t say so.

The next morning, to get away from Nelson and Captain Sharpe, both of whom seemed to be exerting an undue influence over my life, I got on a flight leaving La Guardia Airport for Salt Lake City. By mid-afternoon Idaho time, I found myself on an exceedingly small plane being piloted by an excessively young woman over the Sawtooth Mountains. It landed in Hailey. That’s about ten miles from Sun Valley. And six miles from Wiggins, where I found Samantha R. Corby’s rented condo.

A
T THE FOURTH
real-estate office, I got the news: Yes, they had rented to Samantha Corby. But she was long gone. “God, she left ... Why do I think before Christmas? If I’m thinking of the right person. You understand this is not the field if you’re looking for long-term relationships. The rental market, I mean.” Doreen Brinkerhoff, the agent in charge of renting the furnished condos in Knob Ridge Villas in Wiggins, stood beside a file cabinet. She stuck a ruby-nailed finger through her tangle of shoulder-length black corkscrew curls and scratched her scalp. “Even if they buy. Usually it’s an investment property, so they’re hardly here.” Probably in her early forties, Doreen was firm to a fare-thee-well. Her skin was so tanned that it had the color and texture of the tobacco leaf outside a cigar. “Let me look one place more.” She shoved the drawer shut and, despite a minimal denim skirt and platform sandals, squatted down for a look in the bottom drawer. She struck me as the sort of woman to whom life has offered many reasons to be cynical, yet her hard-featured face was benevolent.

I took out the photos of Courtney I’d gotten from the Web and from Fancy Phil and bent down to let her see them, not daring a squat on general principles, and additionally not after all those cramped hours on airplanes. I gave Doreen a choice: tennis Courtney, bridal Courtney, mommy Courtney holding baby Morgan, baker Courtney holding lattice-top pie. “Does this look anything like the woman you think could be Samantha?” I asked.

Her turquoise eyes—the color, I suspected, not of her irises but of her contact lenses—swept over the pictures. “I ... think ... it ... could ... be. I only met her one time.” She went back to the file drawer, though it was so choked with folders I didn’t know what she could possibly find.

“What makes you hesitate?” I asked.

“Honestly? I don’t remember. Maybe ... Shorter hair? Younger?”

“Samantha Corby looked younger than this woman?”

“I think so. God, if you got to rely on me, I hate to say it ... You’re in deep you-know-what. Oh! Look! Do me a favor. You see where it says ‘2BR 99’? That’s the two-bedroom units in 1999. Pull it out for me. I just did my nails this morning.” After a fair amount of tugging I was finally able to jerk out a thick file. “Depending on how the season is going,” Doreen said, “we sometimes have to rent by the week. That makes for a real fat file.” Swiftly, she was standing and flying through the pages. “Here!

Hallelujah! Look, Judy. Samantha rented through December thirty-first, but she left on the twenty-first.” I had long since given up correcting Judy to Judith when dealing with people who were not likely to be soul mates.

“Does it happen to say why she was leaving early?” I asked. Doreen shook her head. “Okay, big question: Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“Uh ... No. It says ...” She took a page from the file folder and handed it over. In schoolmarm penmanship someone had written “Will call re security deposit.” Since Doreen didn’t stop me, I turned over the page. The paper trembled. That was because my hand was shaking. On the back was a photocopy of a check from Samantha R. Corby to Wiggins Way Realty drawn on the Key Biscayne Bank & Trust—as well as a Florida driver’s license with her photograph.

In the mountains, it was a cool, windows-open day, but I started to sweat. After I wiped my face with the tissue Doreen handed me, I took out my glasses and stared at the full face picture. I couldn’t tell if it was Courtney. A resemblance, sure, but the formerly blond hair now appeared dirty blond or light brown in the black-and-white photocopy. It was shorter, too, curling under mid-neck. The once clear brow was covered with a fringe of uneven bangs. It could have been Courtney. Or Courtney’s younger, less attractive sister, had she had one. Or someone completely unrelated. I copied down Samantha’s home address on Key Biscayne, her height, five-two, and her date of birth, 08-04-71. On the bottom of the card it indicated that Samantha, a caring soul, was an organ donor.

“Do you want to fax it somewhere?” Doreen inquired. “You can use my fax.”

I faxed copies of both sides to myself and also to Nancy at home, in case I needed it sent anywhere before I got back. “This is really awfully nice of you,” I told her.

“Please. It’s been real slow and it’s exciting having a detective—”

“Researcher.”

“Oh, come on, Judy!”

I accepted her knowing smile. “Well, if it is so slow, Doreen, would you mind seeing if the condo she was in is rented now?”

“Sure. But look, after she left, maybe there were five, ten, fifteen other people between then and now.” She seemed to think I had some private-eye purpose in mind, like lifting fingerprints or searching for money under floorboards, and as I could see she was relishing the notion, I didn’t set her straight. Strolling over to her computer, she typed in an address. “Sorry. Summer people in it now. How about this? How about I show you where it is. It’s a short walk. And if you don’t say I sent you, maybe you could knock on a few doors.”

I should have known from Doreen’s calf muscles that a nice walk for her would be at least two miles. After fifteen minutes bouncing along at an altitude over five thousand feet, I was convinced I was going to faint, or at least swoon. It wasn’t only being higher than zero feet above sea level. I felt so detached from everything and everyone I cared about. I could have been renting somebody else’s life, somebody whose job was to chase down a woman who might have called herself Samantha R. Corby.

But the country was glorious. The cloudless sky was a shade of brilliant blue new to me. And there really were purple mountains majesty rising behind downtown Wiggins. Notwithstanding, I held back from humming a few bars because from the little I’d seen I sensed this might not only be the whitest town in America, but also one content with the distinction.

When we got to the other side of Wiggins, Doreen said: “Listen, Judy, off-the-record? Girl Scout’s honor? With someone clean-cut like Samantha Corby whose bank says okay, the check won’t bounce, we sometimes don’t bother with references—not if we’re under the gun like we are in November when she rented.”

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “you’re right. I didn’t see any references on the sheet you showed me.”

“That’s because whoever first showed her the place probably didn’t ask for any. I mean, it’s not like this is New York, nothing personal.” Before we said good-bye, I wrote down my number for Doreen, although we both agreed that if Samantha hadn’t called for her deposit since December, she was unlikely to now.

The Knob Ridge Villas were a series of flat, off-white two-story buildings with gray roofs, unremarkable in any way except, I supposed, in their ability to disappear against a backdrop of snow. In June, they simply looked wan. I could not picture the Vuitton Queen, the Land Rover Lady, the Armani Madonna living in a Knob Ridge Villa. On the other hand, if months earlier Courtney Logan had wanted to disappear without having to hide out in a trailer park in Rapid City, South Dakota, if she wanted to ski or have a first-rate martini or be just a few miles from
al dente
pasta and urbane men, well, this could be the place.

It was getting late in the afternoon, and chilly. Already I was yawning. But since I hadn’t rented a car and wanted to walk back to the Wiggins Inn having made some progress, I started lifting the brass door-knockers on the villas of Knob Ridge. Most of the condos had the comatose air of a resort off-season, after the end of snowtime and just before the summer rush. Only four people answered their doors, although I surmised a few more were at home. Two of the four had only been renting since the end of April, when the ski season ended.

H. Jurgen opened her door about three inches, keeping her hiking booted foot planted right behind it, in case I tried to smash my way inside. No, she had no idea where Samantha had gone. They’d shared a chairlift a couple of times. She hardly knew the woman. She looked at two of the Courtney photos, then back to me, shook her head, and without another word, closed the door. I heard the fall of a deadbolt.

H.’s neighbor, Victor Plummer, was a scrawny man in his seventies with a few tufts of white hair. He lived two condos up from where Courtney had been. While not a gent of the old school, he appeared to be marginally more courteous. He didn’t know where Samantha had gone either, but she’d been a nice girl. He’d heard Vivaldi coming from her place once, and not
The Four Seasons
. He looked at all my photos. “Could this woman be Samantha Corby?” I asked.

“Can’t tell,” he said. His gaunt face was shadowed by its old handsomeness, like the photographs of FDR at Yalta, although you’d have to picture FDR with a very deep tan and a Denver Nuggets T-shirt. “Who’s she?” he asked, pointing an arthritic finger at the photographs.

I was on the verge of finding him endearing, albeit brusque. “She’s a woman named Courtney Logan. She’s been missing since—”

“What is this?” he demanded angrily. “I don’t have time for this kind of crap.”

“Look, Mr. Plummer, the family is very concerned about her.” I pulled out my notepad and hurriedly wrote my name and phone number on it. “Please, if you remember anything about Samantha, or if you hear anything, I’d be grateful—and so would the family—if you’d call me collect.” He, too, closed the door in my face, but at least he grabbed the piece of paper first.

By the time I made it back to the Wiggins Inn, I was shivering. Exhausted, too. A long day and a useless one. The inn didn’t believe in room service, so I had a bowl of pretty good mushroom soup and a roll, and called it a night.

The mattress in my room had been shaped into a V by previous guests. I know I slept because I opened my eyes and was startled to discover it was morning, but I felt I had witnessed every second of the night. I kept thinking how stupid I’d been to spend my own money coming across country to discover that Courtney Logan was no longer in Wiggins, something I’d known before I left my house for La Guardia. Could she have moved to some other part of the Sun Valley area and was living under another name? If she’d left, where would she go from here? Back to Washington? To some other country? How much money did she have to invest in her own disappearance? And naturally, what if this whole thing came down to nothing and I’d been on Fancy Phil’s wild-goose chase?