Hungry Ghosts Page 7

  I slipped inside the garage. My five minutes was down to four. If John caught me, he wouldn’t throw me in jail for being inside a friend’s garage, but he might well create the kind of aftershock that would reverberate through family dinners for decades.

  A window in the back gave just enough light to show that this garage was neater than any I had ever seen. The little car was parked inches from the right wall, leaving its owner, who undoubtedly was Tia, ample space to get in and out of the driver’s seat. In front of it were ten cardboard banker’s boxes, in two rows one atop the other. They were even labeled. If the diary was here, she could have been back upstairs with it in two minutes. She also could have grabbed it and left.

  My phone rang. “Hello?”

  “Darcy, I’m on my way.”

  I shouldered the phone and pulled open the first box. It was labeled Taxes, and that’s what it held. “John, how come you interviewed Tia about Mike disappearing?”

  He was silent so long I wondered if he’d hit a dead spot. But when he spoke, his voice cracked just slightly—but hugely for a police detective. “I did what I could.”

  “But why Tia? What even made you think of her?” I opened the next box—books—and the next—dishes.

  “He mentioned her.”

  “Mike?” Saying his name, forcing John to respond, made the thread to Mike seem real in a way it hadn’t in years. “What did Mike say about Tia?”

  “He was thinking of asking her out.”

  “Really?” I yanked open the last of the top boxes—folders of bank statements, phone bills, printed documents. “Did he talk about girls with you much?” John was the last person to whom I would have mentioned a boyfriend. Rigidity and sarcasm are not appealing traits in a confidant.

  “He only told me about the girls who’d impress me. It’s not unnatural for a boy to want to impress a father figure.” His voice had taken on its familiar tone of righteous defensiveness. John, the Enforcer, a father figure! He must be delusional. I clamped my teeth together and kept searching Tia’s boxes.

  As soon as I could conceal my own sarcasm, I asked, “And what did you say about her?”

  “Reminded him she was sixteen years old.”

  I shoved a box over and peered into a collection of sweaters, scarves, two stones with circles on them, and a couple of perfume samples. “What did she say when you saw her?”

  “Darcy, it was ages ago. I can’t remember.”

  This from a man who’d remembered my most venial sin long after I’d forgotten it. This from a sib who’d searched for Mike for years and never once mentioned it, never talked of leads, hopes, never let on that he, too, was living a half life till Mike came home. I swallowed hard; now was not the time to be vomiting out recriminations. Rather, it was a moment to choreograph as I would a stunt, to give the illusion of . . . “Doesn’t matter, John. I’ll just read what Tia said.”

  “You have no business—”

  “I’m here, John, with the diary. I’m just giving you a chance to offer your version first.” I looked into the last box—blankets. No diary.

  “Darcy, you’re in someone else’s house. I can’t condone you reading her private material.”

  “I know, I’m ‘putting you in a very awkward position.’ That threat worked better on Mike than me, remember? Last chance, that’s what I’m offering you.”

  “Listen, I’m not kidding—”

  “Never mind. I can read for myself.” I hung up, checked the car through its closed windows, and tried the trunk. When has a trunk ever sat unlocked while the doors are locked?

  I was out of the garage and headed back up Tia’s steps when the phone rang, as I knew it would. John had had time to give in without admitting defeat. In our family, defeat was never admitted; setbacks were merely sustained and guerrilla attacks continued long after the enemy had forgotten the war.

  “I’m going to save you the trouble of reading trash,” he said. “Whatever Tia said doesn’t matter, because she’s a liar.”

  “Really?” Liar was the last thing I would have called her. Charming and in control as she was, Tia had never needed to lie. “A liar then, or now?”

  “She was then. No reason she’d change.”

  I barely caught myself before snapping back. I liked Tia. I’d liked her in high school. Her utter gutsiness racing so fast into the dead black of the tunnel impressed me. And, maybe most of all, her taking her injury in stride had me in awe. Think like you’re choreographing a gag, dammit! Keep your eyes on the landing spot, and your mouth shut! I swallowed, and waited.

  “Darcy, when I interviewed her, I already knew Mike’d seen her three times total. He’d told me. At the track, at our house, and once on the bus when he couldn’t get a ride downtown. She pretended there was more, that they had dated. I can tell when a girl’s looking to make herself important. It’s what she was doing.”

  “That’s crazy! She was already popular. She didn’t need to lie. And she was too smart to lie to the police.” What she had told me about not wanting John to think her a silly high school girl made a whole lot more sense.

  “She did!”

  “Prove it!

  “Darcy, you’re very defensive—”

  “Prove it, John.”

  The unmarked car screeched to a stop. He was out the door before it was still. “The proof is,” he said into his phone as he climbed the steps, “that she had no proof.” He clicked off his phone and stood, hands braced on hips, as they had been braced against his equipment belt all those years he’d been on patrol. His clipped black hair topped suspicious hazel eyes. Over the years, he had squinted and pursed his lips till permanent lines bisected his forehead, dug in beside his nose and mouth, and channeled over his chin. Now he leaned against the porch pillar and said, “She said Mike had a Celtic cross tattooed on his groin, as if she’d seen it, as if there had been plenty between them. But I saw Mike coming out of the shower the week before and there was nothing on him. The girl was a liar.”

  “Maybe she just wanted to be rid of you. Why else would she tell you something so easily disproved, that disgusted you, and made you think she was lying?”

  “Because, Darcy, that’s what liars do. I know. Liars are—”

  “—your bread and butter? What can I say to the great authority on human misbehavior?”

  He peered in the doorway.

  “She thought you were cute, John.”

  He stopped still, then turned, a look of disgust pinching his face. “She was sixteen!”

  “Teenage girls thinks guys are cute, John. They even discuss those guys with their friends.” I had forgotten how great was the temptation to tease John.

  “Yeah, well, she didn’t discuss Mike with anyone on the list of friends she gave me.”

  “You checked up on her? Did you figure she was that central to Mike’s disappearance?”

  “No.”

  It was an un-John-like no, a word that wavered rather than hammering. “Not central, but you thought she knew something she wasn’t telling you, right?”

  “Everybody keeps secrets. Question is: is it your secret?”

  “Was it?”

  He glanced back inside the house as if checking for eavesdroppers. It was another minute or two before he admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “Then you’re not through with her, are you?” The battle wasn’t over; merely a setback would have been sustained.

  “I am.”

  “You figured she had a lead to Mike and you let her keep quiet?”

  “I’m a police officer. We don’t harass witnesses.”

  “But—”

  “We don’t harass witnesses—”

  “John, what did you assume she knew?” Was that what she invited me here to discuss?

  “I don’t have all day. I only came out here as a favor to you. I was in the middle of an important report. A hostess walking out on her guest is not a crime. But I’m here. I’ll check around . . . as a favor to you.”


  “What? You’ll keep looking through the front door? John, she’s not here. You don’t need to look. You need to have cops out there,” I said, waving both arms toward the surrounding streets.

  “Don’t tell me my business.” He peered in through the door, pulled it shut, and headed down the stairs. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “Like you have all these years, about Mike?”

  “Darcy, don’t—”

  “Forget it!” I so wanted to stalk off, but he was in the way. I could manage only a weak “Just forget it,” as I watched him get to do the stalking to his car and tire-squeal off.

  John was going to do zip. So be it. I would find her myself. I was dressed for a run anyway, in my “dress sweats.” Don’t assume. Maybe she wasn’t really gone. Maybe she circled back inside while I was in the garage and didn’t want to deal with John. Strange, but hardly stranger than vanishing. I felt foolish, but I knocked. Of course, there was no answer.

  I loped along Broadway, glancing into apartment lobbies, up stairs of flats, into narrow courtyards. At Octavia Street I turned uphill, then east on Pacific toward Van Ness, the thoroughfare where the dynamiting had finally stopped the fire after the great earthquake of 1906. Ahead was downtown and the mixed neighborhoods of Polk Gulch, Russian Hill, North Beach, Chinatown, and the Barbary Coast, behind were the great Victorians and mansions of Pacific Heights.

  Van Ness is a crowded, traffic-clogged, four-lane thoroughfare with bus stops at corners and as good a chance of hailing a cab as a pedestrian has in this city. I ran two blocks in either direction, but there was no sign of Tia. I checked a couple of blocks of Polk Street east, peering past fringed lampshades into antique shops, through the tinted windows of cafés. Two blocks farther down I spotted a woman with short, light brown hair sipping from a paper cup in a coffeehouse and was halfway across the room before I knew she wasn’t Tia.

  When I emerged, the California Street cable car rattled by a couple of blocks away. If Tia’d gotten on it, she’d already be at the Ferry Building. Like New York City, San Francisco nurtures pedestrians. There were a dozen ways she could have gone. Giving up, I headed back to her apartment, but when I got there the door was still locked and everything looked unnervingly normal.

  I wanted to scream.

  Instead, I ran. As I jogged in place at the red light back on Van Ness I wondered how Leo, Garson-roshi, the teacher with whom I came back here to study, would tell me to handle this. He might go for the traditional: all is impermanence, and this interlude is part of that impermanence.

  I crossed and headed along Broadway toward the little tunnel that sucked cars out of the staidness of Russian Hill and spit them into the bright red and gold of Chinatown. As had my old teacher, Leo’s mentor, Yamana-roshi, Leo might say, “We see through our own eyes.” He would mean I was looking at Tia as if she existed wholly in connection with me, with Mike, with my family. He would be telling me to stop viewing her as the ghost of my own hopes and assumptions. He would advise me to see her as she really is.

  As I looped up around the tunnel, I wondered if Leo . . . Then I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. “Leo, it’s Darcy.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m running,” I panted.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I have a question, I mean for you, as my teacher.”

  “You’re calling me from the street, while you’re jogging, for a dokusan question?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said before I could quite tell whether Leo was seriously appalled at the way I’d transmuted the centuries-old traditional private interview in which the student comes to the teacher in a room where a candle is lit and incense burns, and asks a dharma—teaching—question.

  “Be aware!”

  Zen is a practice of awareness of everything. But I suspected Leo meant the traffic. I plunged in with the tale of this afternoon. “We were putting lunch on the table. She went downstairs to get me a diary she wrote when we were in high school. And she never came back. You don’t just walk out on your guest. You don’t leave with the food on the table.”

  “You don’t know her as well—”

  “As you do after a few minutes in a reception?” He sounded just like John.

  “As well as you think.” His voice held none of the frustration of mine. He was merely clarifying.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.” I came down harder on my front leg, pushed off faster. “Oh, okay, ‘don’t assume.’ Listen, I’m not just assuming.” I stopped. Stopped speaking, stopped running. Stood panting. “Leo, I’m not assuming about lunch. I’m not even assuming that she looked at me and resented my walking on two legs without a cane.”

  “Tia’s not one to lie. If she told you it wasn’t about you, believe her. So, you can choose to assume that at the center of her accident and her pain and her sudden departure is you. Or you cannot assume, and see things as they are. Your choice.”

  Don’t assume. I was still panting. Don’t assume. “Okay, but . . . Leo, how do you know . . . ?” Leo had hung up. My teacher hung up on me! The zendo was a couple of blocks away. I pocketed my phone and ran. Hang up on me, indeed!

  But I’d barely hit Columbus Avenue when I reconsidered. Okay, I was assuming some control over Tia I’d never even come near having. Just as I was assuming she’d, in fact, gone out for her diary. Had she? She’d left, but she could be sitting in a neighbor’s kitchen. I had believed that she walked with a limp, but I only had her presentation.

  And what about the liar issue? John insisting she was, Leo sure she wasn’t. Was each of them merely seeing through his own eyes? Was John himself lying? And how did Leo get to be so sure about Tia so quickly? Luckily, in a minute I could ask him just that.

  The light was green at Columbus and Broadway two blocks above the zendo. Running downhill, I moved fast. Double-parked by the zendo was a mob of police cars, light bars flashing.

  CHAPTER 10

  PATROL CARS BLOCKED off the street at Columbus. Their pulsing lights turned the white buildings scarlet, the brick ones to dried blood. A crowd three-deep angled to peer over the hoods, stretched to see above the car roofs, pressed into the spaces between bumpers.

  Leo! Injured?

  “I live here,” I puffed to the cop at the barrier.

  “Driver’s license.”

  “I just moved in.”

  “Proof?”

  “I said I just moved in.”

  “Yeah. Like I haven’t heard that one before. No proof, no passage.” He was small for a cop and thin. He lifted his equipment belt; when he let go it bounced on his hip bones, cell phone, flashlight, and night stick clattering. Behind him, beyond the barrier, a small crowd waited.

  “Ask Leo, the abbot of the Zen Center, in the middle of the block, he’ll—”

  “Anything else I can do for you? Tea while you wait?”

  “Sarcasm is the kind of bullying that elicits an unnecessarily negative response to a city’s police force,” I said, repeating a particularly stodgy line from recruit training I’d heard from John.

  The cop stared. “No proof, no passage, ma’am.”

  “Leeeee-ooooooooooh!”

  The crowd inside the barriers turned. “Quiet!”

  I recognized the voice. Demanding quiet on the set. “This is a movie location?”

  “Well, yeah . . . ma’am.”

  “Robin!” I called to the one person whose name I knew. “Robin, it’s Darcy.” It had been pre-dawn dark when I’d met Robin Sparto yesterday. Since I was an emergency replacement for a double who’d been injured the previous day, he didn’t waste time on my credentials. Once I’d assured him I’d done high falls and had an S.A.G. card, he’d moved on. I wasn’t sure he’d even recognize me in daylight.

  “I did the gag yesterday,” I called to him. “Remember?”

  “Yeah, but we don’t need—”

  “I live on this street, but I don’t have a wallet. Vouch me in.”

&nb
sp; He turned back toward the crew, grumbling. “The damned consultant hasn’t shown up. We’ve been waiting half an hour. The light’s only going to hold so long, you know.”

  “Hey, I live here! What do you need to know?”

  “Yeah? Huh.” He nodded to the cop, who knew when he was beat and stepped aside smartly.

  I was desperate to check on Leo. But, I reminded myself, there was no reason to assume anything had happened, other than his hanging up on me. The biggest danger now was from the impatient talent and the crew standing on the protected side of the vans.

  Robin wore a frustrated expression. “There’s a tunnel somewhere—”

  “Over there. Behind the courtyard wall. That’s where I live. Are you using it?”

  “Probably. Final sequence: Ajiko is led into the death room with the oil lamp and tea. We were going to do it back in L.A. Sealed room is sealed room, you know? But then I heard about this tunnel. It’s like a room, right? Damp dirt walls, no exit. Who owns it?”

  “The tunnel? Eamon Lafferty, I assume. The building’s his.”

  “Then that’s okay. Keys,” he called to one of the gofers. A younger, smaller version of Robin raced over, extending a ring.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “Everyone knows Eamon.”

  “Really?”

  He stared at me, as if he were watching a knobby brown beast transform into a woman, or vice versa. “You of all people must know that. What are you, Eamon’s sister? No wonder he was so hot for you to have this job.”

  “Eamon Lafferty got me the gig?”

  “Oh, don’t—”

  “No, really—” I shut my mouth and shrugged. There’s a time for truth, and a time for silence. Eamon Lafferty had gotten me this job, the same Eamon Lafferty who’d given the zendo the building. How did he even know I was a stunt double? Why would he care, much less find me work?