Two

Emma Howe was a boulder. As gray as rock and just as impervious in a rough-wool sweater the color of steel, baggy dirt-colored slacks, and shoes that looked like prosthetic devices.

The woman on the other side of the desk was not what Billie had expected. The I.J. photographer had found so many kind angles he must have been a contortionist. Not that she was ugly—she had a good face and a strong, compact body—and not that Billie had expected a fluffy, maternal woman, but the photo had suggested a warmth and spark that turned out to be conspicuously missing. Or deliberately withheld.

Emma Howe was stony as a mean-spirited Buddha, wanting Billie to blather, to nervously provide ammunition that could be used to shoot her down.

She had to say something, but it was easier to think of what she would not tell the hummock. She wouldn’t say that The Final Touch had been renamed The Final Gasp when it was locked shut this afternoon. And good riddance. Billie could not, for the life of her, generate enthusiasm for what her now-bankrupt employer called “the magic of inspired accessorizing.” She had been working on an escape plan for months, but the store had staggered and died too soon. There was a sickening uncertainty as to whether her employer had paid Unemployment Comp for her and meantime, Billie had precisely two more weeks of working capital. Enough for one mortgage, PG&E, and telephone payment, ten days of extended nursery school, five jumbo jars of peanut butter, and a large box of dry milk. As little as this job would pay, and as long as her apprenticeship would be, this was nonetheless her ticket to eventual independence. To a life. And if she didn’t get it, she’d have to scramble for another dead-end job, and with a little boy and a mortgage, she wouldn’t have further options for a dozen years.

Let Supersleuth find that out for herself.

“I grew up all over the map,” Billie said. “New York, Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, Texas, Arizona, and California. And for a brief stint, Germany. My father was—still is, in fact—an executive with what’s been nicknamed the ‘I’ve Been Moved’ Corporation. We were transferred every few years. My parents were in Santa Monica when they divorced. I was in boarding school in Connecticut.”

“Your parents still alive?”

“Yes.” What did that have to do with anything?

Emma Howe sipped greasy-looking coffee and relapsed into silence.

The rain and fog coated the window glass. Billie felt submerged with this unyielding woman. She was tempted to lean across the desk and poke at her. Why should you be disappointed by me? she’d demand. Did you expect Sherlock Holmes to show up, eager to do scutwork for next to nothing? This place doesn’t look thriving—and why was she supposed to believe in that suddenly ill receptionist? There wasn’t a nameplate for her, or any evidence of work left half-done on the desk.

The boulder waited.

“There’s this,” Billie said. “I always did well in school. But I found out I was smart—or I found out what smart was—when I worked as an office temp in college; family finances took a nosedive after the divorce. Wherever I’d go, no matter what piece of fancy electronic equipment or word-processing program or machine they asked about, I said I knew how to use it. Once I had the job, I’d say the last fax or computer or whatever had been a little different, could somebody take a second to show me how this gizmo worked so that I didn’t hurt anything? The point is that if I’d been honest, I wouldn’t have gotten any of the jobs—and they wouldn’t have gotten a good worker.”

“This agency isn’t exactly the equivalent of a copy machine,” Emma said.

Bitch! Would it hurt to give a little? “I’m smart enough to think on my own and to pick up whatever’s learnable. Whatever you’re willing to teach me.”

The boulder very slightly nodded.

“And you’re probably worrying about my son,” Billie added. “I know you’re not allowed to ask how I’m going to work child care, but of course you’d think about it.”

“Our hours do tend to be erratic,” Emma said.

There was the slightest whiff of victory in the air. “That’s why I was so impressed,” Billie said softly. “You had two children and managed.”

“They were older.”

“A student at Sonoma State lives at my house rent-free in exchange for baby-sitting. Classes are scheduled for when my son’s in nursery school. But in case of emergency, or conflict of any kind, two backup students with different class hours are on call. I’m covered twenty-four hours a day.”

“Impressive,” Emma said. “Ambitious.”

Damn close to a compliment. Billie moved in for the kill. “I should mention this, too. I found my son.”

“A foundling? As in Charles Dickens?”

“No. When he was two, my ex-husband disappeared with him. The police couldn’t find Cameron or Mr. Macdougal. It took me seven months, but I found them.”

“Excuse me, but Mr. Macdougal is your ex?”

“My ex-husband is Cameron Jay Smith. Mr. Macdougal is the name of a little man in a children’s book, and what my son—whose name is Jesse—called himself when he turned two, which is right before he was taken. It was a short phase, but it lasted long enough to help me find him.”

“How’s that?”

Was she actually interested? Billie controlled the urge to smile. “Cameron’s an artist. Makes money on the side doing housepainting, carpentry, general handyman work. He has no union, no rep, no normal job, nothing constant. No trace. He could work under another name, get all-new ID. But Cameron was raised by an aunt who is his entire family and maybe the one thing in the world he’d never betray. She didn’t have a lot of loves—Cameron, quilting, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and a single beer of an evening. That was about it.

“Problem was finding her. When I met her, she was already retired, driving an RV around the country, deciding where she’d settle. She loved it out here, but it was too expensive and we couldn’t really help. That was the last I knew of her. Location unknown—along with whether she was still alive.

“I rented out my house and lived in the garage, and worked as a temp and searched. I found Grace Smith by gridding off the country, then checking every single Evangelical Lutheran congregation and every quilting association.”

Billie was silent a moment, remembering the map on her garage wall, the big open kind kids crayon state by state in elementary school. She’d colored in her states after she’d exhausted their possibilities. Morning after California morning, she’d dialed, knowing she was insane, knowing there were faster, better methods to search if she’d had money or power, knowing she had neither and no alternative but to dial another number.

“I’d say I’d contracted for a quilt from Grace Smith, a member of their congregation, and could they help me reach her so I could pay her the money I owed.”

“You did this for the entire United States?”

“I would have. But Grace has arthritis. I figured—I hoped—she’d be as kind to her fingers as she could. So I started in the south and worked north, leaving cold places like New England or Minnesota for last and never did get to them. Found her in North Carolina, my eighth state, in a retirement home, and I went there. Got a job on the custodial staff and cleaned Grace’s room when the quilters met, and I found it. It wasn’t even hidden. Right there, in one of those little Hallmark date books by the phone. She only had about ten numbers—doctors, her pastor, the pharmacy, some woman named Milly and one for a ‘C’ in Arizona.”

Billie was surprised that you could hide in Arizona. Its sky was too open and wide, its landscape too rugged.

Emma shook her head. In admiration, Billie hoped—if not for brains or technique, then for tenacity.

“I hired a detective. I could afford two hours of his time, max. But he had access to a reverse phone directory, and I got Cameron’s address. He was calling himself Jay Cameron. I visited every day care, preschool, and nursery school around his area. Said I was moving there and needed to find a place for my little boy.

“None of them had a Smith, a Jesse, a last-name Cameron. But one had a little boy with dyed black hair and his name was Mack—short, he told me he was supposed to say, for Mackenzie, last name, Dougal.” She shrugged. “So I took him home.” She put her hands up and out, signifying that was the end of the tale, although for her, the story never stopped, and almost a year later, every time she picked her son up from day care, or found him safe at home with the sitter it felt like a fresh victory. Cameron had disappeared again before the police reached his apartment.

Her euphoria was always short-lived, including now, followed by the bleak heaviness of what a burden the happy unending represented. Finding her son. Keeping her son. Finding a way to keep her son. This job.

With that, Billie’s cards were on the table and she had nothing left to play.

The chiseled face across from her had no expression.

Game over.

Billie tried to control disappointment so fierce she could taste it. Life would go on, she reminded herself, even if not as hoped for. She’d find something else. With less allure, maybe, no challenge except not falling asleep on the job, but she would not let herself be defeated.

It nonetheless hurt.

“Pretty creative of you.” Emma nodded agreement with her own words. “But there are easier ways. Like finding out where the aunt’s social-security checks were being sent. Her social-security number—the place she’d retired from would have it on record.”

“I didn’t know how to get it, though.”

“You will.” Emma’s voice was flat and matter-of-fact.

It took a while for the words and their meaning to make it across the cluttered desk, then Billie, who had been trying hard to control all emotions, gave up the effort. “Really?” she said, sounding so incredulous that she was sure she’d queered the whole thing. “I have the job?”

Emma raised her eyebrows. “Long as you realize that it is not very dramatic most of the time. Doesn’t generally have a payoff like yours. Most of the time you’re stuck with the calling-every-Lutheran-Evangelical-church-in-the-country part, but it’s for a lawyer who’ll take the information and never tell you what he does with it.”

“I understand.”

“Good,” Emma said. “Except…”

“Yes?”

“I think you say that to me, and you even mean it. You have a grip on reality. But somewhere in the back of your brain, a little voice is saying, ‘Oh, but sometimes it must get involved and tricky like in the movies.’”

Billie looked down at her hands.

“Be honest. If we’re going to be in this together, we have to learn to be honest with one another. You’re thinking, ‘Sometimes it must be your brain against another brain and it must get scary and set the adrenaline running till you can’t believe you’re involved in the whole thing. Sometimes.’ Am I right?”

“Well…yes. You are.”

Emma smiled. “Damn right I am. And damn right it does. Sometimes. Just barely often enough. Just like in the movies.”