With Child (3 page)

"Sometimes you what?"

"Oh, nothing. It's stupid. It's just that when I was little, I used to believe that if I could imagine something bad, it wouldn't happen to me. Childish, huh?"

"Oh, I don't know," Kate said slowly. "It's always the unexpected things that knock you for a loop."

Jules glanced at her quickly, then away again. "Yeah, well. It was probably some psychological interpretation of a statistical probability, like saying lightning won't strike the same place twice. I used to lie in bed at night trying to think of all the terrible things that might happen, and it was always a relief to come up with something really awful, because if I could imagine it clearly enough, it was as if it had actually happened, and then I would know that at least I was safe from
that
."

The adult vocabulary combined with the earnestness of youth made it difficult to get a grip on Jules Cameron, but for the moment Kate put aside the question of what Jules was telling her and went for the most immediate consideration.

"Jules, I truly do not think you need to worry about serial killers and torture murders. The newspapers make you think that kind of thing happens all the time, and sure, there are a lot of things someone like Dio can get into, things that are not very nice. The world isn't a good place for a kid on his own. But I think it's much more likely that, for reasons known only to himself, Dio decided suddenly to move on. And I do honestly think he may just show up again. Without more information, I can't do much for you, and of course you realize that I personally have very little authority outside of San Francisco. However, I will go and ask a few questions, see what I can find out about him, see if I can set the ball rolling. Okay?"

"Thank you." She practically whispered it, overcome by the relief of a burden handed over. For a moment, she looked very young.

"I want you to remember two things, Jules. First of all, Dio seems to be pretty resourceful at taking care of himself. Most kids end up living in boxes under an overpass and falling in with some real shit - with some really rotten characters. Your Dio sounds fairly clever, and I'd say that if he manages to avoid drugs, he has a good chance of staying on his feet."

"He hates drugs. He told me once they make him sick, and they killed his mother. It's the only time he said anything about her, when he was telling me where his name came from, and I think he meant it. Both parts of it."

Jules did not seem to have faced the implication that if the boy knew that drugs made him ill, he at least had to have tried something, but Kate was not about to point this out, either.

"I hope so. The other thing to remember is, even if he has taken off, even if, God forbid, he's dead, he had a friend - you. A lot of runaways never do make friends, not normal friends. It's something to be proud of, Jules." To Kate's horror, the child's lips began to twitch and her eyes fill. Jesus, after the last few days, all she needed was another scene. She moved to cut it off. "However, I also agree with Senora Hidalgo. Befriending some stranger in a park is a damn fool thing to do, and if I were your mother, I'd turn you over my knee."

As the words left her mouth, Kate wondered why on earth conversing with a child invariably turned her into a cliche-mouthing maiden aunt, alternately hearty and judgmental. Don't interrupt, child. It's not polite to point. Wash your mouth out with soap. However, in this case it did the trick: Jules's eyes went instantly dry, her chin rose.

"My mother never hits me. She says it's a shameful abuse of superior strength."

"So it is. But I'd still do it. However," she said, rising, "I'm not your mother, and I don't want you riding the bus home. Let me put on some shoes and I'll drive you back."

"But you have to be at work today. They told me."

"Only on call, and then not until tonight. There's loads of time."

"You should go back to sleep, then."

"I'll sleep later. Nobody dies on a Tuesday night."

"But --"

"Look, Jules, do you have some reason you don't want me to drive you home? Hiding something, maybe?"

"Of course not."

"Fine. I'll go and put on my shoes. Be back in a minute."

"Okay. And Kate? Thank you."

In the basement garage, Jules paused between the two cars. She looked at the gleaming white Saab convertible up on its blocks, and then she took in Kate's dented, scruffy Japanese model, covered with road dirt and smeared with engine grease from the recent repairs, strewn inside with debris and rubbish. She said nothing, just took an empty pretzel box from the floor and with fastidious fingernails gathered up the apple cores and grape stems and dropped them into the box along with the Styrofoam cups, empty wrappers, grease-stained paper bags, and generic garbage. She ran out of room in the pretzel box and used a McDonald's sack for the remainder, then neatly placed both box and bag on the cement floor of the garage just under the driver's door of Lee's car. She carefully gathered up all the cassette tapes from the seat before getting in, then set about matching nineteen scattered tapes to their boxes while Kate backed out of the garage and headed toward the nearest freeway entrance. By the time they had negotiated the most recent route complications, inserted themselves into the flow of determined truckers, and dodged the inevitable panic-stricken station wagons with midwestern plates that decided at the last moment that they needed to get off
right now
, Jules had the tapes securely boxed and arranged in their zippered pouch, the titles up and facing the same way. She placed the zip bag on the floor under her knees, put her hands in her lap, narrowed her eyes at the truck in front of them, and spoke.

"Where's Lee?"

Kate took a deep breath and flexed her hands on the wheel.

"Lee is visiting an aunt, up in Washington."

"The state?"

"Yes."

"We used to live in Seattle, when I was really small. I don't remember it. She must be feeling better, then."

"She must be." Kate felt the child's eyes on her.

"How long has she been away?"

"I just got back this morning from taking her."

"You drove her? That's a long way, isn't it? Is she phobic about flying?"

"She just finds it difficult, with her legs," said Kate evenly, giving absolutely no indication in her voice of the previous two weeks, of the nasty surprises and the queasy blend of loneliness, abandonment, sheer rage, and the dregs of the worst hangover she'd had for many years.

"I suppose she would," said Jules thoughtfully. "Planes are so crowded anyway; with crutches, they'd be awful. Or does she still use the wheelchair?"

"Sometimes, but mostly she uses arm braces."

"And didn't you have a man living in the house, too? Lee's caretaker. I met him. Jon, without the
h
."

"He's away for a while, too."

"So you're all alone. Do you like being alone in the house?" When Kate did not answer immediately, she continued. "I do. I like coming home to a house - or to an apartment, in my case - when you know nobody's there and nobody will be there for a while. I can't wait until Mom thinks I'm old enough to stay by myself. It's a real pain, having Trini the airhead there all the time. She's all right, but she takes up so much space, somehow, and she always has music going. I like being alone, for a while anyway. I don't know how I'd like it all the time. I guess I'd get lonely, at night especially. How long will Lee be gone?"

"I don't know." Now Kate's control was slipping, and she heard the edge in her voice. Jules looked at her again.

"How are her legs, anyway? Al said she could get around pretty well, compared with what they were expecting --"

"Let's not talk about Lee anymore," Kate said, her voice friendly but the warning signs clear. "I'm totally pissed off at her right now. Okay? Tell me, what's that say on your shirt?"

Jules dropped her chin to look at the foreign writing. "It says, "
Panta hellenike estin emoi
." That means, "It's all Greek to me." This guy in my programming class puts himself through college by selling T-shirts. I thought this one was kinda neat."

Kinda neat, Kate thought with a smile, and the psychological interpretations of statistical probabilities. "Tell me about your class," she suggested. The topic lasted Jules until Palo Alto, when Kate left the freeway and asked for directions to the park.

Kate satisfied herself with a slow drive-by and a pause in the parking lot, although Jules was anxious to show her around.

"No, I just wanted to see," she said firmly. "And you used to meet him under that tree? What direction did he usually come from? No, just to get an idea. Now, show me where you live. No, Jules, I'm not just going to drop you off."

Ignoring the girl's protests, Kate parked in a visitor's slot behind the large brick building and walked up the stairs behind her, feeling like a truant officer. The apartment turned out to be larger than the one Kate had seen in San Jose, where Jani and her daughter had lived two floors above a particularly vicious psychopath, but it retained the old one's personality as the lair of a distracted academic and her serious and equally intellectual daughter. The high ceilings seemed to be held up by bookshelves - no neatly arranged storage spaces, either, but depositories laden with volumes in the disarray of constant use. Some improvements had been made over the last place: the ghastly motel furniture had been left behind, the plastic and chrome dinette set traded for a wooden dining table with six matching wooden chairs, the flowered sofa replaced by a suite of comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs and sofa in corduroy the shade of cappuccino. Even the heaps of books seemed less precarious here; a few surfaces were actually free of them.

Jules picked up two mugs, one with a spoon in it, and carried them into the kitchen. Kate followed her.

"Nice place."

"I like it better than the other one. Nobody lived in that building but Yuppies, and then after... I kept thinking I saw him in the hallways." She turned away, furiously embarrassed by this admission, to thrust the mugs and a couple of other things into the dishwasher.

"Spooky," Kate agreed. "Where does Mrs Hidalgo live?"

"Oh, she won't be expecting me for hours yet. I don't get home 'til two sometimes." It had been 'three or four' earlier; Jules, among her many accomplishments, was not a practiced liar.

"I suppose you could forge a note for school," Kate said easily, looking out the window at a desk-sized balcony and a postage stamp-sized swimming pool below, "but Mrs Hidalgo would probably find out, and your mother would blow up. Best defuse the bomb before it starts spluttering."

Jules was silent; then Kate heard her sigh. "You're as bad as Al," she complained. "Okay, just let me just dump these books. You want to see my room?"

"Sure," said Kate. Jules caught up her backpack and led Kate to the other end of the very ordinary apartment. The room, as Kate had suspected, was not ordinary. It was, in fact, like no other teenage bedroom she'd ever seen, and in the course of her professional life she had seen quite a few.

To begin with, it was tidy. Not compulsively so, but beneath a minor accumulation of papers, books, and Coke cans, things were obviously in their assigned and logical places. The shelves were free of dust, and the bed had even been made.

The room was very Jules. The top end of the bed was buried under an arrangement of stuffed animals; on the foot of the bed were two books, each of them weighing at least five pounds. The one on the top was a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. A high shelf, running around three sides of the room, was solid with more toys, teddy bears in the full gamut of pastels, a grouping of stuffed cows and another of elephants, and so on through the bestiary. The shelves below that held books - paperback novels on the higher shelves, solid books lower down; tomes such as few adults had even held were down at waist level. This was a logical-enough arrangement in earthquake country - some of those books would kill a person if they fell from a height of eight feet - but she was amused to see a collection of old and obviously much loved picture books shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of glossy coffee table art books. The cross between childhood naivete and adult sophistication extended to the walls as well: Three framed prints from the pages of
Goodnight Moon
were arranged on one wall, facing a poster of a Renaissance woman's face on the other, an ethereal blond portrait with the name of a German museum underneath.

Jules had dropped her backpack on the desk and gone across to open the door of a wire cage. A black-and-white rat came blinking out onto his mistress's hand, but Kate was distracted by a piece of paper that had been pinned up to the corkboard over the desk, on which was printed the word
sesquipedalian
.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing.

"That's my word for the day," Jules told her matter-of-factly. She had been cuddling the rat to her chin, and she now kissed his pointy nose and allowed him to scramble onto her shoulder. "It means long words. Literally, it refers to something a foot and a half long." She took a peanut from a jar and held it up to her shoulder. Kate watched the rat manipulate the nut between his delicate paws and nibble it down to nothing, and she wondered briefly how to respond to the word of the day before deciding that she didn't actually have to.

"What's his name?" she asked instead.

"Ratty."

"I loved
The Wind in the Willows
when I was a kid," Kate agreed.

"Actually, his full name is Ratiocinate," said Jules, putting him back in the cage with another nut. "But I call him Ratty."

Kate laughed aloud and followed Jules back to the kitchen. The girl looked into the refrigerator. "Would you like a Coke?" she offered. "Or I could make you some coffee. Mrs Hidalgo never has anything but juices to drink; she believes in healthy living." It sounded like a quote, as did many of Jules's remarks. Kate was not actually thirsty, and she didn't much like Coke either, but without knowing why, she found herself accepting the offer. She and Jules stood in the kitchen for a while, talking about the apartment and drinking from the cans, until eventually Kate suggested they should be going downstairs.

Then, on their way out of the apartment, an odd thing happened, one that would have made little impression on Kate had it not been for Jules's reaction. The telephone rang as they walked toward it, and without hesitating, almost without breaking stride, Jules simply picked up the receiver and let it drop immediately back onto the base. No, not drop: Jules slammed it down in a small burst of fury and continued on out of the apartment. Kate followed, waited while Jules dug the key from her shorts pocket and locked the door, and then spoke to the back that she was following down the hallway.

"Get a lot of wrong numbers, do you?" She was totally unprepared for the girl's reaction: Jules whipped around, long braids flying and her face frozen, as if daring Kate to push an inquiry, and then she started down the stairs at a pace so fast, it was almost running. Kate caught up with her at the downstairs neighbor's door, putting out a hand to touch the girl's arm.

"Jules, are you getting a lot of crank phone calls?"

The girl stared at the doorbell, and then the rigidity in her shoulders gave way and she exhaled.

"No, not a lot. I just had one a while back that was really weird, and I guess I'm still jumpy when the phone rings if I'm alone. Stupid to just hang up like that, isn't it? I mean, what if it was Mom?"

"Or Dio?"

She turned to stare at Kate. "God, I didn't think about that. He's never phoned me," she said doubtfully. "But he could."

"If you're having a problem, Jules, you can always have your phone number changed. Or you can arrange with the phone company --"

"No!" she said fiercely. "I don't want to change the number, and I don't want to bring the phone company into it."

"Use the answering machine, then, to screen your calls."

"I do, sometimes."

"Have you told your mom, or Al?"

"It only happened once!" Jules nearly shouted. "It's not a problem."

"It sounds to me like it is."

"Really, Kate, it's not. It's just all the stuff about Dio - it's getting to me. But if whoever it is starts up again, I promise I'll ask Mom to change the number." Jules reached for the doorbell again, and this time Kate let her ring it.

The matriarch of the Hidalgo clan did not quite match the short, squat, big-bosomed surrogate-grandmother-to-the-neighborhood image Kate had formed. True, her skin was the color of an old penny, and true, the smell of something magnificent on the stove filled the stairwell; there was even the clear indication that half the children on the block had moved in. However, the good seniora had a waist slimmer than Kate's, and the jeans and scoop-necked pink T-shirt she wore covered a body taut with aerobic muscles. She also wore a small microphone clipped to the front of her shirt, like a newscaster's mike, only pointing down. She looked at her two visitors with concern.

"Julia, you are home early. Was there a problem at the school?" She gave the name a Spanish pronunciation, but her accent was mild.

"
Buenos dias, Senora
," said Jules carefully. "No
hay problema. Este es mi amiga Kate Martinelli. Yo tengo... tiene... yo tenia una problema, y ella va a ayudarme con, er .
. ."

"That was very good, Julia; you're coming along rapidly. I'm pleased to meet you, Ms Martinelli. Rosa Hidalgo." She put out her hand, which was as firm as the rest of her. "Come in. I was just finishing here. Fieldwork for my thesis in child psychology," she added, looking over her shoulder.

The room was awash with children, along with a number of maternal types planted around the edges like boulders. Rosa Hidalgo moved surely through the small multicolored heads, avoiding the clutter of blocks and toys that covered the floor like debris from a shrapnel bomb.

"That's great for today. Thank you all. How about lunch now? Eh, amigos," she said in higher tones, "you hungry? Burritos, peanut butter, tuna fish, and tell Angelica what you want to drink." She began folding away tape recorder and mike while various boulders moved forward to scoop the abandoned toys into containers and the children, all of them small, marginally verbal, but astonishingly noisy, washed off to the next room, where her daughter, a tall girl of perhaps seventeen, presided with an immense dignity over sandwiches and pitchers of drink.

"Have you eaten, Kate? Jules? There're vegetarian burritos; I hope that is all right. I use adzuki beans. Jennifer, this is Kate. Show her where things are, would you? Tami, I know you need to leave, but I must clarify something. When Tom junior was talking about the dog, was he saying--"

Although Kate was no more hungry than she had been thirsty when offered the Coke upstairs, she ate two of the superb fat burritos, which were everything their fragrance had advertised, and refused a third only at the thought of the already-straining waistband of her trousers.

"Do you have a child here, Kate?" asked the woman whom Rosa had addressed as Jennifer.

"Sorry? Oh, no. No, I don't have any children. I'm a friend of Jules, the girl over there. She lives upstairs. Do you know how much longer --"

She was interrupted by a rapid escalation of shrieks from the next room, at which point Jennifer was suddenly just not there, only her plate teetering on the edge of the sink. Kate rescued it, and was relieved when she saw that the furious quarrel at the children's table was the signal for a mass departure. Twenty minutes of potty visiting and prying toys from clenched fists later, Kate was finally alone with Rosa Hidalgo.

"Whew!
Madre
, I need a cup of coffee. How about you?"

Kate thought a slug of bourbon more like it, but she accepted the lesser drug with thanks. It was real coffee, from a press-filter machine, thick and gritty and exactly right.

"I thought at first you were running a nursery in here."

"Twenty three-and-a-half-year-olds, it sounds more like the monkey house in the zoo. Every six months, they come here in the mornings for a week." She paused, reviewing the syntax of the sentence. "Twice a year, I have them here, every morning for a week."

"Must seem quiet when the week is over," Kate commented.

"
Madre
, my ears, they sing. Next February will be the last time. I wonder if I will miss them."

"You said it was for a thesis?""

"Yes, I am tracing the development of gender characteristics, which boys play with toy cars and which girls prefer dolls, comparing them with the results of a number of other researchers doing similar studies. I have been following this group since they had one year."

"Since they were one year old, Mama," corrected her daughter, clearing dishes in the background.

"Since they were one year old. Thank you, Angel. My English suffers after one of these sessions," she remarked to Kate, her pronunciation more precise than ever. "It is a symptom of stress. Angel, go and get your suit on; we , will go for a swim. You, too, Julia. Leave those dishes; we'll do them later. Now" - she turned to Kate when the door had closed behind the girls - "you will please tell me what problem you are helping Julia with, what is troubling her, and why she did not go to her computer class today."

"I think you're aware that Jules made a friend in the park this summer, a homeless boy." Rosa Hidalgo nodded. "Well, he's disappeared, and she's concerned. She came to ask me to look into it. I'm with the police department," she added. "In San Francisco. I work with her mother's ... boyfriend."

"Alonzo Hawkin, yes. And you live in San Francisco?" Kate nodded. "I see. And she went during school hours that I might not know."

"She thought you'd worry."

"She was correct. Why do the bright ones always do such awesomely stupid things?" The shake of her head was the gesture of an experienced mother rather than that of a trained psychologist. "What will you do, about the boy?"

"There isn't much I can do, to tell you the truth. Talk to the local sheriff's department, put his description out over the wire if he doesn't show up in a few days, see if he's shown up in L.A. or Tucson."

"That does not sound very hopeful."

"Juvenile runaways are nearly impossible to trace. I haven't said anything to Jules, but I think she is aware of the difficulties. She also seems aware of the dangers, though if anything, I'd say she has an overly dramatic view of the threats to the boy. AIDS and hepatitis are more likely than the murdering maniac she visualizes."